The Lord of the Rings in the curriculum, Agatha Christie left out

Agatha Christie's work will not be part of the high school freshman year curriculum, as the proposition by the expert commission has been withdrawn after a negative public reaction and complaints made by numerous literature professors. Instead, high school students will be reading Dobrilo Nenadic's Dorotheus, says Dejana Milijic Subic, head of the Center for Development of Curricula at the State Office of Education.

Discussing the changes made to the curriculum in the first and the fifth grades of primary school and the first year of high school, which are to be implemented this September, Milijic Subic says that the intention of the expert commission was to modernize the high school freshman year program, which has not been changed since 1992, but that the reading list has stayed within the established canon.

The proposition to include Agatha Christie's detective novels on the reading list caused the biggest negative reaction in the public. The members of the commission, Milijic Subic points out, believed that her work should be part of the program primarily due to their links to other arts, such as cinema.

– However, we followed various forums in order to see what the public reaction was and we noticed that this proposition had caused the largest number of negative comments. Some professors even commented that Agatha Christie was morbid, which is certainly not a good argument, as the same could be said of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Mann... – said Milijic Subic.

Instead of Agatha Christie, she says, Nenadic's Dorotheus was proposed, as well as the first book of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

Zavod za unapređenje obrazovanja i vaspitanja Beograd

Center for Development of Curricula at the State Office of Education

State Office of Education

Agatha Christie

curriculum

Dorotheus

Dobrilo Nenadic

Dejana Milijic Subic

Tolkien

The Lord of the Rings