Now incorporating The Sudbury Hill Harrow and Wherever End Times

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Boris's odes

Here's a really Right-wing idea: learn poetry

"...My teachers probably spent more time in Japanese POW camps than they did at teacher-training college, and yet they had one utensil of instruction for which I will always be grateful. They made us learn stuff, and spout it out, and we blushed if we got it wrong; and the result is that I am a kind of slightly wonky poetry jukebox. There must be thousands of texts in there: snatches, fragments and large numbers of whole poems. I could do you a dozen Shakespeare sonnets, the whole of Lycidas (186 lines of the thing) and the first 100 lines of the Iliad in Greek. ... As anyone who loves poetry will testify, when you learn a good poem, you make a good friend. ... What is the point of education, what is the point of civilisation, what is the point of our benighted money-grubbing species and what is the point of Conservatism if we don't instruct our children in the chief glories of their inheritance?" (Telegraph)

Typically amusing faux rant by the Mayor of London.

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