I have no particular love for Steinbeck (which could be because I've never read him) and I don't mind the syllabus being changed around, but I'm not happy about the determining factor being Michael Gove's personal taste.
Yeah, makes sense to me. I personally found Of Mice and Men just as painfully dull when I studied it in high school as other people apparently found Shakespeare or (according to some articles I have now read on this subject) Jane Austen, but, given that it's clearly very meaningful and significant to a lot of students, this hardly seems like a valid reason to kick it off the syllabus - leaving aside my own personal bias in favor of American books (given that I teach in an English-speaking Asian country with a legitimate if not canonical literary history of its own, and yet the only full-length text in four years of the literature syllabus that is not written by a white European male is written by a white American male, I have a feeling that these arguments in favour of teaching texts from a certain national origin just possibly have a tendency to be developed in rather biased ways).
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