Ummm...............
I cannot resist bringing into the discussion the point that our Education Secretary, a career politician naturally with no experience of teaching, is pursuing a personal idealogical policy, committing huge financial resources to establish another tier of unnecessary educational establishments, thus weakening and impoverishing those already in place.
Against which this relatively minor curriculum tinkering - itself an expression of his "little England" outlook, as well as furthering his own agenda - pales into near insignificance.
He has a total unwillingness to spend these millions on transforming and improving existing infrastructure, resources and systems - probably because this would run the danger of showing a comprehensive school system works - and ignores and derides the opinions, suggestions and advice of the teaching professions as well as his own officials.
.
He seems to want to drag education back to when he was a grammar-school boy, and people knew their place.
To my mind if a pupil finds the way into literature through enjoying works of the excellence of "To Kill a Mocking Bird", rather than Jane Austen, who cares what nationality or culture the author hails from ?
Especially if the pupil is from a "deprived" background, and finds the so-called classics, which they are told are the best stuff to read, a near impenetrable thicket.
Let 'em read something, I say ..................
[ My apologies for betraying my own feelings over wider government policy, and confess to having been fortunate enough to encounter a gifted English Literature teacher at my own comprehensive school, who had spent some years in the US. This, to us, impossibly exotic character introduced many of us to works way outside of the prescribed curriculum, at an early stage of our lives.
Including the book in question, and others even more incendiary !
This enlightened approach certainly helped more than a few of us to go on to read widely, and expand our horizons in many ways....... ]
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