declaration of faith to the language and principles of recent reports on the teaching of
English, whose writers have been severely constrained by their masters in government.
The committee saw literature as a means of unifying the country across class barriers
—‘pride and joy in the national literature [should] serve as a bond’ (Newbolt 1921:21).
Their recommendations concerning the selection of texts and teaching methods are
eclectic:
No fixed rule of treatment should be followed. Variety of treatment is an advantage
and a stimulus, but serious study should be kept quite distinct from rapid reading,
though the same book may well afford material for both. To harp on the same
method lesson after lesson, to read in class minute fragments of a whole which the
class may well be relied on to read for themselves without assistance and at their
leisure, to work in successive terms at one and the same book—all these make
staleness in class and teacher inevitable... All good methods have this in common,
that they aim at focussing attention on the living word of the author.
Newbolt 1921:112The argument over Classical or English literature which had so troubled Arnold and
Newbolt may now have been laid to rest, but other disagreements about texts have
continued. This section does not allow a detailed rehearsal of those debates, but no
discussion of current practice in the teaching of literature can be divorced from them.
These disagreements are outlined below in a more polarised way than might be evident
in schools day by day; although it is worth noting that the media, and those with
political rather than educational priorities, have often presented the arguments in
extreme terms, avoiding the complexities of how children actually read and learn.
There has been a continuing debate concerning the purposes of teaching literature in
schools. Arnold’s conviction about its humanising power is still shared by many
literature teachers. In attempts to establish whether reading novels and poems does in
some way make ‘better’ people, researchers have tried to determine what effect literature
actually has upon behaviour. For example, one experiment in the USA probed the effects
on adolescent readers of several books which reaffirmed the value of honesty;
disconcertingly, groups exposed to these texts sometimes proved simply more adept at
lying than parallel groups given a free choice of reading. George Steiner famously cast
doubt on the power of literature ‘to civilise our gentlemen’ in pointing out that
murderers of Jews in concentration camps are known to have been devotees of Goethe
and Rilke when off duty (Steiner 1967:55). The problem for researchers in this field is
always that there are so many variables to take into account; readers can be offered
texts which contain all kinds of ‘humanising’ elements—what they make of them is
another matter.
The humanising teacher has often been at odds with colleagues who adopt a more
utilitarian approach. Literature is sometimes employed as a means of teaching skills:
passages are mined from novels for comprehension or dictation, or even to teach
spelling and syntax. Teachers (particularly in primary schools) working on ‘The Romans’
might inject their children with a shot of Rosemary Sutcliff; or a project on arachnids
might include some snippets from E.B.White’s Charlotte’s Web (1952). Critics of this
588 TEACHING FICTION AND POETRY