These books are on the VCE (Victorian Certificate of Education) curriculum in Australia

These books are on the VCE (Victorian Certificate of Education) curriculum in Australia.
Thoughts on the books?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_Around_Your_Neck.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_Around_Your_Neck
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emile,_or_On_Education
youtube.com/watch?v=EVWiwd0P0c0&t=4s
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Ransom is dogshit

Medea is good, Tim Winton is bad and I've never read Ransom

appears appropriate for 17-19 yo

You don't know how bad it really is right now m8, I'm in year 12 right now and we're doing a semester on male oppression and a semester on racism, in which we contrast aboriginal racism with African American racism.
I've read the selection criteria for the curriculum and it specifically requires books by women and non-whites to "reflect the diversity of Australia"

>VCE
What a miserable and pointless year that was. I had to read Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood, some compilation of the writings of Michael Leunig and we watched All About Eve. I suspect that the majority of the students who perform well in VCE English are the ones who can force themselves to regurgitate shit they don't care about better than everyone else. Best English student in my class was trying to become an Instagram model with an unironic 'gamer gurrrl' schtick as her big selling point last time I heard about her.

reading opinions in order to reflect on them? no way! what has education become!

It's a shame they're worthless opinions from trash works by literally who authors, and criticism is not allowed

maybe if you paid more attention to what they're trying to teach you, instead of being an edgelord, then you could type a coherent sentence

>reading opinions in order to reflect on them
If this were what we were encouraged to do there'd be no problem. But how it really goes is you read the shitty book, then your feminist teacher supplements that offal with a constant barrage of her own, and in between this a couple of essay responses to simple questions are taught to you virtually by rote. You can try forming your own views on whatever it is you have to write on but good luck with that, your teacher has one way that she wants this done and she'll be damned if she's going to teach you anything else. If you can even call what goes on in a Victorian English class teaching. Everything I know about literature came from my own reading. All we did there was surface-level plot analysis.

Give me one reason why we should read the winner of the 2014 women's fiction prize instead of actual literature

"actual literature" is subjective and if you can't handle reading a wide range of texts, even if you don't like the ideas, then you're going to live a very sheltered life full of dunning kruger escapades

Not him. The average Victorian isn't going to read at all outside of school. The small amount of books we force into our youth while we can should be the best of the best, not en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_Around_Your_Neck. When I first saw her name on the list of potential texts in my year I thought I'd gone insane or something.

Another interesting thing to note, I saw a list of texts and the corresponding average scores by students who took each one. The students who got Shakespeare in year 12 did the best overall. Maybe it's because schools that aren't short-sighted enough to force Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi on bored teenagers have better teachers and resources, maybe handling Shakespeare is more intuitive, maybe students genuinely like it more. I can't say. But what I can say is that I can't think of a single good reason to make a Victorian study en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_Around_Your_Neck in year 12.

welcome to education. the purpose is to teach you how a proper english argument is structured. what you think is less important then demonstrating competence in the form.

they're getting you ready for uni where nobody cares about your "original" opinion on feminist lit until you have proven you can write an academic essay.

see you in first year pleb.

>the east coast
fucking plebians
anything good that came out of australia came out of perth

A wide range of texts is good and all, but you're shifting the goalposts here because the curriculum is composed of ideological drivel assigned by a comittee of propagandists. They aren't having us read this shit because of it's literary merit, they're assigning it because of another agenda. Again, give me a reason we aren't reading Shakespeare or some similarly influential and acclaimed writer.

>get sent to a penal colony
>still name all your shit after the old hag that threw you out

lmao

fuck off seppo

ITT: underage b& bogan OP thinks Veeky Forums is his hugbox

>purpose is to teach you how a proper English argument is structured
If I were convinced that the course actually accomplished this I wouldn't complain much, but most of the successful English students I knew couldn't actually do this very well. VCE English incentivises good essays, not good essay-writing. It's easier to learn a handful of essays by rote than it is to master proper form. And a dedicated VCE student is going to place efficiency above everything else because they know that learning doesn't matter a thousandth as much as their qualifications. Once they're studying medicine in Melbourne university they'll never need to touch literature again so why bother?

Are you aware that you're saying our education system doesn't care about original thought, and even actively stifles it? Does that not seem like a problem to you? This kind of thinking will eventually turn most of our intelligent youth into either resentful burn-outs like me or neurotic soulless efficiency/hedonism automatons like 90% of our high-performing university students.

>nothing good has ever come out of Australia >nothing has ever come out of Perth
adds up

2017
0
1
7

prof. barry spurr, who arranged the national english curriculum under tony abbot is an anti-feminist and unabashed racist. he lost his university position over his views.

the curriculum hasn't been reviewed since he last did it.

see what i mean about dunning kruger? enjoy your fail life cryboy

I'm 18 and I'll complain till your ears bleed cunt

Yeah, Ransom is actual garbage. A long slick of substanceless diarrhoea imho.

Burial Rites is actually alright tho

Complete year 12 at a public school in Australia and then tell me that half of the books are worth anybody's time. As a society, we need to admit that ancient oppression is not as important as the books that modern thought is directly built upon. High school graduates in Australia don't know anything about literature despite being made to read at least 2 books a year. Hell, most students at my school never even finished half of the books, even the ones set in year 12. Turns out kids aren't super excited to read a book about an Irish immigrant's journey to repressed racist America or a Marxist's play about Galileo and the evils of the Catholic church.
But I guess dumbing down an entire generation of public schooled children is OK because literature is "subjective".

>an anti-feminist and unabashed racist

>he lost his university position over his views
Is this meant to be proof that what happened was right? There's literally nothing wrong with having such opinions, if they're borne out by scholarship. Stop cucking for the thought-police.

they bother because a certain level of english proficiency is required for university. even if you're doing a BS degree.

i am aware of what i am saying. these are the problems you face when money and education meet. you really think the government gives a fuck about intelligence in comparison to economic growth? why do you think there is a huge push to increase hecs fees and add interests rates on top of that after a 5 year period?

idiots still think debt based reaganomics will "get rid of the deficit".

www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/Documents/vce/Principles_Guidelines_Texts.pdf
This is what I am referring to when I mention selection criteria, I urge you to read it and see for yourself, it's plainly ridiculous

Do you think that our current curriculum is the best way to hammer English proficiency into students? Nothing taught to me in a classroom ever stuck but I still seem to have a solid grip on the language. Get students to enjoy reading for its own sake and discuss it because they want to. I personally think that anybody not capable of doing this doesn't have any business attending a university. I know that if schools started doing this it would immediately break society because of how much depends on the current state of our fucked education industry but surely you know that in principle these things which you are defending are beyond fucked and will eventually collapse and hurt us all very badly in the process.

Will read now.

i did complete year 12 at public school. unlike you, i was able to understand the task asked of me by the HSC.

every 1st year uni class has 1-2 of you cucks. trust me bruh, you do not know shit about literature.

stones in glass houses my friend.

there is a very big problem when he had the final word on dissertation approval. any woman or minority could sue the university for discrimination because of his views. you idiots do it to yourselves.

Not him

please stop

with the

reddit spacing

>i did complete year 12 at public school. unlike you, i was able to understand the task asked of me by the HSC.
I was #2 in my year level for English
>every 1st year uni class has 1-2 of you cucks. trust me bruh, you do not know shit about literature.
What are you even talking about mate. We just raised a generation of kids who don't know anything about literature, history, politics or economics and you're telling me not to throw stones in a glass house. Public education is a fucking joke.

Just finished it. Nothing in there sounds particularly shocking. It's so general that really you could fit just about anything on there. I think that I could easily make a case for The Fifth Head of Cerberus if I wanted to. Of course nobody would agree with me though. The point I'm making is that it seems to come entirely down to who's deciding. There's nothing particularly restrictive here that I can see.

Unfair discrimination is generally not hard to prove. But he wasn't sacked on such grounds. If your point is that, had he not been sacked on the grounds of politics, the academy would inevitably have found a way to sue him on trumped-up charges of discrimination or w/e (which, funnily enough, you seem to know it is; you can barely pretend to be ashamed of that point, even), then that only deepens the worry, as it shows the implication and corruptibility of the legal system.

You think this is all going to last, asshat? Being canny is a good approach within our current academic-political structure - if that's your point; I hope that's all it is - but my point is criticism of the structure: a recommendation that the whole fucking thing be revised.

On revision, buddy, I'll bet money things aren't going to turn out as left as you'd like.

no, it's not the best way but the actual text is not important. it doesn't matter if you have shakespeare or meyer in front of you. the ability to recognise device and it's effects and give solid reasoning with evidence is.

undergrad english is not the study of theory or philosophical readings. it's the study of practical criticism. you'll need to go to post-grad for the cool stuff.

let educates be the judge of who goes to uni dude. your elitism might be cute among your friends but no serious reader will be impressed.

hurt us badly in the process? take a look at syria. that is what a failed state looks like. you're in favour of throwing out any good we currently have and failing the state in order to serve some principle you think might be better in the future? think about it a bit more.

Those 1-2 cucks tend to outperform in uni, in my experience. Especially into the later years of uni, where the power to (however eloquently) repeat the same political point over and over is not so rewarded.

i don't believe you.

>you're in favour of throwing out any good we currently have and failing the state in order to serve some principle you think might be better in the future? think about it a bit more.
This is what he's (rightly) accusing you of; you're merely projecting. (I don't know if projecting's a real thing, but the point is, it's far truer of you than it is of him.)

I think that a good council could easily choose a great selection, the problem is it doesn't seem to fucking happen.
>The text list as a whole, must represent affirming perspectives and be non-discriminatory and inclusive
This is a big one and seems to take precedence over requirements of quality and excellence. The section on community expectations and standards is incredibly restrictive if adhered to, it has very nebulous terms of being "affirming" and "inclusive" which I can only consider political, at least in relation to my own experience.

Our system is not good, you retard. Things are breaking. Money is disappearing. We're falling apart and, when people point out the cracks in the walls, you tell them they only see those cracks because they're not educated enough.

what are you talking about?

xd

>the actual text is not important
Yes it is. There are books that are important and would help people if they were read. Brooklyn by Colm Toibin is not as important as the Iliad. If the text isn't important then we should just get kids to read fucking Garfield

yeah, nah. we're in the business of textual analysis. it's one of the most narrow disciplines in the humanities. what political point do you think people write about in their papers?

>support and promote democratic and community values
This is kind of bad. Not really surprising, though.

And also their use of the word 'affirming' is highly esoteric. I'm trying to think what possible meaning it could have other than 'ideologically reinforcing'.

(But honestly overall it's not that bad.)

>the ability to recognise device and it's effects and give solid reasoning with evidence
This is the problem I saw. The best English students couldn't do this. Our teacher just pointed out each specific use of these devices to us and explained exactly what we were supposed to write about them to get optimal marks. Technically I suppose we were being taught this stuff but it was all in one ear and out the other. 60% of the class took in nothing while 40% just memorized the specific lines from the book and which ones were 'symbolism,' which were 'alliteration' and so on. No thought, just work.

>practical criticism
Nobody is ready for this coming out of year 12. At least, not with what they learned in school.

>let educators be the judge of who goes to uni
They don't give a fuck. They'll let in anybody who pays, regardless of whether they can handle it or if they'll get anything useful out of the experience.

>failed state
I didn't say we should completely tear down our educational infrastructure, and even if we were to we wouldn't immediately turn into Syria. There aren't that many Muslims here yet. All I'm saying is that if the main priority of our education system was to actually teach our youth we'd start radically changing a whole lot of it immediately.

I have to ask, what exactly is your dog in this fight? At the moment you sound like a shitposting contrarian. I'm trying to be civil but I can't imagine how any sane person with a brain could defend the current state of out education system. Do you own La Trobe University?

Some might refer to Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"; the effects of this are leftwing and will make higher grades probable.

Sociology also comes in when you talk about 'ways of seeing'; Judith Butler's a professorial favourite.

But Jorge Luis Borges or Vladimir Nabokov? These days less so.

What the hell is going on in this thread? I never thought there'd actually be people willing to defend the absolute soul crushing government machine that is Australian public education. The English curriculum is bad. It sucks.

Is there a problem with your reading comprehension, pinko?

the text isn't important because the goal is the teach criticism not books.

the iliad is canon because in the founding of the english education system, greek and latin were core subjects. we don't teach greek or latin anymore and so the iliad isn't taught in high school. classical schoolastics didn't teach it because of what the book was about, they taught it because it was written in ancient greek. the text wasn't important in the goal of the school, the greek was.

>classical schoolastics didn't teach it because of what the book was about, they taught it because it was written in ancient greek
>classical schoolastics didn't teach it because of what the book was about
JESUS YOU FUCKING MORON

I am triggered officially. I'm stepping out for a moment to make some coffee.

If you spend six years of your life anlyzing feminist novels on oppression by Australian lesbians you completely invert all your sensibilities in order to rationalize your continued existence

my dog? i'm a bored english post-grad whose been through all these feels before. i'm trying to point some things out because maybe someone who wants to go to uni will get it and have an easier time of the transition. i don't really care about "the system". pointing out what you're expected to achieve is not defending the system. then again, i think if you ever make it to post-grad your opinions about what books should be taught will have drastically changed as well.

lol. scoiological citations will not be accepted by any marker.

walter benjamin? theory isn't even taught until third year and even then it's a broad over-view, including harold bloom. benjamin and weil are post-grad darlings stupid.

I'd be surprised if most of us weren't post-grads, you stool. An English post-grad is hardly a prestigious rank. In fact the majority of the professors I know feel as I do, rather than as you do.

lol. i feel bad for you. must be the stiffest office in the southern hemisphere.

Judith Butler, nonetheless, is a welcome citation. If you must, you can call her a 'philosopher of art'. Do you do marking?

Thoughts on Australia would be more relevant, but this isn't the board for that.

Let it all out cunt, let us know what naughty boys we've been

Because of our diversity of opinion? Dude, you need to take a long shower and rethink a good number of things, if you think you sound relaxed.

who are these people accepting judith butler's political writing in an english essay? when i have to. not if i can get out of it.

No Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith?

Tell them to fuck right off.

yes, because of your diversity of opinion user. good luck with your life lol

Adelaide wasn't a penal colony, stop lumping us in with dickheads REEEEEEEEEEEE

>undergrad english is not the study of theory or philosophical readings. it's the study of practical criticism. you'll need to go to post-grad for the cool stuff.
Wrong: philosophy and literature, it's a second year eng lit topic.

lol if you think any undergrad class isn't about rubrics

Your courses have never dealt with stuff like authorial identity or, like, mandates across demographics, as in, for whites not to write about aboriginals or hetcis not to write about queer people? (That's hyperbolical, but such things as the onus to caution and how to navigate such?) I mean are you seriously telling me your department rejects all notions of literature as politically convolved or as invested with any ethical obligations, and doesn't at any level teach these? Judith Butler (and Judith Butler-types) come up all the fucking time.

Finally someone said it.

let's see what happens if i do this: you sound like a straight white man who thinks because he's happy he's wise

We should exile our politicians and instate a philosopher-king

i think there is a class on "the self" but there is no judith butler in that class. i don't anyone who teaches judith butler to undergrads.

lukacs, eagleton, bloom sure. butler, no. maybe in linguistic cross over units but i don't anything about them.

First we'll need even a single philosopher. Peter Singer won't do.

>if you ever make it to post-grad
What makes you think I'd go to a university to study this stuff if high school made me want to kill myself? I'm a law student, not that that feels any better. I care so much about literature because it's the only thing keeping me sane. Knowing that it's being stomped out of existence in Australia is a pretty powerful counterweight though. I have a younger brother, primary school age, and to put it bluntly he's stupid and not getting any smarter. And I see that the other kids are all like him. The schools force books in their faces but nobody actually reads anymore. Harold Bloom's description of kids in front of Harry Potter feels appropriate, 'their eyes simply scan the page!' No thoughts are stirred up anymore, nobody's challenged, nobody learns. The shared human experience is dead. Australian culture in the future will be ice abuse, noise addiction in the form of 50000 sub-genres of House Music, all of which my friends insist are equally distinct and worthy of admiration, cultural shame and confusion likely culminating with an eventual integration into a global serf-class of cultureless proles only capable of mind-numbing labour and frantic self-indulgence.

>I don't really care about "the system"
You must care about something otherwise you wouldn't be posting. What do you believe if you no longer believe that our education system is a problem? Do you not think it's a problem?

Who says it needs to be a philosopher. Anybody gives more than 0 fucks about the idea of Australia as a nation would be better than what we have now. Bob Katter might not be an incredible thinker but he bleeds Australian and sincerely wants to help his fellow countrymen more than anything else in the world.

Also we should hang Sam Dastyari desu. And force Waleed Ali to swear a secular oath on live tv while we're at it.

Just quietly: Pretty eloquent post t b h. I'd def be interested in reading more from you, re: the state of life in Australia.

Stop samefagging.

I agree with the rest of it, but you're witch-hunting Dastyari. I (used to) know him personally and the work he did to increase financial accountability across both parties as well as to rein in companies paying zero taxes (to the effect of actually getting taxes out of them; to the sum of something like half a billion dollars for the economy) is noble as fuck. Double-check everything you hear about him. He's just being character-assassinated for crossing the wrong people. That's really all it is.

oh please.

i think as long as money and education are intertwined then it's a problem. i don't see a way around it. at the same time, i'm not a fan of revolution and i'm happy to adapt to any gradual change gets made in either way.

i fulfill my warm fuzzies by volunteering to teach creative writing with certain charities. the system isn't the only place to reach kids.

Interesting. I did find the media focus on his particular corruption case interesting considering how blatantly most of our parliament is pulling more or less the same stuff constantly. The idea really was that we need a grand nationalist gesture. Hanging a traitor of some sort would make for a good one. If Dastyari is supposedly on the level I'm sure we won't have to look hard to find another.

>as long as money and education are intertwined then it's a problem
Okay then. Here's a nice conclusion we can work with. Do you think that there's any chance of separating the two or will alternative education be the only source of real learning in Australia?

>i'm happy to adapt to any gradual change gets made in either way.
You've admitted to being a weasel. You may as well have written, 'Whoever's in power, I'll defend them.'

I wonder what you'd do in the case of a revolution. In the case of having to live between two competing systems.

i don't think anyone wants to give up their wage. my head of department is on like 170k because they put their own book on reading lists.

so from what i've seen and heard from different people on the subject, i don't think there is any chance of decoupling the two.

we wouldn't agree on what books to teach anyway, so if it ever did happen then there's the huge fight as everyone rushes to fill the vacuum.

lol yeah, real weasel.

in case of a revolution? idk, i'm a dissident to both extremes. so i guess i'm executed whoever wins.

You wouldn't happen to have read any Ivan Illich by any chance would you? Is he a taboo subject among teachers? I share his belief that our education systems would completely collapse if the formal qualifications they granted were no longer valued. What I'm getting at is how many of these teachers do you think would be eager to shove their pet books down the throats of Victoria's youth if there was no money in it? Who would still care and why? Would anybody? And are any of these people really worth listening to if you aren't going to get a degree out of the deal?

What kind of revolution are we talking about now? An Illich-style deschooling one or full blown 'gas Socialist-Alternative Australia belongs to the Anglos' one?

I'm just floating it as a hypothetical, like a thought-experiment. If left without guidelines, while still expected to produce results, how/what would you teach?

(I was picturing more a civil war, I guess, than a revolution; with SAlt on one side and, ye, an anglosphere renaissance on the other.)

Also - re-reading up on Illich now, seeing this:

>The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description. It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity.

Does such a thing exist? I'd like to use it.

no, i havent. no, most teachers i know have a hard on for russian lit. i do like the white guard though. i prefer south-america or asia if i read in translation. i think without money they still would be very valued. as far as i can tell, money and prestige go hand in hand rn. if you got rid of money then i believe another form of prestige currency would arise and people still wouldn't be happy about what books are taught. that's why i prefer to focus on the skills of practical criticism rather than political motivated readings. as i said, i'd have no problem with the books either way. traditionalist or otherwise.

i don't think you can have one revolution without the other. how would you deschool with out getting rid of the obsession with economic growth?

>if left without guidelines, while still expected to produce results, how/what would you teach?
Something Rousseau-like I think would be ideal. Rural-focused with strong teacher-student bonds. Yes, I know Rousseau didn't raise his own children but I still think that the thinking behind Emile is solid.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emile,_or_On_Education

>The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description. It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity.
>Does such a thing exist? I'd like to use it.
It's funny that you mention this. Ever since I first read that I've thought that the closest thing to it in existence is the online imageboard. We don't meet in person and the quality of discourse is generally rather low but couldn't we say that Veeky Forums is a kind of fulfillment of this idea? The idea was a system that organized people with mutual interests in order to facilitate discussion. That's happening right now. None of us know each other but through Veeky Forums we're having a somewhat productive discussion on the state of education in Victoria. Where else could you get this?

>how would you deschool with out getting rid of the obsession with economic growth?
This is the kicker. I have a lot of problems with the world as it is and the root of all of them is the great meme of GDP. I frankly don't see a way out. We won't reach post-scarcity due to diminishing returns in technological growth, enormous unchecked population growth, environmental degradation and the excess population of the third world dragging down the first so this means that in order to stop it people will have to accept material sacrifices in the name of a greater good. But in a world where nobody reads who will?

I couldn't fit all of this into one post. This idea of prestige you raise is interesting but I don't think that I got my point across properly. What if formal education were somehow beaten and people only learned for the sake of it. Anybody could teach and anybody could be a student. What I was trying to say was a world with no money or prestige tied into education. Purely learning for its own sake. How many teachers believe in this? And what do these teachers want to impress upon their students?

Also I've just started watching this and it's very interesting: youtube.com/watch?v=EVWiwd0P0c0&t=4s

>We won't reach post-scarcity
(Aside (mostly): We may not reach ~global~ post-scarcity, but small groups cutting others out is always an option.)

>If left without guidelines, while still expected to produce results, how/what would you teach?

i dream about teaching a didactically focused class on humour. sterne, mcgimpsey, and maybe saroyan for the drama component. so if i had the chance, i would do that.

exactly but even still, i'm not sure anything would make education better. i think if nationalism was the political force behind education then it would certainly produce a different kind of society but not necessarily a better thinking one.

When you reply 'exactly' to a post containing multiple points spread out over 1998 characters it's hard to tell exactly what you mean. Do you agree with my view of Veeky Forums as the closest we've come to the fulfillment of Illich's vision of ideal education or that Rousseau was right? Or that we're all doomed because Somalians are going to overrun the world in a skinny, brown, balloon-headed tide of hungry, unthinking flesh?

that's extremely hard to answer. the teachers that care still teach according to the values of the wider society. like, teaching the merchant of venice for the questions it raises about prejudice/race/class/punishment.

i agree about GDP. rousseau is cool, i would choose him over hobbes and i don't care about race or anything like that.

this has to be b8. 12 months of study about feminism and racism? what the fuck? do you know what a person can learn in an academia in a year?

also, we all know that these obscure diversity authors get assigned because of the colour of their skin and not because they're talented

"the ideas"

I can't speak for the other user but I wrote the first post you quoted and it's all true. You can probably find the list somewhere. All About Eve, Cat's Eye, and Leunig.

So? Women can do that too, if this disapprove of a male's dissertation. Yet literal extremists are in virtually every university today. They are trusted to be nonpartisan, yet another is not?

>the ability to recognise device and it's effects and give solid reasoning with evidence is.
Ideologue

At your factory schools, they sure are.

yeah, totes literal extremists. btw, i dont think there has ever been a female head of department

What? The head of humanities here is a woman (she's great though). The head of education here is a woman (still great). One has feminist views and the other has her doctorate in feminist philosophy. She has called herself an extremist.

If one extreme is allowed, the other is too.