It's certainly possible that "blue curtains" specifically is a memetic reference that I've absorbed via osmosis, but the experience of having to analyze minute details to a ridiculous extent was very much a true one, regardless of the specifics of the example.
I feel like the "blue curtains" problem with reading in schools is akin to the "shape -> rectangle -> square" problem that early OOP education has. It might be a very basic and simple attempt to explain a concept (inheritance in the case of OOP, symbolism in the case of books), but its simplicity and inoffensive genericness is so overwhelmingly devoid of any of the usefulness that the concept brings that its more harmful to the students than helpful.
I've long argued that programing courses are broken. They present a concept with a hugely simplified model, and then tell you when you don't understand why you'd want to do it that it will make more sense when you build a "real" program. I think they would be better served in a lot of ways by having you write "real" code the hard way first, and then introducing the concepts that OOP (and other patterns) benefit from by showing how those things address the very real pain points the programers experienced. A sort of "in medias res" method of teaching.
I think something similar applies to a lot of the way literature concepts are taught in schools. Boring books that don't connect with the readers and students are assigned, and then terrible examples that are either overly contrived (blue curtains) or blindingly obvious (the bad guy kicks the puppy which shows he's bad) that they just turn the students off. There's no excitement or interest nurtured into the concepts because the taught examples are so lifeless and far removed from what is actually possible.
>It's hard to say what school is doing in wrong when students aren't interested in study. Maybe the answer is to let the mom studious students leave school.
My personal opinions on the matter are
1) "too much mandatory study". Yeah when they're adults, they'll need to work 8 hour jobs, but kids need time to be kids and they need time to let the things they're learning sink in and discover real world applicability in their own lives. 6-7 hours of schooling + 1-3 hours of homework + projects + "extra curricular" programs adds up to a lot of time where students don't have any time to find anything interesting in what they've learned before they're shuffled off to the next things. School is stressful enough when you're just learning, but all the other stuff that's piled on and the regimented testing just burns them out. I was turned off of math courses for half of my schooling because 2nd grade math was full of timed tests in which failures were punished by loss of recess time.
2) Related to that, recognize that education is highly individual and offer more tailored schooling. I had friends who were held back from advanced classes where they would have been challenged and engaged because early in elementary school they performed poorly on a handful of standardized tests and were locked forever in the "standard" track. So much of what you want to teach as a skill can be taught via multiple different avenues, and we should offer schooling that takes advantage of that. Literary concepts like foreshadowing, metaphor, symbolism etc can be taught via film, books, poetry, games and even music. Why does every student then need to go through the same literary courses with the same set of books to learn the material? Math concepts can be taught with money, or physics, or chemistry or computer programming or wood working. Why does everyone need to go through the same math textbook?
The most memorable teachers I ever had were the ones that stepped outside the books. The ones that explored teaching a concept from multiple angles, and who understood that often it was necessary to let the students see the deep end of the pool to get them interested in learning to swim at all. Those teachers worked well for me. They didn't work for others. And some teachers that I found staid and boring and that failed to leave me with any love for the subject they were teaching were ones that connected with other classmates. But we were all crammed into the same set of lessons with the same teacher and teaching styles.
Education smothered my love for reading by forcing me to read material that didn't connect with me and analyze and report on that material in a way that was unnatural for me. The ember that was able to be rekindled was only kept alive by the occasional tending of a teacher that would from time to time allow me to step outside the box to engage with books the way that worked for me. I was lucky in that regard. Many students aren't and that's a shame.