Twenty-two percent of primary teachers
\nCan name no poets at all.
\nNot Keats or Yeats or Wordsworth
\nOr even Fanshawe or Hall.<\/p>\n
More than half of primary teachers
\nAre incapable of naming three!
\nDoes Britain allow such stupids
\nTo teach the children of we?<\/p>\n
For what is the logical next step
\nWhen teachers are intellectually bound?
\nIf words build free imaginations
\nAre this nation’s prospects sound?<\/p>\n
When teachers have nothing to teach
\nAnd their life experiences are shallow
\nIs all that awaits our young children
\nAn education so woefully fallow?<\/p>\n
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:<\/p>\n
Milton, Herbert, Cowper, Butler, Churchill, (HK) White, Shakespeare, Burns, Percy, Pope, Keats, Yeats, Wordsworth, (Sir Walter) Scott<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
And not British poets, but any poets.<\/p>\n
How can this be right, please?<\/p>\n
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:<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
And surely, if any person argues that teaching to a curriculum requires no additional skills then that person must be a fool?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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