More academic issues

In talking about the need for more study of language as compared with literature for people who are planning to teach English in our secondary schools, I was not meaning to belittle the importance of literature for the education of teenagers. 

Reading and discussing the characters of fiction, or the techniques of poetry, or practising the arts of drama in a school production, can be great fun and very valuable in laying the foundations for such important skills as public speaking, discrimination, backing ones arguments, organising ideas, finding the most important points, summarising, and so on and on. 

I have written in an earlier post about the “use” of poetry. But the use of fiction is just as important. I used to wonder sometimes when I heard strict moralists complaining about the lack of religious or moral teaching in our state schools. What on earth do they think English teachers spend half their lives doing, but discussing the rights and wrongs of the behaviour of characters in fiction, or drama, or the themes of any literature? 

One interesting discrimination tool which I believe ought to be part of every English course at High School is the ability to trace the shape of the plot of a story. I used to use the story of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” as my example. Almost any nursery tale that is widely known would do instead. We would note each minor climax of the story in succession, and the final major climax at the end, to trace a graph of the shape of the story, which looked like the skyline of the Southern Alps rising up to Mt Cook.

But teenagers did not forget the way a good story-line works up to a final climax and a short anti-climax, with various highs and lows along the way. 

I have just been reading Anthony Trollope’s autobiography, and he has some basic things to say about his craft. He was the most prolific novelist of his day. He recognised the importance of a plot, but he insisted that of even more importance were the credibility of the characters. Were the people in his novels real? Would real human beings act, change their behaviour or stick to the same habits of mind and life-style, and treat their fellow-men in the same way as the people in books? For Trollope, the ability to depict real people was more important than the ability to construct a great story-line. 

When teenagers have had to think about and discuss and write about these matters, they are on the way to learning at least the beginnings of discrimination between good and bad actions, and good and bad character. 

Learning about literature is learning about life.