A mandatory English course should no longer be a requirement for university applications, as it no longer fully reflect a student’s individual effort and ability.Anthony Devlin/Getty Images

Daryl Sneath is a teacher and novelist.

Successful completion of the Grade 12 English course (or the equivalent) remains a requirement for every student seeking acceptance to a university program in Ontario.

As a high-school English teacher, I believe it should no longer be such a requirement. The course no longer measures what it once did.

As someone who has taught the course for more than 20 years, I’ve always seen it as one that presents opportunities for students to develop a clear and rhetorically effective use of the English language in writing, speaking and critical thinking.

How students have come to meet these opportunities has, to say the least, changed – most recently owing to an obvious and real artificial resource.

Sorry. Let me clarify: The resource is real and the resource is also artificial.

Opinion: When we stop reading, we forget how to think

Ugh. Perhaps we should ask the resource........

© The Globe and Mail