How do we choose what children should read?

This is another post stimulated by my reading habits. I recently walked past a second-hand bookshop and saw on display this late 1950s paperback edition of Wolf Mankowitz's A Kid for Two Farthings. Well of course I had to buy it. It wasn't the rather fetching rendition on the cover of Diana Dors and Sid James drawn from a scene in the screen version that attracted me though. It was pure nostalgia. This is one of the three books that I can remember my class being set to read for English lessons during the first two years of my secondary schooling. It's a relatively slight, middlebrow sort of thing, but charming enough in its own way. The adult me enjoyed it which is more than can be said of the child that it was forced upon. Before "rereading" it I couldn't remember a thing about the story, apart from its title, because my recollection is that I hated it first time around and read barely more than a few pages. Truth be told I couldn't relate to it and my teacher certainly didn't make any effort to help me, or anyone else, understand it. I didn't appreciate the somewhat magical whimsy and the allegorical elements, such as they are, went right over my head. Eleven year olds in the West Midlands during the 1970s were not noted for their sensitive appreciation of the Jewish East End of London during the 1930s and in retrospect it seems an astonishing thing to ask us to read. Perhaps we were expected to learn something by osmosis from the writing itself which is deceptively simple but stylish.

Equally unsuccesful in firing my childish imagination was the second book inflicted on us - Richard Hughes' A High Wind In Jamaica. Hughes is now one of my favourite authors and A High Wind In Jamaica is a masterpiece but it falls squarely into the category of books about children that are best appreciated by adults. I can see that my teacher thought that her 11 year olds ought to like it but the seriousness of the plot and the sophistication of the language were a mile over my head. It just looked to me like a fusty, forty year old, adventure story about a bunch of middle-class children who are captured by pirates. But reading it as an adult you see that it is more Lord of the Flies avant la lettre than Swallows and Amazons and that it isn't the pirates that are the barbarians.

I'm left with a number of thoughts. Were we really only asked to read three books between the ages of 11 and 13? (The other was Ian Seraillier's The Silver Sword which really is a children's adventure story - needless to say I consumed it with alacrity from cover to cover). How and why were these particular books deemed suitable for us? How do you balance relating literature to the everyday lives of the kids that are reading it and persuading them to be curious about events and experiences that are beyond their personnel experience?

While still at school, but somewhat older, we were given Barry Hines' A Kestrel for a Nave as a set text for O Level. I remember that even then I felt we were being patronized. Being mostly working class kids we were meant to relate to the life of the main protagonist, a lonely, hopeless, misfit in a Yorkshire mining village who has but one thing of value in his life - his hawk. The book has a poignancy but it isn't great literatue - "it's a poor novel but a good film script" I remember my, now savvy, English teacher saying - and we certainly didn't relate to it. Sixteen year olds in an affluent Midlands factory town did not consider they had the slightest kinship with scruffy impoverished oiks from Yorkshire. None of us had seen a pit, nor a hawk for that matter and we, we thought, were definitely not headed for dead-end jobs. Just another example of how, when making choices for children, adults can get it wrong.

All this is just a preamble to my final thought. The sociology of literary taste is, as far as I know, pretty unfashionable now. But it occurs to me that for many kids their experience of literature, such as it is, begins and ends with what they are forced to read at school. It would be fascinating to see how that has changed over time. It would also be pretty easy to do. Syllabi for public examinations going back at least to the 1950s are still sitting around in libraries. With a bit of effort a more or less complete list of the novels, plays and poetry inflicted on British school children could be compiled. That would be interesting in itself. Even more interesting would be to get "experts" to rate the "flavours" of the works a bit in the manner that malt whiskies or fine wines are rated. One could then think in terms of projecting each work onto a low dimensional map of literary taste. I wonder what its dimensions might be?

Wie es eigentlich war

My non professional reading is, I guess, pretty random. I have far more unread books on my shelves than I will ever have time to get through but I like the idea of availability - I can pick up something that I've noted as interesting and squirreled away, just as the spirit moves me. Whatever the process is that then guides my selection I have no real idea.
It just so happens that the last two books I read for pleasure had more in common than that they were written by Germans and dealt with painful aspects of German history. Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern) is an account of his life in the front line during World War I. It is extraordinary for several reasons. Firstly it was written very soon (published in 1920) after the end of the war while the experience was still fresh. By contrast most of the classic British accounts (Goodbye to All That, 1929; Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, 1930; Undertones of War, 1928; The Middle Parts of Fortune, 1929) date from at least a decade later and are in a sense refined by the simple passage of time. Secondly Jünger most definitely does not belong to the "war and the pity of war" school. He was and remained throughout his life an ardent German nationalist (though not a Nazi - he was peripherally involved in the Stauffenberg bomb plot) and one gets the sense that his war-time service was the most exilerating thing that ever happened to him. What is truly remarkable though is the quite matter of fact nature of his account. Comrades fall around him or are horribly maimed on practically every page. The shells fall within feet and he expects to die at any moment but carries on doing his duty for what else can he do? He rarely sees the enemy and spends most of his time sheltering from artillery fire in dugouts, cellars and shell holes. There is no reflection on right or wrong or the justice or injustice of the cause - the book begins after the war has started and ends before the armistice - and no poetry. In the end he survives, though wounded more than twenty times and is decorated by the Kaiser. Though the attitude that underlies his account is alien (I would imagine) to most people now, there is an honesty about the writing that made me feel, yes, that is what it was really like for an adventurous young man of his social background, temperament and time and that to still convey this long after the events have faded from living memory is an achievement of considerable merit. You don't have to like the man or what he stood for to admire his art.
Honesty is what I also admire about Peter Gay's story of the six years of his life that he spent as a boy in Nazi Germany - My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin. In fact it is about much more than this. What it is really about is his attempt to understand the impact on his subsequent life. He is at pains to make clear that as "assimilated" jews who could pass as gentiles he and his family were able to live comparatively normal lives until just months before they were able to emigrate in 1939. Many suffered much more than they did and most (though not all) of his family survived the Holocaust. To be sure life could be difficult but what were the alternatives? Gay describes his frustration (and anger) at the lack of comprehension shown by people who ask him: why did it take so long to see what was coming? Why did so many stay when their country rejected them? The answer is simple: you stay, endure the indignities and bottle up your anger because this is your home, your life is here, you don't speak a foreign language and you have no skills that have any value in a foreign country. You probably know intellectually that one day you will have to leave, but while you can still go home from work, draw the curtains and enjoy some semblance of family life you try to carry on as normal. After all, notwithstanding the gangsters that are in power, Germany is probably the least anti-semitic country in Central Europe...
Gay's honesty extends to the confession that his Berlin boyhood poisoned Gay the man. It left him with many unresolved tensions in his feelings about Germany and the Germans. He is honest in admitting that many of these feelings are irrational - the account of his projection of anti-semitism onto the wholly innocent demeanour of a woman working in a currency exchange bureau during his first post-war visit to Germany is told with complete candour. He feels only pleasure at the news of the horrific firestorms that swept through German cities after allied bombing raids killing countless innocent women and children. You are given the impression that he doubts whether they were in fact wholly innocent. Just as with Jünger you may not like what you read, you may feel repelled by some of it, but you were not there. He was and if you are prepared to listen you can learn a little of what it was actually like.

Normal and non-normal science

As a coda to my last post about the stange world of sociology journal publishing I found this short paper by Lin Freeman illuminating: http://moreno.ss.uci.edu/87.pdf. It never occurred to me that acceptance rates in hard science journals would be so much higher than in the social sciences though his explanation makes perfect sense. I wonder how it would look if you included in the sample more paradigmatic disciplines like economics or (non social) psychology?

Students aren't the only ones...

In the quiet Summer months you could be forgiven for missing this piece in the Guardian's education section.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/jul/28/academic-plagiarism
It concerns the retraction of an article published in the British Journal of Sociology in March 2008 by a lecturer from City University because of "substantial overlap" with an article published a few years earlier in Sociology by two completely different authors. The British laws on liable being as they are let's leave it at that.
The sorry tale caught my eye because at the time the BJS article was published I was still its Editor in Chief (though I resigned a month later after, amongst other things, expressing a "difference of opinion" with the LSE's minders - the London School of Economics owns the title - about the proper way to run an academic journal). Though the article in question came out in an issue under my name it had, to the best of my recollection, been accepted by the previous Editor and my only part in the affair was to schedule its publication. However, I should say that there but for the Grace of God go I, for I doubt very much that I would have spotted the "substantial overlap" if it had arrived during my watch and I don't think my predecessor can reasonably be blamed for being asleep on the job.
The problem is that the editors of a general sociology journal like the BJS are almost completely in the hands of their referees. They know next to nothing about the subject matter of most of the articles they receive, the purported author or authors or indeed about the "experts" they ask to referee for them. Sociology is a completely balkanized discipline not only in terms of subject matter but more crucially in terms of what counts as good scientific standards. Add to that the well known reluctance of senior established people to spend their time writing referees' reports and it is a wonder that there aren't more cases of "substantial overlap". How can you ensure that only work of the highest academic quality gets published when the content of what you receive is incomprehensible to all but a few insiders, you have never heard of the author(s) and after receiving your tenth refusal to referee all you can get are five illiterate sentences from the kind of person who will enter the refereeing they do for a journal like the BJS as one of their four RAE submissions? (OK, I exaggerate a bit - the most illiterate refereeing I've seen actually came from a "senior" academic who deigned to scribble a few sentences on what looked like the back of a napkin whilst en route to an international conference. He shares the prize for academic chutzpah with a "senior" member of an editorial board who expected a journal to publish his apparently randomly assembled bullet points as a serious article).

Students should note that plagiarism is unacceptable but their teachers should remember as the KJV puts it:

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

Bukowski on writing

I came across this poem by Charles Bukowski which expresses something important about integrity in writing. I wouldn't take it literally as good advice about how to write a scientific book, but there is something about the spirit of the thing that is relevant for aspiring academics. I see too many doctoral students in my discipline who don't really have anything they passionately want to know who then wonder why they struggle to write something that anyone else cares about. If you don't know what you want to know or someone else has to tell you, don't do it. If all you want is 'DPhil (Oxon)' after your name, don't do it...

so you want to be a writer? by Charles Bukowski

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.
if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.
don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.
when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.
there is no other way.
and there never was.

Look what they did to my graph Ma!

This is a follow up to my previous post. Browsing through the Milburn report my eye was drawn to the first graph above apparently based on something from one of my own publications. They have succeeded in creating a great example of how not to present statistical information in graphical form. In fact I have rarely seen so many bad practices represented in one simple figure. Compare it with my original figure below it which appeared in: John H. Goldthorpe and Colin Mills (2008) 'Trends in Intergenerational Class Mobility in Modern Britain: Evidence from National Surveys, 1972-2005', National Institute Economic Review, 5, July, 83-100. See how many foolish errors you can spot. Here is a starter for 10. The points on the lower graph labelled BHPS7 and EUSILC7 are, as is explained in the article, not derived on the same basis as all the other points and therefore comparisons of levels between these and the other points is meaningless.

Fair Access to the Professions

The final report of the Panel on Fair Access to the Professions chaired by Alan Milburn is released today. I can't pretend I have read all of it but my impression is that it doesn't contain much that is new. It does though reinforce some unhelpful confusions. Pace the report, doing better than your parents because of general economic growth doesn't have any necessary implications for equalizing relative mobility chances and equalizing relative mobility chances does imply - even if politicos don't like it - that the less meritorious sons and daughters of the middle classes are less likely to attain occupational positions as good - in relative terms - as those of their parents. Just because the pie is bigger and therefore everone's slice is bigger in absolute terms doesn't change the fact that some people's slice is twice, three times, four times...bigger than other's. And claiming that equalization of access to desirable positions implies no downward mobility is like pretending that it never rains in Britain during the Summer because you would prefer it to be sunny all the time.

Having said that, the central message of the report is broadly correct. Social background does matter for economic success in ways that are unjust and economically inefficient and whatever progress there has been towards equalizing opportunities in the last 40 years or so has been small compared to the magnitude of the inequality in life chances for children from different social class backgrounds. While the report probably exaggerates (negatively) Britain's comparative position in the world social mobility league it is true that despite our rhetoric we are a middle of the table team. If we were a schoolchild our end of term report would read: 'Could do better if she tried harder'. The report can be read at:

http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/media/227102/fair-access.pdf

One thing the report makes something of is the lack of good quality survey data on the social class origins of people in the workforce. It then baulks at the cost of collecting data by monitoring recruitment to professional positions. Why not simply add a couple of questions on parental social background to just one of the quarters of the Quarterly Labour Force Survey? Response rates to the QLFS are high, the sample size is large - allowing EO monitoring at quite a detailed level - and the marginal cost of a couple of extra questions must be comparatively small. Some of us have been calling for this for years. Why is nobody in the Cabinet Office listening? If you really want to know the answers then you have to ask the questions.