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

[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.