“Critical literacy” to be scrapped in Queensland schools

Fair enough, John, but how can a person learn to write if he doesn’t also learn to read?

Julie McCrossin hosted a reasonable and non-alarmist conversation on RN about this topic earlier in the week, I’m sure it’s available for MP3 download by now. Maybe your son might listen to it? I think sixteen or seventeen is perhaps a little too young to make up one’s mind on the merits or otherwise of recent developments in literary studies.

Essays on Shakespeare and the Canon, or on critical reading, are NECESSARY. Anyone’s first three hundred or so essays are bilge, but unless you get through them, you don’t get to the ones worth reading. Given the tools available, how about giving him a chance to use a blog that you will read, and follow topics? There are some good essayists out there. The other day, I even encountered some decent advice on writing in one.

Or, to put it another way, writing is always writing about SOMETHING, and unless you have a something, it won’t work.

What I’d like for my kids to get out of high school English is an ability to write well in a variety of modes and (if possible) a love of literature.

This requirement could be satisfied by a Business Writing course and a sack of secondhand paperbacks. Though that would be an improvement on most high-school curricula, are you sure you wouldn’t like to restate your goal? Perhaps there’s no need to.

Most of my classmates back in high school agreed even then that we learned to “write” from our history classes’ critical essay assignments; as for literature we read cheesy bilge (Terry Pratchett etc.) on the side and developed interests in the cheesy bilge writers’ evident influences, or not; and got little out of English classes beyond an unfortunate and skewed hatred for the classics that were mistaught to us. Oh yes, and AP credits.

My English classes in South Africa 20 years ago had a section that involved showing you advertisments and teaching/asking you how the advertisers were attempting to manipulate your emotions. However it was a very small part of what we were taught.
I think a greatly expanded version of this, in particular broadended to cover political discourse, would be an invaluable addition to English classes in Australia, or, of course, Britain, the US, Canada and so on.

Harold Bloom? My life is projected to be too short for the portly gnosticiciste of whom you speak. (Which is not to say that it is anticipated to be unduly truncated, by any means.)

I actually liked Shakespeare and his little friends in old-fashioned English classes, and I like Shakespeare also now, but it was the weekly essay in biology classes that taught me most of what I learned at school of the craft of writing.

The things you claim for “the classics” are, of course, pretty much the things that were previously claimed for the classical classics and we’ve been getting along just fine without those. (I was also taught Latin, and I am certainly glad my children won’t be.)

Jos angel, I assume you are making reference to my comment above. Odd — particularly odd since you are decrying the failure of standards in education — that you have misquoted it when it is right in front of you. I clearly stated that Terry Pratchett is cheesy bilge. There is no comparison whatsoever to the works of the godlike Bill Shakespeare.

However, intelligent persons resent being told what their standards should be. And neither Bill nor his classic pals ultimately require anybody’s help, they’re that good. So I conclude it’s best to let youth read whatever they wish and find their own paths to the mountaintop.

My guess is, rhetoric (for the writing well in various styles) and pleasure reading (for the enjoyment of literature) courses would satisfy.

In my own case those were two of my favorites (the former in college, the latter in middle school) so I have to agree :) Would have been nice to get the rhetoric earlier so it would’ve stuck better (my writing isn’t great now as you see from this comment).

On the other hand I liked my 12th grade Humanities course which was “intro to canon” as far as that went (Shakespeare, Giotto, Hume, Dante, Camus, bunch of other (mostly) dead white guys), too.

“What I’d like for my kids to get out of high school English is an ability to write well in a variety of modes and (if possible) a love of literature.”

Clearly, it would be nice if children came out of secondary school English lessons with a love of literature; but I’m not sure that’s a goal you can use to build a curriculum. What would, say, a history curriculum intended to stimulate ‘a love of history’ look like, or a maths curriculum based on similar goals?

Surely, the point of a literature curriculum should be to teach children how literature works – how certain ways of writing produce certain effects, why a piece of writing might be written in one way rather than another, and how they can apply these ideas to things they read. I don’t know if the critical literacy courses actually taught these things or not, but the general idea of teaching the theory of criticism in literature classes strikes me as just obviously right. If that’s not what you’re teaching, what’s the point of the classes?

I say this as someone who wasn’t taught about criticism at school and, thinking back, remembers English classes as an absolute waste of time. We were invited to read books and comment on them, with no reflection as to what sort of comment might be useful. If you want children to love literature, just give them some free time to read books. Teaching them about literature is surely something else entirely.