This summer, I'm re-posting some of the blog posts I wrote while I was working at the Innovation Unit in London, which disappeared when the Innovation Unit discontinued its blog. This post was my big moment in the sun: someone had managed to get national coverage for starting a petition demanding that students at a school stop studying The Simpsons in their Media Studies class, and focus on Shakespeare instead. Stephen Fry weighed in, and at one point tweeted the words "Well exactly" with a link to this post. Over 25,000 people read it. And now you can too:
The BBC reported today that over 400 parents at Kingsmead Community School in Somerset have signed a petition demanding that
the school's Media module stop using class and homework time to analyse The
Simpsons, and devote the newly freed-up time to studying Shakespeare. On BBC
Radio 4's Today programme this morning, parent Joseph Reynolds particularly
recommended A Midsummer Night's Dream. 'There's a time and a place for The
Simpsons,' Reynolds said, 'but it doesn't belong in the classroom.' Reynolds appears
to have a particular understanding of pedagogy, based on two commonly-held but
erroneous premises: that the main function of education is to expose students to new
things, and that education that prepares students to negotiate the day-to-day world
they'll be living in is not 'real' education. I'll look at these assumptions in turn:
Exposure is not the same as understanding
People who don't understand education often think that a teacher's job is to introduce
students to unfamiliar things. Actually, the best teachers help their students to look at
familiar things with new eyes - so physics teaches students to look at suspension
bridges in a new way, biology completely alters their understanding of saliva, and
learning about the Holocaust completely transforms what they think when someone
calls somebody else 'queer' on the playground. It's wonderful when a teacher
introduces you to something that you've never encountered before, but it's just as
wonderful when teachers turn the everyday into something rich and strange. To their
great credit, Kingsmead are standing behind their Media teachers. Assistant Head
Andy Dunnett told the BBC that 'Students are encouraged to look at the text in a
critical way. Initially it's about building up their skills as critical thinkers. They also
learn about different aspects of the media audience, visual narrative, presentation
and stereotypes, and some quite high level thinking ideas like satire, irony and
parody.' This brings me to my response to Reynolds' second assumption...
Education should prepare students for living in the world
You might think everyone feels this way, but the curriculum suggests otherwise. To give one example, most schools take it for granted that 'there's a time and a place for economics, but it's not the mathematics classroom'. So, students graduate able to measure a triangle within an inch of its life, but not to compare interest rates on mortgage offers. And they graduate able to identify a sly reference to Spanish succession in an Elizabethan play, but not to critically engage with popular media - that is to say, the billboards, posters, magazines, TV programmes, and advertisements that tell them they should buy more, lose weight, plug their sweat glands, indulge in snack foods, despise those who come to this country looking for protection from tyranny, and get angrier at benefits cheats than at tax cheats.
There's some pretty dodgy stuff in a Midsummer Night's Dream (the play's first scene
explicitly argues that if a woman falls in love with the man who kidnapped her, it's a
good thing), but kids aren't going to be encountering it every day for the rest of their
lives. William Shakespeare himself suffered the slings and arrows of the dreary
snobbery that animates Reynolds' petition - Ben Jonson alluded to this when he
interrupted his memorial poem to
Shakespeare to point out that his subject 'hadst small Latin and less Greek.'
Shakespeare got his own back most effectively in Love's Labour Lost, with the latin-
spouting buffoon Holofernes, who analyses a
contemporary love poem as follows:
You find not the apostraphas, and so miss the accent: let me supervise the canzonet. Here are only numbers ratified but, for the elegancy, facility, and golden cadence of poesy, caret. Ovidius Naso was the man: and why, indeed, Naso, but for smelling out the odouriferous flowers of fancy, the jerks of invention? Imitari is nothing: so doth the hound his master, the ape his keeper, the tired horse his rider. But, damosella virgin, was this directed to you? (IV,2,1268)
It's easy to imagine a real-life Elizabethan Holofernes petitioning a school to stop teaching Shakespeare, and teach more Ovidius Naso. 'There's a time and place for Shakespeare,' he might have said, 'but he doesn't belong in the classroom.' Shakespeare, who in his time was a contemporary writer (a fact often-forgotten by crusaders like Reynolds) vividly understood how education calcifies when it neglects what is happening NOW.