Education Minister Rob Stokes steps in to guarantee HSC candidates can study Wordsworth and Coleridge
EDUCATION Minister Rob Stokes has guaranteed that students would have to study a novel as part of the HSC. FULL LIST INCLUDED.
NSW
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STUDENTS will be required to study a novel as part of the HSC, Education Minister Rob Stokes guaranteed yesterday.
Mr Stokes said classic poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge would also be on the new HSC program, along with other literary greats including William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Jane Austen.
The minister released the full list of prescribed texts for the revised HSC syllabus to answer criticism by English experts who claimed students could complete Year 12 without reading a novel or poetry.
The list is a smorgasbord of literary talent from Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot and George Orwell to contemporary writers and filmmakers including George Clooney, Al Pacino and Che Guevara.
Australian writers such as Henry Lawson, Tim Winton and David Malouf make the list of texts HSC students will study from October next year, along with Rob Sitch of The Castle fame.
Former inspector of English Don Carter claimed the syllabus had been so downgraded future teachers may only need a “Bachelor of Facebook” or an “Instagram Diploma” to work in schools.
Dr Carter, now a senior lecturer in English education at University of Technology Sydney, said “the axe has been taken to English” with fewer texts required to be studied by Year 12 students and an elective featuring Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley deleted.
The Daily Telegraph can reveal the NSW Education Standards Authority has “made an amendment to clarify the requirement to study a novel in Year 12 in English Advanced, English Standard and English as an Additional Language or Dialect”.
Of 101 texts on the revised list, 26 are new.
FULL LIST OF PRESCRIBED TEXTS FOR 2019-2023 HSC
Mr Stokes said: “I am very pleased important works of literature by writers such as George Orwell, Virginia Woolf and Albert Camus remain part of the HSC English syllabuses.
“Quality literature has always been a key component in every student’s study of English and this will not change.
“This decision makes clear that under the new syllabus students of Year 12 English will have to study at least one novel.”
The government confirmed yesterday that Romanticism no longer would be an elective in English Extension 1 from 2019.
Students will, however, have an opportunity to study great literature of the Romantic Period — including Coleridge, Keats and Wordsworth — in three of five English Extension 1 electives.
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