We have another question now, which is surely one of the most mysterious in the whole exercise.
It quotes a line: 'But it hadn't been like that at all.(page 12)
What does this sentence tell you about Fiona's feelings after Grampa came out of hospital? Explain your answer fully.
I love that 'explain your answer fully'. More exam-ese, a phrase that is hermetically sealed into the language of testing and never emerges to see daylight in everyday speech.
But back to the question...what does this sentence tell you about Fiona's feelings? I'm sorry, but the sentence, ripped from context, as the examiners have done both by quoting it, and referring to it as 'this sentence', tells you absolutely nothing whatsoever about Fiona's feelings. As a sentence, it is entirely un-freighted with the language of feeling. It merely sounds, on its own, like a sentence of contradiction of some sort, which might imply anything from fussy pedantry, to anger, disappointment, mockery, irony, irritation, good humour, contempt, horror, surprise. As you might expect, though, there are three marks up for grabs if you ignore the instruction to look at the single sentence and pour into it all the contextual stuff about Fiona hoping that Grampa would be the same old Grampa and what he was like in reality. Knowing how to do this, wins you three marks but if you write: 'everything she had dreamed of did not come true' will only get you one.
This part of the story interestingly includes some examples of what's known as free indirect discourse, much loved of writers probably since Jane Austen but certainly since Madame Bovary.
'Then they would play cards and she would win most of the games. But it hadn't been like that at all. He sat slumped in his chair by the fire most of the day, his eyes were vague and sometimes he dribbled his food. Just like a baby!'
The phrase 'just like a baby' is probably not the same voice as 'sometimes he dribbled his food'. Now I'm not suggesting that we should be firing questions about free indirect discourse at children. However, when we can get away from interrogating children in the ways that we've seen so far, there might be times when we could invite children, particularly when they're doing some writing themselves, to think of narrative sometimes as a bit like a game, where you can be in one person's head and speak their feelings, then in another person's, sometimes in everyone's head, sometimes only in one person's. And that there are different ways of speaking from inside a person's head. Or sometimes you can avoid being in anyone's head. And that stories nearly always mean that somebody or something is the centre of attention, but you can shift this around and, indeed play with it. But 'play' and 'games' is not on the agenda here.
Then, and I suspect that this is as a reaction to the kind of criticism, I'm making here, we have two questions that suggest that someone somewhere deep in the heart of test-land has realised that stories are indeed often largely about how people's feelings change and why.
How does Fiona's accident change how she feels about Grampa?
And:
What do you think Fiona might have written in her diary after visiting Grampa two weeks after he had moved to his new flat?
Needless to say, it's not as open-ended a question as all that, because the candidates are then told what to think:
'Think about:
what she thought of the flat:
her friendship with Grampa'
What?! Why? Fiona the diarist might not want to mention the flat. Her diary could be about a programme that they watched on the telly together, a story that Grampa told her about when he staggered down the market to buy some carrots, a story about Fiona's mother when she was young, an article in the paper about a fire in the flats next door...or anything! That's the whole point of asking this kind of question. Well it should be but not in these folks' hands. It seems as if even as the examiners give with one hand, they take away with the other.
Finally we are asked:
a) What made Fiona remember things that happened in the past?
Which I answered with 'she was good at remembering catchphrases like 'what are friends for', 'you can do it' and 'those who hurry fastest.'
I'd have got no marks for that.
Why are Fiona's memories important to this story?
I answered that by saying 'because the story is about change', which would have got me one mark but not two. I should have said 'because the story is about Fiona realising that in the past her Grampa helped her and so now she must help him. or because you need to know what happened before and compare it with the present.'
So here we tie the whole story up with a bit of liberal moralising, which to tell the truth passed me by. We are told, then, by 'English tests Mark schemes, key stage 2, levels 3-5 2004' that there is a right meaning to this story, a nearly right meaning and a whole load of wrong ones; and in so doing, it tells you that that's what stories are: things that have an overall right meaning that some clever people, like SATs-setters get and other dullards like me, don't.
This is a model of reading, that as I've suggested worms its way back into teachers' practice through the institutional power of the compulsory SATs system.
And it's a model of reading literature that I reject, for the simple reason that it makes books for children not worth reading.
It makes them dull, tiresome and irritating. It draws attention away from what moves us, or even from questioning why things move us or don't. It centres the facticity of story and de-centres the importance of changing feelings - And it takes the meaning of stories away from you into some strange, slightly frightening and abstract place occupied by Those Who Know Better And More Than You. They know the meaning. 'Play this game and you might be able to join them. Get it wrong and you won't.'
When we remind ourselves that in many schools, the reading of whole books has come to an end, many children don't get to know how things turn out in a story so they will never feel the experience of change when they read. They will never feel what I think is the most important thing about story, the presentation of possibles - possible behaviour, possible scenes and possible worlds. And you need to feel the sensation of how these possibles work out, to get it.
In short, you won't ever get the buzz of reading the stuff. So why bother to do it when, say, you're on your own? Or when you're bored? Or when there's something else to do?
Which brings me to the second reason that suggests that books for children might not be worth reading.
It's one of the curious ironies of our time, that though children's literature has just been discovered. it's precisely at this moment that large sections of the public arena are intent on avoiding a discussion about children's books that treats them just as we might talk about books for adults.
First a little anecdote: I'm very lucky to work for the country's public service broadcaster, the BBC. For ten years, it ran a programme called 'Treasure Islands' which for 18 shows a year, looked exclusively at books aimed at children. It wasn't a children's show. It was aimed at people who would probably be looking for books for children they knew, but not entirely so. The programme had to be sufficiently interesting in its own right, to interest people who were once children themselves, or who might become one while listening to the programme, or even for people to wonder what kind of place or what kind of time it is or was that produces or produced this or that kind of book.
It was taken off the air for the explicit reason that there wasn't room for ghetto programming. Children's books would be now looked at as part of arts and book magazine programmes or in separate features.
Yes, children's books appear more frequently for children with Go4It and BBC 7, but the question remained, do we need a place where a conversation goes on about children's books, just as we have conversations about children's minds or children's behaviour. About children but not always in the language of children themselves.
Meanwhile, TV finds almost no time for this kind of conversation about books for children, unless it involves an author who sells prodigious numbers of books (hooray for that); there's a scandal; or there's what is described as a crisis in childhood, a crisis in literacy or a crisis in parenting.
The popular newspapers are utterly uninterested, and the broadsheets stutter along: The Guardian's pages for children's books, where I'm an occasional reviewer, I see, often has to justify itself with a quarter page ad, whereas an interview with an adult fiction writer can, quite properly, spread to three pages, or a page of fiction reviews go without an ad entirely.
I know that editors like Julia Eccleshare, Nicolette Jones and Jill Slotover, struggle to get regular reviews in, paragraphs here, interviews there but all of them (and others) can tell you how hard it is to get the stuff noticed and taken beyond brief reviews and news.
So what's going on here? Why is there,in the midst of weekly announcements, about literacy standards, schooling, constant heartsearching analyses of children's behaviour and parenting problems an unwillingness to open a conversation about children's books? A conversation about the ideas embodied in the books and the social conditions and traditions they come out of?
It's hard not get conspiratorial about it. Or should I say, structural? It can't be an indifference about literature in general because books are getting as good a whack from the media as they've ever got. It can't be to do with a lack of interest in what, as adults, we think we're doing with our kids. So where's the problem? To tell the truth, it's a problem this culture has with children themselves.
The difficulty surrounding books for children is that they are unashamedly on the side of children. They also suggest that children should be taken seriously. That's not to say that they are serious, though they may well be, but that how children think, feel and behave is something that matters. This is implied both in what the stories seem to be about, but also in the very manner in which they are presented, the very fact that they are presented at all; we say: here is something that you may well enjoy, you are someone worth entertaining, have a laugh, get scared, be amazed, be bewildered. See if you can follow this. What's more, on close examination, different children's books imply different kinds of reader and flip that over, we find different kinds of children reading in different kinds of ways. Behind the 20 millions and 50 millions of readers that hit the headlines are complex and interesting patterns of reading going on...
Now that's a cluster of ideas that is hardly on our culture's dial. Children, our culture, seems to suggest, are often a problem - we have asbos and curfews and off-site units; we have anguish-laden articles about children with problems of the body or mind; we have programmes proving that they are more stupid now (never more clever), their education is worse, their materialism and sexuality are out of control.
Our culture also tells us that children are often best left at home with baby-sitters, it's hard to travel and eat out with them; we find it difficult to create mixed-age occasions.
We have governments who make detailed and expensive plans on how to contain, control and grade children inside educational institutions but very rarely take any notice of places where children play and could or actually do entertain themselves. That's left to low-paid youthworkers and librarians and constantly closing play facilities on one side, or Hollywood and the TV moguls on the other.
In other words what children do, think and feel is well below the radar of the prevailing ideas of the powerful. It doesn't feature as part of public discourse. A possible reason for this is that though children rate as consumers (or their parents on their behalf) they don't rate as producers. Rather like Old Age Pensioners. They don't make anything, so they matter less for what they are, only for what they will become; they're not a state of being, they're a state of being on the way to somewhere else, called adulthood. Again, an ironic state of affairs considering the massive rise in therapies that place our adult lives in the grip of our childhoods. It's as if we're saying, children are boring, but my childhood is fascinating..let me tell you about it...
So, this thing we're in, books for children, has to struggle with this structural indifference. A structural indifference that always mouthes that books for children are worth reading, but rarely puts its money where that mouth is.
Meanwhile, within higher education, the fledgling of university courses on children's literature is beginning to take flight. For the public conversation about children's books to be thoughtful and helpful, we need people doing first degrees and postgraduate work to have some time to look at the ideas and theories surrounding children's literature. For example, children's literature has always played an important, sometimes central part in how western societies have constructed ideas about gender, race, class and identity in general. Think of the power and position in the making of consciousness as such books (and their film and TV adaptations) as 'Little Women', 'Treasure Island' or 'The Wind in the Willows' or more recently 'Where the Wild things Are' or, of course 'Harry Potter'. Again, it is around the reading of books in classrooms and bedrooms and in the talk surrounding those books that we learn how story works: how to pick up on sequences, patterns and symbols; how to see points of view represented by people; how to see consequences; how to allow ourselves to be deceived by narrators and protagonists; how to be disappointed or delighted with the way things turn out. University courses have the time to look at the kinds of satisfactions offered to readers in terms, say, of wish-fulfilment, yearning and desire, projection and transference, and indeed those books that appear to run against the grain and defy, subvert and challenge prevailing ideas of gender, race and class. And yet again, it can look at traditions within the literature, how writers have tried again and again to address such matters as coming of age, transgressive and subversive behaviour, redemption, bravery, in-groups and outcasts, loneliness and solidarity, and how and why these themes have changed according to the epochs in which they were addressed.
Yesterday on the semester on children's literature Piers Bilston and I teach at London Metropolitan we looked at Benjamin Zephaniah's 'Refugee Boy'. It's a book that puts the outsider on the inside. It makes someone who comes from the least important, most outcast group in society, a child refugee from an African country, into the lynchpin of the narrative, the focal point of your attention. The students on that course will go their various ways into a mix of teaching, librarianship, therapy in this country and in other countries having seen that the very narrative method itself, the book's own narratology, has a politics. We speculated whether the book's main protagonist is a 'hero figure', whether stoicism is heroic, and whether the heroic structure dissipated when the collective that supports the lead character becomes more important than him, and what that said about the ideology of the book. We touched on the question of what kind of reader was implied by this text, was it calling for empathy in its readers or something cooler. Wouldn't we need to talk to some young readers of the book to know? Could reader-response surveys and studies be the final arbiter of the value of a book? And quite coincidentally, one of the students said that at her local synagogue, three boys had chosen a passage from the book as their presentation pieces for their bah mitzvahs. We were just about to wind up, when a student from Nigeria said that she was reminded of parts of Chinua Achebe's 'Things Fall Apart', sometimes dubbed the first post-colonial novel and we were able to finish with questions about this post-colonial tradition. Was Benjamin an inheritor of the idea of 'writing back'. You, the white writers of the west, used to write about us, now we write about ourselves. With Achebe it was within Africa, with Benjamin it's here. I think that the world of children's books needs people out there who can engage with children's books on all these levels.
My third problem lies with the publishing industry. What? How can that be? Surely, they are the champions. They're the ones producing the stuff that you, Michael Rosen, are rooting for.
Yes, but.
To tell the truth, I think the publishing industry is not simply interested in publishing books but primarily, not entirely, but primarily interested in publishing new books.
Excuse me while I become economistic. It was about fifteen years ago, that some huge upheavals took place in the world of publishing books for children, and these upheavals had a very specific intention but it was one that was never fully spelled out.
Most of the small independent publishers were taken over by multi-nationals. The multi-nationals brought in a very logical ethos that said that if the commodity of the book - that's to say the number of copies - wasn't selling at a certain rate, it wasn't making money for the company and so should be deleted, remaindered, junked. This could be measured quite objectively by the speed with which it disappeared from its highly expensive-to-rent shelf in the warehouse. Indeed, if it went below a certain rate, it wasn't just not making money, it was losing money. Go, book, go.
The problem with this is that you would soon end up with only a few book titles on your list and that could lead to the law of diminishing returns: fewer books, less noise, less hype, and indeed less money-making. The way to solve the two problems was to create an entirely new publishing policy. It would be to treat the book-making business much more as if it were the magazine trade. Publish books for what in your heart of hearts you would know was a fixed term of about twenty months, then pulp. Every book has a graph of sales and for most it looks like an inverted tick, a short quick rapid rise to a peak and then a fairly rapid tail-off. The trick, surely, is to publish all books so that they are only half a tick. Pulp them before the down stroke descends too far. The best publisher would be one who produces the most number of steep upward ticks, and who pulps at a time that anticipates the plunge. Shelf-life twenty months or less.
Now, I would suggest to you, who like me, may think of books as places of ideas, feelings, possibilities, strange knowledge, intrigue and incredible laughs that this half a tick process is a bit chilling. Might it not be possible that some incredibly brilliant books might just disappear? Of course, all authors think that it's their own book that falls into this category and are very sore about it: 'my best book went to the shredder in 1999.' That sort of thing.
But what is the real structural consequence of this: well, I think it contains dangers and the dangers are in what is or is not hazarded, what models are replicated, what sequences are repeated. Yes, it's a familiar cry, that the engine of capitalism squeezes out the oddball, the divergent, the subversive, the minority, the small. I think there's an element of truth in that but of course, the warehouse watchers have got a perfect riposte haven't they? The democracy of the market place. 'If the kids don't wanna read your book, then why should I publish it. I'm not a charity. You write something they wanna buy and I'll sell it for you...'
Well, there is an alternative, and it takes us back over all three of these impediments to our believing that books for children are worth reading.
And I'll call this, after the strange titles of some old folksongs and broadsheets: the grand conversation.
You see, there is a democracy about books that runs along different lines from the publishing production lines. It lies in the talk and writing that we all have about books for adults, but only fitters and splutters along when it comes to books for children. It got stamped out when all over the country local authorities said that they couldn't afford to sustain the relationship between libraries and schools. It got sidelined when teacher-training courses found that they didn't have time to run modules or semesters on children's literature. Same again, when courses for teachers got so tailored to the curriculum and the literacy strategy that the only way in which schools could get money to second teachers onto courses was if it was for literacy, spelling, grammar, handwriting, behaviour management, gifted children, special needs children and how to run an assembly. Anyone who has worked in and around teacher training and inset training knows how hard it is to get a course off the ground that might be called, let's say, 'Having a laugh, great books for Friday going home time' or 'What to do when the whole class is crying: books that move the heart.' Or 'Any old books - teachers and students on this course will talk about books that they've read to their class and what happened when they did'.
But a democracy of reading, requires a different way of talking about books. In the first part of today we saw one model of how to have a conversation about books. It is, I'm arguing, a highly un-democratic one, even in the fact that the people who ask the questions are represented by nothing more nor less than mysterious initials: QCA. Who are these people? Why are they so shy? Most authors I know love their names to be on the books and articles they write. Why is it so hard to get hold of SATs papers. It must be about the only public document that you can't get on the internet. You have to bribe, cajole and shmooze a headteacher to get hold of one.
I think you only know if books are worth reading if you have a chance to find out what you think of books - and it helps a lot, if you have a chance to find out if anyone else wants to hear what you've got to say. I suggest that the starting point for this is for a curriculum that puts the reading of whole books back on the agenda. It also suggests that the best way to ask children questions about books is either to ask none, or to ask questions that the questioner doesn't know the answers to. Questions like: does this book remind you of anything you've met in real life? Or remind you of anything you've read elsewhere? When you compare the book with these things you know from your life and from your reading, what similarities and differences do you spot? Is there anything about this book that puzzles you? Is there anybody in the room who thinks they can help with this problem? Is there anything you like or dislike about this book? Why's that then? Is there anything we would ask any of the characters in this book? Is there anywhere we can go to find out answers to any questions we have about this book? Thanks to the writer and critic Aidan Chambers for some of these.
But there are also ways in which we can enter a story without interrogating children...
I suspect many of you came up with interesting ideas after I read the story used by the SATs examiners.
I want to finish by looking at a book called 'The Gardener'.
[An excerpt from 'The Gardener' followed but cannot be included here due to copyright]
Every time I read this, I get the feeling that it's worth reading. I don't ask 'worth reading for children', or 'for adults'...just I think it was worth reading it.
I've been making a pilot for a programme that may go out on the new teachers channel and whaddyaknow, it's about reading. Not 'reading', in the literacy sense (you know, are synthetic phonics better than plain phonics? No, not that sort of thing), but reading in the sense of 'reading books'. This is how I got to know about 'The Gardener'. I was asked to interview a teacher who had been reading the book with her class. I asked her how.
She told me that they read the book in stages. And at each scene, each tableau that we've just seen, the class would re-create the moment. When Lydia stood on the station, they acted out a scene of them standing on a station. They wrote letters to Uncle Jim and when Lydia gets to the city, they wrote letters back home. When Lydia planted bulbs, they planted bulbs. They made bread, they decorated cakes, they made a secret place and at a crucial moment, someone, an adult at the school, dressed up as Uncle Jim, appeared with a birthday cake, covered in flowers, and like Jim, didn't smile. They debated the question of why some people smile and why some people don't and what that's about and they talked and talked about the picture in which Uncle Jim is saying goodbye to Lydia. I'm not doing either the teacher or her class justice here, but I hope you're getting the drift. One of the ways in which children find out if a book is worth reading or not, is to live it.
For most of us in this room, as I said at the outset, the question is hardly worth asking, are books for children worth reading? We know it. For many children though, this is not self-apparent. We have to prove it to them. To do that, we need an education system that encourages teachers to find all sorts of different ways for children to live in books. We need a public discourse that can go beyond treating children's books as scandals, sensational sales figures and symptoms of some crisis or some 'seismic shift' in something or another. And we need a publishing industry that remembers that books are not only or simply commodities, but carriers of ideas and feelings. But the industry can only do that if the public discourse and the reading of books in schools wises up.
2005
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