I have been putting off about posting on this because I don't want to fall out with anyone. The Say No to Age Banding campaign is being supported by many bloggers and authors whose blogs/work I enjoy and whom I respect in many ways. But as a blogger on both literature and literacy I can't ignore it any longer.
If you have managed to miss out on this debate you can read Vanessa's eloquent explanation here, Juliet's here and an impassioned plea by guest poster Steve Augarde on dovegreyreader here.
Steve Augarde notes: "I’ve yet to hear of any author, teacher, librarian or reader who thinks this a good idea." So I guess it is time to stick my head above the parapet. I don't necessarily think it is a good idea to indelibly mark a book as part of the book production process, but a sticker, why not?
There have been impassioned comments on the above blogs by readers and writers, many of them professional readers or writers, about how they or their children read outside the assumed ages of certain types of literature and profited from doing so. Of course. Me too. But let me throw something else into the pot here.
Just addressing Steve's criteria for support/objection: I have an English degree, a post graduate teaching qualification, an MA on the 18th century novel, teaching experience including being "second" in the English department and whole school literacy co-ordinator. I have a decade of experience marking GCSE exams scripts, and I now run my own business selling books. Oh and I am a parent and an aunt. My father was a head teacher and my mother a specialist in the teaching of reading, so I came from a very literate home. I am lucky, and because of that I think this idea needs a second glance.
Back over a decade ago, when I started teaching as a starry eyed middle class graduate in one of the most "challenging" schools in the country, in one of the most deprived areas of the north of England, I had strong feelings about the individuality of kids, and how reading stereo-typing was bad etc. etc., and I would have jumped like a shot to sign this petition. Then I took a middle set year 7 into the library. This was a middle set note, not the bottom set. For many of the kids this was the biggest library in which they had ever been. Even so it was not huge. A long wall of books about 8 bays wide ran away from you as you entered, then there were 2 bays across the bottom of the room before the shelves turned back for about 3 bays, cutting the bottom of the room in half. The other long wall was full of shiny new pcs and desks for homework. Some of the brighter girls went to the shelves and picked out pink things, Baby Sitters club and such like, some, including some boys picked Goosebumps. No other books were touched. 7 years of primary school education, battling against non-literate home backgrounds, hadn't been able to make much of a boost in their literary aspirations. Most of the boys, and some of the girls, just ran about. Given a big space what else were they to do; you can see their thinking.
I persuaded them into chairs and tried to single out the non-book-selectors and assist them to find something. Faced with rows of books they were petrified, which came out as sullen and objectionable behaviour. So I started trying to narrow it down, selecting a few books which I though might interest them, spreading them out on a few tables. Hands vigorously shoved in pockets. Wouldn't touch, wouldn't look. These kids could read a bit, below their chronological age, but they could read a bit, yet nothing could break this barrier between them and the books. Eventually I picked on the most troublesome individual thinking if I could get him to pick a book up, the others would follow.
"What about this one?"
"Is it a boy's book?"
"It is for anyone."
"I want a boy's book"
I paraphrase here. These kids literacy standards were so poor that verbal communication was hard work and heavily reliant on implicit language teamed with shrugs, grunts and grimaces. Having extracted the meaning, I was staggered, was that it? All it was that mattered was the book had to tick some hidden boxes? So, what next, lower my egalitarian standards and start looking for "boys' books", or begin a sociological discussion on gender in fiction with a kid that couldn't give a proverbial, and indeed had made that very point in those terms earlier? I started looking for boy's books. I even found some, labelled as such, helping boy readers. They pounced. They read them, well a bit, and went back to look for similar things the next time we went in. Their diet didn't vary much, though we did manage the Lancashire reading challenge (certificates for reading books from 5 different genres) as a class, and some of them got certificates. But I had to get them into the library and up to the shelves to start the process. They were so out of the reading loop that all the clues that a middle class kid (or parent) would use to tell them about the subject matter, the reading ability, the age range anticipated, were not there in their minds. They might pick a book because they liked the picture of a an RAF plane on the front but they couldn't tell you whether they were expecting a story, history, biography, or a fighter pilot's instruction book. They had no idea whether the contents was likely to be akin to Andy McNab or Thomas the Tank Engine.
So who are books for? No doubt most of those who have signed petition would say everybody. I'd beg to differ. I'd say they were for middle class kids and their parents who use the libraries, who go to book shops, who know you can ask for help, who have the vocabulary to attempt the questions needed to find a right book.
We label books for adults. We have Penguin Classics, Penguin reissues in classic crime banded green covers, Everyman, Macmillan New Writers, Heineman African Writers series, Canongate Scottish Classics, Virago, Persephone etc., We also label with chick lit covers, airport covers, gritty crime covers, quaint-harking-back-to-Agatha-Christie crime covers, misery lit covers, ghost written biographies of famous people covers and you don't need to be a literacy co-ordinator to estimate the reading age of each genre. Adults have reading ages too you know. Many of them have ones lower than those of your own kids.
I had a very good reading age of 16+ when I was just 9 - if you are literate enough to blog on books your kids probably have a high reading age too. I have, aged 36, a spelling age of just 14 - there's a confession for you. I avoid some writing situations - anything "live" for example. I never used the blackboard when teaching. Unlike most teachers, most literate adults, I have a window of experience of what it is like to not quite be in control of language. How is the parent or grandparent of a child buying maybe one book a year, for Christmas maybe, supposed to break into our world of books? When confronted with a live situation in a shop, even if they ask, they discover knowing the age of their grandchild is not enough, they have to answer other questions the helpful shop assistant throws at them. It is not they don't know their child but they don't understand, because they don't read, why additional questions are relevant. My kids would've said, "What's point?" (no definite article). They just want a story book that's "right". In a good independent shop the assistant will take an interest and frighten the horses of the non-literate buyer. Perhaps banded books, with stickers so the middle class shop keeper/parent can remove them, will enable the Smiths routine of "books? Over there ..." to be an advantage for those out of their comfort zone. They can go "over there", see the stickers and get the right book (maybe, maybe not, but if it is the only book they're going to buy all year then let them just buy it!) by grabbing one with a label on it. They don't have to enter University Challange, specialist subject, your grandchild, to get something, anything. And for some families this start, this attempt at ownership and interaction with books, is so hard that anything that makes it easier is a good thing.
My caveat to the above, is that it is a good thing in moderation. Not all books should be labelled, and no book benefits from being labelled permanently for the reasons outlined by others on the blog links at the top of this post. All I am saying is that those of us equipped to choose books easily should beware ring fencing books in for ourselves, and for us alone.
...Since writing this, I have noticed Jane's good suggestions for the book-challenged parent over at Books, Mud and Compost and I would especially endorse numbers 4, 5 and 6.
It is interesting actually, as yet, how few teachers have signed this petition. There are some on there, of course, and I am certainly not saying all teachers would agree with me; they won't. However, the list is dominated by authors, publishers, booksellers and librarians. These people deal mostly with kids and families already engaged with books, and for those kids they have a point. I am talking about the rest. (BTW there are between 450,000 and 500,000 serving teachers at any one time in the UK, add to that those no longer teaching, those retired etc. and you have a huge number of people. The number of teachers signing the petition is not statistically significant as yet.)
Excellent post Catherine, and great to get another point of view. I did start off hissing and spitting with fury initially in my post at the perfidy of parents, but overnight I calmed down and thought about the working class village in which I live, and some of the parents I know, who are petrified of books themselves.
That's why I feel libraries are so vital. They are risk-free (no need to spend any money) environments where you can find out about books. All kudos to you for what you did with your class. They were lucky to have you.
Posted by: Jane | June 10, 2008 at 06:06 PM
This is a really great post, Catherine - very thought-provoking and very persuasive. I've been mulling it over all day.
Posted by: Juliet | June 10, 2008 at 09:35 PM
A very interesting article, but I must point out that the suggestion is NOT for any kind of removable sticker but for the age guidance to be PERMANENTLY printed on the book. And this without any consultation with many ten publishers I have books with has ever asked me about the matter....
Posted by: adele geras | June 11, 2008 at 04:42 PM
That came out not as I put it on...sorry. I meant to say:
And this without any consultation. Not one of the ten publishers...etc.
Posted by: adele geras | June 11, 2008 at 04:44 PM
The story of the visit to the library with a group of reluctant readers (a situation with which I am very familiar) seems to support the argument for saying no to age-banding. Those are the very youngsters who would never look at a book with a sticker telling the world that it was meant for younger children.
You ask where the teachers are; all those I have spoken to are against the move to put age labels on books. I have retired so I have time to read and comment on blogs, my former colleagues are all too busy teaching.
Posted by: Maureen | June 11, 2008 at 05:31 PM
Thank you all for your comments. I have addressed some of the points you raise in my next (last!) post on the subject. I have a lot of sympathy with the No campaign, but feel that instead of fighting it powerful literary people could use it, with admittedly a bit of tweaking, as a force for good.
Posted by: Juxtabook | June 14, 2008 at 09:51 PM
What an interesting issue, and post, and something which had completely passed me by. My instinct would have been No Age Banding, but your post has made me reconsider. I certainly think authors should be consulted (who reads their books being, I would have thought, more important than what the illustrations look like?) but...
Well, I spent my formative years moving from Enid Blyton to Goosebumps to Point Horror, and somehow came out all right!
Posted by: Simon T | June 21, 2008 at 11:03 AM