Michael Gove has a talent for making himself unpopular with the media. Ever since tuition fees he has become a sort of ghoul, a man hell bent on ruining the British education system. Now he’s put his foot in it again with his reforms to the English GCSE, in a move heralded by the press as the “banning” of To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men from the syllabuses.
I don’t necessarily want to speak in defence of Gove – who knows what kind of nationalistic idea he might be trying to appeal to – but one can’t help but be astonished at the eagerness of journalists to spice up their stories. However much people bang on about the banning of American books, if one actually examines the issue, it is quite clear that Gove has done nothing of the sort.
The impetus for the change, it turns out, is Worcester College’s very own Provost, Jonathan Bate, who sits on a board of experts reporting recommendations to the government concerning the English syllabus.
The group came to the conclusion that the current GCSE English syllabus is terrifyingly narrow, with 90% of AQA students reading only one novel (or should that be novella?) – Of Mice and Men. Bate himself has said in The Guardian that many children found this book “tedious, undeveloped, overly schematic and all too easy to reduce to a set of themes”.
The board thus suggested a broadening of the syllabus, with a pre-Twentieth Century novel, a play, and a selection of poetry. They even recommended that, since teachers evidently teach best what they are passionate about, we abandon set texts altogether and leave only this general framework. If Of Mice and Men is not tedious in itself, then surely the fact that the vast majority of anyone reading this has studied it, makes it so.
Unfortunately, the reforms to the GCSE have had the result that American literature seems to have been dropped from the syllabus. Our Provost, and Gove alongside him, have blamed the exam boards, as unable to move away from the idea of a small corpus of fixed set texts.
One suspects there is more to it than this, but it is worth bearing in mind next time the headlines run and Twitter buzzes that the drastic and draconian measures being touted – here the eradication of American literature from the syllabuses – are rarely the reality.
