This house believes poetry is an unnecessary burden for schools.

If top academics and those highly informed about the subject take issue with poetry, school pupils cannot be expected to fathom it. On December 7th, 2007, The Guardian, a British newspaper affiliated to the Left, noted that this ambiguous identity of poetry renders it very difficult to teach;"But until education theory asks itself what poetry itself is, and therefore what the teacher is trying to get across, poems will continue largely to figure as teaching aids, exercises and - for teenagers - increasingly tedious, somewhat arbitrary puzzles".¹
The canonised poets and their poetry are concerned with adult life experiences, e.g. love, life, work, history and politics, solitude, loneliness, etc. For this reason, widely acclaimed poetry is deep and requires an adult mind and mature emotional depth to understand, or at least draw something from, this famous poetry.
¹ Sampson, Fiona, "Poetry is not a tool for teaching other things", guardian.co.uk Books Blog, 7 December 2007, 1 September 2011

While great poetry may deal with adult experiences there is poetry that targets a younger audience and methods available to teach this type of poetry. Children’s poetry, for instance, is not complex or dark in subject matter and uses very regular rhythm and rhyme schemes, which young students will enjoy. If age-appropriate poetry is taught in schools then it gives young people the chance to develop an appreciation for poetry and its various techniques. This means that in later years young people will have the skills necessary to properly understand great poetry. Poems that require more mature minds to understand can, and should, be used to stretch students to teach about these contexts as well as about the kind of imagry and analogy used in the poems. Using more difficult poems to stretch puplils will ensure they keep improving.

It is like asking a student who cannot count to solve a highly complex algebraic equation; completely impossible because the groundwork remains a nemesis. If the pupils cannot understand the basics of reading, writing and grammar, they will certainly struggle to with more complex concepts fundamental to the study of poetry such as similies, personifications, metaphors and extended metaphors. Let us take the UK as an example, for it is a country in which many students do not make progress in basic English. A report in 2011 voiced concern at the number of school children struggling with English and the published some horrifying statistics; "Hundreds of thousands of pupils are falling behind in the basics after starting secondary school, official figures suggest … three in 10 are not making enough progress in English, according to Department for Education data.160,000 did not make enough progress in English.”¹

¹Press Association, “Many secondary school pupils failing to meet expectations, report reveals”, guardian.co.uk, 9 June 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jun/09/secondary-school-pupils-..., accessed 1 September 2011

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On the contrary, poetry is helpful to teaching English. Learning poetry involves chanting, exploration of syllables and vowel sounds. As the pupils chant the syllables, they read the letters that go into making that sound and so spelling will be improved. Reading poetry aloud improves reading ability because the student is vocalising the building blocks that form certain sounds to make words. Public speaking ability will also be improved from a vocal exploration of poetry.

Given that the highly respected Royal Holloway University of London is one such institution that supports this, the future of poetry education and even poetry itself does not look hopeful.
Sir Andrew Motion, Professor of Creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, specified that; "Poetry is a house of many mansions. It does pupils a disservice only to tell them things they already know. Rap has its own challenges and opportunities - but so do many other kinds of poetry, many of which are neglected in schools".¹ Eminem has caused much offence and controversy over the years with his homophobic lyrics. This is just one example of why rap is not to be encouraged at all, let alone awarded a label of (so-called) "poetry". Rappers like him must not be promoted as great artists in the classroom. It is unthinkable that rappers who promote gun crime, drugs and degrade women should be given a platform and even promoted in classrooms. These are simply not the values education can possibly support.
¹ Edwards, Paul, "Why rap should be taught in schools", Royal Holloway University of London, 28 January 2010, accessed 1 September 2011

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Musicians have for some time been awarded poet status. The artist and their personal lifestyle choices can and must be regarded equally. Bob Dylan was originally described thus; "He sounded like a lung cancer victim singing Woody Gutherie. Now he's a Rolling Stone singing Emmanuel Kant" (page 36, Uncut Legends [magazine] #1: Dylan, September 2003). In 1992, he was described as "as good as Keats" (Ibid). If Bob Dylan can graduate from folk to electric to poet status, modern day musicians must also be allowed to follow suite; to gain the recognition they deserve and become similarly promoted.
The poet and their personal lifestyle choices is separable from the poetry they produce. Dylan Thomas, Wales' national poet who is greatly and proudly upheld was an adulterer and an alcoholic. However, this does not make his impressive poetry any less credible. We must not sanitise all the great artists, but accept that the great art they offer as artists forgives them their wrongdoing as people. If we applied the policy of disregarding the art of every artist who has ever done wrong, we would soon lose many canonised ones and several of those who are held in very high esteem.

In the UK, The Labour Party introduced The Literacy Hour, a programme that meant schools were obliged to dedicate more time to basic literacy (and numeracy) upon their election in 1997. However, as the aforementioned statistics have shown, all that has increased is the number of pupils failing in this basic subject. There are 5 million illiterate people in Scotland alone. All we know is that more time does need to be spent learning the basic literacy and numeracy. Appreciating literature and poetry, the artistic side of the English language, cannot be addressed until learners have fully understood and grasped the tools of reading, writing and vowel sounds that allow for fiction and poetry to be produced. We need an educational programme that recognises reading and writing as a matter of urgency and literary and poetry appreciation as a luxury in order to reduce the number of illiterate pupils.

It is unthinkable that a school pupil does not know who his/her national poet is. English school pupils should be familiar with William Shakespeare, Scottish school pupils with Robert Burns and Welsh pupils with Dylan Thomas, Irish ones with James Joyce. Familiarity with one's own national poet is a basic.

If top academics and those highly informed about the subject take issue with poetry, school pupils cannot be expected to fathom it. On December 7th, 2007, The Guardian, a British newspaper affiliated to the Left, noted that this ambiguous identity of poetry renders it very difficult to teach;"But until education theory asks itself what poetry itself is, and therefore what the teacher is trying to get across, poems will continue largely to figure as teaching aids, exercises and - for teenagers - increasingly tedious, somewhat arbitrary puzzles".¹
The canonised poets and their poetry are concerned with adult life experiences, e.g. love, life, work, history and politics, solitude, loneliness, etc. For this reason, widely acclaimed poetry is deep and requires an adult mind and mature emotional depth to understand, or at least draw something from, this famous poetry.
¹ Sampson, Fiona, "Poetry is not a tool for teaching other things", guardian.co.uk Books Blog, 7 December 2007, 1 September 2011

While great poetry may deal with adult experiences there is poetry that targets a younger audience and methods available to teach this type of poetry. Children’s poetry, for instance, is not complex or dark in subject matter and uses very regular rhythm and rhyme schemes, which young students will enjoy. If age-appropriate poetry is taught in schools then it gives young people the chance to develop an appreciation for poetry and its various techniques. This means that in later years young people will have the skills necessary to properly understand great poetry. Poems that require more mature minds to understand can, and should, be used to stretch students to teach about these contexts as well as about the kind of imagry and analogy used in the poems. Using more difficult poems to stretch puplils will ensure they keep improving.

It is like asking a student who cannot count to solve a highly complex algebraic equation; completely impossible because the groundwork remains a nemesis. If the pupils cannot understand the basics of reading, writing and grammar, they will certainly struggle to with more complex concepts fundamental to the study of poetry such as similies, personifications, metaphors and extended metaphors. Let us take the UK as an example, for it is a country in which many students do not make progress in basic English. A report in 2011 voiced concern at the number of school children struggling with English and the published some horrifying statistics; "Hundreds of thousands of pupils are falling behind in the basics after starting secondary school, official figures suggest … three in 10 are not making enough progress in English, according to Department for Education data.160,000 did not make enough progress in English.”¹

¹Press Association, “Many secondary school pupils failing to meet expectations, report reveals”, guardian.co.uk, 9 June 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jun/09/secondary-school-pupils-..., accessed 1 September 2011

improve this

On the contrary, poetry is helpful to teaching English. Learning poetry involves chanting, exploration of syllables and vowel sounds. As the pupils chant the syllables, they read the letters that go into making that sound and so spelling will be improved. Reading poetry aloud improves reading ability because the student is vocalising the building blocks that form certain sounds to make words. Public speaking ability will also be improved from a vocal exploration of poetry.

Given that the highly respected Royal Holloway University of London is one such institution that supports this, the future of poetry education and even poetry itself does not look hopeful.
Sir Andrew Motion, Professor of Creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, specified that; "Poetry is a house of many mansions. It does pupils a disservice only to tell them things they already know. Rap has its own challenges and opportunities - but so do many other kinds of poetry, many of which are neglected in schools".¹ Eminem has caused much offence and controversy over the years with his homophobic lyrics. This is just one example of why rap is not to be encouraged at all, let alone awarded a label of (so-called) "poetry". Rappers like him must not be promoted as great artists in the classroom. It is unthinkable that rappers who promote gun crime, drugs and degrade women should be given a platform and even promoted in classrooms. These are simply not the values education can possibly support.
¹ Edwards, Paul, "Why rap should be taught in schools", Royal Holloway University of London, 28 January 2010, accessed 1 September 2011

improve this

Musicians have for some time been awarded poet status. The artist and their personal lifestyle choices can and must be regarded equally. Bob Dylan was originally described thus; "He sounded like a lung cancer victim singing Woody Gutherie. Now he's a Rolling Stone singing Emmanuel Kant" (page 36, Uncut Legends [magazine] #1: Dylan, September 2003). In 1992, he was described as "as good as Keats" (Ibid). If Bob Dylan can graduate from folk to electric to poet status, modern day musicians must also be allowed to follow suite; to gain the recognition they deserve and become similarly promoted.
The poet and their personal lifestyle choices is separable from the poetry they produce. Dylan Thomas, Wales' national poet who is greatly and proudly upheld was an adulterer and an alcoholic. However, this does not make his impressive poetry any less credible. We must not sanitise all the great artists, but accept that the great art they offer as artists forgives them their wrongdoing as people. If we applied the policy of disregarding the art of every artist who has ever done wrong, we would soon lose many canonised ones and several of those who are held in very high esteem.

In the UK, The Labour Party introduced The Literacy Hour, a programme that meant schools were obliged to dedicate more time to basic literacy (and numeracy) upon their election in 1997. However, as the aforementioned statistics have shown, all that has increased is the number of pupils failing in this basic subject. There are 5 million illiterate people in Scotland alone. All we know is that more time does need to be spent learning the basic literacy and numeracy. Appreciating literature and poetry, the artistic side of the English language, cannot be addressed until learners have fully understood and grasped the tools of reading, writing and vowel sounds that allow for fiction and poetry to be produced. We need an educational programme that recognises reading and writing as a matter of urgency and literary and poetry appreciation as a luxury in order to reduce the number of illiterate pupils.

It is unthinkable that a school pupil does not know who his/her national poet is. English school pupils should be familiar with William Shakespeare, Scottish school pupils with Robert Burns and Welsh pupils with Dylan Thomas, Irish ones with James Joyce. Familiarity with one's own national poet is a basic.

It is an enjoyable way to teach the core subject of home language and literature written therein; interesting and obscure concepts hold the learner's interest when studying their home language and its landmark literature, while simultaneously expanding vocabulary and improving spelling.
Poetry offers a fun method of teaching subjects that can otherwise easily be exhaustive and repetitive For examples;
Shirley Hughes' poems for young readers such as Best friends introduce young readers to the vowel sounds of their home language.
The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson teaches the reader about a great historical landmark.
The war poetry of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon et al teaches students about the First World War and the horrors thereof.
Zoe's Earrings by Kit Wright teaches pre-GCSE students about accents.^1
1 Wright, Kit, "Zoe's Earrings", BBC Learning Zone, accessed 1 September 2011

Learning the basics of literature and language is not designed to be fun or enjoyable, it is an essential requirement. It is important that students can get to grips with the basics of their home language and a standard 'look, cover, write, check' method for learning spelling and expanding vocabulary is effective, for it requires the learner to write the words themselves. Simply reading them is not enough, especially not in the context of a poem- unconventional, even strange concepts typical of poetry may well be too demanding for the pupil, whose priority is to learn writing and reading. They can still learn reading through the cultural means of reading novels, in which the extended prose used by the author is far easier to follow.

War poetry, although foreign to our own experiences of peacetime, enables us as readers to gain insight into the minds of the terrified men who fought for our freedom. Wilfred Owen suffered from shellshock as a result of fighting in the war. In his poem Mental Cases, he describes his time and experiences at Craiglockhart psychiatric hospital in Scotland, where he and Siegfried Sassoon (another WW1 poet) were treated for the condition;
"Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?
Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows" (lines 1-2)¹In our time of peace, we will never be able to fully empathise with their terrifying experiences, or successfully decode every observation, but we must read some of their poetry in order to appreciate the true and full horrors of war. We must do this out of respect for those who died for our freedom, and as such war poetry must be taught in schools.
¹ Owen Owen, Wilfred, "Mental Cases", Wilfred Owen,accessed 1 September 2011.

An appreciation for the true horrors of war can be gained through factual reading. Factual books about the horrors of the First World War offer better understanding the true extent of the atrocities than poetry. Firstly, they are factual and not based upon opinion. Secondly, they are more modern and have been written in the aftermath of the First World War. Therefore, they tell its full story and provide a panoramic view of the Greta War. Thirdly, many of the men who wrote war poetry went mad with shellshock. Trying to find sense in the nonsensical lyrics of poetry by those poor men sent mad is an impossible task; knowledge of and research into shellshock is a relatively new development.

It is fundamental that education teaches students about the human condition in order to enable an understanding of humanity. High school students must therefore gain awareness of not only human ideas but also an awareness of how humans choose to express these ideas, which means they must learn about art. One of the ways in which humans choose to express their emotions is through literature, language and speech- poetry. For example, many Victorian poets such as William Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott, who spent much time in the Lake District, turned to writing nature poetry, such as Wordsworth's famous poem Daffodils, because they wanted to "see into the life of things",¹ and the best way to both investigate and express this was through nature poetry.
¹ Lefebure, Molly, The Illustrated Lake Poets, Windward, 1987, p. 144

In failing schools, it IS justifiable to separate art from education. When a high number of students are struggling with basic literacy and numeracy, this is what needs to be addressed. Artistic studies will simply have to take a backseat while teaching of the basics is improved. This is a temporary measure, once teaching and abilities in basic literacy and numeracy improve, schools which have previously been failing can expand back into artistic studies. If this is not the case, and art and poetry continue to have a high profile in failing schools, what will result is a mass of very cultured high school leavers (not necessarily graduates) unable to add up in their head and with poor vocabulary, able to quote Shakespeare effortlessly but no idea how to spell his name.

We want cultured people to graduate from high schools. It is undesirable that all high school graduates, who are an educated group of people, will have no knowledge of art and no desire to ever immerse themselves in anything cultural such as a museum, or art gallery. This is what will happen if poetry and other art subjects are not respected in schools. As it is, English literature is the only cultural subject that is compulsory at GCSE level. Because it is the only obligatory cultural GCSE subject, as much culture must be channelled into it as possible i.e. novels and much poetry.

We must be realistic in education; we need to prepare our students for the difficulties of the real world. It is those subjects that are vocational in nature and/or life skills, home language (not literature), maths and science and modern languages, business studies, law that must take priority in schools. We must equip and train the new generation to successfully gain employment. Therefore, art subjects like poetry are no priority.