I took my children to see the Postman Pat movie the other day. At five years old, they found it entertaining, chatting happily to each other afterwards about the army of Patbots - evil robot simulcra that stand in for the famous postie while he's chasing fame on a TV talent contest. Andrew Pulver who reviewed if for this paper suggested that it was a bit of a frightening storyline for the tinies - and that the filmmakers should have stuck to helping Mrs Goggins and rescuing the odd sheep out of a tree. While my twins didn't seem unduly disturbed by the Patbot's laser eyes, I could see that it didn't have quite the cosy appeal of the original series, and that the film was perhaps pandering to parents who have been too spoilt by the witty Pixar films to put up with purely childish fare. My main beef was with the cheap looking animation (I have definitely and forever been spoilt by Wallace and Gromit). Having sat through my share of execrable Disney knock-offs though, I have to say that I remain grateful for anything resembling a storyline.
So, American titles have been cleansed from the GCSE reading list to make way for more patriotic paperbacks. Although Michael Gove claims that his changes to the syllabus are about increasing breadth of reading, the dropping of a 'prose from other cultures' section in favour of ticking off old fashioned canonical texts such as Shakespeare and the Romantic poets seems retrogressive. For most children, books such as Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird aren't just their first introduction to a complicated new moral universe, but a glimpse at a cosmopolitan new world beyond our shores. The inclusion of Pigeon English and Anita and Me seem to gesture towards at least educating children in the diversity of their own island but in general this does seem a depressing retreat into a 1940s classroom when there was still plenty of pink on the map but the great thing was to be able to recite your Kipling. John Steinbeck and Harper Lee, Maya Angelou and Arthur Miller speak to the righteous idealism, empathy and thirsty curiosity of young minds. Let's not substitute them for lesser authors just because they are British.
