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.

Funny how news works - here's a government department going to town on offensive words. I am less offended than I am impressed by the number of dictionaries they must have combed to dig these up from. I'm guessing this has the personal stamp of Boris approval ? He would have been my go to man for racist language in the government.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-65730464

“My Antonia” is on the A Level curriculum and uses Aye tie for Italian - that was a bit of a blow. All I need to read is greasy Diego and I might start having flashbacks.

Sorry I meant Eyetie

Actually had that wrong the word was ‘Wp ’ but whatever it was a bit of a 1970s blast. When about in aged 18, I got sent an Italian cook book and a card with the words ‘Go home Wp ’ accompanied by some cutting from the Sun. The whole thing was a bit odd, I thought as I was born here and this is my home. It was odd to see words like that in print in an A Level text . Mind you the Sun still uses phrases like ‘Italian Stallion’ for Italian males. Somehow this seems acceptable.

I thought it was Eye tie ? Unless you are a Geordie I guess ?

Yes, heard that at school in the 70s.

Weirdly I have just been tidying up some files and came across some uploads of school memorabilia including a programme for the school play. 8 out of the 40 names are clearly non-English.

This was the local comp in an outer London suburb.

I think today’s students would benefit from reading Lord of the Flies, a tale of how a group of youngsters scare themselves into a frenzy that ends in violence and murder.

Today's students do read Lord of the Flies... A remarkably fitting allegory about mankind's capacity for evil.

It's alao got colonial overtones that are absolutely picked up on when you read it with a class!

So if teenagers find Algebra offensive shall we 'cancel' that too in order to protect their faux sensitivities? If they find the left wing rhetoric of Animal Farm offensive shall we 'cancel' that too?

I think it’s pretty important that these books stay on the curriculum from an academic perspective (I have a degree in English Lit.)

Of Mice and Men is a reflection of 1930s America and highlights the injustices of the time. I haven’t read OMAM for a while but I remember reading it and wondering whether Steinbeck deliberately wrote it from a sympathetic, socially aware perspective or whether he just wrote about how things were at the time. 90 years on, we can still pick the book apart and understand what life might have been like then and how the social climate shaped the literature of the time, whether the author did that consciously or not.

To Kill A Mockingbird is in a similar vein but Harper Lee’s own morals and attitudes are a lot clearer in the text. As I wrote this, I remembered that I did an essay comparing the two at A Level!

I agree with this, and doubly so for any texts that feature colonialism (ie. Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'). Thematically, books are meant to challenge and, on occasion, trouble us. Reading classic texts is a great way to mature younger readers and widen their perspectives.

That's ridiculous - algebra isn't offensive.

The book is written by Steinbeck. It's a product of its time and you can look at the historical context. However, it does contain offensive language that is deeply rooted in emotional, generational trauma. It's also written by a white man and the minority characters are othered.

There are other books out there that can achieve the same means. Too many people on here are looking back with nostalgia because they were taught the book at school - that in itself should say something!

It's about teaching these texts at the appropriate time though as well. Heart of Darkness for instance has been an A level text. (Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies are current GCSE texts) In England the issue is that it's often being taught before the students are mature enough to deal with it. You really can't teach it properly to 8s and 9s and do those issue proper justice. It's for the same reason I wouldn't teach Othello at KS 3 (or Hamlet). Why did OMAM move to KS3 in England? Money. It's as simple as that. Schools had sets of the books that needed to be used.
Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath is an option at A Level as it happens. Nobody is cancelling Steinbeck. Just like I wasn't cancelling Stevenson when I stopped teaching Jekyll and Hyde to my students at GCSE. I was choosing a different text that worked better for their age and my purposes.
I also don't think it's the place of white middle class teachers (at my school) to tell their students what being in a room doing that text feels like.
I had previously thought that all teachers realised this issue and that the language in question would be discussed but the word itself not used out loud in class. Not all the department agreed.

Absolutely agree with you.

Doesn't surprise me at all thinking back to the book. They did use it a fair bit and it's bound to be cancelled in today's culture. No, I don't think it should be cancelled. If anything schools should continue to study the book and highlight such old speech from a bygone era for discussion in class. You should learn from history to make things better not just ignore history.

I agree with almost everything you’ve said… except where you’ve claimed ‘nobody is cancelling Steinbeck’. I just wouldn’t be too sure about that, sadly. Have you seen how they’re bowdlerising Ronald Dahl, for example? This BBC ‘story’ could easily be early, ominous rumblings of a move to ‘cancel’ OMAM, especially since it isn’t the first time I’ve seen such ideas in the media. There are some real clowns at the top…

Can’t bear the book, and feel sorry for the kids who year after year have to plough through it for GCSE, but am 100% against cancelling or revisiting classics to smooth them of unpalatable views/language.

they are of their time, need to be placed in that context, but in those times this is how people spoke, this is how people viewed the world and it’s important to understand that and the journey society has been on since, not to pretend that it didn’t happen.

And as I said on another thread, once cancelling/amendment of books happens, who gets to decide? Who makes the rules? Who should have that power?

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

I completely agree with you... but this is why this is a powerful book to teach. We teach about eugenics - that's such important context. We explore the concept of otherness. The text, when well taught, opens up really important discussions that kids might otherwise never have.

I watched the Dam busters last week, and had forgotten about the dogs name, it is suitably dubbed as 'Trigger' this is such a minor part of the film.
Surely something similar could be done to Of mice and men for the classroom, it's been years since I read it, so can't remember how often it's used and how significant to the story it is.
In 'To kill a mockingbird' for example,the word is used quite a bit, but surely significant? as it shows the hatred and disregard to those of colour.

Garrison highlights the importance of ‘teachers who are knowledgeable of disability studies and ableism [who] can foster their students’ ability to critically analyse disability as a social construct in literature and in society’ (Garrison, 2008, p. 205).

Well exactly. In fact, my English department have read this article and I even share bits with my students. We teach literature through a lens of disability studies earlier on, as well as about race and gender, so they are well prepared by the time they study OMAM. So important to have teachers who can teach this text well.

How to kill a mocking bird was pulled out of my sons school last year. My sons class where half way through the book then apparently a parent complained and the kids where told to take the books to storage.
My son brought the book home to finish reading himself.

Sal

@HollyGolightly4

The book is written by Steinbeck. It's a product of its time and you can look at the historical context. However, it does contain offensive language that is deeply rooted in emotional, generational trauma. It's also written by a white man and the minority characters are othered

These are all reasons it should still be taught - not hidden.

Really interesting discussion.

I've been teaching English for 10 years and love doing this book with classes because the vast majority of students find something to love in it. It's the one book that adults always mention to me when they find out what I do for a living. It resonates.

However, after BLM made young people feel more comfortable addressing racism, some of our previous students of colour contacted my school to let us know how uncomfortable they found reading it in a room full of their peers. Regardless of my personal love for the text, their views cannot be disregarded. We initially worked hard to spemd more timd on the context, with a big emphasis on racism in the modern world/BLM/privilege etc, but ultimately stopped teaching it and I don't think that was a bad move.

Re: misogyny. I have no idea about Steinbeck's personal life (and I should probably educate myself there) but it's always been my opinion that the writer is hugely sympathetic towards the character of Curley's Wife. She's a normal woman, living in a horribly misogynistic society in which even the 'good guys' (as a pp rightly pointed out) are hugely discriminatory to her. To me, she's a sensitive portrait of a woman who has been manipulated, exploited and abused by men. The very fact she doesn't even get a name is a deliberate choice by the writer to highlight how women were viewed as property. The only women mentioned are prostitutes and mother figures and all the men are desperate to fit her into one of these boxes- they don't see women as complex human beings and so they can't compute when confronted by her. Even her appearance seems to get explained by her dreams of movie stardom and her feeling that she should emulate the femme fatale ideal so prevalent in Hollywood at that time.

I don't think OMAM is, at heart, a misogynistic book. I think its a book showing the damage misogyny can do. But it doesn't lecture and therefore you have to dig to find the message with kids.

Sorry for the essay!

My DS did this for GCSE. It is only 107 pages, whilst the novel I studied for the same educational level was Tess of the d’Urbervilles, at 596 pages.
I remember thinking at the time that it had been picked with boys in mind, as they are not as avid readers as girls were.
But why should GCSE books (and it was studied as a book by DS and not a play) be so different in length? There’s a whole lot more to unpick from a novel that has nearly six times the number of words, and the GCSE is in English Literature, not psychology (which was the focus of the exam questions on it).
I think it was chosen so that those who refuse to read could still get good marks - perfect example of a dumbed-down curriculum.

My DS did this for GCSE. It is only 107 pages, whilst the novel I studied for the same educational level was Tess of the d’Urbervilles, at 596 pages.

I was forced to trudge through "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall". The only good bit was we had a trip to see Joan Bakewell give a one-woman show about the Brontes.

I can distinctly recall the discussion around the themes were vary much from a condescending "aren't we much better these days ?" which allowed children to stand down from fighting for equality as we'd sorted that, hadn't we.

I suspect the "cancelling" of OMAM is from a similar "we've fixed racism too" agenda.

The reality is both books should be taught from a viewpoint that this is still fucking happening