The state of English teaching in Australia

English teaching in Australia seems to be in a bad way, and I'm not sure if it has any chance of getting better.

On the one hand, I was heartened to read recently that the new Western Australian OBE English course for Year 12, in which students "were asked to study the Big Brother television show, Mr Men children's books and movie posters", is to be scrapped and replaced with a more traditional course that actually specifies students must study "at least one major text, such as a play or a novel". I do truly pity those students who have been caught in the middle of this OBE schemozzle.

On the other hand, it seems that at the federal level there is no way to beat back the encroachement of the critical literacy army of the various English Teaching Associations. The latest Weekend Australian says that the plans of the Federal Liberal government to provide professional development summer schools to teachers in order to improve their literacy teaching skills appear to have been scuttled by the inclusion of the AATE among the organisers. The AATE plan to waste teachers' time with discussions of whether a blog should be studied as a "literary text", and the so-called importance of including so much "cultural diversity" in the texts students read that they will have no understanding of the majority of Australians' historically Judeo-Christian culture. One of the academics involved is interested in "ways in which heterosexism might be countered in English classrooms". Not exactly the sort of "literacy outcome" most parents would expect or prioritise for their child's time in English classes, I would have thought.

I would like to offer a counter-proposal: have the teachers spend their time renewing their knowledge of correct Standard Australian English spellings, learning some of the rigorous grammatical rules for proper sentence construction and analysis, and actually reading some quality literature from the Western Canon, such as Homer's Iliad, Dante's Divine Comedy, Cervantes' Don Quixote, or even something a little lighter by Jane Austen or Charles Dickens. Afterward, they could share some of what they have learnt with their students. Unfortunately, I suspect that's a bit too much to expect of the people to whom we entrust the instruction of this nation's children in the beauties of their mother tongue.