I guess I agree that writing essays about literature doesn't teach you how to write well, but I don't think that means we shouldn't ask students to think critic

I guess I agree that writing essays about literature doesn't teach you how to write well, but I don't think that means we shouldn't ask students to think critically about things and formulate arguments about them. That's extremely valuable, and isn't given enough emphasis, as evidence by the widespread lack of critical thinking in the world. And while you can certainly mount arguments about things other than literature, I also think we should be asking students to read literature, because having a widely shared corpus is important for a culture. So, if schools have time and resources to teach writing as a separate unit from critical thinking, and to teach literature as a separate unit from both of those, go right ahead and refactor everything into separate modules. On the other hand, if time or resources are limited, it may make sense to combine one or two (or heck, all three) of those things together, leaving us pretty much where we started, and implying that either the premise of the article is wrong, or (if not) that there is some other explanation for why schools don't teach writing very well.