The boy who chose not to study literature

A discontinuity

Photo by Jilbert Ebrahimi on Unsplash

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I have been thinking about a post by Rebecca Birch — whose Substack you should follow — on why boys underperform in English and what we can do about it. She touches on boys’ motivation for studying English and this is relevant. Birch is open that she has no definitive solutions, but her suggestions are perceptive.

Like Birch, I offer no strong evidence. Instead, I present a case study of one — me.

In July 1992, at the age of sixteen, I had a decision to make. Unlike Australia, where English is mandated to the age of eighteen, I had a free choice of three or four A Levels and I chose maths x 2, physics and chemistry.

There’s nothing unusual about that. It was a standard choice for the time. However, it was not an obvious one to my English teacher, Mrs B, who thought I was making a mistake. And perhaps she had a point.

I had written a science fiction novel on an old manual typewriter at twelve. Becoming a novelist was one of my longstanding, competing ambitions. After giving up English, I went on a self-driven literary journey through Steinbeck and Fitzgerald, the latter resonating with my experiences as a boy from Dudley at a posh university. I read Austen in Africa and at some point, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which I found compelling. To this day, I write when I have the time and have started a weird fiction Substack.

Yet I lack the literary chops a study of the subject would have given me. I eased into texts I thought I would like. I wasn’t challenged. I am impoverished as a writer as a result. So why did I give it up?

One way to view it is in reverse. I chose maths, physics and chemistry because I was curious about the world and I wanted to know how it worked. Implicitly, I did not view English as being able to provide these answers. And that must be due to my experience.

In early secondary school, I remember making videos. I was a member of a bunch of clowns who played everything for laughs in most classes. In one video, Gaz pretended to pee up a tree in the background and we all got in trouble — Mrs B, my form tutor but not at that time my English teacher, lectured us on the law and indecent exposure.

We brought in tapes of pop music and analysed the lyrics — sort of. My contribution was Tone Loc’s Funky Cold Medina, which now strikes me as inappropriate. We never learnt grammar or anything like that. Then there were the issues.

We had to debate whether beauty contests were degrading to women and write an essay on it. Well, it was presented as a debate, but we all knew the correct answer, particularly after Cal brought in a VHS tape of Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders dressed as dirty old men who became increasingly vocal and aroused while watching a beauty contest. Looking back from 2022, when any form of degradation we may desire is available at the swipe of a screen, beauty contests strike me as quaint, if not charming. At that time, I saw it all as a little — simplistic.

Instead of writing the requested essay, I wrote a sarcastic and parodic account titled, “All men are bastards,” where I riffed on the idea that when a heterosexual couple split up, we assume it is the man’s fault, as well as the sitcom tropes of useless, feckless men being useless and therefore funny. Mrs B liked it. I was fortunate that at that time, England was experimenting with a 100% coursework GCSE in English so I was allowed to put that in my portfolio. I’m not sure how I would have gone in an exam.

Mrs B then gave me the novel, Rogue Male, to read, as well as an absurdly sexist short story by Somerset Maugham about some people on a boat.

Two highlights of my English lessons stand out from the others. Both were orchestrated by Mrs B who had the virtue of being a proper English teacher who didn’t make us shoot dumb videos. The first was analysing Requiescat by Oscar Wilde. I don’t think we had ever talked about death before. The second was a classroom argument about Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Mrs B thought Rushdie was culpable — that he knew what was he was doing, was deliberately provocative in order to generate publicity and deserved to reap what he had sown. I argued the free speech position that I have continued to develop. I’ve still not read the book.

The Satanic Verses was an issue, but not one with an obvious and pre-ordained answer — at least not to me. I suppose that’s why I found it interesting.

So, when I had that decision to make, I chose to drop English. I guess I effectively rebelled against it in a teenagery way. When it wasn’t being experimental and stupid, it was being didactic, attempting to indoctrinate me in twee moral lessons about the world — sexism is bad, we should care for the environment etc. I couldn’t be done with it.

I’m not sure how English has now evolved and what the experience is like for boys in Australia today. Nor am I sure exactly how gendered my perspective on this is and whether girls would have similar reactions and experiences. I do worry about an ironically uncritical acceptance of critical theory and how this may affect the experiences of everyone.

And I think this is what English can learn from science and mathematics. There are few occasions in a physics lesson when a student is left wondering if this particular topic has been selected as a Trojan horse for the teacher’s values. Although postmodernists may deny it, physics just is. Undoubtedly, this is why it lacks appeal for so many — why they don’t find it relevant. But we don’t insist everyone studies physics to eighteen.