It is poetry.
The BBC reports:
An exam board is removing a poem about a knife-carrying violent loner from its anthology for GCSE English because of fears over teenage knife crime.
The AQA exam board has decided to withdraw the poem Education for Leisure written by Carol Ann Duffy.
The exam board is writing to schools to advise them to destroy the copies of the anthology - and says it will send replacements not containing this poem.You can, at your own risk, read the poem here.
Is this an indication that education is now so centralised that English teachers have no choice over the texts they teach? And that their only course of action if they don't like a poem is to campaign to have the whole anthology pulped?
3 comments:
English teachers don't have any choice about the texts they teach to exam, no. But I'd have thought they could choose which others to do throughout the non-exam parts of the course. And pulping the books is going a bit bloody far, isn't it?
This being, of course, because we are asked to believe that people are so dumb in Britain that reading about someone wanting to stab with a bread knife will make them want to do it for real. It's a pretty bleak view of humanity isn't it?
On this basis, should we not be editing much of English literature before it reaches schools? 'Course Shakespeare's plays would be shorter, and I am not too happy about some of those school hymns in assembly either. You might find Simpson minor nailing his brother to a cross if we keep half the Easter ones in...
When will this nonsense end - the depressing assumption that chidren cannot handle ideas, images, words, language without seeing in them only the means of furthering anti-social behaviour?
The usual debate on this sort of topic gets hijacked by Daily Mail anti-PC folk. But there is a liberal point to make too. This bleak vision of people as automata, treating words on a page as prompts for violence, is the stuff of totalitarianism, not a free society.
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