Gary Day

Attempts to teach only what is perceived to be relevant denies students the chance to explore life and art through literature

I wonder if other subjects have the same trouble that English does? I can't imagine cosmologists saying that the opinions of Russell Grant are just as valid as those of Stephen Hawking. But that's the sort of thing you encounter in my field. Only the other day a reader in literature tried to convince me that Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness was as "linguistically complex" as Coronation Street. As linguistically complex, mind. F.R. Leavis wouldn't be the only one to have something to say about that.

How did we arrive at this state of affairs? It began in the 1980s and 1990s, when many of the best minds in the profession devoted themselves to proving that literature didn't exist. Imagine if mathematicians got rid of numbers or geographers of land. That's what happened in English. Does it matter? Lord, no. They've done us a favour. Any contact with gold would only make us notice dross. That, though, wasn't the reason they liquidated the idea of literature. A fear that reading imaginative works was not going to add to the sum of human knowledge was one motive - as if that were literature's true end - but the main one was that Chaucer and Co. were responsible for the oppression of the working class, women, gays and ethnic groups. Now you know. The elite were kept in power by Penguin Classics. But not for much longer. Not now that critics were on to them.

One tactic was to read the canon - whatever that may be - in a subversive fashion. For those who found that too difficult, there was always popular culture, which had the added bonus of making you look far more democratic than your colleagues who clung to Coleridge. I mean, what has he got to offer the information society? Imagination? Pah! Deliver only what is "culturally relevant" says the National Association for the Teaching of the English. But relevant to what? The powers that be? The needs of the economy? The mind-set of mass culture? Students' lives? Yes, that's right. Let's patronise them by assuming they can't cope with anything outside their experience. Besides, we don't really want them to think there's a world elsewhere, do we? This is the kind of thinking - if I can use that word - that lies behind a headline in the Times Educational Supplement : "Ditch poetry for pop videos" (June 17).

But for those who want to be truly up to date, there's only one choice - skills. Forget joy, forget beauty - the English were never happy with those anyway - and forget passion. Those things have no place in literature. The interest today is in how students may "gain competencies in, and awareness of, expository skills such as critical thinking, information gathering, writing skills, group participation and presentation skills".

These things are useful. Knowing that there's "a world in a grain of sand" is not. Nobody, but nobody is going to give you a job just because you were inspired by the last lines of Middlemarch . All the talk nowadays, to use Seamus Heaney's phrase, is not of "arbitrary riches" but "engineered instruction". The whole apparatus of teaching and learning is designed to elicit the correct response to a work.

And so, too, is a simplistic use of critical theory. Literature is far more than an illustration of, say, the evils of patriarchy. But try telling that to some feminists. One declared that she was "offended by the idea that anyone would want to teach dead white males". Me, too. I think it's disgusting to dig up the dead - Jmale or female - Jand expect them to take yet more courses. After being forced to undergo lifelong learning, they deserve a bit of peace.

All the same, it is a sad day when an English lecturer gets upset at the thought of Dickens being on the syllabus. This combination of ideological sensitivity, almighty hubris and the introduction of skills has all but wrecked the study of literature.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that students should read Marian Evans instead of Kathy Lette - "only on a varied diet can we live" and all that. What I am saying is that if we give up on the idea of literature as a medium for the exploration of what is good in life and art, then we short-change our students. Our job is not to validate their experience - they are perfectly capable of doing that themselves - but to deepen, extend and refine it. And we can do that only by teaching different kinds of literature, from the easily consumable to the more demanding. While we may learn things from poems, plays and novels, that is not why we read them - it is to find our own words, not those of the critic or the bureaucrat.

There, I'm glad I got that off my chest. Now I can write about something more important.

Gary Day is principal lecturer in English at De Montfort University.