I believe students should not be required to take four years of English. Some would say that in the four years that you take in high school you learn to speak in front of people, write essays and read different types of texts. But most of it isn’t needed in the real world.

You might find yourself speaking in front of people in your everyday life but that is what makes it pointless to do it in an English class. In a lot of classes you give presentations that practice speaking in large groups. And for most people English is their native language. This means they know how to speak because it has been around them all their life and have had English like classes since elementary school.

Writing can be used on a daily basis depending on your job, but that doesn’t mean that everyone should need classes for it. Yes you might write messages but with a middle school education you should have good enough grammar to write complex sentences. And on your phone or computer you have spell check.

And the reading skills that you need for life are learned much earlier in school like early middle school. I don’t think that knowing about poetic writing helps you out in many careers. My Freshman year we read Romeo and Juliet so we could understand old English but I believe this is pointless because nobody talks like that anymore.

My final reason that four years of English is unnecessary is that the amount of classes needed doesn’t match with the four years that we have to take.  English one and English two are required along with a composition, a literature and a communication class with English one being a year long class and the rest being a semester long. That only gets you three years of English so you have to take 2 more semesters of English when you have already done the required classes.