Wales exam board removes Steinbeck book from curriculum

In some rather strange news this festive season, it transpires that the Welsh Joint Education Committee (WJEC) has banned John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men from being studied at GCSE level in Wales. The news comes amid concerns about the use of racist language in the novel, with the move to come into force from next September. Good heavens…

Critics, including Wales’ Children’s Commissioner Rocio Cifuentes, have slammed Steinbeck’s novel for being ‘psychologically and emotionally’ harmful to black children who have been reading it in schools. Cifuentes herself has insisted that the move is ‘not censorship’, adding:

This is safeguarding the wellbeing of children who have told us how awful those discussions have made them feel in those classrooms.

For its part, the WJEC exam board revealed it had employed an anti-racism consultant ‘to help us ensure our qualifications reflect a modern and inclusive Wales’, with the organisation noting that: ‘This is a new qualification, and as such, our starting point for selecting texts was not the existing English literature qualification.’