Twenty-two percent of primary teachers
Can name no poets at all.
Not Keats or Yeats or Wordsworth
Or even Fanshawe or Hall.
More than half of primary teachers
Are incapable of naming three!
Does Britain allow such stupids
To teach the children of we?
For what is the logical next step
When teachers are intellectually bound?
If words build free imaginations
Are this nation’s prospects sound?
When teachers have nothing to teach
And their life experiences are shallow
Is all that awaits our young children
An education so woefully fallow?
OK, I am not a poet, but I can name more than three; my first attempt with a pen and paper and not very much concentration yielded 14:
Milton, Herbert, Cowper, Butler, Churchill, (HK) White, Shakespeare, Burns, Percy, Pope, Keats, Yeats, Wordsworth, (Sir Walter) Scott
But I am enormously troubled by the study that shows that almost a quarter of primary school teachers in the United Kingdom are unable to name any *any* poets at all.
And not British poets, but any poets.
How can this be right, please?
For a number of years I have thought that the British Education System is massively flawed, and for me these findings merely underlines the flaw:
How can it be right for a person to become a teacher when that person has never actually left the scholastic/academic environment – has never actually experienced life from the outside?
How can it be proper for a 22-year-old to walk out of college and in front of a class when that 22-year-old has actually achieved nothing apart from passing a few exams?
Teaching to a curriculum is one thing, but what life skills has a teacher got to share if that teacher has experienced nothing of life itself?
And surely, if any person argues that teaching to a curriculum requires no additional skills then that person must be a fool?
I challenge any teacher to successfully argue that they were as good in that role on Day One (fresh-faced from college) as they were after ten years life experience.
I haven’t heard of HK White, but I would have been able to name at couple of contemporary poets – that’s appalling. I am not sure about the life experience thing, though it couldn’t hurt – but not knowing about poets?
Blimey.
]Checks list for own name, fails to find it… Sigh] I’m hoping to be well known before I die. 🙂
The basic problem with poetry is, in my opinion, the way it’s taught to people. If you get someone who injects fire, life and depth into the reading and or performance of it then the kids come away thinking it’s interesting and want to know more – but so many times flowery crap or dreary dirgelike passages are intoned in a voice like a pronouncement of football results.
I don’t recall EVER being introduced to any poetry at school – to be fair that was in the 1970s – but I think the rot started there and is still filtering down through the generations today.
There’s such a wide variety of styles, subjects and approaches to poetry it makes you weep when people write it off as some kind of intellectual navel-gazing leather elbow-patched drivel. Some of it is – most of it is not.
But then I suppose I *might* be a little biased…
The TDA need teachers because there is a shortage. They don’t care where they get them from.
Hi Hilary, I’m here to be convinced that taking children out of school, putting them in to college and then putting them in front of a classroom of children is good. I just need someone to demonstrate to me that it is good and why it is good.
Ian, your name was in the first draft. But aside from poetry, I think this is an example of something else afoot in the world of education.
Soupy, thanks. I get that. And it saddens me a little.
Just don’t get me on the English education system – it’s a disaster and it certainly isn’t a system. Trouble is I’m not convinced that the Tories will change things much when they get in, despite the fact that Michael Gove is a very clued up minister.
When New Labour got in all those years ago the mantra was ‘education, education, education’ and they did Jack apart from chuck money at the problem. They should be kicked out for that alone.