Through a selective reading of acclaimed Scottish poet and writer Iain Crichton Smith’s work, you might just detect a negative view of women.

In perhaps his most famous short story The Telegram, the two main characters are referred to throughout only by their size and sex - “the thin woman who was thinking the fat woman was very stupid” - while the only male character is a noble church elder struck down by tragedy. In Home, another short story, the snobbish wife is described as having a face like “a desiccated gypsy…held together like a lacy bag by the wrinkles”, while the husband has merely “a weather-beaten, red-veined face with a strong jaw”. And in perhaps the most relentlessly misogynistic story, Mother and Son, the mother is a bitter woman who delights in provoking her ineffectual son.

However, these texts are not a selective reading from Crichton’s Smith’s extensive body of work - where more positive representations of women do appear - but actually three out of the four short stories chosen by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) as part of the Scottish set text studied at National 5 and Higher English each year by thousands of school students.

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This wouldn’t matter as much if the students were exposed to a wide range of literature - after all, young people should encounter texts they disagree with as well as being pointed towards other works that challenge stereotypes. However, given the prescribed nature of the course and the time pressures faced by every English department in the country, many students will read little other literature this year beyond Crichton Smith’s questionable views of women.

Take sexist literature out of schools

By making these short stories part of the set-text canon, it’s almost giving misogyny an official seal of approval from the SQA, providing the young male reader permission to judge women by their appearance only, while the young women in the class will see the female represented as negative, antagonistic and without agency.

Today, more than ever - when in many areas there seems to have been a general cultural shift back to the mores and norms of the 1950s in how we perceive those other than the mainstream white, male majority - we do need to take into account authors’ problematic representations of women, minorities and people with disabilities when deciding which texts to give our young people to study. This has to go beyond looking for what full sets of texts are available in the book cupboard that have not been graffitied on.

I think it is revealing that there are double the number of male authors as female on the Scottish set-text list, which is almost exclusively white. Yet, with a little imagination, the set texts could easily be better balanced. Only two of the prose selections were written this century, yet in the past couple of decades we have seen work from writers such as Jenni Fagan and Douglas Stuart describing the modern Scottish teenage experience from the point of view of an outsider, in ways that are relatable to young people growing up today. Another option would be to break up the need for four short stories from the same author. This would allow students to compare Crichton Smith’s Mother and Son with Fearless, a short story by Janice Galloway in which the young female narrator challenges the patriarchy in her community, for example. This would also remove writers’ lesser works from the list, which just now feel like fillers.

The SQA could be even more adventurous in removing chauvinism completely from the English curriculum by taking away the need for the set text to be Scottish. Students at GCSE level in England study set texts from the US, Ireland and Nigeria; students anywhere are far more likely to be engaged by literature that is selected by the quality of the work rather than the geographical area where the artist was born.

The three-year review of the Scottish text is overdue - delayed, I imagine, by Covid. Let’s hope the SQA, a normally conservative organisation, uses this as an opportunity to get radical.

Gordon Cairns is a forest school and English teacher who works in Scotland