Several years ago I came across a survey of British teachers
of English literature. Over time, many
groups have greatly revised, often in the name of relevance and diversity, the
reading list for the GCSE, the exam British students took before graduating
high school (a current or at least recent list). But which books did teachers actually pick to
teach?
The answer was, when possible, An Inspector Calls by
J. B. Priestly, to the extent that I was able to calculate that a large
majority of British students were tested, and have always been tested, on An
Inspector Calls, no matter what other options are available. The second place book was, by the way, Animal
Farm.
So the point of the survey was that more varied contemporary
options to the exam did not matter much if teachers just kept riding the same
old warhorses. My point, somewhat different,
is that I was not even sure what An Inspector Calls was. I had better read it. I just did.
It is a popular play from 1945. It is short – is it the shortest text on the list?
– is it the easiest?
ERIC: My God, it’s a bit thick, when you come to think of it – (Act I, p. 25)
Is it ever! A bourgeois
family is having a pleasant dinner celebrating the engagement of the daughter
to a perfectly respectable young man when a police inspector calls with the
shocking news that a young woman has committed suicide, and that (this takes a
little time) every member of the family is at least a bit responsible for her
death. In another sense, none of them
are at all responsible, but I suppose that idea is one of the things that makes
the play teachable. We can have a good
debate about agency.
GERALD: (Crossing D. to Inspector) Getting a bit heavy-handed, aren’t you, Inspector? (ERIC crosses D. to chair R. of table.)
INSPECTOR: Possibly. But if you’re easy with me, I’m easy with you.
GERALD: After all, y’know, we’re respectable citizens and not dangerous criminals.
INSPECTOR: Sometimes there isn’t as much difference as you think. Often, if it was left to me, I wouldn’t know where to draw the line. (I, 23)
The Inspector is, like Father Brown and Columbo, as much an
avenging angel as a detective, an idea that I hoped would be implicit but is
instead made explicit by the end of the play.
Everything is made explicit. This
is the Inspector’s exit speech:
INSPECTOR: One Eva Smith has gone – but there are millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths still left with us, with their lives, their hopes and fears, their suffering and chance of happiness, all intertwined with our lives, with what we think and say and do. We don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish. We don’t live alone. Good night. (III, 53-4)
When An Inspector Calls premiered, Germany had just
surrendered, days earlier, to the Allies; the war with Japan would go on for
several more months. I am having trouble
fitting this speech into that context.
But otherwise An Inspector Calls is careful to resolve all of its
mysteries.
It is a well-made play; I would love to see it performed. But it does not look like a great national
treasure to me. Knock it off that list! Make teachers pick something else! Not that I wish new class preps on teachers –
sorry. And perhaps there is some kind of
Chesterton’s Fence argument against removing it.
There is no equivalent in the U.S., where our educational
system is chaos, or in France, where the texts for the Bac change every year.
I am likely getting much about the GCSE wrong, and sadly I will
never be able to find that survey again.
Page numbers refer to the 1972 Dramatists Play Service
edition.
I need to read this. I'm commenting just from the inspector's paragraph: is this an early statement of "it takes an entire village"? or "you didn't make that" and ones successes are the product of all those around them? Just curious.
ReplyDeleteI would be surprised that "An Inspector Calls" would now feature on the GCSE syllabus. Given that GCSEs started in 1988, I am a little surprised that it ever featured. Back in my schooldays, we had GCE O levels and CSEs - the former were more academic. My brother, in 1966-67, studied Trollope's "The Warden" and Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar". The logic of imposing a Victorian novel about almshouses and moral duty upon 15 year olds still eludes me. It did give him a life long dislike of Trollope. He was none too fond of Shakespeare either. The idea, back then, was that adolescents needed a good wodge of the English Literature canon and it did not matter if the subject matter was alien to their sensibilities. I was luckier. In 1972-73, I studied "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "The Crucible" and a smattering of some 20th century British poets. I still think these were good choices. My daughter studied "Animal Farm" and "Educating Rita" - pretty much closer to the results of this survey. She went on to do A level English, which is the standard required for university entrance and was given "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini and "Small Island" by Andrea Levy, which I thought were entertaining but not overwhelming. In contrast, when I took A level English, I studied Hardy's "Return of the Native". Her love of literature, I think, is despite the choices of the examining boards.
ReplyDeleteAs a former English teacher who taught this play several times, I can say quite a bit about this.
ReplyDeleteI taught it at one school for a pre-GCSE class of Year 9 students (13-14 years) and at a different school as a GCSE set text. It's quite a nice play to teach in the sense of engaging students, as it's really accessible, has a good twisty story and has lots of juicy themes - meaning that it can be enjoyed by students of a wide variety of educational attainment. However, as a teacher having to read the same thing year after year, I found nothing new in it after the first reading; once you've read it, you've got it, and that's that. It's not like that other GCSE favourite, Macbeth, which you can teach year after year without it becoming stale. You almost never encounter a student offering an unexpected insight into An Inspector Calls; cohort after cohort, they all say and write the same sorts of thing, whereas with Macbeth, there'll be a few students every year who'll come up with something unusual and interesting.
The first school I taught at didn't think An Inspector Calls was a great GCSE text, principally because it was difficult for the most able students to write answers that reached their full potential. GCSE answers are marked according to a set of criteria, one of which is 'writer's methods' - which most commonly involves use of language as it's something students will have written about extensively since at least the start of secondary school. Well, there's not a great deal to analyze in Priestley's language as it's so plain, so students might then be nudged into writing about other 'methods': structure, symbolism or stage techniques. But, for 16-year olds, it is often more difficult to score highly when writing about these than it is when doing small-scale stylistic analysis because they have generally not been trained to the same extent over the course of their education. In the place of Priestley, my first school preferred that other great favourite among GCSE texts, Lord of the Flies.
My second school was in Leeds - so Bradford-born Priestley was seen as a local boy, which may have been a factor in choosing An Inspector Calls. Also, it was in a much more economically deprived area with a lower level of educational attainment; picking the 'easiest' text is a common way to try to maximise the number of exam passes. With student absence becoming an increasing problem in recent years, it's a calculation that students who've missed school will more be likely to be able to catch up with An Inspector Calls than with a more difficult text.
I don't think it would be a good idea to change texts every year, but schools would ideally be able to change things whenever they thought teachers were becoming jaded by the repetition. There are strong factors in the British education system working against this, however. While exam boards do make changes to their lists from time to time, the most popular options tend to stay put (and there is considerable overlap among the different exam boards), which allows schools to stick with the same text year after year.
ReplyDeleteFirstly, there's the excessive teacher workload (the main reason I quit); having to make new schemes of learning and lesson materials to teach a new text would add to that enormously. Then there's the inclination to teach the easiest text of those on offer (the shortest and simplest).
There's also the factor that, around the more popular texts, there has grown an enormous industry of study guides, BBC revision aids and Youtube videos capitalising on the idea that students need all this extra help in order to revise (something that wasn't available to me). A Youtube search for 'An Inspector Calls GCSE revision' is going to turn up a very different set of results from a search concerning a less popular text, such as Stephen Kelman's Pigeon English. If a school were to switch from An Inspector Calls to a less obvious choice, this might not be supported by students or their families, worried about the reduction of available exam support.
Oh, and I don't think it's quite right to say that the GCSE is the exam equivalent of graduating high school. 'Secondary school' is the generic term here for institutions with students aged 11-16 (or 11-18). GCSEs are typically taken at age 16, leaving students with another two years of compulsory education or training. If students continue with academic education, that usually means sitting A-level exams at 18, which might be taught at the same school or at a separate 6th form college. The same few exam boards that administer the GCSEs also run A-levels, and so also choose the range of texts available.
ReplyDeleteMy wife teaches An Inspector Calls at school. The reason for its popularity is not hard to discern: it has a very clear message which is explicitly stated, and an explicit, clearly stated message is both easy to teach, and easy for even the most recalcitrant of students to take in.
ReplyDeleteIt takes a village, yes, although here it takes a village, or at least a complacent family, to destroy a person. There is also some connection to the idea in Brothers Karamazov that we are all guilty for everyone's crimes.
ReplyDeleteNo more Trollope on the 19th century GCSE list. "Julius Caesar" is still on the Shakespeare list. The survey I read did not cover those topics but I assume the 19th century results would be similar, that the shortest texts are by far the most chosen.
And who can blame the teachers or schools? Drag everyone through A Christmas Carol or The Sign of Four, compared to Jane Eyre? Why would anyone pick Jane Eyre. I am highly sympathetic to the arguments Mimic Hootings makes. Pile more work on the teachers; no thanks. Or anyway space it out.
Although at the same time I feel bad for teachers who have no choice but to grind through the same book year after year even if they want to mix it up for their own sanity.
Thanks, Mimic, for the helpful insights from your own experience. "once you've read it, you've got it" - that is sure how it looked to me.
I should note, for people who don't know the British system, that the GCSE exams are high school graduation requirements while the A level exams are a bit later and are for students going to a university. As I understand it. The U.S. has no equivalent, except perhaps the New York State Regents exams. The SAT is a whole 'nother kind of beast.
If I were a British book blogger, and had my old energy, I would read the rest of the books on the GCSE list and do an old-fashioned compare & contrast.
ReplyDeleteThat survey showed that the right strategy to get new books going is not to simply add them to the list but also to remove An Inspector Calls. But no one dares. Imagine the backlash!