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"Miss, is this a real book?"

The title of this article is taken from a conversation that took place in an English classroom in a school in the east end of Glasgow a few years ago. The context was that the S1 class had been reading the novel, Think Me Back (Forde, 2001). The novel is a supernatural mystery based on the Clydebank Blitz and the reason the question was asked was that the young man concerned had never before read a book that was set in a place near where he lived or where some of the characters spoke the same way he did. Consequently he believed that the teacher might have perpetrated an elaborate fraud in order to get him to 'engage with a book'. Sadly this experience, even today, is not an isolated one. Large numbers of adult Scots have emerged from school believing that literature was not written by or about people like them. Some of our well-known and respected authors, such as Theresa Breslin and Andrew O'Hagan have spoken and written about this topic and about the impact this had on their motivation to write.

According to important educational documents and initiatives, the situation described above really should have been quite unusual since all recent documents about the teaching of English in Scotland have strongly advocated the use of Scottish Literature in the classroom. In 1976 the Scottish Education Department's Central Committee on English, stated that, "Scottish Literature should be an essential ingredient ... throughout primary and secondary education." And again, the 1981 Scottish Consultative Council for the Curriculum (SCCC) Primary Language Arts document stated that, "the child’s Scottish voice with its idioms and dialect words must be worthy of respect." By 1991 and the publication of the English Language 5–14 document the following advice was being given,

Pupils should be allowed to use their mother tongue throughout the school. Given that language and identity are inextricably linked, it is often through literature in the Scots language that culture is transmitted ... Scottish writing and writing about Scotland should permeate the curriculum and be introduced from an early stage, taking its place beside English literature. The objective of this is to value and examine critically the ideas, beliefs and emotions of Scottish writers, and to set them against the different insights and perspectives of writers from other places and other times. Scottish texts should be actively sought and used in classrooms ... Teachers should help pupils to recognize themselves, and be able to look at themselves as Scots in a detached and self-aware manner.1

With such clear and direct advice over at least thirty years, why should my young first-year pupil have been so surprised at encountering and studying a Scottish young adult novel? The answer is simple: despite these clear directives, Scottish language, literature and culture does not permeate the curriculum and in some cases only makes an appearance twice a year at Burns' Day or St Andrew's Day. If they are lucky, some pupils experience a 'Scottish week'. Which leads one to wonder what they experience the rest of the year? Sadly, the recognition and impact of a diet of mainly English literature on pupils' sense of identity is relatively unexamined.

The latest curriculum development initiative, A Curriculum for Excellence: Purpose and Principles for the Curriculum 3-18 (2004) continues this positive advocacy for Scots language, literature and culture commenting that the curriculum,

Provid(es) a locus for valuing and building upon the languages that children bring to school. The Language and Literature of Scotland are valuable sources of learning about culture, identity and language.2

Given the Establishment's seemingly strong support for Scottish Literature in the curriculum, it is worth considering more precisely what the benefits are for pupils and teachers and even for the wider Scottish community in the use of Scottish texts in schools.

Children learn to read their culture right from the start of their education, and discover quickly how reading overlaps with their lives. Literature is central to this development, but if the only texts they have access to do not include Scottish material then this overlap may not occur. Young Scottish readers need to be aware of texts' absences; the ideas or assumptions they take for granted and therefore do not explicitly assert. If the only literature that is available is that which is labelled English, rather even than British, then this becomes even more important. Consider the popular series books of the 1950s and 1960s: Elinor M Brent-Dyer's Chalet School series (Brent-Dyer, 1925-1970), Enid Blyton’s prodigious oeuvre or any of the so-called 'classic' children’s books such as Swallows and Amazons (Ransome, 1930) or The Secret Garden (Hodgson-Burnett, 1911). Readers would be hard pressed to identify any but token Scottish characters and any that do exist seem only to confirm the stereotypical depiction. The question must be asked whether any characters from minority groups in these books, such as the Scots, only achieve success by giving up their distinctiveness and adopting the values and lifestyles of the mainstream society, or whether they manage to succeed while keeping sight of, and remaining true to their heritage? Do the Scottish characters solve their own problems and make their own decisions or are they helped by people from the mainstream? If the Scottish voice is absent or subordinate then there is no likelihood of change or influence with the 'other' and change is all one-sided: a form of colonisation.

It is in the stories written for and told to children that a culture confirms and reproduces itself. In order to understand the way a culture envisions itself we need look no further than the stories adults tell and re-tell their children. Literary reading begins where the reader is and goes on from there. Unless the reader finds him or herself in a book they will have a hard time finding anyone else. Children and young people are in the process of learning to become members of the adult community they have been born into. To join that community they must learn its values—become the kind of people who can live within it by accepting and negotiating its particular visions of what kind of people they should be. To be shaped by one's culture is merely to be human, and Children's Literature is inevitably part of that which does the shaping.

In turn, children's fiction, far from comprising a mere afterthought in Scotland's creative psyche, plays a fundamental role in the shaping of that collectively imagined space known as Scottish Literature and the culture it seeks to represent. If it is true that in some sense children and young people become what they read about, then the narratives that they are exposed to can play an important part in making them who they believe themselves to be. In offering subject positions, fictional texts for children work to construct their readers' subjectivity. They do this by encouraging real readers to become implied readers, to identify with specific characters and points of view through which a text is focalised. Readers can therefore be manipulated; inexperienced readers perhaps more than most. Knowing how to read against a text therefore can become a significant skill. That makes it all the more important in terms of the existence of Scottish culture, that there should be an identifiable Scottish Literature in which Scottish children are represented and where readers can both recognise and question the images, points of view, experiences and characters presented. [...]

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