In a nutshell.
And the problem that a lot of people have with students in elementary school is that they're not high school or jr college students.
Look, the push for critical thinking and abstraction reasoning on the part of 2nd and 3rd graders is insane. They're brains, for the most part, aren't there yet. You can scaffold, help, support, encourage, and do everything you want, but most kids won't get it.
Same with what the writer wants for high school students. Of course the kids aren't being taught as they should be taught in college--on the other hand, the first thing that my graduate literature faculty had us do was close reading. First, what does the text say. Milk it for every bit of information. Look at vocabulary. Look at the explicit meaning of the text. How do formal features help determine stylistics. Then we could start talking about society and culture. Otherwise it would be too easy to take all works of literature as primarily grist for a socio-political exegesis, when in many cases they've survived as masterworks for 150-200 years even as feudalism and monarchies died, the industrial revolution spread, and capitalism changed and evolved.
Oddly, by the time we were in college we'd already learned a lot of politics, cultural information, etc. So that the literature classroom was not primarily a sociology, cultural studies, history or political science classroom. You try that in high school, and you get what happens with Animal Farm in 9th grade. You spend a week talking about the history as a stand-alone topic, and then work during the next two weeks reading the book and trying to explicit various bits in terms of history that the kids have barely learned. (And only after doing both of those do you turn to additional analytical sources.)
This way of constructing meaning, oddly, is very much like how humans construe a sentence. First you wait until the key word (typically a verb) provides event structure. Then you reintegrate all the sentential "stuff" that came before the event structure was in place. You add in all the material following this. Then, a fraction of a second later, there's a spike in brain potential as context and real-world knowledge (all that cultural/historical/political) stuff gets pitched in to help place the sentence in a real-world setting. (At some point later you listen to other folk talking about what you understood--often you get it right, sometimes you miss something. Secondary analytical sources.)
In high school, some of the brightest "get it" and have enough background or interest to fill in the real-world knowlege on their own. Most don't. Worse, a lot of kids are getting into AP classes these days without fundamental, basic close-reading skills. I think it's a lousy idea to readjust public education to focus on primarily the bottom 10%. But it's also a lousy idea to assume that all students are in the top 5%.
I mean, really: A lot of college undergraduates can't do an adequate job of close-reading, and people want to skip over this and focus on all the stuff that surrounds a text and situates it. This is important, to be sure, but not at the expense of just having the text there as a kind of touchstone for the real discussion. The text is first and foremost a text; only then is it a point of departure for other things, or a symbol to build a polemic around. Yet even in college too many professors let the kids not read the text, explaining it or letting Cliff Notes do the reading and thinking for the kids so that the professor can drone on about the socio-cultural implications that s/he's really interested.
"I know all about _Tom Sawyer_."
"Have you ever read it?"
"Well, no, but I can tell you all about the history, society, and culture at the time. I understand it fully as a topic of conversation."
"But not as literature. When did the English Dept. become a tool of the history and political science departments?"
"Uh ..."
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