What is the purpose of English class typically? Or what should be the purpose of English?

Well typically the purpose of English is to teach people how the language works, but in a prescriptive manner based on popular style guides. Attention is significantly focused on parts of speech, proper punctuation, grammatical rules, basically the foundation of a style guide presented as a bit more than just a style guide.

Now I'd say I think it's important that people learn how to use English and understand it, but I think it's significantly less important and infinitely less relevant to learn to describe how you use it. I'm a damn good driver, but I have next to no idea how cars work. I can just barely change a tire. I don't need to know how it works to know how to use it.

It seems to me that for most people that's how language is. It certainly is for me. I have only the faintest of notions of what a past participle is and I don't think it really matters. Unless I'm trying to teach English I don't need to know it. We don't learn language by learning what the parts are, we learn it by using it and by hearing others use it. People are using adverbs correctly before they have any idea what an adverb is. You don't learn what nouns are before you learn what cats, dogs, and balls are.

That's not to say that style guides are worthless, they have their place, but I think it's a major mistake to cause students to confuse style guides with rules that are somehow inherent to the language itself. There's nothing wrong with ending a sentence with a preposition and 'ain't' is totally a word. You might want to be able to distinguish between 'their' and 'they're' if you want to come across as vaguely intelligent, but it's honestly not that important to most people's interactions. Moreover, it's fairly superficial. I mean, sure, being well spoken can make you seem intelligent, but it's not as good as having something significant to say, and outside of a classroom context correcting other people can be worse than not saying anything at all.

Then there's the other side of what English is right now, which is the approach to literature. Literature is important, people should enjoy reading and do it all their lives as far as I'm concerned. The problem I found, though, and that I hear again and again from pretty much everyone else, is that English teachers have a tendency to over-analyze and even to impose their own preconceived notions onto it, to the detriment of those who are forced to sit through it.

So what should English be? You certainly do have to make sure they're capable of writing without looking like total prats, but I'd say it's much more important to build an appreciation for language and for writing in general. Language isn't just the domain of academics, it's the domain of artists. Look at all the new words Shakespear alone gave us. That's not something you get from a person who's afraid to use language incorrectly. You don't get that if you can't see language as your own, but as something handed down to you from an ivory tower. The ivory tower didn't invent language, the people did. It was art from the beginning long before academics even existed. If people view language as something that's theirs, something they're being taught to hone for their own use rather than something someone else owns that's being forced upon them, they can feel passionate about it. You can't feel passionate about inflexible robotic language that's been foisted on you mostly in the form of restriction of your preexisting individual stylistic choices.

So here are a few steps to make an English class not suck:

1) Don't ever describe language choices as "wrong". If you make a prescriptive statement, classify it as such and make sure the students know the motivation behind that prescription.

2) Try to find some more modern uses of language to illustrate that it doesn't just belong to a bunch of old dead men and stuffy academics. Don't just bang away at the same old style guides and literature, show some alternatives, some diversity. Check out some different dialects, even pidgins. If you make people care about language they'll learn a lot on their own even when you're long gone from their lives.

3) Poetry? Throw some Wu Tang and Eminem in with your Rimbaud and Robert Frost. Ask the class for examples of some more recent wordsmiths that they'd like to look into.

4) Books and short stories? Throw a little bit of weird or significant scifi in there. There's a mountain of well written and engaging scifi novels and short stories out there, and it's a lot more interesting than some of the samey boring crap they had us reading when I was in school.

Basically, try to break away from that snooty classist English and embrace the real living language that's spoken and written as a massively diverse modern lingua franca.