A mandatory English course should no longer be a requirement for university applications, as it no longer fully reflect a student’s individual effort and ability.Anthony Devlin/Getty Images
Daryl Sneath is a teacher and novelist.
Successful completion of the Grade 12 English course (or the equivalent) remains a requirement for every student seeking acceptance to a university program in Ontario.
As a high-school English teacher, I believe it should no longer be such a requirement. The course no longer measures what it once did.
As someone who has taught the course for more than 20 years, I’ve always seen it as one that presents opportunities for students to develop a clear and rhetorically effective use of the English language in writing, speaking and critical thinking.
How students have come to meet these opportunities has, to say the least, changed – most recently owing to an obvious and real artificial resource.
Sorry. Let me clarify: The resource is real and the resource is also artificial.
Opinion: When we stop reading, we forget how to think
Ugh. Perhaps we should ask the resource itself for help here: “Is the use of ‘artificial’ in the phrase ‘obvious and real artificial resource’ a misplaced modifier and, as a result, is the phrase confusing? If so, please explain.”
Answer: “Yes. And no.”
Excellent. Who doesn’t appreciate a little ambiguity?
If we want to understand the ambiguity, we need first to understand grammatical and linguistic concepts such as “fragmentation,” “syntactic anchor,” “semantic tension,” and (of course) “misplaced modifier,” all of which the resource mentions in the uniquely bulleted explanation of the initial question. Which (enter irony) is argument enough for keeping English, as a subject, a requirement. I know.
But the subject is a harder sell now than it’s ever been. Who among us mere mortals can compete?
“Okay, class, now that we have spent a month viewing, discussing, and analyzing the play, I would like to hear what you think about Hazlitt’s claim that ‘We are all Hamlet.’ You have 60 minutes to write a 300-word response using your notes.”
To be fair, such a request still yields insightful and diverse discussion in a high-school classroom. The problem is that when the task requires writing, the “resource” is too readily available and too generous with its assistance. Anyone who knows how to cut-and-paste has on instant offer clear, organized, well-supported written answers.
The “resource” is that easy to use.
Not so easy to resist.
In workshops meant to address the issue, the educational powers-that-be often argue sentiments such as this: If teachers were only able to guide our students in how they utilize the resource as an assistant or tutor then our students would become freer, more empathic, and generally better readers of the world.
Maybe. But not better writers. Not writers at all.
In the case of writing it is not a resource, or an assistant, or a tutor. Instead, the machine has nullified any cause for a student to sit staring at a blank page while waiting for the right words to swirl about the cerebral cortex and arrive in some kind of order approximating a clearly written idea, only then to be amended, stared at in turn, and, sometimes, completely erased.
Known, in the biz, as process.
I get it, though. Who, these days, would waste a single Sisyphean moment with “process” when a perfectly capable machine is sitting right there waiting to do the work for us?
Let’s ask the machine itself.
Answer: “I don’t mean to offend, but perhaps if you came to recognize the great privilege of being alive at this moment in time, with all the advantages at your beck that such an existential fact begets, then you might come to view ‘process’ as Promethean rather than Sisyphean. Just saying.”
It would be fun if the machine interacted this way. Until it does, I think I’ll abstain.
The Ontario Curriculum for English (revised in 2007 by the Ministry of Education and amended for the new Grade 9 course in 2023) continues to state that by taking Grade 12 University English students will come to “draft and revise their writing using a variety of […] forms and stylistic elements” and thereby “develop greater control in writing.”
If teachers wish to ensure that students meet this curricular expectation, then we need to keep the machine out of the students’ hands. Which is impossible.
Because it is impossible, the majority of student grades we report at semester’s end (which still include assessment on writing) no longer fully reflect a student’s individual effort and ability. As such, the course should no longer be a requirement for university applications.
The most immediate result of such a universal change would be far fewer high school English classes, but they wouldn’t all disappear. There are still students who genuinely love to read and write.
Imagine a future high school English class populated entirely with students who want to try their actual hand – whilst this machine, as Hamlet notes, is to them – at this uniquely human thing we call writing.