Michael Gove's English reforms

[caramel_betty]

So, the BBC are reporting the following.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-22841266 The course content will include at least one play by Shakespeare, a selection of work by the Romantic poets, a 19th Century novel, a selection of poetry since 1850 and a 20th Century

Comments

[bopeepsheep]

We studied two Shakespeare plays (Macbeth, Much Ado); Seamus Heaney, William Wordsworth, and Wilfred Owen's poetry; Tess of the D'Urbevilles; and three 20th century novels (Peter Carey, Graham Swift, William Golding) when I did GCSE English in 1988. That fits Gove's list, as it happens, but we also spent quite a lot of time with a wider reading list - there were about 90 novels and dramas on it, from Achebe to Zola, and we had to prove we'd read at least 10 of them by the end of the course, and give a short presentation on one of them as part of the Oral component. It was doable in the two years - but of course our English teacher had a lot less other stuff to do, and could cope with the marking the extra work created.

Re Gatsby: that problem came up a lot at university, surprisingly. There were the people who had merely watched an Austen adaptation, and those who had read the book... and the differences were obvious to everyone after the first embarrassing seminar. (It wasn't quite "Jane Eyre with robots" but nearly.) And yet some people continued doing it, right to the end of their degrees. Why? Why do an English degree if you don't want to read the book??