The precise time in my life it happened, truth is, I can't tell anymore. But the moment is still as clear as day. The first time I became aware of poetry. I don't mean nursery rhymes or Dr Seuss doggerel. I mean the real McCoy - proper adult poetry. My mum was sitting on her chair in the kitchen, she closed her eyes and just started half-whispering: "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,/ The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea ... "
My mum left school at 15 and while still a teenager she took the route of the McAlpine's Fusiliers and came from Ireland to England for work. My dad also left school at 15. Both my parents always had this simple ambition: to make sure their kids got the education that was cut off for them. They didn't mean sausage-factory education, where kids are grad-ground down and pop out the other end as one-size-fits all skills units. They meant an education that expanded the mind, that engaged with the best that had gone before and held the promise of better to come in the future. As my mum's spontaneous rendition of Gray's Elegy shows, they treasured the "bits of the best" they managed to take with them from what education they'd had.
We may not see their like again. As is so often the way nowadays, elite dumber-downers are stamping over education and the English curriculum. To round off a week that saw poetry teaching in the classroom fingered as "lightweight" and the reading ability of both primary and secondary school students in the UK plummet in international league tables, the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust came up with this gem: let's introduce a BTEC equivalent to the English GCSE which concentrates on functional uses of English, such as travel brochures and marketing material, bypassing any bothersome fiction or poetry.
Did I miss something here or isn't this utilitarian approach to language something most kids have got a grip on by the time they leave primary school? But then since when did English for primary schoolchildren, in all its imaginative richness, stop short at the nuts-and-bolts of real world practicality.
What makes me sick to the stomach every time I hear such radical educational proposals is the creeping snobbery behind the dumbed-down "inclusivity". I don't expect or want every 16-year-old to be au fait with The Faerie Queene. I think if a teenager wants to leave school at 16 and join the world of work, they should be allowed to do so instead of being cajoled to stay in full-time education until they are 18. But education is not just about equipping people as fit-for-the-job. It is about opening all of our minds to the best of what we are.
To say to a particular group of students "go be functional" is not to meet a lack of imagination on their part: it is criminal bad faith and lack of imagination on the part of educational leaders. Who are they to say what words of poetry will or won't stay with plumbers and hairdressers? To send a guillotine of functionality to slice apart different classes of children is to rough-chop society. There is a sneaking segregation in education that we must resist to the hilt. When the Institute of Ideas published its criticisms of those science GCSEs that concentrated on scientific literacy rather than scientific theory, Baroness Warnock commented that "Science is going to be relegated to the position of Latin and Greek and will only be taught in the independent schools". Is this the way that literature too will go? Kids in comprehensive schools being channelled into practical pigeon-holes and sold the lie that their functional qualification in English is the same as the challenge and joy of reading great literature?
If so, we are an embarrassment to ourselves. A hunger for books, as Doris Lessing put it in her Nobel laureate's acceptance speech, is a human thing. Lessing's description of a young woman in Chad devouring half a torn out page of Anna Karenina during a bitter drought, reminds us that great literature is universal, that literature raises us up from the dread functionality of hunger and thirst. Great literature isn't important as an escape from the mundane and the functional, it is necessary to human dignity. You reach for Anna Karenina not to forget your hunger but to remind yourself that while you may be at the mercy of forces outside of your control, you are also greater than those forces. Keats's Ode to a Nightingale calls us away from death and suffering to hear the same nightingale as Ruth and remind Keats and us of the greatness we are part of.
The only response to those in the education establishment who seek to close the books and minds of our young people - whatever path those young people may take in the future - is this: shame on you!
