My take on the average American high school English curriculum is I have no idea what the average is because I only experienced one run through two high schools

My take on the average American high school English curriculum is I have no idea what the average is because I only experienced one run through two high schools and you didn't experience much more than that, either. My experience did not match yours at all. I cannot recall any instance ever where a teacher expected me to love what we were reading. They expected we could suss out some sort of thematic relevance and defend our theses with examples found in the text and that's about it. We weren't training to be professional critics that evaluate quality and make recommendations about what others may or may not enjoy consuming. It was more demonstrate you know how to pay attention and extract some level of meaning from a text. If you instead memorize and regurgitate what is in the Cliffs Notes, that seems like a fast track to becoming the kind of person who is always told to read the manual because you clearly didn't. While they surely don't do a great job at it, American high schools as far as I can tell are mostly just trying to create adults that don't become brain vampires expecting their better educated peers to be free question answering services because they never learned how to learn.