To Kill A Mockingbird

I read various alarming reports in the media recently claiming that the Education Secretary at Westminster, Michael Gove, had banned certain great works of American literature including To Kill and Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men and The Crucible.

Now this surprised me I have to say and I considered writing about this outrageous act because The Crucible, for example, saved me form a force fed diet of Shakespeare which I could never really warm to when I was at school.

Yet here we have the truth in an article written by Michael Gove for The Telegraph - the whole thing's a old of baloney from beginning to end, a complete work of fiction, and even though he's a 'nasty' Tory in some people's eyes not even he would dream of killing a mockingbird.

You'd think that the people behind these ridiculous reports would now have the good grace to apologise for writing such nonsense although I suspect it all comes down to the kind of politics that people are so fed up with these days.      


Michael Gove: Kill a Mockingbird? I’d never dream of it.

Reports that I want to ban American authors from the curriculum are the purest fiction, says Michael Gove.

Gregory Peck in the 1962 film version of 'To Kill A Mockingbird' Photo: Rex Features


By Michael Gove - The Telegraph

Arthur Miller’s wonderful play The Crucible has a powerful central message. It’s the same lesson anyone reading Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar learns from the fate of Cinna the poet. When emotion triumphs over reason, and when members of a crowd encourage each other’s righteous indignation, then the truth gets trampled underfoot.

That’s what happened over the weekend – with respect to the English literature GCSE of all things. Newspapers breathlessly reported the “fact” that I have banned Arthur Miller, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice And Men and Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird from the nation’s classrooms. I have apparently decreed that only literature written by true-born Englishmen (copyright Daniel Defoe) can be read by our children. And without waiting to do anything as mundane as checking the facts, a host of culture warriors have taken to Twitter to denounce this literary isolationism.

As an English literature graduate – and indeed unabashed Americanophile – I am rather pleased on one level that so many rhetorical swords should have leapt from their scabbards to defend both literature and the unity of the Anglosphere. But sadly I can’t take too much delight in these protestations of literary affection. Because they are – in more than just one sense – rooted in fiction.

I have not banned anything. Nor has anyone else. All we are doing is asking exam boards to broaden – not narrow – the books young people study for GCSE.

Last year the Department for Education set out new requirements around which exam boards would frame their specifications. The new subject content for all GCSEs is broader and deeper than before – reflecting a higher level of ambition for children. In English literature, we emphasised that students must read a wide range of texts. We also set out a core that had to be covered – specifically 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.

Beyond this, exam boards have the freedom to design specifications so that they are stretching and interesting, and include any number of other texts from which teachers can then choose.

A specification that allows for Keats and Heaney, Shakespeare and Miller, the Brontës and Pinter was welcomed by teachers, who recognise that English literature has an unparalleled range of writers who can inspire young minds. And what has been sad about English literature GCSE in the past has been how few of those writers have been studied.

In one year recently, 280,000 candidates studied just one novel for the AQA GCSE. The overwhelming majority of them (more than 190,000) studied Of Mice and Men. Most of the remaining AQA pupils studied other 20th-century texts including works such as Lord of the Flies. The numbers studying novels written before 1900 – Pride and Prejudice, Far from the Madding Crowd and Wuthering Heights – were tiny in comparison, around 1 per cent of the total. The situation is no different in drama, or when one looks at other exam boards.

Do I think Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbirdare bad books? Of course not. I read and loved them all as a child. And I want children in the future to be able to read them all. But sometimes a rogue meme can be halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on. Just because one chap at one exam board claimed I didn’t likeOf Mice and Men, the myth took hold that it – and every other pesky American author – had been banned.

There are, in reality, four exam boards that can offer GCSE English literature and there are no rules requiring them to exclude or marginalise any writer. If they wish to include Steinbeck – whether it’s Of Mice and Men or The Grapes of Wrath – no one would be more delighted than me, because I want children to read more widely and range more freely intellectually in every subject. In English literature, I want young people to encounter as many books as possible from different cultures. I want pupils to grow up able to empathise with Jane Eyre as well as Lennie, to admire Elizabeth Bennet as much as Scout Finch.

The evidence that students can be introduced to a wide range of English literature at a young age is there in wonderful schools such as King Solomon Academy, in one of the poorest parts of London, where all children are expected to read Jane Austen, a Shakespearean pastoral comedy such as As You Like It, and a Shakespearean tragedy alongside George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, William Golding, Erich Maria Remarque and Primo Levi.

Or consider what they teach at Thomas Jones Primary, in Ladbroke Grove, a school with one of the most disadvantaged intakes in London. The range of texts studied by Year 6 pupils there typically includes not just Philip Pullman but a range of Shakespeare, and poems by Blake, Brooke, Auden, Eliot and Tennyson.

We have the best generation of young teachers ever in our schools, with more top degrees than ever before. Our new English literature GCSE has been designed with them in mind, as a way of helping to introduce more and more children to the great minds of the past.

As with all our reforms, we want children to become masters of the best that has been thought and written. And with the cultural confidence and imaginative sympathy that comes from reading great literature, children can then go on to be authors of their own life stories.

Michael Gove is Secretary of State for Education