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Yeah learning about the pace at which TNG episodes were written and shot was a revelation to me, and it made me question why so much is invested in a show that was, as good as it was, clearly hobbled by not having time to really flesh out ideas and rework bad scripts, and was basically rushing all the way to its end.
Similarly, years ago I was listening to a Phil Ochs song about how terrible "liberals" are and it just hit me, why am I getting my political opinions from music? From rock to rap, why are the pop stars determining what I think over political scientists, essayists etc.
It's feels like even the most deep cuts of pop culture feel shallow as a puddle, it's like it's all expressionism, just surface level reactions to things, no humility, no ability to dig deeper, due to time constraints or just ignorance of the authors. And it almost feels like a psyop where we're told to just stay in the there, don't try to look up the past, it's all problematic and boring. Like they read Great Expectations and Shakespeare in High School just to intimidate and bore you so you stay away from that stuff for good.
I feel this in my bones, because I loathed school assigned reading. Except for one singular English class in 10th grade where we read Brave New World, 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, it was my most hated subject. Good god, I remember slogging through Mill on the Floss one year. It was quite possibly the most boring thing I was ever forced to read. And I remember when they added the diversity requirement to summer reading, where you had to read X many books from the standard list, and then X many books from the diversity list. Because god damnit, you will appreciate poorly written polemics.
I have a model (not, I think, original) of three ideal types:
(1) People interested in things. Their ideal book would be a hard sci-fi book that explains how the time machine/interstellar space craft actually works. I have known a few people who embody this almost perfectly and they are either about as autistic as you can be while still being functional OR successful salt-of-the-earth tradesmen.
(2) People interested in abstract ideas. I think that people who gravitate towards classic dystopian fiction, as well as Big Theory sci-fi like Dune or some of Asimov's work, tend to be this way, as well as mathematicians, philosophers, theologians, theoretical physicists etc.
(3) People interested in people. They like books about people. This is almost all books regarded as "classic" literature, as well as a lot of any genre of books, as well as a lot of entertainment in general.
My classic image of (3) is a high school English teacher, who are also at least partly responsible for putting many of type (1) and (2) people off reading fiction. Works like the Dune novels and Asimov's books/stories were literally banned as dissertation topics at my high school due to "insufficient literary merit"; I was just about able to convince them to let me write about Dostoevsky, but I was strongly encouraged to write about the characters rather than the ideas. I know another person who had the same experience with Brave New World and Nineteen-Eighty Four, which were too respected to be banned as topics. You were supposed to write about Jane Austen, Shakespeare (as long as you focused on style and characters), George Elliott (or F. Scott Fitzgerald if you weren't bright) and the like: character-focused, with minimal action, and certainly no in-depth discussions of how a time machine worked.
I think ideas are very important, but I hope it’s not uncharitable to say that writing a 4,000 word essay on the physics of interstellar travel in a hard sci-fi novel, for a high schooler, is more suited to a science class than an English one, where literary analysis is going to involve discussions of word choice, sentence structure, rhythm, commentary on descriptions and so on. Of course it would be entirely possible to write great literary criticism of passages revolving around specific speculative technology in science fiction, but high school nerds are unlikely to be capable of it, and it will turn into a bad Reddit post full of bad math and numbers that combines the worst of both low quality STEM and literature papers, so one sympathizes with the English teachers.
Plus, geeky teenage boys are always going to be interested in science fiction; some would say the job of an English teacher is to help develop a wider interest in fiction that might also involve genres they wouldn’t otherwise read.
As you note, there are two separate things here:
(1) Focus on literary technique.
(2) The subject matter.
It's easier to use (2) as a way to lure otherwise uninterested students into talking about (1), IF you are more interested in (1), as English teachers tend to be. But there we agree.
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