In a move to make our children’s education more ‘relevant’, the great literary tradition has been losing ground for some time. But now ‘multimodal texts’ -  such as graphic novels, magazine articles, advertisements and television programmes - are being proposed as an intellectual supplement if not an alternative to literature. The reality of this was brought home to parent Joseph Reynolds in Somerset when in July 2010 he found his daughter’s English class had spent six weeks studying The Simpsons, leaving no time for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Mr Reynolds’s subsequent campaign to ‘raise the bar’ resulted in a petition with 400 signatures being delivered to the school, yet this failed to bring about any change of policy. And in the wider media Mr Reynolds was roundly criticised for promoting a one-sidedly traditional curriculum, and failing to appreciate the subtle cleverness of 21st century visual media.

The Simpsons, with its quick-witted verbal displays, its multi-layered meanings, and its manifold cultural references, is seen by many commentators as both entertaining and worthy of academic study. And celebrated television dramas such as The Wire seem almost to make reading redundant as a means of appreciating complex plots and subtle characterisation. But while these ‘texts’ can no doubt be used to teach important ideas in an English class - irony or bathos, for example - is there anything lost if we abandon the cultural treasures passed down through the generations? Is there a case for teaching Shakespeare as literature that is valuable in itself, rather than as a means to an end? Or does it not matter what children study as long as they’re learning something?

If modern media are better than Shakespeare for teaching today’s students how to ‘read’ the real world then what case can be made for classic literary works today? What aesthetic and moral values do the written works of Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens represent, and are these any better than those expressed in modern media? And can an objective pedagogic case even be made for certain books, or must we confine ourselves merely to celebrating the books we love and hoping that others agree?