The original reason I dropped in to author Susan Hill's blog just now was that I was trying to find something she'd said recently about W.H. Auden's centenary. (She's so worried his work is neglected that she's thinking of hiring herself out at parties to recite As I Walked Out One Evening.) Then I began browsing her thoughts on government plans to require younger teens to study George Eliot and Co:
I do wish the Education Secretary would spend a day with me going down my e-mails from desperate middle to lower grade 14 year olds. They are trying. They really are. And they are reading "I'm the King of the Castle" and "The Woman in Black", for heaven`s sake - not difficult reads. Not Dickens. Not George Eliot... These young people are not natural readers. They have probably found learning to read at all hard work. They certainly do not come from a background where parents and friends read. And however they write to me, they are sincerely wanting help. They mean well (mostly.) If they are struggling with me, heaven help them and their teachers if they are forced to read Eliot and Dickens. Shakespeare is bad enough. I have no idea why they are being forced through him either...
A friend of mine teaches 14-16 year old bottom set Comprehensive boys angling. As a hobby. He is brilliant at it and they love it. One boy asked if he had any angling magazines and Chris took him some. He read his way through them, finger under the line, mouthing the words, glued to them because he was passionately interested in the subject. He said he had never read anything - ANYTHING - that he had enjoyed and found interesting until these magazines. Chris has now taken him some angling books and he is immersed in them. But he asked him what he did read and he said nothing, reading was so awful at school. What were they reading in class ? "Romeo and Juliet". Do you wonder if boys roam the streets ?
Please, please read the rest. Even if you don't agree with what she has to say, she's asking important questions about the meaning of education.
She seems to be suggesting a degree of specialisation: that what's taught should be suited to the recipient. That is contrary to the whole thrust of the progessive educational reforms since the sixties. If children aren't essentially identical, why have comprehensives, why abolish streaming, and so on? (Bloody hell, it seems I've just argued in the same vein in my comment on your jazz list.)
Posted by: dearieme | Wednesday, February 21, 2007 at 05:27 PM
A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local but prized elsewhere.
Posted by: jameshigham | Wednesday, February 21, 2007 at 06:40 PM