Bullock (1975)

Notes on the text
Preliminary pages Foreword, Membership, Contents, Introduction

Part 1 Attitudes and standards
Chapter 1 Attitudes to the teaching of English
Chapter 2 Standards of reading
Chapter 3 Monitoring

Part 2 Language in the early years
Chapter 4 Language and learning
Chapter 5 Language in the early years

Part 3 Reading
Chapter 6 The reading process
Chapter 7 Reading in the early years
Chapter 8 Reading: the later stages
Chapter 9 Literature

Part 4 Language in the middle and secondary years
Chapter 10 Oral language
Chapter 11 Written language
Chapter 12 Language across the curriculum

Part 5 Organisation
Chapter 13 The primary and middle years
Chapter 14 Continuity between schools
Chapter 15 The secondary school
Chapter 16 LEA advisory services

Part 6 Reading and language difficulties
Chapter 17 Screening, diagnosis and recording
Chapter 18 Children with reading difficulties
Chapter 19 Adult literacy
Chapter 20 Children from families of overseas origin

Part 7 Resources
Chapter 21 Books
Chapter 22 Technological aids and broadcasting

Part 8 Teacher education and training
Chapter 23 Initial training
Chapter 24 In-service education

Part 9 The survey
Chapter 25: I Introduction
Chapter 25: II Primary commentary
Chapter 25: III Secondary commentary
Chapter 25: IV The questionnaire forms (not online)
Chapter 25: V Technical notes (not online)

Part 10 Sumary of conclusions and recommendations
Chapter 26 Conclusions and recommendations

Appendix A Witnesses and sources of evidence
Appendix B Visits made
Glossary
Index

Report of the Committee of Enquiry appointed by the Secretary of State for Education and Science under the Chairmanship of Sir Alan Bullock FBA

London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office 1975
© Crown copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland.

Chapter 9 Literature
[pages 124 - 138]

9.1 This part of the Report would not be complete if it did not end with a discussion of literature, which to many teachers is the most rewarding form of the child's encounter with language. In the main, opinions converge upon the value of literature, if they take separate ways on the treatment it should receive in school. Much has been claimed for it: that it helps to shape the personality, refine the sensibility, sharpen the critical intelligence; that it is a powerful instrument for empathy, a medium through which the child can acquire his values. Writing in 1917, Nowell Smith (1) saw its purpose as 'the formation of a personality fitted for civilised life'. The Newsom Report (2), some 50 years later, said that 'all pupils, including those of very limited attainments, need the civilising experience of contact with great literature, and can respond to its universality'. These are spirited credos, only two of many, and they represent a faith that English teaching needs. They have not, of course, gone unchallenged. In recent years it has been questioned whether literature does in fact make the reader a better and more sensitive human being. What was a matter of self-evident truth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is no longer exempt from question. Few would subscribe to the simple view that it offers models for living which the reader lifts from the pages. In fact, Sampson (3) made the point astringently 50 years ago, and few had a more passionate belief than he in the place of literature in school. '... let me beg teachers to take a sane view of literature. Let us have no pose or affectation about it. Reading Blake to a class is not going to turn boys into saints'. One American educationist has said bluntly that when it comes down to it there is no evidence that the reading of literature in schools produces in any way the social or emotional effects claimed for it. Another has argued that the teacher of English is not the custodian of ethics and character, and that in these matters he has no more and no less responsibility than his colleagues in other subjects. Many American teachers would accept his proposition that the prime responsibility of the English teacher in teaching literature is to teach literature. Thus it is not uncommon to find American high school pupils examining the generic characteristics of a work of literature and assembling patterns of image and symbol. This is not to say that teachers in the USA are single-mindedly concerned with the cognitive aspects of literature. It was, in fact, an American who attacked the writers of sequential curricula as 'afraid to go where the feelings, perceptions, and questions of children would take them'. Nevertheless, there is a difference in emphasis between the two countries in this as in other aspects of English teaching. This was apparent at the Dartmouth Seminar of 1966, when British and American teachers of English met to discuss the subject in depth.

9.2 In Britain the tradition of literature teaching is one which aims at personal and moral growth, and in the last two decades this emphasis has grown. It is a soundly based tradition, and properly interpreted is a powerful force in English teaching. Literature brings the child into an encounter with language in its most complex and varied forms. Through these complexities are presented the thoughts, experiences, and feelings of people who exist outside and beyond the reader's daily awareness. This process of bringing them within that circle of consciousness is where the greatest value of literature lies. It provides imaginative insight into what another person is feeling; it allows the contemplation of possible human experiences which the reader himself has not met. It has the capacity to develop that empathy of which Shelley was speaking when he said: 'A man to be greatly good, must imagine intensively and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own'. Equally, it confronts the reader with problems similar to his own, and does it at the safety of one remove. He draws reassurance from realising that his personal difficulties and his feelings of deficiency are not unique to himself; that they are as likely to be the experience of others. Adolescents need this kind of reassurance, to be found in the sort of relieving awareness summed up in CS Lewis's remark: 'Nothing, I suspect, is more astonishing in any man's life than the discovery that there do exist people very, very like himself'. The media which influence their world often put a relentless emphasis on euphoria as the natural state of life. They encourage the inference that not to experience it is somehow to miss out and fall short of the norm. Most young people take a realistic view of this, but we can hardly be surprised that there are some who feel it as a pressure. This is only one uncertainty, and perhaps a minor one, but certainly reassurance is one of the available outcomes of this encounter with a wide range of possible human experience.

9.3 It may well be that we lack evidence of the 'civilising' power of literature and that some of the claims made for it have seemed over-ambitious. But we can look to the results of various studies of children's reading as some indication of its value as a personal resource. These have suggested, for example, that children's favourite stories at different ages reflect the particular fantasies and emotional conflicts which are foremost in their experience at that time. The child gets most enjoyment from those stories which say something to his condition and help him to resolve these inner conflicts. Books compensate for the difficulties of growing up. They present the child with a vicarious satisfaction that takes him outside his own world and lets him identify for a time with someone else. They present him with controlled experience, which he can observe from the outside at the same time as being involved within it. Thus, the fulfilling of private wishes, the fabrication of an inner environment, is an important property of children's reading. It accounts for the conclusion that although the names of the most widely-read authors change from one decade to the next the characteristic features of their books remain much the same. The presentation is vivid and dramatic, the characters relatively unsubtle, and virtue triumphs in an ending which places everyone where he should be. As he works his way through the book the reader's sympathies will be engaged, his antipathies aroused. It is, of course, easy to say this, but less easy to escape its implications. Books may offer vicarious satisfaction and little else. Indeed many do, and the sympathies they engage and the antipathies they arouse may be far from what we would hope. The child will not necessarily, and not automatically, progress from books which simply vicariously fulfil his wishes to those where a complexity of relationships enlarges his understanding of the range of human possibilities. One would hope to develop the kind of response which is summed up in WP Ker's remark from Imagination and Judgement: '... dramatic imagination enters into every question of justice. How can you understand other people's motives unless you act out a fragment or two of a play in which they are the characters?' The development of this response presents the teacher with one of his most delicate areas of operation, and one where his skill and knowledge play an extremely important part. One fact which becomes increasingly evident is the very great extent to which success lies in the contribution of the teacher. It is true in the initial acquisition of reading; it is true in the development of the reading habit; it is true in the growth of discernment. The first of these we have already discussed; the others we will now go on to consider.

9.4 There is no doubt at all in our minds that one of the most important tasks facing the teacher of older juniors and younger secondary pupils is to increase the amount and range of their voluntary reading. We believe that there is a strong association between this and reading attainment, and that private reading can make an important contribution to children's linguistic and experiential development. Before we go on to discuss what the school can and should do to promote it, it will be useful to spend a moment on what is known of children's reading habits. The most recent information on a large scale comes from Whitehead's survey (4) in his Schools Council research project. Almost half the 10 year olds in this survey claimed to have read three or more books during the previous month, the percentage dropping to some two fifths at 12+ and about a third at 14+. There is, however, a substantial minority of children who do not read books at all in their leisure time, and the number increases significantly with age. 13 per cent of Whitehead's 10+ sample had not read a book during the previous month, while at 12+ the corresponding figure was 29 per cent and at 14+ 36 per cent. At each age point this category contained a higher proportion of boys than of girls, and at 14+ the number among the former was as high as 40 per cent. When all else has been considered it seems that there is a fairly large group of children in secondary schools who have the reading skills but do not choose to read books outside school time. A great deal is obviously going to depend on the home environment. It hardly needs saying that where reading has no status and books no place the incentives to read will be slight. But it is clear to us that the school can make a very big difference to this situation. Various studies have revealed that teacher influence on a child's choice of book is considerable, particularly in the case of the less able pupil. Another important conclusion is that for the child who is not a habitual reader the simple fact of which book is where will often determine what he reads. These two factors - teacher influence and book provision - hold the key to an improvement in reading standards in the junior and secondary years.

9.5 We referred earlier to the damaging notion that once the child has mastered the decoding process he will make his own way. Few teachers would subscribe to it in such blunt terms, but it is nevertheless a notion that is implicit in much classroom procedure. In many junior schools there is a graded reader series to be completed before the child can go to a free choice of 'real books'. Some schools allow these to be read without such a graduation hurdle, but we often met the assumption that mastery of the graded series meant that the child could now read. The teachers were assiduous in their concern that the child should 'learn to read', but when he could decode to their satisfaction they came to see him as self-supporting. In some schools the dependence on supplementary 'readers' was uncomfortably long, and the child had little experience of good children's literature. We found, in fact, that some capable readers almost never read a book in school. They dipped into reference and information books, many of which did not give occasion for sustained reading, but they did not read novels. We also noticed that this was related to the teacher's discontinuance of any kind of record of the child's reading. As long as the child was engaged on the reading scheme, or the graded readers supplementary to it, the teacher would usually keep a note of his progress through it. But we met few teachers who kept a record of what the child read after this. There were only comparatively rare instances of their knowing the pattern and balance of the children's reading, which in our opinion is one of the essential features of a policy of expanding its range.

9.6 A feature which ranks equally with this is the teacher's knowledge of what is available, especially in good modern children's literature. In the middle years of schooling in particular the range of emotional and intellectual development within any one class can be extremely wide, and a correspondingly wide range of fiction is needed. The indications are that narrative books are substantially outnumbered by non-fiction in most primary schools. With the increased emphasis on learning through discovery and personal interests schools have tended to acquire collections of information books to support this kind of work. These are to be found in encouraging profusion in book corners, entrance halls, corridors and bays, as well as in rooms designated as a central library. They are often supplemented by subject boxes or project loans from the school library service, and many primary schools still have their sets of class textbooks. The result is a commanding majority of non-fiction material in the school at any one time. This profusion is encouraging only if it does not indicate a corresponding neglect of fiction. We have already discussed the value of good imaginative literature in its own right, but we would also suggest that it should be used more widely in association with information books. Suppose, for example, a teacher of older juniors or younger secondary pupils is setting up a study of the Vikings. There are plenty of information books on this topic, but it would be an incomplete experience if the child were to have access only to these. The teacher might therefore cluster about this core a modernised version of the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon and the Icelandic Njal's Saga or The Saga of Grettir the Strong; Madeleine Polland's novel Beorn the Proud and Walter Hodges' The Namesake; Patricia Beer's poem Abbey Tomb, and Gael Turnbull's Gunnar from his Burial Mound from his group of poems Five from the Sagas. All these complement one another and throw fresh light on the source books. Patricia Beer's poem, for instance, is about the fate of monks in a pillaged abbey; Madeleine Polland's novel includes an attack on a monastery from the Vikings' viewpoint. An encounter of this kind could be used to lead a child to wider reading of fiction through an awakened interest. To exploit a promising situation in this way the teacher needs to know what is relevant and available.

9.7 The third important feature of this process of developing self-initiated reading is ingenuity in 'promoting' books. At its simplest and most effective level this will be a case of the teacher's knowledge and enthusiasm bringing child, book, and situation together in a natural interaction. In the course of one visit two members of the Committee were in a primary school library during the lunch hour when a boy came in carrying a tin containing some maggots he had found. The teacher immediately showed a keen interest, talked to him about them, then led him to a shelf where there was a book on the subject. She generated such a curiosity about the book that the boy went off carrying it with his tin of maggots, promising to let her know more about them when he'd read it. This is a seemingly obvious procedure, but not as simple as it sounds, and not as common. There was no doubt of the boy's eagerness to read that book, but it was produced by the teacher's genuine interest in what he had to show her, and her knowing that there was just the book to turn the incident to a reading advantage. In short, it revealed an expert ability to bring the right book to the right child at the right time. Opportunities do not always arrive as such happy accidents, but they can be engineered. We came across similar instances in secondary schools, for example where the teacher had found for the pupil a short story which had something in common with one the pupil had written himself. In the teacher's words, 'the imaginative exploration of the pupil's work can provide a way into the more difficult adult work of fiction'.

9.8 It is a particularly effective device for a teacher to stir demand by reading out arresting passages from new books. Television programmes likely to arouse a keen interest can be anticipated, and the teacher can have ready and waiting the appropriate books to catch the wave. There is almost no limit to the 'publicity' devices that might be conceived. For instance, in the display of dust jackets of new books arrows can lead off to large illustrations and short off-prints of associated material. Pupils can be given a board on which to pin up extracts calculated to make the curious want to know more. The teacher might tape trailer passages on cassettes for children to listen to on headsets. Some pupils might produce advertisement posters or design alternative dust jackets from their knowledge of the book. And always the children should be encouraged to talk about what they have read, to the teacher and among themselves. By keeping a note of what children read he could bring three or four together who had had common experience of a particular book and let them explore one another's reactions to it. This is so much more productive and so much less forbidding than the obligatory written book review, where the pupil knows that his pleasure has inevitably to be followed by a chore.

9.9 All this kind of activity presupposes a wide range of books ready to hand and responsive to the teacher's controlling inventiveness. The acquisition of books and the promotional activities are essentially related, and anything less than a professionally informed policy will not achieve the object. The building up of book resources is often something of a piecemeal process rather than a planned response to defined objectives. School library services are an invaluable resource, but they are a support for the teacher, not a substitute for his control of the total learning situation. We discuss this question of book supply in Chapter 21 but mention it here to underscore the importance of keeping a flow of good imaginative literature at the children's fingertips. Various studies have shown that a large number of contemporary writers of good quality fiction are barely represented in many schools, despite the fact that quantitatively the school may be generally well stocked with books. The survey conducted by Whitehead revealed that at least 77 per cent of all the books read by his sample fell within the category of 'narrative', which included biographical writing as well as fiction. Though there was some evidence of a veering towards informational books among the older boys, the category of 'non-narrative' still accounted for only 14.5 per cent of all book reading. It was clear that the narrative mode provided for children of all ages by far the strongest motivation towards the reading of books. The potential of this for a general increase in reading needs no elaboration, and the school should have the books both to create and meet the demand. It is a recognition of this fact that underlies the success of those schools which have achieved a remarkably high rate of voluntary reading.

9.10 We believe that this recognition cannot take place at too early an age, and that fantasy, fairy tale and folk tale should take their place in the repertoire in the earliest stages of reading. JRR Tolkien pointed out that fairy tales were not evolved for the nursery; they found their way there by historical accident. They contain the strength and simplicity of their origins, as well as their deep significance. The children will have had experience of them in a good pre-reading programme, when a teacher or parent will have read them aloud or will have told the stories. All too often when their own reading begins they lose this world in favour of a circumscribed domestic situation with narrow limits of action and feeling. We accept the argument that its commonest representation in early reading books offers few toeholds for the working class child. But we do not believe that it should simply be replaced by one that is set in a working class environment. There is obviously an important place for such material, but we have heard the case for 'relevance' carried to the point of excluding fantasy or any stories with settings or characters unfamiliar to the pupils from their first-hand experience. We do not accept this view. Though we consider it important that much of a child's reading matter should offer contact at many points with the life he knows, we believe that true relevance lies in the way a piece of fiction engages with the reader's emotional concerns. A work like Billy Liar, for example, has value for the older pupil not because of its environmental setting but because of its evocation of an aspect of adolescence and its exploration of family tensions.

9.11 We have emphasised that learning to read is a developmental process which continues over the years. To read intelligently is to read responsively; it is to ask questions of the text and use one's own framework of experience in interpreting it. In working his way through a book the reader imports, projects, anticipates, speculates on alternative outcomes; and nowhere is this process more active than in a work of imaginative literature. We strongly recommend that there should be a major effort to increase voluntary reading, which should be recognised as a powerful instrument for the improvement of standards. And in making this recommendation we recall a particularly telling remark from the evidence: pupils admitted to an adult literacy scheme had been asked to say why, in their opinion, they failed to learn to read at school. 'Only one common factor emerges: they did not learn from the process of learning to read that it was something other people did for pleasure'.

9.12 Most teachers of English would include among their most important aims a growth of discernment in their pupils. 'Discernment' is a word that begs many questions, and it could be taken to mean that the task of every English teacher is to take every pupil up to a permanent relationship with the great classics. In the last decade this notion has increasingly drawn contention. On the one hand there are those teachers who see literature in terms of a heritage, with which they must endow their pupils. On the other hand there are those who argue that many pupils can never be expected to take literature into their lives in any such sense. There is an equal polarity of view on what should be done with literature in the classroom. To some teachers there is no question but that this should consist of a close and detailed examination of the text, each successive encounter an attempt to sharpen discrimination. For others the text is very little more than a point of departure, a springboard to be barely touched before taking off for the element of personal experience or social issue. Nor is this to be neatly equated with the ability of the pupils. In our visits we saw lessons where pupils of modest capacity were being pressed very closely to the text. And we saw able pupils engaged on experience-based programmes where the text was only perfunctorily visited. Nevertheless, the first approach is traditionally thought appropriate for pupils preparing for examinations and, by extension, for pupils whose road will in due course lead there.

9.13 The influence of examinations on literature teaching has come in for a good deal of assault, not least from those who could hardly be accused of anti-academic bias. Sampson, writing in 1921, said 'If in any school something called literature is systematically taught, the efforts will usually be found to be directed towards literary history, or "meanings", or the explanation of difficulties, or summaries of plays and stories, or descriptions of characters .... all of which are evasions of the real work before the teacher responsible for literature'. And Aldous Huxley in The Olive Tree wrote that examinations in literature encourage pupils to repeat 'mechanically and without reflection other people's judgements'. C Day Lewis saw the process as a threat to a true and sincere response. He described it as a lamentable practice to equip the students with highly sophisticated instruments of criticism, check that the poet responds positively to their tests, and then say 'OK boys, now you may love him'. Such censures gain force when applied to this approach to literature with pupils of lesser capacity. We have seen pupils preparing for O Level and CSE with a diet of activities corresponding very closely to those catalogued by George Sampson. The explanations and the summaries have expanded to takeover point; the literature has receded. We must seriously question what is being achieved when pupils are producing chapter summaries in sequence, taking endless notes to prepare model answers and writing stereotyped commentaries which carry no hint of a felt response. Yet this is the standard experience of very large numbers of fourth and fifth formers who spend a term or more on a modest novel which makes no claim to merit such long drawn out attention. We recognise the difficulty facing the teacher, who has the task of talking about a narrative the sequence of which the pupils have not grasped. There are substantial technical problems with which very many teachers have not yet managed to come to terms. These add up to knowing how to help pupils 'through' a novel to the point of being able to respond to its experience without such unreal chores as chapter synopsis. We should like to see more professional discussion of appropriate teaching techniques for class approaches to a full-length novel.

9.14 There is no doubt that many secondary school pupils develop unsympathetic attitudes to literature as a result of their experience in preparing for an examination. We saw lessons in which a novel was treated as a hoard of factual information, with the pupils scoring marks for the facts they remembered. How many sheep did Gabriel Oak lose? What was the name of Bathsheba's maid? Where had Fanny Robins been working before she walked to Casterbridge? We saw pupils encountering poems as little more than comprehension passages, on which the teacher's information and interpretations were recorded as marginal notes. Yet in the same breath it must be said that the right relationship between teacher, text, and pupil can and does have a strikingly positive effect on attitudes to literature. In one fairly recent study (5) a substantial majority of a large sample of O Level candidates of both sexes said they had no intention of reading more poetry after leaving school. But a study of the boys' responses showed that the small minority taking the opposite view came from just six of the twenty-nine classes in ten different schools. It is likely that the positive effect of the teachers of those six classes had been very strong. It is also clear that some of the recent developments in examining have encouraged extensive reading and imaginative teaching. In some of the CSE classes we visited, pupils were responding sensitively to a wide variety of literature and deepening their understanding and enjoyment of it in the course of their study.

9.15 In a very real sense a pupil is himself being judged each time he responds in class to a piece of literature, particularly a poem. More is at stake than his knowledge of the text. Is the value judgement he forms the one the teacher finds acceptable? Is he betraying himself, he may well ask, as one who lacks discrimination? In no other area of classroom operations is there quite the same degree of vulnerability, with poetry the most exposing element of all. Every skilled teacher has his own means of reducing this vulnerability, of balancing the need to explore the text with the need to preserve its appeal. Some of the most successful lessons we have seen have been those in which the teacher has contrived to stand alongside his pupils in this process of exploration. In other words, he has avoided using the text as a repository of answers to which he possesses the key. His curiosity about the work has remained alive and has not been extinguished by layers of acquired judgement. These are the most favourable conditions for any work of literature: when teacher and taught approach it in a common spirit of exploration. Inevitably and naturally the teacher will guide, but he will do this by devising situations which lead the pupils to their own insight. Nothing is served if the pupil simply learns to repeat 'mechanically and without reflection other people's judgements', and if in the process he is lost to what literature has to offer him. As we see it, the main emphasis should be on extending the range of the pupil's reading. True discernment can come only from a breadth of experience. Learning how to appreciate with enthusiasm is more important than learning how to reject.

9.16 Over the past ten years or so there has been a growth in secondary schools of the organisation of thematic work. This has been felt to be particularly appropriate in mixed ability classes, since it enables pupils of varying capacity to work alongside one another productively. Sometimes the whole class may read certain poems or short stories together, while at others the material they are handling has been selected to suit their ability. Thematic work has thus provided the pupils with a common purpose, and by its very nature has encouraged an organic treatment of talk, reading, writing, and dramatisation. Literature has fared variously in such arrangements. It has certainly escaped what TS Eliot called the 'dryness of schematic analysis', but sometimes the encounter has been so brief that the pupil has been denied anything but a fleeting consciousness of it. We have seen lessons where the pupil's acquaintance with literature, other than what he reads privately, has been confined to a passage used to introduce a discussion; not a discussion upon the passage, which has been barely visited, but upon an area of experience to which it is related. There were several occasions on which virtually no attention at all was given to the words on the page. 'Have any of you had an experience like this?' is a tempting question after a first reading; but it becomes valuable only if the experience is then brought back to the text, and if there is a sharpening of response to the detail of the writing. An obvious danger in humanities lessons is for the literature to be selected solely on the ground that it matches the theme, however inappropriate it may be in other ways. Moreover, when a poem or story is enlisted to serve a theme it can become the property of that theme to the extent that its richness is oversimplified, its more rewarding complexities ignored. There is also a natural tendency to use collections of short extracts, so that the pupils' experience of complete books becomes minimal. We have a definite impression that fewer full-length novels are read. Anthologies are certainly a valuable resource, but they should open up opportunities, not constitute an end in themselves. The teacher's aim should always be to extend the range of writing to which the children can respond. Where anthologies are used we commend those that include complete pieces or substantial extracts, virtually artistic units on their own, rather than merely short snippets clipped out of their context.

9.17 The success of any innovation turns upon the manner and quality of its interpretation. At its best, thematic work has given to literature a self-proving eminence in the context of photograph, film, television, radio, and newspaper account which have been associated with it in developing the theme. We have seen excellent examples of work founded on such constellations of media. We have been particularly impressed by those situations, admittedly rarer, where the teacher has carefully chosen a core of poetry and drama and gathered about it prose texts which set up reverberations. By such means the words on the page can be brought into varying degrees of focus, and breadth achieved without loss of a controlled degree of depth. Many schools are successfully extending the range and variety of their pupils' reading with a large number of carefully selected titles from post-war fiction. These speak to the young adult, often on a helpfully simple level, and explore experiences of direct concern to him. In one small secondary modern school in an urban area we saw a fifth year class of moderate ability supporting their CSE set book study with an extensive range of such titles, chosen by the teacher with an excellent eye for their appeal and relevance. There was no doubt of his success in developing his pupils' enjoyment of wide reading while at the same time preparing them for the examination.

9.18 These and similar forms of organisation demand not only professional skill but professional knowledge. Whatever the value of his contribution in other ways the teacher without specialist qualifications in English cannot be expected to have the same ready access to a wide range of sources. Where a team of teachers is cooperating on a theme, particularly with a humanities programme, the guidance of an English specialist is essential. It is by no means always the case that he is to be found there. If the child is to meet literature the extent, relevance and quality of that literature must not be a matter of chance but the informed judgement of one who has a wide and detailed knowledge of suitable texts. He may not actually be teaching the class, but his advice and support should be available to whichever of his colleagues is. In the best of such arrangements this goes without saying. Regular consultation, reviews and synopses of material, joint study of the books to be used: these and many other devices ensure that all the non-specialist teachers of English are fully resourced. But such planning is not universal, and it is still too readily assumed that anyone can turn his hand to English. This assumption all too often results in a narrower experience of literature, and the closing of opportunities that might have been opened up had the teacher only known of particular books that match them.

9.19 In recent years there has been a welcome growth in the practice of wide individualised reading within a class. This is a pattern which some teachers have long operated, and its advantages were pressed by Jenkinson (6) in his 1940 survey when he advocated small sets of books as opposed to the collective reading of the class novel. And yet the latter is still to be found in many schools as the standard, indeed the exclusive, procedure. We refer here not to the classes which are preparing for examinations, but lower and middle school groups. Its great disadvantage is that it usually entails a slow plod, in which the pupils' experience of the book is parcelled out over a term or part of a term at weekly intervals. There are likely to be pupils who read fewer books during the whole term in school than they read out of school in one month. Moreover, this pattern is often associated with the allocation to particular classes or year groups of certain novels. These lists are often interpreted quite strictly, so that a pupil has no official access to a book in a higher list. Such grading systems are more often than not quite arbitrary and are not based on anything other than an intuitive 'feel'. The intuition of an experienced teacher is a valuable instrument, but experience shows that assessments of suitability can vary widely. In one group of four comparable secondary schools there was only partial agreement as to where a particular book belonged. Of the following books, each to be found in the first or second years of at least two of the four schools, only three were prescribed for the same age point in every case: Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Tanglewood Tales, Jim Davis, Tom Sawyer, David Copperfield, A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. Indeed, certain of the books that appeared in one school's lower school list would be deferred by another until the third or fourth year. Where classes are of mixed ability the logic of such restrictions is further open to question.

9.20 At its most extreme the system of class reading at the rate of one or two books a term must put literature in a somewhat artificial light in the mind of the pupil. We have already remarked that children's voluntary reading is not as great in quantity as it should be, but there is no doubt as to its diversity and variety. The 6,000 children in Whitehead's sample who claimed to have read one or more books during the previous four weeks named more than 7,500 separate and distinct titles. In our view the teacher can have a marked effect on his pupils' reading by extending the individualised provision within the classroom and relating it to their reading outside school hours. We have argued that this implies a knowledge on his part of the wide range of good modern fiction available. Some of the book lists we saw in schools were remarkably well-informed on this score, but others contained little beyond the established 'classics', and reflected a stock which had not received an infusion of new (as opposed to replacement) material for some considerable time. It is equally important that the teacher should know something about the pupils' reading habits, and should discover what books they read in their previous school and the nature and extent of the work that has grown out of this reading. We hope he would then keep his own record of their reading in school and would discuss with them the books they read outside it. Perhaps it hardly needs adding that these will often disappoint him. Every survey so far carried out into children's reading reveals that much of it is ephemeral or well below what informed adults would consider to be good material. Nevertheless, the skilled teacher will not reject or denigrate it. The willingness to talk about it and take up the child's enthusiasm is essential to the process of encouraging him to widen his range.

9.21 In recommending an expansion of supported individualised reading in schools we see it as a complementary process to group attention to the text, which provides so valuable an opportunity to deepen the reading experience. Some of the best and most lasting effects of English teaching have come from the simultaneous encounter of teacher, pupil and text. We have suggested above that this experience can be more universally enjoyed when it takes the form of a shared exploration. This is clearly not easy. The teacher has a deeper knowledge of literature in general and that work in particular than his pupils can possess. He brings to the situation a wider experience of life and a maturer view of it. To contain these in the process of sharing is a measure of his skill at its highest level. A child derives value from a work of literature in direct proportion to the genuineness of the response he is able to make to it. The teacher's skill lies in developing the subtlety and complexity of this response without catechism or a one-way traffic in apodictic [incontrovertible] judgements. This is particularly true in the case of poetry, which our visits showed to be receiving a wide range of treatment. At its best it was distinguished, and the children were being given an experience which was enviable and a pleasure to witness. At the other extreme some children rarely encountered poetry of any kind.

9.22 It has to be acknowledged that poetry starts at a disadvantage. In the public view it is something rather odd, certainly outside the current of normal life; it is either numinous, and therefore rarely to be invoked, or an object of comic derision. Definitions of poetry are almost limitless, but they always agree upon this central fact: that it is a man speaking to men, of his and their condition, in language which consists of the best words in the best order, language used with the greatest possible inclusiveness and power. Matthew Arnold said of it that it is 'simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things'. To DH Lawrence '... the essential quality of poetry is that it makes a new effort of attention and "discovers" a new world within the known world'. Definitions can inspirit, but they can also deter. It is a reinforcement of the prejudice against poetry to present it as something precious, arcane, to be revered. This concept, a particularly tenacious one, sees poetry as 'something more or less involuntarily secreted by the author', oozing from the unconscious in a manner quite unlike that of prose, which is consciously controlled. The teacher is often faced with the task of showing that poetry is not some inaccessible form of utterance, but that it speaks directly to children, as to anyone else, and has something to say which is relevant to their living here and now.

9.23 We have already referred to the analytical approach to poetry. This has been successively reinforced by every new examination which has been introduced, even where the authors of that examination have intended something quite different. TS Eliot once said of practical criticism: 'It cannot be recommended to young people without grave danger of deadening their sensibility ... and confounding the genuine development of taste with the sham acquisition of it'. But it is to be found, in however skeletal or distorted a form, in some clearly inappropriate situations. We have seen CSE classes working their way almost mechanistically through a set anthology, paraphrasing and answering endless comprehension questions on the way; and this is standard practice for many O Level pupils. It is perhaps not surprising that in the survey mentioned earlier (paragraph 9.14) the pupils' attitude to poetry was a dispiriting one. Of 1,000 O Level and A Level students only 170 said they would read any more poetry after leaving school; 96 of the 800 O Level students, 74 of the 200 A Level students. Equally revealing was their attitude towards particular texts. The four O Level poetry anthologies were conspicuously disliked, while at A Level Milton's poetry, and particularly Paradise Lost, was notably unpopular. It is at least possible that his standing was related to the degree of 'external' labour his poetry demands: factual knowledge, annotation, paraphrase, classical and biblical allusions.*

*Cf Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch On the Art of Reading (1920): 'You have (we will say) a class of thirty or forty in front of you ... you will not (if you are wise) choose a passage from Paradise Lost: your knowledge telling you that Paradise Lost was written, late in his life, by a great virtuoso, and older men (of whom I, sad to say, am one) assuring you that to taste the Milton of Paradise Lost a man must have passed his thirtieth year'.

9.25 All this leads us back inevitably to the question of the teacher's knowledge of his material. Many schools simply do not have the resources to take this kind of opportunity. The anthologies, thematic source books, and collections of extracts are a great help, but they do not go far enough. Many of them are sensitively and intelligently compiled, and the editor has allowed his own good judgement to operate on his own very wide reading. Some, however, are simply anthologies of anthologies, yielding only a few new poems to supplement the very large overlap with collections that have gone before. A particular poem will appear time and again, though in fact it may not be either the most appealing or the most suitable of the very many the author has written. Inevitably, anthologies age, and where a school relies on class sets (sometimes, as we have seen, shared between two or three classes) the range of available material will become relatively narrower as time goes by. It is exceptionally difficult for the individual teacher to keep abreast of all the new poetry that is published. Indeed, except for those with a particular interest in it there is often a time lag, so that the teacher is not aware of much of the work produced in the last two decades. A good anthology will do a great deal to introduce teacher and pupil alike to new and unfamiliar material, but it should not be a substitute for the extensive reading of poetry by the teacher himself. We know this is an ideal; but if the teacher wants to find material that he knows will be right for his pupils and the context he has created, this is the most rewarding way. There is some very good poetry published that never finds its way into an anthology, and much of it would appeal directly to the pupils. There is certainly everything to be said for teachers in a primary school and members of an English department maintaining a collective knowledge of what is being produced. We found that one of the strengths of the well qualified groups of specialists in some comprehensive schools was precisely this team approach to reading. Communally, the department had an impressive knowledge, upon which every individual member could draw. This awareness thus becomes a major contributor to the central resource collection a department creates for itself. Such a collection will contain print and non-print materials of all kinds, and one of its essentials should be a wide range of poetry gathered through teachers' first-hand reading of the work of individual poets. A resource point of this kind can be particularly helpful to a young teacher early in his first appointment. To enjoy so wide a choice, to be able to call freely on record, tape, or cassette, may make all the difference to his attitude to poetry in the classroom in that first year. Another valuable facility is the Arts Council-DES 'Writers in Schools' scheme, which enables poets to visit schools to read and talk about their work. Where we have seen this in operation it has been very successful. Some schools have developed the interest it has generated by taking pupils to exhibitions of poetry and public readings.

9.26 We have placed some emphasis on contemporary poetry, but this is not to imply that we recommend it at the expense of older poetry. It is simply that much of the work of this half century, and perhaps particularly the last two decades of it, has a voice to which a larger number of young people can more readily respond. Moreover, it is fresh to many teachers themselves and some feel able to read it to their pupils with the pleasure of a new discovery. Poetry of this century and of earlier centuries can be read side by side, to the mutual illumination of both. And what we have said about going beyond anthologies applies with little less force to the latter.

9.27 Poetry has great educative power, but in many schools it suffers from lack of commitment, misunderstanding, and the wrong kind of orientation; above all it lacks adequate resources. There are few more rewarding experiences in all English teaching than when teacher and pupil meet in the enjoyment of a poem. We are not so unrealistic as to believe that all pupils can take away from school with them a lasting love of poetry. There will always be many people to whom it offers nothing. But we are certain that it does not reach as many as it might, and we believe this can be achieved.

9.28 We can sum up by saying that whatever else the pupil takes away from his experience of literature in school he should have learned to see it as a source of pleasure, as something that will continue to be a part of his life. The power to bring this about lies with the teacher, but it cannot be pretended that the task is easy. In outlining some of the difficulties we have inevitably had to be critical of certain approaches which we believe compound them. However, we must conclude with warm appreciation of the work we have seen in many of the schools we visited, which we believe is representative of the imaginative treatment literature is widely receiving. It is an aspect of English which has made some remarkable advances in recent years, and we feel that great credit belongs to the teachers who have done so much to bring these about.

References

1. Smith Nowell Cambridge Essays on Education Editor AC Benson, Cambridge University Press: 1917.

2. Half our Future HMSO: 1963.

3. Sampson G English for the English Cambridge University Press: 1921.

4. Whitehead F, Capey AC and Maddren W Children's Reading Interests Schools Council Working Paper No. 52: Evans/Methuen Educational: 1974.

5. Yarlott G and Harpin WS 1,000 Responses to English Literature Educational Research 13.1 and 13.2: 1972/73.

6. Jenkinson AJ What do Boys and Girls Read? An investigation into reading habits with some suggestions about the teaching of literature in secondary and senior schools: Methuen: 1940.