THE row over the books pupils study for English GCSE rumbles on as more exam boards announce plans to ditch foreign authors.

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee and I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, who died last week, will disappear from the course from 2015.

Instead, pupils will have to study at least one Shakespeare play, a 19th century novel, a selection of poetry since 1789, and fiction or drama from the British Isles from 1914 onwards.

On the list from 2015 will be the writers Jane Austen, George Orwell, Kazuo Ishiguro and Meera Syal, and the Department for Education has said that the secondary curriculum must learn about ‘seminal world literature’ between the ages of 11 and 14, and American classics fall into that category.

Too restrictive, say critics, and an online petition against the changes has attracted thousands of signatures.

But I disagree with them. The national curriculum already includes a great emphasis on American history, with children in secondary education studying, for example, the American Indians but not the Industrial Revolution, and the civil rights movement but not the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act. My children know who Rosa Parks is but they’d never heard of William Wilberforce. They know about General Custer but not Disraeli or Gladstone.

Of course, the works of Steinbeck, Lee and Angelou are marvellous, but while children are studying them, they are also absorbing American culture and history to the detriment of the culture and history of the country they live in.

Dickens, for example, was instrumental in changing the lives of the poor in Victorian England simply because he used his writings as social commentary to criticise the yawning gap between rich and poor. Reading his works offer young people a valuable history lesson as well as a masterclass on how to create characters.

The romantic fiction of Jane Austen, too, gives readers a window into the claustrophobic and mannered world of the English gentry of the 1800s and the narrow world its women occupied. By contrast the lives of servants in the first half of the 20th century are explored in Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, in particular the issues of loyalty and the social constraints of the time.

And George Orwell? Bring on Animal Farm and 1984, the study of which must include discussions of the 1917 Russian revolution and Stalin.

So, too restrictive? I say the new reading list will open up a whole new world to pupils. A world of British history. And what’s to stop them reading Steinbeck, Lee and Angelou for pleasure at the same time?