IT’S ALWAYS A great pleasure to watch Michael Gove, Tory Bloke for Education (or TBfE, as the current fashion for acronyms might have it), winding up the Bedlamites of the left with some new plan to educate our children or, horribile dictu! encourage them to read more books.
A couple of years ago he returned from a trip to the States with the idea that primary school pupils should be encouraged to read 50 books a year. He got the idea from a group of charter schools where they’d implemented the scheme with great success – and with no get-outs for the “disadvantaged”. Now normally I’d dismiss any new policy or idea brought back from the States by a politico as worthy only of a swift screwing up into a ball before being launched into the bin, but in this case the idea is sound.
Why shouldn’t we encourage children to be adventurous in their reading? Why shouldn’t we stretch them, get them to read as much as they can, even if they don’t make the full 50? What’s wrong with being ambitious for our youngsters? Gove wasn’t proposing this as policy; it was just a suggestion, a challenge. Clearly it was a challenge too far for the intellectual elite of the liberal-left, who clearly thought even their own offspring weren’t up to the task.
It’s a measure of the soundness of Gove’s suggestion that it aroused so much bile. Everything from library closures to the accusations of conservative, authoritarian 1950s-ism was thrown at it. The latter even came along with “Latin, rhetoric and good table manners”, believe it or not (only a Guardian reader could consider those to be bad things).
One of the best comments was “He’d probably like to see Animal Farm on the list”. I’m assuming that was an insult. As it happens, this was at the time when our eldest grandson read Animal Farm in his first year at secondary school and understood exactly what it was about. “It’s about communism, isn’t it, grandpa?” he said. “It certainly is, my boy,” I replied, “and now you know who the enemy are.” Get them young, that’s what I say.
That little spat died down, the libraries didn’t all close, the teaching unions carried on opposing Gove because they’re a bunch of Marxists and the righteous folded their arms and let their kids read anything they wanted, if they read anything at all.
But Gove has just given them another poke in the eye, in a speech to teachers at Brighton College: “You come home to find your 17-year-old daughter engrossed in a book. Which would delight you more – if it were Twilight or Middlemarch?” – he asks, rhetorically. He praises various academies and schools for developing reading lists that challenge their pupils with “the Bible, Jane Austen, Shakespearean pastoral comedy such as As You Like It, a Shakespearean tragedy and Primo Levi alongside George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, William Golding, Erich Maria Remarque and Malcolm Gladwell”.
You may be thinking “Strewth, that’s a pretty grown-up list,” and you’d be right. But one of the ways to encourage children to grow up is to start getting them to do grown-up things, such as reading grown-up books.
It just happens that many of the books proposed are not just grown-up but “old” and “old” is always categorised as bad by certain people, even some who want youngsters to develop the reading habit. Tom Chivers comes out with it in his article on Gove’s speech: “it sounds as though he thinks the old is always better than the new, the dull-but-worthy always better than the funny:” Well, Tom, that’s because the old often is better, just as the new often isn’t. And just because something isn’t funny doesn’t mean it’s dull, any more than something must be dull because it’s worthy.
Reading some of those old books is necessary to acquaint pupils with our literary heritage and to give them some experience of those qualities by which they can measure the latest popular titles, beyond merely saying “this is good because I like it”. Let them read trash by all means, tons of it, but not at the expense of the quality stuff.
At the core of the Bedlamite reaction to the Govist agenda is a sulky resistance to the idea of high expectations. Don’t expect the young ones to climb that mountain, some of them might not make it, is the attitude; best let them all sink in this soggy marsh of mediocrity where everything is easy and equal. All the more reason, in my book, to make them read Animal Farm as well as learn some Latin and rhetoric. And, why not, some table manners while they’re at it?
