The fight for English

Standing in front of a new class I could not assume that any of the students had read George Eliot, Henry James, Joyce, Hemingway, Woolfe, White, Winton, Stephen King, Zadie Smith or Ian McEwin, to name just a few. When I asked them why they were here they said they wanted to be writers. It was like wanting to be a brain surgeon but not being interested in brains.

My job was not to teach English. My job was to teach professional writing. There are school teachers far more capable people than me, armed with zest and imagination, that could impart the mystery and joy of reading and performing Shakespeare, Beckett or Berkoff.

Jonathan Swift is up-roaringly funny. He's a poke in the eye for the establishment. Chaucer is preoccupied with drinking and sex. Why not? And after reading the poetry of Andrew Marvell, well, he wouldn't be the first choice of a date for your daughter. And they're not even the good bits.

All of that stuff should have already been taught. We need a national teaching curriculum. It should provide students with the ability to write and argue in a logical and coherent manner.

Any future school curriculum needs to arm students not with relativistic twaddle but to draw their own conclusions about some of the best writing in the history of literature. Then let the students make up their own minds if it's any good. At the moment, to quote F.R. Leavis, many kids aren't saying anything intelligible.

It's not that they haven't got anything to say. Far from it. They simply lack the tools to express themselves.

If they can explain in a logical and concise way why the screenwriting behind the “tooth and fang” e-games trumps the dramatic writing of C.S. Forester, then more power to them.

A recent survey by Canberra based academic Andrew Leigh concludes, “troubling new evidence suggests that literacy and numeracy scores have stagnated or fallen since the 1970s despite the doubling of resources”.

Commonwealth and state governments can throw all the money they like at a system that is churning out semi-literates and semi-numerates but in my experience, much of the money is spent on IT development rather than helping students write comprehensible content.

Allow me to digress. There are serious issues with the push in some schools to replace texts with online books. Quoted recently in the Adelaide Sunday Mail, Ms Trudy Sweeney, president of Computers in Education Group SA said, “The curriculum recognises that it's important to have authentic tasks, which means their learning shouldn't just be out of a text book in isolation of the world”.

In the same news story, Dr Robert Fitzgerald, a research fellow in ICT at Canberra University said, “Publishers are realising that, whether it's in schools or universities, it's hard to convince students to buy those big heavy books”.

In isolation of the world? Where does she think these kids live?