Ask most parents what they want for their children and the answers will be overwhelmingly on the lines of wanting them to be happy, good, well-balanced and fulfilled individuals.

Ask most parents what they want for their children and the answers will be overwhelmingly on the lines of wanting them to be happy, good, well-balanced and fulfilled individuals. The younger the child, the more likely this is to be centre frame.

As children advance through their education, concerns about enabling them to reach their full potential come more into play and at some stage, there will be a greater emphasis on what that might mean in terms of making a living.

What you are much less likely to hear, is an emphasis on defining any of these wishes in terms of a testing regime which seems to be sucking the life out of the joy of learning and driving teachers to exhaustion and despair.

The poet Michael Rosen wrote an open letter to the Education Secretary Nicky Morgan on 7 April, demolishing the idea that children’s reactions to a poem could be measured or confined to pre-determined interpretations.

The prescriptive and stultifying regime criticised by Rosen was not one intended for young people in their late teens, who might just have read and enjoyed enough poetry to be able to survive the purely technical interrogation of a text: it was a Key Stage 1 requirement – designed for seven and eight year olds.

This is an age where the imagination is lissom and tender – “wax to receive and marble to retain”. If it is nurtured through sensitive teaching, it will blossom in a manner which lays a foundation for all disciplines.

Poetry, perhaps more than any other form of expression, shows, rather than tells a child that language can be playful, strange, mysterious and liberating. It sets ajar the door of original, independent thinking and does not always have to ‘make sense’. A friend who is a teacher told me of once finding a boy generally thought ‘unpromising’, browsing a volume of Gerard Manley Hopkins. She asked him what he thought of these dense and brilliantly strange poems. “It’s great, Miss”, was his reply.”I dunno what it means but I like the noise it makes.” It is horrible to imagine what might have been done to that lad if Rosen’s ‘Mr Examiner’ had grasped the breath of his nascent perception of beauty and throttled the life out of it in order to boost the youth to a Grade C GCSE pass and his school to a more advantageous position within a league table.

It is well known that Shelley believed poets to be “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. The preamble to this statement is not always heard: “[poets] are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society…” It is a bold claim, the meaning of which educationalists and politicians would do well to reflect upon. The tension between utilitarian education and liberal education is of long standing. Writing over 160 years ago, Dickens satirised the utilitarians who “see figures and averages and nothing else”, in the horrible and ultimately piteous figure of the headmaster Thomas Gradgrind.

This strangely timeless educational theorist could see nothing but inadequacy in little Sissy Jupe, a child of the circus, who did not know the definition of a horse (“’Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth”). That she would carpet a floor with pictures of flowers and was later to be a kind friend to Gradgrind’s own daughter was neither here nor there in his rigid and formulaic worldview.

If we are content that the needs of the CBI should be the driver of our education system and that as a consequence, only the narrowly measurable can be of value, we should not think ourselves more enlightened than this pinched parody figure who believed that only ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ answers were possible in the realm of beauty and the imagination.

Poetry offers liberation. Neither children nor adults will always understand its meaning. But the capacity to relish the noise it makes renders it harder for power to oppress us. Perhaps that is why they would crush our children’s earliest experiences of heightened and transformative language.

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© Jill Segger is an Associate Director of Ekklesia with particular involvement in editorial issues. She is a freelance writer who contributes to the Church Times, Catholic Herald, Tribune, Reform and The Friend, among other publications. Jill is an active Quaker. See: http://www.journalistdirectory.com/journalist/TQig/Jill-Segger You can follow Jill on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/quakerpen