Best Laid Schemes
Naomi Grant · Teaching ‘Of Mice and Men’
A few miles south of Soledad, California, not far from the Salinas river, George Milton and Lennie Small arrive at a ranch. Itinerant workers who have been forced to flee their last town, they are assessed by the boss – an unnamed figure in a Stetson hat, high-heeled boots and spurs; unlike them, he is no labouring man. ‘What stake you got in this guy?’ he asks George. ‘I never seen one guy take so much trouble for another guy.’ I was reminded of the scene earlier this year, in the week of Trump’s inauguration. I was on a bus in North London, when the driver pulled to a stop and went across the road to help a woman who had collapsed. Some passengers got angry. ‘What’s he doing helping someone else?’ one of them barked.
In 2014, OCR (the major exam-awarding body in the UK) announced that it would be scrapping John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men from the GCSE English syllabus. Other American texts, such as The Crucible and To Kill a Mockingbird, were also to be dropped. Michael Gove, then the education secretary, complained about the ‘narrowness’ of a syllabus that he went on to make even narrower. He was disappointed that 90 per cent of candidates were studying Of Mice and Men.
I’ve taught the book to pupils of all abilities and I’m always struck by its power to engage and move them. I once worked with a group of SEN (special educational needs) pupils who had been removed from mainstream classes. We read the book out loud together (it isn’t too long, which helps) and an unusual silence fell when we reached the part where Curley’s wife announces that the ranch workers have left the ‘weak ones’ behind when they go out for a night on the town. Everyone in the group knew what that felt like. In other classes there were different resonances. Most pupils sympathise with Lennie and George; often the task is to get them to recognise that the inhumanity of the men’s boss is a condition of impoverishment, rather than evil. He is the product of a world in which it isn’t good to be alone, but impossible to be your brother’s keeper.
Jonathan Bate has called Of Mice and Men an ‘insufficiently demanding book’, but accessibility isn’t incompatible with intellectual – or literary – sophistication. I once asked a group of pupils to produce mock Facebook profile pages for the characters. Some who struggled to express themselves in writing produced illustrations of the fantasies that sustains the characters, with ‘likes’ including rabbits, puppies and alfalfa. Lennie’s page showed that he had only one friend but had been poked by Curley’s wife. One pupil took particular delight in drawing and then censoring the posts of the brothel keeper, Old Suzy; another pointed out that Slim would have been too cool for the social network and refused to complete the assignment.
The Conservative manifesto outlined the party’s vision for a ‘great meritocracy’ – a society in which ‘everyone has a fair chance to go as far as their talent and hard work will allow’. For GCSE pupils (or ‘learners’, as the OCR calls them), whose results come out tomorrow, this means a new 9 to 1 grading scale to ‘facilitate greater differentiation between pupils’.
The emphasis on new, demanding content and the promise to address grade inflation may sound like a good idea but it betrays an ignorance of what goes on in the classroom. It also makes the starkest sort of competition the basis for evaluating pupils: competition founded on a very narrow idea of which books are worthwhile, and what meaningful engagement with them looks like. There is no longer a coursework component (a Tory bugbear). Anything that allows pupils to do well or work differently is seen as suspicious, as though education must always be skewed so that only a very few can succeed. This doesn’t reflect the wide-ranging discussions we have in the classroom; it tries to preclude them.
There can be any number of obstacles to progress and it is often the laziest pupils (of all abilities) who need the most support in learning how to learn. ‘Opportunity,’ says Justine Greening, the current education secretary, ‘is about how we translate hope into something real – something concrete … Our strong economy is vital, because it’s the opportunity engine of our country. But we now truly need to make it a country where everyone has an equal shot at taking advantage of those opportunities being created.’ What Greening doesn’t say is that inequality – including in education – lies at the heart of Conservative policy. ‘Concrete’, ‘strong’, ‘engine’, ‘shot’, ‘advantage’. My pupils can recognise the language of power; Of Mice and Men is the sort of book that helps us talk about it. The great meritocracy conspires to leave the ‘weak ones behind’.
Comments
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23 August 2017
at
11:20pm
JWA
says:
It doesn't simply conspire - it revels in it, bestowing permission not to care to those who find the slightest pricking of conscience an inconvenience. Thank you for this, it will make an excellent reading comprehension for my students.
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5 September 2017
at
12:56pm
LRB4Me
says:
I, too, have taught OM and M for four decades to pupils of all ages and it is always fresh and revelatory. It isn't just the touching and accessible story. There is always learning to be done in the of character, language, description and context. The construction is so clever - see how the first few pages prefigure the catastrophe. There is as much good learning to be done in this little book as in many far heftier tomes. Why are such decisions - as so many in education - left to anyone other than dedicated and experienced practitioners?
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5 September 2017
at
1:16pm
jaguarjon53
says:
This book was brilliant for me at school. Being neither an athlete nor an aesthete, I identified with Lennie. It also helped change my attitude to my fellow human beings. That's the problem for the Tory 'mind', uncluttered as it is by any culture or humanity. Their narrow shallow values can't compete with the real thing. They're still f***ing peasants as far as I can see (John Lennon).
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5 September 2017
at
3:20pm
ssullonly
says:
I do have a problem and I don't have a Tory mind! Very roughly, one needed to study a work of Shakespeare, some poetry and a novel for GCSE. So many schools were choosing OMM that more ambitious novels were forced out. I came under pressure from my Head of Department to teach OMM (shorter, takes less time...) This at a Girls'Independent school of high repute. Result, when the same pupils came to A Level, was extreme difficulty coping with longer novels - Pride & Prejudice, Great Expectations, Scarlet Letter. When GCSE started, in the 1980s, the first two of these were commonly taught. No doubt it is possible to respond to OMM at a level that deserves an A* or a Grade 9. But there are other - and dare one say, more worthwhile? - novels.
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6 September 2017
at
9:19pm
Scampo
says:
@
ssullonly
I can't agree with your use of the word "ambitious" in this context. Linguistically more difficult, I take it you mean. I certainly am able to teach the narrative techniques of the novella at a very 'ambitious' level, certainly sufficient to test the abilities of even the very brightest fifteen-year-old. The form and content are certainly easier to read and interpret when compared with, say, Dickens, but this allows for easier enjoyment rather than easier analysis.
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5 September 2017
at
5:43pm
vulpiani
says:
Along with Jonathan Bate, I was part of the advisory group that suggested removing American texts from the GCSE English Literature syllabus. Our thinking was that since the texts set for GCSE are very limited, we should look to the wealth of literature produced in these islands as the key resource for the study of English Literature. That includes the rich and growing range of texts produced by writers from our newer communities. Of course OMM is worth reading but so are hundreds of other texts. This fixation on American texts smacks of latent deference to all things American - and white American to boot.
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7 September 2017
at
3:19am
DawnRaven
says:
As a Canadian reader, I cannot really appreciate the political and practical considerations and constraints faced by British educators. Being no great fan of American literature in general, I would certainly agree that the British canon contains more than enough great works to inspire and instruct all students. Yet I cannot agree with the dismissal of Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men" on the grounds that the novel(la) is too short and simple and insufficiently challenging. It is a masterpiece (forgive me,I am indeed white, but female and not yet completely dead), an earthy story driven by a profound moral and philosophical message of heart-breaking despair. In fact, I would contend that OMMM is among "classic" school texts evaluated on the basis of a superficial appearance of accessibility and brevity, and consequently cheated of a full adult appreciation of its tragic power. Canadian educator David Solway has written persuasively on the way in which comparable British works--Golding's "Lord of the Flies," in particular--are intellectually gutted by presentation on a supposedly "adolescent" level. As Ms. Grant makes clear, the real issue is not choice of text, but a bureaucratic shortchanging of the student's capacity to grasp and make meaning...and this shortchanging ultimately implies an instrumental, cynical attitude toward the value of literature itself.
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