Children's authors rail against Michael Gove's reading lists

[WestVirginiaRebel]

UK Guardian:

Children's authors are gearing up for a fight over whether schools should be given government-approved lists of books that children should have read by the time they reach a certain age.

Authors Michael Rosen and Alan Gibbons appear first in line in the latest round of what has almost become a national sport in England over the last 25 years – criticising ministers for seeking to prescribe what they see as the best texts.

The idea of replicating in primary schools what already happens in the first three years of secondary schools is being floated by a small panel of experts set up by the education secretary, Michael Gove, to review the national curriculum for five to 16-year-olds, according to the Times Educational Supplement (TES).

Rosen, a former children's laureate, told the TES : "I'm all in favour of people recommending books to each other. What I'm utterly against is some centralised list which is supposed to be the government's view or the state's view.

"If Michael Gove wants to suggest his list, that's fine. But if it is the government's list or the DfE's list, I would profoundly distrust it."

He later said: "If Michael Gove says who's recommending them [the books and authors], then that's democratic, that's the way we share ideas.

"If it's just a dictation that this is the way we read books, then we don't live in a totalitarian country, we're not in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, where they dictated what books you have to read."

Gibbons said: "What we need to see in schools is trust in teachers and librarians. We need a network of people who know about books and keep up to date with children's literature, who have the freedom to select books according to their pupils' backgrounds and interests."
________

Well, government always knows what's best, doesn't it?