Wednesday 3 September 2008

Danger - This Poem Might Make You Think

A poem by one of the U.K.'s leading contemporary poets, Carol Ann Duffy, had been withdrawn from an anthology for schools because of complaints about it. The problem? It tries to understand a young person who uses a knife by looking at it through their head.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7594566.stm

How stupid! This is not a rant about poetry needing to connect to everyday life (it should and does) - but what kind of thinking says we hide the problem away and don't try to understand what is happening? Some young people do carry knives - we know that. What Duffy's poem does is allow a teacher to explore the feelings and reasons that are behind the action of such individuals. But oh no - the exam board have caved in and joined the 'stick out head in the sand' brigade and taken the poem out.

How do we tackle knife crime? How do we address the feelings that cause young people to feel the need to carry weapons? Just increasing punishments (important though these messages can be) will achieve little. Here was an opportunity to help young people think through the ideas behind the action and it has been thrown away.

A sad day for poetry, for education and for society. Right...that's off my chest...I'll go a read a poem about daffodils (until the pollen police say it has to be banned because some people will get hay fever from them so its unfair to suggest they provide a beneficial service).

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