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

dawndonnaagain Roddy Doyle, Meera Syall, Susan Hill, Joe Simpson will also be surprised someone thinks they are 19th C authors

Really, mrs ruffalo Edith Wharton, Henry James, Herman Melville, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald? In what way are they simplistic?

Yes, brdgrl, there are. Gertrude Stein springs to mind - I love Gertrude Stein. But those books are not on the syllabus.

I'm interested in what you have just written, SlipshodSibyl. My son is very able at English and he has just read "Lord of the Flies" and "To Kill a Mockingbird" for his GCSE.

I was stunned.

I don't consider those "texts for the able" and was extremely surprised that his teacher had chosen them.

I really do wonder what he can possibly have written about those two texts because neither demonstrate enough artistry to sustain an in-depth analysis. And, as I moaned earlier, you don't really get to discuss the message of "To Kill a Mockingbird".

As for "Lord of the Flies". It is an extremely mediocre book. It just doesn't have enough going for it to be something more able students study.

So why the heck did his teacher make him do it?

You see, I am massively in favour of an inclusive syllabus - but I'm not an idiot. Those two books were not adequate to sustain a really sustained analysis of them as aesthetic artefacts. "TKAM" is meaty at the level of its message - but that's not how it's used. Ironically, it then makes it very hard for a child to actually utilise the full range of their abilities in the actual exam. There is something really awry in the "more able" reaches of the exam. Is it really just down to the teacher's choice?

Here is what the DfE specified as the aims of English Literature GCSE:

? read a wide range of classic literature fluently and with good understanding, and make connections across their reading
? read in depth, critically and evaluatively, so that they are able to discuss and explain their understanding and ideas
? develop the habit of reading widely and often
? appreciate the depth and power of the English literary heritage
? write accurately, effectively and analytically about their reading, using Standard English
acquire and use a wide vocabulary, including the grammatical terminology1 and other literary and linguistic terms they need to criticise and analyse what

And

? at least one play by Shakespeare
? at least one 19th century novel 2
? a selection3 of poetry since 1789, including representative Romantic poetry
? fiction or drama from the British Isles from 1914 onwards.
All works should have been originally written in English.

That's what Gove has set out. Dickens etc is what the exam boards have specified to meet these requirements.

I just can't find these aims objectionable, even if it doesn't include Of Mice and Men.

...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.

And yet, Of Mice and Men is a work that is included on the syllabi of many university-level courses, including top-notch literature courses at Ivy League universities in the United States. If taught at a suitable level, it is by no means 'too simple' for even very able secondary school pupils.
There is a fundamental misunderstanding in the current UK system about what makes a work of literature 'challenging'.

" If taught at a suitable level, it is by no means 'too simple' for even very able secondary school pupils."

That's an excellent point - I've used Shakespeare with infants but at a very different level to what would be suitable for older pupils.

I manage to teach 'Of Mice & Men' to the most able. I've just marked a GCSE exam script that contained some fabulously original & Vell-expressed ideas.

Now, I'm awfully bored with George & Lennie after teaching it for 15 years & examining GCSE Eng Lit for five, but it's simply wrong to suggest that it can't stretch the most able. The complexity is less apparent than in a C19th novel, which in some ways actually makes it a greater challenge, but it's there.

I quite fancy doing 'Lord of the Flies', although I know the rest of my department will howl me down on that one.

x post brdgrl!

I would have felt I was letting down a fairly able class if this was their main novel for exam

Why? Exam boards are responsible for making sure that questions on different texts are comparable in difficulty and certainly that any candidate should be able to access the full range of marks irrespective of what they'd studied.

I enjoyed this response to Gove's latest idiocy.

shinbonestar.org/2014/05/25/mr-wormwood-michael-gove/

'By shifting to pre-20th century texts, in one swoop Gove is erasing many representations of race and women beyond servants, petticoats and tragic lovelorn figures....He is Bob Ewell, Curley and Abigail Williams'

Quite.

This isn't Gove's 'latest' idiocy. The lit requirements came out last November. There was a consultation, anyone could have responded to it. They mostly didn't.

And now there is outrage. I wonder about the timing.

brdrl - we didn't have set texts at the university I went to, other than a Shakespeare paper. That meant that everything was pretty much open to study. If I were to look at Steinbeck, I'd probably have tried for a reflective essay, linking his incorporation within the American university syllabus with the development of Literary studies alongside the New Deal.

So, I'm not surprised it's "on" a university syllabus.

But there isn't that sort of choice and freedom of study at GCSE. I wouldn't study Steinbeck for his language because his language is not a good example of literary language working hard. Other writers do that "literary language/structure of writing far better. Steinbeck does other things far better. He's good as an example of other stuff. Yet students at GCSE are having to read Steinbeck as an example of literary language doing its thing.

He is being used as an example of language because his writing is quite straightforward, and comes wrapped around a good, engaging tale. That is fine, up to a point. However, it does leave the young people who can see that this is not, actually, a particularly good piece of writing-as-writing, or a particularly deep tale, feeling a bit short-changed.

It's as though you have Einstein on your teaching staff, and you have him teaching PE. And everyone who says, "Erm, he's not a great PE teacher" is tole "But he's Einstein!!" Ideally, you use the well-shaped object for the task it is suited for.

I'm not saying that the "classics" are any better, actually. We had to read a whole selection of fairly mediocre, second-rate "classics" for 'O' level, and we read then at a pretty superficial level. So that was pretty crap.

I just think that there is an issue. It may well be insurmountable. Pretending it doesn't exist isn't helpful.

You can imply that I am simply an idiot who doesn't really understand about the literary and critical potential of various bits of literature and culture if you want but that is palpably crazy. I have several degrees now and those degrees were achieved by writing critically (and sometimes brilliantly) on a whole range of literature. I'm no idiot: I can find the critical text on "Dracula" that marked the turning-point for its inclusion into the ranks of texts-it-is-acceptable-to-write-on-to-get-published-in-peer-review-journals.

I'm inclusionist to my core. I'm prepared to accept that fairly linguistically straightforward texts be studied at GCSE as the way that we can have inclusionist education. I'm not prepared to pretend they are complex. And I'm not going to lie and say that my child found his beliefs challenged, and his blood thrilled by the wild potentialities of literature through his experience of studying for the GCSE because that's not true.

I'm hoping he'll take A level, and I'm hoping his teacher will choose a bit more ambitiously from the choices on offer.

Is everyone aware that Gove has dictated the content of the history curriculum as well, ignoring advice from experts in both subjects? In fact, Gove has the power to do whatever he likes.

noble - I don't think the timing's sinister, it's just that exam boards have finished drafting their new gsces, so it's the first chance to see what texts they're using.

Apologies for the late reply. My DSS2 has read the vast majority of the 50 or so works of French literature for his French lit bac this year (Y12 equivalent - he is 16). He has read "the French equivalents" of the English classics: Corneille, Racine, Voltaire, Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, Baudelaire, Hugo etc

But it would have been obvious last November that Of Mice and Men isn't post-1914 British Literature and thus not included. The news story didn't need to wait on the exam boards.

And the consultation was open then, people could have made their opinions known, and potentially changed the specification. It's a bit late to be whinging about it now.

'I would have felt I was letting down a fairly able class if this was their main novel for exam

Why? Exam boards are responsible for making sure that questions on different texts are comparable in difficulty and certainly that any candidate should be able to access the full range of marks irrespective of what they'd studied.'

Well maybe. But in practice they aren't really. And the journey to get there is easier. Otherwise, I think thecatfromjapan's last post has summed up the just if what I feel. Of Mice and Men isn't good prep for those wanting to do A Level and id like to send competent, keen readers, most of whom won't do A Level away having tackled more difficult literature.

Reported Darren as spam.

Might help Darren if he could spell. Knobhouse!

GCSEs in many (all?) subjects have not been good preparation for A-level for quite a while, hence the requirement to get A or A* at GCSE in order to even contemplate the A-level.

noble - ah I see, yes I'm with you in that case. Although not about whether the spec would have changed- the consultation was lip service IMO, Gove was going to do what he wanted all along.

I just want to kill him. Not a joke. I keep thinking about how hard I'd like to hit him with a chair leg - repeatedly.

I'm worried by this.

As educators, surely our job is to introduce non populist works to children who may not be exposed to them otherwise. The teaching of poetry, for example, from primary school up, tries too hard to be 'cool' and 'relevant'.
Teaching children to recite more challenging poetry and to help them decipher and understand these poems, therefore elevating their educational experience,serves them much more than doing an urban rap about living in a tower block.

I really disagree that Steinbeck does not make language "work hard". I think that OMAM is almost like poetry in its restraint. I think it is an extraordinary piece of writing and achieves that rare accomplishment of communicating something complex and profound about the human condition in an accessible and direct way. Maybe you find Beckett similarly overly simplistic? After all, nothing much happens in Godot and the language is very simple.

The claim that to be of merit, something has to be complex is certainly debatable. Shakespeare was populist in his time, as was Dickens. They are mostly hard to access now because their use of language is archaic. I don't even translate all of Romeo and Juliet for year 10 because it's so sexist and verging on the obscene.. (I do love Shakespeare )

It's a GCSE: it needs to be challenging and accessible. Surely employers want a C to mean a kid can write a sentence or 5 and universities want an A* to mean that a kid is pretty eloquent. If teaching texts exclusively from the 19th century canon (and I love them - I'm an English graduate, after all) will mean dragging young, dyslexic Adam, who wants to work as a paramedic through Dickens instead of Steinbeck, who us that benefitting exactly? It'll make him feel alienated from the curriculum and mean that I spend more time teaching him content than the literacy skills he actually needs. It's bonkers!