/lit/ - Literature

Were witnessing the degeneration of education. Partly due to Ofsted muscleing in on what teachers can and cannot teach, and how eNgAGiNg their lessons have to be to for the students. Actual learning has taken a back seat in favour of entertainment.

Sadly we've arrived at a point where even educational admin staff dictate over the content of lessons to tick the shitty Ofsted boxes.

>>23503639
That makes me very sad, anon. It also makes me wonder whether this outcome was always the natural outcome of education for the masses, but, really, I simply think the system has been actively and comprehensively undermined.

>>23503639
I don't quite understand your question, but I do question the wisdom sometimes of forcing 15-18 year olds to read things like Dickens, Austen, Hardy and Shakespeare with such little life experiences. There are modern works that are more accessible, and will engage more with children and not turn them off literature for life. I genuinely think high school English should be focusing on classic YA fiction rather than classic adult fiction.
>>23503937
Sounds like the opposite is happening here though, no? The claim is that the standard curriculum set by Ofsted is boring and the teacher is trying to open up to more popular choices (which is ridiculous because even at 2H a week of classes you basically have 60H of contact time with a class in a year and exams will be set on 2-3 set texts which have to be studied. There is no time or room for anything else other than sticking rigidly to a curriculum). people don't realise how little time students are actually in school/classes day to day - 60H a year of instruction in a subject is nothing, an adult would get through that amount of learning in a month of self study and online classes. This is all kids can reasonably manage though. Let's say somehow you can fit in 3H a week alongside everything else. That's still only 90H or 2 adult working weeks of time in a year to absorb a subject. Kids need to be in school for longer.

>>23503954
A sad assessment, but a good point. Maybe this is the inevitable outcome. The left's dogmatic encroachment on education is so sad.

>>23504031
Ah, yeah, fair play. I see that I misread the OP

>>23503639
Britons don't call it "high school", we call it secondary school. "Signing up" for classes also sounds like an Americanism. Maybe you were trying to cater to the majority US audience on /lit/, but I still don't quite believe this post because it doesn't sound true. But it's an unusual/pointless LARP to make up. It's not at all reflective of my experience with secondary education in English in the UK, but I was lucky enough to go to a top all-boys public school ("private" for Americans) on a bursary.

>>23504031
>The claim is that the standard curriculum set by Ofsted is boring and the teacher is trying to open up to more popular choices
I'm the OP. It's not only that. In fact the curriculum was designed around this hermeneutic of suspicion. Yes, the texts we read were classics for the most part, but the interpretative framework we were given heavily encouraged us to analyse these texts from a critical Marxist, feminist or social justice perspective.

>>23504217
I went to college, which is the UK equivalent of American high school. If I said "college" that would cause all sorts of terminological confusion. You do choose your subjects in UK high schools. We do 3-4 grades called A-Levels, as I'm sure you know. And you get to choose which ones you do. It's nice that you went to a good school; I went to a majority Muslim college in the city and everything I said was true. Since you challenged me I tried to find the booklet they gave us where we were essentially taught that we must interpret texts from a feminist or Marxist perspective, but I can't.

>>23504246
Well, it does sound more believable with this added context, and I'm sorry that you went to such a bad school. It's sad that educational experiences can differ so widely and partly a function of the UK's overpowering class system -- ironically to sound more Marxist than I would wish. If you can go to a good university afterwards which should be possible with Oxbridge tirelessly attempting to widen participation to poorer state schools, then you should do so. Otherwise STEM does unfortunately seem to be the only good route for poorer state schools. Unfortunately even lower Russell groups do not seem very good for humanities from what I have heard so if you want to do humanities at higher level it's Oxbridge, and maybe London and Durham, or nothing. Oxbridge itself of course isn't free from the maze of ideological trappings but it will give you a space to study literature seriously if you wish. Classics is also less subject to this nonsense than English lit.

Anon, none of the shit you've said in this thread is true. Why are you so invested in spreading lies like this?

>>23504340
If that were true, you should be easy for you to prove him wrong. But you didn't try, you just asserted it's all false because it attacks your antiwhite agenda. You cowards always squirm when someone calls your agendas out. You're a pathetic lying coward.

>>23503639
It feels like schools are not schools anymore but businesses and students clients who have to be constantly entertained otherwise they'll go over to the competitor. I remember when one of our professors told us the new dean has not actually published any reseach that's worthwhile but was granted the title of professor to have some legitimacy and his actual background was something related to management. This was one of the world's top 50 universities, by the way.

>>23503639
In school I found Shakespeare to be dreary, especially when we had school trips to the Globe theatre. I'd have much rather have been playing football in PE or out doing something interesting, like some of the Geography school trips we did where we had to track the flow of a whole river and collect soil and rock samples. It was only until I was an adult when I found Shakespeare to be an enjoyable subject.
The education system has failed because it fails to develop and find new ways to engage with its pupils. As technology changes so does our cognitive behaviour, so it's well and good to tell students to sit and read but frankly kids nowadays won't be able to engage with that constructively unless teachers find a new way to teach it. I'm sure the cracks have been growing since television came about. The thing is, the education system is years behind, and won't be able to properly fix these issues because ultimately it is a tedious bureaucracy that's more focused on Ofsted scores and meaningless grades than shaping the next generation into fully functioning human beings.

>>23504217
Brits who are currently school age have adopted many Americanisms, including those ones. No shit - there's another one - your experience at public school was different to the state comp drudge mill/modern day workhouse. I left school in Britain over ten years ago, and it was a state comp drudge mill/modern day workhouse in a rural area where most of students weren't the least bit interested in either progressive politics or classic literature, but I find OP's account much harder to dismiss than you do.

>>23504365
NTA but there are still loads of details in the story that look LARP-y. E.g. "50 Shades of Grey was a popular choice" -- teenage girls aren't going to suggest the class study erotica, no matter how bad the school. Reading Stormzy is also very unlikely, especially considering the left-leaning types are often currently concerned with content/trigger warnings. Finally little details like "after contemplating for a moment, smirked" come off as invented and unbelievable, and the fact that it was a male teacher when most male teachers in English literature are more conservative than the women, it doesn't quite add up.

>>23504031
>I genuinely think high school English should be focusing on classic YA fiction rather than classic adult fiction.
Good point. I only wanted to read manga when I was in school (at 14 I used to think Cage of Eden was a complex masterpiece) but then as I grew older I dropped manga and started wanting to explore serious literature, without being prodded by anyone. And I think this is important to some extent, I believe many of the adults who read Harry Potter and Brandon Sanderson's novels were never able to fulfil their childhood desire of reading things that were appropriate for their age and ended up stuck at that level.

>>23504378
The thing is that it all reads a bit like conservative despair porn. Even details like "majority Muslim school", I wonder if OP is now going to claim to be one of the only white students in this college... I've met state school English literature students from poorer Northern areas, my ex was one of them, and they've had much more normal experiences than this.

>>23504397
Meant for >>23504377

>>23504395
>Cage of Eden
What was it about?

>>23504340
>>23504378
>>23504397
It's funny being accused of lying when you're completely innocent. Yes, the girl did suggest 50 Shades of Grey. No, I wasn't one of the only white students. Yes, they did read Stormzy. (Stormzy, by the way, has endorsements from Labour politicians like Jeremy Corbyn, contrary to your assertion that left wing people don't like him). I guess it's a good sign that you consider this unthinkable; it means my case was especially bad and not representative.

>>23504315
I should've applied to Oxbridge but I always considered it beyond my reach. That's where all the elite people go, I thought. So I ended up studying philosophy a different Russell Group uni. In hindsight I should've tried Oxbridge because I got all A* in my A-levels.

>>23504224
I can believe this. Universities have been going the same way for a long time, it's no surprise that schools are going this way too. Stick to sciences for education and arts for pleasure

>>23504372
I'm sure this is happening a lot. I'll never forget the opening speech from my vice chancellor on my first day when she declared (proudly) - "this is not a school, this is a business" - selling research from depts like chemistry and engineering is the name of the game not having tofu eating leftists annotating Austen.

>>23504374
this is absolutely where the education system falls down. I get you have to try and put the best wordsmith in to the curriculum somehow, but Shakespeare was not designed to be read in the classroom and certainly not by children. I don't know what the alternative is but having 13 year olds trying to even read, let alone understand, something like King Lear or Macbeth is frankly ridiculous.

>>23504509
Same, I never thought I'd even get there and the application system was so strange anyway. You don't apply to oxford you apply to 1 (and only 1) college. It's not a fair or good system and designed to keep people out. most people I've met who went to Oxbridge I'm not sure could even have the wit to follow a map and drive themselves there. Not sure spending 3-4 years around that sort would have done me any good any way.

>>23504497
I'm not sure the left wing like Jeremy Corben either to be honest

>>23504374
Rather than being outraged at the way technology is affecting us, you propose that the schooling system should “update itself to our new cognitive requirements” and, what, have TikTok style classes? How about we stop giving kids access to this mind warping technology, and try to use less of it ourselves?

Lol @ the middle class boys in this thread who think it’s fake because stuff like this doesn’t happen in their private boys schools. You just don’t know working class “people”. Couple weeks ago I was working on a construction site where this guy was bragging that in prison he used to smoke his pubic hair in a roll of tissue paper because he was that desperate for a smoke. Another guy on there couldn’t do basic arithmetic to calculate his wages (stuff as simple as 145 x 2). Working class in this country are barely conscious.

good thing my parents decided to move out of the uk while i was still a child, if i had stayed im sure i wouldve grown to resent classic english lit and poetry sheerly because of the fact i wouldve been forced to read it (like what happened here, in Bulgaria) and wouldve never even entertained the possibility of reading say Keats for enjoyment

>>23504671
As a left winger in the UK, I have no idea what you're basing that on, unless you consider people like Owen Smith and Lisa Nandy to be the sole face of the UK left. Anyone I know who'd call themselves a socialist was hugely behind him in both elections.

>>23505496
well he's been expelled from the national left wing party for being a raging anti-semite. Doesn't seem like "the left" want anything to do with him

>b-bros... we can't let woke SJWs take over our elementary school education...

>>23505512
>bros... make sure they teach shakespeare when i'm gone....
>preserve... western civilization....

>>23503639
>On the first day of my English Literature high school class, I was surprised to find I was one of the only males who had signed up for it.
>UK
Isn't English compulsory until A-Level? College or 6th form, not high-school.

Is this bait?

>>23505517
see>>23504246

>>23504217
>fag needs to let us know it's a "top" school
Amazing that Br*ts maintain their snobbery even as their own capital is turned into a third world bazaar and all of their intellectuals are Americanized midwits for 50 years now. The last British man will be letting everyone know he got fourth form in is GCAC's and went to Nigger College at Oxcunt while the Paki BBC beats his head in with truncheons for forgetting to renew his breathing license.

>>23505541
You sound very well-adjusted.

>>23505553

>>23503639
Yeah sorry. I've come to the conclusion recently that England and the UK are absolutely fucked. In the United States I think we better assimilate our immigrants to not be outright nuisances (at least in the town where I live, which has a large Indian and Chinese population), but in the UK it looks like that the opposite in the case. You're letting in all of these people that legitimately hate your country's values, but take advantages of the country's institutions and programs. Again, there are some groups like this in the United States, but it seems to be a lot less pronounced

These are just my observations as an American, anyway

>>23504031
>I do question the wisdom sometimes of forcing 15-18 year olds to read things like Dickens, Austen, Hardy and Shakespeare with such little life experiences.

I think it's more a case of choosing your classics well. I really enjoyed Romeo and Juliet in school because it's such a young adult/teenage story. Every teenage boy can identify with Romeo, I feel, and while I wouldn't know firsthand I think girls would take a natural interest in it too. For contrast, I never really got Much Ado About Nothing or Macbeth - which were also curricular at school - until I was older and I had the life experience to truly understand them.
Lowering the entry level to YA brings up more problems than it solves. The timelessness of the classics is an important part of their study, which would be lost by chasing elusive ''down with the kids''ness, especially via the slow machinery of state institutions versus the pace of youth culture. You would still have schools teaching kids with post-Hunger Games dystopislop today with such a system. Also, above the primary school level, you're effectively just alienating the kids who really are interested in and receptive to literature in order to cater to those who would probably be happier watching the movie adaptation. I wouldn't have given a shit about English class if it had been Harry Potter/Twilight analysis, and nor really would be any of the people who would only pay attention to those books. At that point, you might as well give up on teaching it.

>>23505579
Every single political party in the current election has a firm policy on wanting to reduce immigration and we also voted on Brexit 8 years ago as a hard push to reduce immigration. I agree with you that it's currently an issue, which is why it's such a hot topic at the current election, but the result is the UK is becoming more isolationist and not less.

>>23505579
Labour, Conservatives and Reform (the three parties with any chance of winning this election) all want to reduce immigration and we also voted on Brexit 8 years ago to help reduce immigration. I agree with you it's a big problem which is why it's currently such a hot topic at the election, but the result of it is the UK is becoming more isolationist and not less. We also have a higher overall percentage white population than the US.

>>23505512
This video is stupid and this man doesn't understand London. London is not England. We don't represent the rest of the country. We exist in a little bubble. Once you go to other places in the UK -- York, Oxford, Devon, etc -- you start to see the real England, which is white.

>>23505667
People never voted for immigration in the first place. It just got foisted on us because it's economically necessary, from the perspective of our rulers. That hasn't changed, so I doubt the will of the public will make any more difference than it ever has.

>>23505696
This is a cope. Our capital and greatest city is no longer ours, and all our other major cities are following. England isn't just London, but nor is it just a dwindling list of villages with an average age of over 60.

>>23503937
Unironically this. The classes have been dumbed down to the point that if you have an interest in the subject outside the class you will breeze through British education. The sort of students they try to teach by making stuff more engaging and incorporating creole into the poetry curriculum literally could not care less regardless because they would rather be dealing drugs, partying, or getting pregnant (inb4 racism from the 5 leftists on this board, this is in a 97% white area but is generally true across the whole of England).

I remember in A level sociology the sort of students that were target groups for affirmative action type schemes would literally just sit there sort of dazed and confused. When they did speak it was in a very jaunty sort of way as if they were bolting together phrases that they didn’t understand like the monk in “Canticle for Leibowitz.” You could hear it in the way they speak.

Interestingly enough if you look at the mark scheme for exam papers this is actually what the test is testing you on and the schools that get better grades actually teach their students like this.

I.e. for a question on Marxism a phrase like “the bourgeoise steal the surplus value of the proletariat through the wage system which Marxists view as wage slavery.” The student will be awarded so many points for using the terms bourgeoise and proletariat, and then so many points for mentioning wage slavery. The student does not actually have to understand what these concepts are, they just have to bring up the concepts when prompted by a certain question. In theory a child could pass an exam with good marks by writing down disjointed words and phrases that flag point awards in the mark scheme rather than actually writing coherent explanations and I have seen things like this happen with stem subjects. I think things like this are why grade inflation is such a big issue in the British system. When even a state comprehensive like the school I attended has figured out how to game the system like this it’s really not much of an achievement to get B grades anymore.

Side note. If you’re even halfway competent you will be told to apply for oxbridge on the off chance you get in because the schools love it when they can say students have been to oxbridge. They basically pressured my friend’s brother into applying and he actually got in but had a mental breakdown from stress. He’s recovered now but it wasn’t right of them to push him into a situation where he’d be so far removed from what he knew and who he knew. So many of my peers applied thinking they had a decent chance (we literally had a sort of oxbridge applicants club that had a few dozen people in it for year of about 90 or so) or only applied for top tier unis thinking they had a shot and were very disappointed on results day. I have aspergers so I only applied to two decent unis in a city near my hometown so I didn’t have this disappointment.

Do you fear growing up on a farm and being raised at a specific distance from other things?

>>23505165
Unironically this. I spent most of my time indoors until I was around 16 because I’m and autist. At around that age I touched grass, lost weight, learned to cook, etc. and then after that I started noticing that around 50% of the people around me were comically stupid. As in something you couldn’t make up because it would seem simply to over the tile. It’s like walking through some sort of nether-realm of high time preference and boisterousness. Since I started going out more I’ve always been a bit afraid of these people because they are impossible to predict and I view it as something of a life goal to leave this place and find some sort of calling where I can be alone. They also seem to have a hostility towards people who aren’t like them (yet are fond of globohomo) and this manifests in a hostility towards anyone who talks in rp or who doesn’t dress like them.

I’m a geordie but have no accent so other geordies think I’m from somewhere else (they often say Kent which is odd because Kentish accents aren’t rp). They will also see minor purchases as foppish and extravagant (e.g. I was chastised by an acquaintance for spending £3 on a loaf of bread (you can pay extra in tbe supermarket for freshly baked bread with cheddar cheese baked into it and it’s still warm when you get it) but view expensive trainers as a worthwhile purchase.

of course the standards have to be bought down to the level of the new arrivals

>>23505924>>23505870
I didn’t want to pay to move away from home which was why I only applied to unis near my hometown. Like you say I also wanted to feel a specific distance from things rather than merely being sort of plonked down in the middle of some city that happened to have a university in it which was why I applied to a uni so close to home. I know where things are in the city where I attend uni. It would take days but if I needed to I could literally walk from uni back home because I know the route like the back of my hand, and regardless I know the train and bus routes as well. I’m essentially a sort of rural uni student now which is somewhat odd. I’m the only person my age I know who keeps chickens. I also know where literally everything is in this city. For example on the first day there literally everyone was talking about one neighbourhood that had a reputation as being really rough but I knew of another that was worse but very close to the uni in the city centre. If I moved away I would not have that sort of local knowledge and I imagine being a sperg I’d get myself stabbed by saying something in the middle of an enriched no go zone.

I actually pass through the latter area on the bus occasionally. Once there was a crime scene with an abandoned sports car in the middle of the road so the bus driver had to go another way. It was interesting having to explain that to the guy lecturing us on the America civil war.

>>23505962
btw use this period to actually design a job
try not to make the job taking care of a woman, which you should have finished by now

>>23503639
I'm not a Brit.
In my country there are people in elite universities who unironically think songs that are much worse than Stormzy's are excellent songs and should be studied.
And any criticism of it is elitism.

>>23505962
lol vagin unda chin

>>23503639
At least you are actually engaging with the texts critically. In America, where I attended a public highschool, the conversations in English class hardly rose above merely identifying themes and morals in the work and crafting textbook 5 paragraph essays that were essentially just regurgitations of the text. I can remember that our textbook for English 2 did not have the entire odyssey in it and the few books that it did have were halved. Genuinely, I cannot remember one single discussion in my English classes that rose above surface level identification of textual components: this is a protagonist, a conflict, a setting, etc. In college it was somewhat better but the damage had already been done to the majority of my peers at the time given that they were incapable of expressing their thoughts as words due to the lack of previous experience. A friend of my roommate freshman year came to me because I was writing papers for money on the side and said something to the tune of ‘noone has ever asked me what I think about a book before.’ Granted, my state is probably not the best to be comparing to the national average but there are people walking around today with college degrees from respected institutions that couldn’t tell you what subtext or allusion is to save their life. For another example I remember we were reading Othello in my sophomore year for an English literature course and a girl in my class was confused about why everyone thought Iago was a bad guy and when questioned by the teacher as to why she thought Iago was a good guy she replied ‘everyone in the book says he is’ with a shrug.

What low standards everyone in this thread has. Students should be encouraged to read as much as they can outside of school, and the love of reading extracurricularly should be encouraged.

>>23506820
I remember in freshman year of college I took my first "real" literature course and it was pretty refreshing. It was the first time that I had engaged with a work of literature beyond surface level, and it honestly probably changed my life trajectory.

The sad part is that most of the other students in the class did not give a shit. This was an introductory course that most were enrolled in because the university makes our schedules for our first semester. It was like dead silent in the classroom whenever the teacher asked us discussion questions. There were people missing very basic details (picrel) and some not even reading it at all.

The teacher there (a grad student) also taught me how to argue in a paper better than any English teacher I've ever had.

>>23504031
>I do question the wisdom sometimes of forcing 15-18 year olds to read things like Dickens, Austen, Hardy and Shakespeare with such little life experiences.
When the fuck else are they going to read it though? When they're slaving away at three jobs from 18 to 78 to afford to live in a car?

>>23505496
As a left younger in the uk. Have there been any books worth reading that offer a rebuttal Hayek? Specially written after thatcher.

>>23505515
>>23505512
It's funny that you don't even try to debate him, you're just affirming his worldview, and helping to create more "radicals"

>>23504397
>The thing is that it all reads a bit like conservative despair porn
So? Even if it is made-up, in reflects reality and encourages a dialogue. Leftists do this all the time, even though their peurile worldview is completely at odds with reality 98% of the time.

>>23504340
Complete cope.

>>23504246
I went to an ivy league school. The prof I had for anthropology was telling the class how savage tribes were an example of communism working, and we should learn from them. Of course, you can learn all about Boaz and his hack/fraud school of thought, it really isn't surprising that they'd push these anti-Western, anti-White, anti-Human agendas to brainwash the youth into hating themselves and becoming activists intent on tearing apart the fabric of society, like the stupid juveniles that they are.

>>23506848
That undermines the tenets of pseudo-enlightenment ideology propagated by the institutions to create a more servile slave class, so don't expect it any time soon.

What we can expect is a further race to the bottom, because that's the only way to achieve equality with the 3rd world peasants being imported en masse against the overwhelming democratic will of the people.

>>23505712
>"This is cope"
>Can't refute what he says
Good job, you fucking stupid retard! No wonder the standards in schools are so low with people like you. You must be some kind of inbred toilet shitskin, huh? Just kidding of course, I'm satirising the typical Nazi fascist chud hate speechp which plagues this vile site. Obviously diversity is our strength, look at the high levels of trust, social cohesion, low rates of mental illness, low crime rates, etc. which we always see whenever an area becomes less Wh- I mean more diverse!

I can tell that your IQ is pretty high, I'm thinking 135+, isn't that right, dumdum?

>>23505577
Are you even White?

>>23504378
>often currently concerned with content/trigger warnings.
That was years ago at this point, the move has been towards the DEI shit where if a minority portrays something possibly offensive, it gets a pass. The focus overall is on "inclusion".

>>23503639
>high school class
and here's how we know you're a yank off /pol/ and not an actual British person

anyway in my A-level English class I did Hamlet, Frankenstein, Dracula, and a coursework piece on Phillip Larkin and the play Jerusalem. oh and also did Paradise Lost and She Stoops to Conquer which was quite fun
I had one teacher who I could only describe as the personification of reddit and another who was a very hardcore feminist (she got preggers after a year and swapped out for the most boring man alive)
all in all our curriculum was normal and hardly political, the only thing that really was was our teacher going very feminist in the reading of Frankenstein

>>23505935
>I started noticing that around 50% of the people around me were comically stupid. As in something you couldn’t make up because it would seem simply to over the tile. It’s like walking through some sort of nether-realm of high time preference and boisterousness. Since I started going out more I’ve always been a bit afraid of these people because they are impossible to predict
>I’m a geordie
See, there's your problem. You live in Newcastle.

>>23503639
Agreeing with the other bong anons ITT, you should've just called it secondary or sixth form because this looks like half a LARP. This situation obviously depends massively on which school you go to, which exam board they use, and what the teachers are like, though I think it's fair to say that on the whole the standard of education in the UK is clearly slipping. Covid really screwed both schools and young students over, and education was already going downhill before then. I'm lucky that my English A-Level was mostly pretty good -- the only bit I hated was coursework, because school chose one text for us and my class got a shit book.
It's worse with the universities. Those are almost entirely transactional when it comes to education now, and if you don't find friends or a suitable social group then you're absolutely fucked. I've just completed my English Lit degree at a Russell Group uni and I can comfortably say it was the most miserable three years of my life. Not all of that was because of the uni itself, but a fair part of it was because of how thoroughly underwhelmed I was
>about 95% of the course was women (which, as a man, makes you feel incredibly out of place)
>the first year and a half is entirely prescribed modules that are incredibly topically broad without any real depth
>most of the tutors I had in the first two years were PhD students with little experience who barely gave a fuck
>only 3 hours of contact time per week per module -- 1 hour lecture and 2 hour workshop or seminar
>barely anyone talks in class and discussion was sometimes like drawing blood from a stone
>you spend only a week on each text, so it's impossible to keep up with the reading and pointless to focus on anything other than what you plan to write on
>some tutors are far more interested in sociopolitical themes and contexts of a text than they are in the actual text itself, to the point where it felt more like sociology or history at times
>one compulsory module that ran through the first two years was laughable, covering absolutely basic shit in 1st year (we spent one workshop on essay titles) and then wanky critical theory in 2nd
>between the minimal contact hours, the impossibility/pointlessness of doing all the reading, and how essays are only at the midpoint and end of term, it feels like you're barely doing any work at all
>at the same time, once the essays DO come around everyone feels overwhelmed by them because of how little practice there's been
>strikes in my first two years
>a uni-wide change from three terms to two semesters in final year, which the department didn't handle well at all timetable-wise (we had to prep for our final essays three weeks into the modules, and then the essays and dissertation deadlines were only a week apart)
The modules became much better in 3rd year and there were some honestly great tutors doing a thankless job, but it was all too little, too late. I hated it and most others I've talked to did too.

>>23508898
>the first year and a half is entirely prescribed modules that are incredibly topically broad without any real depth
I remember at York doing a compulsory first-year unit called 'Medieval to Modern', which literally went from Le Morte d'Arthur to Mrs Dalloway.

When I was moving in at the start of my second year, I went to a Sainsbury's to get basic supplies and the guy working the checkout was the PhD student who had run that unit. Very unpropitious start to the year.

(For the record I had a great time at uni. Lots of good tutors. I guess I got lucky.)

>>23508922
Fucking hell, that's a coincidence and a half. My uni WAS York.
Shows how things are nowadays, I guess. I don't know when you did your degree but from what I gather, UK universities are a pretty different beast to what they were even only 5 or 10 years ago.

>>23508922
Lol should've spitted on him.

>>23504660
There's the Tales From Shakespeare book by Lamb. Kids can and should be introduced to Shakespeare young, this book is good for those before high school, so when they actually study the main text they aren't confused and struggling.

>>23503639
this post is quite literally fake and gay, and op is a faggot (unsurprising). Take your faggotry back to >>reddit where it belongs

>>23503639
After years of meeting students who fail to connect with the literature, it's possible your instructor was genuinely incredulous about you liking any of it. It may not be much deeper than that.

>>23506848
I disagree heavily with this. "The reader," is a type. Some people won't benefit much from a life of reading, and will perform their function just fine without it. We are academically minded. Imagine if a blue collar worker who doesn't read said, "anon really should roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty as much as possible outside of work. It's good and builds character. Put down the books and pick up a wrench." You know that's not in line with your type, and that he's wrong.
Imagine a whole society of readers. Imagine a whole society of wrenchers. It wouldn't work. Every type working together in harmony at their differentiated tasks is how society works.

>>23503639
education in USA overrun by leftists

>>23504660
Schoolchildren have been reading Shakespeare for hundreds of years and it’s quite literally an integral part of a British education.

>>23508778
I live in a rural Northumbrian town that’s close enough that the people there consider themselves geordies. It’s far worse inside the city proper.

>>23505515

>>23509912
There's nothing to learn from Shakespeare aside from the fact that it's a play. I think theatrics works well. If you want actual learning go to math education. I used to do math problems every day until I gave up because it just got progressively harder, almost as if I had no free will. I think I am possessed by a demon sometimes. And learning calculus might make the demon mad.

>>23504031
>The left's dogmatic encroachment on education is so sad.
This assumes that the right would fare much better, I think they'd prefer to defund the liberal arts entirely. I think leftoids at least feel some obligation towards "literature" even though few seem to actually enjoy it. I've met very few right leaning people who were really "literate".

>>23503639
This is why Dawkins himself partly turned 180 and calls himself a cultural Christian now and wants to protect the KJV bible's legacy and put it in schools. lol

>>23504031
>Dickens, Austen, Hardy and Shakespeare with such little life experiences.
Rimbaud wrote golden Vergilian verses in Latin at age 14 with a public school education. IQ and teacher diff.

>>23509954
>Imagine a whole society of readers.
Provided all of them would be readers they'll do just fine, as they'd have nobody to lean on in terms of physical works, so they'll be forced to adapt to a bare minimum - and they already know how to learn.
>Imagine a whole society of wrenchers.
Provided all of them are wrenchers to the core, they'll do just fine on their own too - purely natural society with natural knack for physical works.
It is the coexistence, that is a huge problem.

>>23510924
Yeah, this is the dire situation. The right has seemed, in general, to be happy to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and I recall that in the 90s, they made no secret of how they would orient education, no less biased than the Left, just differently biased. They'd be just as likely to cut Shakespeare due to contempt for what they take to be eggheadedness ad their favor for a business-like bottom line.

>>23511844
Dogmatism is the plague of the human race

>>23510892
There's everything to learn from Shakespeare. You learn only math and you'll remain largely ignorant, thoughtless, and careless, like you are being right now. Seems you are the kind of person who needs Shakespeare.

>>23510861
>I've made a huge mistake.

>>23511983
I can't believe you would write this to me.

>>23504365
terrible bait, here's your (You) faggot
In his OP anon says
>Literary education in the UK (at least at the high school level) operates under a spiteful hermeneutic of suspicion
This is utter horseshit and there is no way for me to 'prove' it to you because we are not in a fucking classroom, you thick-headed cunt.
The reality is that all school subjects are treated with suspicion by certain students, and other students engage beautifully. English teachers by and large in the UK are not some 'hello fellow kids' caricature willing to sell out their profession for attention from a bunch of spotty faggots. They are themselves graduates of the subject, who took it at university because they loved, sincerely and not cynically, reading middlebrow Victorian novels like Wuthering Heights, and entered teaching for a stable income.
>we were practically forced to become detectives, snooping around the texts and trying to find evidence against the author of some problematic thing he said
Another absolute crock of shite. A Level students are typically taught key themes and symbolism in the chosen texts in order to attain marks on a frustratingly limited-yet-ambiguous exam markscheme. This can cross over into 'feminist' analysis, but only if you can make a functional point out of it. If there is any suspicion in UK English education, it's the cynicism of viewing it as means to an end under credentialism, not some culture war wet dream about critical theory power dynamics. Now, if OP were recounting his university experience, the screed would be slightly more believable, but only slightly.
When you look at the way OP writes, two possibilities become apparent. Either he's some insincere non-bongoloid shit stirrer, or his experiences were indeed real, but his pain comes from his own mediocrity. No one who writes
>Such an astounding attitude towards literature is certainly not conducive to education
sincerely could be a good reader, or good writer.
>The idea that I could like Byron's poetry was out of the question.
Byron is already part of the curriculum for many A Level English sub-courses for one, and plenty of us studied classic texts when given the choice. It's bloody impossible to get a good grade studying something completely new and un-addressed in existing discourse, so naturally we all gravitated towards texts that were comfortably safe, traditional, and thus easier to research and write about. I myself chose Hamlet and Brighton Rock for my coursework essay. A classmate did voluntarily did Chaucer. >antiwhite agenda
what a load of shit. You don't read, you just circlejerk other anons' Evola posts.
>>23504497
Serious question OP, how old are you?
>the interpretative framework we were given heavily encouraged us to analyse these texts from a critical Marxist, feminist or social justice perspective
This is not the norm, especially at A Level. You had a shitty department, simple as.
>>23507271
Fuck leftists, and fuck you. Lying is wrong.

>>23505165
Breaking news, the majority of young people are stupid. Yes, obviously a bunch of 16-18 year old comprehensive school twats aren't going to give a shit about an arts education, or really any schooling at all beyond the bare minimum. This is hardly relevant to the state of 'literary education in the UK
>>23508898
Very sober and relevant complaints. This was pretty much my own experience too.
There are things to be worrying about when it comes to English education but it's moreso the result of slipping standards from short-sighted planning and a lack of properly talented/experienced tutors.
I will say that while it's true the reading appears unfocused and high-volume, you're supposed to start reading the texts earlier in the year so that you're ready when their week comes around, rather than reading them during and only during the week they're 'covered'. This is why earlier weeks are usually short stories or novellas.

>>23513113
>I will say that while it's true the reading appears unfocused and high-volume, you're supposed to start reading the texts earlier in the year so that you're ready when their week comes around, rather than reading them during and only during the week they're 'covered'. This is why earlier weeks are usually short stories or novellas.
Very true, but it doesn't help when the uni gives out its reading lists only a month and half in advance (IIRC). They got even worse with it as time went on, too
Also, it just becomes far more sensible to devote your time and energy to reading and studying the text you decide to write on, instead of trying to read everything and the included recommended criticism in time for the workshops every week, before having to move onto the next week's text that you're not writing about. I tried to keep up with reading everything at the start of first year because I wanted to be a good student, and I think most everyone else did too, but it's just not viable considering you're balancing three modules each week each with their own reading. Most likely it's partly why discussion was often so limited in those early modules. Though it's far better if you're lucky to get a module that's only focusing on a small handful of books, or even just one. I did a short summer module on Ulysses and then a full module on Joyce's prose works, and I think those are the only two cases where I got all the reading done.

>>23504217
>>23504315
>>23504340
>>23504378
>>23508019
>>23508898
>>23513113
>>23513072
To all of you who have most uncharitably accused me of lying, of being a secret American, and of deriving my pain from my “mediocrity”: here you go. I have spent the past half hour attempting to search for this document so I could present it with a timestamp, but alas I appear to have thrown it away or mislaid it. All that I have is this photograph, with personal details redacted. Here you will see that not only do I have an A-Level in English Literature, just as I said I did, but also, any notion of me coping for my mediocrity is patently unjustified, since I obtained the best grades possible in all of my subjects. (Not that I consider this latter point an achievement — as I said, the education system is so degraded that this was not hard to do at all. I am merely defending my honour against your vile invectives.) I ask you now, if you be Christians, to retract these slanders and falsities, and to cease this public profanation of my character. For truly, everything I have said was 100% true, and I swear to this before the throne of Almighty God Himself. And finally, to the man who called me a mediocrity due to my use of the phrase “not conducive to education”: I ask you to retract this strange accusation; first, on the grounds that one must not expect stylistic perfection in a 4chan post; and second, because there is nothing wrong with the phrase in itself. This being done, I will forgive you all; although, since you have met me with such an unkind reception, I think I will not come to this forum again.

Regards…

>>23513072
I think this is a great post, very thorough and grounded in reality. I appreciate the extent of your righteous indignation and unwavering pursuit of truth for its own sake, anon.

>>23513285
You brought it back round in the end. Masterful troll, 8/10.

>>23503639
I didn't do english at A-level but i can attest to this. Everything is obviously interpreted as a way to do a social critique of the period, and this is the way we are all led and trained by teachers.

>But I wonder: is it a cause or an effect? What I mean is, is there something inherent in the population which means that Stormzy will always be for them the height of culture, and Shakespeare of boredom, or is this a failure of education?
Submissive bureacrats under the strain of teaching the unwashed masses + a pivot in western culture from pursuing high culture to becoming cynical about any such distinction, bringing stormzy and shakespeare to an equivalence. I met a foreign exchange student the other day who of his own accord has started learning the violin, taking lessons. He excitedly told me about how he wanted to get into classical music. Anybody doing that in the UK would be made fun of as a 'tory' and stuck up/holding onto stuffy ideas. Even among privileged private school students. Our culture idealises low culture not high culture. It is not the same across the world.

>>23510695
I'm a southerner who now lives in the Toon. It's not nearly that bad. Lots of great restaurants, culture and interesting people around. Yes, there's lots of pond life, but its no worse than London

>>23503639
If these high school students were born 200 years ago, they would have been illiterate peasants. The fact that they are able to read is a significant advancement compared to what would have been expected of them in the past.
The only educated class until recent times was the aristocracy which could afford it and that's still the case to an extent. The wealthy families send them kids to prestigious private schools which nurture their taste for the arts and teach them how to lead. Meanwhile public education merely serves as a way to indoctrinate the future wage slave who shall work for the privately educated kids.

>>23503639
>Rather than training us to be literary critics or admirers of art
I never wanted to become a literary critic or an admirer of art. I do not care about these things and I also found high school literature to be incredibly boring, not because of some left/right thing but because I am not interested in what people without any vision or ambition have to say.

>>23504031
I disagree, subjects like biology and mathematics are difficult, but we would not accept a lowering of standards in these subjects, especially not because students don't enjoy them, why should literature be any different? This is especially the case for electives like physics, which is similar to OP's class in being chosen.

Your reasoning assume that literature as a subject should be enjoyable for all students, but as I see it, it is no different to other subjects in that it is taught because it os necessary to becoming an educated adult (qua reading comprehension) Those who take an interest in the subject, be it literature, mathematics or physics, will pursue their own further studies. But it would be. disservice both to the student who do take pleasure in such subjects and those students who are improved by those subjects, to lower the standards for the latter.

>>23504031
>but I do question the wisdom sometimes of forcing 15-18 year olds to read things like Dickens, Austen, Hardy and Shakespeare with such little life experiences.
Not only that but there should have been an introductory lesson to each work, not just have students read shit without any historical context. I was 16 when I had to read Camus' Stranger in high school. As you said, it's debatable what lesson can a 16 year-old gain from an absurdist dive into individualism, but for non Frog, not being told about French occupation of Algeria, how it went on and so on, meant I was gonna miss the entire point of the novel. I re-read it recently and found both the core message as well as its anticolonialist/antimperialist message to be rather trite but at least I could understand the point the author was making.

>>23515468
You still don't get it. Context is important of course but how do you think a 16 year old is going to react when faced with random historical context for a country they're unfamiliar with and for a novel they haven't read yet? Much better to let them experience the text first hand and get personal experience with the text without preconceived ideas or readings before forcing historical context upon them. Although frustration with what we didn't know when we were being educated is universal, often our teachers were wiser than we knew and it's always better to give them the benefit of the doubt than always just look to reform. And the language you're using shows you still don't get The Stranger, art and especially not Camus' art is not propaganda, Camus is not "making a point" with The Stranger, especially since the essence of absurdism is quite the opposite.

>>23515521
But he wasn't writing in a vacuum. The historical context would have been readily apparent to people of his time. And one of the works central ideas was anti-imperialist. It's a waste of time to have someone read about it they have no idea of the stakes involved, people's motivations, etc. Like trying to learn calculus without learning the multiplication table.

>Camus is not "making a point" with The Stranger, especially since the essence of absurdism is quite the opposite
Without trying to go into sophistry, that's a point in itself. I just said the idea od absurdism and his flavour of individualism didn't resonate with me. That said, as a kid I couldn't even understand what absurdism was or the meaning of individualism so reading it was a waste of time. As an adult I can read about it and agree or disagree.