Great Britain’s Minister of Education Michael Gove wants more British literature on the recommended list for middle and high school students, so he has cut some classic American works. To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, and The Crucible are the only dropped titles I’ve found so far.

The head of one British exam board said, “In the new syllabus 70-80% of the books are from the English canon.”

The Department of Education states it is not restricting any books or types of books. It is making their standards more rigorous. “It does ensure pupils will learn about a wide range of literature, including at least one Shakespeare play, a 19th-century novel written anywhere and post-1914 fiction or drama written in the British Isles.”

Oxford University professor John Carey said, “the idea of cutting out American books because they are not British is crazy.”

Elsewhere, kittens frolic in the grass.

Do you have a problem with this? I don’t, because I don’t think asking kids to read Dickens instead of Steinbeck will kill their spirits, and I wonder how many non-classics of the English language exist that will inspire just as many kids as the classics they replace.

I remember one of my English professors saying that new anthologies never added anything to their section on William Wordsworth. They just repeated the same poems with a couple seemingly random ones to make their selection look independent. The random ones stuck him as inferior to the standards. He didn’t say this directly, but I gathered that he believed Wordsworth is not the major poet his reputation suggests, but a minor one of significant place. So if the groupthink could be challenged a bit, Wordsworth could step back from the front line of English literature studies and give space to someone else in another period.

That’s where I go with the minister’s recommendations for British students. Is The Crucible so stinking awesome English-language students must, must, must read it? I doubt it. Let it have a rest and give another strong play its year in the sun. If that means more Shakespeare, Marlowe, or Harold Pinter, it’s probably time for it.

And now for something completely different. Clive Thompson shares his discovery of the moral outrage over playing chess that cropped up in the 1800s. He quotes from an interview with the authors of Bad for You: Exposing the War on Fun!, which is a book about the historic complaints over new and popular entertainments.

Cunningham: Just wait. Each new wave of fear over the latest technology that interests kids is just that: a wave. The wave comes, it crests, and then it crashes against the shore and fades away. That’s partly why we chose to create the timelines in the book, like Youth-a-Phobia or Fear of the New, to give a historical view of these hysterical reactions. But with the distance of time, all these panics start to look foolish and quaint..

Pyle: Especially that “pernicious excitement” of chess embraced by children “of very inferior character.”

Part of that outrage is recorded in Scientific American: “Persons engaged in sedentary occupations should never practice this cheerless game; they require out-door exercises for recreation — not the sort of mental gladiatorship. Those who are engaged in mental pursuits should avoid a chess-board as they would an adder’s nest, because chess misdirects and exhausts their intellectual energies. Rather let them dance, sing, play ball, perform gymnastics, roam in the woods or by the seashore, than play chess.”

Thompson points out that these complaints are not completely fruit-looped, even if they are overstated. Would that young people were taking up live steel combat instead of this or other games for so-called good, clean fun.