Repeat after me…

The fuss stirred up by the mere suggestion that poetry might be part of the school curriculum was extremely suspicious. Just as George Osborne quietly announced his u-turn on the charities tax during the less soporific sections of Leveson, the proposal that children should have to learn poetry off by heart smacked of a smoke screen.
 
What evil is lurking in the small print of Gove’s national curriculum? Will school dinners get even smaller? Have all our schools been sold to Google?
 
But when it comes to poetry, there seem to be two main objections to Gove’s plan. First, though Gove may ostensibly want to give teachers more freedom, this according to the National Union of Teachers is further proof of him tightening control over teachers and reducing their autonomy faced with the needs of individual children.
 
Secondly, as espoused by Simon Armitage in the Guardian, poetry should be ‘subversive’ and putting it at the heart of the national curriculum might be championing its ‘traditional’ values.