What the Dickens have they done to year 12 English in NSW?

[mike carey]

The HSC is the final external examination that high school students sit in the NSW education system, and a new English Literature syllabus has recently been released. Here is an op-ed published in the Australian Financial Review, a newspaper. I loved the analysis the author brought to the subject and his liberal use of literary references. I was particularly taken by his observation that there are enough works by women (among other groups) that the syllabus could consist of entirely of them (or of works by men called 'Charles') without compromising its excellence.

What the Dickens have they done to the year 12 English syllabus?

Charles Dickens, George Orwell and Sylvia Plath will all disappear from the HSC English syllabus in NSW, but their replacements aren’t too shabby.

Charles Dickens is among the classic authors who will be dropped from the NSW English syllabus from 2027. 

Jonty Claypole

Dec 24, 2024 – 5.00am

Please bureaucrats, I want some more.

Some more Dickens, that is. Forget Spotify Unwrapped – the most eagerly anticipated reveal in literary circles at the end of this year was the announcement of what books NSW students would have to study for their higher school certificate from 2027.

And I’m afraid it was Hard Times for fans of Dickens, as well as a host of other classic authors, in what is formally known as the NSW HSC English Prescriptions 2027-28.

As the chief executive of Red Room Poetry, a non-profit dedicated to fostering engagement with poetry in Australia, and co-host of the Secret Life of Books podcast, imagine my horror at discovering that Dickens, George Orwell, Sylvia Plath and others have vanished from the syllabus.

It put me in mind of Winston Smith disappearing into the Ministry of Love in Nineteen Eighty-Four. A generation of students won’t get that reference any more.

If you’re wondering why you should care, keep in mind that an English syllabus is far more than a collection of challenging books that most students never go near again.

Those books contain stories, history, characters and values. A syllabus is a statement about who we are, what we value, and where we are going. It can be confident and future-facing or it can be reactionary and inward-looking. It is a political statement as much as a cultural one.

As a life-long devotee of Dickens – the greatest novelist who ever lived, obviously! – my knee-jerk reaction was outrage. And not just because I love his work.

A few weeks ago, I explored the life of the great African-American writer James Baldwin on the Secret Life of Books with my co-host Sophie Gee. Baldwin grew up in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance in 1930s New York, when black writers and artists claimed a central role in the intellectual life of the nation. Yet the writer who inspired Baldwin most was Charles Dickens. He once said that he read A Tale of Two Cities, set during the French Revolution, “over and over and over again”.

It was the character of Madame Defarge, a bloodthirsty radical, that spoke to Baldwin the most.

“I recognised that unrelenting hatred”, he wrote, “for it was all up and down my street, and in my father’s face and voice.”

Dickens’ novel about Paris in the 1790s gave Baldwin a language to explore white supremacist America in the 1930s – and the influence of Madame Defarge’s homicidal rage is evident on every page of his incendiary debut Go Tell It On The Mountain.

Dickens’ work, like all great art, transcends time and place. Or at least did, until it ran aground in NSW. My reaction to Sylvia Plath’s banishment was similar. If I had a dollar for every time a poet has told me that it was Plath’s work that inspired them to write, well … I wouldn’t be a millionaire, but I could buy a few rounds at Poetry in the Pub.

For a few hours I simmered in rage. Then I looked more closely at the new syllabus, and realised I had missed the bigger picture.

Change can be a good thing

For a start, it’s apparent that for every classic writer dropped, another has been put in. Goodbye Great Expectations, John Donne and T.S. Eliot; hello Pride and Prejudice, William Blake and Yeats. That swap, I had to admit, is hardly evidence of dumbing-down.

The reality is that there are hundreds of classic authors, and the syllabus can only manage a few dozen at any given moment. Maybe the change is good. After all, you only need to read Jane Austen to know that it’s improper to dance with the same partner all night.

Undeniably, the new syllabus is also far more representative of our society today. Women, First Nations and Asian-Australian writers are more present than ever before. Anyone who worries that this is mere wokeism – the triumph of identity politics over quality – should bear in mind that the HSC syllabus could feature nothing but women or First Nations or Asian-Australian writers, not to mention writers called “Charles”, without compromising excellence. Our culture is not short of canonical authors.

The syllabus is particularly canny when it comes to pairings: when two works, usually a historic and a contemporary one, are studied together to explore connections, contrasts, or shared themes, ideas, and perspectives.

Students will now be expected to study the poetry of John Keats, alongside Jane Campion’s brilliant biopic of the romantic poet and his love affair with the literal girl-next-door, Bright Star.

Meanwhile poet William Blake is teamed with Olga Tokarczuk’s 2009 mystery novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead with its (deranged) Blake-obsessed narrator. Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway is paired with Stephen Daldry’s Dalloway-esque film The Hours.

These pairings provide vital context, but make an important intellectual point too. Classics are not hermetically sealed messages-in-bottles washing up on different shores at different times, but are in constant conversation with other writers. Just as Dickens spoke to Baldwin. Or, to use a more contemporary example, as Mark Twain did to Percival Everett in this year’s bestseller, James, which reimagines Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective.

The syllabus I was taught at school wasn’t half so sophisticated. The texts we studied were like Shelley’s collapsed colossal statue in the desert. Solitary, grim, devoid of context. More likely to inspire despair than wonder.

Golden age for Australian poetry

The increased focus on contemporary poetry in the syllabus is also welcome. Australia is going through a golden age for the art form. Poets are winning national awards and slam poetry fills venues. The BBC was so intrigued, it brought its Contains Strong Language festival to Sydney this year (with the support of the ABC and Red Room Poetry) to broadcast six hours of poetry-based programming to millions of people in the UK and around the world.

For this renaissance to continue, we depend upon our schools to fire the creativity of students. This means exposing students to a broad range of poetry – as Dante wrote, ‘from a little spark may burst a flame’ – and the syllabus does this well.

First Nations poet Ali Cobby Eckermann is among the additions to the NSW English syllabus. 

Ali Cobby Eckermann, Evelyn Araluen and Samuel Wagan Watson are First Nations poets of exceptional talent. Omar Musa and Ouyang Yu, likewise, speak – unforgettably – to their experience as Asian-Australians. From elsewhere in the English-speaking world, Louise Gluck, Carol Ann Duffy and Raymond Antrobus represent different schools of modern poetry. And even if you are more of a Dead Poets Society type, there is still plenty of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to moon over.

Finally, the greater presence of First Nations writers is a sign of a confident society that appreciates its literary uniqueness. Many European cultures do not have an indigenous culture to re-energise tired canons. In aesthetic terms alone, this is a great gift, which is why other countries around the world are looking enviously at current innovations in Australian literature.

The impact of Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy, for instance, is not dissimilar to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy in the 18th century – it pushes the art form into new territory in a way that is both exciting and unsettling.

A syllabus should cast the net wide, with something to engage every student who might otherwise wonder what the point of English literature is. You can quibble about the detail of who’s in and who’s out, but NSW has met that brief. I believe it will inspire not one future James Baldwin, but many.

And while I’m sorry to see Dickens go, I’m sure he’ll be back before long. After all, he packed too many of his undesirables off to the then-colony of New South Wales – whether the Artful Dodger or Mr Micawber (not to mention two of Dickens’ own sons) – for us to eliminate him entirely from our history.

Jonty Claypole is chief executive of Red Room Poetry and co-host of the Secret Life Of Books podcast.

[SirBillybob]

I enjoyed Everett’s James over the holidays. Essential reading. 

[Luv2play]

It appears the educational authorities in NSW have got it right. Their students will still be exposed to the essence of good literature, enough to whet their appetites for searching out the others. 

[sydneyboy]

In this philistine era it’s a miracle Shakespeare survived.