John Stein­beck­’s Of Mice and Men has been on the exam­i­na­tion syl­labus for Eng­lish school­child­ren for more than 50 years. It’s prob­a­bly time for a change. There’s been an inter­est­ing row here, how­ev­er, because of its removal, which has been accom­pa­nied by the removal of Arthur Miller’s The Cru­cible and Harp­er Lee’s To Kill a Mock­ing­bird, and all three were removed by pub­lic exam­i­na­tion boards at the sug­ges­tion of Michael Gove, the Sec­re­tary of State for Edu­ca­tion, on the grounds that chil­dren in Eng­land should be read­ing books by Eng­lish writers.

Mr. Gove’s impressive lip would curl, I’m sure, at mention of pleasure.

Of course there’s noth­ing to stop any young per­son from read­ing those books and oth­ers that are also now more or less exclud­ed as exam­i­na­tion texts: Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and J.D. Salinger’s The Catch­er in the Rye. This is a row about school exam­i­na­tions and about the texts that are sanc­ti­fied by inclu­sion in them. These ​“Amer­i­can” books have been pop­u­lar with teach­ers and stu­dents, in part because they tack­le issues such as racism and inequal­i­ty and grow­ing up in ways that make for live­ly dis­cus­sion while main­tain­ing dis­tance from the stu­dents’ par­tic­u­lar experiences.

What’s out­ra­geous is that a cab­i­net min­is­ter should dic­tate what teenagers study. Gove wants more Shake­speare, more 19th-cen­tu­ry Eng­lish fic­tion and poet­ry, more rigour and, he says, more breadth. There has been a rush by writ­ers and oth­ers to offer their ide­al lit­er­a­ture syl­labus­es, all of them accom­pa­nied by the usu­al range of jus­ti­fi­ca­tions: that the books they’ve cho­sen are ​“great” literature,“classics” even, that they are or were par­tic­u­lar favorites in some­one’s child­hood, that they are excit­ing­ly con­tem­po­rary, or not at all con­tem­po­rary, that they tack­le vital themes, or indeed, that they don’t and are the bet­ter for it. And then there is pleasure.

Most Eng­lish teach­ers think, as I did, that the best bit of their job is read­ing and enjoy­ing sto­ries and plays and poems with young peo­ple and talk­ing about them. The prob­lem is that when it comes to exam time the process is turned into a strange sort of study which requires stu­dents to learn to write in answer to ques­tions (which usu­al­ly and disin­gen­u­ous­ly con­tain words like ​“dis­cuss”).

Most Eng­lish teach­ers will have taught stu­dents who are enthu­si­as­tic read­ers. Those stu­dents may even rise to the bizarre request that they com­pare and con­trast the Oedi­pus of Sopho­cles with Kafka’s Gre­gor in The Meta­mor­pho­sis, as some were recent­ly required to do.

But many teenagers are not keen read­ers, and their Eng­lish teach­ers want above all to change that. A diet of texts that bore them, and a year or so of prac­tis­ing writ­ing essays about them, can turn young peo­ple off lit­er­a­ture for a long time, if not for­ev­er. I got around all this when I was 15 by refus­ing to read any of my set books and sim­ply get­ting friends and fam­i­ly (and I was lucky to have them) to tell me what to write. I passed the exam, though not bril­liant­ly. But it also left Mac­beth and Kid­napped to be read for plea­sure and inter­est at a lat­er date.

Mr. Gove’s impres­sive lip would curl, I’m sure, at men­tion of plea­sure. Yet sure­ly that is what we hope young peo­ple will come to expect and to expe­ri­ence from read­ing. With­out that expec­ta­tion of plea­sure and inter­est, they will miss out on the humour and the tragedy and the insight that comes from lit­er­a­ture. And if they are teenagers, it is quite like­ly (though not inevitable) that they will get plea­sure from books their teach­ers and their par­ents don’t like or even approve of.

Gove seems to think that young peo­ple will believe that the First World War was glo­ri­ous and that Eng­lish writ­ers are bet­ter than Amer­i­can ones, if they are told as much. I have been read­ing the mem­oir of the Czech nov­el­ist Ivan Klí­ma, which tells the sto­ry of what hap­pened to banned writ­ers and their work when pub­lish­ing and jour­nal­ism and edu­ca­tion were con­trolled by gov­ern­ment com­mit­tees. These com­mit­tees decid­ed what should be includ­ed and what banned based entire­ly on what was said or implied in them about how things were going in Czecho­slo­va­kia at the time. I rec­om­mend the mem­oir to Mr. Gove.