The National Curriculum seems to be working

[featherfinyipp]

In a lecture on irony yesterday, the lecturer first used an example from 'A Modest Proposal' by Jonathan Swift. She asked if we were familiar with the text, and a few cursory hands were raised. Her next example for analysis was 'My Last Duchess' by Robert Browning. She again asked if anyone was familiar with it. Three quarters of the lecture

Comments

[jacquilynne]

I wonder, though, if everyone studies the same thing, what happens to collective cultural literacy?

If curriculums were more localized, you'd have had a mix of people in that class who were familiar and not familiar with My Last Duchess, more people who were familiar with A Modest Proposal and people who were familiar with, I dunno, Hard Times. It would introduce more ideas into the dialogue and also encourage more people to do unassigned reading in order to keep up with general educated conversation.

[featherfinyipp]

To be fair, there are several different exam boards each with their own syllabuses available for all schools to pick from. Additionally within each syllabus, there's flexibility in terms of which texts you actually teach from it. I suppose much of my delight in this incident came from the fact that, unusually, such a large proportion of people all studied the same syllabus and the same poem from within it. Usually you're hard pressed to find such a ubiquitous text when talking about things you studied at school.

[elliotbay]

I'm surprised so few people were familiar with "A Modest Proposal". It seems like the canonical satire.