An Open Letter to Michael Gove

Director of Education

Sanctuary Buildings

Great Smith Street

London

SW1P 3BT

Dear Mr. Gove.

As part of the 'Big Society', we feel it is our duty to discuss with you some of the finer points of your latest reforms to the English school system. Are you sitting comfortably? Good. This may come as quite a shock.

As graduates in the field of English Literature, we can often be found to take umbrage with many of the current coalition government's policies, reforms, and downright troubling decisions. Student life, and the pursuit of education, has certainly not been made easier by the current regime. We were personally lucky enough to avoid having to pay the extortionate £9000 fees imposed in 2012, by only a couple of years. We have heard the government defending this decision time and again, yet the facts speak for themselves: more and more students will now be unable to ever pay off their student loans, and as this occurs, the country's financial situation will almost certainly be adversely affected. This was, of course, an outcome easily foreseeable by most people, yet the government clearly, and very surprisingly, were unable to do so, until it was too late. However, that is for another rant. The arguments over student loans have long left the doorstep of the Conservatives - the majority perceive blame as resting firmly on the shoulders of the Liberal Democrats, those who made up such a large proportion of the demographic who voted for them feeling, quite understandably, betrayed.

Why is it that we mention this event, then? It had very little to do with you, after all. Well, it is the aforementioned lack of foresight involved which concerns us most at this present moment in time. The government seems perpetually inclined to think of the here and now more than the future, or, in some cases, not to think at all. It is this which bothers us most. It is a common occurrence that Conservatives and Liberal Democrats alike will condemn the Labour party for their lack of foresight, 'leaving' you to deal with the deficit, but it is a problem which seems to plague every party whenever they are in government, and governing with blinkers on, we would suggest, is not the best way to tackle politics.

The radical new changes made by you to the education of schoolchildren in this country has been a controversial matter for a while now. Time and again the public has spoken out against your reforms, yet our concerns have been ignored. It does your party no credit - what do we plebeians know of what is best for our own children, after all? Yet the very core of the matter is that whenever the government makes a severe change to our lives it is us who has to live with the consequences. Politicians can afford to attend good private schools if state schools would not meet their children's needs, after all, but for the common man, this is not a perceivable option. Our schools are for all intents and purposes at your beck and call; is it not imperative, therefore, that you should consider the practical application and ultimate consequences of your reforms? Trust us as we proceed to inform you of the grave error you have committed in your latest radical alterations to our education system.

It was recently reported how you have decided to 'ban' non-English classics from the GCSE syllabus, thus losing the chance to learn of the racial inequality as presented in books such as Harper Lee's 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird and the social themes of John Steinbeck's 1937 classic Of Mice and Men. Within a very short timeframe, an online petition had been set up to convince you to change your reforms, and the hashtag '#Mockingbird' was trending on Twitter. As much as many of us writing to you now detest the 'hashtag', its popularity is testament to the strength of the opposition to this unwelcome announcement.

You soon bit back, however, by clarifying that nothing has been banned, and that you are merely 'asking exam boards to broaden - not narrow - the books young people study for GCSE.'

Unfortunately, your logicality seems to have been turned down to a particularly low temperature that day, so as a kindness we have decided to clarify things for you. It is true that you stipulate students must study (and we quote from your article rebuffing these unsavoury 'rumours' as published in The Telegraph on 26 May) 'a whole Shakespeare play, poetry from 1789 including the [R]omantics [we have kindly added the appropriate capital 'R' for you there], a 19th-century novel and some fiction or drama written in the British Isles since 1914 [why British we can't fathom].' You go on to add: '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.'

Unfortunately, this only highlights, not refutes, the problem. While you may never have 'banned' these books per se, your reforms have put the English Literature syllabus into a situation where it would be nigh on impossible to include any additional material, foreign or otherwise. The set-up is so fixed and so challenging that there would be no space to add any additional material to the subject whether or not the presiding teacher had the will or the inclination to take on the additional challenge. One of us works for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and can confirm the continued popularity of Shakespeare - the Trust received over 800,000 visitors in 2013, and the Royal Shakespeare Company regularly sells out performances - but these patrons are usually adults and students. Children, conversely, and understandably, often have great difficulty understanding Shakespeare, not necessarily because Shakespeare's language is particularly challenging - David Crystal reminds us that 'Over 90% of the English used in Shakespeare's day has not lost its meaning' - but because it is perceived to be so. Children need to be eased into Shakespeare, introduced to it in fun ways (I would recommend in performance rather than on the page, and in simpler forms, such as the tried and tested Macbeth) and guided through his true challenges. It is for this reason only parts of the plays are usually used in classrooms: by the time a teacher has helped a class fully understand and appreciate a full Shakespeare play, it is time to move on to a 19th-century novel, a period where the form of the novel was relatively young in England and still very elitist, and thus another challenge presents itself. It will be a relief once schools can bring their pupils to the post-1914 works, and they can all uniformly rely on George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945). Where in all this, we ask, is there going to be any room for non-English literature? Anyone with a logical mind can see the problem here.

The nation of origin for these texts should not be just cause for them to be so unceremoniously torn away from syllabuses. They are timeless classics that highlight historical extremes of inequality and the human condition and emphasise their continued application to modern society. Surely the core purpose of the study of English Literature as a subject is to learn about different histories, different cultures, different philosophies. Naturally, as a country it is right and just that we have our own native authors at the forefront of our studies - Shakespeare, as England's elected national poet, should have a prominent position in our education, just as Scotland should teach Robert Burns and Russia should rightly revere Alexander Pushkin - but we should have enough scope to realistically include at least one or two pieces of literature from the rest of the world in there. We are, after all, a part of the world, despite the efforts of certain quarters to cut us off as an entirely independent sceptred isle set in the silver sea which serves it in the office of a wall. Take away our syllabuses interactions with the rest of the globe and your reforms make you little different educationally to how UKIP want to be internationally.

To draw this letter to a neat conclusion, we wish to quote the article by The Guardian newspaper which was one of the first to report on your supposed 'axing' of American classics from the GCSE syllabus:

'Last year, Gove, who has said children should be reading 50 books a year from the age of 11, told a conference of independent school heads that he would much prefer to see a child reading George Eliot's Middlemarch than one of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight vampire novels.'

Wouldn't we all? But the sad fact is that Middlemarch is a far tougher book to tackle than Twilight. Anybody with a literary bone in their body would surely acknowledge that. What is at issue here is not what children read, but developing an enthusiasm for reading. Many of us grew up on comics, yet now several of us are embarking on postgraduate study. One of us is pursuing MA research into early modern English drama; another is writing a PhD thesis reading Lacanian psychoanalytic theory through the writings of the English Romantic poets. It is certainly a big step up from The Beano (not that we are for a minute suggesting The Beano make it onto the GCSE syllabus). The point is, children develop literary skills through different methods, but what is most important is that they enjoy developing them. As much as any of us may like Dickens now, make our teenager selves read Bleak House and we'd be put off English for life. So often we hear people lamenting our chosen subject paths because of their own difficulties in studying English at school, so much so that many now have a mental block against the subject, unwilling even to try to pursue the classics independently. By narrowing the curriculum as you have done, you do not show an understanding for how best to mould intellectual minds, but rather risk torturing students through hours of potentially mind-numbing reading, creating a generation who cannot succeed in English purely because they are bored by it. It is an undesirable reality, but a reality it is nonetheless.

Without the ability to choose a wide range of literature from around the world and throughout time, our children will not have the will or interest to even conceive of reading fifty books per year. At that age, our own interests in literature were probably formed far better with Of Mice and Men, Macbeth and An Inspector Calls than with, say, Middlemarch, Love's Labour's Lost and David Copperfield. If it ain't broke, as the old adage says, don't fix it. Our education system needs reform, yes - one of us could tell you long, rambling stories about having to teach himself the entirety of GCSE mathematics because his teacher was so poor she spent the entirety of each class shouting at one unruly child rather than actually doing any teaching, and there are doubtless many under-performing schools out there, but statistics and generalisation is what gets governments into trouble over issues such as this. Teachers, by and large, do a bloody marvellous job in this country, and it saddens us - no, it outrages us - to see so many leaving their careers because of what you are doing to them and their pupils. Is it not more sensible to allow the professionals in the classroom to choose the appropriate materials for study for their own pupils? They should themselves know what is most appropriate for nurturing their students' intelligence and success, and should be able to teach them beyond the confines of a national curriculum. One of us remembers fondly how an enjoyment of early modern drama first began to formulate after a teacher took a class to see a performance of King Lear despite the curriculum's insistence on the same old chestnut, Romeo and Juliet (which is now, incidentally, despite his love of Shakespeare, his least favourite play, doubtlessly down in no small part to forcibly having the same passages drummed into him class after class after class). The two titles which have been referenced time and again in this controversy - Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird - cover a great variety of themes without the difficulty of language in need of repeated teacher translation. If you will forgive a sudden change in tone, it would be desirable if you would climb down from your ivory tower and actually look at what you are doing to the people who have to live with each and every one of your myopic and narrow-minded reforms. Perhaps it would be wise to acknowledge your own limited knowledge of the classroom and trust the judgement of those who have been trained - at great personal financial expense - to teach. We wouldn't know how to run a government department, after all, and we acknowledge that.

There's good change and there's bad change - McDonald's making their chicken nuggets with 100% real chicken was undoubtedly good change; then again, the new and 'improved' Cornetto is a major let down. Be a chicken nugget, Mr. Gove, and not a Cornetto.

Yours faithfully,
The Pessimist Chronicles, ©2014.

PS: We would point out that, in the current economic client, children should be able to get those fifty books per year from public libraries. But what do we know?

This letter was sent to Michael Gove on the evening of the 9th June 2014. Unless we are refused permission, any response received will be communicated to our readers immediately.