Does English give students a good grounding in world literature? John Waters casts a cold eye.

"English", in the Leaving Cert sense, used to be about language and literature, about writing and comprehension, composition and criticism, a little bit about grammar and a wagged finger about spelling and syntax. It wasn't exactly a language subject, like French or Spanish, but neither was it about everything the English language is about.

It was Yeats and Orwell; Maria Edgeworth and Dylan Thomas; Kavanagh, Kinsella and something about roast pig. It was hard to pin down, but you sort of knew what it was.

You knew too that it wasn't really about language and literature - that there was an approved use of language in which sentences have subject, predicate and object and that there were skiploads of great books out there that never got mentioned.

But "English" has changed. It's got bigger and broader, more varied and probably less predictable. But it still isn't what you might expect it to be. I did my Leaving Cert in 1973 and made another half-stab at the English course in 1980. It didn't change at all in between, nor for a long time afterwards. About four years ago though, they gave the course a complete overhaul, and the result is interesting for a lot of wrong reasons.

Looking at the 2005 curriculum, the most immediate aspect is what hasn't changed. Wuthering Heights, Of Mice and Men and Silas Marner are still there, on the required reading lists for both the higher and ordinary courses.

Great novels, certainly, but are they that great? Less controversially, Shakespeare survives also. The list has been augmented with Hugh Leonard (Home Before Night), John McGahern (Amongst Women) Séan O'Casey (Juno) and, more mysteriously, David Malouf's Fly Away Peter.

And it's all a bit like that: a light leavening of the eccentric and the obscure with the odd obvious choice. The higher level poets include stalwarts like Yeats, Kavanagh, Wordsworth and Eliot, but also Eavan Boland, Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney. The ordinary-level list extends to a few jazzier names, like Ciaran Carson and Roger McGough.

Most interesting is the list of prescribed "texts" for comparative study, from which students must read any three apart from the one already selected from the required reading list.

The most common characteristic of the comparative list, apart from inoffensiveness, is obscurity. It includes films like Baz Luhrmann's Strictly Ballroom, Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves and John Huston's The Dead.

There is a fairly eclectic mix of writers, from Sophocles to Maeve Binchy via Henrik Ibsen, Arthur Miller and Jung Chang. But many of the names, while worthy in their own way, would not suggest themselves as "musts" for a grounding in world literature.

While there are some excellent writers on the list, many are far from obvious choices and most of the world's most celebrated writers are absent.

It seems odd, at first sight for example, that someone appears to have gone to great lengths to overhaul the English syllabus but never thought of making mandatory a Kafka, Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. (There are no eastern European writers at all in 2005.) For a moment it occurs that perhaps the list includes only writers who wrote in English, but this is merely almost the case.

There are glaring omissions close to home: Joyce is acknowledged only by the inclusion of the Huston movie. Also missing are Beckett and Flann O'Brien, John B. Keane and Tom Murphy. Indeed, almost anyone you care to think of from any conventional understanding of the literary pantheon is likely to be missing: Rushdie, Rumi, Boll, O'Neill, De Lillo, Proust, Brecht, Mandelstam, Kundera, Freud, Greene, Williams, Sartre, Camus. Make your own list of 38 writers and I guarantee you won't get more than a dozen on the course, even including those I've already mentioned.

The extensive explanatory notes issued by the Department of Education are helpfully revealing not merely about the background reasoning but indeed about the, as it were, "purpose" of "English".

The syllabus, these notes aver, should "provide opportunities for the development of the higher-order thinking skills for analysis, inference, synthesis and evaluation". The point, we are told, is for students to become "independent learners who can operate in the world beyond the school in a range of contexts".

Our old friends grammar and syntax get a token mention and there is a nod towards the aesthetics of language, but mostly the talk is of "texts" and "genres", "resources", "language products" and "learning outcomes". A "text" is anything from a memo to a movie to a political speech.

All this is, on the face of things, unexceptionable. Detectable also, however, is the shadow of an ideological view of both literature and language.

"Language," the department's document elaborates, "is not a neutral medium of expression and communication. It is embedded in history, culture, society and ultimately, personal subjectivity. In the contemporary world, the cultural reality of a person's own use of language needs to be highlighted. To achieve this end, a range of resources will be selected from different periods and cultures and students will be encouraged to approach them in a comparative manner.

"In encountering this diversity, students should develop an understanding of how the language a person uses shapes the way that person views the world."

All "texts", we are assured, "create their own view of reality by using a specific linguistic style within certain specific categories of language forms, which can be called 'genres'".

Students are urged to approach "texts" from a variety of critical viewpoints and to analyse and compare "under such categories as gender, power and class". If you didn't recognise this as straight out of the advanced feminist manual, the departmental notes provide a helpful dig in the rib-cage: "Resources will be chosen to give the fullest recognition possible to the experience of both sexes." The penny drops.

Of the 38 writers on the comparative list, 15 are women. Not a bad thing in itself, except that whatever way you look at it, the vast, vast majority of the great writers have been male. To attempt, therefore, to achieve even a relative balance of the sexes (roughly 60/40 here) is a recipe for mediocrity and, yes, subjectivity.

Pat Barker, Muriel Spark and Annie Proulx are fine writers, but hardly the most essential grounding for someone trying to get their head around the pantheon. Many of the male writers, accordingly, appear to have, where possible, been chosen both to harmonise with the relevant world view and to avoid shining overmuch amidst the necessary relative obscurity of the female choices.

A dim memory returns of the doomed Exploring Masculinities project for transition-year boys: the same clunking hand, the same slithery agenda.

This agenda, of course, extends beyond what is termed "gender" (an interesting word for study in itself: having started life as term for grammatical categories, it has become the ideological code for an insistence that the differences between men and women are essentially man-made).

Predictably - once you understand what's going on - there is a black African male writer (Chinua Achebe), a black female writer (Maya Angelou), a female Indian writer (Gita Mehta) and so forth, to most of which names the most immediate response of the average general reader is "who?" Presently, one comprehends why there are no east Europeans: too European, male and white.

Barely below the surface of this syllabus is a sense of a neurotic ideological grievance, a message that certain categories of humans have been done down in, or by, literature and that this is the most important thing our young people need to learn.

The purpose of literature in the Leaving Cert English syllabus appears to be the turning out of alert readers of "texts" who will pounce on issues of alleged prejudice and discrimination rather than be inspired by the wealth of words in the canon of world literature. Its most striking aspect is not where it takes you but where it is "coming from".

While it purports to shine a light on the tendentiousness of culture, the English syllabus is itself deeply tendentious. What "English" has become at its dead hand is the study of words as propaganda, with literature treated as though it were indeed no different from memos and speeches - a chronicling of experience and events rather than an imaginative exploration of human possibility.