It’s a slightly different example, but this same attitude to “learning” - that is, the idea that you’re just meant to copy and memorise, not think independently - is why, despite wanting to be an author since age 11 - despite growing up to become an author, even - I was so burnt out on English by the end of high school that I didn’t study it at university.
Why? Because even though “critical thinking skills” were one of the much-touted outcomes our English curriculum was meant to teach, the fact of the matter was that you weren’t allowed to challenge the desired interpretation. We’d be given set texts and told, “here is how this text relates to the theme of the unit,” but we weren’t allowed to argue the opposite or for a different interpretation, even if we could do so intelligently using the text itself. It drove me absolutely insane: it wasn’t literary analysis, it was just parroting back buzzwords attached to quotes selected by someone else.
If I hadn’t cared about the subject, it would’ve been easy to just shrug and go along with it. But English was my favourite subject, and I cared then - as I care now - about literary analysis and interpretation, and it was infuriating to be told what my opinions had to be in what was a purely subjective medium. Each unit would be something stupidly broad and vague, like Journey or Change, and the texts would be completely disparate things that we were meant to link together because of their apparent shared relationship to the unit title, no matter how forced it felt. One time, we were given a Shakespeare play and a book excerpting diary entries from various Australian explorers, and we had to talk about how they both related to Journey as something intended by the author, and I was like: Shakespeare wasn’t writing about fucking journey as a metaphor! He wanted to tell a good story and get paid! And those explorers were all writing about literal journeys, not metaphoric ones! You cannot compare their motives here, let alone say they’re ultimately the same! But pointing this out, I was told, was “cheeky” and meant I wasn’t taking the work seriously.
Another time, in an exam in the Change unit, we were given the visual image of a woman with butterfly wings and told to write an essay, a poem, a script or a short story inspired by it, as related to change. I wrote a poem about metamorphosis, and look: a lot of teenage poetry is bad, and I certainly wrote my fair share of it, but it was a decent poem, and when I got a really middling mark for it, much lower than my usual English score, I was confused. I went to the head of department and asked him what I’d done wrong, and he said, well, the poem was good, but it wasn’t original. I said, dude, you gave us a picture of a butterfly woman and asked us to write about it through the lens of a specific theme - there’s only so much originality you can manage in that context, and in any case, the grading rubric, which was printed on the exam paper, didn’t mention originality. He looked uncomfortable and said, well, it’s not so much that, it’s just that we prefer it when students don’t write poetry in the first place, because it’s harder to mark. I said, then why is it even an option if you’re going to mark me down just for choosing it?
I ended up with a better grade, but the whole experience was maddening. They claimed a desire for us to be original, but wouldn’t let us think critically or interpret the themes in our own way, or god forbid choose our own; and meanwhile, you got the highest marks for just parroting back what you were told. We were given printed lists of ‘signpost words’ and told to use them in essays, as their presence would signal to the marker that we knew what we were doing - just the presence of the word, not how we used it or whether our argument was good.
Anyway. It burned me out hugely, and even though I still ended up writing for a living, not a day goes by where I don’t see some absolute terrible discourse going around online and think, this person was taught in school that agreeing with and mimicking someone else’s analysis is the same as critical thinking, even when that analysis draws a really long fucking bow in service to a specific agenda that it doesn’t want to acknowledge, and like. Is it really so hard, so threatening, to give people the tools to think and be creative, rather than just rote-learning a bunch of bullshit? AUGH.
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