One of the trust destroying parts of my K-12 was poetry interpretation. It became clear very quickly that we were being "given" the desired interpretation durin

One of the trust destroying parts of my K-12 was poetry interpretation. It became clear very quickly that we were being "given" the desired interpretation during class and not really taught to actually interpret the works. I once challenged the head of my high school English department over the interpretation of a particular poem. They had weighed it down with layer upon layers of symbolism and interpretation but never able to answer the fundamental question of whether or not we were inventing meaning and attaching symbols and thus creating interpretation or the author intended this in his work. I wasn't saying that our analysis wasn't important, but I still feel it's an important distinction that the pedagogy wasn't making and I got the feeling that compliance to the accepted interpretation was more desired than being able to interpret the work yourself. Eventually I got so upset, I went and did some research and hunted down some interviews with the author which discussed the interpretation and in those interviews he explicitly called out the specific line of interpretation we were being taught as both nonsense and not at all what he meant in that particular piece and not how he generally writes. I printed out these interviews, including revelation that the title had been added by an editor years later, made copies, highlighted the relevant sections and turned them in instead of my analysis paper and took the F. It broke all of the trust I had in the education system after that and I very much turned "off" as a student after that. Later in college, when I felt my grades were more important to my future, I killed that little bit inside myself that fought the status quo and just regurgitated the accepted interpretation. I even became so good at it I found myself into various honors lit courses as a CS student. But I knew it was mostly nonsense and I honestly feel kind of ashamed at having learned to excel in the subject by become such a bullshit artist. The experience was so poor that it's left a lifelong bad taste in my mouth for poetry and various other artforms that lend themselves to deep analysis and interpretation. It's largely ruined modern art for me and I find myself veering away from "intellectually challenging" works because I'm not sure if the meaning I'm getting is real, or if I'm supposed to give in to some popular interpretation -- which inevitably makes me feel like I'm being snookered. Interestingly, modern analysis of that same poem now seem to agree with my young take on it and not the hard-line we were being force fed in high school (an invented anti-communism attachment) - but it seems only after the author made a particular point at becoming very vocal against the status quo. So small victories? so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens ~William Carlos Williams