Hundreds of angry teachers, students, writers and poets, including George Szirtes and former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, have signed the Hands Off Poetry! petition to reinstate Carol Ann Duffy’s poem Education for Leisure in the GCSE English syllabus.
Having been studied without controversy by hundreds of thousands of pupils every year for a decade, the poem has been removed from this year’s syllabus by examination board Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA). The decision was taken in September 2008, after it had received just three complaints. One objected to imaginary animal cruelty (I pour the goldfish down the bog. I pull the chain. / I see that it is good. The budgie is panicking), while the other two were about the poem’s hint to imaginary knife-crime (I get our bread-knife and go out. / The pavements glitter suddenly. I touch your arm). On its website, the exam board advises schools to destroy the old, unexpurgated copies of its anthology.
There may well be some guilt involved in AQA’s panicked and almost comical reaction, as it had illustrated the poem with a picture of a huge, glittering knife, in an obvious attempt to make it look ‘cool’, dangerous and appealing to teenagers, who are not supposed to be interested in boring literature. This of course says more about AQA’s opinions of literature, the ability of teachers to teach it and the mental capacity of teenagers than anything else, but it is a minor sin.
Yet withdrawing the poem precisely because some students might find it too cool has exposed AQA’s complete lack of educational vision. After all, an institution that believed in its duty to promote the study of literature would have found it rather easy to defend its choice of poems in the face of not-so-overwhelming pressure. The examination board decided instead, at the drop of a hat, to betray its main mission and the very reason for its existence and adopt the new and contradictory aim of protecting children from poems.
Of course, from a pragmatic standpoint, it makes little difference to our children’s education if one poem is substituted by another. Both the school curriculum and the literary canon have always changed. However, it is important not to underestimate the gravity of AQA’s unprecedented action, which opens the door to further abuses of the curriculum. No literary work is safe from the health and safety approach to literature, just like no area of our lives is safe from health and safety regulations.
And this brings us to why the censoring of Education for Leisure is an important civil liberties issue. I think that our excessively pragmatic attitude has greatly contributed to undermine the principles of freedom and democracy, and the tradition of civil liberties in this country. We are no longer able to stand up for important principles unless they have immediate, practical consequences for our everyday lives.
Take the example of seat belts. It is undoubtedly a sensible thing to use them when we are driving, and wearing them is not a great nuisance. It doesn’t feel in practice as if our freedom has been greatly diminished when we comply with a law that aims to protect our health.
And yet, once we accept that, when it comes to our health and safety, the state knows better and has the right to direct our behaviour, we have already given up our most fundamental freedom. If we are not even allowed to decide what to do and what risks to take with our own lives, if we are not allowed to govern ourselves, how can we be trusted to participate in government through the democratic process? No wonder we are seldom allowed to have a say in the decisions that matter, such as the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, through a referendum.
So when a few years down the line the state knocks on our doors to tell us that we are not allowed to babysit for each other unless we have an official state licence, when attempts are made to regulate what we smoke, drink or eat, even in the privacy of our homes, and when our children’s lunchboxes are regularly checked by the newly enlisted health and safety agents (aka teachers), it is no good to complain that this is ‘health and safety gone mad’.
That very phrase, just like ‘pc gone mad’, implies that we have already accepted that health and safety are the normal principles according to which our society should be ruled and they trump our democratic freedoms any day. It’s only when they become a practical nuisance to our everyday lives that we react, and then only for a short time, until we adapt our behaviour and get used to the new regulations. But this only invites the enabling state to seek new, unregulated areas of our lives where we can be further ‘protected’ and ‘helped to make the right choices’: after smoking, drinking, then eating, raising our children and so on. It’s not going to stop.
The same is true for the banning of Education for Leisure. If we accept this unprecedented, absurd decision, we agree that the curriculum should be devised and managed according to health-and-safety, rather than educational, principles and in a few years we will see more and more bans and bizarre decisions until ‘violent’, ‘racist’ or ‘sexist’ Shakespeare plays are banned from schools, which now seems extremely unlikely, though not unthinkable.
If we don’t react now that the principle is being undermined, we won’t even have the vocabulary to oppose further restrictions. Our children deserve a liberal education, an education for free citizens, not one based on health and safety, which is the education of the unfree: slaves, workers or consumers. And in this respect at least it makes little difference if one says slaves, workers or consumers.
