Final word

English lit left behind as the world moves on

PHOTO by rihard_wolfram

Fact file

Verity Hodges is a 14-year-old GCSE student from the south of England. CAN you see anything wrong with these texts?

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Lord of the Flies

A Christmas Carol

An Inspector Calls

Your immediate answer may be that each has value, each is a classic, that they are the books you teach in your own schools if you are an English teacher and you may have studied these books during your own school days. They’re familiar, they’re well-known, they’ve been taught in schools for generations. They are your classic GCSE English literature texts and are the ones I will be studying for my own exam.

No representation of the diversity in our society

But as a collection they’re all written by dead white men. There are no women. No people of colour. No books that deal with sexuality and gender, something which I know is an extremely important issue for the cohort reading these books. No representation of anyone except the people we consider ‘normal’, in a society which is becoming more inclusive and accepting by the day.

We are sticking to the confines of a society in these books that the world has moved far from. English is supposed to help us understand the world around us using language and literature, to introduce us to concepts and stories to shape our view of the world. By teaching these books, we are saying to an entire generation of children that anyone outside the ‘straight, white male’ parameters isn’t as important as those who fit inside it.

I received the list of books I would be studying a couple of weeks before the end of the summer term of year 9, in July 2021. I immediately noticed that these books had no representation, that they were all written before 1954 and by white men. The ‘modern’ novel was written 67 years ago. Several members of my class were angry and disappointed, so I drafted a letter to my head of English at my majority-white school.

He invited me to his office for a chat about why the books were chosen before he wrote a formal reply. He said we’d experience wider representation in the fiction unit he’d just put together for year 10, which would feature diversity.

That appears to be it for differentiation for the whole two-year course, and I find this disappointing and not right for today’s young people. Though he congratulated me on fighting injustices and intimated that this issue itself was an injustice, no change was going to be forthcoming in our set texts.

Pupils benefit from seeing their own lives reflected

So I am now stuck with four texts, none written by a woman, none written by a person of colour, none representing the LGBT+ community and nothing non-neurotypical.

These books have been taught year after year, and I know there are texts with wider representation on the syllabus, but it seems to largely be lip service. There are many children who I know would benefit from seeing that people like them can achieve so much more than what they see in their immediate line of sight, yet less than one per cent of them study a book written by a person of colour, according to the Penguin Lit in Colour survey.

We need things to change.

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