As an old man I now think the art and humanities classes in school landed at the wrong time.

You need context to really understand a book or a work of art. You want to know what kind of environment produced it, what it's talking to.

But when you're in school, there isn't time for that. You aren't going to know a bunch of things about history to put things into context, because there simply isn't enough time for it.

So you end up doing a bunch of weird commentary on say a book where you as a teenager have no idea where to place it. Like if you read Dickens, will you know enough about the industrial revolution, the condition of cities at the time, and such? Will you know what kind of thing the characters would care about?

How would you know what the characters in Pride and Prejudice are worried about if you don't know how that society is?

So as a kid it just totally didn't mean anything to me, it was just a strange torture where you are meant to comment on the motivations of the characters and how the writing style brings that out.

It’s certainly true that an adult would tend to have more additional knowledge and be better able to understand a lot of writing, but if you avoid exposing kids to anything they don’t have total understanding of the context of, you won’t really be able to teach them anything. Discussing books can help provide some of that context they’re missing. It’s probably fine to teach arithmetic before algebraic number theory too.

It felt even worse when reading Shakespeare, which is nominally the same language you and I speak, but just barely. Add the fact that it's a play, where the performance carries a lot of the meaning.

The end result was that I - and as far as I could tell, 99% of my classmates - got basically negative value out of sitting in class and reading lines we didn't understand out loud, without even time to try and parse it out because we were too busy just scanning the lines to see when it was our turn to speak.

I'm not sure I would necessarily agree with "strange torture" more like "sore muscles from exercising mental muscles". Yes I remember hating The Great Gatsby when I was 14 and having to read it critically in school, I sure didn't have a lot context, but I remember having to do it, and I can look back after years of secondary and post secondary schooling and appreciate the exercise.

I think we should be much denser and more rigorous with school material in the middle/high schoolers, at least relative to what my experience in public school USA was, but that's sort of a separate discussion.

> But when you're in school, there isn't time for that. You aren't going to know a bunch of things about history to put things into context, because there simply isn't enough time for it.

I think you just had bad teachers. Historical context was always part of the English language/literature curricula at my high school, and it definitely made a difference. I didn’t even go to a good school. Our district was the worst funded in our state with a 40% dropout rate.

I think books in education often serve as an means to putting yourself in those scenarios and attempting to learn more about different times and cultures.