Search
Close this search box.
Studying novels & poetry at school

Rosemary Ross Johnston, The study of novels and poetry is essential for senior secondary students, EduResearch Matters, 27 March 2017

The serious dumbing down of the senior English syllabus in NSW will have significant repercussions for students, employers, writers, poets, and Australian culture.

The changes have been widely criticized. The worst ones are the reduction in texts to be studied, the study of both novels and poetry becoming optional and the formerly non-ATAR English course now becoming assessable for the ATAR. My colleague Don Carter, who in a former role led the team developing the non-ATAR course, is greatly concerned by how this will affect students, as is Jackie Manuel, who has examined these changes in detail here on this blog.

Yes we understand the importance of STEM education and why it needs special attention these days. Also it can’t be denied that film, media and digital texts are part of today’s technologies so should be studied. And bottom line, these changes to HSC English will save money by cutting marking time.

So why worry about our HSC students skipping novels and poetry in their final year of school? What have novels and poetry got to offer in today’s world?

So much, so very much.

Why studying  novels and poetry should be compulsory

The intensive study of multiple texts, written from diverse points of view and cultural heritages, gives a vicarious glimpse of the worlds of others. Literature is the ultimate virtual reality.

Novels

In a novel, and without fancy gaming scenes and movement, sound effects, actors and cinematography, literary worlds (and plot and characters) are built by a writer using one simple tool, the infinite arrangements of an alphabet consisting of a mere 26 letters, and are then sustained and grown by readers’ imaginations.

Intensive study of novels grows awareness of how words can be used and manipulated, in both positive and negative ways, and helps us learn how we, and others, respond to such words, as well as how we can use them. Forensic study of novels, delving beyond the top layer and investigating how language creates characters and conveys feelings and emotions somehow sparks all senses; hearing, seeing, feeling, touching, smelling. Observing and studying people both like and unlike ourselves in crafted case studies in a created world provides resources that mature our understandings of our own world.

Exploring how novels and poetry (I’ll come to poetry in a minute) work, not only breeds creativity, that highly sought-after attribute when everyone is talking ‘innovation’, it also expands awareness of other perspectives, ways of thinking, and needs and problems. A novel can change cultures and bring about social change. Think about the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Abraham Lincoln is reported to have said on meeting author Harriet Beecher Stowe, ‘So this is the little lady whose book started a big war.’ He was of course referring to the American Civil War.

This lowering of standards by NSW represents a lowering of expectations and is a sad reflection of our impoverished educational philosophy. It’s a scary repeat of the scrapping of grammar decades ago.

In a few years we’ll (suddenly!) discover that Australian students are lagging behind world standards not only in literacy and reading and writing skills but in cultural literacy, creativity, nuanced thinking and the ability to critically analyse language.

The more people and experiences we are exposed to, actually, and virtually (and I repeat, literature is of course a virtual reality), the more we learn to respect others and respect difference. As David Parker notes, novels are ‘sites of the culture’s deepest moral questionings’; Simon Haines writes that they are sites of ‘ethical reflection’.

This is the ethical reflection of deep literacy, not just respect but a generous and intimate understanding of others that makes us hope for their wellbeing. Writing about the novel, Martha Nussbaum says that ‘respect for a soul’ is ‘built into the genre itself’. In other words it makes us more empathic, more collaborative, better teammates. It makes for more flexibility in thinking, more agility in considering how things can be done.

And some of our most beautiful novels can be challenging and need a guide (good teachers!) to introduce us to them. I’m thinking of Tim Winton’s opening lines in Cloudstreet – ‘The beautiful, the beautiful, the river’, and David Malouf’s description of the sea in Remembering Babylon:

It glows in fullness till the tide is high and the light almost, but not quite, unbearable, as the moon plucks at our world and all the waters of the earth ache towards it ….

Extended exposure to creative imageries such as these encourage a similar ache, and the capacity to listen with the mind as well as the ear, to see with the spirit as well as the eyes. Creativity is contagious; it jumps from one thought to another, from one imagination to another, from one mode of expression to another.

Poetry

Poetry is the literary genre that first attracts children into language. Think of ‘Round and round the garden/Dancing teddy bear’ and ‘Twinkle twinkle little star’: rhythm and rhyme, sound and imagery. Poetry is important both for philosophical and pragmatic reasons, both for self enhancement (life enhancement) and for the skills it grows.

Poetry breeds and cultivates and demonstrates succinctness of expression, depths of thinking that generate a creative climate of shared human-ness – humanity. It uses words like Russian dolls; open up one word and another one tumbles out, wrapped in thoughts and feelings and scattering other images along the way. Advertisers and jingle writers know and love this, and we need our children to understand how it happens.

Read more