Truth is beauty, beauty truth, sir!

I think you'll find English will also teach student how to write essays, which is something you need to do at uni. I'm probably wrong but i thought English was only compulsory if you wanted to go to uni (i.e. get a uai- the reason for finishing the HSC), i do know of a couple of guys who went through my school and i think that they only did HSC English because they needed it for TAFE.

It does (kinda) teach essay writing skills, but a point that the guy on the radio mentioned was that don't subjects like History teach essay writing skills as well? Though perhaps they don't focus specifically on the writing process as much as perhaps English could (or should). And yeah English works on critically analysing texts, which I agree is important, but they do focus singly on a specific genre of texts. What about this idea: the processes taught that are supposed to be specific to English could be disentagled from those traditional texts and just taught separately instead (if that's possible)? Then you could have the study of those texts that are specific to our history (or whatever) in another subject.

So you think maybe there should be a separate, compulsory class purely on essay-writing technique (and maybe the basics of the rules of the language), and then there should be Literature Analysis/Creative Writing classes that are optional?

I could get behind that.

Yeah, something like that. I agree that the language/comprehension skills are very important, but I'm just not sure that they're really what is taught in English classes; I know I did little of this in my high school, but I guess it was a rather crummy high school, and I did only do standard English, and not much of it at that. But perhaps that's the point, that this standard high school was perhaps representative of many public schools, maybe.

But I guess it comes down to the fact that kids won't learn if they don't want to. And they don't want to.

I thought I'd try open this topic up again... see if people would take an interest or not.

The english course has come up again in the news recently, but this time I think it was more about whether the 'literature' taught in english classes should remain as it was e.g. older texts, like novels and poetry and whatnot. Or that we should now be including things like advertising and sms text and more modern examples of text to analyse.

Well most languages evolve, at least the English language does so I don't see why the way we teach it shouldn't.

Fair call.

I'm pretty certain that the sms language stuff gets covered in the modern history sylabus (i.e. change to our society in the 21st C)

Really? Interesting. Do they discuss the language of it? Or more about its history and such?

Not too sure- one of my Youth Group kids mentioned it...

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/life-and-style/from-playdough-to-plato/2008/09/04/1220121421599.html?page=fullpage

Article wrote:For the past decade, Brisbane's Buranda State School has been teaching philosophy to children from the tender age of five to when they graduate to high school.

I heard an interview with the principal of this school on the radio yesterday. It was real interesting. Despite the article being pretty lame, it sounded like it was doing some good. Maybe they should be talking about making this a part of the curriculum, rather than discussions on SMS text or driving lessons or other crap being taught in schools.

Can't they do bolth?

Certainly not bolth, but maybe both. But, aren’t we already having problems with cramming too much into the syllabus? There’s only so much you can teach the kids in a limited time, yeah? Unless we teach them an hour of each subject...

you mean... *gasp* take out the important things like enforced "sport"/ Assemblies/ other useless crap?

Oh I'm all for removing those crappy things. But, you see, I feel that you're still not understanding this concept of 'time' and the limited nature of said phenomena, and the ability to only be able to perform a finite amount of actions in said 'limited' 'time'.