Honors students DO NEED instruction on literary analysis. Give me a break!
If high school students don't need instruction in literary analysis, then all my literature classes in college were a waste of time!
Literary Analysis is the KEY to improving critical thinking. Questions are asked that provoke thought and analysis (Why did the character do this? Why did the writer feel this is important? etc. etc.)
The point is that they were supposed to be "taught" these skills in the junior high honors class. My son did fine (A-) in last years Humanities with strong writing grades. So I am unsure if past teachers did a poor job teaching the skill OR the fact that since he can string together a coherent & grammatical essay hid his lack of understanding.
They DO literary analysis in the honors English classes. They do a LOT of it, but don't spend a lot of time discussing the mechanics of writing it into a paper. A literary analysis paper is a different thing than writing a Social Studies report, or a lab report. It is also different kind of critical thinking than the analysis needed to understand higher level math for example. Looking for hidden meanings/themes in a book is a different skill than analyzing why a science experiment failed, or where the bug is in the code, or how to best build that mathematical 'proof'.
My own strength is math/computer science and I am a voracious reader. I made it through university without taking much literary analysis. Trying to understand "why" a writer thinks something is important something I find particularly perplexing. I do enjoy exploring the themes/moral of a story. But when I am asking "why" a writer wrote in one particular way I'm likely to say 'because it makes a good story'.
