More VCE Lite

The Australian reports that a survey of Australian Defense Force Academy students has found "intelligent students are graduating from high school and entering university with writing skills that are so poor they are unable to structure a sentence". Almost half the students stated that they were more confident with oral communication than they were with grammar. This could also mean that most students were more comfortable with grammar than they were with oral skills. I know that I'd rather write an essay than give an oral presentation. Of course, these results have been compared with the proposed VCE English changes. Victorian Opposition Education spokesman Victor Perton greases up the slippery slope;

"I don't believe there's any other country in the world that would allow its final-year native language course to have such a low threshhold of achievement - they only have to read one book and they can spend the rest of their time watching The Simpsons. "The next stage of this farce is that the students will probably be assessed on the quality of their SMS messaging or their creative graffiti."

An editorial in The Australian describes "a mish-mash of trendy postmodern theories sailing under the banner of "critical literacy" [that] has infiltrated our schools" and contends that "by denying serious books to students in the advanced years of secondary school, our education bureaucracies are quite simply denying them the key to the gates of Western culture". The piece concludes with;

For over a century, following the lead of the great English critic Matthew Arnold, it was understood that serious works of literature had an important role in creating an inclusive society by giving everybody access to a core set of highly valued texts, and to all the advanced skills in reading, writing and understanding that come along with them. All this got thrown into reverse in the 1980s when various forms of scepticism regarding Western culture, many of them rearguard versions of Marxism, took hold in the universities. Now it has filtered down to our schools, where instead of being given basic skills of cultural and written literacy, our students are thrown a couple of ephemeral books to read and presented with a few glib tidbits of "theory"

And also - Lynne Kosky, contrary to Andrew Bolt's accusations, claims she is still unconvinced by the proposed changes to VCE English.