Today as part of my course to become an English teacher I reviewed the list of approved texts that are part of the West Australian curriculum. What I saw were old books, mostly by white people, that are no longer relevant to the students who are studying them. While I’m sure that there can be something gained from the study of these texts, books such as Pride and Prejudice, Merry-go-round in the Sea, and Animal Farm, why are we not allowing students to learn the same values and ideologies from texts that are actually relevant to their current culture?
There are so many diverse and inclusive books out there in the Young Adult market, and a fair few of them written by Australian authors in an Australian context, so why don’t we use those? Talking to the many teenagers that I come into contact with, so many of them are becoming disinterested in reading because the literature they are being exposed to is “boring”. I’ll admit, that there are a lot of people that just plain don’t like reading, but it makes it even harder to engage young readers when we are forcing them to read and think critically about texts from over 100 years ago. Wouldn’t it be better to break up the strong, steady march of white, postcolonial texts written before they were born, with a few books that are from the 21st century? I don’t know about you, but I felt as a teenager more able to relate to characters that lived in eras similar to mine, more than those that didn’t. Yes Fantasy and Sci-fi are also great, (with wonderfully diverse characters) but won’t a teenager in an age of technology and rapidly changing ideologies relate to a character in the same culture– rather than a teenage protagonist that doesn’t even know what social media is and still listens to cassette tapes on their Walkman as they channel the punk trend?
If you want to look at some wonderfully diverse, and thought-provoking Australian YA novels then have a go at a few of the following books: