Only a sadist would inflict Dryden on our schoolchildren
Only a sadist would inflict Dryden on our schoolchildren | Catherine Bennett | Comment is free | The Observer
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What is to be done with boys who won't read? Solutions to this problem currently range from bribery with cakes and the provision of virile literature to more male teachers and exciting outdoor adventures, so as to tire boys into reading. Alternatively, the education secretary suggests, they should study Dryden.
The only difficulty for teachers wishing to share Michael Gove's proposal with 11-year-old boys is knowing where to start. Should they treat the lads to the allegorical Absalom and Achitophel, in which the poet uses the Old Testament story of Absalom's rebellion against King David as a device for attacking Monmouth, the illegitimate son of Charles II, along with his fellow participants in the exclusion crisis, an episode with which most members of the current cabinet are no doubt familiar? There is a risk that the opening passages, featuring some suggestive lines about King David/Charles's lust and scattered seed might lead to unwelcome sniggering.
In that case, how about the safer territory of Religio Laici, in which the poet tolerantly addresses the religious disputes of the day: "Nor does it balk my charity, to find/ The Egyptian bishop of another mind"? Or his comic masterpiece, Mac Flecknoe, satirising an obscure Restoration rival: "A tun of man, in thy large bulk is writ,/but sure thou'rt but a kilderkin of wit" (kilderkin: an old English unit of volume equal to two firkins).
Even lovers of Dryden may find themselves pressed to select the poem that best encapsulates his strengths for, as one editor, John Conaghan, loyally put it: "His genius is immense, but various and not consummate in any single work." There is, says The Cambridge Guide to Literature, a further difficulty with the master of the heroic couplet: "He is today admired but not quite enjoyed." Though "today" is a bit misleading, the legions of Dryden-averse having also included Wordsworth and Michael Gove's own mentor, Matthew Arnold. Then again, neither of these poets had the inducement of a cake at the end of every stanza.
It could be, anyway, that the sheer, pitiless tedium of reading or effectively translating Dryden's satires will be, in Gove's opinion, a salutary lesson for our indulged youth. In his conference speech, he declared that education has been undermined by lefty "ideologues" who, craftily subverting the national curriculum imposed by Kenneth Baker, have promulgated their belief that schools "shouldn't be doing anything so old-fashioned as passing on knowledge, requiring children to work hard or immersing them in anything like dates in history or times tables in mathematics". While the reform of history teaching so as to instil what Gove unblushingly calls "our island story" is to be led by the non-ideological celebrity scholar Simon Schama, it appears that the non-ideological revival of letters is to be led by Gove himself, wearing his FR Leavis hat.
"The great tradition of our literature – Dryden, Pope, Swift, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Austen, Dickens and Hardy – should be at the heart of school life," he told teachers. Presumably, he is unaware that, out of his list of neglected names, fewer than half (Dryden, Pope, Byron and Shelley) do not already feature in key stage three of the national curriculum as "texts that enable pupils to understand the appeal and importance over time of texts from the English literary heritage".
At key stage four, for 14-to 16-year-olds, all his favourites are options. But perhaps Gove wants them to be compulsory? Only the imposition of his personal canon will show whether he is correct in believing that England's behaviourally challenged teens can be made to share his enthusiasm for an Augustan even other Augustans couldn't stand. Perhaps mere incompetence has led to the "Boys into Books" scheme and to English teachers on internet forums sharing experiences of the poetically disengaged.
"I need to model how to analyse a poem," writes one, deputed to teach war poetry, "as the students do not really understand the poetry terms such as metaphor, personification etc, but it is very difficult to get the group quiet quickly enough or long enough." The teacher had tried to engage a group of low-ability 14-year-olds with a clip from All Quiet on the Western Front: "Approximately half the class continued shouting and disrupting those who were trying to watch." But that is not to say the boys would not enjoy The Rape of the Loch.
In terms of intergenerational fairness, however, the Gove reforms would be an outrage. Where in the last half century have Dryden and Pope been routinely imposed on children? Even in the corporal punishment years, such abuse was rare. Gove's plans for English literature, which he is not too ideologically repressed to call "the best in the world", would not just transport us to a time before Trots and nutters did away with spelling, but to some strange, faraway place that, surely, never existed outside his head.
Even his literary favourite, Dickens, satirised the rote-learning which Gove, in full Gradgrind mode, recently described as "a traditional education, sitting in rows, learning the kings and queens of England, the great works of literature, proper mental arithmetic, algebra by the age of 11, modern foreign languages. That's the best training of the mind and that's how children will be able to compete". Unless, of course, they plan to emulate Philip Green, a school-leaver at 16 who, knowing only the rudiments of Dryden, was recently invited to advise the government's Etonians.
You can recoil quite as much as Gove from the elevation of hack-work into set texts and still, given a choice between, say, JK Rowling and Byron, go for the book that is likely to keep 12-year-olds reading. But getting children to read for pleasure is not, plainly, uppermost in his mind. Nor is culture for its own sake or his priorities would be the assault on humanities in higher education and the threat to school libraries.
Instead, Gove's eccentric emphasis on a pair of Augustans who are commonly reserved for abler undergraduates suggests that his project for English literature is as instrumentalist as his retro, kings-and-queens version of history. This will not surprise readers of his old columns in the Times who recall his admiration for the Restoration era and of those poets – Dryden and Pope – who saw "in the monarchy a source of benign, and necessary, authority, unpolluted by ambition and above the petty politicking of parliaments".
Of rival school ideologies, Gove's recognisably traditionalist approach might, of course, appeal to more parents than the happiness lessons, Caryl Churchill and black history months of the Labour years. It is the founders of free schools, recently invited to soar above the rest, who must be wondering how their coming liberation can be reconciled with endless interfering by a man with a thing about authority.
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Christ on a bike, what a fucking depressing article.
I know for a fact that most boys don't enjoy maths either, so we'd best get rid of that. In fact, most hate school in its entirety, so why don't we just give up on the concept of education altogether?
There's this bizarre middle class obsession that reading should be Fun and is necessarily Good For You, whereas any child knows that these categories are mutually exclusive. Yes, poetry is boring, but when your kid's all grown up and giving his first speech to the Bar Council's annual dinner do you really want him to quote Harry Potter as an opening?
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