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.
