When I was in high school, my English classes focused quite a bit on performing that sort of analysis. Then I majored in English at a college whose department was still very much aligned with the New Critical “close reading” methodology. Then I went to a PhD program in a top-ten department.

My experiences: My college experience prepared me very well to analyze texts—to understand their mechanics, to discuss the ways in which they develop meaning out of those mechanics, and to argue for an interpretation on the basis of that. What it did not prepare me to do well was to conduct literary research, which was the point of the PhD program. Nevertheless, most of my grad school professors valued my ability to conduct a close reading of a text because many other students who came from more research- and theory-oriented undergrad backgrounds had difficulty in explicating texts without resorting to extra-textual frameworks.

I ended up leaving the PhD program for various reasons, but I will say that the close-reading skills I developed in college have been widely applicable for me outside of academia. Close reading forces you to interact with a text at a granular level and to be attentive to the assumptions that it is smuggling in through its construction. Some lit folks now prefer to talk about “slow reading,” but it’s mostly the same thing.

I would argue that, given the deluge of text with which any of us is confronted on a daily basis, the ability to slow down and to be attentive to a text is a necessary interpretive skill. Maybe students don’t all need to learn to identify figures of speech and poetic devices, but they should learn how to sit with a text and analyze how it’s put together. For one thing, this makes them more sensitive and acute readers. For another, it ideally can make them clearer and more forceful writers. (It is no accident that many of the greatest canonical writers honed their skills by producing parodies of other great writers: the exercise requires getting into the mind and comprehending the style of another writer in order to understand the choices that (s)he has made.) Good reading is a prerequisite for good writing, and that is partly a function of reading widely, yes, but it is also a function of reading deeply.

Rather than jettisoning analytical approaches entirely, we might be better off teaching students how to read, in the sense of showing them that different texts require different levels and forms of engagement. (Insert here the Baconian adage about the different kinds of books.) Some texts can be skimmed simply to mine for information, while other texts require much more deliberate and analytical reading. Students should develop the skills to perform both kinds of reading. And then there’s also reading that isn’t done for a purpose other than sheer enjoyment, and that should be encouraged too (perhaps by having students, as you say, read some stuff just to share their responses to it). But I think a disservice is done when we treat reading as a univocal act, whether that means we make it all about analysis or all about generating responses to texts.

In my high school, English class existed to teach you to do two things - read books and write essays. No other class cared about both things (individually or separately). Kids need to do both, so emphasizing one over the other does them a disservice. TFA talks about the problems that result when you starve the reading side, and this post suggests (I think) starving the writing side (writing your "real thoughts" vs learning to structure them as an essay).

>"read as many books as possible and write down your real thoughts about them."

What's gonna stop kids from just asking ChatGPT to do it for them so they can get back to doom scrolling social media or playing videogames?

If kids today have access to much higher quality (and addictive) entertainment than books, how are you gonna convince them to read anything?

Shouldn't that depends on the age? I'm not north American, I think in middle school we had to do book reviews, of any book we wanted from a selection (often by themes: ucronia, utopia, dystopia, historical, epistolary... Or by style: classic, romantic, naturalist, modern...), then in highschool deep dive in specific chapters of a book, where we do a more stylistic study and, if the teacher is really good and the chosen book appropriate, we try to make the book contradict itself, without outside knowledge[0].

Seems like the best approach to me, but i'm partial.

[0] just realized my teacher was better than I thought she was, and we, like Mr Jourdain speaking in prose, deconstructed books without realising.

Or by eliminating the Chromebooks at school and actually requiring students to carry physical books. I don't just mean textbooks. I mean hand carrying novels. Its one thing to theoretically know what a book is because you have seen one once or twice on a television show, but its a world of difference to actually hold one in your hands with pages that give way to the depth and length of the reading.

Isn’t this a perfect example of the side-effect of the introduction of KPIs?

Once you introduce KPIs, your observed cohort will adapt and optimize on these KPIs alone and on nothing else, as there is no incentive for them to do so.

It was common to get at least a book's worth of reading a week for the humanities oriented classes at my undergrad. Always fun seeing the freshman morale sink a few weeks in when they realized they had to either skim aggressively or do ~10-20 hours of reading.

Of course, those suckers got to avoid the hard science lab time, so good for them.

Were those classes actually reading all of Pride and Prejudice in a single week, or were they skimming and then using prior skill and knowledge to conduct discussions on the book?

Many teachers and administrators love the anesthetizing effects of technology.

Kids, and parents, are so badly behaved, and teachers’ hands are so tied, that any noble intentions about actually teaching go right out the window.

But can they still be at an elite college? Or is it still an elite college if the students there can't read books?

A few centuries ago, the difference between "elite" and "not elite" was the ability to read. And it may become that again.

If you have kids, I don't care what the schools do. You make sure they can and do read.