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English Should not be Compulsory in High School

theprestige said:
We're not marveling at anyone's literary skills, in a high school lit class. We're getting exposed to significant works of literature.
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The first part is not true. We absolutely were analyzing literary skills such as use of metaphor, narrative structure, characterization, hyperbole etc… in English literature in A-level in the UK, particularly when it came to Shakespeare and Dickens. But looking into it I see that we did study some translated texts. Specifically Henrik Ibsen.
 
Just came across this thread. Did a quick scan through, so my apologies if this response is too late, or has been covered before....
bobdroege7 said:
It is a most necessary skill.

English majors may not make top salaries right out of college, but after 20 years they do indeed catch up.
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It is a necessary skill to read/write English well.

The question is whether what is taught in later years of high school actually teaches you anything useful.

When I was in high school (decades ago, in Canada), English was the only mandatory class in the last few years. But pretty much everything we were taught at that point involved things like reading novels and dealing with things like "symbolism". Might be useful if you plan to become a novelist, but for someone like an engineer who wants to read/write technical reports (or even read fiction books for their own enjoyment) it was pretty much useless. No talks about sentence structure/grammar, how to write an essay, etc. (Some of that was covered in earlier grades, but only in a superficial way.)

I hated every moment.

When I went to university, we were required to take an english course. Fortunately for us science-types, they had a course called "Writing for Scientists". Finally, after almost a decade of useless discussions about symbolism in novels and other useless junk we covered in high school, we were learning real, useful skills... how to write essays, how to do research in a library, what a peer-reviewed source was.
 
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English literature GCSE was the last compulsory English I had to do, at age 15-16 (we did the language GCSE a year earlier) - in my class our set texts were Jane Eyre, The Crucible, and an anthology of poetry by four poets. I read The Crucible which was very good, only liked one of the poets (Robert Frost) enough to read the quarter of the book devoted to him, and didn’t bother reading Jane Eyre at all. Got my only GCSE A* out of it, and I have quite successfully built a career around ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ my way through stuff. So I support English Literature being on the syllabus to build those skills.

The other 2 classes in my year got The Turn of the Screw and Animal Farm as their novel to analyse, so I was quite annoyed by that, and I might have read those.
 
gypsyjackson said:
English literature GCSE was the last compulsory English I had to do, at age 15-16 (we did the language GCSE a year earlier) - in my class our set texts were Jane Eyre, The Crucible, and an anthology of poetry by four poets. I read The Crucible which was very good, only liked one of the poets (Robert Frost) enough to read the quarter of the book devoted to him, and didn’t bother reading Jane Eyre at all. Got my only GCSE A* out of it, and I have quite successfully built a career around ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ my way through stuff. So I support English Literature being on the syllabus to build those skills.

The other 2 classes in my year got The Turn of the Screw and Animal Farm as their novel to analyse, so I was quite annoyed by that, and I might have read those.
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dann said:
The Turn of the Screw and Animal Farm are novellas.
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Well, GCSE is actually junior high school age (14-16), rather than American high school age which is more or less covered by A-levels.

If I recall correctly, when doing GCSEs, we studied some Shakespeare (MacBeth, although it had a parallel text in contemporary English), metaphysical poetry (John Donne, Andrew Marvel), Shaw's Pygmalion, and Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge. I expect I must have also read some kind of contemporary literature as well, but I don't remember.

For A-level I remember that we did more Shakespeare, Hamlet and Richard II, but not with the parallel text, Dickens's Great Expectations, the Romantic poets (Samuel Taylor Colerdidge, in particular), some contemporary novels (Atwood's Surfacing and Ackroyd's Hawksmoor), as well as Ibsen's Doll's House (I think the only thing that had been translated) and a collection of African poetry.
 
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dann said:
The Turn of the Screw and Animal Farm are novellas.
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Reminds me of when I was on a creative writing course at Birkbeck. An eminent author - forget who - urged readers in an 'On Writing' book to read Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, as an example of perfect writing and the perfect novel, which was so outstanding, it won the Nobel Prize.

On getting my hands on this book I was absolutely stunned and gobsmacked. I was also filled with jealousy and resentment that American kids got to study such a simple, short, very short, story in simple 12-year-old language, whilst we had to grapple with complex Shakespeare, Dickins and Chaucer (i.e., relatively complex for a 13-year-old).

I do agree with the OP somewhat that English Literature in High School involves being able to express what the author was thinking and as this is largely decreed by the establishment, as it were, and as you lose marks for diverting from the textbook view, it can be a rather pretentious exercise.
 
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angrysoba said:
Well, GCSE is actually junior high school age (14-16), rather than American high school age which is more or less covered by A-levels.

If I recall correctly, when doing GCSEs, we studied some Shakespeare (MacBeth, although it had a parallel text in contemporary English), metaphysical poetry (John Donne, Andrew Marvel), Shaw's Pygmalion, and Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge. I expect I must have also read some kind of contemporary literature as well, but I don't remember.

For A-level I remember that we did more Shakespeare, Hamlet and Richard II, but not with the parallel text, Dickens's Great Expectations, the Romantic poets (Samuel Taylor Colerdidge, in particular), some contemporary novels (Atwood's Surfacing and Ackroyd's Hawksmoor), as well as Ibsen's Doll's House (I think the only thing that had been translated) and a collection of African poetry.
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The Head of English at my school objected in principle to the standard English Literature exams at 'O' Level where you had to memorise big chunks of the book in order to do well. However, there was a version of the exam (it might have been new at the time) where you were allowed to take the text to the exam with you so you could give accurate quotes if necessary, and concentrate more on addressing the meaning of the text, etc. We had One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn, Henry IV Part 1, and The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy. Despite having the texts with me, I managed to fail. Perhaps I should have actually read all the books; I never managed to get very far through The Woodlanders; my only memory of it is Hardy's use of the pathetic fallacy - every time someone felt miserable, it rained (or was it vice versa?).
 
zooterkin said:
The Head of English at my school objected in principle to the standard English Literature exams at 'O' Level where you had to memorise big chunks of the book in order to do well. However, there was a version of the exam (it might have been new at the time) where you were allowed to take the text to the exam with you so you could give accurate quotes if necessary, and concentrate more on addressing the meaning of the text, etc. We had One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn, Henry IV Part 1, and The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy. Despite having the texts with me, I managed to fail. Perhaps I should have actually read all the books; I never managed to get very far through The Woodlanders; my only memory of it is Hardy's use of the pathetic fallacy - every time someone felt miserable, it rained (or was it vice versa?).
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The only big I remember about Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge was when one of the characters built a machine that could do the work instead of the farmers and “the crowd gazed in astonishment at Farfrae’s glorious erection.” That woke the class up!
 
My brother read "Ivan Denisovich" in High School, and I read it after him, because it was another book in the house.

As a consequence, I also read "The First Circle" and "Cancer Ward" (borrowed from the local library).

"One day in the life" is still on my bookshelves somewhere...
 
I hated the English Lit part of my secondary education - English Lang was just a bore. Two main reasons, one the books we were meant to read were either boring "worthy" books or books I'd read before or boring worthy books I had read before and the second reason was the reading along and out aloud parts of the classes. That was sheer torture for me, akin to the Chinese water torture. The only fun bit of the last two years was when even our very genre-snob teacher (only the literature genre was worthy of being read) gave up on Great Expectations as our exam text for it being so tedious and boring and we swapped to The Lord of The Flies, I would always try to get a mention in about it being a science fiction novel much to her annoyance.
 
What I really disliked about English Lit at scool was having to memorise loads of poetry, took all the pleasure out of it, and as I am not good at memorising great wodges of poetry, the teacher took great delight in 'randomly' (he used a pack of cards with pupil's names on) choosing me to try and recite whatever the latest piece was. Bastard.

Most of the books we had to read were the usual stuff. Two I never managed to finish were RL Stevenson's Kidnapped and RD Blackmore's Lorna Doone. Good grief they were boring in the extreme, especially the latter.

But the idea of Eng Lit classes is OK, just a matter of choosing the right subject matter. imo, of course.
 
Darat said:
Youi had the same teacher? @D
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And me: mine insisted that EM Forster's The Machine Stops, which was in a short story collection we "did" for O-level Eng Lit, could not possibly be sf, as Forster wrote it.

My reply, as the resident sf head, was that it wasn't good sf but it was still sf.

Still, it was better than utter deus ex machina, contrived bollocks like Great Expectations.

Same bloke tried to tell me the Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder wasn't well written, when we "did" that a couple of years earlier. Oddly, he couldn't explain to me how and why it was badly written, aside from saying that it was sf, so it had to be bad.

And he couldn't explain to me why certain passages in GE where "symbolic" of something or other, just that "it's obvious". When I argued that something else in GE was "obviously symbolic", while giving reasons, he dismissed me.

I was a pain in the arse during Eng Lit, as I detested it. Same bloke taught me for Language, at which I was good.
 
SteveAitch said:
What I really disliked about English Lit at scool was having to memorise loads of poetry, took all the pleasure out of it, and as I am not good at memorising great wodges of poetry, the teacher took great delight in 'randomly' (he used a pack of cards with pupil's names on) choosing me to try and recite whatever the latest piece was. Bastard.

Most of the books we had to read were the usual stuff. Two I never managed to finish were RL Stevenson's Kidnapped and RD Blackmore's Lorna Doone. Good grief they were boring in the extreme, especially the latter.

But the idea of Eng Lit classes is OK, just a matter of choosing the right subject matter. imo, of course.
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As a child, I could recite 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43997/the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-text-of-1834, happily that memory is now lost to time.

It was weird circumstances, I'd played the lead in the school production of 'Lieutenant Cockatoo' which was very loosely based on the poem.

After the play was done, I followed up by learning the poem.

Both of those things probably served me well for learning lines for other performances.

But I'm really glad that it's not all stuck in my head.

(One of Rosencrantz's speeches was stuck in there for about 20 years, the one that started with:

"The single and peculiar life is bound, with the strength and armour of the mind, to keep itself free from 'noyance, but much more that soul upon whose life, depends and rests the lives of many..."

(Now I'm annoyed that, that part is still in there taking up room.)

:(
 
Dagnabit!

More bits of dialog have just surfaced:

"Happy that we're not o'er happy."

"On fortune's cap we're not the button."

"Nor the soles of her shoes?"

"Faith! Her privates, we."

"O Strumpet fortune!"

You'd think after forty years, I'd be free of that junk, but no, it's still in there.
 
Heck, I was a theatre kid, and I once tried to memorise Hamlet's soliloquy and only made it two-thirds of the way through.
 
I was in Brazil for 7th grade, so I got Portuguese literature. Ended up arguing with the teacher about whether the title character was the main character of the novel. The teacher argued that he was in the title, so he was obviously the main character. I argued that if you actually read the story, he played a bit part. The driving force in the plot was someone else.

And of course when I returned to the States and matriculated in high school, they wouldn't give Lit credits for the Portuguese lit I'd read.
 
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