Continuing from my previous post, why do we make students study English in high school?
OK,
first of all, you have to until you finish Yr 12. So...there's that.
Why do we privilege English and mathematics by making them the
compulsory subjects students must take? Perhaps our society would be
better served if every student had to take four out of five years of
their high school careers learning one of the hard sciences. We may
not have much demand for novelists and poets, but we sure have a
demand for students who could grow up and cure cancers (plural. Look
it up- there wouldn't be one single cure for what is a multitude of
diseases that we label under the umbrella term “cancer”). Perhaps
that is vicious hyperbole, but I suppose what I am addressing is the
application of subject knowledge in “the real world”.
OK,
so first of all, I stand by what I said when I stated that the things
you learn in English like essay-writing or poem-composing may not
directly impact your job, in the same way that other high school
subjects might. An electronics course might improve your efficacy as
an engineer. Knowing some basic exponential math is going to come in
handy if you're a statistician. Being able to run really fast will
come in handy when you're working as a prostitute catering to the
crystal meth market (I hear those guys are wily, but they're often
confused by bright lights). We have a massive surplus of people who
want to be professional authors, poets, screenwriters, and
journalists and only a tiny number of employment opportunities for
these occupations. Obviously, we, as a society, could stand to lose a
few aspiring poets in exchange for people who take the time to learn
more about human biology and consequently won't oppose, and can
actively explain to others the benefits of vaccinating children (my
feeling about this is if you have a blanket policy about not
vaccinating kids en masse,
you either don't understand the science as well as you think you do
or you actively hate children). The question remains, why study
English? Again, I have an English degree so clearly I didn't think it
was as much of a waste of time as watching Pretty Little
Liars (I also have a Media
degree so my opinion's very slightly valid there too).
So,
I think it's pretty clear by now that in my soapbox-crusade in
promoting English in schools, I'm going to have to deal with my
reasons one post at a time so today I want to talk about the
transference of skills. For simplicity's sake, look at the idea of
multiplication. When you're taught in schools that 7 x 8 = 56, you
aren't rote-learning specific numbers so that you also have to learn
8 x 7 = 56, but you're learning about a concept that can be
transferred, so that when you're later working out how many pieces of
pie you'll need for a group of kids you can work out that 3 x 13 =
39. In much the same way, essay-writing is not actually about the
ability to write essays (if your boss ever makes you sit down and
write an essay about your job, I do feel really bad for you). What
essay-writing, as a skill, enables you to do is learn how to
critically analyze and apply reasoning to a specific situation, gain
a perceptive awareness of what's happening, and structure how you
want to articulate your thoughts in a serious, formal manner. These
three skills will come in handy in later life, and it's difficult to
teach these skills for specific jobs so we have to teach them in
abstract. Learning film language (high shots, low shots, soundtrack,
sound effects, et cetera) isn't about learning film analysis, but
about learning how to recognize the structure of systems where you
aren't necessarily told what you're meant to be observing. This might
come in handy later if, let's say, you're a firefighter and you have
to look out for weaknesses of the structural integrity in a burning
building. Having experience with learning such systems like film
language make it easier to learn systems in later life.
What
about making posters?
I
got no idea about that one.
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