New Ways for a New Age

“New Ways for a New Age?”:

Reforming the English Curriculum

in Post-Compulsory Secondary Education in

New South Wales, Australia.

A paper delivered by

Dr Jacqueline Manuel

University of Western Sydney

Australia

at the

British Education Research Association

“BERA 97” Conference

University of York,

September 10 – 14

The Challenge for Change

In the early 1980s, Anthony Adams sounded a warning to English teachers, educational policy makers and curriculum designers: unless we undertook a revisioning of the epistemological and pedagogical underpinning of our subject in the context of a post-industrial educational realm, then the “world will have passed it by, and what we have traditionally thought of as English studies … will become the preserve of an eccentric few.”[1] In this paper I wish to describe and critique the ways in which the education system in New South Wales, Australia, is seeking to address these challenges and in so doing reposition English as the pivot of the curriculum created to equip our young citizens for the uncertainties and exigencies of the contemporary world.

When examining the place, nature and role of English in Australia today, it is crucial to remember that the context within which English education occurs in the 1990s is in some ways markedly distant and distinct from that which generated the original Higher School Certificate English Syllabus in the early 1960s. In his provocative book Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures, James A. Berlin insists that “We have the feeling we live in a decentred world, a realm of fragmentation and incoherence, without a nucleus or foundation for experience”[2] and

the processes of decentring and fragmentation have shaken the foundations of our experience. Our faith in the universal laws of reason and the centrality of Western cultural heritage in the larger world has eroded.”[3]

The conditions for work and leisure that dramatically affect the nature and quality of our lives have been profoundly influenced by the development of information technology as well as the dynamics of a globalised economy and changing labour market, with relatively high unemployment among the youth and over 45s in many developed countries and increasingly longer working hours for those employed.

Berlin argues that our education systems,

despite the inadequacies of the curriculum, are much better equipped to prepare workers for the new job market than they are to prepare citizens for the quotidian cultural conditions of our new economy. In other words, our students are more likely to acquire the abilities and dispositions that will enable them to become successful workers than the abilities and dispositions to make critical sense of this age of image and spectacle, to understand their daily experience in a post-modern culture.[4]

Clearly, over the past three and a half decades there has been a substantial broadening of what is considered appropriate matter for the secondary school curriculum, and the teaching of subject English in Australia has to a large extent accommodated this expansion. Many of the fine English curriculum documents implemented in Australian schools today are thoroughly recognisable descendants of the philosophical, theoretical and pedagogical model grounded by the “New English” of the late 1960s, early 1970s. But while the K-6 and 7-10 English syllabuses have been more responsive to shifts generated by and consequent to the watershed movement of “New English”, the Years 11-12 curriculum has changed little in its orientation since the first Higher School Certificate in 1967.

It is axiomatic that “curriculum designs must be continually evolving and flexible … built on accumulated knowledge which sets the most recent innovations and studies into perspective”[5] if they are to fulfil their charter. In the 1990s, such designs must take account of the convergence of the peculiar socio-economic, cultural and political forces that define our moment and heavily impinge upon the nature and quality of formal educational experiences. In addition to the decentring of individual and collective experience in post-industrial society and culture, and the role and the impact of continuous advances in technology, other significant forces under the rubric of ‘post-modern’ English would include:

An expansion in, and development of, literary, critical, cultural, linguistic and communications theories that have far-reaching implications for the nature of our enterprise in the English classroom;

Increasingly high rates of youth unemployment;
The thrust for a more vocationally-oriented, utilitarian and outcomes-based curriculum with a concomitant emphasis on preparing highly communicative, flexible and adaptive young workers;
Sharply rising retention rates at the post-compulsory level with a significantly diversified student population, and
The central role of the media in shaping, defining, inscribing and disseminating culture, values, and information, and in determining ways of knowing, seeing and responding.

But those who seek to implement the substantive educational shifts through innovative and progressive curriculum design, have also to confront those forces of inertia summed up in that incisive observation made more than a decade ago by John Goodlad in his comprehensive assessment of American education, A Place Called School, that schools, basically have not changed since they moved indoors.

The NSW Education System

It is necessary to understand that the education system in NSW, the largest of the Australian States, is one of the largest in the English speaking world, educating over one million students in 3,000 schools employing 33,000 primary, and 35,000 secondary, school teachers. The curriculum for all students, in both government and non-government schools, is authorised by the NSW Board of Studies. Like equivalent bodies throughout the world, the Board is faced with the constant and substantial task of catering for the ever-increasing demands, in both the intensity and the diversity of the curriculum, of meeting the needs, interests and capacities of a diversified student population within a very large system. Approximately 116,000 students enrol in the subject English in Years 11 - 12 (student ages 17 - 18) for the Higher School Certificate – the post-compulsory qualification.

The Historical Context for Reform

From 1912 until the 1960s, compulsory secondary education in NSW concluded after three years of secondary education when students sat for the Intermediate Certificate. Those proceeding, usually with aspirations to matriculate to university, sat for the Leaving Certificate external public examination two years later. The vast majority of students did not proceed to the Leaving Certificate. In the 1940s and early 1950s, of every 100 students commencing 6th class, only fewer than 20 or so completed their Leaving Certificate five years later. For example, of the 50,000 who enrolled in first year government high schools in New South Wales in 1948, only 16.1% survived to commence their LC year in 1952. [6]

In the post-war economic boom period from the late 1940s through to the very early 1960s, jobs were relatively easy to take up once a student acquired the Intermediate Certificate. The comparable figure today, of course, is around 70%, and almost certainly about to climb following the Australian Federal Government’s latest plan to abolish unemployment benefits for 16-18 year olds.

In 1953 a then Labor government in NSW decided that the time had come to evaluate the whole of the secondary education system that had changed little since 1912. Under the chairmanship of Dr (later Sir) Harold Wyndham it established a Committee of Inquiry which took four years to complete its report, handed it to the Government in 1957. For a variety of political and economic reasons the Government delayed a decision to implement what became known as “the Wyndham Scheme” until late 1961. Then after a furious flurry of activity over but a few months, the NSW secondary schools opened their doors on the first day of the 1962 school year at the end of January to welcome the ‘new’ First Form students. They became the first class to sit the new “School Certificate” exam at the completion of the now four years of compulsory school. A relatively small proportion (by today’s standards) then proceeded to take the first Higher School Certificate Examination in 1967.

The British Influence

There always has been, of course, a strong British influence on the history of education in NSW. The section on English in the junior secondary school (Forms I to IV) in the Wyndham Report is strongly redolent of the spirit and language of earlier major British reports and, in particular, of the 1921 Newbolt Report (The Teaching of English in England) along with that powerful little book written by George Sampson, a member of Newbolt’s committee, English for the English. This latter work, published also in 1921, is famous particularly for Sampson’s passionate insistence that all teachers ought to be teachers of English, and for its view of reading literature as an “almost sacramental” act.[7]

The spirit of what can be called ‘Newbolt English’ infused the post-compulsory English curriculum that had just been implemented in 1953, the year that Wyndham commenced his inquiry. The 1921 report, in turn, drew its inspiration from what can be termed ‘Arnoldian’ English - Matthew Arnold’s fierce insistence upon the almost redemptive and ennobling value, and transformative potential of, the study of English literature in the school curriculum. Arnold believed that literature and its study must now provide the moral backbone for a British society at risk of decay because of what he perceived to be the lassitude of an enfeebled Established Church.

In reviewing its final recommendation the Newbolt Report had concluded:

....we have given to ‘English’ a very wide significance. We have looked upon it as almost convertible with thought of which we have called it the very stuff and process. We have treated it as a subject, but at the same time, as a method, the principal whereby education may achieve its ultimate aim giving a wide outlook on life. When that aim is kept in view, it will be found that English as a subject must not take any place which may happen to be vacant, but the first place; and that English as a method must have entry everywhere.[8]

The 1953 Syllabus in English for secondary schools strongly embodied these views - indeed the first underlined sentence was repeated almost exactly, in meaning and spirit, in the first sentence of the 1953 Syllabus. This document had been written by members of the “English Teachers Group”, many of whom had been teachers of English in the UK and / or had been strongly influenced by the Arnoldian ideals of English advocated by the Newbolt Report and pretty well enshrined in the curriculum in UK schools up to the time of the British comprehensive education reforms of 1944. In that part of the 1953 syllabus dealing with the Leaving Certificate curriculum, there were three sections: Expression of Thought, Comprehension of Thought, and Literature. This last section, which occupied the largest amount of pedagogical time in most classrooms, reflected the overriding priorities of Australian curricula in English of the time. In these syllabuses, attention was primarily focussed upon the assimilation of literature as ‘humanising’ and ‘civilising’ content, not dissimilar from Dixon’s ‘cultural heritage’ model divested of its peculiarly British ‘cultural heritage’ and educational nationalism, as well as upon the inculcation of ‘literary taste’ in students.[9][10]

What is not found in this (1953) syllabus is that emphasis upon the exploration and encouragement of the student’s direct, honest and personal response that is found in the writings of F. R. Leavis (especially Education and the University), Denys Thompson, I. A. Richards, D. W. Harding and the other Scrutiny writers of the 1930s and what has been called (among other things) the Cambridge School of English.[11]

The Role of the University of Sydney in the formation of the HSC English Curriculum

But by the time the Higher School Certificate English Syllabus, established in late 1964 by the Board of Senior School Studies, came to plan a curriculum in English for the new Higher School Certificate, a revolution had taken place in the academic study of English at the University of Sydney. This university, and its Department of English, had always been the key shaping influence of the Leaving Certificate English curriculum since 1912. In 1963 a new, dynamic, Professor had been appointed to the Challis Chair, Professor Sam Goldberg. He had been heavily influenced at Cambridge by F. R. Leavis and his followers and was the leading “Leavisite” in Australia. With a passion he sought to reform the whole ethos of English studies at the University and within the new HSC English curriculum.

At the time of writing what became known as the 1965 HSC English curriculum, a senior member of Goldberg’s Department, Professor G A Wilkes (who held the Chair in Australian Literature but - at that time - remained under the authority of Goldberg as Challis Chair and Head of the Department), was elected Chair of the HSC English Syllabus Committee by its members. But Goldberg’s influence was very strong. Soon after the curriculum was written there was a vitriolic split in the Department and the Vice Chancellor divided the Department - with the ‘Leavisites et al in one ‘department’ under Goldberg, and the latter’s enemies et al in another department under Wilkes. But within a year or so Goldberg and most of his followers had returned to the University of Melbourne (from whence they had come via Cambridge, in many cases) and Wilkes assumed leadership of the one department. But in subsequent years, Professor Wilkes never attempted to alter the basic theoretical thrust of the inaugural HSC English syllabus.

Wilkes told his departmental colleagues that the new HSC syllabus, bibliography and reading lists “meant that much of what had usually been covered in the English I course at the University would now be handed over to schools”[12] Virtually all of the 45 books cited in a bibliography designed to assist students in the ‘Language’ component of the syllabus were used in undergraduate courses at the University.

Compared with the previous 1953 syllabus, there was a vast jump in both the quality and quantity of texts set for the Literature component of the curriculum. The vast majority of texts set were on reading lists in First, Second, Third Years of the undergraduate program. The bulk of the texts had their origin in the Cambridge ‘Tripos’, the ‘canon’ of texts authorised by the Leavisite bibles such as The Great Tradition, The Common Pursuit, and the many articles published over the years in Scrutiny.

The Leavisite Legacy

This syllabus imported New Criticism, Leavisism, and practical criticism to the NSW senior school curriculum. The Leavisites eschewed any imposition of a ‘literary taste’ model of English teaching. Of course, in practice, they often were merely imposing their own form of ‘literary taste’ Although Leavis traced his roots solidly back to Matthew Arnold, the first HSC English curriculum was devoid of the quasi-religious cadences of salvation-and-redemption-through-literature. For the first time ever, the teaching and examining of poetry became mandatory in the post-compulsory English curriculum (from 1912 onwards it had been optional - teachers and students could select short stories and other forms of literary prose instead). The Leavisite thrust on eliciting personal, individual, ‘honest’ response to literature, uncluttered by fixations with literary history, or repetitions of “supposedly ‘acceptable’ views” of a text,[13] or the regurgitations of dry analyses of plot, summary and character, or summaries of literary critical positions, were the hallmarks of this curriculum.

There was also a substantial section on the study of the English language - its history, its linguistic features, semantics, syntax and so on - which the Leavisite influence was unable to exclude. But in 1976 most of this was removed from the curriculum.

There were three levels in the English curriculum. Assuming that the vast majority of students proceeding to Years 11 and 12 were of matriculable calibre and that their choices of subjects and levels would be determined by student choice, the Third level course, designed for the majority of students - who would proceed to university but who would not necessarily study English at the university - was quite challenging but more ‘catholic’ in its range of texts than those found in First and Second Levels. Alongside Shakespeare, Bernard Shaw, Arthur Miller, John Steinbeck and J. D. Salinger there was also a range of Australian literature.

The Second and First levels were designed for those intending to proceed with English studies at university - the First Level was the more challenging in its quantity of texts required to be studied. The Leavisite canon was here arraigned: virtually all of the texts were on the English I and English II reading lists of the Department of English at the University of Sydney. There was Chaucer, Donne, Pope, Hopkins, Eliot, Tess of the d’Urbevilles, Sons and Lovers, King Lear, Othello, Murder in the Cathedral, Oedipus Rex, Huckleberry Finn, The Crucible, Look Back in Anger - and a tiny smidgeon of Australian literature.