A leading teachers' union in Scotland has backed a controversial bid to remove a Scottish poem featuring a blade-wielding killer from a school syllabus amid fears over teenage knife crime.
A leading teachers' union in Scotland has backed a controversial bid to remove a Scottish poem featuring a blade-wielding killer from a school syllabus amid fears over teenage knife crime.
The Scottish Secondary Teachers' Association (SSTA) said the AQA exam board's decision to withdraw Glasgow-born Carol Ann Duffy's poem, Education for Leisure, from its GCSE English anthology was "common sense".
But Scotland's parent- teacher body branded the board's response censorship. A leading Scottish poetry expert said it was a "backward step".
The AQA maintained that it had been a difficult choice made in response to a complaint concerning the growing UK blade culture.
Jim Docherty, deputy general secretary of the Scottish Secondary Teachers' Association, said it was "common sense" and questioned why the poem had ever been studied in the first place.
The first line of the poem reads: "Today I am going to kill something. Anything."
A description follows of the disturbed thoughts of a disillusioned unemployed loner who kills a fly and then a goldfish. In the last verse he or she goes outside armed with a bread knife.
Judith Gillespie, of the Scottish Parent Teacher Council, said: "Quite often a lot of death in art is incidental to the main message that the artist is trying to get across. Othello who kills his wife is about jealousy Macbeth is about seeking power by any means.
"My view of art is that you don't censor it. I thought we were beyond that. To say it the poem is promoting knife crime is not where we should be."
Robyn Marsack, director of the Scottish Poetry Library, said: "I do think it is a backward step. I understand that there are concerns about violence and knives especially but what is this poem doing?
"It's not saying go out with a knife and you'll feel better. It's saying this is the mindset of the loner, is this what you call education?"
Carol Ann Duffy wrote the work during the Thatcher years as a plea for better education to stop rising violence then. Yesterday her literary agent, Peter Strauss, said she still worked hard to promote education. He said: "Given what she has been striving to do this must be upsetting . . . Does the same person who complained say we should ban Romeo and Juliet?"
The AQA admitted that "when taught sensitively" the poem was useful for exploring social and psychological issues as well as literary matters.
But it added: "The decision underlines the often difficult balance that exists between encouraging and facilitating young people to think critically about difficult but important topics and the need to do this in a way which is sensitive to social issues and public concern."
