Thursday, 3 April 2025
The stupidification
Malcolm Clark has a useful Critic piece on Scottish education. It is not complimentary.
The stupidification of Scottish schools
Scottish education is being dumbed down in the name of diversity
At the end of last year, Scotland’s education chiefs announced a new list of approved texts for pupils taking English exams at secondary schools. It represents everything that is wrong with Scottish education and the country’s cultural Establishment.
Ten years ago the SNP government decided there would be only one compulsory question asked in Scotland’s equivalent of GCSEs and A levels in English, and it would be about Scottish authors. It was claimed this would encourage pupils to study the great writers Scotland has produced, from Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson to Burns and Lewis Grassic Gibbon.
There was nothing to stop a teacher teaching other great writers like Jane Austen, but this compulsory question would highlight Scotland’s proud literary tradition. Now, with this latest revision of the list of approved texts, it is clear the country’s education chiefs are on a mission to dumb down. The list, we are told, is all about “increased diversity”.
The whole piece is depressing but well worth reading as an indicator of how far down the rabbit hole progressives can go. Even further than this presumably.
That’s why this list perfectly embodies Scotland’s new national culture after 25 wasted years of devolution. It’s no accident the bulk of the list is made up of short texts with simple, sometimes even infantile language that require the least possible effort from pupils. Kids are even reassured they only have to study the first section of Duck Feet. Perish the thought they might have to deal with a whole novel!
There is of course one other terrifying possible explanation for the cultural vandalism this list represents. Might many of Scotland’s teachers now be so lazy and so thick this is all they are capable of teaching?
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8 comments:
Humza Yousaf's literary criticism:
Willie Collins, The Woman in White: White!
Zadie Smith, White Teeth: White!
Dostoyevsky, White Nights: White!
Jack London, White Fang: White!
Robert Graves, The White Goddess: White!
Several centuries of educational excellence tossed away in a decade or two by the SNP. They're traitors. I'd hang them. I mean just that; if nobody else volunteered I'd pull the lever myself.
Having dipped into Duck Feet via a kindle sample, I’m not sure I’d describe it as written in ‘Scots’ - it reads more a phonetic transcription of Strathclyde’s urban hybrid argot - more Rab C. Nesbitt than the language of my rural lowland ancestors.
In effect, it is the equivalent of the ‘literature’ texts in phonetic London street slang laced with Jamaican patois so believed of progressive English teachers south of the border - inverse snobbery disguised as cultural diversity.
The problem they have is that Lowland Scots, as opposed to Gaelic, has for centuries been a spoken rather than written form; Scotland’s (then) excellent state education meant that educated Scots in the 18th-20th centuries wrote in fluent and grammatical English, whatever the accent or dialect used at home or in the playground.
Sam - and his take on Fagin would be interesting.
dearieme - it's the voters I don't understand, why they keep propping up such a crew.
Macheath - the article sample was enough for me. Even that sample suggests inverse snobbery disguised as cultural diversity. Inverse snobbery seems to have a long history, worth exploring, at least as a casual interest.
Ah but you know what they say about, 'if it aint broke....'
Red rag to the progressives!!
Tammly - 'and if it is broke it wasn't us.'
Came back to reread; SV’s comment has just reminded me of a friend of similar literary tastes who asked to borrow my copy of ‘White Fang’.
A week later, she came back to return it and admitted, rather sheepishly, that she had arrived at her book club to find the others discussing ‘White Teeth’.
It must have been an interesting evening!
Macheath - ha ha but oh dear it must have been an interesting evening.
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