In a push to include more British literature in GCSEs, classic American novels including To Kill a Mockingbird are set to be dropped from the syllabus.
OCR, one of the UK's biggest exam boards, publishes its new English literature GCSE syllabus this week and reports say it will neither include the Pulitzer prizewinning novel by Harper Lee nor John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. Arthur Miller's play The Crucible is another text which may disappear from many GCSE classrooms.
Academics and writers reacted angrily to the news on Sunday. By Monday morning, To Kill a Mockingbird was trending on Twitter, as users shared their reactions as well as quotes from the book.
Remember the person whose life was made *worse* by reading 'To Kill a Mockingbird'? Of course you don't, because THEY DON'T EXIST.
— Lauren Laverne (@laurenlaverne) May 25, 2014
To Kill A Mockingbird gone. But why would Gove want children to learn about tolerance and doing what is right rather than what is popular?
— Emma Kennedy (@EmmaK67) May 25, 2014
A statement from the Department of Education has insisted it was not banning anything. Last year, education secretary Michael Gove, who has said children should be reading 50 books a year from the age of 11, told a conference of independent school heads that he would much prefer to see a child reading George Eliot's Middlemarch than one of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight vampire novels.
The furious reaction from Twitter comes from many who studied the novel themselves at school, describing reading it as a "rite of passage". We'd like to know which books shaped your reading as a teenager? What was it about those books that inspired you? Do you have any suggestions for books which should be on the syllabus?
Here are some of the responses we've received today, on Twitter and in the comments:
@Claire_Phipps A Passage to India, important because it made me furious
— Duma (@Duma365) May 26, 2014
@JonathanHaynes Can I have three?! Lord of the Flies, 1984, Of Mice and Men
— Amy J Gardner (@amyjgardner) May 26, 2014
Studying Of Mice and Men in high school stimulated my otherwise non-existent interest in literature and turned me into an avid reader of American literature, subsequently leading me to study American literature at university, which i sat my final exam for on Friday.
My mum is a high school teacher in an area where the majority of the students are of 'low ability' and it never ceases to amaze her how, year after year, her students are able engage with both Of Mice and Men and To Kill A Mockingbird at a much higher level than any of the other texts she teaches. It does not matter where the texts that are used to teach high school students are from, what matters is whether or not the students are able to engage with them.
The Great Gatsby, I don't think a single day has gone by since I first studied that book where it hasn't had some effect on how I look at the world. It was a sort of portal to adulthood, revealing to all of us the beauty and futility of our childhood dreams, compared with the harsh adult world we were about to emerge into.
Gatsby for me became the symbol of every bit of innocence I left behind when leaving school, and when leaving the characters behind at the end of the book (for I won't spoil it for those who've read it,) it genuinely felt like I was leaving behind my childhood. A book has never had such a profound effect on me, and I doubt one ever will again.
Share your thoughts in the comments below. We'll feature the best above the line.
Did "Under Milk Wood" for A level English lit. Total revelation as to the sheer FUN to be had from language, from caricature too. The sound of Welsh rhythms was as beautiful as music (is to others).
Funny thing, I was bored senseless by the other books on the syllabus.