What should children read in school?

Kill..... Motion.....

My list would be:
'Moonwhales' by Ted Hughes
'Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats' by T. S. Eliot
'God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian' by Kurt Vonnegut
Everything by Roald Dahl (they can start on the adult stuff once they finish the children's stuff.)
'Alice In Wonderland'
'Gulliver's Travels'
'Incidents in the Life of my Uncle Arly' by Edward Lear
Catullus (if they decide to do Latin - as a reward for such foolishness)
'Le Petit Prince'
'A Christmas Carol'

every book i read in school was ruined for me, i wouldn't make them read anything worthwhile that they stand an outside chance of enjoying in later life.

maybe Watchmen by Alan Moore, even the worst english teacher couldn't ruin a comic.

When I was in the third year of middle school (year6 nowadays) so I was 10, we had a wonderful teacher who had a passion for literature and a magic way of passing that love on.

We read

The midnight Fox by Betsy Byas
Goodnight Mr Tom by Michelle Majorian
The machine Gunners by Robert Westall

all of which are beautifully written, why not keep with children's books, it doesn't rush kids to maturity by feeding them dickens pre-teens

and oodles of poetry but I don't remember which poets.

As a teenager, I agree that a bad teacher can massacre a good book although I liked Romeo and Juliet. I was indifferent to Lord of the Flies.

Off on my own I read a lot of Grham Greene, some Aldous Huxley, Gerald Durrell and James Herriott.

Motion's list is absurd and quite likely counter-productive. I agree with Liana, they should read what they love, learn to love the written word, to be excited by the world of books.

Visit my blog: http://whatisthisstrangeplace.blogspot.com/

My Father read most of the books on Jack's list to me. I don't think the entire responsibility falls on the school. If a kid grows up with 456 channels of Satellite TV and not a single book in the house you're heading for trouble. Going to the library to get new books to read was the highlight of my week!

By the same token these government schemes to get families to read/ feed their kids properly etc fill be with dismay. When we need the State to implement the most basic of parenting skills we're in a bad way!

The Catcher in the Rye J.D.Salinger
One flew over the cuckoo's nest Ken Kesey
Fahrenheit 451

Depends how old they are.
I had to read gone with the wind, that 1115 pg snore fest in the 7th grade.

I'd like to Stephen King Or John Grisham but we all know that won't happen

king and grisham should never be mentioned in the same post with salinger, kesey and bradbury...

I loved this comment

I've no idea if Motion has kids but if he does, they'd surely be the kind that he forces to recite French short stories, while doing ballet, at his dinner parties.

All the set books we had at school were ruined by dissecting them paragraph by paragraph before we'd read them through. The only exception to this was, Flowers for Algernon. It wasn't a set book but each lesson the teacher sat and read it to us anyway. We were enthralled. Lots of stifled blubbing, I seem to recall.

Is stifled blubbing good asks Rob in the pub using my password!?

Malcolm says hello too!

The Little Prince
Asimov's Foundation trilogy
Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf
Tom Robbins: Jitterbug Perfume

This is Rob in the pub using Tony's password:

Marvel Comics: Spiderman, Batman, Superman
Asterix the Gaul
Herge's Adventures of Tintin
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick

Steppenwolf, yes!
The little prince, yes, yes!

If I ever have kids, you lot are helping with their reading list. I agree with so many, I can't be bothered to do more.

Enzo..
www.thedevilbetweenus.com

PS Tony, are you drunk?

The Land of Green Ginger by Noel Langley (preferably with illustrations by Edward Ardizzone)

My teacher in the last year of primary school left me with a lasting fear of maths but he was ace at reading out loud.

Ooh it's quiz night isn't it... Rob, I thought your fave would've been Garfield for sure.

"the odyssey" was a good book though, but it bored me sometimes. If I was a teacher I'd show the film based on it, "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" which was an excellent movie, and still very interesting and unique.

And with the best film (NOT movie!) soundtrack ever.

Taking the target age as fifteen I'd say:

1984 by George Orwell
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Junk by Melvin Burgess
Fall Out by Gudrun Pauswang
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The World's Smallest Unicorn and Other Stories by Shena Mackay
War of the Worlds by HG Wells (or The Time Machine, or The Island of Doctor Moreu)
Metamorphosis by Ovid
The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde by R.L. Stevenson
Quatermass and The Pit by Nigel Neale
Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James
Border Crossing by Pat Barker
The Necropolis Railway by Andrew Martin
The Curious Case of The Dog In The Night by that bloke
Ghost World by Daniel Clowes
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
No Blade of Grass by John Christopher
Anno Dracula by Kim Newman
A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delany
The Society Within by Courtia Newland
Microserfs by Douglas Coupland

Hmmm... Not so bloody easy is it?

Most of my suggestions seem to include teenage boys (having been one) rather than teenage girls... What do teenage girls like?

I reckon there must be a whole sub genre of 'kids doing it for themselves novels', where the relationship between kids and adults is a tensely negotiated thing. I imagine this is a well mined seam for teaching in school though...

The problem is, I suppose, whether you feel you should be imparting some grand messages (Matthem Arnold style) or whether you're treating books as cultural artifacts and understanding them as such.

Is it tenable to occupy a position of moral improvement through literature, (which is what I feel this debate rotates around, whether stated or unstated)?

In other words, is it important to sort out WHY you want kids to read before you suggest WHAT they should read?

Motion seems to be suggesting that they eat their greens, doesn't he?

Cheers,

Mark Brown, Editor (on leave), www.ABCtales.com

I thought Mark's list was brill. I think a good thing to do is start children off with things they like, get them used torreading, and then progress from there.

I'm thinking of my friend Paul at school, who only liked Stephen King novels. My English teacher kept trying to get him to read Far from the Madding Crowd, Hamlet and Jane Eyre but he was having none of it, was Paul. He was predicted an E for GCSE, until my teacher suddenly saw sense, and let him read as much Stephen King as he liked. In the end he got a B at GCSE and went on to do A Level and got a B for that too.

Not a major success story, but my point was that once he was allowed to see all books as worth reading, he starting trying other things. Hamlet is one of his favourite plays now.

Studying Angela Carter at school was a big turning point for me. The Magic Toyshop just blew me away at 15 - and the main character in that is 15/16. I also remember loving The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, because it was the first time I realised that language, and the use of language, wasn't a set rule, and that a writer could play with it and make moods and emotions with it. The Catcher in the Rye is always a good one.

I think the more people like that twit Motion separate 'worthy' reads from reads in general the more people who haven't had access to a classical education will be put off by the big ones. Of course, I feel, certain books are more interesting, one can learn more from them, but slamming a big fat Odyssey in front of some 13 year old who likes playing on his play station and wondering why he won't read it seems like a silly thing to me.

Also I think The Portrait of a Lady is the most boring book in the whole world, and it is the only book I have not got to the end of.

(and only one woman on twit's list)

What we're forgetting as well perhaps is that for the purposes of GCSE, there has to be a standard list on which kids can be examined. I had to do Wuthering Shites unfortunately. This cuts out some really good genre fiction like sci-fi and crime. Most teachers are agreed that they have to stick to a few standard general fiction books to cover everyone and for ease of marking.

This is a real shame because genre fiction like sci fi opens the doors of literature to kids who are just trying to find their reading niche. My brother hardley read anything at school. Then when he was about 17/18 i introduced him to Jostein Gaarder's philosophy, Rumi's writing and Jeff noon and Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk and he's never looked back... he's probably read more than I have.

It probably goes back to Pesky's original point that anything that catches a person's imagination and makes them read is good.

I buy Patrick the Top Gear magazine as it gets him to read. Who am I to say I'm any better just because I read whatever it is I read?

"What we're forgetting as well perhaps is that for the purposes of GCSE, there has to be a standard list on which kids can be examined."

As I remember (from 7 years ago, aroundabouts,) the questions are very bland, and centered around only 2 or 3 of the many books teachers try and get you to read throughout the year. Also, getting high marks in the exams usually rests on your ability to regurgitate things you've been told about the text. If they don't expect children to be able to respond independently and intelligently to texts at 16, there's no need for the set texts to be centralised.

Interestingly, some of the books people have suggested were ones I was introduced to at GCSE level or before:
'Shooting an Elephant and other essays' - disliked this intensely.
'1984' - enjoyed watching the film of it. Otherwise, uninspiring. Even at that age, I found its 'message' unremarkable.
'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' - couldn't even get started on it at the time, although I've since found I liked it.
'Day of the Triffids' was brilliant.

What I want to know is

1. As I am (well I consider myself to be) reasonably well read, why can't I spell?
2. Can fingers build a spell check into the forum

God I am soo lazy

Razzle.