My experience of programming is making a turtle move around on a screen, so programming is dumb. My experience of math is working out how fast trains traveling towards each other are going, so math is dumb. My experience of chemistry is making a bit of paper change color when dipped in vinegar, so chemistry is dumb. And so on ad nauseam.

Those all proved useful though using real empirical based systems. If your programming class was, “what do you think the author meant by this line of code?” with no evidence to support any kind of guess, then yes it would be dumb.

As I said in another comment, at this level "literary criticism" is intended to develop rudimentary skills of textual interpretation. You learn what symbolism is and are asked to produce some examples. It doesn't matter what the poem "actually" means any more than it matters that you're ignoring friction and variable speeds and the changing mass of trains as they burn fuel when you work out how fast they're going in school math tests. When you get to more advanced textual analysis, you have to justify readings based on the work as a whole, the writer's oeuvre, historical context, linguistic concerns, philosophical frameworks, and so on.

> at this level "literary criticism" is intended to develop...skills of textual interpretation

But it is also at this level that multiple-choice tests about which bits of a text mean what (as the original article illustrates) proliferate. It is at this level that the textbook is the One Truth about what a text means. As one other comment points out, at this level there is no recourse but "authority" which is, ironically, detached from the author.

> It doesn't matter what the poem "actually" means any more than it matters that you're ignoring friction

This is a false equivalence. When we ignore 'what the poem "actually" means' it opens up interpretation to a colossal array of extremely subjective possibilities. "The curtains are blue" could symbolize anything from the author's depression to his thoughts about the Yuan dynasty. In contrast, the effects of ignoring friction can be objectively proven (if not empirically demonstrated) and would give us a definite answer, no mental gymnastics required.

In real-life engineering, we also tolerate a certain amount of slack and simplification in our models so long as the discrepancy between computation and observation is not so drastic. In this sense, ignoring those variables is tantamount to practice in iterative refinement (you are launching a projectile in an indoors gymnasium; you wouldn't really care if your computation is off by a foot or so because you ignored air resistance and the curvature of the Earth). The simplification can still provide value (not to mention practicality). But eking out an explanation just for the sake of giving an explanation, relegating "the work as a whole, the writer's oeuvre, historical context, linguistic concerns, philosophical frameworks, and so on" to more advanced levels, is just sloppy scholarship and build poor habits.

Your argument seems to boil down to this. Only empirical disciplines count as valid scholarship. Interpretive disciplines in the humanities are not empirical in the same way as engineering and scientific disciplines. Therefore they are not valid scholarship.

Unless you're prepared to budge on the first premise, there's nothing much I can say to persuade you.

I just refused. I had good enough grades that I could afford to actively sabotage those lessons with passive aggressive responses that let my teacher know very well by the end of it what I thought of the whole thing.

I found it quite interesting that I was the only person in that class who regularly both read and wrote poems, and at the same time the one who had the sharpest reaction to being forced to analyse them in ways I felt actively destroyed my enjoyment of those poems.

One of the highlights of my school years was during this torture, when I got a chance to read a poem I'd written during one of those lessons aloud, with the intent that we would analyse it.

The teacher walked right into it, not yet aware how much I detested it.

My poem was a scathing criticism of tearing poems apart to invent meanings, unsupported by facts, that the author likely never intended, just barely civil enough to be read out in school.

My teacher got red and mumbled something I think nobody in class heard over the cheering and clapping.

I don't think I ever want to perform any of my poems again - it's a hard reaction to beat.

My teacher and I reached a cautious detente - he didn't punish my grade as much as he could have for that and other demonstrations, and I contained it and mostly played along. But the following year we did have to do a major report that included a literary analysis of a novel, and I told him flat out that I knew I could afford to come out a full grade lower and still not drop a grade for my final grade of the year, and that I just would ignore substantial parts of the requirements.

I did all of the 'mechanical' analysis of vocabulary and identifying allegories and the like, but then flat out refused to speculate on what the text meant. That was purely demonstrative - I certainly could have talked about my subjective interpretation, but the exercise in pretending there was an objective interpretation just made me upset.

It did not just affect my enjoyment of reading, but also my enjoyment of writing - the thought of my writing even potentially being treated like that was profoundly depressing.

To this day I think these kinds of lessons are destructive and do massive damage to students enjoyment of literature.