(Re)Writing English: English teaching in the public sphere.

A thoughtful and measured response to the national curriculum debate from David Williamson was published in The Australian today.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20546352-7583,00.html

Williamson quite rightly highlights the rhetorical tradition in English, and –surprise, surprise- even suggests there is a place for post-structuralist approaches in the classroom. He uses some apposite examples from canonical literature to highlight how English teaching is inevitably political in nature because of the way the greatest literary works have dealt with such loaded themes as the exercising of power, social stratification, poverty, race, gender and so on. It is almost inevitable that aware young readers will draw parallels between the fictive worlds of these texts and their own.

As I imagine all English teachers would be, I am sympathetic to Williamson’s argument about the affirming power of great literature and the way it imaginatively brings to life the ‘guiding emotions’ of human experience. So many wonderful stories that I read through my childhood and adolescence stay with me today. Indeed, they have all informed who I now am and what I believe. That this appears to be a common - if not universal - experience amongst colleagues (indeed there is research to suggest this is the primary reason why people choose to become English teachers) gives lie to the idea that English classrooms are now inhabited by political ideologues. After all, how many teachers have really become high school English teachers because they are passionate about deconstruction? However, it is because they are alive to the power of literature and its capacity to inform a rich and imaginative life that many English teachers do take theories such as post –structuralism seriously. Such a theory does not negate the power and wonder of literature: it instead emphasises and confirms it by seeking to explain the basis of its transformative powers.

So, it is on this point that I cannot agree with Williamson. His suggestion about splitting ‘Rhetoric’ from ‘Story’ strikes me as unconvincing. It seems to me that Williamson underestimates the power of poetics or literary discourse to actually shape how we understand and enact the proper expression of what he calls the ‘guiding emotions’.

The recent public mourning of the deaths of Peter Brock and Steve Irwin is a case in point. The excessive public attention given to the deaths of these two accomplished men seems to me to draw at once on the conventions of tragic drama and epic adventure. Here were two intrepid heroes, each living much ‘larger’, more thrilling and colourful lives than the rest of us, daring to tempt fate at every turn. Yet, each man was also one of us. They retained a ‘common touch’; they were not gods but god-like. Because they were mortal, it was inevitable that fate would win out - as many great stories remind us. The greatest narratives of all time teach us that we can only aspire- or, as some would have it, are only allowed – to test the limits of our humanity, and therefore our mortality, so far. So we mourn Brock and Irwin. Indeed, to do otherwise has been labelled ‘unAustralian’. Their ‘largeness’ reminds us of our ‘smallness’, their risk taking reminds us of our trepidation. Above all, their too-early deaths remind each of us of our own inevitable fate; in mourning them we anticpate our own demise and mourn for the loss of the hope that we too might yet have lived as giants.

Meanwhile, for the days that Brock and Irwin dominate our media, countless other less 'heroic' deaths (eg the victims of famine and civil war) pass unremarked and unmourned, relegated to a few seconds of screen time in television news bulletins or a few words in the middle pages of the major newspapers. Our great stories of the past have not taught us to weep for the deaths of these innocents, the victims of man’s enduring inhumanity to his own kind.