Media Literacy - Comment #6,135,856

In Lit classes, it was always just a matter of
1. Read "To Kill A Mockingbird"
2. Take exams correctly recalling the characters and plot of "To Kill A Mockingbird"
3. Everyone gets A's except for a few people who for so e reason weren't able to read the book.
4. Teacher tells everyone how they did by name.
5.
Nothing like the kind of abstract analysis here was ever touched on. It was always about what happened in the story, not what the story means.

In retrospect, my comment below this one pertaining to education and abstract thinking may not have come from the best informed frame of reference.

I am now thankful that my English teachers, for all of their faults, made the attempt to get us to think critically about what we were reading.

Before today, I never really questioned the fact that all my Lit classes K-12 were basically exercises in memorization and recitation.

Some teachers are bad, some students are dumb

I dunno, that's pretty standard fare where I'm from and I'd say attempts to teach media literacy are a huge contributor to this problem.

I don't think I've seen any worse culprit of this sort of thing than the english teachers we have.

They tend to obsess over imposing meaning that just isn't there, it's exactly the sort of thing that I would expect to result in a take like "Breaking Bad is fascist adjacent"

I read that book in school and the teachers did have a discussion on what the story means. My teacher better not have been in the minority

I went to school in Romania, and most of what we learned in Romanian Literature was to read and memorize commentaries by established literature critics on the books we were assigned (reading the books themselves helped, but was optional), then rewrite those commentaries in our own words when the final exam comes.

My public education was not without the "Lost Cause" narrative, and painted a rather flattering portrait of Robert E. Lee. Perhaps I should consider that the biases present in my education may have extended beyond just Civil War history.

If you're lucky, your teachers will put much more emphasis on teaching you HOW to think rather than WHAT to think.

Speaking as someone who grew up in Bible Belt America: they do that on purpose. Conservative assholes don't want children to understand what a novel like that means, because they don't want children to grow up thinking racism is bad.