Gove kills the mockingbird with ban on US classic novels ...what do you think?

[mrz]

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/article1414764.ece?CMP=OTH-gnws-standard-2014_05_24

There, you go. Literature leaving its mark.

I studied 'To Kill A Mockingbird' at GCSE. It's still my all-time favourite book.

thecat it's because holding thinks that man is inately evil. He also based lord of the flies on the boys at the boys grammar school where he taught. He was my dad's teacher ....

GOLDING bloody autocorrect. Made innately : the telly!

Three points. Firstly, Weatherall, the rape is not just about a male myth of women lying, it is about patriarchy-she was coerced into lying by her father and the dominant male white society she lived in. My dd pointed this out to me whilst revising.
Second, I do think the choice of books is currently narrow and sometimes exclusive and does need revising periodically. (MAM,IC,LOTF)
Thirdly- POB IS A FUCKING IGNORANT TWAT!

I did the second year of GCSEs and our teacher decidednot to do Mockingbird because she said it was a great book we should all read (and let us take the set used by previous years), but was actually quite hard to write well about because we were coming from a very modern viewpoint of obviously racism and domestic violence are wrong. The subtleties of Southern communities and why it wasn't easy to resolve would be harder to grasp until we were older.

She also had a point that we'd never have picked up the Mayor of Casterbridge and tackled its themes by ourselves. After a few weeks we were into it, but that really did take a skilled teacher.

overthemill: I know he does. My feeling is that anyone who thinks that people are innately evil should be forced to fuck off and live by himself.

Does your dad have any good stories about him? (Pleae tell me that your dad did something really horrible, like lock him in a cupboard and set fire to - hence Golding's misanthropy. That would make me laugh.)

Why is there no James Joyce?

POB?

I teach English GCSE and have taught OMAM and Mockingbird. I love Steinbeck and find his message particularly relevant in today's socio-economic climate. OMAM works well and I'm surprised by how much the kids enjoy it. Lower ability kids can cope with it due to its brevity and the terse simplicity of the language used. For high ability kids, Steinbeck's use of prose, his narrative style and the political themes in the novel, give them plenty to get their teeth into. The fact that Gove cannot see the value if OMAM reflects on his ignorance; it's a stunning piece of prose and I don't think there are many better writers than him.

Japan in answer to your point: the current GCSE is obsessed with close language analysis to the point where sometimes, it becomes divorced from the overarching point of the novel. For students to access anything above a C-grade, they need to analyse language. For most students this is a very counter-intuitive way of looking at writing and it is true that it can make you look at style mire than content. I try hard to maintain a balance but it can get skewed. That's why writers like Duffy work well - she is very stylised and to divorce what she says from how she says it, is to miss the point. However with Harper Lee or Steinbeck, it's all about the message so some contorting is required to meet the grade criteria.

One thing is for sure: as an English teacher you have to work beyond requirements to inspire both a love of literature and to equip kids with skills necessary for the GCSE. The two do not work in synchronicity.

Gove is an idiot who is making the very self-indulgent mistake of drawing from his own experience and extrapolating universal truths. He could do with re-reading Mockingbird and taking on board some of Atticus Finch's advice. Reading Victorian novels when you're dyslexic, of below average intelligence, helping care for younger siblings and when the height of your cultural experience is The Voice is of benefit to no one. This will just further alienate struggling kids but maybe that's the point: let the peasants know their place, make sure that the education system teaches them that they have nothing of value to contribute - let the boys from Eton look after all the power and the money...

this reminds me. I've never read any hobbit books and have no desire to. I've never read LOTF and think I'd quite like to. But when I was younger I thought they were both part of the same series :o

OhWhatFuckWittery - very succinct. I was trying to think how to put that.

I'd much rather read To Kill a Mockingbird than The Mayor of Casterbridge that was so dull we cheated and watched a video of it.

Maria, your post has reminded me of the English teachers who inspired a love of thinking and reading in me, and made me believe that "English" was the place in the syllabus where you could fly, think, and learn.

It's a shame he didn't make this announcement in time for the current Y11, who have just studied these texts, to be able to disagree with Gove's opinions in their responses to their exam questions that they sat last week. He was obviously too scared to risk them writing some amazing A*/A grade responses to his ridiculous opinions.

Now children get to enjoy 'great' British classics like Wuthering Heights

Which was incredibly dull and it was a struggle to get through my A2 year because we had to study that.

So much depends on the teacher.

DD has had her love of reading and literature destroyed by a nasty, spiteful teacher over the last two years.

But weatherall - that's the point, there's a woman, a poor woman from a family with a bad reputation, who had she been raped would never have got a conviction for it...she would normally have been ripped apart in court, if it even got that far.

She's somebody with no power or privilege at all accusing him of a crime where the victim is usually blamed and often disbelieved even with evidence and yet because she's white and he's black, she's believed automatically.

The idea that women are often wrongly thought to be lying about being raped, yet she was believed without even the most basic investigation is integral in showing how powerless black people were.

I would like the Tories to explain to me how they have the fucking nerve to call Labour government a nanny state when they have Gove who is dictating everything down to the minitae of the curriculum?

Jesus wept. Roll on May 2015 and jog on Tories.

To kill a mockingbird is dangerous and shouldn't be taught in schools.

It perpetuates a rape myth "women lie about rape".

weatherall I don't think your comprehension is very good if you have read it. There are at least two possible scenarios for the truth in the book. One is that the girl who is pressured into making the rape claim was having a consensual relationship with a black man. The other is that she is was actually raped but probably as part of an ongoing pattern of abuse within her own white family.

One thing that has been clearly discussed when I have talked about the book either at school, college or anywhere else is that the woman is coerced and pressured and abused. The other thing that is clear is that due to the racial hierarchy white people who do the most disgusting or awful things are still considered "better" than a black person.

Andrea Dworkin has a nice interpretation of "Wuthering Heights". She begins her reading with the proposition that Heathcliff is the illegitimate off-spring of the "Father", and is not White. She then examines the intersections of class, gender and subtle abuse of power in heterosexual realtionships.

Again, the interesting parts of the book can be destroyed by the parameters of what is permissible in a GCSE exam. Although its novel structure (triple, enclosed nrrative) is fascinating.

I would like the Tories to explain to me how they have the fucking nerve to call Labour government a nanny state when they have Gove who is dictating everything down to the minitae of the curriculum?

They alwasy do this. They produce loads of controlling legislation and claim it is in the interests of freedom -- of their ricj mates, I think.

No US authors at all? We studied The Cucible and Look Back in Anger among others. And yes, DDs are looking at Steinbeck. Is The Color Purple out too? Great to study other cultures.

What about Irish authors, like Sean O'Casey, Heaney, Joyce, etc?

I remember years ago a teenager telling me that she loved To Kill a Mocking Bird. Which was the first book she had ever read in her life. Seems crazy to ban it.

I and both my children loved Of Mice and Men! Maybe it depends on how its taught? There are a lot of themes in it - racism, how women are viewed, power and powerlessness etc. Similarly To Kill a Mocking Bird can embrace themes of Racism etc. However being a longer book it actually needs more time to bring those out, which is why I like of Mice and Men, because it is short you can spend more time bringing themes out and dealing with wider context.

My 15 year old is furious with Gove for these changes. She strongly feels that she should be able to study literature in English from all around the world.

I am concerned that he seems to be trying to force all 16 year olds to follow exactly his approved syllabus for english Language. A lot of FE colleges and Sixth Form colleges seem to be being forced to make students resit English language if they have passed the "wrong" iGCSE.

Can I just say how much i hate English 19th century novels? I cannot stand them and they are going to form the bulk of literature if Gove gets his way.

For this reason alone I'm in with Charles. Let's kill him.