when did people lose the wonder of stories? when did they start thinking stories are meant to be 1:1 equivalents to the boring and worst parts of the real world instead of heightened, metaphorical depictions of the human condition, the complexity of our emotions writ large?

I ask this question constantly because it makes me sad and I want to know the answer, as someone who picked a degree in English instead of English education because the uphill battle I knew I’d be fighting just felt too big for me

I don’t blame the kids who’ve never gotten through an entire book or who slept through their English classes, I feel like there must be something fundamentally broken in the way we teach literature and it’s bleeding not just into how people consume stories but how they make them