How do people graduate college and not know the word "eclectic" ?

It's because they don't read. I've been watching the "homework help" forums and have noticed that only rarely are books assigned that aren't among a tiny list of "favorites":

To Kill a Mockingbird
Catcher in the Rye
1984
Animal Farm
The Great Gatsby
Lord of the Flies

Rarely we see a few other titles:
Wuthering Heights
Jane Eyre
Pride and Prejudice
Huckleberry Finn
The Picture of Dorian Grey

and once in a blue moon, "Macbeth".

I even asked in the forum (which is supposed to be read by teachers as well as students) whether teachers didn't have any more imagination than to assign these same books over and over, and why didn't they assign the classics?

The answers I got were appalling. To the teachers, these were the classics. They raged at me for "not knowing" that teachers were given a list of books they had to choose from, which isn't the point. The point was that they always choose the same five books. Some teachers asked, "What do you want them to read, Twilight?" because, I suppose, the only books outside the list were either Harry Potter or vampire books.

The kids answered that these were great books; one claimed Great Gatsby for his one-unit list of Greatest Books Ever Written. One kid said he had been assigned some of these books two years in a row, and nobody, neither students nor teachers, even tried to name any other books outside the list.

Not Canterbury Tales, nor Paradise Lost, no poetry by John Donne, nothing by Dickens or Thackeray, no Poe, Swift, or Fielding, not Hawthorne, nor even "Uncle Tom's Cabin"--which is probably why they think our Civil War was fought over economics and not slavery.

What's my point, that the kids are stupid? No, but their teachers are illiterate, and don't mind passing their own ignorance on to the kids. The teachers have three thousand years worth of literary richness, and all they bother to pass on to the next generation is the two great navel-gazing works, Catcher in the Rye and Great Gatsby. The result is that our next generation's information remains scant and their horizons don't extend beyond the ends of their arms. Maybe the remote control comes into play here but as with the reading assignments, they're only taken to where they can stare at their own navels. "Sunny with a Chance" and "Wizards of Waverly Place" do not expand their horizons.