Set texts at school

[MillyR]

Sorry that this is a bit of a thread about a thread, but in education there is a thread discussing Of Mice and Men still being a set text at GCSE. Nobody has mentioned in that thread that it is a book about a man killing a woman. As Steinbeck wrote:

She is 'not a person, she's a symbol. She has no function, except to be a foil ? and a danger to Lennie.'

This is in addition to 'Atonement' and "To Kill A Mocking Bird' both being set texts. In both of these a woman makes false accusations about who is the rapist. So in all three books a woman is harmed but we are pushed towards sympathising with a male character.

I am just wondering if this has a bit of an impact. When I was at school we did 'The Color Purple' and it had a major impact on me. I know these books must be looked at critically in schools, but criticising the books doesn't really cancel out the impact of the stories. Of Mice and Men is particularly sentimental and melodramatic so designed to move the reader to care about the killer.

Did anybody study these books at school, or teach them?

Because literature is not the same thing as history; it serves a different function. Most people have a far greater interest in imaginative story telling - be it through films, music, books or computer games than they have in history. History isn't even a compulsory subject after year 8.

Story telling is an important social experience and it is important to the inner lives of people; it is something that all cultures do. When people study that in an academic way, it isn't just to get a qualification; it is also to learn skills that enhance their engagement with those stories - that is something that will benefit them their whole lives.

And the inner lives of women is not generally about thinking about our lives as some sort of social commentary on men or on sexism; it is about us human beings, and I think that should be reflected in some of the texts that pupils engage with in a structured way in school.

Noble giraffe, I never mentioned feminist literature at all. Why should improving the achievement of boys be at odds with reading books that have positive, or at least neutral messages for girls? Surely schools can do both?

Milly, I just used 'feminist literature' as a shorthand for literature with positive messages for girls, rather than meaning Germaine Greer or whatever.

The concern at GCSE will be with not turning off boys more than they already are, because grades are all.

Of course, what people think will turn off boys is not always the case. JK Rowling had to become JK so that boys wouldn't realise she was a female writer before getting hooked on Harry Potter. But boys were still reading even when it became apparent she was female and she is credited with bringing a lot of boys back to reading.

I suspect one of the main issues is getting boys to pass English language at C, rather than English Literature. Pupils who aren't likely to pass English language (where even fewer books are part of the exam) are unlikely to study English literature GCSE. It is something I should be looking into in the next year before DS begins his GCSEs. My concern at the moment is the amount of the marks that are for the study of poetry, which I think he will find difficult regardless of the subject matter.

Although now it would seem I am derailing my own thread!

noble - that's really interesting about Steinbeck having a real-life prompt for the book!

I have to say, I do wonder if girls don't do better at English partly because they have to do that much more work to 'read' a male-dominated world and to read texts chosen to appeal to boys.

'Why should improving the achievement of boys be at odds with reading books that have positive, or at least neutral messages for girls? Surely schools can do both?'

I remember being utterly dismayed that my DCs were reading 'Little House on the Prairie' at about age 9/10 as a set text in school. The DDs hated its saccharine quality and DS did too. I couldn't understand why the school had picked it over 'Farmer Boy', also by Laura Ingalls Wilder, which was a better read imo as a child, even though it was about the life of a boy. They all loved 'Island of the Blue Dolphins' though.

Something I was wondering last night - I wonder if anyone would be concerned if it were girls who were performing significantly worse than boys?

Or would that be considered perfectly acceptable given the rubbish that's been spouted about male and female brains over the years?

MillyR I think you are a bit out of date, most schools have all pupils studying both Eng Lit and Eng Lang, and some of the Eng Lang assessment is based on their set books. So children of all levels are studying these texts, and being assessed on them. If you have a bottom set (or low set such as the one my son is in) which is mainly boys (as they are), who struggle to read, it is very hard to get them to read anything, which they need to for the exam. So teachers look for books which are short, they can relate to a bit, and are of some literary merit. The same boys will also have to study a Shakespeare, and a poetry anthology, so the book is the most easily adaptable to their needs.
However they don't just read during 2 years of GCSE, they read all through school, a wide variety of books. They also have PSE, RE, History etc. in which to discuss feminism, racism etc.

Mummytime, have you actually read the thread?

I am not talking about children having the opportunity for pupils to have the opportunity to discuss racism or feminism. If that was the point, they could do that through reading To Kill a Mocking Bird. People from minority ethnic groups and girls do not exist purely as some kind of talking point or social issue for boys to debate. They exist in their own right as people and ought to be able to read fiction about themselves. This is totally different to RE or History.

Nobody would think it was acceptable for schools to set multiple texts where underage boys are raped and then made false allegations about who raped them, or about men being murdered by women. Nobody would attempt to justify this by saying it was a really good opportunity to talk with boys about men's rights. Nobody would set a school curriculum that was entirely based on novels written by women about women and defend this by saying that a good teacher would use this as a basis for discussing men's rights, or defend the book choice by saying it was 'great literature' and girls had the right to read it.

I am aware that some sections of the GCSE English language paper can be answered based on books studied as part of the GCSE English literature syllabus, at least for some exam boards. I never said otherwise. And not all children have the opportunity to do both. I am also aware that children read other books in school, as I am not incredibly ignorant (who on earth is that ignorant?)

I don't mean to single you out, because your sentiment has been repeated by others in this thread. People seem entirely unable to see that discussing feminism in schools is not the same thing as women being represented in the curriculum. It would be rather like saying that schools will not hire any female teachers in future, but this will give schools the opportunity to discuss feminism and social issues with pupils. Wouldn't it be better for girls if schools simply hired female teachers and read some books by and about women? Or maybe girls shouldn't go to school at all, and that could give an even greater talking point about feminism and women's social issues for the boys to discuss.

Milly, I'm going to save this thread so I can look back at it when I'm trying to argue for teaching more writing by and about women. Especially this: 'People seem entirely unable to see that discussing feminism in schools is not the same thing as women being represented in the curriculum.'

It's so true.

Btw, I am confused as to why a short novel set in a foreign country, in another time, and featuring two adults as main characters, would be especially boy-friendly? Do we actually have quite odd ideas about what appeals to boys? I noticed that Mildred Taylor's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is on the GCSE syllabus (correct me if I'm wrong), which is a similar length, with more even distribution of male/female characters and with a main character who's at least roughly GCSE-age ... but I assume we're meant to conclude boys wouldn't want to read it as the main character is a girl?

Where does this set in, this idea that girls will read anything but boys will only read 'boys' books'? I've heard people say it about 5 year olds, which seems absurd! Is it possible that, if we didn't keep wrapping boys in cotton wool, they wouldn't be failing at English? Academic skills are like muscles - exercise them, and they grow. I would think that constantly reading stories where the main character is a boy, or where women are presented as 'other', is going to force girls to make a bigger imaginative effort to see themselves in the story. Maybe that is why they are better than boys at English Lit.

I think that getting boys to read books that very much reflect their interests are a good way of getting boys back to reading for pleasure, but this should be done by the schools in KS3.

I have been thinking about the point you raised about girls having to work harder because they are not in the books/are symbols in the books/are mis-represented in the books, and I kind of think it is an Uncle Tom's Cabin effect.

If girls experience this misrepresentation or absence, many of them are going to wonder why the author has done that, or why they are so misrepresented, because they have the immediate reference point of themselves to see that the author has created this effect that is different from their reality. That creates an analysis of the text that involves higher less skills. So perhaps it isn't girls working harder but that the othering of female characters makes it easier for girls to critique the text. Boys actually have to work harder to achieve that analysis, because they are increasingly being given books that match their inner world.

So I wonder if putting books like 'Touching the Void' on the set text on the grounds that it appeals to boys actually leads to a decline in their results, because the less academic boys will have to work that much harder to critique the text because it so closely matches their expectations of how life should be represented.

Sorry to waffle; I am not clear enough in my own mind about this to be succinct.

The problem is: very few women got published before the 20th century. Also I can think of very few women authors who have written literary and short books. "Roll of Thunder Hear my cry" is actually often studied before GCSE, so might meet the same comment my son made on MacBeth, which was to complain as he has studied it for 6 out of the last 7 years (yes including primary school).
I am not saying boys will only read boy books. I am saying that at least half of the boys in bottom sets will be extremely reluctant to read anything but boy books.
However the reason that books like "Mice and Men" or "To Kill a Mocking Bird" are on syllabuses is because they can be read in a variety of ways, and a variety of issues can be brought out of them.
But I do agree there should be more female authors on the syllabuses, even if only higher sets are likely to study them. Why can't we have Sylvia Plath instead of Dylan Thomas (or is he there because he's Welsh)?

As for what appeals to boys. I would say that what appeals to DS (who reads very stereotypical boy books - Cherub spy series, Percy Jackson series) is:

1. A hero
2. A sense of justice - of clear issues of right and wrong. People doing the right thing even if it goes against orders from an authority figure.
3. Action and physical danger.
4. The creation of a very detailed world system- ancient myth, spy organisation etc in the same way that computer games create a detailed world system.

From this perspective I think if we are going to appeal boys in the GCSE curriculum then Animal Farm, Brave New World and 1984 would be more obvious choices than those frequently selected by schools. Animal Farm also has the advantage, like Of Mice and Men, of being short.

Mummytime, I was more thinking in terms of the Post 1914 section of the English literature specification, which the three books I mentioned fall under. There are a lot of books written by women or about women in this time period, including novellas.

Harper Lee was of course a woman and Scout is a girl, but I think the issues over TKAMB are more of an issue to me because of the other books studied alongside it.

'The problem is: very few women got published before the 20th century.'

This is a widely-believed factoid, but I don't think it is true. In fact, I know it's not.

I do take your point about it not being good to study the same books over and over - I remember how dull history (WW bloody II, ever time!) was, for that reason.

But there are loads of women authors, and plenty of books that could appeal to boys and girls. It's the combination of the three mentioned in the OP that really looks awful, isn't it?

LRD, I didn't really answer your question about boys in general and just mentioned secondary school boys in particular. I don't know why people think 5 year old boys want a particular kind of book; I've not noticed it to be true with children that young. With primary school boys it seems to be the type of book rather than the gender of the character.

I don't know what has gone wrong with boys (and to some extent girls) and English in primary schools, but it certainly happened to DS and I still don't understand it! It was rectified immediately by his Secondary school, and part of that was the example set by peers.

Oh - no, your answer was really interesting, thanks Milly. Sorry I didn't acknowledge it!

I do think it is really poor the way that some boys seem to get taught they need 'special' literature - as if they couldn't possibly enjoy or cope anything else. I know that doesn't happen in every school and I do see that I'm making a 'what about the menz' argument, but it is not good for either boys or girls, so I think it stands.

I have two basic issues I want to say on this thread (because I'm probably not making much sense otherwise).

One is: we need to get children reading books that represent a good range of authors and characters and situations.

Second one is: we need to stop whitewashing the existence of women authors and books about women out of the picture. This ties in with what's being said on the WHSmith thread about putting 'women's fiction' in its own (pink) section. A lot of people, I think, don't realize how much writing by and about women there is out there - and how many books women buy. As you say Milly, if we look at post-1914 fiction, there are plenty of women authors. But as UMS says, there are also plenty of women who wrote at a time when that was considered quite a respectable thing for a woman to do if she needed to work. There is a very, very, very long history of women authors and of writing that engages with women's lives and women's stories. An awful lot of children grow up not knowing about this - or thinking, at best, that women writers began to appear with Jane Austen and tailed off thereafter. It's not true and IMO it's a lack of respect to women in general when we whitewash the history of women in literature.

One of the issues is that children don't read, or don't read very much. It probably wouldn't matter as much which 3 books were representing post 1914 literature in a GCSE classroom if children were reading for pleasure. Although there is a gap between boys and girls, most girls don't read every day either, and many children say that they never read for pleasure.

I think it comes back to story telling. Children can now involve themselves with this by watching films of playing computer games, so there isn't as much of a desire to read fiction for pleasure. Books have to compete with other stories.

The way this dealt with in schools seems at odds with what children are doing. One of the solutions has been to give reference books to boys on the basis that they don't like fiction. Well, if that is the case, why do so many of them want to spend hours every day playing Fable or similar on a console, which are entirely fictional worlds and the mode of play is story based, often with quite a bit of text including written dialogue?

Likewise, why are we told boys don't want to involve themselves in collaborative discussion and have to be taught English in another way? Online gaming is largely based on teamwork, collaboration and discussion.

I think that there needs to be better preparation of children before they get to GCSE level, so that they want to read for pleasure. A lot of that is that literature going to have to mirror the way that they interact with new media. But the proposals that are put forward based on some strange stereotype that boys want to read fact books about racing cars and then answer questions on them in a solitary yet competitive manner are obviously flawed.

Yes, I think that's a really important point about not reading.

And I don't care for the snobbery about films and so on - yes, a film doesn't have as many words as a book. But it is immensely more visually complex than a book, too. It's just a different medium. We had a really brilliant teacher who was able to translate literature into something that felt very immediate, and she did it not by saying 'reading is good; films etc. are bad', but by showing us how a lot of what we were studying was actually quite similar to the things we enjoyed watching.

The issue still remains though that functional skills in reading and writing, which we all need as adults, are hugely improved through extensive reading. So film is great for stories and for visual skills, but is doesn't have that impact on reading and writing that books have.