My daughter is in Year 1 at our local C of E school and my son will start Reception this autumn. I grew up in America, so my children’s introduction to the British primary education system is mine too. I was pleased to learn that my daughter spent her first term studying the Battle of Hastings, which was taught with fitting seriousness and detail. It is local history to us – Battle is just 15 minutes down the road – and the children were encouraged to imagine our local scenery and surrounding villages as they would have been a thousand years ago.
I am baffled that the same rigour does not hold for the study of British poetry. There is a surprising lack of classic verse in the primary years. Last year in Reception my daughter studied Rudyard Kipling but without reading his actual poems or stories. Instead, the children were given a ‘simplified’ version of The Jungle Book and Just So Stories.
But why? Kipling’s works are perfectly intelligible as they are. His young daughter Effie certainly understood them: they were written ‘just so’, in exactly the words she’d heard again and again. She would fall asleep to her father reading them and would startle awake if he deviated even, he said, ‘by one single little word’. The right words matter in prose of course but even more so in poetry. Children can hear the cadence naturally – when it fits and when it doesn’t.
Poetic and dramatic memorisation seems to stop after the nursery rhymes of pre-school, apart from the annual and abominable nativity play, in which ‘Away in a Manger’ has been replaced by ‘The Wonky Donkey’.
This month my daughter’s class studied the different cultures of the nations of Britain. Given this was happening around Burns Night, it would have been a perfect opportunity to learn some of his poems. Instead, she came home singing, ‘And aw the lassies say hullo, Donald where’s your troosers!’ in full voice. Though it technically follows a metre, I don’t feel it quite counts as poetry.
The other day I picked up The Jungle Book (the real version, not the soulless precis supplied by her school) and read the opening poem to my daughter:
Now Chil the Kite brings home the night
That Mang the Bat sets free –
The herds are shut in byre and hut,
For loosed till dawn are we.
This is the hour of pride and power,
Talon and tush and claw.
Oh, hear the call! – Good hunting all
That keep the Jungle Law!
It absolutely thrilled her.
She is currently in a cat phase – pretending to be a cat, watching movies about cats, reading books about cats. They have captured her imagination. I opened our old copy of The Faber Book of Children’s Verse looking for poems about cats and have rediscovered ones by W.B. Yeats, John Keats and William Blake, among others. The imagery and tone – both mysterious and comic – of ‘The Song of the Jellicles’ from T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, are perfect for a five-year-old girl:
Jellicle Cats come out to-night,
Jellicle Cats come one and all:
The Jellicle Moon is shining bright –
Jellicles come to the Jellicle Ball….
Until the Jellicle Moon appears
They make their toilette and take their repose:
Jellicles wash behind their ears,
Jellicles dry between their toes.
The image of a bunch of cats washing behind their ears and drying between their toes reduced her to uncontrollable giggles.
Sadly, poems from previous centuries don’t often appear in classrooms. Instead, children will be given new poems with moral messages and platitudes like ‘Be yourself,’ and ‘There’s only one you’. These aren’t bad messages necessarily but they’re a lot less fun than a story about cats dancing by the light of the moon. What’s the message of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats? It doesn’t have one – they’re simply good poems.
In British classrooms there seems to be no discerning between good poems and bad ones. Much of the verse in children’s books these days doesn’t even scan. Other countries expect more from their children. I spoke to a Polish friend recently who remembers learning poems throughout primary and secondary education. At her school, drama and poetry were considered as important as maths or science. ‘We were constantly memorising poems and scenes from plays,’ she says. ‘By the time I went to university I was perfectly comfortable with public speaking.’
The practice also gave her a strong sense of Poland’s and Europe’s literary traditions. Perhaps the problem is that much of the British education system is no longer proud of its past or culture. Many teachers are nervous of several great children’s writers, including Kipling, because they see them as outdated or ‘problematic’.
Children in China memorise hundreds of Chinese poems by heart, many of them from as far back as the eighth century. The Japanese also consider their poetry an integral part of education. Primary students learn shodo, the art of calligraphy, as well as the haiku, which they study and then compose themselves. British schoolchildren could easily be taught iambic pentameter at a young age without even knowing the term; the metre is simple and natural, following the rhythm of a heartbeat.
As enthusiasm for the spoken word declines, so does literacy. The bright lights and quick swipes of smart devices grab attention too easily – a dusty old paperback of poetry can hardly compete. Hard copies of classic prose and poetry aren’t even accessible to many schoolchildren – public library stocks have sharply declined, and many have closed down. But almost every poem ever published can be found online and printed off to read in class. Children could listen to the poems being read aloud and memorise them just by listening. Why not start with ‘The Song of the Jellicles’?
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