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

When did I say I have a problem with Animal Farm? Because I didn't take your wink as a joke?

I don't think literature should be banned/removed/decided on by a stupid narrow-minded politician with an agenda. If I read that a committee of educators sat around and changed the GCSE curriculum then it would be an easier pill to swallow.

I do not like my children's future being shaped by one man and his archaic biases.

Bring on the General Election.

partial blame a sleepless night! I meant 'roll of thunder, hear my cry' so sorry totally brain dead today....

We read of Kes, for three years! I'd never burn a book, but I'd seriously consider that one for fire lighting. A boring, depressing, clunky read taught by an appalling teacher who was barely in the room.

I read mockingbird for myself and it is still my all time favourite novel, but needs to be taught alongside American civil rights to truly appreciate it's themes.

I can sort of see what Gove is among for here because the current curriculum is obviously not working if our local secondary school results area wide are any indication. I won't be voting labour in the next elections though. They're system of everyone must have a degree has done more harm than good IMHO.

nobel one thing I find really tough when teaching English literature , ie set in this country, is a complete lack of understanding of many cultural or religious references to be found in literature that is not contemporary. So pupils today often don't 'Get' the religious imagery or symbolism because they simply do but gave a grounding in reading bible stories or a knowledge if British/English /Scottish history/ culture. I strongly support the teaching of religions other than Christianity and to learn about cultures and histories other than our own but the broad nature of study (in my experience teaching in middle schools and with 3 kids of my own ages 21,18 and 15) they just don't know enough to evaluate English literature. My eldest dd studied the West (USA) the history of medicine and other interesting topics but doesn't know anything about the English Civil War nor the Industrisl Revolution (so a lot of Hardy is closed to her ). It's a shame and I think a loss . I am not a zen iphone by any stretch of the imagination but students today do not study appropriate topics and Gove will not be helping this .all governments have weighed in too heavily and should let specialists set the curriculum.

HolidayCriminal will they find Austen, Thackery, Bronte, Hardy, Blake, Rossetti et al more engaging?

Of Mice and Men is one of the most boring books on the planet.
My DS has proposed Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as a suitable alternative and he has a point.

At school I had to do a Dickens book. I cannot remember which.
I have a full set of Dickens at home. I've never read ANY of them.
GCSE English Lit is a rapid way to KILL books : at least then make them books that kids would not read by choice.

DD is doing Mice and Men and An Inspector Calls : she heartily hates both of them.

BUT
The choice should be down to those who understand WHY certain books are chosen, not fuckwit politicians who hated one or another.

Labour have no better ideas, but Gove is so dangerous to the long term future of learning in this country that the other Tory Twats must see they have to get rid of him.

I for one would be quite happy to see students have to study a wider range of novels.
At my DSC's much-praised grammar school, DSD did Mockingbird for TWO YEARS.
Now its DSS' turn, and they are doing it again. He's memorising all the same 'key phrases' and doing the same outlining and the exact same exercises...it's dreadful.

The problem isn't the text of course - it's that the children study past exam papers and are drilled with specific responses to the set text, instead of learning analytical skills. They ought to study multiple texts (many more than those set presently) during the term, and then be given an exam paper which asks them to analyse a completely different piece of work. My DSD has an A* in To Kill A Mockingbird. Doesn't mean she can get as much from any other piece of literature. It's a complete failure as an approach to learning. IMHO.

Has anyone said the texts are worse?

Is education now being decided on the personal whims of one man? Seems a bizarre way to run a country.

Weatherall, I don't want to derail this thread so I'm going to reply once then walk away.

weatherall Sun 25-May-14 11:45:18
Strawberry- you can't know rape was lied about unless you were actually there.
Rapists don't have horns you know.

I do know of a case of sexual assault which was a lie. I was there, and it was very damaging to the man involved, which is perhaps why I find this a difficult subject. But you CANNOT say it is a myth that women lie about these things- of course they do, the same way people lie at times about all sorts of things. (Rape crisis says the myth is that women OFTEN lie about rape- of course that's a myth, but you can't say it NEVER happens either.)

MN had a 'we believe you' campaign to highlight these issues ffs!

Yes I know, and I didn't agree with some aspects of that, either. Don't 'ffs' me. (And certainly not if you're then going to take issue with someone calling you a numpty.)

Back to the book...many other posters have argued far more eloquently than me, but I just want to add...when you mention real life, you are (presumably) talking about now, a time when we have relative equality, DNA testing and laws to protect victims AND the innocent. It is likely to be correct now that a vast majority of rape/sexual assault accusations are real.

But the book is dealing with a different time, and a different balance of power. A black man was in real danger in those days if he was accused of rape. He had no way of proving his innocence, so it would be his word against hers. And a white woman would have been believed over a black man in most circumstances. TKAMB and OMAM are brilliant novels for studying the power imbalance between those groups that were on the outside of mainstream society. Women, black people, the old and the disabled were all marginalised. The rape lie is an important example to use, because before DNA testing it would have been exactly the kind of crime where the outcome was dependent on the power balance between the victim and the accused.

I will be sad to see these books disappear from our curriculum- l teach SEN children and they get so much out of OMAM. Gove is a prick.

The man is incapable of comprehending that great literature speaks, no matter what the original language.
The gcse last year was wide and varied: The Woman in Black Susan Hill, (British writer). The Time Machine. H.G. Wells. (British). Lord of the Flies. William Golding. (British). As well as To Kill A Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men. Interestingly, the books mentioned are books that encourage children to question what is around them, to question authority and in some cases to defy authority.
Gove is an idiot who has misinterpretated the UKIP stance and thinks that the public want British books because a few people voted UKIP. He's a twat.

Michael Gove is onto something. My son just done AS Eng Lit. He has not studied a single Chaucer poem or anything by Milton or Wordsworth. We have endless American novels, which are good, but do not challenge more able students linguistically. Older works aren't necessarily 'harder' to write about come GCSE or AS level, though, as the language itself gives you things you can immediately latch onto when you're discussing them. My son would have preferred a Victorian novel such as Great Expectations to The Road.

We have arguably the finest, broadest literary canon in the world and we should let children enjoy more of it.

I've gone away and thought about this a bit more.

Broadly, I agree with the points put by Maria33. If you are going to have an exam taken by pretty much every child, then you need to set a test, and a set of texts, that mean every child has a fair stab at answering some questions, and can read a fair bit of the stuff they are being examined on. It becomes ridiculous otherwise.

Having said that, my ds has been completely persuaded that literature is crap as a subject of study. Which is a shame. I've done my best, so have his teachers, but he's been through the exam - and the exam is what it is. I can tell him that things are very different at university level - but what does that say? And 'A' level isn't very different from GCSE. Many of the set texts are inadequate as tools through which you can explore ideas and the brilliance of which literature is capable.

Personally, I had too many friends fail under the old system. CSE people spent years ploughing through "A Kestrel for a Knave" because that was what related to their experience, and they needed a looooong time to read a book; the 'O' level élite were allowed access to High Culture, and were set upon the path of critical thinking. It sucked as a system.

But there are some problems with the current set-up. Pretending they don't exist just leaves the goal wide open, I think.

I'm no Gove fan but he is not a complete, irrational, reactionary bigot. We are being naive to paint him as such. There are going to be a lot of people really pleased about this.

I think a better approach is to examine why this is happening, and what is good/bad.

for myself, I think it is a sea-change going all the way through education. I don't think I like it. It seems to be a real move away from aiming to be inclusive. I think it is going to lead to a very horrible learning environment for the vulnerable. I feel we need to work to understand what is motivating people to move in this direction (I do believe Gove is answering the call of a significant number of people). My belief is that fear lies at the bottom of it: fear of a global market-place.

I think these fears, and this answer to them is wrong. But, at present, that is just my feeling.

How much of a change is this, actually?
Back when I did some of the first GCSEs, we had to do 3 Shakespeare plays (Shakepeare being compulsory), war poetry (all English, I think - Hardy and Owen and others), and I think the req was for another English novel and a free choice of another.

Hasn't Shakespeare and UK poetry been on the syllabus all along, with about 3 other books involved, so 1-2 foreign ones max anyway - which would be exactly the same as the 70-80% UK literature that Gove is now wanting?

I did GCSE History but it was Europe Not UK 1870-45, so at the time I knew nothing about UK history after 1688 and precious little after 1600, which meant the social niceties of Austen went over my head for years (I taught some extracts in my late 20s, and finally realised it's actually funny!), ditto Dickens (who is still pretty tedious).

Abra1d That's the teaching, staff can choose from a list. My dd has just done AS Lit. She did Hardy, Stevenson, Bronte. Tennyson. Shaw. Ibsen.

That's kind of my point. Teachers choose and sometimes their choices seem bizarre. I wish my son had had your dd's list, dawn.

The comment from some academics is that it is a curriculum from the '40s

I love both books but if it is true that 90% of students have done Of Mice and Men for their exam then I think there is a problem. I wouldn't have taught it beyond year 9 to able pupils,though I would always encourage anyone to read it. It just isn't challenging enough for these students and I would have felt I was letting down a fairly able class if this was their main novel for exam.

I used to find it a wonderful book to teach classes who might once have been 'Easter Leavers' or who are disengaged from school or reading. It is short (it can be nigh on impossible to get them to do reading homework) has clear themes and leads to plenty of discussion and the language is simple, with a lot of repetition (useful in these circumstances) but is also poetic. it is possible to structure work to get a reasonable essay out of any child with this book so that they may enter coursework/ an exam.

I feel similarly about Mockingbird, but less so - it gets children who aren't keen readers hooked but I wouldn't choose it for higher ability groups even though I love it. The assault story lines in both are of great interest to the age group who are becoming interested in adult issues and provide a springboard for exploring them and questioning teenage attitudes. They aren't the only books providing these opportunities of course.

I have noticed among the children of friends that many are being examined on these texts when I would think they ought to be challenged more. Are they actually banned or has OCR chosen not to include them?

I could not agree with any petition claiming that Dickens and Shakespeare are unsuitable for most children. There is no need to plough through any author and Shakespeare especially may be taught to any age and ability through active participation and with some judicious editing.

If you are going to have an exam taken by pretty much every child

It's not though, it's not compulsory. If you are going to have an academic qualification in English Literature is it really too much to expect that the students who opt to take it study a 19th century novel? Or Shakespeare? Or some modern British literature?

There was a consultation on this, by the way. Why didn't all these people outraged that the post-1914 literature is restricted to British authors not respond to the consultation? As far as the consultation, not many people responded at all, and certainly didn't complain about the British literature element.

mrz Roddy Doyle, Meera Syall, Susan Hill, Joe Simpson may all be surprised to hear that.
Personally, I think a mix of old and new is good. I'd like to see Murakami, Malorie Blackman and Phillip Pullman added to the list.

We have endless American novels, which are good, but do not challenge more able students linguistically.
Well - this may be true of the specific ones chosen, but there certainly are American novels which present as much linguistic challenge as English ones.

Abra1d I think that teachers get lazy sometimes. I know one teacher who has been teaching 'Of Mice and Men' for years, it's easy. Personally I think she should get of her arse and read a bit more.
Some schools have a policy of changing it each year, that would be a better option, I see no harm in getting a teacher to widen their reading if they haven't done so.

There are a couple of other points, not all books appeal to all, and often, particularly at this age, not all books appeal to both sexes.

I agree, American classics are much more simplistic in style. I agree with Gove on this one.

dawndonna, Roddy Doyle would be off the list now!