To trust or not to trust: that was the question
By Justin Norrie Education Reporter
October 21, 2005
Media critics … Daniella Cavasinni and Montana Linkio.
Photo: Sahlan Hayes
The media are not to be trusted, HSC student Montana Linkio tells the Herald. That much she has learnt from her final year of English studies.
"No offence, seriously - but I'm quite cynical about the media now," she said. "Whenever I see that woman on Today Tonight all I can think of is Brooke Vandenberg from Frontline."
Montana and her classmate, Daniella Cavasinni, from Tara Anglican School for Girls at North Parramatta, studied six episodes of the D-Generation's current affairs spoof for yesterday's advanced English exam.
They were asked to write an essay for the "Telling the Truth" elective explaining how "representation" in the show was affected by "deliberate selection and emphasis".
"The media lies. It's everywhere in the media: selection and emphasis," Daniella adds, just to make the point nice and clear.
It is especially evident, she says, among critics of the English syllabus, who say it has been hijacked by radicals intent on brainwashing youth with unfashionable critical theory.
"People who say the syllabus is radical, they're the ones making radical claims," Montana said.
By comparing Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet with Tom Stoppard's 1967 interpretation of it, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, students could see how fundamental values had endured over centuries, the pair said.
"It was a really interesting way of studying. It became quite philosophical to see how the life and death issue in Hamlet became the basis for the nihilism and existentialism in Stoppard's play," Montana said.
"It was so much better than doing Shakespeare-on-a-pedestal in that boring old-fashioned approach."
Tara students Lilly Jones-Weir, Kirrilly Whittington and Mia van Niekerk said the standard English paper was too time-consuming and vague. "You had to know so many texts and you had to do three essays in 40 minutes each. It was horrendous," Lilly said. "The last question we didn't know whether to do an essay or a speech - no one knew."
English teachers agreed that both exams were challenging. The head of English at Cecil Hills High School, Stephen Plummer, said the advanced and standard papers were both "quite fair, but much less conceptual and much more challenging than Monday's papers".
TODAY'S EXAMS
Legal Studies
Studies of Religion
