It still feels academic though. Suppose your response to that is, "Well, suck it up, its formalized".

I'd argue that it'd be worse if you could teach your book, and a 50 year old who both has rich lived experience and grew up in the time period the book was talking about has the exact same understanding of said book as a bored edgy 16 year old.

Either you're a godly teacher, or chances are the book doesn't have much depth. And maybe you are a really good teacher, I certainly wouldn't want to teach public school teenagers for a job. But while I'm charitable to teachers, I'm also charitable to the depth of novels.

I read Dostoevsky when I was 16 and I'm still learning more things about him and myself a decade later.