Truth is beauty, beauty truth, sir!

A topic on the radio the other day was about whether or not English should be a compulsory subject in high schools. Any opinions?

It should be in English-speaking countries, yes. COME ON!

I said I respected the "it depends" response, but I certainly don't respect the "Come on!" response, also known as the Lleyton response...Zing!

Yes I compared you to Leyton

What are a Leyton?

I was doing Gob from Arrested Development.

I don't know who that is, and yeah I spelt Lleyton wrong one of the times (I'm not sure which; two "l's" what the hell??).

But you still have to explain why it should be compulsory in English-speaking countries.

I still don't know what a Lleyton OR a Leyton is.

Teaching people to properly comprehend and use the language of their country should be compulsory.

A Lleyton is a Lleyton Hewitt, as in the one that goes "Come on!".

What do you mean when you say "properly comprehend and use" a language? And why do you think the English course does this?

i think the current syllabus (did i spell that right) doesn't do what Marc believes it does. It's supposed purpose is to teach an appreciation of english language literature, and to get kids using their own creativity. the same subject could be just called literature, and yes it should be compulsory- for the simple fact that it gives students a chance to both use (and expand) their creative brain bits, and because it assists in building a students ability to explore/critique/understand the various literary works that their society both uses now (the simpsons were used in the HSC in recent years) and those of the past (Shakespeare, etc)

Not so much a rant as what i hope is the beginning of another lively discussion.

Enjoy your new rank.

I, too, hope it turns into a nice discussion.

I agree with your description of what English is supposed to do, and I agree that it is valuable, but when it comes to being compulsory I'm less sure. Surely mathematics, or science, or history, are all very valuable, but none of them are compulsory. The most pertinent example is Maths, since, as you know, it was compulsory but now isn't.

That doesn't mean English shouldn't be. It means Maths should be.

Yeah good point. Though I do see the side of the argument that allows kids to select the subject that they think will help them best - wait, kids don't know shit.

And neither do we. That's what makes it so juicy.

Yeah... I guess. Doesn't address the question though.

What question?

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...