English in Australia 121, March 1998 ENGLISH IN AUSTRALIA 'What Should Our Children Read?' Paper given to the Sydney Institute, 22 July, 1997 by Nick Enright (with an introductory comment by Ernie Tucker) I was fortunate to be in the audience when Sydney playwright and film writer Nick Enright gave the following paper to a public audience at one of The Sydney Institute's regular discussion functions. His passion was inspiring, reminding me of Yevtushenko's poem, 'Telling lies to the young is wrong'. Enright and two others had been invited to speak on the topic 'what should our children read?' because a media circus, lasting from February to April 1997, gave the moral minority a victory it had been denied for the previous six years of campaigning to censor texts set for Years 11 and 12 students. NSW still has one externally set and marked public exam, the Higher School Certificate (HSC), and in English there are usually about 25 texts listed, for teachers and students to choose about six to study for each course. In the most academic of the three courses, there was only one compulsory text, Hamlet. These text lists are devised by a representative committee of teachers and academics, then passed to a wider reference group before being approved or rejected by the Board of Studies. This triple test was devised by a Liberal Party minister in the 1980s and, to the chagrin of the ultra right wing religious members of the NSW parliament upper house, the Reverend Fred and Mrs Elaine Nile, it allowed texts to be selected for study which they regarded as obscene, anti-religious, sexual , shocking, depressing or undermining parental authority (and these descriptors are only a sample). The Niles routinely object to most of the texts and Elaine Nile has been a member of the reference group since its inception. And so it came to pass that after trying since 1991 to ban Top Girls, one of the Niles' typical press releases landed on the desk of a Sydney radio station. I suppose it was a slow news day, because the producer gave the story to an ex-sports reporter who was running a talk back show, and they called the ALP Minister for Education, John Aquilina, for comment. What followed could only cause NSW teachers to wonder - yet again - about Aquilina's appointment as minister by our self styled 'education Premier', Bob Carr. Amongst other comments, Aquilina repeated the outrageous claim of a former Victorian minister, Arthur Rylah, that he wouldn't want his daughter to read it. That the minister is an ex-English teacher compounded the sense of betrayal which ETANSW members felt at such comments. As the media circus travelled on ('Putrid Play for School Study' thundered the Daily Telegraph) the minister accepted another talk back invitation from the notoriously popular Alan Jones who operates a talk back show on another station. Here Aquilina announced that he had decided to set up yet another review panel to consider the suitability of the play. ETANSW members were aghast to find that democratic processes of text selection were destroyed in a few minutes of populist radio, but somewhat bemused to find that Gillian Mears' play Fineflour and Peter Goldsworthy's novel Maestro were also referred to the panel. Dame Leonie Kramer was appointed to chair the panel, including two principals of elite girls schools and the director of the Catholic Education Commission of NSW. On April 4 (did they delay to avoid April Fools Day?) the panel announced that Maestro was highly commended in the terms of their criteria which were: 'literary merit, broad community, ethical and moral standards and whether each text was considered a good teaching book'. The decision in favour of Maestro reflected the foolishness of the Nile method of relying on outraged parishioners to photocopy selected pages as a basis for their objections, thus relieving them of the possible contamination entailed in reading the whole text. (Apparently Goldsworthy had made the mistake of referring to furniture shaking thus arousing some readers' imaginations.) But Top Girls and Fine Flour were headed for the bin. The panel thoughtfully suggested that the three other review groups could do better in future if they considered that 'each book recommended, needs to be taught and furthers the literary and linguistic development of the students'. A tidal wave of talk back radio and letters to the editor followed, as ETANSW led a sustained and widespread protest which was strongly supported by students studying the texts. The Sydney Morning Herald published an editorial defending the ban, but its senior writer, David Marr, was given two pages on Saturday 5 April, which he used for a brilliant denunciation of the events under the title 'The Moral Warriors - How they stop people reading and watching what they want'. Marr also helped form a 'Watch on Censorship' committee. Soon irony took the stage. Dame Leonie admitted that she had been a member of the Board of Studies which first approved the plays in 1991 but she had not read them then. The members of the text selection committee had previously decided to drop the plays in the normal way that they rotate texts set for HSC study, but now they were in no mood to appear to be supporting the censors. After much anguished discussion and after Nick Enright's speech, the compromise was reached with the minister that the plays could not be banned in 1997, as some schools had already studied them, and they would not be banned in 1998 either. They would come off the list of set texts, along with many other texts which were being changed in the normal way, in 1999. Moreover, this would leave them available for teachers to make their own choice about using them for study in Year 11 in that and subsequent years, and who knows? - in the new millennium they might even be set again for the HSC. Ernie Tucker What Should Our Children Read? The row which sparked tonight's discussion directs us to a particular meaning for the question before us: not simply what young people might read, but what reading should be set for them at school, particularly at high school. Tonight I will take children to mean young people between puberty and the end of high school. I exclude younger kids because to include them raises large but intrinsic questions about early childhood and cognitive development. And I confine myself to what young people might read during or around their schooling, because if the question were more general, my reply would be much briefer: they should read whatever they like and can lay their hands on, texts as many and various as are pleasurable for them. Why is literature taught at all? The study of literature does not follow the model of most other disciplines. In maths and the sciences, in foreign language studies, certain formulations - theorems, laws, tables, conjugations - are learned and applied: education by problem-solving, if you like. But most of us don't read creative writing to learn how to write it, nor, except in a broad sense, do high school students analyse literature as a technical model. Those of us who wrote to the minister protesting about recent decisions would have heard from him that the texts to be removed from the lists do not contribute significantly to students' linguistic development. This is nonsense. Linguistic analysis could be taught from the works of Daniel Steele, or from Hansard. (I'm not being frivolous. Students might learn much about our language by the creative uses found for it in airport fiction or in parliament.) We don't read to learn how to write, or even to learn about how others write. I think we read in order to learn how to read; or, put another way, we read the word to help us read the world. Proponents of the canon would argue that we study the best as a yardstick for the rest; relativists might counter that any text will do, for by our response to it we learn something about ourselves. But both would surely agree that the act of reading causes us to reassess what we know and believe in the light of what we now experience. What we gain from imaginative writing cannot be quantified. Its lessons cannot be formulated, though at exam-time everybody pretends otherwise. We engage with a text, its forms and its ideas; that engagement leads to some shift in consciousness as the mind opens to new ideas and sensations. But I suspect that most of us hear tonight's topic in the negative. If the question were truly affirmative we would all be here reciting our own version of a literary canon. A new wowserism is gripping this country, and its passion is prohibition: what should our children not read? I was at high school in California in the 1960s when the John Birch Society tried to remove John Hersey's Hiroshima from school reading lists because it was subversive. In the 1980s, Rod Cavalier had David Malouf's Johnno struck off the New South Wales lists not for nihilism or advocacy of suicide but because Johnno himself uses the word 'fuck'. More recently, a principal in London banned Romeo and Juliet because it was heterosexist. Even more recently, our Premier felt that Baz Luhrmann's film of the same play would be welcome in NSW schools if shorn of its drug references. And now we reach tonight's casus belli: everbody's top girl Professor Kramer and her panel (Brian Croke, director of Catholic education, Louise Robert-Smith of North Sydney Girls High School and Judith Wheeldon of Abbotsleigh) found small literary merit in a play which is elsewhere held as a modern classic.