Uk exam boards to drop To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men

[carpetmojo]

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....... ]

[tubemonkey]

Post-1914 drama and prose

JB Priestley - An Inspector Calls
Alan Bennett - The History Boys
Willy Russell - Blood Brothers
Dennis Kelly - DNA
Shelagh Delaney - A Taste of Honey
Simon Stephens - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time (drama adaptation)
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Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go
Meera Syal - Anita and Me
Stephen Kelman - Pigeon English

I don't know the above titles, but all of the rest on that list are definitely better choices than TKAM and OMAM; both of which I despised reading in school. So cheers to the folks who removed them.

[ProfCrash]

Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing, Julius Caesar

19th Century novel:

Charles Dickens - Great Expectations
Charles Dickens - A Christmas Carol
Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre

Post-1914 drama and prose

William Golding - The Lord of the Flies
George Orwell - Animal Farm

Those are the books I read in High School English class in the US. There are others that I read not covered on that list (Wuthering Heights was pure torture) and I know plenty of folks who read a slightly different mix. It depended on the teacher and the school.

My college English classes covered authors from all over the globe who wrote in the English language. I did take a class on American Authors and Expatriots in Paris: 1920's that focuses on American authors who lived in Paris but even then, we discussed other authors, English speaking and otherwise, who influenced the Americans abroad. And the art, music, politics and party scene. It was an awesome class.

So, English Literature to me means anything written in the English language. Classes on American authors were titled as such. You could even specialize in American authors if you wanted but you still had classes that covered the entire English language.

I don't have a problem with the Brits focusing on British authors but it seems to me that an English degree is not about a specific country but the language as a whole and that includes how the language is used in outside of the UK or Great Britain.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by ProfCrash

I don't have a problem with the Brits focusing on British authors but it seems to me that an English degree is not about a specific country but the language as a whole and that includes how the language is used in outside of the UK or Great Britain.

Bear in mind that this isn't a degree - it's an elementary study of the subject for teenagers.

[tubemonkey]

Most Americans use the terms English and British interchangeably. They also think England, Great Britain, and United Kingdom are all names for the same country.

[ProfCrash]

Many Americans think that Africa is one country. We do not do a great job teaching geography in this country. I know this because when I taught International Relations and Comparative Politics I always had to pull down the map and point out to my students that those individual countries are really sovereign territories and that there is no country of Africa but there is a continent of Africa with independent countries. I promise you that this conversation took up a good portion of a class with about 25% of the class telling me I was wrong and that their text book was wrong.

I drank a good amount at the begining of the semester.

I do think that part of the confusion is that in the US we call the states, well, states. So when you introduce a Kenya as a State, they think state = Kansas so Kenya is the same as Kansas meaning that there is an entire country of Africa. My problem is that we would have this conversation about Africa after we defined a state, country, nation and so they should not have that confusion.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by ProfCrash

Many Americans think that Africa is one country. We do not do a great job teaching geography in this country.

[ProfCrash]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Bear in mind that this isn't a degree - it's an elementary study of the subject for teenagers.

And in my English classes in the US we read Brits alongside Americans in elementary, junior high, and high school. It really wasn't that confusing. I think I read Huck Finn in the same class that we read Lord of the Flies.

I fail to see how it is confusing or problematic. The point of the class is to teach students to appreciate the use of the English language. We are fortunate that there are so many great authors across the globe that write in English. Why limit the students to reading only British authors?

Sorry, that argue doesn't fly with me. Heck, Wuthering Heights was one of the three books you could chose to write on for the Advanced Placement exam when I took it. the AP exam is taken so that students can get college credit for high school classes. The point of the exam is to demonstrate that you understand the various devices used in the English language and could make a coherent argument regarding the use of English in a specific novel. It was not to demonstrate that you understood how an American author wrote but how the English language was being used.

There is plenty of time for people to focus their learning on one specific subset of literature, I fail to see why that is needed for younger children.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by ProfCrash

Many Americans think that Africa is one country. We do not do a great job teaching geography in this country. I know this because when I taught International Relations and Comparative Politics I always had to pull down the map and point out to my students that those individual countries are really sovereign territories and that there is no country of Africa but there is a continent of Africa with independent countries. I promise you that this conversation took up a good portion of a class with about 25% of the class telling me I was wrong and that their text book was wrong.

I drank a good amount at the begining of the semester.

I do think that part of the confusion is that in the US we call the states, well, states. So when you introduce a Kenya as a State, they think state = Kansas so Kenya is the same as Kansas meaning that there is an entire country of Africa. My problem is that we would have this conversation about Africa after we defined a state, country, nation and so they should not have that confusion.

That's funny; but at the same time, it's extremely disheartening.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by ProfCrash

I fail to see how it is confusing or problematic. The point of the class is to teach students to appreciate the use of the English language. We are fortunate that there are so many great authors across the globe that write in English. Why limit the students to reading only British authors?

Because the purpose of the course is to instil a small portion of their literary and cultural heritage into young people. British cultural heritage, not American, or whoever else may happen to write in English. That's certainly not saying that there aren't important works of literature written by non-British authors - of course there are - and if a student decides to study literature at a more advanced level, they may well be studied, but that is not the purpose of the GCSE course.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

Most Americans use the terms English and British interchangeably. They also think England, Great Britain, and United Kingdom are all names for the same country.

Most British people have the same confusion, believe me. The problem is that some of these names refer to political entities, while others are geographic. "Great Britain", for example, is the name for the island that is the British mainland, and comprises most of England, Scotland, and Wales, while "UK" (or, more formally, "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland") includes Northern Ireland and all the other small islands, too. Many people who live in England use "England" interchangeably with "Britain" (which annoys people who live in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland).

So Americans aren't alone in finding it confusing.

[Jessica Lares]

That's not a bad list. I also read a lot of them in middle/high school, I also took a semester of Shakespeare as extra curriculum.

[Bilbo1967]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Because the purpose of the course is to instil a small portion of their literary and cultural heritage into young people. British cultural heritage, not American, or whoever else may happen to write in English. That's certainly not saying that there aren't important works of literature written by non-British authors - of course there are - and if a student decides to study literature at a more advanced level, they may well be studied, but that is not the purpose of the GCSE course.

Do you have a cite for that being the purpose of the course? It's not something I've ever seen stated anywhere.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Bilbo1967

Do you have a cite for that being the purpose of the course? It's not something I've ever seen stated anywhere.

Just seems like common sense to me. What do you think the purpose is?

[andyh2000]

It would appear culture is a part of it but definitely not the only purpose:

GCSE specifications in English literature should develop knowledge and skills in reading,
writing and critical thinking. Through literature, students have a chance to develop
culturally and acquire knowledge of the best that has been thought and written. Studying
GCSE English literature should encourage students to read widely for pleasure, and as a
preparation for studying literature at a higher level.

from https://www.gov.uk/government/upload...literature.pdf

Andrew