Last week I took part in a debate on one of the most important issues affecting education and culture. Hosted by Intelligence Squared, the motion was: ‘It’s time to ditch the canon of Great White Men’. I was against; the teacher and author Jeffrey Boakye was for it. I lost. Boakye is a better speaker than I, and he made his points more effectively. The audience rightly rewarded him with victory.
The point I tried to make in the debate is that studying literature should not be about relevance or works that reflect my identity as a ‘marginalised person’; it should be about works that transcend categories and speak to a common humanity. Boakye, by contrast, put a greater emphasis on subjectivity. The canon, he argued, lives in all of us. It is not out there. It is in here.
As he argues in a subsequent Guardian column that expressed much of what he said in the debate, “I don’t think education is built with these pillars [of knowledge] in the first place. I think the curriculum lives outside objectivity. I think it lives in us, in our hearts and minds, with all the lived experiences different educators can embody.”
For Boakye, the canon should speak to the direct experiences of students. So he teaches “the poetry of William Blake juxtaposed with Boy in Da Corner by Dizzee Rascal.” And he teaches “Christopher Booker along with Akala.” According to him, “Euro 2020 was more than a football tournament — it became a grounding text for the study of nationhood, race and masculinity.”
How perfectly reasonable. Boakye sounds like the archetypal cool teacher but as I was reading, one question kept returning: would the parents of private school children put up with this? Would they allow their children to be taught Dizzee Rascal in English class?
This is one aspect I wished I had stressed more forcefully when I spoke with Boakye. One important element in the debate about the canon is class. Impoverished kids need the canon more than children from affluent homes. I like grime and I love football. But if you come from a household with very few books, there is little to be gained from studying grime artists and football when you should instead be reading texts whose quality has been judged by the best critic of all: time.
The canon allows chidren from working-class backgrounds to sit side by side with kids whose families are not only flush with economic capital but cultural capital. This isn’t just about novels and poems. It’s also about film, music and art. Like it or not, there is a body of great works in all these fields that have influenced later works. A lack of knowledge about classic works of art is like being able to understand a language but not speak it; it is in the air, but you have not been solidly acculturated to it. It is an insidious form of exclusion.
Classical music influences the soundtracks of many movies; Shakespeare has laid the foundation for any psychologically gripping TV plot. Many people describe teaching the canon as elitist. I can think of nothing more democratic.
I hope Jude Belllingham learns Spanish
When Birmingham City retired Jude Bellingham’s no.22 shirt after he joined Borussia Dortmund in 2020, everyone laughed. Three years on and he has joined Real Madrid for £88 million. He’s not 20 yet.
I hope he tries to learn Spanish. English players are not known for their knowledge of foreign languages. And this isn’t just confined to footballers — according to a new
report by the British Academy, the number of students studying modern languages has dropped by 39 per cent in the last 10 years.
As a nation, we are among the worst in Europe in learning other languages. This is a tragedy.
A language is not simply a means of communication; it is a portal into another world.
I think Bellingham will be brilliant for Real Madrid. He is physically and technically superb. What will truly impress me, though, is if he becomes a true Madridista and nails the lingo of his new club too.
