"Engaging students in a meaningful process of reflection and analysis as a conduit to a heightened understanding of both themselves and the epistemological and philosophical ambiguities of the human experience."
English
The Balgowlah Boys Campus English curriculum is tailored specifically for boys learning, advocating academic and personal growth through engagement, and embracing empathy, resilience and moral integrity as the defining parameters of personal growth.
Tracing the ongoing process of maturation that shapes experience in junior school, Stage 4 - 6 English engages the boys in an evolving process of reflection and analysis, examining the emerging relationship between young men and the world, and encouraging students to participate in a meaningful process of reflection and analysis to facilitate a greater understanding and awareness of themselves and the human experience.
Through an ongoing study of seminal literary works across a variety of text types, students engage with the complexities of human relationships, exploring masculinity, conflict, the ontological ambiguities concomitant with our contemporary fascination with the synthetic, as well as the shifting cultural, political and philosophical parameters of morality and ethics.
Supplemented by an ongoing and structured study of expression and literary analysis, we aim to develop the students' capacity to identify how ideas and values are explored in texts.
Our intention is to encourage not only an ongoing understanding of the relationship between language and meaning, but also an awareness of the way choices, decisions and actions affect their world.
In this way, the English curriculum is a study of all men, integral to our personal and collective identity, and fundamental to our understanding of the human condition.
Core Texts include:
Stage 4-5
- Banjo Patterson; Collected Poems
- Golding; Lord of the Flies
- Lee; To Kill a Mockingbird
- Remarque;All Quiet on the Western Front
- Shakespeare; Romeo and Juliet
- Shakespeare; Macbeth
- Wright (Dir.)/Austen; Pride and Prejudice (2005)
Stage 6
- Frost; Collected Poems
- Huxley; Brave New World
- Miller; The Crucible
- Shakespeare; Hamlet
- Shakespeare; King Lear