Bad literary education

The narrator sits with her daughter.

“After a few failed attempts at drawing something, she asks me to make four squares for her—two at the top, two at the bottom—and instructs me to label them in this order: ‘Character’, ‘Setting’, ‘Problem’, ‘Solution’. When I finish labelling the four squares and ask what they’re for, she explains that at school, they taught her to tell stories this way. Bad literary education begins too early and continues for way too long” (Valeria Luiselli, Lost children archive, 2020, p61).