The Quandary - 20 Mar 2008

If exam boards put more modern novels on the syllabus and squeeze out the classics, isn’t this dumbing down?

Hillary's Advice

Parents always want to see their children flogging through Eliot or Hardy even though they would rarely open one of these authors’ books themselves Sometimes I think they just want their children to suffer in the same way that they did at school. Other times I allow them a higher motive -- that they understand that great literature demands effort, and believe it is the job of schools to teach children how to make it.

But what about novels that are clearly of modern times – The Catcher in the Rye, Animal Farm – but have now gained classic status. Are they permissible? And, if so, at what point did they become so?

Then there are the novels that are on their way there, but not yet arrived, such as Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong, now widely studied in schools, even though critics still argue its merits. How long before this becomes a classic?

Faulks, himself is in no doubt about the value of studying modern fiction and recently pointed a recent seminar of English teachers to Alan Hollinghurst’s Line of Beauty, as a modern novel that reworks a classic theme. “It’s about pleasure, and the debt to pleasure … it’s exactly the same theme as Brideshead Revisited, about becoming depressed and drinking too much because you’re sad and posh.”
Eve Meyers-Belkin, head of English at Henrietta Barnet School, in north London, who led the seminar for The Prince’s Teaching Institute, believes there should be a good mixture of texts, to give students variety and balance. But in fact, she points out, students don’t always enjoy studying modern books because often not much has been written about them, “so they actually have to think for themselves.”