Charlotte and Emily stay in

The Guardian talks about changes in the curriculum of English lessons:

Austen, Dickens, Trollope and two Brontë sisters are staying in. But Orwell, Hemingway and Doris Lessing may be removed from the curriculum for 11- to 14-year-olds, the education secretary will announce today. Alan Johnson has moved to quash reports that changes to the key stage three curriculum will mean a "dumbing down" of English lessons.

He says students will still be expected to study authors from a prescribed list of authors from before the first world war, although schools will be able to choose from within that. The list includes Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Arthur Conan Doyle and George Eliot, writers who are "a crucial part of our national heritage".
However, he wants to begin debate on whether more modern authors should remain on the list. The government's exam advisers, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, is to be asked to "review and update" authors in these categories. (...)
11-14 English curriculum

Staying in

Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, John Bunyan, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Conrad, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Eliot, Henry Fielding, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jonathan Swift, Anthony Trollope, HG Wells

Under threat

EM Forster, William Golding, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, DH Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, George Orwell, Muriel Spark, William Trevor, Evelyn Waugh, JG Ballard, RK Narayan, Berlie Doherty, Susan Hill, Laurie Lee, Joan Lingard, Alan Sillitoe, Bill Naughton, Mildred Taylor, Robert Westall, Chinua Achebe, Maya Angelou, Willa Cather, Anita Desai, Nadine Gordimer, Ernest Hemingway, HH Richardson, Doris Lessing, John Steinbeck, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

Categories: In_the_News