Dammit. That’s twice in about a week I’ve missed an obvious joke.
Michael Gove, UK Education Secretary and raving ideologue, removes American classics from curriculum
Chalk this up as a non-story. What’s most sad about it is that people who should know better are reacting to an incorrect story to further a political point-of-view.
I’m not a Tory supporter, but Gove consistently comes across as smarter than the usual lefty knee-jerk teaching activists he’s up against:
It just makes the anti-Gove crowd looks petty and childish.
There isn’t “a list”. Wallenstein’s quote includes the requirements:
So students can read Ethan Frome but not Of Mice And Men or *Catch-22 *or… any other American novel they might actually enjoy.
By “teaching activists” you mean teachers, yes?
It says it has to include those things, not that it has to be exclusive to those things. A little cursory research indicates that these GCSE programs are meant to last two years, more in the case of complicated subjects, including literature, which seems more than enough time to cover the four required topics, and throw in plenty of Steinbeck or Twain.
No, he’s upset the mice are getting top billing.
There’s less class time for that than you’d think. Kids get between 3 and four hours of English a week, but that’s for English Lit and English Lang, which are taught together but are separate GCSEs. More class time is spent on English Lang because you can’t get into sixth form or do anything, really, without at least a C grade in that subject. So that’s about 80 hours’ total class time for Eng Lit.
GCSEs don’t last for more than two years in any subject. Where are you getting that from?
The prescribed areas - Shakespeare, etc, listed above - are what the kids will be examined on in Eng Lit, plus general reading and writing skills assessed separately to those texts. It would be a very unusual school that took some of its limited time to teach stuff kids they won’t be examined on.
There’s also no guidance on what other changes there are to English GCSE, WRT marking schemes, weighting, how exactly they want to assess speaking and listening, etc, despite the changes coming into force from September. I mean that even teachers haven’t been given any guidance. It’s ridiculous.
BTW, in case anyone thinks teachers will be free to choose any books which meet those specifications, they won’t. Now that the exam boards have been told the areas that will be examined, they will choose specific texts to put in the exams. Teachers will have a choice of two prescribed texts from each area. Not that they know which texts yet.
One change I actually don’t mind is the change from modern poetry to Romantic poetry. Some of the modern poetry on the curriculum is really hard for kids to access, as well as not actually being very good; the Romantics will actually be more accessible and enjoyable. But it’s going to be hard for the first year when teachers have to rush to prepare new resources after they’re finally told what texts they’re going to use.
Yeah, there’s not going to be a lot more time for other things, especially with coursework, various exams and revision, etc., in between.
The list as a whole is just so backward-looking. And it’s not just this change. There’s a pattern of this sort of traditionalist, looking back to the “good old days” thinking in policy decisions throughout government. It’s unnecessary interference according to personal preference and values, and the product of an ideology rooted in the mad belief that at some point we knew how things should be. Those who didn’t like it were rightly (figuratively) beaten into submission, since they obviously didn’t know what was good for them. Unfortunately, liberals took over and started believing in such lofty ideas as relevance, looking at other cultures or keeping students awake with content rather than canes.
On a personal level, I wouldn’t mind seeing “19th century novel” replaced with “foreign English language novel”. The obvious choice would be an American one, but it wouldn’t have to be.
My daughter’s coursework was all “controlled assessments.” Coursework done in class, with a teacher invigilating, and only using school computers. Art coursework al had to be done in class too. The difference was that you could improve stuff by coming back into school to work on it some more (up to a limit), rather than an exam where you go in, write, and that’s it.
But they’re getting rid of controlled assessments too. It’s all final exams.
They’re saying “for every subject” but that just won’t work for drama or art or music. Mind you, Gove is mandating them out of existence too, so it’s not clear what’s going to happen to them. It’s not clear at all what’s going to happen in the coming academic year, which is not that far away.
Anyway, it’ll be 80 hours or so of teaching for all the topics covered, where the texts will be decided by the exam boards.
I think some American posters may be under the impression that the teachers grade this stuff; they don’t. Even for coursework, it was graded first by them and then by someone else; sometimes, their grades were sometimes taken as they were, but you could never count on it, and it was always on a scale where you basically ticked boxes saying they’d acheived this, this and this.
For exams, the teachers have no part in the grading. They also have little choice in the texts they teach - they can choose from two for each section, then their students have a choice on what question to answer in the exam.
This does have a lot of plus points, IMO, but when a minister decides to dictate what will be studied, the minus points come into play.
Note that “[a]ll works should have been originally written in English.” So no Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky either.
That’s actually fair enough. These are 15-16 year olds (when they take the exam). Give them a chance!
Bah! I had to read Crime and Punishment at 12 or 13. If I had to suffer, these little bastards should too.
Seriously, though, none of Dostoyevsky’s novels are anywhere near as boring as Ethan Frome. It is quite literally the least interesting thing I have ever read. That includes the labels of household products, laundry tags on clothing, Haynes manuals, and political manifestos.
Agreed - this is a non-story. The Guardian reliably parrots any old tosh about the Education Secretary. Even Labour’s Education Secretaries were not immune from this nonsense.
Editing to add: here Michael Gove’s response to the charges that he has “banned” American literature.
I read “Of Mice and Men” at school. I liked to play truant a lot, so I think it’s the only book I ever did read under orders. It wasn’t much good. If you want to get kids reading then give them books which aren’t tedious. No Jane Austen, no Hardy, preferably no poetry of any kind, or if you must then make it something from the first world war rather than silly introspective wander-lonely-as-a-cloud stuff. More Buchan. More Beano. Maybe Bab Ballads. Stuff children might actually like, or at least be able to read, rather than endless bullshit aimed at eighteenth century noblewomen.
I had a similar experience with “The Sprouts of Wrath”.
Yeah, who needs facts or memory? I’ll just google it.
Personally, I think school is just somewhere lazy people deposit their children to be bullied into conformity because they can’t be arsed teaching their own children and invariably staffed by a gaggle of ignorant thugs.
Yeah, aside from jokes, nobody has claimed that he “banned” anything.
Really? Nobody at all?
The Mirror: " Education secretary Michael Gove set to ban children’s classic ‘Of Mice And Men’ from British classrooms."
The Sunday Times: “Gove kills the mockingbird with ban on US classic novels”.
The Guardian and the Independent write that Gove has “axed” certain American texts. You yourself said, “He’s getting rid of Of Mice and Men because he, personally, doesn’t like it?” Someone further up the thread made reference to censorship.
So yeah, there are plenty of (false) claims that certain books have been banned.
When I said “he’s getting rid of…” I didn’t mean he was banning it, I meant he was seeking to remove it from the school curriculum, which isn’t the same thing.
But it seems you are correct - there are people inappropriately using the word “ban”.
It’s not banning. Teachers are still free to teach texts that are not on the curriculum. They will lose their jobs and their students will fail their GCSEs, but it’s not banning. It’s just restricting the core texts more and more, not banning. Nobody else has ever used the word “ban” in the sense of “restricting” before.
Does this guy have some personal animus against American literature or is this simply a case of British kids being taught British things? I’m asking, I really don’t know enough about the situation to determine it either way.
On one hand, these are classic books. But on the other hand, they are classics to the US because it deals with our history. Someone growing up in England will not have the same history to deal with. What’s wrong with teaching English kids English things?