ontheedgeofeverything

I graduated high school over ten years ago. As reluctant as I am to admit that, the detail is relevant to this post. Ten years is a decent length of time, and while it isn’t anything too wild, when it comes to education, I do think it should be considered a significant duration of time.

I am currently tutoring a student in English who is in grade 11. I first started meeting with them a few months back, and upon our first session together during which they asked that I help her with some essay prep, I learned that one of the texts their class had recently finished reading, and were expected to reference in the paper, is Lord of the Flies by William Goulding.

I almost shit myself when she told me this, because I read this same text when I was in the eleventh grade in high school, over a decade ago.

I asked her if she could remember some of the other core texts she had read over the years in high school, and just about each and everyone are the same texts I read when I was her age. Naturally, Shakespeare is still being taught to high school students, and this is one teaching I take issue with. Personally, I have no fucking clue why students are still reading Shakespeare which is written in a form of English that will arguably never be resurrected in this modern world, and yet, here we are, years later, continuing to teach the same useless shit.

I am not a teacher, and this post is not in any way an attack on teachers. Rather, this post is critiquing the seriously outdated educational curriculum that continues to be perpetuated without strong or sound reasoning, and I think the time has come for a refresher.

While we are on the topic, scrap Chaucer, too.

Photo by Fiona Murray-deGraaff on Unsplash