Originally Posted by
Ionathus
I'm not surprised anytime people hate a classic because they had a miserable time with it in school. English lit classes, especially in my part of the world, are immensely hit-or-miss.
Sure, a good teacher might teach about a literary movement, a writing choice that the author makes, or how the author develops a theme throughout the book. But it's very easy to slip into spending your entire unit on All Quiet On The Western Front just basically learning facts about WWI, or spending a unit on To Kill A Mockingbird learning about racism of the time. It can kind of turn into a pseudo-history or -social studies class if you're not careful.
Of course, books are a reflection of their time and place, and you need to understand the cultural context to understand why the author wrote it that way. But looking back on my education, a lot of lit teachers took the safe route by just...exploring the author's cultural upbringing and the topics they were writing about, rather than actually teaching us how to recognize, analyze, and draw conclusions about the writing's messages. I remember being 17 and being given a test about The Great Gatsby that exclusively asked me about plot-points (and fairly nitpicky ones, at that) and had nothing to do with the content, themes, context, or writing style of the book. It was 100% purely "prove that you read this book." I think a lot of English lit teachers skate by with this sort of thing, which is a shame, because actually teaching your students to understand written communication and storytelling would be a pretty game-changing educational milestone.
Compare this to classes like Algebra or Chemistry, where your ability to teach the fundamental ideas is a lot harder to B.S. -- because if you don't explain principles A, B, and C to your students, they're just going to be completely incapable of doing most of the learning and work required by the class.