I'm not sure if this appropriate but I'd like to say thanks to Middlesex University and to the Deputy Vice Chancellor, Professor Ken Goulding who has made this visiting professorship appointment. And to Professor Richard Tufnell and the School of Lifelong Learning and Education for putting it about that it might be a good idea.
I'd also like to thank the people who saw me through my postgraduate work, Tony Watkins, Dennis Butts and Dudley Jones at Reading University, Ruth Merttens, then at the then University of North London and Jean Webb from Worcester University College and Margaret Meek Spencer from everywhere but especially the Institute of Education in London for supervising me in more ways and for much longer than comes within the remit of PhDs. In fact, since I was about 20, I think, and still going on.
I know these lists can go on forever but I can't leave out my mother and father, also known as Connie and Harold Rosen. The first time I ever came here to what was then Trent Park college, it was because my mother was teaching a diploma in primary education at the college, and she asked me to come along and read some poems to her group. My father is in the room now and between them, they gave me a life, an education, encouragement, support and great stuff to write about.
And thanks too to my wife for making it possible for me to be standing here now and not sitting staring at the wall, and hello to our baby. He's called Emile - he's spelled as if he's Zola but with a deliberate echo of a book that's well worth reading, 'Emil and the detectives'.
And are books for children worth reading?
What a strange question to ask! Most of us in this room have spent years making, reading, teaching or studying children's books. We've devoted great chunks of our lives to this matter. So surely it's a question that doesn't even need asking. We just know that they're worth reading.
Well, perhaps that would be the case, if it weren't for some problems. Problems that make it harder for us to answer the question. I mean, if you say, are books for children worth reading, I sometimes feel like saying, well, when you think of the way they're treated, you might think not.
Let's begin with education. It's in schools where most people not only learn to read, they learn how to read. For many people, outside of the regularly book-reading minority, this is the one place where they will learn what reading feels like; and what reading is for. It's the critical moment when either the reading bug might bite or give up trying. Now, the world of children's books has always existed in a symbiotic relationship with education, with schools looking to children's literature for books to read; and children's literature looking to schools to buy their books for its libraries and classrooms and for schools to create active readers who come back over and over again to read more books. So, no apologies for beginning with education.
But what's going on with books in schools? Many of us here have been witness to the fact that the way books are read in schools has, over the last four or five years changed. We are full of anecdotal evidence of, say, years 5 and 6 classrooms where whole books are not being read; where books are being chopped up into fragments which are then turned into worksheets; and these fragments are then used as examples for exercises on spotting verbs and similes.
We can offer eyewitness accounts of how the word 'literature' has been abolished. It is, as you know, now called, 'literacy'. So this has turned the act of reading into a performance to be assessed: how well is he reading? Is she reading accurately? Is she reading fluently? How can we test this reading performance? How can we create a set of classroom activities around reading that will be testable so that we can show that a child is reading at this or that level?
For those of us who write children's books, let alone for the hundreds of thousands of people who enjoy the business of reading books with the children they know, we're pretty sure that this is not why we got involved. The reasons why we write books for children are complex and diverse but amongst them you can find a notion like: wanting to say things that matter to young people. And when I say, 'matter' that can take in such ideas as wanting to intrigue, entertain, educate, amuse, excite, stir up and challenge our audience. I don't know many writers of books for children who would say, 'I write children's books so that a class of year 5 children can count the adjectives on page 43 of my latest novel.'
But let's leave the anecdotal evidence to one side, and even my wistful complaints about what's happening to our precious books in schools. In fact, looking at the people in this room makes me think we should set up an open and independent commission to look into exactly how books are being read in schools at the moment. And before that, to set the field, we could invite people who have thought long and hard about why we read and enjoy literature, to offer some thoughts. And then we could match these thoughts with what is actually going on. I have a picture of taking let's say A.S. Byatt, Derek Walcott - I don't know - John Carey, Germaine Greer into a set of primary schools to see a classroom preparing for a SAT reading paper and asking our visitors if what's going on matches up with what they think literature is for. Come to think of it, it might make an interesting documentary...
In the meantime, we either have the anecdotes and the speculation, or we can look closely at the ideas that have come to dominate how teachers and children read books in schools. Where should we look for these ideas? Compressed into the hundreds of anonymous foolscap booklets that have landed up on headteachers' desks over the last ten years? You know, the ones full of phrases like 'research has shown that' without ever telling you whose research or what the results of the research were.
Or should we look at the part of the process where a model of reading is put before teachers as the most valuable, a model that has the currency that really counts?
Let me read you a story. It's called 'You Can Do It' by Theresa Breslin.
[An excerpt from 'You Can Do It' followed but cannot be included here due to copyright]
Now, I wonder if you could help me here. I want you to imagine that you have that story in front of you and you're in the company of a group of children. Can I ask you to talk to the person next to you about what kinds of things you might do with that story? Before, during or after reading it.
Well, as some of you may or may not know, this was the story that was set in the Key Stage 2 English Reading SAT for levels 3-5 last year.
So let's see what kind of activity that exam is, what is the purpose and meaning of a SATs paper in relation to a story? And you can compare that with the kinds of activities you've just come up with. But before we get on, just so that there's no misunderstanding, I'll explain why I'm doing this. It's because it's my view that within and behind the questions asked on a SAT paper is a whole outlook that implies a way of reading. But more than that: without stating explicitly that this is the approach teachers should take when reading stories to their children, the sheer institutional power of the SATs creates a dominant discourse. Something is being dictated here. Very few of us here need reminding how much pressure there is on teachers, parents and of course the children themselves to do well in the SATs, to get the school a good place in the league tables, to show the Ofsted inspectors and the local press that this isn't a failing school and so on. That's the institutional power that lies behind the questions that I'm going to look at now.
So, having read the story, the children begin. You might like to try too. I won't be marking your papers.
The first group of questions you're asked goes like this:
'Choose the best group of words to fit the passage and put a ring around your choice'.
Then there are five multiple choice questions, along these lines:
'When Fiona waited she remembered how Grampa had
'saved her' 'helped her' 'played games' 'read to her'.
What the children are being asked to do here follows rule one of all exams: that a your best chance of being able to answer a question lies in the extent to which you know the game, the extent to which you've been initiated into the procedures and jargon of the exam itself; and it's much less of a matter of knowing the answer to what is actually being asked. It's hard to think of a more opaque way of saying what they're asking than with the sentence: 'Choose the best group of words to fit the passage...' Can words 'fit' passages? And what's a 'passage' anyway? We should remember, that it is at this very moment, in the difficulties of decoding the code of exam questions that children are graded and selected, rewarded and failed. For some of us, it's particularly distressing to know that it is the things we write that can be used in this way. Once again, I can say that I don't know of a writer of books for children who came into the business thinking, 'I hope that one day I'll write something that examiners will be able to use to dub some children failures.'
And then there's the mess of multiple choice to think about. It's thought that multiple choice questions are more objective and therefore more informative about the candidate than open-ended questions about such fuzzy things as feelings and emotions. In fact, hidden in every multiple choice question is the snag that the wrong answers are not all as equally wrong. Some are more obviously wrong than others. Some wrong answers could at a stretch be kind of right. The marks given never reflect this. In other words, it's not very objective at all and tell you very little or very misleading things about how a child is thinking.
So, in the question I just gave you, the right answer, says the booklet invitingly called 'English tests, Mark schemes' is that Grampa 'helped her' but the way he helped her in the pool, you may remember was in a way to play games with her. No marks for using your intelligence and giving both as answers.
We are also asked about what Fiona found after she fell downstairs: 'a photograph album', 'some old letters' 'a photograph of Grampa in uniform' or a 'letter from Grampa'. This is a trick question, because, yes, she did find a photo of Grampa in uniform but that was earlier in the story. The right answer is a photograph album.
What is going on here? It's a crude attempt to impose a rightness on the way a child should read. That there is some kind of correctness and that this correctness is linked to identifying facts about a story in their right order, in the right time-frame. We should remember here that Theresa Breslins' story is not a whodunnit, where our reading will in part depend on remembering who did what to whom and when.
It's a story, I would suggest, that is very much about shifts in feeling. The significance of whether she found the photo album after Fiona fell, or the photo of Grampa is minute. It is what I'll call a 'spurious facticity' , an unnecessary and falsely based obsession with what are perceived to be the 'facts' of a story, in lieu of its shifting tone and feeling.
Interestingly enough, for a mode of examining that pretends to be objective and factual the next two questions offer a correct answer that introduces ideas not stated in the story. After her spell at hospital, we are asked if Fiona and her dad went to 'watch television', 'see mum and grampa', 'collect the old photos', or 'help Mum with the packing'. Well, we know that Fiona went to see Grampa but there's no certainty that Mum was there too.
What is this kind of trickery for? It's for whose benefit, exactly? What does it prove? Again, and excuse me for repeating it, I think the function of this kind of interrogation is to control teachers in the way that they read stories with children. In order to get your class to do well at the tests, you the teacher should spend time each week, perhaps each day, interrogating children along these lines after you've looked at a story or a passage from a story. Once again, we are talking about a process here of showing this model of reading and talking about reading as the one with the most value.
By the way, I've got some questions here for SATs setters in case they use passages from some well-known books.
'On what side of the road, was the good Samaritan walking?'
'On what leg, is Long John Silver's wooden leg?'
'In which way did Odysseus turn the stake in Cyclops eye, left, right or both ways?'
'How sharp was Hamlet's sword to go through an arras tapestry, Polonius's clothes and in sufficiently far to kill him?'
As with all systems that draw attention to their own correctness, SATs frequently contain errors and misleading information.
We are asked, 'Why did Fiona's mother feel annoyed at the beginning of the story?' And we are offered page 9 as a place to look. In fact at least one possible answer is stated quite clearly on page 10...Mother is calling up to Fiona with various things like 'what is keeping you so long?' and then, 'I don't want Grampa to be waiting too long.'
Because the examiner and child are locked into this ballet of correctness, when misleading or unhelpful, or not-helpful-enough information is given us, we never have the courage to defy what we're told. If it says see page 9 they must be right. The answer won't be on page 10, and even if it looks like it is, it can't be, because they've said it's page 9. This is, in its own way, an example of the classic psychologists' test of conformity. Better to conform than to be right. Better to risk nothing than to be right.
Then we are asked what grampa's proverb means: 'Those who hurry fastest are the first to fall.' 'Explain what he meant.'
Now, let me begin to look up from this dreary business for a moment. Faced with a story that has an old person passing on his thoughts to a young one in the form of a proverb, just think of the interesting directions you could go: you could ask the children to collect proverbs and sayings that their own grandparents and parents say. You could ask what it feels like to be told these things? And you could even ask, if Grampa's one or any of the others that the children collect, are, in their view, true?
In this way, we would make the children equal to the story, not part of a process that rewards and humiliates. We would also, and I'll be coming back to this, be treating story as something open-ended. A place where we acknowledge that the reader brings with him or her a knowledge that he or she responds with and that this is one of the unavoidable and utterly delicious things about reading.
By the way, you get two marks if you say something like 'people who rush things never get them done.' But only one mark if you say something like 'he meant don't rush what you're doing, take your time.'
In direct contrast to this approach to response, the next question crystallises all that's wrong with this approach to literature:
'...pain flared in her knees. (page 12)
Why is this an effective way of describing how Fiona felt after she fell down the stairs?
We are so indoctrinated into this way of talking to children about literature, it's sometimes hard to see what's so appalling about it.
Who says that 'pain flared in her knees' is 'effective'? Where is the author of this opinion? How does the author of that opinion justify it? No, we have the pure silence of authority, embodied in the dull, voice of the examiner. The exam states that it's 'effective', so it must be. Conform children, conform.
The question also reveals an obsession that lies behind the teaching of literature, in particular, poetry - that's to say 'metaphor'. For quite complicated reasons, metaphor shoots up the league table of priorities in the teaching of literature and is considered much more worthy of close examination than say repartee, mimesis, intonation or lying. Again, we have here an example of indoctrination-of-teachers disguised as exam-question: teach the children metaphor if you want them to pass their exams. Why? Where's the justification for this? Where's the intellectual rationale that makes metaphor king of the castle? Nowhere to be found.
I've got nothing against metaphors but even within the parameters of its given high status, consider the possibility of asking children to come up with their own ways of saying what it felt like when they hurt themselves. Did things 'flare', as Theresa Breslin, or did they explode, rip, stab...etc? Why tell children that Theresa is the goddess of effectiveness? The reading of literature shouldn't be someone forcing you to your knees at the feet of authors in praise of their effective metaphors.
The next question likewise reproduces one of the classic misleading notions that lie deep in the heart of old school literature teaching: 'Why do you think the author included these details about how Grampa used to look?' the details in question are the photographs that spill out of the box, him in his uniform, his strong face and dark moustache.
This is the process whereby the correct answer is the one in the examiner's head, who for some magical and mysterious reason had a direct channel of communication with the author's mind. So what you now have to do, is not include any random or Freudian reasons that you might come up with like, say, Theresa Breslin likes men with dark moustaches. Nor should you suggest that it might be for any ideological reasons to do with this family being quite well off with Grampa's 'big old house' and that such people often mark out their lives with nicely kept photo albums. Nor should you suggest that this is a story that relies on two kinds of flashback, the one in the narrative and the one in the objects that are referred to, sometimes both at the same time.
No, the correct answer, is, I thought because using details makes stories come alive, or something like that. I don't think I would have got a mark for that. 2 marks for pointing out that it's a way of comparing the state of Grampa now with what he used to be like, but only one mark for saying that 'it shows that people change as they grow up.' To be honest, I think they got out of their depth with this one and can't distinguish between questions about author intention, questions about rhetoric and questions about what is thought by these people that a bit of writing will do to you.
Again, we could say, why not first ask children about what it's like when they go through photo albums and see pictures of what their grandparents and parents looked like when they were younger? And the thoughts you might have here would inform you about Fiona's reactions. But the snag with that, is that we wouldn't know what they would answer, and the children wouldn't go through this bit of pretend mind-reading that is always thought to be so important. Instead, they would spend a moment guessing what was in their own heads. They would be the authority of their own experience, rather than novices in the process of becoming experts on examiners' heads. As it happens, in my experience, exam-setters are amongst the least able to divine what authors are up to.
By the way, I have noticed the pseudo-liberal 'Why do you think the author included these details...'
It's pseudo liberal because there are only two kinds of right answers allowed. This leaves teachers in their daily practice with the job of setting children this kind of question so that the children can learn how to make their mind-reading guesses fit the examiners' requirements more and more closely. Under 'Assessment focus 6' this is known as 'identify and comment on writers' purposes and viewpoints, and the overall effect of the text on the reader.' (All that took about a term on my MA on children's lit at Reading) By the way, his has nothing to do with encouraging children to respond to what stories feel like to them, nothing very much to do with daring and experimenting with what they might think a story might be about. Nothing to do with investigating story for all its possibilities. And it's this readerly sense of indecision, wonder and experiment that many writers deliberately play with. Vital to active writing and reading; irrelevant to SATs examiners.
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