Children deserve Shakespeare, not teachers who promote ignorance.

Why do teachers insist on promoting anti-science policies?

Writing in the Times, Freddie Baveystock, Head of English at Harris Westminster, has said that Shakespeare should not be compulsory at GCSE and that pupils should study modern authors as well as Instagram posts.

If I found out he was teaching my child, I’d have them moved out of his class.

Although his argument was disguised as concern for the those pupils who are bored by a traditional syllabus, Baveystock’s objections were really to the Gove syllabus reforms and are based on his own personal taste. His views are not informed by educational science.

Baveystock called it a “category error” for the government to impose a knowledge rich curriculum because that is a concept from the sciences not applicable to the study of literature. Instead, he promotes the idea that teaching literature is all about people’s feelings and their own response to the text.

This is the promotion of ignorance and shouldn’t be allowed in schools.

Literature is, like all subjects, a body of knowledge. Your own response to a work of literature isn’t worth very much if you don’t know the difference between comedy and tragedy, lyric and epic. Whatever works of modern literature are should still be subject to this sort of knowledge acquisition. What good is it to study Zadie Smith without knowing something about the history of the novel, the nature of the comic genre, and the techniques of narrative? Knowledge of the texts and of critical technique are the equivalent of knowledge of chemical reactions and evolutionary processes.

Without those things, you aren’t really studying literature. You’re just passing the time. Dilettantism is the enemy of good schooling. Children should learn about free indirect style and prosody the way they learn about gravity and molecule formation. They should memorise important parts of the text the way they memorise equations and formulae.

The science is against Baveystock on this. Despite widespread beliefs among many educationalists, based on ideological ideas, the empirical literature is clear. Learning means acquiring knowledge. Not teaching literature as a knowledge subject is an easy way to disadvantage your pupils for the rest of their lives. He wants pupils to engage creatively, but doesn’t seem to know the science showing that creativity relies on knowledge. Scotland moved to a skills-based curriculum, while England kept their knowledge-based one, and Scottish results have been in decline ever since, while English schools are performing well. There is no such thing as skills without knowledge.

This is how Dan Willingham a Professor of Cognitive Psychology puts it, (emphasis added)

Data from the last 40 years lead to a conclusion that is not scientifically challengeable: thinking well requires knowing facts, and that's true not simply because you need something to think about. The very processes that teachers care about most—critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem solving—are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is stored in long-term memory (not just found in the environment).

The English Association, the organisation pushing for curriculum reforms of which Baveystock is a part, calls for things like, “assessment needed to be “authentic” and reduce “by rote” responses.” They also want open-book exams, to teach techniques rather than facts (which they put in scare quotes—“facts”) about a text. They call for something like a close reading exam, but in order to allow for “a more authentic, less retrieval-based approach.” In other words, they don’t actually want to teach children any knowledge of literature. They are promoting an anti-science, anti-learning, anti-education agenda.

This is what Baveystock wrote in the Times,

The most widely studied literary text in the UK these days is JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, closely followed by A Christmas Carol and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. These are not books to ignite a passion for reading. I would happily throw out the study of Dickens from schools, and likewise Priestley. Even our obsession with Shakespeare needs discussion. I am open to the idea of an entire Shakespeare text not being mandatory at GCSE but can you imagine the outcry?

When I was at Oxford University 40 years ago, English was the most popular subject at A-level but numbers have slumped in recent years. In 2014 maths became number one, and this summer English came fifth, behind psychology and chemistry.

Well, when he was at Oxford forty years ago Shakespeare very much was mandatory in schools. The O-level exams for 1972 included King John and Romeo and Juliet. In 1984 it included The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest.

Why should Freddie Baveystock’s pupils be denied the advantages of the education he received?

He complains that in “exam papers from the 1960s questions were framed as “How do you respond to this piece of writing/book?”” Whereas today we ask children to write about greed in Dickens, or similar. In the 1984 exam I referenced above, questions included asking pupils to give an account of a particular scene or to answer this:

‘Prospero has the mysterious power of a magician, but the weakness and virtues of an ordinary human being.’ Illustrate the truth of this statement by detailed references to what happens in the play.

That is, the questions explicitly require knowledge, not just of the text, but of the critical body of knowledge required to make such an assessment. It’s the same in the 1970s papers too.

Lamenting the loss of Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird from the curriculum, he writes that Gove et al.,

…brought in traditional British classics chosen from a narrow list of texts in an attempt to smuggle British cultural nationalism into teenagers’ minds. It was misplaced. We live in a multicultural world. End of story.

What cultural nationalism is being smuggled in through An Inspector Calls or Julius Caesar? How multicultural does he think Of Mice and Men is? (My fourteen-year-old brother is currently studying To Kill a Mockingbird at school, by the way.)

Talking on the Today programme, Baveystock said that teaching A Christmas Carol as a “little morality tale” for the “four thousandth time” was “putting everyone to sleep.” Gross philistinism aside, what ought to be obvious is that while it may not be exciting for the teacher who has to teach this book repeatedly over a forty year career, the pupils are coming to it for the first time.

Baveystock takes his own personal dislike of Dickens (which he makes plain in the Times) more seriously than his pupil’s learning needs.

The errors in Baveystock’s argument become most clear in this story about his own daughter.

My daughter had a similar experience with Romeo and Juliet, which was taught in her classroom as a play about patriarchal attitudes. How patronising, and frankly wrong. I was so appalled to see her being turned off Shakespeare that I took her to see the play at the Almeida Theatre in north London and she was dumbstruck. She really enjoyed it. 

Other people’s children shouldn’t have to read a whole Shakespeare play. But his daughter will. Other people’s children will study James Graham (this is a serious suggestion: not Shakespeare, but James Graham). Other people’s children will read modern poetry. But Freddie Baveystock will make sure his daughter gets the immense advantage he got—that of learning about Shakespeare.

He writes near the end of his piece, “It pains me that my A-level students do not know how to read a poem aloud, because they are not taught these skills.” And they never will be while people like him believe in personal response and skills rather than knowledge.

Baveystock gave a short interview recently where he was asked who his hero was. “George Eliot.” he said, “We desperately need her vision and empathy today.”

What a shame that he doesn’t think his pupils deserve George Eliot as well.