Teachers and their Books An enquiry into the fiction-reading habits of teachers

Bob Bibby The Summerhill School, Kingswinford

Too often there is far too large a gap between the sort of literature recommended by the English teacher and the normal reading tastes both of children and adults (W. Stewart, 1950).

Throughout this century, concern has been expressed by educationists about the quantity and quality of the fiction-reading undertaken voluntarily by young people. From Professor Green in 1913 to Frank Whitehead and his team in 1977, research has been conducted into the reading habits of young people and always there has been great wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth at the poverty of the fictional diet on which so many youngsters subsist. Consider, for example, these comments by Professor Green, regarding the boys and girls at evening school in the West Riding in 1913:

. . . the great majority live in quite a different world from their teachers. Here are dwarfed little selves whose emotional life is bound up with local gossip, the excitement of football, and a humour so crude that their teachers find i t difficult to see any fun whatsoever in i t . . . . They sink into reading as a dissipation. Anything will do if it will only carry them out of the world that is theirs. Fiction and fun! Fun and fiction! And what strange fiction it is! Wild adventure, impossible school stories, sentimental novels, the merest melodrama, make up the main amount.’

A. J. Jenkinson’s survey in 1940 follows a similar line of thinking, though

It is natural that juvenile and adolescent tastes should be “inferior” to adult tastes; it is also natural that adults should think them worse than they are because they tend to judge by adult standards. This point will be readily accepted, but many will, I think, urge that the literary tastes of the adult population are debased or undeveloped and that it is only in the schools that the tastes of the population at large can be improved.’

M. Paffard continues the same theme in 1962: . . . secondary school pupils prefer work written in easy language, dealing with themes that are relatively immature emotionally, in which they find it easy to identify themselves with the hero or heroine and in which the element of wish-fulfilment is comparatively open.’

perhaps the tone is a little less condescending:

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And finally Frank Whitehead e t al . have this to say in 1977:

What does give cause for concern is the disturbingly high proportion of children (as many as 36% overall) who have either failed to establish or have abandoned the book-reading habit by the age of 14 + . . . . These non-book-readers are unwittingly missing a vital source of enrichment of experience which even a plethora of exposure to the audio-visual cannot make up for.4

Clearly, then, educationists believe that fiction-reading is an important factor in children’s development and that, consequently, it is the school’s task to ensure that a suitably rich diet of fiction is provided for children to read. The arguments between educationists have been about the best method of making such provision so that children can become, in Jenkinson’s words, ‘discriminating and independent readers’.

Now since this has obviously been of great concern to educationists for the last seventy years and since teachers are, by and large, drawn from those people who have gained the most benefits from their education, it might be reasonable to expect that the majority of teachers are wide and discrim- inating readers of fiction. And, of course, I do not simply mean those who teach English (who might well see such reading as an extension of their work) but all teachers. Surprisingly, there does not appear to have been any research into the comparison between the reading habits of teachers and those of children, nor into the relationship between teachers’ reading habits and their own educational experience of literature.

What follows is an account of a small investigation into the fiction- reading of a sample of secondary school teachers, which aimed to seek some solutions in the two areas outlined above.

* * * The investigation was conducted by means of a questionnaire, copies of which were distributed to all the teachers of two urban comprehensive schools, whose headmasters actively encouraged their staffs to complete and return the questionnaires. Despite this supportive background, from a possible total of 104 teachers only 37 completed questionnaires were received, roughly evenly divided between the two schools. Why were more completed responses not received? I can only speculate as to the possible reasons but 1 strongly suspect that they include the following:

(a) forgetfulness or loss of the questionnaire: (b) too many activities, too little time; (c) resistance to educational research as being ‘irrelevant’; (d) suspicion that some sort of check was being made: (e) guilt at inability to give ‘good’ answers.

However, I suspect that the major reason why 67 out of 104 teachers did not complete the questionnaire was because they do not read fiction.

I t seems from the nature of the responses that were received that the vast

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majority of respondents were keen and regular fiction-readers. Conse- quently the results of the investigation which follow may be highly untypical of the body of teachers in these two schools, never mind of the profession as a whole. The amount of fiction-reading undertaken voluntarily by teachers may indeed by considerably lower than these figures suggest.

Of the 37 who did reply, almost exactly half taught Arts or Humanities subjects, including 8 English teachers. In addition, 16 out of the 37 had studied English Literature at least to A-level standard. These figures emphasise how untypical of the secondary school teacher population the respondents almost certainly were. If this is so, as seems likely, i t adds extra meaning to the results summarised below.

In reply to questions designed to ascertain the amount of fiction-reading undertaken during a five-month period of time, i t appeared that the normal reading pattern over this period was 1-2 books per month. When asked to list novels read in the previous month, which included two weeks of school holidays, the replies showed that the average number of novels read was 2.65 per person. Over a similar period but with a random sample of the whole school population in the ten to fifteen age range and from a one hundred per cent response, Whitehead and his colleagues produced an averaged rate of 2 .39 books read per person,5 which is not hugely different. However, I have already stressed that my respondents seem highly untypical and it is therefore likely that a one hundred per cent response would have shown that teachers in general read less fiction than their pupils.

A further question which sought information about the usage of public libraries for borrowing fiction-books demonstrated that only 21 - 6 per cent of my respondents came into the category of what Whitehead et al. call ‘regular visitors’ (i.e. visiting the library once a fortnight or more). Their comparable figure was 2 6 - 7 per cent.6 Again, bearing in mind the untypical nature of my sample, it seems likely that teachers use public libraries far less frequently than their pupils for their fiction-reading requirements.

Attempting to give some indication of the quality of the fiction being read by teachers is more difficult. The distinction drawn by Whitehead et al. between ‘quality’ books and ‘non-quality’ books:

. . . on the one hand those whose production has been essentially a commercial operation, a matter of catering for the market; and on the other hand those in which the involvement of the writer with his subject matter and his audience has been such as to generate a texture of imaginative experience which rises above the merely routine and derivative.’

seemed the most helpful, though I now have doubts about the validity of this sort of distinction.

Of the 87 titles mentioned as having been read during the previous month, 57 appeared to come into the category of ‘non-quality’. These were by and large historical romances, thrillers, war stories or science fiction. The only novels mentioned more than once were The Devil’s Alternative by

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Frederick Forsyth (three mentions), T h e Hobbit by Tolkien, The Number of the Beast by Robert Heinlein, Hungry as the Sea by Wilbur Smith and The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough (each with two mentions).

A further question sought the names of favourite novelists and, although D. H. Lawrence with four mentions was easily the most popular choice, fifteen responses mentioned authors who would come into the ‘non-quality’ category, such as Leon Uris (who is on record as stating, ‘You can write Westerns in any part of the world’”), Lillian Beckwith, Alistair Maclean, Susan Howatch and Desmond Bagley (who ‘uses a small computer for writing-it enables him to insert, calculate wordage and play back at will’9).

I t is important at this stage to point out that all but two of my respondents had studied English Literature to 0-level and to repeat that sixteen of them had studied it to A-level. I t is relevant here, then, to consider what their views of their English Literature studies were.

Of the 37 respondents, only 11 said that they found their studies helpful to them. Of these, five were English teachers with English degrees, who might be thought unlikely to give other than a positive response here. All of the other six taught Arts or Humanities subjects and all but one had studied English Literature to A-level. The remaining 26 respondents, who included five who had studied to A-level in English Literature, were highly critical of their studies. ‘Too analytical’, ‘put me off reading novels’, ‘stultifying’, ‘they deterred me’, ‘very boring’ and ‘too biased toward petty academic points’ were typical of the criticisms received. Perhaps saddest of all was the young English graduate teacher who had ‘been put off reading through over- exposure to novels’! The bulk of the criticisms, however, came from teachers who had not studied English Literature beyond 0-level.

These findings bear out convincingly the comments of Whitehead et a l . , who note:

It was disappointing (though not unexpectedly so) to find that the 0-level English Literature syllabus, with its traditional set of three books to be studied in detail, bore scant relationship to these pupils’ own reading enthusiasm and seemed indeed to have exercised little influence upon their private reading, except to inhibit it.”’

The deadening effect of 0-level English Literature syllabuses and teaching has been a cause for concern with many English teachers for a number of years and has been the reason behind many of the experimental syllabuses, often of a Mode 111 variety, devised by dedicated teachers. Certainly, it would appear from the results of my investigation that the traditional examination is proving counter-productive if its aim is to produce dis- criminating readers. David Bazen,” however, has shown recently how many of the writing tasks set for coursework in Mode 111 English Literature schemes closely resemble the sorts of questions asked on the traditional examination paper. Margaret Mathieson” has highlighted the worries over the need for ‘exceptional people’ as English teachers to live up to the ‘lofty aims’ expected of them and it is no doubt true that some of us, in our desire

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to do well by our pupils, may not be sufficiently exceptional and may be achieving the opposite of what we intend, even with alternative methods of assessment.

The reading of imaginative literature is a much devalued activity in our society. The total British paperback sales of John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, as reported in early 1982, are only 186,750, for instance, and those of Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man- praised, publicized and televised-are only 150,000.’3 In a population of 54 million people, those sales strike me as being infinitesimal, especially since among that population there are something over three million who have passed 0-level English Literature and three quarters of a million who have passed A-level English Literature. If the population at large does not read much, i t is unreasonable to expect teachers to follow widely different patterns of behaviour .

What does appear to be happening is that we, as English teachers, are in danger of setting ourselves up as the guardians of the true culture and of making books into Literature, so that few read them, except with a sense that they must be studied. I fear that we may be in danger of claiming for our subject the same status that the defenders of a classical education claimed for the study of Latin and Greek in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And look what has happened to those subjects in schools! In 1951, Douglas Bush was warning us of this:

Neither scholars nor critics have given much attention to the common reatler. If the common reader is now almost extinct, or devotes his time to books on Russia and atomic energy, or has delivered her soul to the book clubs, the process of reconversion will be uphill work.’‘

Our staffroom colleagues are likely to be examples of what Bush calls ‘the common reader’. As my investigation has shown, the reading of imaginative literature has a highly important place in life for some but for many i t appears not to have. The ‘process of reconversion’, if i t is to take place in schools and if it is to be abetted by English teachers must begin by making reading enjoyable. Maybe then we shall be able to encourage in our pupils the desire to make reading a life-long activity. One of my respondents, who is now an avid fiction-reader with a wide spectrum of tastes, summed up what is, I suspect, still all too true when he commented that ‘school litera- ture was a separate compartment’ for him. How many of us are aware how true this is for many of our pupils and our colleagues? How many of us are aware of the need to break down that separation?

References

1 .

2.

J. A. Green, ‘The Teaching of English Literature’,Journal of Experimental Pedagogy, vol. 2 (1913), pp. 24-5. A. J. Jenkinson, What do Boys and Girls Read?, p. 152. Methuen, 1940.

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3.

4.

5. 6. 7 . 8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

K. Paffard, ‘Review of Research into the Teaching of English Literature since 1945’, Educational Research, vol. 4 (1962), p. 223. F. Whitehead, A. C. Capey, W. Maddren, A. Wellings, Children and their Books, 285-6. Macmillan, 1977. Ibid. p. 51 Ibid. p. 74. Ibid. p. 112. Cited by J. A. Sutherland, ‘Bestsellers’. p. 203. Koutledge, 1981. Ibid. p. 145. F. Whitehead et a[., Children and their Books, p. 194. D. Bazen, ‘Literature without Examinations’, English in Education, 13.3 (Autumn 1979), pp. 12-17. M . Mathieson, T h e Preachers of Culture. Allen and Unwin, 1975. See The Sunday Times Colour Supplement (14 Feb. 1982) for a fuller list, which contains some interesting examples. D. Bush, ‘The Humanist Critic’, The Kenyon Review (1951j.