Irrational Curriculum The recommended re…
Irrational Curriculum
The recommended reading list for Key Stages Three and Four National Curriculum English includes very little Anglo-Cornish Literature and no Cornish Literature in translation.
Have a gake at the wall being built here.
First, the canonical breeze-block:
Austen, Blake, Browning, Bunyan, Byron, Chaucer, Congreve, Clare, Coleridge, Collins, Conrad, Defoe, Donne, Dryden, Eliot, Fielding, Gaskell, Goldsmith, Herbert, Herrick, Hopkins, James, Keats, Marlowe, Marvell, Milton, Pope, Shakespeare, Shelley, Sheridan, Spenser, Stevenson, Swift, Tennyson, Trollope, Vaughan, Wells, Wilde, Wordsworth, Wyatt.
Secondly, the cement:
Adam, Amis, Armitage, Auden, Ayckbourn, Barker, Bennett, Cormier, Fowles, Frost, Greene, Hare, Harrison, Hill, Hughes, Huxley, Jennings, Larkin, Lively, Orwell, Owen, Pinter, Plath, Porter, Pullman, Russell, Sassoon, Shaffer, Shaw, Sherriff, Smith, Trevor, Wesker, Wyndham.
Finally, the tokenistic multi-cultural plaster:
Agard, Angelou, Brew, Desai, Gordimer, Rai, Syal, Mah.
I want to knock down this wall, but I can’t.
Did you know that Dickens was going to write a novel set in Cornwall?
The Brontës – they had connections to Penzance didn’t they?
Yeah – Lawrence, all that signalling to the German subs off Zennor.
And Matthew Arnold – his mother was Cornish wasn’t she?
And surely there’s enough Celts in there anyway?
I mean, come on, Robert Burns, W.B. Yeats and R.S. Thomas.
The Scots, the Irish and the Welsh are safe enough.
And William Golding, he was born in Newquay wasn’t he?
Your Booker Prize winner, he was.
And what about Hardy – all that Boscastle and Emma stuff;
Beeney Cliff, Lyonesse and all.
What you moaning for anyway?
You’ve got Charles Causley in there.
Good enough then.
Good enough.
I see them now: all those enthused kids
down Parc an Tansys, back Pengegon,
keenly plodding through their
Dryden, Pope,
and Sir Thomas Wyatt.
