So I suppose that in future the GCSE course in Music will only feature study of the works of Vaughan Williams and Elgar - Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Rossini and Tchaikovsky will all be left out. And in the study of art the whole of the Italian Renaissance, the flowering of Dutch art in the seventeenth century, and Impressionism will be ignored in favour of the study of Constable, Turner and perhaps the Pre-Raphaelites.
I am referring to the excision of any texts not written by English authors (I've not seen mention of other UK authors such as Dylan Thomas or Seamus Heaney being acceptable) from future school syllabuses, reported in the newspapers over the past weekend as part of government thinking on educational policy. I had thought that the study of English Literature meant the study of works produced in English, but that idea is perhaps too avant garde. Some of the greatest novels that affected me as a teeneager - Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton, or The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck - seem now to be off limits.
As a geographer, and one interested in teaching about social, demographic and political issues, I wonder where this parochialism might leave me. In teaching about urban structures I have always sought to take examples and case studies from around the world. In teaching population geography I have always placed local developments in a wider international context. Perhaps I have been wrong in doing so. Perhaps I should have spent my career developing students' understanding of the United Kingdom strictly speaking, with no comparative recognition of how the same forces that affect us in Britain have been accommodated elsewhere. But to undertake such a task would be incredibly narrow, and limiting on student experience.
It seems to me that we are in particular danger at present of pursuing a Little Englander agenda, seeking to pull up the drawbridges that link us to the rest of the world. In doing so we are at risk of burying our heads in the sand and totally ignoring the forces of globalisation (of economies, cultures, political structures and so on) that shape our contemporary circumstances.
And if we do that we will not prepare our students for what their future lives will surely hold - engagement with people all round the world as part of their careers, their leisure activities, or their personal development.
I am referring to the excision of any texts not written by English authors (I've not seen mention of other UK authors such as Dylan Thomas or Seamus Heaney being acceptable) from future school syllabuses, reported in the newspapers over the past weekend as part of government thinking on educational policy. I had thought that the study of English Literature meant the study of works produced in English, but that idea is perhaps too avant garde. Some of the greatest novels that affected me as a teeneager - Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton, or The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck - seem now to be off limits.
As a geographer, and one interested in teaching about social, demographic and political issues, I wonder where this parochialism might leave me. In teaching about urban structures I have always sought to take examples and case studies from around the world. In teaching population geography I have always placed local developments in a wider international context. Perhaps I have been wrong in doing so. Perhaps I should have spent my career developing students' understanding of the United Kingdom strictly speaking, with no comparative recognition of how the same forces that affect us in Britain have been accommodated elsewhere. But to undertake such a task would be incredibly narrow, and limiting on student experience.
It seems to me that we are in particular danger at present of pursuing a Little Englander agenda, seeking to pull up the drawbridges that link us to the rest of the world. In doing so we are at risk of burying our heads in the sand and totally ignoring the forces of globalisation (of economies, cultures, political structures and so on) that shape our contemporary circumstances.
And if we do that we will not prepare our students for what their future lives will surely hold - engagement with people all round the world as part of their careers, their leisure activities, or their personal development.
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