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Comment by souprock | Hacker News Reader

Uh, no. Those English classes were in fact a load of hot garbage. In the two decades since I graduated, I have not once been asked to write Marxist literary criticism of poetry. I haven't even been asked to produce a bibliography, especially not a punctuation-perfect one in MLA format.

Reasonably correct use of the English language is important, but that wasn't taught. Grammar is not part of a typical English class at the college level. It's a college admission requirement. I probably met the requirement in 6th grade. Even if grammar were covered in college, it's not likely to stick if the previous 12 to 15 years of school didn't make it stick.

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I was never required to write Marxist literary criticisms of poetry. I learned rhetoric. I learned to write clearly and concisely, and I learned to write persuasively.

Correct grammar is not sufficient for effective communication.

Lucky you. English classes are normally a load of hot garbage. Concise writing would earn an F.

That stuff you learned is still not college material. It's remedial. OK, yes, there are remedial classes taught at most colleges, sadly enough. It's not justification to mandate that normal students take English classes in college.

Freshman English classes are generally English composition classes not literature classes. More often that not they have nothing to do with Marxist literary critique.

If you think that English composition shouldn't be taught in college, you clearly haven't ready many undergraduate essays. It's fine for you to think that this information should be remedial. Looking at the writing of "normal" students, it clearly isn't.

Also most schools offer a CLEP exam for English composition, so if you consider the information remedial, you can easily skip it.

Well, maybe we shouldn't have 2/3 of the population attempt college, and maybe we shouldn't let every warm body with a pulse graduate from high school. Truth is that English classes in high school are also often a load of hot garbage, because evidently the teachers prefer politics and art over teaching English.

For my own kids, the solution is homeschooling, with dual-enrollment in a community college starting at age 11 to 13. Community college seems to have less of the hot garbage than a typical 4-year school would.

That’s a different argument. If most college students are lacking a skill, teaching it is by definition not remedial.

A class on Ancient Greek isn’t remedial just because the top 1% of society that went to college in the 19th century learned it in secondary school.

I’ve never had experience with English teachers who teach art and politics instead of English, but then again American school systems are very diverse. You might want to consider that before you make generalizations. You also might want to consider whether you have enough real evidence to hold such strong opinions on the state of English education.

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