Now that my youngest has got her A-level grades, I’m finally free to say just how much I have loathed the past 20 or so years I have spent helping my children with their English homework.
This is a sad admission. After all, I studied English at university and still love reading classic literature and learning poetry by heart. But when I read that the number of 18-year-olds taking English A-level has plummeted to its lowest level since 2001 I wasn’t at all surprised. If I were that age, I’m not sure I’d choose to do English either.
The first taste I had of just how grisly English has become was when I helped the Rat with his GCSEs. I don’t think at any stage he was required to complete an actual book. Instead, he studied what were known as ‘texts’ — gobbets of often third-rate prose and poetry, selected either for its diversity (Maya Angelou) or its accessibility (including, I seem to remember, random verbiage written by children). Maybe whoever set the course had been to the same Terry Eagleton lecture that I had — ‘Why study Shakespeare when you can study the telephone directory?’ — but didn’t realise it was an intellectual joke.
Things got even less fun when I tried to help Boy prepare for Oxbridge. I gave him two hefty ring-binders containing the essays I’d written at school and university. They stood up quite well, I thought: fluent, playful, with the occasional insight worthy of a little red tick in the margin. And a sight more enjoyable than the turgid, convoluted, achingly worthy toss that Boy was required to produce for his teachers at school.
Boy isn’t stupid. He won one of his school’s top competitive English prizes, beating all the King’s Scholars.
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