"English" shouldn't be a high school class...

[jake williams]

...or, generally speaking, a university department.

Please allow me to explain, because (and don't try to psychoanalyze this) I found this particular issue to be one of the greatest sites of existential angst for most of my time in high school. My reasons are approximately as follows.

Most importantly, while creating and organizing clearly defined and discrete units of study is always complex and problematic, "English" is an unusually poorly-formed one.

What does it mean for native English speaking high school students to study English?


The study of English grammar and vocabulary. Literate native English speakers have nothing to learn from a high school English class. You learn the words for parts of speech, which is mostly useless, and you learn style rules, which are inconsistent. Formal writing skills are absolutely useful, but I learned more in high school about essay writing in a few weeks' worth of history classes than I did in four years of English (including dropping out of grade 11 English twice and nearly failing it the third time). If we had a year of advanced literacy skills in high scohol it'd still probably be too much. There's lots to learn about formal language skills but you already do that if you're practically using it. I don't want to write a literary essay and never will have to; I will continue to have to write the sorts of essays I wrote in history classes, but I learned how to do it there, not in English class.
The study of English literature as an art form. There's no reason not to study Shakespeare aside from the fact that he's pretty boring and you certainly won't be discovering anything new about the guy, but there's no particular reason for high school students to focus on English literature in particular beyond lack of knowledge of foreign languages. Translations of literature from other languages if anything is generally more informative than a study of English literature in particular; you learn much more about the depth and variety of literature as a creative form than you do if confined to literature originally written in English.
The study of the history of the English-speaking world (contained within the history of the language itself). It makes sense for English students to study English history, but there's no particular reasons for Canadian students to study English or American rather than French or Russian history unless one accepts the legitimacy of British colonialism and its organization of the world.

Any of these things might be useful specializations for academics in particular fields. We have specialists in the study of particular amphibians and Arabic classical music, and there's no reason we shouldn't. But we shouldn't be making our kids take mandatory classes in amphibian biology, or Arab nationhood. There is a vibrant academic linguistics, some of which (albeit rarely) focuses on the grammars of particular languages, but its work looks virtually nothing like what is studied in academic English classes.

More importantly and more frustratingly however, I found the study of "English" as something else altogether: the study of a set of values, social norms and views of history wrapped under a veil of academic objectivity. Particular stylistic conventions designed by and in the service of particular loci of social power - for example, the preferences of grammar and pronunciation used by certain communities, or even more problematically, pretenses of objectivity themselves such as proscriptions of personal pronouns - are cast as objective (academically confirmed) "facts" of the English language. The students' linguistic preferences are not preferences - they're mistakes. The teachers' linguistic preferences are not preferences - they're correct. This understanding of language is totally foreign to the actual academic study of language, on whose legitimacy teachers' claims are predicated.

More than that, English classes are used on a regular basis as ways of teaching things about society and history where the actual subject is so masked as to be free from debate. When a history teacher talks about the Cold War, she brings to it her particular historical study of the Cold War or at very least, her study of historiography and general historical facts surrounding the war. She presents the historical facts, and if students disagree with what is being taught, the debate centres around the nature of the available evidence about those historical facts. The same is true if that teacher is teaching the history of American racism, or medieval Britain.

But if an English teacher is teaching about the Cold War (1984), American racism (To Kill a Mockingbird), or medieval Britain (Shakespeare), the historical facts he presents are unquestionable, or at best generally not questioned. Here historical facts can be presented without debate. No questions are begged. Questioning students might fail to question a dishonest history teacher, but they can't question dishonest English teachers. English teachers, you see, are not teaching history - they're simply teaching style, form, grammar and vocabulary. You can't be questioning that, can you?

Thus in the failure to adequately make our public high schools' curricula accountable to some logical organization, we create a fertile ground for the unchecked indoctrination into dominant ideology. It's precisely because "English" is not some specific thing being taught to students that students can instead be taught what the ruling class would have them learn.

That said, I can certainly think of bigger problems in public education, and the deep malcontentment that the organization of high school "English" curriculum impresses in me seems well out of step with its actual importance. That fact makes it no less the case, though.

[Jimmie Higgins]

In California public schools there was a back and forth thing going on for a while where grammer was pushed hard and then alternately not taught at all. If you can't tell from my posts, I was in school during the "pick grammar up organically as you read" regime:D.

I didn't really understand basic grammar concepts until I got to high school and was taught grammar in Spanish class... I had to kind of reverse engineer it because they taught up Spanish grammar as if we all understood English grammar.

Anyway while I do think that grammar should be taught in existing capitalist schools, I think it's a good point about making Literature be world, not only English lit. That being said, I do think that lit from England is actually worthy of study in of itself like people might study painting styles of certain regions or Greek sculpture or Arabic poetry.

As far as English history... well that's not taught in US English classes which are basically there to have kids read from the "official cannon" based on what some bureaucrat decided every US student should read. All these books are read without much historical context, and personally that's why I do enjoy reading Shakespeare or Chaucer (the dirty jokes help too) or more recent things. In a lot of ways, a contextual reading of older lit really highlights how much "common sense" ideas change based on the historical situation.

But I think a lot of your observations are correct, but I don't think it stops with the teaching of literature. The entire way education is organized doesn't really foster real organic learning, public education - in the absence of any movements - really is there primarily to teach kids how to function in capitalist society and be good workers (for most) or good managers (for some).

[Sensible Socialist]

InThe entire way education is organized doesn't really foster real organic learning, public education - in the absence of any movements - really is there primarily to teach kids how to function in capitalist society and be good workers (for most) or good managers (for some).
You've hit the nail on the head. For any subject, it's an arrangement of facts chosen by an "educator" who is in the position to choose what a student learns and what they do not learn. Four years of a wide-open subject area becomes four years of nothing learned, only stored and discarded after the test, instead an actual in-depth study of a particular piece of the wide topic.

[praxis1966]

Jammoe - Have you considered that you're being a tad culturally insensitive in your argumentation? Consider the following. If you're speaking to someone who is a non-native English speaker, chances are the English they have been taught is this version of English which you apparently scorn. If you go about making grammar choices independently, or worse yet have never been taught what you term "correct" English, there is a good chance of a communication breakdown. This may not seem overly important, but in organizing, say, working class Latin Americans in a union drive I'm sure you can see how "correct" English becomes something of great value if indeed you want the people with whom you wish to communicate to understand the issues you all are discussing.

Basically, to do otherwise would be analogous to allowing every computer on the internet to set up its own way of packet design for information exchange along the medium. This would cause the entire system to break down. However, since all computers worldwide agree to a TCP/IP protocol, things function seamlessly regardless of the actual data traveling inside the packet. What I'm saying is that learning rules of proscribed grammar and vocabulary may seem dictatorial, but it's done so that anyone with a grasp of the concepts can communicate effectively. In short, this is why I have and will always disagree with the notion that we should somehow do away with them...


You've hit the nail on the head. For any subject, it's an arrangement of facts chosen by an "educator" who is in the position to choose what a student learns and what they do not learn. Four years of a wide-open subject area becomes four years of nothing learned, only stored and discarded after the test, instead an actual in-depth study of a particular piece of the wide topic.

The first statement here is patently false as Jimmie Higgins already pointed out. Curriculum is not chosen by an "educator." In most cases, it's chosen by state legislators and/or bureaucrats. Once again, a fundamental misunderstanding in the way public education works rears it's ugly head. However, I wholeheartedly agree with the second sentence. I have two major qualms with the educational system: the curriculum, particularly in the case of government, history and literature courses, and in the actual method which many teachers use, which Freire describes as the "banking method." It is at this point I would suggest a thorough read of his works Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Education for Critical Consciousness.

[o well this is ok I guess]

there's no particular reason for high school students to focus on English literature in particular beyond lack of knowledge of foreign languages. Translations of literature from other languages if anything is generally more informative than a study of English literature in particular; you learn much more about the depth and variety of literature as a creative form than you do if confined to literature originally written in English This isn't necessarily true.
For the purpose of structure, yes, but one often cannot properly appreciate the literary style of an author when reading his works outside the language it was written in.

Too much of, say, Don Quixote cannot be properly expressed in English. There's a certain rhythm to it that cannot be reproduced. I would assume the same is so of Ulysses when translated to other languages (though more for reasons of its extensive vocabulary, rather than its style).

[Devrim]

In California public schools there was a back and forth thing going on for a while where grammer was pushed hard and then alternately not taught at all. If you can't tell from my posts, I was in school during the "pick grammar up organically as you read" regime:D.

I didn't really understand basic grammar concepts until I got to high school and was taught grammar in Spanish class... I had to kind of reverse engineer it because they taught up Spanish grammar as if we all understood English grammar.


I wasn't taught grammar either until I started doing foreign languages at school.
Then I was told that this is 'present simple', and I had no idea at all what that meant.


The study of English grammar and vocabulary. Literate native English speakers have nothing to learn from a high school English class. You learn the words for parts of speech, which is mostly useless,

The words for parts of speech are not useless. If you intend to learn a foreign language as a adult, I would say they are pretty essential as are other grammatical concepts.

Devrim

[jake williams]

I do think that grammar should be taught in existing capitalist schools
I don't disagree that there are particular literacy skills you need to learn in an organized way. You do actually have to be taught to read and write. But I'm skeptical of how useful a lot of what is actually taught on this count is, and I think there are a lot of things that should be taught which are not.


That being said, I do think that lit from England is actually worthy of study in of itself like people might study painting styles of certain regions or Greek sculpture or Arabic poetry.
I don't disagree with this, as I think I said. The point is, in Ontario high schools there are a mandatory four years of high school English. Each year there's a unit of Shakespeare, in other words there's a year's worth of mandatory Shakespeare for all students at my high school. Sorry, but that's fucking stupid. I can think of about a million things it would be more useful, or interesting, or personally or socially valuable to spend a year learning about than Shakespeare.

Of course the curriculum is going to be different between Ontario and California but I do think there are some general principles that apply.


But I think a lot of your observations are correct, but I don't think it stops with the teaching of literature. The entire way education is organized doesn't really foster real organic learning, public education - in the absence of any movements - really is there primarily to teach kids how to function in capitalist society and be good workers (for most) or good managers (for some).
Most of what I said was very biased by specific experiences I had in high school, which is partly why I put this here instead of Politics or something. In particular I had some very good history teachers (one of whom is basically a family friend, I think my mom and I are going to see her Friday), and some pretty awful English teachers. One of the history teachers I had is a borderline misogynist and at very least a pretty ordinary conservative academic historian. But the political conversations and debates I would have with him, inside and outside of class, were a lot more civil, productive and rational than similar debates that went on in English classes. The trouble really is that you have to talk about history, sociology and politics in English class, but in history classes the terms of debate are explicit, whereas in English classes the terms of debate are set by a specific set of procedures for debate.

For example, in an English class one time we were supposed to be talking about a newspaper article about "slow food". In the mini essay I had to write, I tried to make the case that while there are lots of legitimate criticisms of the food industry that one could make, in actual practice "slow food" culture is totally inaccessible to ordinary people who simply don't have the time or money to do it. The teacher was furious that I wasn't obeying the injunction to "take a side" - I had to be either for or against it. It wasn't that my opinion, necessarily, had to be that; simply that my essay had to take one of two positions on the topic.

I can't possibly imagine being asked to do this in, say, an economics class about this on the same topic. I can imagine being asked to prepare a summary of the arguments for, say, contractionary policy during a recession, but I can't imagine being asked not to acknowledge the evidence against it, problems, contradictions and so on. In every other class where one is discussing and debating some actual subject matter - history, science, math, whatever - the actual truth or falsity of facts, the actual meaning of available evidence and so on, is what matters. In English, where the "subject matter" is grammar, style and so on, even while one is talking about history or politics, the capacity of students to challenge the nature of the history of politics is severely circumscribed.


Jammoe - Have you considered that you're being a tad culturally insensitive in your argumentation? Consider the following. If you're speaking to someone who is a non-native English speaker, chances are the English they have been taught is this version of English which you apparently scorn. If you go about making grammar choices independently, or worse yet have never been taught what you term "correct" English, there is a good chance of a communication breakdown. This may not seem overly important, but in organizing, say, working class Latin Americans in a union drive I'm sure you can see how "correct" English becomes something of great value if indeed you want the people with whom you wish to communicate to understand the issues you all are discussing.
This is true to an extent but I think the issue is more complicated than that. There's a lot of use to being able to use a "standard language" that allows you to communicate as effectively as possible with a broadest possible range of people, but I think what's actually taught in high school English classes accomplishes this to a pretty limited extent. If anything the specific sort of academic literary English that suits you well in high school English writing is particularly ill-suited to, say, organizing workers who speak English as a second language.

There's a whole set of skills involved with communicating with non-native speakers - you need to be able to listen well, it helps to have some background in the speaker's own native language, you need to be able to speak clearly, use simple grammatical constructions, and simple vocabulary. These sorts of things should all be taught to students. But they're very different things than learning how to not use personal pronouns, split infinitives, particular verb moods or conjugations and so on.

Again, I'm not saying that there aren't very important and useful skills involving literacy and communication that ouir public schools should be teaching; my concern is that this has a limited relationship with what English classes in high school, at least my high school, actually teach, and that on top of that they're often a vehicle for other sorts of information that it's more difficult to try to teach in, say, a history class. You can convey information about the Cold War by teaching kids 1984 that it's more difficult to convey in a history class. You can convey information about what constitutes "our civilization" and canon and whatnot that is difficult to convey in a history class, etc.


Basically, to do otherwise would be analogous to allowing every computer on the internet to set up its own way of packet design for information exchange along the medium. This would cause the entire system to break down. However, since all computers worldwide agree to a TCP/IP protocol, things function seamlessly regardless of the actual data traveling inside the packet. What I'm saying is that learning rules of proscribed grammar and vocabulary may seem dictatorial, but it's done so that anyone with a grasp of the concepts can communicate effectively. In short, this is why I have and will always disagree with the notion that we should somehow do away with them...
I think this analogy is particularly problematic because we don't have computers that dynamically adapt to each others' standards, and because we can program computers to use the same communication standards in a way we can't program children. Children (and teenagers) simply don't learn language the same way computers "learn" TCP/IP. Language is almost entirely learned based on the dynamic adaptation to the language used by others. You learn the vocabulary of mathematics partly from being explicity told the names for things, the structure of proofs and arguments and so on, and if anything this is truer of math than it is elsewhere, but mainly you learn from a lot of reading and writing. You can do good historical writing, scientific writing, and so on mainly if you read it a lot.


The first statement here is patently false as Jimmie Higgins already pointed out. Curriculum is not chosen by an "educator." In most cases, it's chosen by state legislators and/or bureaucrats.
Yes and no. Of course in general the main structure and content of curriculum is set by state actors (ie. not teachers), and teachers as workers are increasingly marginalized from decision-making, "deprofessionalized", and deskilled both as a political attack on progressive union workers and as a broader attack on skilled labour in general.

But I think it's possible, if we're not careful, to miss some of the nuances of how the ruling class actually uses the state in practice. I think to a significant extent, when the bourgeoisie controls not just the high schools but the universities, controls how teachers themselves are educated, and controls the broad structure of the curriculum and the broad terms of debate and education, it's not so important for them to specifically decide what or how an English class is taught. Things are organized from the outside sufficiently in their interests so as to make it possible to allow English teachers some measure of relative autonomy. Of course it's a superficial autonomy; when they actually radically challenge convention or society, they'll get a word from administrators; when they get "too political" by being anything other than bright-eyed left liberals, they'll get a write up. But as long as they follow a certain set of rules, they sort of are allowed some measure of decision making, which isn't always or necessarily a good thing if we're committed to having democratically controlled schools.

[RHIZOMES]

I agree with all of this. 'English' should be abolished and replaced with 'Literary Studies'.

Terry Eagleton wrote a pretty good historical materialist/Marxist critique in his book on literary theory, entitled "The Rise of English (http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=QNmFm4M_RXkC&lpg=PP1&dq=literary%20theory&pg=PA15#v=onepage&q&f=false)" if anyone is interested.

[praxis1966]

Each year there's a unit of Shakespeare, in other words there's a year's worth of mandatory Shakespeare for all students at my high school. Sorry, but that's fucking stupid. I can think of about a million things it would be more useful, or interesting, or personally or socially valuable to spend a year learning about than Shakespeare.

I halfway want to agree with this and halfway don't. What makes me want to agree is mostly personal preference, though. I love some Shakespeare. Not for nothing, though, but there is something to be said for acquiring an understanding of modern cliches and truisms by reading the texts from which they originated. I was also lucky enough to take AP courses in which we did get into the socio-political situation influencing Shakespeare's work, but this isn't anything you couldn't pick up in a history class.

I know what you're going to say, though, because I can hear myself saying it, "Is this really a good enough reason to read so much of it?" "Not really," would be my answer. I do agree that an inordinate amount of time gets spent on him; time which, in my opinion, would be at least in part much better spent on poetry. I love the stuff, and I personally think there are a lot of good critical thinking and analytical skills which can be developed by reading and discussing it. Sadly, this is the area of literature most often brushed aside as unimportant.


I had some... some pretty awful English teachers.

You said a mouthful there, pally. On the contrary, I had some pretty good ones which is perhaps why my opinion is biased in the other direction. For instance, in my freshman year, I had team taught English and social sciences (government the first semester and economics the second) courses. What this meant is that we were in the same classroom with the same students for two study periods straight with two teachers in the classroom the whole time... We all had subscriptions to Time magazine in the first semester from which my social sciences teacher used to assign articles on some current governmental affair which we were expected to discuss and debate, sometimes write an essay on. The English teacher would then cull vocabulary words and such from the articles assigned by the social sciences teacher. There was a lot more to it than that, but it was one of the best experiences I ever had in a classroom.

At any rate, these two teachers encouraged the kind of thinking you talked about in your economics classes. As a major project, we had to write a major research paper on some hot topic in politics... We were then paired up with another student who chose the same topic and pitted against another pair of students in a formal debate. This forced us to include contradictory evidence into our thinking since it would be necessary to prepare effective counterarguments.


This is true to an extent but I think the issue is more complicated than that. There's a lot of use to being able to use a "standard language" that allows you to communicate as effectively as possible with a broadest possible range of people, but I think what's actually taught in high school English classes accomplishes this to a pretty limited extent.

I'd be inclined to agree since what rules for "standard English" communication you need to communicate with non-native English speakers can and should be acquired by the time a student finishes the 8th grade here in the US. However, most likely as a testament to the ineffectiveness of the American education system, this isn't the case. Hence a necessity to keep "banging" this stuff into people's heads. I graduated with a lot of people who somehow managed to get out of high school who, for instance, still couldn't wrap their heads around the idea of a five paragraph expository essay.


There's a whole set of skills involved with communicating with non-native speakers

I agree, and the kind of thing you're talking about is something that you'll only pick up from exposure to other cultures... Which is something that unfortunately doesn't happen often enough for most people. To me, this stems from the larger societal problem of de facto segregation here in the States. Some school districts have tried to address the issue (Berkeley Unified for instance), but I haven't read enough of the research on how they're doing to comment on how successful they are. That doesn't in my mind diminish the importance of being able to communicate effectively in "standard" English, though.


I think this analogy is particularly problematic because we don't have computers that dynamically adapt to each others' standards

Without getting too much into the technicalities of it, computers do actually dynamically adapt to each other, but always within a given set of parameters as outlined by predetermined protocols. TCP in particular does this, and so does UDP... I more or less agree with the rest of what you're saying, but I also think you're beating my analogy to death, lol. I never intended to suggest that people should be "programmed" in the way that computers are, for instance... In essence, I think you've gone a bit further with my analogy than I meant to argue.



But I think it's possible, if we're not careful, to miss some of the nuances of how the ruling class actually uses the state in practice. I think to a significant extent, when the bourgeoisie controls not just the high schools but the universities, controls how teachers themselves are educated, and controls the broad structure of the curriculum and the broad terms of debate and education, it's not so important for them to specifically decide what or how an English class is taught. Things are organized from the outside sufficiently in their interests so as to make it possible to allow English teachers some measure of relative autonomy. Of course it's a superficial autonomy; when they actually radically challenge convention or society, they'll get a word from administrators; when they get "too political" by being anything other than bright-eyed left liberals, they'll get a write up. But as long as they follow a certain set of rules, they sort of are allowed some measure of decision making, which isn't always or necessarily a good thing if we're committed to having democratically controlled schools.

Yeah, I agree with this probably more than you may have assumed when you wrote it. Not for nothing, I've heard plenty of teachers say exactly the same thing... Especially history teachers... Geography teachers, too. I don't know if you're aware or not, but the maps that get used in geography classes at the middle school level here in the US are basically racist and serve to reinforce the global hegemony of the advanced capitalist states on a level at which the student isn't conscious. For instance, Europe and Africa appear about the same size and the US looks bigger than China even though the latter is estimated to be roughly 600,000 km2 larger. They know better than the textbooks they're required to use, but to challenge that status quo would mean they're out of a job. Anyway, like I said, read Freire. I think you'd love his work because he addresses the exact educational issues you seem to be criticizing... Which is why I'm sure his criticisms and suggestions on how to better organize classrooms haven't been adopted by and large, lol.

As an aside, I'd like to take a moment to comment on the irony of your arguments... I've rarely seen grammar, punctuation, and spelling as good as I've seen in your posts in this thread. :lol:

[Sensible Socialist]

The first statement here is patently false as Jimmie Higgins already pointed out. Curriculum is not chosen by an "educator." In most cases, it's chosen by state legislators and/or bureaucrats.
Have you ever considered why I put the word educator in quotation marks? Often state bureaucrats are hailed as educators even when they have little to no background in education. I'm aware of this. :thumbup1:

[praxis1966]

Have you ever considered why I put the word educator in quotation marks? Often state bureaucrats are hailed as educators even when they have little to no background in education. I'm aware of this. :thumbup1:

lol Sorry 'bout jumping down your throat then... I can be about as subtle as a cartoon anvil drop sometimes, especially when it comes to the family business. You see, my father got into education specifically because he was a New Left Marxist and believed in the potential for liberation via free public education.

[Zealot]

They teach a lot of nonsense in English classes and I didn't really learn anything new in my high school English class. That said, it should still be compulsory for people who struggle with it and the other "know-it-alls" should be given the option of something else, just a thought.

[Tim Cornelis]

As a non-native speaker, English classes for native English speakers seems particularly unfruitful. About half the time "your" or "you're" is needed it is used wrongly.

It really isn't that hard to know the difference between "than" and "then", your and you're, their, they're, there! It could be taught in one week, yet half of the native English speakers can't write proper English after four or six years of high school + elementary!