Education for Morons… by Morons
nick cowen, 14 October 2008
Last month, Britain’s biggest examinations board AQA decided to drop a popular poem from its GCSE syllabus written by Scottish poet Carol Ann Duffy.
Entitled ‘Education for Leisure’, the poem takes the form of a stream of consciousness account of the thoughts and increasingly violent deeds of a bored and alienated unemployed teenager while he languishes at home, immediately before picking up a bread-knife to go out and commit an act of gratuitous violence.
Explaining his board’s decision to drop the poem, AQA’s director-general Mike Cresswell said that it had been taken out of ‘concerns about the topic of the poem in the light of the current climate surrounding knife crime’. A spokeswoman for AQA has added that: ‘the decision was not taken lightly and only after due consideration of the issues involved.’
Exactly what are those issues?
The exam board had apparently received several complaints about the poem. One, from a school’s exam invigilator, reportedly said of the poem:
‘I think it’s absolutely horrendous – what sort of message is that to give to kids who are reading it as part of their GCSE syllabus?’
It is one thing for someone who clearly has not a clue what the poem was about to condemn it for supposedly glorifying knife-crime — quite mistakenly so, since it clearly has precisely the opposite intent. It is another for an exam board to capitulate to such unintelligent complaint and drop the poem.
That the principal complainant had not a clue what the poem was about was admitted by her when she described the poet’s witty and pointed riposte to her complaint as ‘a bit weird’, adding:
‘But having read her other poems I found they were all a bit weird. But that’s me.’
Yes, ma’am, that is you, but only you.
Now, however, all young people will be deprived of the opportunity to study and discuss an excellent, and previously very popular, poem that has as much likelihood of inciting any young person to commit an act of knife-crime as would their being made to read Macbeth.
How differently AQA responded to similar complaints when the poem was first included in the GCSE syllabus in 2004. Then, a spokesman for the exam board rightly said in defence of its inclusion:
‘It is a poem selected by teachers and… approved by the government watchdog, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. It is a fictional view of an adolescent’s feelings. Pupils can do the course without touching the work.’
What has changed between now and then to account for AQA’s change of mind?
Well, of course, youth knife crime has gone up horrendously. But then, as remarked earlier, no one but a complete fool could think that the poem condoned, let alone glorified, knife crime. Nor can it be thought remotely likely to incite any teenager to commit such a form of crime.
The answer as to what accounts for AQA’s change of heart is that, sadly, during the intervening years, we have become a nation of censors and fear and intimidation now increasingly rule the examination syllabus, as they have come to rule the air-waves, book-shops and stage boards.
This might be considered a trivial matter, but it is not. Exposure to poetry early in life cultivates the imagination and sensibility and forms an integral part of any decent liberal education.
The irony is that this very point was, indeed, the whole burden of Duffy’s offending poem. For what she is saying in it is that the boy was sent out into the world ill-equipped for his life of forced inactivity precisely because of the unsuited education he received at school. As it happens, the unsuitability of the education on which the poet comments pertains to his having been made to study Shakespeare. Immediately following an allusion to the lines from King Lear, ‘As flies to wanton boys are to th’ gods. They kill us for sport…’, Duffy’s poem continues: ‘We did that at school. Shakespeare. It was in another language…’
Whatever the merits of the poet’s suggestion as to the ill-advisedness of teaching Shakespeare in school to boys like the protagonist of her poem, Duffy is surely right that squandering the opportunity to cultivate the imagination and sensibility of schoolchildren through their being made to study English properly in school contributes to the thuggish brutality all too rampant on our streets today.
And, now, not for the sake of substituting in its place the better teaching of Shakespeare, but merely for a quiet life, AQA has acquiesced to the demands of those shouting loudest, and has dropped Duffy’s poem which did address young people in a voice that they could understand about issues that are all too uppermost on the anxious minds of many of them. Where there might have been an opportunity for real candour, clarity and insight in the classroom into the issues of youth knife crime, all there now is likely to be is only a convenient silence, or else the well-meaning but distant tones of a community police-officer or youth worker who, for all their worth and good intent, can never stir or help form the moral imagination of young people nearly as well as can any gifted poet.
It’s enough to make one turn to violent crime, so damnable has the idiocy of our times become.
While agreeing with all that you say Michele, ‘Macbeth’ is the most studied play at primary school. It is the ‘Merchant of Venice’ that has been ‘banned’ because it is supposedly racist.
David Conway makes some very valid points about the absurdity and cowardice of AQA’s ban of Education for Leisure. I wholeheartedly agree and have even launched the Hands Off Poetry petition to oppose this ridiculous act of censorship.
However, he misses a crucial link between the instrumental use of poetry by AQA, which I denounced in ‘The Corruption of the Curriculum’, and this ban. If it is legitimate to include poems in the curriculum, not for their literary merits but because of external criteria that have nothing to do with literature, such as the gender or ethnic origin of the authors, the issues they deal with or their politically correct message (e.g. against violence, pro-education, etc.), then it makes perfect sense to exclude them when there is public concern about a particular issue. If we think poems are valuable mainly because of their message and its effects on children’s behaviour, then any controversy about their message or how it might be interpreted calls into question their value.
What this incident has exposed is the blatant fact that AQA, one of the organisations charged with effectively determining the English curriculum, has no great belief or even interest in literature or in education but is primarily concerned with covering its own back and the smooth running of the examinations machine – beyond that, who cares what poems children have to study?
David Cameron pointed out in his conference speech the absurdity of the president of the Spelling Society’s position that children should not be taught to spell correctly. AQA’s case is no different. As it is typical in today’s climate, its censorship does not stem from the will to impose its authority but from uncertainty and lack of belief in the importance of literature and education.
Incidentally, we may note that David Cameron is doing exactly the same thing – as did Tony Blair before him – when he distances himself from the traditional values of his own party in order to appear modern.
If we want to give a sense of purpose to education, and improve its quality, we need to argue that schoolchildren should study the best possible literature. Aesthetic judgment is out of fashion and draws accusations of elitism, but without it we are left with an arbitrary process that demeans both literature and education. We would be much better off disagreeing about which are the best poems, based on their literary merits.
Finally, this ban sets a very dangerous precedent. Those who like me don’t think that ‘Education for Leisure’ is a great poem (though it does have literary qualities) should harbour no illusions that this is an isolated incident. Our education authorities do not have the nerve, yet, to ban violent, disturbing and brilliant works such as ‘Macbeth’, but make no mistake, as they become more confident, they will ban a Shakespeare play a few years down the line. And we will be unable to oppose the ban because by then it will have become normal practice.
I have long wished to have a polygraph when faced with these people and ask but 3 questions:
1. “Do you truly believe what you are saying?”
2. “Do you say such things as these primarily because it makes you feel important and virtuous?”
3. “Fundamentally, do you struggle to like yourself?”
Not quite blessed with their liberal-mindedness, the test would be a little like the ducking stool I am afraid.
If they answered ‘no/yes/yes’, they would be coaxed into some self-destructive tendency or other, using the fears elicited by questions 2 & 3.
If they answered ‘yes/no/no’, we must assume incredible gullibility. Therefore, I would read them a poem about the heroic superman, jumping off a skyscraper with underpants on the outside of trousers…. and wait patiently for the subliminal messages to take effect.