Educahsun! Educashun! Educashun!That is what Nanny would have us believe is her prime mission in life.
Fair enough, you might say. However, as with everything that Nanny does, it has to be on her terms.
Nanny loves to stick her nasty old nose into all matters, no matter how large or small. In this particular case she has started to poke around the very minutiae of the reading curriculum.
Nanny did not like what she found in Poets' Corner.
She was aghast to find that some schools were encouraging their pupils to read poetry written by Englishmen and women.
That simply cannot be allowed to continue.
Why is that then?
Well you see folks, the English language is a difficult beast to master; and simply put, some of Nanny's charges are having a little trouble speaking it as it should be spoke.
Now, some of you might suggest that these children should be given more intensive training in order to master what, I for one thought anyway, is the mother tongue and common language of our country.
After all, if you can't speak the language of the country that you live in and don't try or want to learn it, what hope have you?
I was wrong, Nanny knows that the easiest way to meet her educashun targets is to make the targets easier.
Aha!
Therefore she has decided to get rid of all those nasty difficult English poets, and other well known writers such as Orwell (we all know why Nanny doesn't like Orwell, don't we children?), and replace them with lightweight offerings from abroad.
The OCR exam board English literature course continues to study "War Poetry" but, instead of focusing on Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon, nearly half the poems on the syllabus are written by unknowns.
Nanny claims that the idea is to try to give the feeling from the "home front", so instead of Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth children now read poems by Katharine Tynan Hinkson and Winifred M Letts...who?
Quote:
"There they go marching all in step so gay!"
Grabs at the heart strings, doesn't it?
Ugh!
One third of OCR's English GCSE course is now devoted not to an appreciation of classic English writing, eg George Orwell, but to "different cultures".
Seminal (can I say seminal?) works such as; The Gold-Legged Frog by Khamsing Srinawk (according to OCR, a "national artist of literature in Thailand"), and Feng Ji-cai (The Tall Woman and her Short Husband, set in China) now clutter the already confused minds of the pupils.
Andrew Cunningham, a teacher, claims that a nearby comprehensive asks that the poems and stories in its GCSE syllabus only mainly should have been written in English. Some poems may not even be the originals, but translations!
The syllabus now contains such masterpieces as; John Agard's Half-Caste, written in Caribbean dialect, Tatamkhulu Afrika's Nothing's Changed, Nissim Ezekiel's Night of the Scorpion and Moniza Alvi's Presents from My Aunts in Pakistan.
Edexcel, the other main exam board, also likes Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan. There is now, in fact, a collection of internet sites offering pre-written essays on it.
Quote:
"She is from India, but has been forced to speak English."
Nanny is destroying our cultural heritage, on the Nazi like bonfire of multi-culturism.
Antonio Gramsci, that old communist intellectual taught that to succeed communism needed to take over the education and information organs of the target nation and to destroy it's culture. Although eventually Stalin, Mao, PolPot, Hitler, and Musollini failed despite uncountable deaths and murders, their objective may still be attained by Gramsci's teaching through our schools, media and socialist governments. He is halfway there already. Centuries of slow cultural progress, constitutional development, spiritual and social building, lie around us in ruins, brought about by our Left Ruling Elite and Governing class.
ReplyDeleteIt's not a new idea. When I did english lit O-level (yes, that long ago!) we had to read a book called "Green Days by the River", i which most of the dialogue was in pidgin english.
ReplyDeleteWell, it seems that these days you can be an acceptable A level inglesh litterachewer candidate and gain a university place (why dow so few people refer to 'reading' a subject these days?) having achieved A grades without being that bothered about reading books - and especially not poetry - as my younger daughter proves.
ReplyDeleteThose people that I schooled with who followed the 'arts' route seemed always to be writing endless endless essays or had their noses deep in the bowels of a serious volume or two. Now it's rattle off a 2500 word assignment once a (University) term, maybe two it things get really tough for the poor student, and watch the soap operas. (At least calling them operas makes them culture I suppose).
I must confess I don't recall doing anything other than 'proper' Eng. Lit. for O level, but then I really don't remember.
Orwell was, in those days, to be read rather than studied. Nw that is has become the political training manual of choice it is no surprise that it should should have a sort of educational 'D' notice slapped on it. Teaching the new generations how to interpret what you are doing in politics is certainly not a wise political decision no mayyet how much it is n the public interest.
"There they go marching all in step so gay!"
ReplyDeleteIf it's not about horses I assume it has been selected on the basis of a google search for something politically correct containing the word 'gay'.
Either that or it is being set up for ridicule.
Still, I suppose the teachers can select one of the other poems to teach - they certainly don't seem to attempt to cover more than one these days according to my youngest.
Next it will be rap rap. (I hesitate to allow the word 'lyrics' anywhere near that thought ...)