Archived material
Some aspects of the documents in this section no longer apply, however they have been archived for reference.
Nice Distinctions: Stage 6 English And The Gentle Art Of Discrimination
Adrian Mitchell
Where, in the great scheme of things, is Stage 6 English? In recent times, nowhere much it seems. For quite a while now there has been an uncanny quiet. It's as though those responsible for curriculum design have embraced too literally the theoretical position of infinite deferral . This forum is the first welcome sign that the arteries have not become entirely desiccated.
So - given that we are all here, what might be some of the useful questions to address? What do we need to establish clearly among ourselves as we set out to determine our recommendations about the shape and size of Stage 6 English? One that follows on from what I was just hinting at is "what is the value of English, and in particular Stage 6 English?" How does it help? What is the good of English?
The answer to that depends largely on who you are talking to: the community, the teacher, the student... In terms of the community, it seems to me unfortunately the case that on the whole, as a professional group we have not been very effective at representing ourselves to those of any other persuasion, any other discipline. That's ironic, given our specialisation, that we don't seem to make ourselves heard, or well understood, or at least not in our own terms. We haven't been able to articulate the value of English, or to separate our concept of value from that of the vested interests, or the market. We can't pretend that utilitarianism does not exist; we can't resort to some version of Oscar Wilde's clever provocation, and claim that English should be perfectly useless. We're talking serious business here, we are talking TER. We have to find a response for the P & C, and Oscar Wilde never had to confront that. For example, it would undoubtedly be an advantage to us if we could demonstrate that English helps you get into Medicine. We all know it doesn't. Better still if we could say, as perhaps we should, that English helps you get through Medicine, helps you take Medicine; or anything else for that matter. But we don't because we can't. We have become the victims of an economy of scale, and we see year after year our students, and especially our advanced students, disadvantaged because of their subject choice.
None of us is impressed by the bean counters and peanut peddlers. They keep telling us what's good for us and our discipline, and the Bell curves keep on being invoked like a modern promissory rainbow. Common experience tells us that Bell curves are not true, in that they don't show what is happening to our students. They are a statistician's device, and become true only because of the mathematics of big numbers, when the peanuts hide under the thimbles. Agreed, what I am arguing is by rhetoric - but that is what we deal with in English, it is how we get at our truth. Rhetoric was one of the foundation academic disciplines along with mathematics, and is just as fundamental as an avenue to knowledge. Rhetoric is how we do it, and just because it is rhetoric doesn't mean that it is to be discounted. Rhetoric is about organising language, rhetoric is if you like the numbers of coming to the point.
We have no dialogue with the peanut crunchers. They do not notice when they prick us that we bleed, that we are bleeding. The terms in which our students are represented to themselves are not the terms which emerge from our discipline, our system. Their achievements are measured in terms irrelevant to, and I would add inimical to, the discipline in which they are presenting themselves. There's an inherent inconsequentiality in principle in this situation: the demand that a qualitative discipline become somehow quantified, not only in its assessment but also in its syllabus. It's not just that under present scaling arrangements we see insufficient reward for work done. What we want is some other means of identifying our students' achievements - maybe going some of the way to standards-referencing would be good for English.
There is more at issue for the status of English than compressions of measurement - I'm not going to say any more about that because (the line is irresistible) I can feel a Mack attack coming on. There's something more, again astonishing given that our subject is English. We don't seem to be recommending ourselves very effectively, not even to ourselves. We have to see if over this weekend we can do something about that - but what? In what way can we represent our own significance? I'm not going to wander into areas of Key Competencies and the like here, I'm interested in how we think about our own discipline, and how we display that image of what we do. Consider for example our favourite stalking horse. Just how many units of Mathematics do you need to read a thermometer? How many units of Mathematics do you actually need for anything? The omni-importance of Mathematics is not to be questioned, apparently. I don't doubt for a minute the interest of Mathematics for mathematicians; on the other hand, I don't know if the community is wonderfully well-served by its disproportionate presence in whatever new version of the HSC that gets dreamed up. English is not only the medium of instruction, but the medium of our social interaction. The question is not whether English should be there, but how much of it, and in what aspect. English, not Mathematics, is the core of the Higher School Certificate, the vital underpinning of Stage 6.
English is no longer the subject or the discipline it once was. Even if you were to consider that a matter of profound regret, the fact is that what is now called the clientele looks for more, or other, than the classic dispensation, the great tradition. But conceding this is no reason to dispense with the dispensation. English may no longer be about the best that is known and thought in the world - and indeed there is undeniable difficulty in agreeing about just what constitutes the best; and an even greater difficulty in convincing students they ought to read it. English is not a fixed discipline, and I suspect it never was. There are at present approaches to English which give the high priority to self-expression (but wouldn't it be nice if there were something to express...) and others which discount authorial activity and read texts as cultural documents, manifestations of ideological undercurrents. Disclosed, the hitherto concealed is bravely flaunted, much as Madonna's underwear - the fashionably antifashionable sign of our postmodern times. One of the documents that has been circulated for this forum identifies a number of different approaches to English - the Cultural Heritage model, Personal Growth, Cultural Analysis, Literacy Development.. all with features to recommend them, each with a limitation of some kind. And the question for us is what do we think would be best for Stage 6 English? But maybe another question ought to be heard first: what do students think the value of Stage 6 might be?
One answer to that is provided in a student response to such a question, only it was asked of the A-levels in Great Britain, and it was asked some time ago. Britain is a different place, with different customs and indifferent plumbing, agreed. But the response was interesting I suggest: for according to the students, the value of English at this stage is that it has taught them how to discriminate. How to decide between what they might accept and what they need to question; or between what they might admire as original and innovative, and what is hackneyed and cliche-ridden and plain dull; or between what is interesting in its formulation, but a pitch nevertheless at some other agenda. And this not only in terms of the texts they are to read, but in terms of their own expression, probably written but also spoken.
The study of English literature is not just the reading of books. It is the formation of opinion, character and ideas. It is a defence against bad writing, borrowed ideas, and skilful advertising. It is a lesson in self-expression and clear thinking; and it is an enjoyable experience. Maybe Australian students would be a lot more sceptical, even scathing in a bad year - yet there's the germ of an important concept here. It reminds me a little of a road safety programme a few years ago, perhaps still in place called defensive driving, which didn't mean driving forever in second gear, or driving in a Volvo, but being smart, aware, knowledgeable and skilful enough so that you are ready for whatever might come up. So might one think of 'defensive reading' - to recognise what you are reading for what it actually is.
How do you learn to discriminate? Certainly by becoming familiar with a variety of models of the kinds of texts that are available; or the kinds of writing skills that might be called upon, recognising agency as well as appreciating content. The capacity for discrimination not only means judgement, but the conjoint ability to argue or defend that perception; so that the process of discrimination is as significant in the educational strategy as the judgement itself. What that requires in familiar terms is not just that a student should "know" a text, or a strategy, but know why it is like it is and how it works and then, desirably, whether it works or not in this particular context. It seems to me that somewhere here lies a common thread between the various approaches identified in that document. And that provides a warrant for English that even the warty adherents of quantifiable disciplines ought to be able to acknowledge.
Let me hasten to differentiate between discrimination between and discrimination against. What I have in mind is a programme that ought to move very strongly against that second sort of discrimination. I alluded earlier to Arnold's "best that is known and thought in the world." Applying that to contemporary Australian circumstance, we would want to look at writing both in English and in translation, from wherever it happens to come, so that the range of represented experience, as well as the range of representation of that experience, is as wide as can be managed. That is to bring further into the foreground some of the thinking involved in drawing up the wide reading programme; and, I would like to add, the all-but forgotten original discussions about the Topic Area. There were good principles there, but they have in my opinion largely dropped from sight.
Knowledge is power, said Francis Bacon; which is meant to cheer us up because that's all the power we are going to get. If knowledge is in fact power, then it is power held in abeyance, latent. Discrimination comes into play when that knowledge is applied; it is the necessary next step, its agency. What you learn has to be put to work, has to be put into operation, process. So the acquisition of knowledge, the learning process, is not about getting smart but about how to be smart - wising up, if you like. In principle that ought to be possible in all subject areas, but it is particularly a benefit to be derived from subject English; and if that were to be identified as the target concern then the kind of curriculum design and the recommended texts and so on can be much more extensive, less repetitively intensive than has been the practice for many years. It certainly means we should be a lot more adventurous about taking up literature - whether imaginative or factual - from the wide range now available. Chances are that is where the best that is known and thought is to be discovered anyway. Look at the cultural diversity represented in the Booker Prize winners; and the same pattern is represented in languages other than English. The so-called metropolitan cultures are not the be-all and end-all of literature or knowledge, though they do seem to hold on to the major publishing houses. The multicultural community from which our Stage 6 candidature is constituted is matched by the recognised accomplishment of so many writers from so many cultures around the world - that is not just a happy co-incidence but an indication of where else we ought to be looking for our texts.
There's another aspect of my theme I'd like to open up. No doubt it has to do with my involvement in the examining side of the HSC, or Stage 6. The examinations are there because they are required to be there, and that's the way it is going to be for some time to come - the Government has made that quite clear. If we can get past the inherent difficulty of an exam that is simultaneously designed to be competitive and yet also to certify a standard of attainment, then there's a question about the educational benefit of formal examinations. I actually believe there is a very real benefit indeed, provided we are clear about what we are doing: that we are not so impressed by prodigious feats of short-span memory (how many quotations can even a good student come up with 2 weeks after the exam?) as by the ability to think on one's feet, to think to some point; to find a response to some proposition - either for or against or arguing out the pros and cons - inside a limited time. The time limit has the function of requiring students to decide on priorities, to decide on the most pertinent points in the case they are constructing, to discriminate between all the things they know and then to present their view as effectively as they can. Knowledge being selectively put into play again, you see. Not what the student knows but the selection from among the many things known; and if we get anxious about the word discrimination because it resonates with discrimination against, where ignorance, not knowledge, is both latent and patent, then perhaps another way of thinking about this agency of knowledge is to think of it as a new rhetoric; and you see how deftly I've swooped right back to my beginning, though that might also mean I've progressed nowhere at all.
This is just the moment to scuttle sideways, in a ragged subordinate clause. For there is another thought that occurred to me when I first began fretting about what on earth I could say this morning. I have been reading some history, partly to even up the scores - if historians are going to appropriate fiction then why shouldn't we look at the narratives of once upon a time. Actually I was reading Greg Denning, who had written about Captain Bligh's bad language, and guess what? History isn't what it used to be either, just like English. It too is under radical reformation. One thing that caught my mind's eye was Denning's comment that we are approaching an incipient post-post-modernism, in which any form of representation calls attention to its own representing as well as its relation to what it represents. That leaves traditional History with its passion for the last post terribly nostalgic for the certainties of fact.
Now I mention this as a salutary model for what we too are encountering, but also as a strategy for introducing one further dot point to my wish list. Some of you may remember what I recollect inexactly, that a few years ago there was a run of answers in the HSC 2 Unit Related novel section where it became apparent that students were making no distinction between the nineteenth century and the middle ages. Maybe it was the dark ages. Anyway, the historical sense was entirely missing. In our kindly way we all fell about laughing, but that was a mistake: because it now seems to me to have been one of those telling moments when we failed to comprehend what we were being told. We were told it again with the famous essay on the end of history - that was all about the end of the cold war and Bob's your uncle, whether Menzies or Santamaria it didn't matter any more. The end of history; that is, the end of a process of declining awareness of the evidence, the actual effective weight, of the past and its relation to the present. Where's no past tense, the ignorant present's all... True. I don't especially need to make History's case for it; but do you see the implication for our discipline, for example the implication for how narrative is read, or mis-read, or un-read? Certainly there can be no comfortable Aristotelian/Forsterian assumptions about the structure and logic of plot, of cause and effect across time, if all that is retrievable is the endless titillation of sensation. Next week, next chapter, is another barely related episode... Re-runs can be expected... In this new context there is an especial need to articulate the interconnection of what has preceded and what is recommended as somehow "relevant", meaning all too often instantly attractive no matter how brainless. Without spelling it out, that suggests to me a much more important reason for continuing to re-visit the literature of the past even while we investigate the attractions of so much that is widely interesting in current writing. If our students are to discover the grounds of the distinctions between different kinds of writing, different levels of writing, different kinds of ideas, as well as the grounds for valuing these divergences, then we need to have developed in them a sufficient awareness for them to make confident discriminations for themselves. We have to find the means of heightening their awareness of how language both determines what they read and how they read, and in that process develop the skills I called defensive reading, defensive writing, though it doesn't much matter what it is called: the skills are what matters. That's the challenge I see for Stage 6 English.