DavidJS, my post might have been unclear, because I had to edit back to fit the word limit.

My primary schooling was a bit before yours, but my point was that we were both capable of reading the text of that Austen quotation as fundamentally irrelevant to who we were, you as gay (making some assumptions here), and me as a young girl. That quotation was addressed neither of us, it is addressed to a wealthy man who is supposed to want a "wife". Marriage is set out as a social imperative in Austen's works, but not all girls and boys saw their lives ahead in those limited terms.

That is, as children we were both capable of enjoying Austen as literature, at the same time as thinking critically about the political, historical and social context of the quotation, and in that sense I am saying that we were "deconstructionists", before the French gave us the theory. I would hope that children are still making up their own minds about the meaning of the literature they read, at school and in their own time.

Perhaps the pendulum has swung too far in favour of deconstruction in our schools, I am not close enough to know these days, but I hope we don't throw it all out in meeting some other ideological agenda. The political attacks on our teachers in schools, universities and museums, are becoming increasingly rancorous in recent years, as part of the so-called "culture war", which is essentially ideological and not neccesarily in the best interests of our children.