 GCSE poem dropped over knife fear
3rd Sept 2008
An exam board is removing a poem
about a knife-carrying violent loner from its
anthology for GCSE English because of fears over
teenage knife crime.
The AQA exam board has decided to withdraw the poem
Education for Leisure written by Carol Ann Duffy.
The exam board is writing to schools to advise them
to destroy the copies of the anthology - and says it
will send replacements not containing this poem.
The poem begins with the line: "Today I am going to
kill something. Anything."
It describes the thoughts of a disturbed, isolated
individual who feels underappreciated and
undervalued and who kills a fly then a goldfish. The
poem concludes with this angry loner going outside
with a bread knife.
Some teachers have been complaining for years about
the poem's inclusion in the anthology.
In 2002, English staff at a school in Hull, East
Yorkshire, refused to teach the poem and said they
would even tear the page from the book if they had
to.
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The exam board said
the poem had been a "popular choice" for pupils -
allowing GCSE English students to debate issues
about the state of mind of the poem's narrator.
But a spokeswoman said the board had received a
complaint and against a background of fears over
teenage knife crime had now decided to drop it from
the anthology.
"People will have different views on this - but we
have to make a decision in the light of what is
currently happening," she said. |
The exam board said the decision had not been taken
lightly but that the selection of poems had to
respond to current "social issues and public
concern".
Carol Ann Duffy's literary agent, Peter Strauss,
told the BBC's iPM programme that the poem was not a
promotion of violence.
"This poem is pro-education and anti-violence. It is
not glorifying violence in any way," said Mr
Strauss.
"Carol Ann Duffy is a vocational poet for the young.
She gets children fired up about language and verse.
She talks to more schoolchildren than I've ever met.
She's encouraged more people to have a love of words
and a love of education than anyone else I know,"
said Mr Strauss.
The AQA anthology includes several other poems by
Carol Ann Duffy and a selection of work by modern
writers Seamus Heaney, Gillian Clarke and Simon
Armitage and earlier poets including Yeats,
Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Tennyson and Blake.
credits: bbc |
