>>24830337
Because education in general has been reduced to a system of indoctrination; it is no longer education but right instruction. As a result the actual quality of the education suffers, students lack all context for why they should study a given text, they're only told that it's historically/culturally significant, and that will suffice. It's no wonder that only the brightest and most determined will pay any attention, because they are already going to try their best regardless of what they're given, but for everyone else there's no sense of why they should be doing this, so they don't care and their efforts (like your own) suffer as a result.

They don't give you things to read because they are pleasurable to read (though most are) they give it to you because it is a Significant Work (tm) with Significant Themes, and that's what you study. Really, it's no wonder that AI is becoming such trouble these days, because it's perfectly suited to give answers to the robotic questions they ask students. There's no teaching of critical thinking or appreciation of the finer qualities of a work, only what it has to say with styles and techniques as a bonus (which aren't of any real use in highschool unless you want to copy them yourself), and any Large Language Model can churn out a reasonable answer to any of those questions in 5 seconds.

>>24830337
Because children want to read stories and don't care for prose and poetry

>>24830337
>Damn, why are high school English classes so shit?
even if the school was any good that would'nt have been the right time for you to read it. what they shouldve been doing was drilling you to death in latin and greek grammar

>>24830337
>>24830337
>seven years later

There were competent and engaging holdout boomers in higher numbers; Gen Xers are fewer just by the cohort numbers-- and worse, indoctrinated and beaten down Millenials with zero backbone that drank the Kool-Aid abound.

And if they don't teach Civics and American History outside the court history in Ghislaine Maxwell's father's textbooks, it's as good as random with literature, much less national development of it. Busywork bullshit so you can't indulge your intellectual curiosity in leisure is part of the program.

>>24830337
>I didn’t pay attention in 11th grade
>I did pay attention as an adult
Unless your teacher was outright terrible, how is this the school’s fault?

>>24830337
Most teachers deserve to be raped by the sex ed teacher’s big black dildo.

>>24830337
School is designed to make you hate reading. Whenever you read, you'll be reminded of all the horrible classes and the literary eras shoved down your throat. In my case, realism and romanticism, and I hate those two to this day.