I've taught literature once, and the kids tuned out unless I made the literature all about them.

The girls wanted to hear about how women were treated. The African-Americans wanted something that reminded them of how oppressive it was for them, and really wanted to make serfdom = slavery and the tsar's emancipation of serfs = Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.

Etc.

They wanted easy targets for empathy, and insisted not on so much understanding others as presented but on forcing characters into their own moulds. Their theory of mind was "I only need to care about people like me or like what I want to be, and that only goes so far as to see how they're like I think I am."

I was taught the opposite. Literature was good for showing that all people have similar motivations, and when they don't for "getting inside the mind" of the other person and seeing things from their perspective. This was nice for the social literature of the mid-late 1800s, for a lot of 20th century fiction, but also good for things like Austen (where the characters are of different sex, social class, and if you don't understand the culture you can't hope to understand the characters on their own terms). Sometimes it's a stretch, and sort of freaky.

Some seek a theory of mind, expanding their view of human behavior while learning literary forms and functions. Some just seek validation and confuse that psychological self-help with literature.

And some schools of criticism basically endorse the "let's see what from my agenda I can read into this novel." Making everything all about the self, in that most petty act of empathy--feeling sorry for one's self.