English curriculum: past vs. present

Monash University academic Baden Eunson compares the current VCE English curriculum with 1966's. Back in those days, students may have been subjected to "boring, pedantic" teachers, but it produced a generation of students who "could spell, had a wide vocabulary and could construct and punctuate grammatical sentences". These days, Eunson says, students rely too heavily on computer spell-checkers. In Eunson's role as a teacher of professional writing to tertiary students, he claims he often has to cram the basics in, the fill in the gaps left by a less rigourous VCE. Today's VCE English, Eunson contends, is "a half-baked mish-mash of partially understood concepts from linguistics, critical theory and cultural studies". What's needed is...

...a substantial skills upgrading for at least one generation of teachers because English has de-skilled itself. It now no longer has a technical vocabulary they can deploy to work with students - the type of language that teachers in the 1950s and 1960s had access to.

As a related aside, ever notice how things were apparently always better when baby boomers were growing up?