Mockingbird Axed

[jazzy_dave]

So Michael Gove , our Education Minister , wants to relegate or remove American classics such as To Kill A Mockingbird from the English curriculum in our schools. Another philistine move from this weedy government that i find abhorrent. -

From a Guardian headline on my tablet

"To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men axed as Gove orders more Brit lit.  New English literature GCSE ditches American classics for pre-20th century British authors such as Dickens and Austen".

The article continues - "Last year, Gove, who has said children should be reading 50 books a year from the age of 11, told a conference of independent school heads that he would much prefer to see a child reading George Eliot's Middlemarch than one of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight vampire novels.

The actor and writer Emma Kennedy tweeted: "But why would Gove want children to learn about tolerance and doing what is right rather than what is popular?"
The Department for Education said: "In the past, English literature GCSEs were not rigorous enough and their content was often far too narrow. We published the new subject content for English literature in December. It doesn't ban any authors, books or genres. It does ensure pupils will learn about a wide range of literature, including at least one Shakespeare play, a 19th-century novel written anywhere and post-1914 fiction or drama written in the British Isles.

"That is only the minimum pupils will be expected to learn. It is now up to exam boards to design new GCSEs, which must then be accredited by the independent exams regulator Ofqual."

The direction on the syllabus content published by the department last year, and which exam boards must follow, specified: "Students should study a range of high-quality, intellectually challenging, and substantial whole texts in detail. These must include: at least one play by Shakespeare; at least one 19th-century novel; a selection of poetry since 1789, including representative Romantic poetry; and fiction or drama from the British Isles from 1914 onwards. All works should have been originally written in English."

The exam boards – and indeed individual schools – are free to add any extra books they see fit, but the new rules have left them very little room for any 20th-century writing from outside Britain.

Although pre-20th century literature will now dominate, Anita and Me, Meera Syal's 1996 story of a British Punjabi girl in the Midlands, and DNA, Dennis Kelly's 2007 play about bullying, are understood to have made it on to the list."

When will this government leave schools to set their own lists from a recommended reading list and not interfere. 

Comments

[quirkytizzy.livejournal.com]

It greatly upsets me to see any government restrict the kind of reading its citizens "should" do.

That said, I am a firm believer of including contemporary and modern works in children's reading development, too. If I can't write like Nietzsche and get an A (I would get an F because HOLY RUN ON SENTENCE BATMAN), then show me an appropriate writer who built his ideas off Nietzsche that I can emulate.

Neither author is BAD, per say, but a student's reading education should be COMPREHENSIVE and teach them not only for what the world WAS, but prepare them for the world NOW.

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

Totally agree. They should be reading current authors as well. Too much reliance on Austen and Dickens will put most teenagers off reading.

[a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com]

Srsly? OMG...Because the world needs MORE Dickens and Austen. Look, Dickens had a few good books, but I found Austen intolerable. You want them bored and to give up reading as a bad joke, force the new curriculum. I'm no big fan of SM myself. I find her work trashy and without taste or imagination. But I'd rather teens read her first, THEN go on to find better - than not read at all. THEY ARE READING. Let's leave it at that.

You want to add more British authors? COOL. GO FOR IT. But this kinda smacks as insulting. 'YOU CAN NO READ UNLESS YOU STAY IN-COUNTRY.' Just...ugh...really. Shows what this current government thinks of the rest of the world - and their own citizens. Meh.

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

It does sound rather xenophobic. The curriculum needs to have diversity. I can think of a few authors teenagers should read, Ben Okri for one, or Iain Banks , the Discworld series, Philip Pullman,the list could go on.

[a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com]

Yes!! One hundred percent completely agree!! Removing is bad...adding can be a challenge, but you'd be amazed how many children would rise to that challenge. Discworld, His Dark Materials, Harry Potter, The Hobbit...these would be awesome things to add - and they will span a century with their relevance: discourse on hatred, politics, religion, societal structure and hierarchy. YES. Get them to read these books - and more and more books. Hell with it - bring on the Austen and the Dickens...show the parallels and opposites, encourage discussion and interpretation (and don't discourage thinking outside of the box). THAT is what literature needs. THAT is what children need. Being narrowminded and yet calling for a broadening of horizons (but only on certain terms) is a living oxy-moron...heavy on moron. Tis tasteless, really.

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

Thank God! I thought I was the only one who hated Austen. I *loathed* having to read Pride and Prejudice at school. I'd rather have had Pullman given the chance. It's as if the Tories are trying to turn back time to some imagined Golden Age of theirs where children weren't allowed to have enquiring minds. Tasteless, indeed.

[a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com]

I managed to duck it thank goodness!! I'm an avid reader. I'll read a damned CEREAL BOX - but Austen? UGH. YAAA-AAWWWNNN.

Gods, yes!! I am envious of some of these kids and teens nowadays. We didn't have these books when I was a kid! *Pouts* But we DID have Neverending Story...hmmm...That makes up for some of it.

Yeah. The whole idea is...cute. *sarcasm*

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

Damn, can't even remember most of my syllabus now... We had an awesome English teacher at college, though; she got me into Angela Carter and stuff like that. She was *vivid*. If she was still teaching now, she'd have a fit at Gove.

[a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com]

LOL!! My high school years were a blur and I never made it into college, sadly enough. A good English teacher is worth a thousand of any other. I've been lucky enough to have three of them in my life - and I come from a family of avid thinkers and readers.

This is the type of policy that makes teachers walk out. Seriously, politicians can barely tie their shoes. They need to leave teaching and the area of, to those who know it best - and go practice sincerity in a mirror until they get it right. *HANDS*

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

That las sentence made me smile and I thought how true.

[a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com]

LOL!! Didn't think about it when I wrote it, but I giggle-snorted over it later.:D

[kabuldur.livejournal.com]

I LOVED Angela Carter when I discovered her!

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

Yes one of mine too. I have yet to read The Magic Toyshop. It is on my pile to read next bumf.

[kabuldur.livejournal.com]

You totally should! If my memory serves me rightly, it was a bit disturbing :P

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

There is no "as if" about it. Gove's new reading list is exactly what was on the syllabus when I did O-level Eng. Lit. half a century ago. Yes, 50 years one he wants to go back to some imagined Golden Age when children lapped up the classics.

I don't think so. We didn't lap them up then, we mostly loathed them. OK, I did like Austen at the age of 14 but I have gone right off her books now and much prefer Mrs Gaskell and Trollope, but I would NOT ask kids to read them.

This past year I have been teaching re-sit GCSE English language to a bunch of teenagers at the local FE college. They are mostly on vocational courses, such as engineering and outdoor pursuits. It's hard enough to get them to read anything, let alone a story in archaic language about people so far out of their experience that they may as well be reading Game of Thrones. Ironically, quite a few of them said that they enjoyed Mice and Men. Well done, Gove! Alter the syllabus to further disadvantage the less academic kids why don't you?

[a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com]

I think that's what really got me the most about this. This...need to go backwards - as if somehow, living in the past, denying the future and the ideas that may spring from those ideas - is so much better. The whole 'we did things this way back then'. Yeah. And life was truly like Donna Reed and Leave It to Beaver in the 50s and 60s. Gimme a break. Either his memory is fuzzy, or he truly believes everything was better twenty years ago. And he he believes so...well, I'm afraid no one can help him. I DO know one thing though - he needs to leave political office. Now. Before he does more harm than good. Backwards thinking/behavior serves no one. And the delusions a lot of these politicians labor under are nothing but mere fantasy and so much smoke. The fact that they want to use the government as a platform to twist the world into something that caters to those fantasies is what scares me.

Banning ANYTHING is never a good idea. And education should be progressive. NOT regressive. It's a disservice to those who will be following in their footsteps twenty years from now...

[msstacy13.livejournal.com]

Not just xenophobic,
but a lingering assumption that Americans are innately and inescably inexperienced.

[a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com]

We have a bad habit of looking that way via the news and web, but that is the overall assumption, yeah. A weird prejudice, but a prejudice all the same. We're suppose to be going global. That is not global, that is isolationist thinking - and that type of thinking is dangerous and a disservice to his country.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

You want them bored and to give up reading as a bad joke, force the new curriculum.

Weirdly that is the effect Steinbeck had on me, and Harper Lee - whereas I discovered Austen for myself and plunged in only to emerge at meal times.

[a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com]

LOL!! You got me there...sorry for the generalization (I got excited)! I couldn't read Shakespeare either, though oddly enough, I adore them as plays upon the stage. Guess the visual experience helps.

I should have said 'Don't remove, rearrange, ban books according to this particular politician's taste - be happy they're reading and encourage reading ALL THE THINGS'. That likely would have been better.

After all, I have a friend that loves the Bronte novels, though that is the era (like with Austen) that I just can't get into.

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

Yes i agree . I do find his plays in a theatre exhilarating, more so than written down, and when David Tennant did Hamlet , well, that was so amazing.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

encourage reading ALL THE THINGS

Absolutely. Oddly, and I am most certainly not a fan of Michael Gove, it does seem as if part of what he said was that the current system which encourages teachers to only concentrate on small sections of books was wrong, and the pupils should read the whole books...

You're right about it all being a matter of taste, too; I love Austen but don't really like any of the Bronte sisters' works enough to read them again from choice :)

[tx-cronopio.livejournal.com]

Well, we normally don't know the names of MPs over here, but I've thought he was an idiot since his January comments about World War I.

[postingwhore.livejournal.com]

What did he say? O:

[thespian15.livejournal.com]

It doesn't ban any authors, books or genres.
But they are going to remove American authors, huh?
I have a real problem when people start talking about removing/banning books. :o
Demanding kids read 50 books a year, and maybe reading two themselves, right? UGH.....
Hugs, Jon

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

When I was a kid reading twenty books a year was an achievement.

[thespian15.livejournal.com]

I would think 20 would be great for a kid to read in a year.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I was one of those kids who hoovered up books and always maxed out my library tickets, but what with homework and essential reading for other courses, I probably didn't average more than 20 or so novels per year. And novels were thinner in those days. :)

There is a reason these "50 book challenges" are, well, challenges!

[kaishin108.livejournal.com]

Just burn the Classics, who needs them, righttt that is the answer... shaking head.

[maxauburn.livejournal.com]

I remember being bored to tears with 90% of the books I had to read in high school.

I was reading a book a week outside of what we were forced to read in school. The books I read for fun were great compared to "The Classics" that were being forced on us.

I wish they'd had HAVE SPACE SUIT, WILL TRAVEL, by Robert Heinlein on the list of books to read for school- or something by Asimov, Bradbury, or Arthur C. Clarke.....

[changeling72.livejournal.com]

Very narrow minded.

I do believe there is more to life than Dickens and Austen (and that Mockingbird is a wonderful book more relevant and likely to appeal to youngsters), but I equally think it's a shame when people slag off Dickens and Austen. I am sure I don't enjoy some of the authors other people don't like, but one man's meat is another man's poison.

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

Agreed. There are some great Dickens books such as A Tale Of two Cities. I had to do Austen for my arts foundation course many years ago, and from that, i began to appreciate the style and so on.

[kabuldur.livejournal.com]

What??? Talk about parochial. What about broadening our horizons and celebrating other cultures? To Kill a Mockingbird might be my all time favourite book. Even if set in the states, it is about racism and justice all that - in a good way!

Mind you, I do think that British literature should have an emphasis on it, but not to the exclusion of all else.

And yes, some contemporary works should be included.

Just looking at the comments below, I really think The Hobbit should be included!

And reading 50 books a year? That would turn off most teenagers immediately. In uni I was reading one book a week outside the curriculum, but most people are not like that, nor would I want them to be. We are all different - diversity is good!

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

At grammar school we were expected to read twenty. However, the list did include modern writers and the odd genre fiction. I think good science books should be included such as the Crick and Watson discovery of DNA in the Penguin book "Double Helix". But that is just my personal view.

[kabuldur.livejournal.com]

20 might be doable, but 50? Unless you counted comic books etc. I recommend When the Wind Blows, Maus and Shaun Tan's The Arrival for the latter :)

When doing my second degree I often read books by the same author when studying different authors (one a week and once I was doing three of those subject at once!). I often found that other students were often reading those same books, too! They were real book nerds, some of them. They had read widely and could hold intelligent discussions about other books in the same genre or when we were trying to pick up a difficult subject. One of my fellow students had taught creative writing at QUT, and another was already a journalist! (Let's face it, many journalists really want to write fiction.) And most had been published before!

[rosamicula.livejournal.com]

It's not quite that simple, actually, and no books have been banned, that just makes good headlines. The changes won't help and the system is terrible at the moment, because bright kids do separate courses called English Language and English Literature and the dim ones do something called English which is a mash up of the two. It's the ones studying English that all do Mice and Men because it is short and easy.

It's a complete waste of time to inflict literature of any kind on kids who are functionally illiterate (255 of them fail to get a C even in the easy course). They should study a practical, skills based English lang course that actually endows them with the skills they need, but self-righteous liberal cunts and sanctimonious tory cunts both (all of whose children are fully literate, I'm sure) seem to think they 'need' exposure to the classics.

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the clarification. Totally agree that inflicting classics onto the functionally illiterate is counter-productive. The system does need rejigging but i am not qualified to say how.

[msstacy13.livejournal.com]

I prefer "concise and accessible" but, yeah,
the more compact a cornerstone of literature is,
the more likely it is to be read.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

This past year I have been teaching re-sit GCSE English language to a bunch of teenagers at the local FE college. They are mostly on vocational courses, such as engineering and outdoor pursuits. It's hard enough to get them to read anything, let alone a story in archaic language about people so far out of their experience that they may as well be reading Game of Thrones. Ironically, quite a few of them said that they enjoyed Mice and Men.

The syllabus we've been following (WJEC) doesn't require them to read a novel, but it's still not practically based enough. All my students do need to improve their literacy, especially their writing skills, but answering questions on a short story under exam conditions is not really appropriate to their needs.

I really used to like the old Key Skills qualifications but most teachers used to the old idea of "We teach the kids then they sit a test" way of working never could get the hang of making them work. Sadly. :(

[rosamicula.livejournal.com]

I started teaching in FE in Wales in the late nineties, so most of my GCSE teaching has been the poor buggers doing resits. I whizz through the literature, spoon-feeding them all the way, then focus on teaching them the reading and writing skills they haven't acquired in 11 years of schooling.

The WJEC syllabus makes me want to weep. There used to be an educational league table of the British nations where NI was at the top, then Wales, then Scotland, then England. Now Wales is at the bottom. WJEC is making plenty of money now, from delivering the 'most accessible' - i.e. easiest - syllabus. My private tuition pupils, all of whom are under twelve, and none of whom are particularly able, easily score A on the foundation papers and C or better on the higher.

For the last ten weeks, I have been running an intervention project for under-achievers in a South London comp where the English results are dire. They use WJEC, of course. The head of English was utterly bemused when I suggested SPaG teaching should be embedded in every lesson, and they should have a cross-curricular literacy policy to ensure that grammar, syntax and spelling were addressed in every lesson. She thinks SPaG is a sort of tiresome bolt-on extra, and said her team 'needed training' to deliver it and teachers of other subjects should not be expected to deliver it.

[howlin-wolf-66.livejournal.com]

Yep; just hands off, and let the schools decide for themselves what to do!

"To Kill a Mockingbird" is my favourite book - I don't mind it not being on there... I just hate the constant meddling.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

'Leaves of Grass' and 'Huckleberry Finn' are about the only works by an American author that I can confidently assert are classics, and should be taught in schools. Lots of entertaining novels coming out of our country, but little of it with any real or lasting value, and still less that I think children should be exposed to.

Good for Michael Gove, and I wish we had his likes here.

[kabuldur.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, we had some of Tom Sawyer set for Year 4 (8-9 year olds) and I loved it! The whole book is not suitable for today's kids, though, in my humble opinion (murder in the graveyard etc). Even the white washing of the fence could be construed on how kids can disobey their elders,which might not be a good example :o(

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Taking 'Of Mice and Men' off is probably the first time I've ever thought 'Good Man!' about him - forcing kids to read it is unusual and cruel punishment, I think.

I'm also very glad that we didn't have to read Mockingbird when I did O levels - I did try to read it once but didn't get much past the first twenty pages or so. One of very few books I have started and not finished - the most memorable other one was Tarka the Otter, so not just American authors!

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

Oh i loved Tarka The Otter when i was a kid. It made me cry.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

For some reason i could never get into it - every time I picked it up I couldn't remember what had happened in the pages I'd already read, so I gave up!

I do know about the ending though, as I heard something about it a couple of years ago on Radio 4 - some years ago another young boy like yourself, who read it and cried, wrote to the author asking was it possible that Tarka swam out to sea, came ashore somewhere, and recovered? He got a 2 line reply which basically said 'Don't be ridiculous - he died.'

[kabuldur.livejournal.com]

I couldn't stand Tarka the Otter - and I'm a very well read person - so, you're not alone there :)

I loved Grapes of Wrath, though. Of mice and men...not so much...

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

I'm glad it had the same effect on someone else too!

I remember reading Grapes of Wrath at school - and whilst I didn't love it, it was certainly better, from my point of view, than Mice and Men. We clearly have somewhat similar tastes, at least about books pushed into our hands at school!

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

That was one we read at school as well. The other one i remember vividly was Jean Rhys "Wise Sargasso Sea", which is quite a different perspective of the 'madwoman in the attic' from that drawn in Jane Eyre.