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Dumbing down?

Thursday, 29th May 2008

Cambridge don-cum-blogger Mary Beard defends the decision to insert  Amy Winehouse's lyrics into the final-year English lit exams:

One of the most successful courses I ever ran... was... called “The Roman emperor: construction and deconstruction of an image”. This was about the time of the protracted break up of the marriage of  Charles and Diana... The students read the tabloids...and the various biographies as they emerged. In at least one of the exams (the course ran for 3 years), a section of the paper was a gobbet test on part of the Camilla-gate tapes...Some of the more staid members of the History Faculty were a bit dubious about getting their brightest and best to read Andrew Morton's biography of Di, let alone having a pirated phone conversation reprinted in the exam paper.. But the result was explosive. . .and enlightening. There turned out to be all kinds of trade-offs in thinking about the tittle-tattle of ancient and modern monarchies. 
I think the tapes should have been off-limits, as they were a private conversation, but the rest of her post is quite persuasive.

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