The Simpsons versus Shakespeare

Last year, Joseph Reynolds hit the headlines and shook up the world of education. Don’t know his name? Not surprising. Joseph Reynolds is not an expert in educational theory, nor is he a teacher. Neither is he a rich, influential and well-connected parent who can exert the ‘right’ kind of pressure on his daughter’s school or set up a free school. Since he works as a marine engineer in the merchant navy, he cannot even act as a governor. Being divorced, he has an additional difficulty when trying to make the best possible decisions about his daughter’s education. Like many parents, he has often wondered whether his child is receiving a good enough education, for example when he realised that Niamh, towards the end of primary school, did not know the times tables or how to do long multiplication, or at the start of secondary school, when he saw the English curriculum was very lightweight and included almost no literature. Yet, I suppose like most of us, he often decided not to ‘make a fuss’ and hoped everything would be all right in the end.

But when he realised in 2010 that his daughter – then a year 8 pupil at Kingsmead School, Somerset – had been studying nothing but the opening sequence of The Simpsons for over six weeks and that by the end of the year there was no time left for the planned reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he decided to act. When his request for more good literature and less cartoons was rejected by the school, he stood on the village square for five days and gathered 400 signatures for his petition. He wrote to every politician, educationalist and commentator he could think of, from the Prime Minister and the Education Secretary to journalist David Aaronovitch and former children laureate Michael Rosen. Former Ofsted Chief Inspector Chris Woodhead wrote a sympathetic article in The Times. Bill Bryson and Prince Charles’s office wrote back to wish him well, but no one else was interested.  The media picked up the story, a typical culture wars controversy that could have featured in an episode of The Simpsons itself, and Joseph Reynolds was generally lambasted as a backward individual who does not understand the modern world. The online comments to a Daily Mail article were mainly negative and included one by Ian McNeilly, director of NATE (National Association for the Teaching of English) and the Today programme interviewer, ‘seemed to be holding back a chuckle’. Stephen Fry, who is no enemy of high culture, tweeted ‘What kind of illiterate morons can object to their children being taught The Simpsons? One despairs…’

Yet Mr Reynolds knows perfectly well he is right. He knows because he has received a good state education himself (North Andover High School, Massachusetts), even if at the time he wasn’t aware and thought that was just school, nothing to write home about. He knows there is a difference between literature and cartoons (no matter how good). He knows that children don’t need to go to school in order to enjoy cartoons, but that it takes years of study to understand great literature and become an educated person. He also knows that literature is not just one form of communication among many, such as newspaper articles, leaflets, adverts, text messages, commercial letters and all the less valuable forms that have invaded the English curriculum, but the highest form of language and the most valuable part of the English curriculum, one that embodies centuries of reflection on the eternal questions facing human beings. Someone who understands the most complex form of language, someone who knows the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Jane Austen, George Eliot and the rest of the great tradition of English literature, will have no difficulty in understanding simpler forms of communication and, more importantly, in seeing through the sophisms of today’s conformist elites – just like Jane Austen saw through those of yesterday’s. Today’s educational elites find it difficult to believe in education as the best knowledge of the world that the present generation can transmit to the new one, and therefore in their own ability to motivate children. That’s why schools rely so much on the authority of celebrity culture.

Finally, it is rather strange that Conservative politicians, having made so many eloquent noises both about the Big Society and about the necessity to study more great literature in school, have remained silent when contacted by a parent who has started a petition in line with their policies. Perhaps not even Cameron and Gove dare risk unpopularity in the playground of British politics by taking on the mighty Bart and Lisa.

Throughout October and November, The Independent Online is partnering with the Institute of Ideas’ Battle of Ideas festival to present a series of guest blogs from festival speakers on the key questions of our time.

Michele Ledda is coordinator of Civitas Supplementary Schools Project, Yorkshire, and co-organiser of Leeds Salon. He is producing the Battle of Ideas session The Simpsons versus Shakespeare, in association with TES, which takes place on Sunday 30 October.

*The name of Mr Reynold’s daughter has been changed.

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