To my friends, it’s no secret that I love reading. To my parents, it was a strain on their purse strings. But there was a brief period when reading lost that spark for me, and with hindsight, I think that GCSEs were to blame.
I recall my GCSE English lessons with a feeling very far from fondness. The classroom (like Goldilocks’ stolen porridge) was consistently either too hot or too cold, my stomach always decided to grumble at the quietest moments, and the teaching style felt incredibly, incredibly dull. Now I must make it clear that I do not in any way blame my teachers; they were doing the best with what they had. But the strength of my love for literature was pushed to its limits during my GCSE years.
Instead of being encouraged to form our own opinions on the texts we studied, the structure of the UK examination system meant that an excessively formulaic teaching method was favoured. As experts in the subject, our English teachers dictated to us what a specific rhyme pattern in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’ meant, or the exact connotation of the red feather in Curley’s wife’s shoe in Of Mice and Men. Because we were aiming to score marks by guessing what the Edexcel or AQA gods interpreted in a text, we had little opportunity to explore how literature made us, as individuals, think and feel. I especially remember one of the revision techniques most commonly suggested to us for essay questions: plan an introduction, three paragraphs and a conclusion for each possible question. Whatever you do, don’t actually do any thinking in the exam! You simply don’t have time.
Whether this is a popular opinion or not, I wholeheartedly disagree with the concept of set mark schemes when it comes to essays on literature. Good literature is designed to have a different effect on every person who encounters it. However, students – whose youth would mean that, if encouraged, they could bring fresh ideas to the literary canon – are punished for deviating from the opinions of just a few adults working for an exam board. The UK’s quantitative examination system is impossible to reconcile with the idiosyncrasy of literary interpretation. And the rigid structure of the exam system leads to such dreary rote-learning of the arts, completely contrary to their essence as fluid and subjective. The pursuits of learning quotes off by heart and regurgitating forgettable statistics for ‘context marks’ are neither intellectually stimulating nor fun in any way.
GCSE students are at a pivotal stage in their life, when they start thinking about what they want to do in the future but most still have all options available. This is why I believe it is imperative that something is done to change the system. There are so many different routes that teens of today can take for entertainment, and reading is falling to the bottom of the list. We can’t just blame Netflix and TikTok for stealing the youth’s attention – we have to address the fact that the current way of teaching the arts is one of the largest obstacles to reigniting young peoples’ passion for literature.
So what must be done? I propose that open-book exams should be put into practice to do away with unnecessary quote-learning. Other exam sections should feature more unseen poems and prose or drama passages to test a student’s literary analysis skills, rather than their memory. And what I think is most important is that examiners ensure their marking is far more open to individual interpretation than it is currently. Students should not be marked on whether their view of the meaning behind a particular figurative device is in accordance with that of an examiner. Instead, exam responses with merit should be considered those which coherently and efficiently support their own line of argument, no matter what the argument is. This style of assessment is employed to great effect at university level teaching, and somewhat also at A-Level, so why not for GCSEs?
Of course this issue is not the worst that the UK government currently faces, but it is pressing nonetheless. Something needs to be done, so that our country’s future generations don’t lose their love for literature entirely. After all, without readers, who will write?