My Fury About English Literature GCSEs

Many of my writer friends have been getting very exercised this week about the suggestion that US novels are to be removed from English Literature GCSE syllabus. My Facebook account has caught fire with their indignation. Their excitation arises mainly from articles written by John Sutherland in the Guardian. For reference, look at http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/26/10-american-writers-english-children-study-gcse-michael-Gove though don’t take too much notice of any of the supposed facts he quotes.

I’ve done some fact checking and my first question is this : Is John Sutherland an idiot? Three of the 10 US ‘novels’ he lists as must-reads for GCSE students are collections of poetry, one is a play and one is a non-fiction book about American history. I wonder whether he’s actually read them or is this just sloppy genre classification? In the original version of the same article, he managed to mistake a picture of Herman Melville for one of Walt Whitman (hey, John, for future reference, Walt’s the folksy looking guy with the long white beard). Poor, John, he certainly does not seem to know that students only study approximately 6 writers in total at GCSE, depending on how they approach the poetry section, so suggesting they ‘should’ study 10 US novels shows a wanton ignorance of what the English Literature GCSE consists of. Once again, are you sure your qualified to comment on this issue, Mr Sutherland?

If we’re going to have a debate about the English Lit GCSE, please let’s choose a spokesman who looks like he could pass the exam ( i.e. research and present evidence without distorting it and with proper references to source).

Here’s where I think the debate really ought to concentrate:

What is being taught at Eng Lit GCSE is not an ‘introduction to the books we think our kids should be reading’, neither is it brainwashing about how to love ‘good’ literature. Rather, the course is about developing a technical ability to analyse text. Having been through it with two kids of my own recently, the main issue is choosing a text that has relevance to them. As much as I love Harper Lee and John Steinbeck ( my two favourite all time authors as it happens) I am forced to admit that they say nothing at all of relevance to my kids, and neither – by the way – would any of the other authors on Mr Sutherland’s list (and this has nothing to do with the nationality of the author, rather it’s just that my kids see them as representations of a bygone age and it’s bad enough that they have to consider such things in history lessons.) To put it plainly, those authors are too damned slow at getting to the crux of the issue, and not enough things blow up.

They have a good point. What we like isn’t what they like and the tragedy of what Gove wants to do is not what he wants to get rid of, but the fact that he wants to replace it with turgid 19th century novels from the age of marriage plots and out dated sexual politics that have more place as history lessons than as a vehicle for teaching textural analysis. I suspect any mission of encouraging a ‘lasting appreciation for literature’ would be better served by making kids analyse the books they want to read, rather than torturing them with ones they don’t.

As I understand it, Gove is not proposing to ban anybody on grounds of nationality. Rather he’s insisting that the course consists of ‘a whole Shakespeare play, poetry from 1789 including the romantics, a 19th-century novel, and some fiction or drama written in the British Isles since 1914,’ so the poetry and 19th-Century novel has no prescription as to authorial nationality (as has been suggested elsewhere). What this revised syllabus does prescribe is that this is a ticket to Dullsville that’s probably the best way to ensure that we have more Scientists and Engineers going through universities in future. What Eng Lit is teaching – rightly in my view – is not cultural history, but how to approach contextual concepts such as thematic identification, character and character ambiguity, imagery, poetic meter etc. These are just as prevalent and well formed in the novels of, for example, Chris d’Lacey or JK Rowling as they are in Steinbeck, and rendered with more structural integrity in modern novels than in Victorian ones. In my view, you could teach English Lit GCSE just as well from ‘Fly Cherokee Fly’ and ‘Harry Potter’ as you could from ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ (though you’d end up with a knowledge of racing pigeons and magic rather than American Civil rights issues) and rather better than you can from ‘Pride and Prejudice’.

I’ve also seen it suggested that trying to marginalise American writers is somehow making the GCSE more parochial. Believe me, you could hardly make it more parochial than it already is. If you take out the Shakespeare, more than 50% of the material my kids were given was by American writers. I mean, come on, this is already way out of balance. There are about 1.5 billion or 1.8 billion English speakers in the world, and only 300 million (20%) are American. English is the primary language of the Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and various Caribbean and Pacific island nations, and an official language of Pakistan, India, the Philippines, Singapore and many sub-Saharan African countries. Do these countries enjoy any representation, prescribed or otherwise, in the literature education of our children? No, they do not.