In the same HS, I had an art teacher who was great. I gained an appreciation for abstract, 'modern' art, even if I didn't necessarily like everything I saw. She focused on how things made us feel, and if, for instance, they evoked images of other things. Stuff like that, which was all about suggestion and how elements in the image worked together, but without wrong answers or D's if we disagreed with her.
I can accept that Literature is not about science as much as it is about defining the (intentional or non) meaning a literary work carries for its audience, but at university levels it certainly likes to present itself as if it were a science (rather than an art in itself) and embraces an obscene cargo cult effigy of what real science sounds like -- exactly like new age pseudo-science.
Furthermore, by presenting itself as a science, it gives undue authority to other social "sciences" that seem to get away with asserting falsifiable claims with no attempt to provide empirical evidence, which in turn transfers that false authority to political interest groups.
The world could do with a good amount less woo than it has now.
My humanities-professor friends today are very good at taking the former approach, at least when talking with me. But the latter was definitely how literature was taught in all of the schools I went to. The green light on the dock was X. Or in another class, it was clearly Y. Or, in a third, it was X, and Y, and Z, and Ƶ and Ź and Ž and ζ, at which point the explanation seemed to be more akin to improvisational poetry about a Rorschach blot than any serious attempt at unpacking a metaphor or understanding an author. But it was still framed as authoritative analysis, which mainly made me think that the teachers were not so clear on what actual facts were.