No, Just No!

For the first time ever, we have a British prime minister who studied for an English degree. Not all of his 58 predecessors went to university, but those who did favoured subjects such as history and classics and, more recently, philosophy, politics and economics.

And turned out to be so utterly useless at all those things… 

Yet reading fiction is a fantastic preparation for life, for understanding people and the times through which we live. Novels encourage empathy, they help you to stand in other people’s shoes, to navigate complicated, sometimes conflicting emotions, they entertain and bring joy.

I agree! 

However, there has been a marked decline over recent years in the numbers of children reading for pleasure.

Wonder why? 

In 2025, the educational charity End Sexism in Schools released a report – Manopolies – revealing that 76% of students study An Inspector Calls by JB Priestley for their modern text from a possible 21 modern texts (a play, wonderful as it is, that’s been on one board’s set text list for 39 years). Then a whopping 93% of students study either A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens or The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson for their 19th-century novel from nine possible texts (including Charlotte Brontë, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen). Only 5% of students in England and Wales study a female-authored text at GCSE.

Oh, that’s why! Nothing kills the desire to read a book for pleasure as thoroughly as white middle class liberals demanding you read one that ticks an ‘equality’ box. And they think they can encourage kids to do it by forcing them into the curriculum. 

It’s true that there are diverse modern works by inspirational women on the lists of the four exam boards – Kit de Waal, Tanika Gupta, Jeanette Winterson, Malorie Blackman are all offered. The problem is that schools are disincentivised to change the texts they teach as this would involve costs and additional work.

And so, 'The Guardian' decides to ask modern authors to pick books which will 'inspire a lifelong love of reading' and so should be set as school texts. Let's read some of the blurbs to see why, eh, Reader?  

Wouldn’t it be refreshing to see a blisteringly funny novel on the syllabus? The Trees is a daring satire on racism, generational guilt and cultural complicity, inspired by the lynching of Emmett Till.

Emmet Till is a black man who was lynched in the Deep South of America in 1955, and so bears as much relationship to the lives of modern black children in the UK as Nanook of the North. 

I recommend this play. For a Black working-class London family, it’s a normal weekday – until the teenage son is senselessly stabbed and killed.

Well, it’s gritty and urban, and realistic, but do children want to read about something so familiar to their lives? I thought the point was to ‘walk in someone else’s shoes’? 

This wise, chaotic, gentle, painful, funny, superb novel follows five teens trying to navigate the most difficult year of their lives, while the town’s cool indie kids are battling Stranger Things-sized perils in vignettes at the start of each chapter. It contains some of the truest (and helpful) lines about social anxiety I’ve ever read.

 Great, giving kids 'social anxiety' to read about to ensure more kids believe themselves to be victims. Why the need to ban the internet if the schools are going to spread popular social contagions instead?

In those two exam years, my daughter studied not one female prose writer, not one writer of colour, only four female characters in the entire trio of set texts (if you count Macbeth’s witches as individual characters, which is debatable, oh and a female pig, according to one teacher).

Your daughter has a virtue-signalling fool for a mother - let her read what she needs to without checking it against a politically correct purity test first. Female and black characters don't automatically make a work of literature better just because someone on the Internet said so!

One of the weaknesses of the literary education of this country is that students are not exposed early in life to the valuable literatures of non-European people, particularly Africans.

If they really were valuable, we'd all be able to name one. I can't, can you Reader?