So: I followed the link to the syllabus, and it seems to me both a lot worse and slightly better than I understood from reading your summary.
Slightly better, in that I didn't understand that some of these are options, rather than a compulsory syllabus: it is still possible to study Emily Dickinson instead of Carol Ann Duffy (not your fault: reading back, you did say "allow the teaching of", and I simply misunderstood!).
But a lot worse, because I'm flabbergasted about just how limited and narrow the syllabus is as a whole. These are, if I understand correctly, people taking English as one of just three or four subjects at the school-leaving age of 18. And that's it? That's all they study? Fifteen short poems by one poet (only two of whom are writing before 1980)? One play, which doesn't have to be by Shakespeare? One (not very long) novel (only one of which was published before 1900)? And two factual books, both published (as they point out) after 2000? That's what they're spending a third of their time on for a year or two at school in their late teens? And this is meant to get them ready for studying English at university - or indeed for reading literature more widely at home?
Personally (and unlike C.S. Lewis), I think it's not a bad idea to include the occasional modern work in an English syllabus. I still remember the pleasure of studying Watership Down in school at the age of 12: it was less than 5 years after it was published. It's a book that I perhaps would have gotten round to reading eventually, but probably not so young, and I feel like I benefited hugely from reading it then - it's stayed with me for the rest of my life. But that was (a) a longer book than most of the ones on this syllabus; (b) challenging enough for a 12 year old so that it was helpful, if not essential, to read it with a teacher's guidance, and (c), crucially, being read in the context of a lot of more classic literature, which formed the main body of the syllabus.
I know teenagers are unwilling to read nowadays - in my own university-level teaching I push the students through a lot of difficult texts, and I'm met with constant complaints, as well as my own private realization that most of the students don't do all or even most of the reading, taking every short-cut they can to avoid it while still getting a reasonable grade. But I've never seen anything like this: these are students aged 17 or 18 who have actively chosen to study English, and they are made to read less in two years than I have on my syllabus for 6 weeks' worth of reading.
I don't know what can be done about this ("Old man shakes his fist at the heavens at the cluelessness of the young"). My feeling, like yours, is that there is still the desire for literature out there - novels are still being written and sold, even classic literature still seems to have a market. It's as much the lack of ambition on the part of the syllabus-setters that surprises me: presumably they COULD create a much more challenging syllabus if they wanted, and people would study it because they would have to. But apparently they don't. Is this about competition between subjects: the fear that if they make English too "difficult", people will abandon it for easier subjects instead?
It's almost certainly at least in part about inter subject competition; English and English lit are in massive decline at A level. This year just gone there were ~35,000 entries for English lit versus ~80,000 for Psychology.
Anecdotally, my sister is an English teacher, and their A level syllabus has I believe a 100 poem anthology, a play (Streetcar), and a novel (Jane Eyre), and they struggle to get them to do the reading. Some drop out, because there is too much of it, and others have to be dragged through by the skin of their teeth.
And I'm not saying I definitely disagree with adding more texts and rigour, but if interest drops below a certain point, it becomes harder for schools to justify offering a subject, and they're certainly not going to have multiple classes with only a handful of students, which reduces the subject combinations you can have with it.
This makes me feel unutterably sad and desperate. But it has also spurred on a decision: from now on, when I am asked to read to children anywhere - including my beloved Southeast Asian schools where I read via Zoom - I will always choose the classics.
I was prepared to scoff at your takes here — making an unwarranted assumption that you objected to anyone examining the fact Orwell was a vicious asshole (if we’re being polite), because that’s what I’ve come to expect when I see “Orwell” — but out of a sense of fairness, decided to read both your review and this post fully.
Mea culpa; we fully agree.
I grew up until age ten in Russia, both Soviet and post-Soviet; my mama was a philologist by training, and even if she hadn’t been, my Russian primers were by and large classic short fiction, sketches, and extracts from longer romans and novels — sometimes but not necessarily ones written by Great Russian [sic — Gogol was a Russophone novelist, not Russian, I will die on this hill] Novelists specifically for children and adolescents.
As a result, I have zero fear of the classics (I don’t read them often because I’m still on a bizarro nonfiction and theory kick. I barely read pulp [complimentary] and popular [derogatory] novels any more, never mind classics from any genre, contemporary standouts, or anything else.) It genuinely helped to have those texts presented as accessible and age-appropriate.
If we’re going to chuck out Orwell, why not replace him with a notable author working in the same era and rough genre? Why not … idk, Zora Neale Hurston or somebody (I’m aware she was an anthropologist, but given enough time, a memoir becomes an autoethnology)? Since like … the other thing here is, a biography is not the same kind of text as a memoir. If we’re chucking “Down and Out In Paris and London”, at least replace it with something with a similar relationship to sources, verification, etc.
Nobody understood or explicated totalitarianism like Orwell did. And the Wartime Diaries he contributed to the British press prior to WWII helped undergird Britain’s (and thus the west’s) entrance into that conflict. I wouldn’t want to write the counterfactual on that.
This latest “popular front” isn’t worth the time. Btw his book on the Spanish Civil War is brilliant also.
A simple “good grief” should have sufficed to counter this level of malevolent idiocy.
Wasn’t Koestler writing about the authoritarian tyranny of the communist state rather than the mind control Orwell pinpointed particularly in 1984?
At any rate, they were friends. And of course, there are a lot of authors one could bring into the discussion about communist state tyranny. Ie Solzhenitsyn for a colossal one.
The sophomoric churlishness of the original comment here set me off.
In my odd North Dakota high school, all the overachievers and smart children took Latin. I find the canon to be a place of home on can venture and return too. I find we should encourage the canon in school and to look beyond it in one’s own private reading as well.
I love Bolano 2666 , but will it make it to 2666 ?, I don’t know but Sophocles and Shakespeare will.
Being made to read something above your head has a use nobody explains at the time. The measurement gets taken decades later. A book that was too hard at seventeen stays where you left it, so going back at fifty shows you the distance you have covered. That distance is most of what you were given. Contemporary work will not hold still for it. It meets the reader at whatever age he happens to be, which is pleasant and leaves him nothing to return to.
And no more Advanced Extension Award / STEP papers designed to stretch the top 10% as far as I can see. (Discontinued in 2009 when the A level A* was introduced) One of the highlights of my UVI year. What a shame.
Is that the same as the AS level ( I think it was called)? I went to a comprehensive and was one of three pupils selected for that. We had a lovely small group and discussed poetry in depth. Then our teacher had to shut it down because they had too many remedial kids and not enough teachers for them. She argued that bright kids have special needs too, but nope. :-/ Still read English at a red brick, though.
I don't think you mean an AS level - they are just half an A level. Everyone used to do the AS exams at the end of year 12, which would give them half of their A level marks, or a standalone qualification if they dropped the subject.
This is such a great restatement of the issue: "The problem is not that Wifedom is 'replacing' Orwell, but that the whole syllabus is stupid either way."
I was blessed with wonderful teachers when I was studying English literature for A level in 1965. The set texts included Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, Conrad, Graham Greene. I was allowed to give lectures on Saul Bellow and Sean O’Casey. I did a scholarship paper on Ulysses.
I’m assuming you are aware that these texts are on the list of possible NEA choices (coursework), not set texts. I teach this specification and last year my class studied Jane Eyre and Othello, alongside modern poetry (though I could have chosen Blake or Dickinson). The students then make a choice of one of the non fiction texts on the list you reference, and teachers guide them to a second text choice, and support them to write a comparative essay. I find this semi-independent study is excellent for developing essay writing and critical thinking skills, focusing for example on presentation of narrative voice; or the different ways that language is used. It’s easy to froth and criticise when you have no knowledge of a course or the teaching of it, and to undermine the efforts of teachers and students. The Language and Literature course generally engages students who might not choose a more traditional literature course. My experience is that it is engaging and thought provoking, and the positive feedback I get from my students tells me they get a lot from their study.
I haven’t mentioned Bill Bryson or Carol Ann Duffy. Is this a reply to my comment? My comment highlights that the texts you have criticised are coursework texts that might be chosen by individual students and are not taught as whole class texts. I also draw attention to the classic texts my students have studied and the writing skills they develop through the semi-independent NEA component.
My piece objects both to the set texts and the coursework texts, and in any event the coursework texts are chosen from a list that is inadequate. That your students happen to be fortunate enough to be given Jane Eyre doesn't excuse the fact that other teachers can choose Atonement instead.
This all sounds a bit snobby to me. In Tasmania in years 11 and 12 students study six wonderful poems from Shakespeare to Duffy (now replaced with the brilliant Ali Cobby Eckerman) taking detours through Byron, Barrett Browning and Judith Wright. It's a mad, exhilarating gallop through the poetry movements to see how the art evolves and echoes back on itself through the ages. Free verse is a crucial addition so they can see how poetry is alive and well today. Also free verse is now decidedly vintage if you want to talk about drawing lines.
Why remove Orwell but add a bio about his wife? You should be able to form an opinion, which you can't if you only know the bio. Shouldn't they read Orwell *and* the bio, in that case? Or her actual books, not someone writing about her books. I'm actually confused why non-fiction like that is on the syllabus at all, tbh. And I've had two non-fiction books published!
At A-level, we read "Wuthering Heights" in great detail, Shakespeare's sonnets, Wordsworth, "The Alchemist", a book of six contemporary women poets.... No non-fiction on there. Other than an excerpt from "The Road to Wigan Pier" (the woman trying to clear a downpipe with a stick) when the inspectors paid a visit (or was that at GCSE? Possibly... It was 30 years ago...)
Obviously literary non-fiction is a thing, but doesn't it nees time to percolate? It seems like a rather knee-jerk reaction. And there's plenty of literary non-fiction written by women - "Moon in Eclipse" about Mary Shelley is excellent, for example. Or Virginia Woolf and her room of one's own.
I did my qualifications fairly recently (GCSE around 6 years ago, A-Level about 4) so I have some experience with recent syllabuses.
I think George Orwell is one of our best writers so one has to make a very strong case to replace him with anything, let alone a questionable memoir. For me, doing Animal Farm at GCSE was a watershed moment and contributed to my abiding love of literature. So in this respect I am saddened to think others will be deprived of a similar experience.
I think it's good to see the teaching of English as a bridge between casual and sustained reading as well as exposure to great works. On one level, then, it is less about the texts themselves and more about their length and complexity. This shouldn't come at the expense of quality but I don't think only reading the classics should be the MO.
I do share your exasperation with the teaching of excerpts in lieu of books though. Thinking back, I recall my GCSE texts were quite short; Animal Farm and The Sign of the Four were the key texts and they are a novella and a short story. Perhaps we did not move into teaching extracts as suddenly as we thought. It only occurred because of a slower, longer-term reduction in expectations and the reduced capacities of the average English department after a decade of austerity.
The reason chosen GCSE texts are almost always short, even though there are longer options on the list, is that schools deliberately pick the shortest options possible (traditionally Of Mice and Men and an Inspector Calls; if you went to an English state school in the last 15 years the odds are good that you did at least one of the above) because the books have to be read in class, and the longer the book the longer it takes, and the less time you have for actual analysis. No English teacher with a brain in their head is going to trust their class to read a book at home, and no head of department would let them even if they wanted to. Teachers of core subjects are under an insane amount of pressure, and while long term a system where kids read the books at home would be better, I don't know how you would get there, because currently you might have a singular child in a top set who reads the book, a handful of their compatriots who read an AI summary, and the rest won't even pretend to have read it.
I agree. It is these factors which are more to blame than 'woke' which seems a slightly spurious argument. The classes were too large (one teacher, up to 30 students, scant resources) and funding too stretched to make the reading of longer texts realistic for most students. A handful would have read them but most wouldn't.
If AI was available when I was doing GCSEs, I am sure they would have been used quite widely. The closest approximation of the tech was Google Translate for language classes and I have many memories of people turning in gibberish.
I don't think length can explain choosing The Sign of the Four over the other Sherlock Holmes novels: they are all pretty comparable in length.
If you have some other reason than anti-colonialist ideology why you think The Sign of the Four was chosen over the manifestly superior The Hound of the Baskervilles, or the historically more interesting A Study in Scarlet, I'd be interested to hear it. But in the absence of an alternative explanation, I don't think that "wokeness" is a spurious argument at all: it seems the obvious answer.
But seriously, I think it's an incredibly revealing choice. If you've decided for some odd reason that Sherlock Holmes is the way to go, then one might think you'd choose the the best Sherlock Holmes novel, and obviously The Hound of the Baskervilles is the only contender. Or if you wanted something more offbeat, then maybe A Study in Scarlet, as the book which introduced him. So why The Sign of the Four?
And the answer is painfully obvious: it's the only Sherlock Holmes book that allows you to address the Theme of Colonialism. Belisarius says he took his GCSEs 6 years ago - so 2020, right in the heart of The Great Awokening. And the Theme of Colonialism was obviously something that needed to be at the center of every English syllabus in some form.
Whether the book is any good, of course, was an irrelevant question.
Considering Funder’s book when reading George Orwell in English courses or in women’s studies makes sense. I loved Funder’s book. I ran across it in my public library shortly after it was published and read no commentary about it. I’m a Canadian whose parents both left large families in England in the early 1950s. Funder’s book described so many social norms, incompletely and hazily mentioned by family members; it was rich with pictures of everyday lower and middle class life: the scope of women’s responsibilities, household and farm drudgery, life in cheap apartments, diet, sanitation, health care, travel, scarcity and more. The book added rich context to stories my aunts and grandmothers told me, and left me with a haunting mystery—what led Eileen Orwell to sacrifice so much for her husband. I have retained vivid pictures: Eileen smoking as she peeled apples (so like my grandmother), women’s daily tasks in rural England (like my mother and her four sisters), difficult decisions centring around a lack of money, and values about personal privacy, so very different than today’s norms.
So: I followed the link to the syllabus, and it seems to me both a lot worse and slightly better than I understood from reading your summary.
Slightly better, in that I didn't understand that some of these are options, rather than a compulsory syllabus: it is still possible to study Emily Dickinson instead of Carol Ann Duffy (not your fault: reading back, you did say "allow the teaching of", and I simply misunderstood!).
But a lot worse, because I'm flabbergasted about just how limited and narrow the syllabus is as a whole. These are, if I understand correctly, people taking English as one of just three or four subjects at the school-leaving age of 18. And that's it? That's all they study? Fifteen short poems by one poet (only two of whom are writing before 1980)? One play, which doesn't have to be by Shakespeare? One (not very long) novel (only one of which was published before 1900)? And two factual books, both published (as they point out) after 2000? That's what they're spending a third of their time on for a year or two at school in their late teens? And this is meant to get them ready for studying English at university - or indeed for reading literature more widely at home?
Personally (and unlike C.S. Lewis), I think it's not a bad idea to include the occasional modern work in an English syllabus. I still remember the pleasure of studying Watership Down in school at the age of 12: it was less than 5 years after it was published. It's a book that I perhaps would have gotten round to reading eventually, but probably not so young, and I feel like I benefited hugely from reading it then - it's stayed with me for the rest of my life. But that was (a) a longer book than most of the ones on this syllabus; (b) challenging enough for a 12 year old so that it was helpful, if not essential, to read it with a teacher's guidance, and (c), crucially, being read in the context of a lot of more classic literature, which formed the main body of the syllabus.
I know teenagers are unwilling to read nowadays - in my own university-level teaching I push the students through a lot of difficult texts, and I'm met with constant complaints, as well as my own private realization that most of the students don't do all or even most of the reading, taking every short-cut they can to avoid it while still getting a reasonable grade. But I've never seen anything like this: these are students aged 17 or 18 who have actively chosen to study English, and they are made to read less in two years than I have on my syllabus for 6 weeks' worth of reading.
I don't know what can be done about this ("Old man shakes his fist at the heavens at the cluelessness of the young"). My feeling, like yours, is that there is still the desire for literature out there - novels are still being written and sold, even classic literature still seems to have a market. It's as much the lack of ambition on the part of the syllabus-setters that surprises me: presumably they COULD create a much more challenging syllabus if they wanted, and people would study it because they would have to. But apparently they don't. Is this about competition between subjects: the fear that if they make English too "difficult", people will abandon it for easier subjects instead?
One thing we can do is to publicly insist on higher standards!
It's almost certainly at least in part about inter subject competition; English and English lit are in massive decline at A level. This year just gone there were ~35,000 entries for English lit versus ~80,000 for Psychology.
Anecdotally, my sister is an English teacher, and their A level syllabus has I believe a 100 poem anthology, a play (Streetcar), and a novel (Jane Eyre), and they struggle to get them to do the reading. Some drop out, because there is too much of it, and others have to be dragged through by the skin of their teeth.
And I'm not saying I definitely disagree with adding more texts and rigour, but if interest drops below a certain point, it becomes harder for schools to justify offering a subject, and they're certainly not going to have multiple classes with only a handful of students, which reduces the subject combinations you can have with it.
I understand what you mean, just saying it's a half literature, half language A level, so it will look narrower
This makes me feel unutterably sad and desperate. But it has also spurred on a decision: from now on, when I am asked to read to children anywhere - including my beloved Southeast Asian schools where I read via Zoom - I will always choose the classics.
yes! good!
I was prepared to scoff at your takes here — making an unwarranted assumption that you objected to anyone examining the fact Orwell was a vicious asshole (if we’re being polite), because that’s what I’ve come to expect when I see “Orwell” — but out of a sense of fairness, decided to read both your review and this post fully.
Mea culpa; we fully agree.
I grew up until age ten in Russia, both Soviet and post-Soviet; my mama was a philologist by training, and even if she hadn’t been, my Russian primers were by and large classic short fiction, sketches, and extracts from longer romans and novels — sometimes but not necessarily ones written by Great Russian [sic — Gogol was a Russophone novelist, not Russian, I will die on this hill] Novelists specifically for children and adolescents.
As a result, I have zero fear of the classics (I don’t read them often because I’m still on a bizarro nonfiction and theory kick. I barely read pulp [complimentary] and popular [derogatory] novels any more, never mind classics from any genre, contemporary standouts, or anything else.) It genuinely helped to have those texts presented as accessible and age-appropriate.
If we’re going to chuck out Orwell, why not replace him with a notable author working in the same era and rough genre? Why not … idk, Zora Neale Hurston or somebody (I’m aware she was an anthropologist, but given enough time, a memoir becomes an autoethnology)? Since like … the other thing here is, a biography is not the same kind of text as a memoir. If we’re chucking “Down and Out In Paris and London”, at least replace it with something with a similar relationship to sources, verification, etc.
“If we’re going to chuck out Orwell, why not replace him with a notable author working in the same era and rough genre”?
Aldous Huxley says hello.
They only study 3 or 4 texts so the vast majority of authors have already been chucked out
Nobody understood or explicated totalitarianism like Orwell did. And the Wartime Diaries he contributed to the British press prior to WWII helped undergird Britain’s (and thus the west’s) entrance into that conflict. I wouldn’t want to write the counterfactual on that.
This latest “popular front” isn’t worth the time. Btw his book on the Spanish Civil War is brilliant also.
A simple “good grief” should have sufficed to counter this level of malevolent idiocy.
“To make a prairie it takes a clover
and one bee, —
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.”
(She also who shall not be replaced.)
I think Arthur Koestler was just as good at explaining totalitarianism as Orwell.
Wasn’t Koestler writing about the authoritarian tyranny of the communist state rather than the mind control Orwell pinpointed particularly in 1984?
At any rate, they were friends. And of course, there are a lot of authors one could bring into the discussion about communist state tyranny. Ie Solzhenitsyn for a colossal one.
The sophomoric churlishness of the original comment here set me off.
Yes, you're correct that Koestler was writing specifically about the Stalinist USSR.
I believe Rubashov’s interrogation has more depth and intellectual nuance than Orwell's 1984.
Koestler and Orwell were friends; in fact, Orwell wrote 1984 with the influence of Koestler's Darkness at Noon.
yes indeed
Btw a fine essay, I find it quite on the mark
thanks!
It seems like you speak at least to the congregation, beyond the choir, I hope you turn the heads of the stiff necked philistines as well! Good luck!
In my odd North Dakota high school, all the overachievers and smart children took Latin. I find the canon to be a place of home on can venture and return too. I find we should encourage the canon in school and to look beyond it in one’s own private reading as well.
I love Bolano 2666 , but will it make it to 2666 ?, I don’t know but Sophocles and Shakespeare will.
Being made to read something above your head has a use nobody explains at the time. The measurement gets taken decades later. A book that was too hard at seventeen stays where you left it, so going back at fifty shows you the distance you have covered. That distance is most of what you were given. Contemporary work will not hold still for it. It meets the reader at whatever age he happens to be, which is pleasant and leaves him nothing to return to.
And no more Advanced Extension Award / STEP papers designed to stretch the top 10% as far as I can see. (Discontinued in 2009 when the A level A* was introduced) One of the highlights of my UVI year. What a shame.
Is that the same as the AS level ( I think it was called)? I went to a comprehensive and was one of three pupils selected for that. We had a lovely small group and discussed poetry in depth. Then our teacher had to shut it down because they had too many remedial kids and not enough teachers for them. She argued that bright kids have special needs too, but nope. :-/ Still read English at a red brick, though.
I don't think you mean an AS level - they are just half an A level. Everyone used to do the AS exams at the end of year 12, which would give them half of their A level marks, or a standalone qualification if they dropped the subject.
Ahh that's it - I think it was known as the S level!
Yes exactly ! I think some were call step papers but we called them AEA! I’m going to try and find some of them online..! Xx
This is such a great restatement of the issue: "The problem is not that Wifedom is 'replacing' Orwell, but that the whole syllabus is stupid either way."
I was blessed with wonderful teachers when I was studying English literature for A level in 1965. The set texts included Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, Conrad, Graham Greene. I was allowed to give lectures on Saul Bellow and Sean O’Casey. I did a scholarship paper on Ulysses.
This is a really brilliant article.
thanks!
'the whole syllabus is stupid': what arrogant & condescending twaddle.
I’m assuming you are aware that these texts are on the list of possible NEA choices (coursework), not set texts. I teach this specification and last year my class studied Jane Eyre and Othello, alongside modern poetry (though I could have chosen Blake or Dickinson). The students then make a choice of one of the non fiction texts on the list you reference, and teachers guide them to a second text choice, and support them to write a comparative essay. I find this semi-independent study is excellent for developing essay writing and critical thinking skills, focusing for example on presentation of narrative voice; or the different ways that language is used. It’s easy to froth and criticise when you have no knowledge of a course or the teaching of it, and to undermine the efforts of teachers and students. The Language and Literature course generally engages students who might not choose a more traditional literature course. My experience is that it is engaging and thought provoking, and the positive feedback I get from my students tells me they get a lot from their study.
None of this is an argument that authors like Bill Bryson or Carol Ann Duffy ought to be on an A-level syllabus
I haven’t mentioned Bill Bryson or Carol Ann Duffy. Is this a reply to my comment? My comment highlights that the texts you have criticised are coursework texts that might be chosen by individual students and are not taught as whole class texts. I also draw attention to the classic texts my students have studied and the writing skills they develop through the semi-independent NEA component.
My piece objects both to the set texts and the coursework texts, and in any event the coursework texts are chosen from a list that is inadequate. That your students happen to be fortunate enough to be given Jane Eyre doesn't excuse the fact that other teachers can choose Atonement instead.
This all sounds a bit snobby to me. In Tasmania in years 11 and 12 students study six wonderful poems from Shakespeare to Duffy (now replaced with the brilliant Ali Cobby Eckerman) taking detours through Byron, Barrett Browning and Judith Wright. It's a mad, exhilarating gallop through the poetry movements to see how the art evolves and echoes back on itself through the ages. Free verse is a crucial addition so they can see how poetry is alive and well today. Also free verse is now decidedly vintage if you want to talk about drawing lines.
Why remove Orwell but add a bio about his wife? You should be able to form an opinion, which you can't if you only know the bio. Shouldn't they read Orwell *and* the bio, in that case? Or her actual books, not someone writing about her books. I'm actually confused why non-fiction like that is on the syllabus at all, tbh. And I've had two non-fiction books published!
At A-level, we read "Wuthering Heights" in great detail, Shakespeare's sonnets, Wordsworth, "The Alchemist", a book of six contemporary women poets.... No non-fiction on there. Other than an excerpt from "The Road to Wigan Pier" (the woman trying to clear a downpipe with a stick) when the inspectors paid a visit (or was that at GCSE? Possibly... It was 30 years ago...)
Obviously literary non-fiction is a thing, but doesn't it nees time to percolate? It seems like a rather knee-jerk reaction. And there's plenty of literary non-fiction written by women - "Moon in Eclipse" about Mary Shelley is excellent, for example. Or Virginia Woolf and her room of one's own.
Interesting piece. I'm of two minds about this.
I did my qualifications fairly recently (GCSE around 6 years ago, A-Level about 4) so I have some experience with recent syllabuses.
I think George Orwell is one of our best writers so one has to make a very strong case to replace him with anything, let alone a questionable memoir. For me, doing Animal Farm at GCSE was a watershed moment and contributed to my abiding love of literature. So in this respect I am saddened to think others will be deprived of a similar experience.
I think it's good to see the teaching of English as a bridge between casual and sustained reading as well as exposure to great works. On one level, then, it is less about the texts themselves and more about their length and complexity. This shouldn't come at the expense of quality but I don't think only reading the classics should be the MO.
I do share your exasperation with the teaching of excerpts in lieu of books though. Thinking back, I recall my GCSE texts were quite short; Animal Farm and The Sign of the Four were the key texts and they are a novella and a short story. Perhaps we did not move into teaching extracts as suddenly as we thought. It only occurred because of a slower, longer-term reduction in expectations and the reduced capacities of the average English department after a decade of austerity.
It is insane that The Sign of the Four was a GCSE text!
The reason chosen GCSE texts are almost always short, even though there are longer options on the list, is that schools deliberately pick the shortest options possible (traditionally Of Mice and Men and an Inspector Calls; if you went to an English state school in the last 15 years the odds are good that you did at least one of the above) because the books have to be read in class, and the longer the book the longer it takes, and the less time you have for actual analysis. No English teacher with a brain in their head is going to trust their class to read a book at home, and no head of department would let them even if they wanted to. Teachers of core subjects are under an insane amount of pressure, and while long term a system where kids read the books at home would be better, I don't know how you would get there, because currently you might have a singular child in a top set who reads the book, a handful of their compatriots who read an AI summary, and the rest won't even pretend to have read it.
I agree. It is these factors which are more to blame than 'woke' which seems a slightly spurious argument. The classes were too large (one teacher, up to 30 students, scant resources) and funding too stretched to make the reading of longer texts realistic for most students. A handful would have read them but most wouldn't.
If AI was available when I was doing GCSEs, I am sure they would have been used quite widely. The closest approximation of the tech was Google Translate for language classes and I have many memories of people turning in gibberish.
I don't think length can explain choosing The Sign of the Four over the other Sherlock Holmes novels: they are all pretty comparable in length.
If you have some other reason than anti-colonialist ideology why you think The Sign of the Four was chosen over the manifestly superior The Hound of the Baskervilles, or the historically more interesting A Study in Scarlet, I'd be interested to hear it. But in the absence of an alternative explanation, I don't think that "wokeness" is a spurious argument at all: it seems the obvious answer.
At least it was written before 1900 ...
But seriously, I think it's an incredibly revealing choice. If you've decided for some odd reason that Sherlock Holmes is the way to go, then one might think you'd choose the the best Sherlock Holmes novel, and obviously The Hound of the Baskervilles is the only contender. Or if you wanted something more offbeat, then maybe A Study in Scarlet, as the book which introduced him. So why The Sign of the Four?
And the answer is painfully obvious: it's the only Sherlock Holmes book that allows you to address the Theme of Colonialism. Belisarius says he took his GCSEs 6 years ago - so 2020, right in the heart of The Great Awokening. And the Theme of Colonialism was obviously something that needed to be at the center of every English syllabus in some form.
Whether the book is any good, of course, was an irrelevant question.
Considering Funder’s book when reading George Orwell in English courses or in women’s studies makes sense. I loved Funder’s book. I ran across it in my public library shortly after it was published and read no commentary about it. I’m a Canadian whose parents both left large families in England in the early 1950s. Funder’s book described so many social norms, incompletely and hazily mentioned by family members; it was rich with pictures of everyday lower and middle class life: the scope of women’s responsibilities, household and farm drudgery, life in cheap apartments, diet, sanitation, health care, travel, scarcity and more. The book added rich context to stories my aunts and grandmothers told me, and left me with a haunting mystery—what led Eileen Orwell to sacrifice so much for her husband. I have retained vivid pictures: Eileen smoking as she peeled apples (so like my grandmother), women’s daily tasks in rural England (like my mother and her four sisters), difficult decisions centring around a lack of money, and values about personal privacy, so very different than today’s norms.
I don't doubt your feelings about her book, but those are not the criteria for good history or for a syllabus