It must be possible to believe that a curriculum should not be preserved for all eternity in aspic – that some measure of change can only be a good thing – and yet still to grieve on hearing the news that OCR, one of the three main exam boards, has removed work by Thomas Hardy, John Keats, Philip Larkin and Wilfred Owen from its syllabus.
Such mournfulness seems natural to me, born as it is as much of what we love as of where we might stand in the culture wars. If the young don’t yet have their favourite verses, the rest of us wander around with certain lines engraved forever on our hearts, the only truly lovely remnants we may have of our long-ago school days.
