Yeah english class activities we had were not on citing sources or thinking critically. We learned how to read and write fast and that was most of it.

As example there was those multiple choice questions asking stuff like “which paragraph had this sentence in it.” What does that even teach?

Hell I used to be praised for writing huge paragraphs of text. Then found out splitting into small ones makes it more readable by my own testing.

I learned where to use who and whom in a LoTR meme posted on lemmy ffs.

So yeah it was mostly children being used for checkboxes to get funding and whatnot.