School curricula ‘detrimental’ to state-educated literature undergraduates, claims former Warwick professor

The declining size of state school curricula and increasing use of social media has caused state-educated pupils to fall behind their private school counterparts, a former Warwick professor has claimed.

Sir Jonathan Bate, who was previously Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at Warwick before moving to Oxford, has claimed that the shortening length of books on GCSE and A Level syllabuses in state schools means that students are going to university unequipped to study longer books.

Whilst teaching at Oxford, Bate says he observed that state-educated literature students “hadn’t really developed that habit of concentrated, lengthy reading which private schools in both the UK and the US concentrate on”.

With universities looking toward state-educated applications more so than in the past, Bate argues that the growing gap between state and private school pupils results from disruption to teaching in state schools leading to less focused reading.

Those [state school] students come from disadvantaged schools where the teachers’ main task is crowd control, and so the demands in terms of reading long books are just not there

Sir Jonathan Bate, Professor of English Literature at Oxford

Bate told BBC’s Today programme that the issue among state school pupils is “an unintended consequence of the push in […] universities towards diversity and access”.

He also added that: “Those students come from disadvantaged schools where the teachers’ main task is crowd control, and so the demands in terms of reading long books are just not there.”

He also criticised what he termed a so-called “Of Mice and Men effect” in the “thinning of the GCSE and A Level syllabuses and the tendency to prescribe works because they’re shorter”.

A rise in mobile phone usage has also contributed to “the attrition of attention spans” and a decline in literacy rates, according to the Oxford professor

Using Steinbeck’s novella, which is widely studied by GCSE students, as an example, he claimed that “they would never prescribe The Grapes of Wrath anymore” as Of Mice and Men is “nice and short”.

A rise in mobile phone usage has also contributed to “the attrition of attention spans” and a decline in literacy rates, according to the Oxford professor. He claimed that social media sites, such as YouTube and TikTok, provided “instant dopamine hits” with their short, addictive videos, driving young people away from long-form texts.

Bate, who has been teaching for over 40 years, is concerned at the declining ability of students being able to read longer texts, remarking that he could ask students to read as many as three Dickens texts in a week when he started teaching at Cambridge. Now, the Professor of English Literature at Oxford, claims that “many students will struggle to get through one novel in three weeks”.

Bate added, however, that state-funded schools in the US are seeing a comparatively “big revival” in “so-called classical education”. Works such as the Iliad and the Odyssey – both of which are found on Warwick’s undergraduate English Literature course ­– were featured on his son’s curriculum at a US charter high school.

Praising these approaches, Bate added that he believes that “intensive, thoughtful quiet reading of great books is good for mental health” and worries that the decline in reading to develop “concentration and critical thinking” will be “problematic for society”.