WHAT BOYS LIKE

Education officials in the United Kingdom had a problem on their hands. Results of nationwide tests conducted last year indicated that while nearly 80 percent of eleven-year-old girls measured up to expected levels for reading comprehension, less than 66 percent of boys did so. The gender discrepancy was even worse for fourteen-year-olds.

When British education secretary David Blunkett heard the news in April, he rashly staked his job on turning the statistics around, publicly threatening to resign if both boys and girls weren't performing at the 80 percent mark by 2002. An unidentified Education Department source confided to the London Daily Mail that Blunkett "wants teachers to select ... more adventure stories which might appeal particularly to boy." It hardly seemed a coincidence, then, that just one month later, the UK's Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), a governmentally appointed but independent organization, published its recommendations for a new secondary school reading list: Drop long-winded classics by the likes of Henry James, Lord Byron, Edmund Spenser, and Matthew Arnold in favor of faster-paced contemporary novels by George Orwell and J.G. Ballard.

Not surprisingly, the decanonizations induced a state of apoplexy in literary scholars and dominated the newspaper editorial pages for several weeks. "Unpardonable," snapped Anne Barton, a professor at Trinity College, Cambridge, to the London Times. "A shame," cried the novelist and critic Malcomlm Bradbury to the same paper. Both were outraged over what the paper termed the "loss of early greats from the world of English literature."

The controversial reading list is, in fact, part of a larger set of scholastic guidelines developed by the QCA in tandem with Blunkett and published in May as the National Curriculum Review Consultation. Both the QCA and Blunkett are now hesitant to talk about the basis for their revisions to the reading list, but it seems education officials were especially worried that female teachers have not been choosing the kind of literature that would most interest their male pupils. If given too many novels by Jane Austen and George Eliot and not enough by H.G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Arthur Conan Doyle, boys evidently stand in serious danger of developing the idea that reading is, well, not a manly undertaking. As a senior government source explained to the Daily Mail, Blunkett was "concerned that teachers are more interested in female-friendly stories of love and romance than stirring tales of derring-do which appeal to young boys."

Of course, gender-sensitive reading lists alone may not be enough to send male test scores soaring. The National Curriculum Review Consultation also urges teachers to engage boys' interest in English by integrating reading and writing "into activities which involve getting things done as well as expressing imagination and feeling."

Could such old-fashioned assumptions about sexual difference really have currency with British schoolteachers? Although few are willing to say so on the record, many seem comfortable with Blunkett's apparent gender logic. "How often do we see the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed student, often male, switch off and no longer find school challenging and stimulating?" lamented Judith Mullen, the head of Melbourn Village College in Cambridgeshire, to London's Financial Times in May.

The QCA insists that Henry James and the other authors were not dropped solely because they were deemed uninteresting to young men; nor are the decisions, in the words of one spokesperson, a judgment on any author's "quality and suitability." Still, even where gender is not an issue, critics worry that the organization is pandering to contemporary sensibilities, recommending a turn to literature lite. The Review Consultation asserts that "teachers, individually and collectively, have to reappraise their teaching in response to the changing needs of their pupils and the ideas and attitudes of society and economic forces." And while the introduction of more contemporary and multicultural voices (such as the playwrights Samuel Beckett and David Hare, the poet Derek Walcott, and the Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o) into the curriculum has been widely applauded, many academics are sore that these inaugurations should come at the expense of traditional writers deemed less palatable. "I deplore the idea that contemporary authors should be an unremitting diet," says Barton. "It is important for children to be put in touch with writers of the past as well as writers of the present. It impoverishes the study of young writers not to read their predecessors."

Of course, the academics may also be concerned that the QCA did not consult with any literary scholars before making its recommendations. Instead, it seems that the board's research was handled mostly through what a QCA spokesperson called "advice from the [teaching] profession": questionnaires to schoolteachers, surveys, and interviews. In the case of James, for example, "few schools are choosing novels by Henry James and we thought it sensible to include somebody more popular with the schools."

Perhaps taken aback by all the negative publicity, the QUCA now seems eager to wash its hands of responsibility for the reading list. According to QCA board member Alan Cod, the list is only a suggestion, "the sort of things schools should be thinking of" -- a remark that strikes critics as particularly week-kneed.

"Ministers cannot have it both ways," fumed the columnist Roy Hattersly in the Guardian in June. "Since they want the teachers to follow their lead, they cannot pretend that they hope to be ignored when they suggest that schools turn their backs on [Henry James], one of the half dozen greatest novelists of the English language."

Perhaps James ought to have the last word on the controversy. In his 1884 essay, "The Art of Fiction," he responded to the critic Walter Besant, who had insisted that the good novel must be full of adventures. "Why of adventures more than of green spectacles?" James wondered. "And what is adventure when it comes to that, and by what sign is the listening pupil to recognize it? It is an adventure -- an immense one -- for me to write this little article; and for a Bostonian nymph to reject an English duke is an adventure only less stirring, I should say, than for an English duke to be rejected by a Bostonian nymph. I see dramas within dramas in that, and innumerable points of view."


September, 1999