In the film Donnie Darko, an English Literature teacher is hounded out of her job for teaching Graham Greene's "The Destructors", a pivotal scene of which the eponymous anti-hero is accused of copying. When I originally saw the movie, my first thought was, "Well that's not realistic nowadays".
My second thought was, "Well maybe in
My third thought was a smug and rather self-satisfied, "Well it certainly couldn't happen here. This is
It seems that such smugness, as such smugness usually is, was misplaced. A work by poet Carol Ann Duffy has been removed from the syllabus because of its content and because of complaints by people who have so clearly missed the point that it seems remarkable that they can claim to have read it at all. The poem is called Education For Leisure and begins "Today I am going to kill something. Anything." Its detractors seem to be entirely unaware that far from a glorification of knife crime, it is a bleak polemic about the need for education as a kind of antidote to the narrator's utterly hopeless and nihilistic point of view.
The poet's response was to pen another poem, Mrs Schofield's GCSE, which points out, in the form of a series of exam questions, just how much knife crime there is in Shakespeare. Mrs Schofield was one of the people complaining about the poem and crowing triumphally when it was removed from the syllabus.
