to think Of Mice and Men should not be cancelled?

[Florenz]

I read this on the BBC website today. Kids are upset because it contains the N word. I do not think it should be removed from the school curriculum. It's a classic work of literature, one of the few books we read at school that I genuinely enjoyed and read ahead of where we were in class because I wanted to find out what happened. We went to see the film with John Malkovich and Gary Sinise with school as well.

No one gets offended by Shakespeare or Chaucer in the same way OP and it is trite to make this statement as an argument

This! There are better ways to discuss the same issues that aren’t overtly offensive.

@TooManyAnimals94 are you Jewish?

Absolutely if teenagers are finding it highly offensive

Others do not feel the same

In England?

Do the teenagers that find it offensive understand the book?

I don't think there are the same restrictions at A Level, although my school is 11-16.

In fact, my nephew studied Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Colour Purple and Catcher in the Rye, so definitely not!

It's not being cancelled. Although given who the OP is I'm guessing they just don't want to miss out on the chance to say the n word.

Yes.

English teacher here: OMaM is a book which connects with kids like no other that I've taught to younger teens. They get really invested in the characters and it opens up brilliant conversations about socialism, history, poverty, loneliness and lots of other important things. Would be a crying shame to see it cancelled.

@ThanksItHasPockets Yes in England. However @HollyGolightly4 has explained that this is because she was at an independent where students are still allowed to study international literature.

We used to read "An Inspector Calls" with my GCSE set. These days it's harder to ignore the misogyny, and yes, as PPs have said you can spend lessons on contextualising it but is the text justifiably great enough to warrant it (e.g. Othello or The Merchant of Venice might be)?

I do think The Handmaid's Tale is (or at least should be!) taught with an awareness that it's literally about enslaving women; it's not casual authorial misogyny on behalf of the author, as per Of Mice and Men (yes of course it's of its time but times change). Handmaid is still problematic because the people of colour are sent away to the contaminated lands and that is barely the focus of the novel.

There are so many excellent novels out there that the syllabus should change regularly. Nobody is banning the book, just changing the focus onto something new.

And this comes about through parallelism of Lennie accidentally killing animals, and being compared to an animal over and over again. Lennie is not George's pet to be killed as Candy's dog was, but the implication is there

Ah, that will have been the iGCSE, presumably Pearson Edexcel. Although it is equivalent to the GCSE it is a different qualification.

I think the range of comments here show that it is impossible to find one text that works for every student in every classroom in every school. This is why banning texts or making texts compulsory is generally a bad idea.

I teach in an SEMH school in south-east London. Around 80% of my students are BAME. Obviously they all have additional needs. Teaching OMAM is one of the highlights of my year. It has been the turning point for so many students who hated any kind of reading etc. They are perfectly capable of understanding why Candy’s Wife is never named, why Lennie is shot by George and that Crooks’ treatment is highly criticised. They are outraged, appalled and deeply moved by this text. I have spoken to ex-students who left our school years ago who still refer to reading OMAM as one of their school highlights. It works for my students in my school taught by me. That doesn’t mean the same is true for others.

you can spend lessons on contextualising it but is the text justifiably great enough to warrant it (e.g. Othello or The Merchant of Venice might

how can the text be taught out of context? Surely contextualising is integral to the teaching of any the text, not a separate teaching point.

We used to read that book out loud in class and every time we got to an N-Bomb, usually when a character was complaining about 'Crooks the Stable Buck' my teacher would stop the person reading and make me take over. Being the only black kid in my school, I guess it she thought it was safer that way and I had some sort of pass! Quite liked the book but used to pray a hole would swallow me up every time I was suddenly asked to read.

And might Shooting curley not have been a more fitting solution? No let's shoot the disabled guy and that's OK because it's "merciful" because he is disabled

I find the presentation of disability absolutely horrific. Worse now I have me own disabled DS.

There are books that represent struggle in a considered sensitive fashion and then there are books that protray struggle and have no morally redeeming factors whatsoever. There are too many good books in the world to be focusing on the bad ones

I am mixed race and I would have found it deeply offensive if I 'd had to study it in school. I am in my seventies now, but the memory of boys chasing me when I was 5, shouting the N word, will live with me forever. Some black teenagers of today may have experienced similar.

I watched my autistic son perform the extract and afterwards I burst into tears as the depiction of disability is frankly shocking. A disabled person is the bad one who can kill without understanding and the heroic non disabled George has to kill him to stop Lennie having a painful death. How does that stop children today ‘othering’ non NT kids. As it was, at the time, my disabled son was being ‘othered’ in Drama ,made to play the ghoul outside a cottage the other kids had to run away from etc. The non NT in Steinbeck’s book is portrayed as some bizarre innocent monster to justify his murder and align you with George - in other words, Steinbeck has done a number on his readers. If you research it, California had eugenic laws eg false sterilisation of thousands of non NT women’s. Steinbeck was highly interested in the eugenics movement of the 1930s, seeking to justify it. Eugenics you know became that little thing that Hitler got interested in and decided to use as an excuse to kill not only Jews but millions of people with autism and learning disabilities. Incidentally eugenics is always bubbling slightly under the surface, you only has to be aware during Covid, read the Guardian and know the policies that were put in place for learning disabled and/ or ASD should they have needed a scarce ventilator. In essence, the NT would be preferred over the non NT no questions asked, your son preferred over mine etc. I called my GP soon as I read it and they promised and did get my son as high up the list for the vaccine as possible. They were equally shocked.

What have I just read?

I’m sorry that happened to you. Your teacher was a fuckwit.

I thought it was a show and was going to be cancelled. Cancelled only exists on social media, get off social media! There's a whole world of hysteria on there that noone gives a shit about when they put down their phone and re-enter reality. It was a clickbait article anyway. Just ignore.

Harry Potter?

If unflinching portraits of how a society was/is, are too offensive, which books are ok to teach instead?

I presume that there is some great literature that doesn't have a moment of making anyone uncomfortable. Which great literature is that, great but won't offend ?

It’s horribly misogynist was my takeaway when I read it recently. As far as Christie’s Ten Little Indians (and variations on that title) it’s really anti-Semitic. Christie was a great plotter, but the portrayal of the Hewish character, and how other characters speak of him, is awful.

I don’t believe in canceling, but also don’t see the necessity in teaching kids books with outdated prejudices I don’t trust that most teachers would handle it well. (Having worked w teachers and seen them not address, for example, misogyny and anti-semitism, in texts.