Hooked on Classics
Hooked on Classics
Hooked on Classics
“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“I have not banned anything,” said Michael Gove in a rather petulant article in the Telegraph last week.
“All we are doing is asking exam boards to broaden - not narrow - the books young people study for GCSE.”
I wonder if he’s happy with the result?
Because, as David Didau’s handy table demonstrates (including the texts he might have included), it’s not exactly a shimmering smorgasbord of ‘the best that has been thought and said’.
It’s more like a bowl of stale Twiglets.
I’m sitting here, one week after so many of us responded splenetically to an article by the Sunday Times’ Education Editor. It had this feisty headline:
Gove kills the mockingbird with ban on US classic novels
There was a flurry of Twitter outrage and then, of course, a familiar narrative began to play out, including Mr Gove’s sneering remark about ‘cultural warriors’ and a hasty, badly written and laughably defensive ‘Mythbuster’ document from the DfE.
Someone somewhere had clearly been rattled.
But much of the ensuing criticism caricatured what some of us were actually trying to say.
So here, for what they are worth, are a few concluding remarks on the set-text debacle of the past week.
First, that dismissal of us as ‘cultural warriors’.
I think this was a misguided comment from the Secretary of State for Education.
The tradition of English teaching has often been rooted in what the late David Holbrook described in his book English for Maturity as ‘educating against the environment’.
He picks up on a sense of shared mission from the likes of Matthew Arnold, George Sampson, Richard Hoggart, FR Leavis, Peter Abbs and others in identifying that what great English teachers do is to take young people beyond their current environment - physical as well as imaginative - and, through literature and language, bring them into a succession of brave new worlds.
Great teaching does what great literature does: it opens minds.
I think if I had been the Secretary of State I might have felt rather proud that the nation’s English teachers were rallying around some seminal works that we know from experience can ignite a genuine engagement from young people who may often have given up on reading.
If I were him, I’d want, even if grudgingly, to acknowledge that the straitjacket of too many preceding National Strategies hadn’t left us all neutered and compliant.
We were prepared to shout about something we believed in.
Frankly, part of me is delighted that I shan’t have to teach Of Mice and Men for an examination again.
But we need to be careful in our dismissal of a text that is read by so many 16-year-olds. It may prompt an annual sense of deja vu in us; but it’s new to them.
An example: I’m teaching a Year 10 ‘Pathways’ class this year. It’s a small group who need special attention with their reading and writing. They lack confidence. They don’t read for pleasure.
I read Of Mice and Men with them last term.
One student, Luke, said to our Librarian that he really liked the novel and was there some other book she could recommend to him? She did (I think it may have been RJ Palacio’s breathtaking novel about facial disfigurement, Wonder).
Anyhow, Luke caught me in the corridor just before half-term and told me that he’d read the book on his own and, as he put it, ‘had totally got into it and wanted to read something else.’
He had clearly experienced something that we - the word rich, the bookish - take for granted. Reading for pleasure: it’s what we do.
But he, for the first time in his memory, now saw why people like us read books, how those inky words on a page can weave a captivating magic.
And the trigger for this was Of Mice and Men, plus a librarian who knows the students, knows her books, and knows which books might work best with which students. It’s why schools benefit so much from librarians.
So forgive me if I reject the cheap accusation that as English teachers we only read Steinbeck’s short novel because it’s short and quick to get through and unchallenging.
Time and again I’ve seen how Steinbeck’s deceptive simplicity of language and characters and themes speaks to young people in ways that cynics would hardly recognise.
Which brings us to last week’s other criticism. Oh, they said, you can still enjoy the ‘freedom’ to teach Steinbeck and your other American favourites. It’s just that these titles won’t be assessed. But you can still read them for the fun of it.
This is where, for me, the dark cynicism underlying last week’s debacle was exposed. This Government knows that in a heavy culture of accountability teachers in core subjects have little room for manoeuvre. That’s why they don’t show a lot of interest in the curriculum or in issuing guidance about what is taught.
It’s why the new National Curriculum will be anything but national. The Government knows that what shapes behaviour in classrooms isn’t what’s in the curriculum: it’s what’s in the test.
Remember that early announcement about the English Baccalaureate, presented initially as a supposedly high-status certificate that would demonstrate that students had studied more rigorous subjects?
It was, to many of us, pernicious.
And look at how schools responded. We gather that some - quite disgracefully - started moving students out of options like Music and telling them that they now needed to study History or Geography or French.
What is tested and reported in performance tables drives what happens in schools.
So it’s a bit of sophistry to be told that teachers can still choose to read any texts they want to. The reality is that in a crowded curriculum, with English to be taught as well, it’s at best naive to think that the new English Literature courses will have lots of space for what once characterised the subject - namely, wider reading.
Of course set-texts will dominate.
And what an odd range of titles they are, and what a bizarre coincidence that Anita and Me should show up on all four. How did that happen?
And - hang on - this is supposed to be ‘broader’?
Finally, one general comment before I head off to do the marking I’ve had a week to do and - as ever - haven’t yet touched.
I recognise that this will brand me eternally as a paid-up member of the Blob, as an inveterate Enemy of Promise, or, at the very least, as the Suffolk-based dinosaur of the teaching profession.
But I think we need to be much more careful about our obsession with ‘the classics’. I didn’t read Shakespeare until I was seventeen. I didn’t read a Victorian novel until then.
As a result I read texts when I had a certain level of emotional maturity to take in their themes.
We must, in other words, beware of being hooked on classics just because they are deemed classics.
We know from Ofsted’s excellent 2009 report English at the Crossroads that getting young people to read more is a challenge. Schools need to be very mindful of how they encourage reading for pleasure: simply prescribing silent reading lessons is most emphatically not the answer. Indeed, it can do damage.
Remember also that the National Literacy Trust reported in 2011 that ‘3 in 10 UK children own no books’. Read the Guardian account here.
I was one of those who - amid a lot of sniping from the sidelines - agreed with Michael Gove’s ambition for every child to read fifty books a year.
I agreed with him because I belong to The Literacy Club, just as he does and, if you’re reading this far into my ranting blog, you do too. We are the word rich.
But many of the students we are teaching are not. They are the word poor.
They see us reading texts, losing ourselves in them, laughing or crying at them, then talking about what we have enjoyed, and it must feel sometimes as if they are squinting through smudged windows into a different world, one which is unrecognisable from what they see at home.
We are living in an exceptional age of fiction for young adults: never has there been so much good reading available to young people.
Through key stage 3, this is what I think they should be steeped in. Then, at key stage 4, having established some independence and some resilience, it’s onto the next stage: the development of critical reading, of writing essays to express ideas logically, of making comparisons, of aiming to build a genuine love of reading for life.
That, we thought, was what the Secretary of State wanted. It’s certainly what we as English teachers want.
So quite how, in a week tainted by recrimination and book snobbery, have we ended up with lists that are so unsatisfactory, a debate that is so mean-spirited, and a set of exam specifications which, from here at least, look so unlikely to help the word poor to come and join us as enthusiastic members of The Literacy Club?
Geoff Barton
Suffolk
Sunday 1 June, 2014
21:20
Sunday, 1 June 2014