To understand the beauty of what the literary classics have to offer, we must first learn literary criticism. Then we can reject the cliches that have little to offer to our personal lives, and embrace the values that lift us up, and have done so to others, for many centuries.
My particular concern is to do with the teaching of grammar in Australian schools.I'll never forget one of my year 8 teachers teaching our class what a noun was. 2 years later, I went to America and felt so overwhelmed because I didn't know what a "gerund" or a "participial phrase" was. Do we really want to sound illiterate to the rest of the world?
I say we learn literary criticism (I took literature 3/4 in year 12 and it opened my mind up to so many different things) and grammar.

Well, Kevin
Your interest in 'Why our schools are failing' would surely imply your concern as an educator to recognise and make use of the widest range of hermeneutic tools to offer the widest possible range of students access to the full range of textual production, a range not limited to the traditionally recognised canon of literary production. It's been obvious for many years that this canon has strong elitist and exclusive overtones ('au contraire'!, I hear you cry...).
So why would any true educator, aware of the implicit intention of education to bring out latent potential, seek to act politically, as you are, to exclude one valueable set of (postmodern/poststructuralist) approaches to recognising precisely that point - that all language and all textual production needs to be understood in terms of it historico-cultural specificity, and not simply of an elitist notion of its 'aesthetic' and 'moral' (politically charged terms, there) value.
Anna.

Although it is some years since attending school, I found that the value of English classes was comparitively less than that of other classes and subjects. It did not prepare me for university, work or community work. If anything it was in subjects such as commerce and geography where my reading and writing skills improved. University and work turned me into a reasonable user of language.

Deconstruction may be useful for undergraduates to master, but the Secondary Level its a waste of time. Do they teach category theory in Year 8 Maths? Is Quantum Theory taught in Year 11 Chemistry?

Kevin Donnelly does not speak for me. He rants against analysing Shakespeare from a feminist perspective. Yet in page 2 of "A Midsummer Night's Dream", dire threats are made to Hermia because she does not want to marry a man chosen by her father.