‘Get him, Lennie’
‘Get him, Lennie’
‘Get him, Lennie’
‘As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment. Then gradually time awakened again and moved sluggishly on’.
John Steinbeck, Of Mice & Men
‘Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird’.
Miss Maudie in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird
‘What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.’
Holden Caufield in JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye
‘Great stones they lay upon his chest until he plead aye or nay. They say he give them but two words. "More weight," he says. And died.’
Elizabeth Proctor in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible
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In September it will be thirty years since I started my career as an English teacher.
Back in 1984, fresh from university, I was on a mission to be what Matthew Arnold called ‘a preacher of culture’, bringing the stories and poems that had helped to define me to the next generation of young people.
That’s what English teachers, still under the long shadow of FR Leavis, felt we did.
I was an unashamed preacher of culture.
And I still am. Indeed, I am more so now, more determinedly so.
Because I realise not only that we read books because we like to read books, but that books define us, that they nourish our imagination, that they build our understanding, that they pass on ideas between generations, and that they bring us to our fullest intellectual capacity.
So, yes, I like books.
And I’m also writing this in a week when the tawdry Little Englander attitudes of UKIP have briefly gained some fleeting national attention.
I’m writing it also after reading Matthew Parris’s brilliant Times column yesterday which said politicians need to be braver and tell voters that they are wrong about immigration fears. Their underlying racism is wrong.
I’m writing it also on the day when the Sunday Times is reporting that Michael Gove has intervened to stop certain American texts being read for the GCSE English Literature examination.
The suggestion appears to be that a Secretary of State who himself read English is making decisions about which texts should be examined at GCSE and which should not.
He is apparently exerting an influence to ensure more emphasis on the Englishness of English.
The timing, frankly, couldn’t be worse.
And judging by the reaction on Twitter, English teachers aren’t happy.
Any of us who have spent bleak Thursday afternoons with a class of disbuggerous adolescents will know that some set-texts weave a special kind of magic, capturing young people’s imaginations and taking them way beyond their own experience.
Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is one of them.
The raw linguistic simplicity doesn’t make this novella a superficial ‘easy’ text, whatever the Secretary of State may say. Its language and narrative carry huge force, its beguiling accessibility leading a class into deep issues of what it is to be human.
And it grips non-readers who long ago gave up on something as old-fangled as books.
Thus we read Of Mice & Men each year not just because it’s easy to read but also because it teaches something essential about relationships, about human hopes and dreams, about the fragile promise of a better life ahead.
Similarly, we read To Kill a Mockingbird because it illuminates what it is to be human, how to step into someone else’s psychological shoes, what it is to be wise and empathetic, and we relish its nuances, its uncertainties, and its strong messages about accepting outsiders.
We read The Crucible because it teaches us to withstand social hysteria, to have the moral purpose to trust in our own values. It teaches us too about language that is powerful and simple and compelling.
We read The Catcher in the Rye because it illuminates the churning uncertainties of adolescence, giving hope and igniting our understanding of an extraordinary new form of colloquial storytelling that our students need to hear.
We read these books because they matter, not just because they are examined at GCSE.
Many of us are, after all, the preachers of culture.
When I started teaching there were no leagues tables, no system of performance management, no obsessive tracking of student progress.
My first Year 11 class - a group of students just five years younger than I was - were assessed on the texts I chose, the essays they wrote, and the marks I gave.
All of this, I remember sensing under a weight of unnerving personal responsibility, would be moderated and validated.
But it was a sign of the trust of the school, of the system, that I as English teacher was expected to make the key decisions on behalf of the class.
I remember with those Year 11 students reading and setting assignments on Philip Larkin, Emily Dickinson and Charles Dickens. I chose texts that would challenge and interest that mixed-ability class.
I recall the top student, Heather - now presumably in her late-forties - writing about Philip Larkin’s poem ‘To the Sea’ and commenting on how the implicit colour-scheme of red, white and blue reinforced a sense of the poem’s quintessential Englishness.
She read and responded brilliantly to the text.
I could only admire the intellectual pzazz of a 16-year old at that proud comprehensive school in Leeds, rather like the one I now lead in Suffolk.
Such an assessment system - trusting teachers to choose the texts that were appropriate for the class in front of them - would presumably be unthinkable today, at least in our country with our politicians.
It would be classed as cheating, or dumbing down, or spoon-feeding, or not giving sufficient attention to the texts on the wish-list of the incumbent of Sanctuary Buildings.
It’s a reminder that underlying today’s bleak Sunday Times article on set-texts we have allowed politics in our country to drive education, and for the narrowness of assessment to determine what is taught.
That’s the system we have allowed to be built up around us, and it has happened on our watch.
Only the very, very naive - chiefly people who have never taught on one of those wet Thursday afternoons - would therefore be surprised that English teachers are dismayed at today’s set-text announcement.
Of course we are angry about it.
Only people outside the classroom would fail to realise why inside the classroom Of Mice and Men, The Crucible, Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird matter so much.
English teachers: we are the preachers of culture, teaching texts that matter, not just texts that are deemed appropriate by politicians clambering up a career ladder.
Thus, in the midst of a bank holiday weekend, we are furious at the further politicising of the curriculum, and of the high-minded, small-minded, close-minded decision to tinker yet again with classroom practice.
And, if we are true to our instincts and to our heritage, we must resist.
Geoff Barton
Suffolk
Sunday 25 May 2014
8:30 pm
Sunday, 25 May 2014