Dave Culling, a performing arts and drama teacher at St Benedict Catholic Academy, in Derby, runs a poetry group and is part of Big Adventures Theatre Company. He is angry over a Government order to trim back the number of GCSEs, so he decided to write and send a poem (reproduced below) to Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove expressing his concerns. This is what he had to say...
VERY little research seems to have gone into this proposed alteration to the curriculum.
To combine performing arts and performance studies with drama as if they are all the same and have overlap is ridiculous to anyone who has ever taught, or been educated in, those subjects.
They cover a range of skills, including rigorous academic ones, that lead to our students getting a rounded education. Not just in the arts, but in life skills, too.
Some students want to be performers and these subjects are perfect for them to pursue that noble and time-honoured profession.
If the aim for students is drama school then what use would one A-level in drama accompanied by two in completely irrelevant subjects be?
Any drama school looking for candidates will look at that and question why the potential undergraduate has not shown more interest in the performing arts.
Even for those students who do not pursue a career in the performing arts, these subjects have proved invaluable for gaining a range of personal skills that simply cannot be accrued from other subjects, including confidence, self-presentation, teamwork and collaboration, time management and organisational skills, self-awareness, self-discipline, communication skills, analytical, critical and research skills and stamina.
These skills have led our students into all sorts of employment, including teacher, engineer, doctor and mathematician.
We have ex-students in all of these professions and they would, I'm sure, cite the performance subjects as a big part of the reason they had the confidence to pursue their career and to nail the interview.
In my opinion, Mr Gove needs to look beyond the peripheral nature of the presentation of the arts in the populist media, such as X Factor, and actually look at the contribution the arts makes to our country and to our students.
Would the Olympics opening ceremony have happened or been anywhere near as spectacular without the input of all those artists that he seems to think we do not need?
Does he not value the theatre, opera, ballet, musical theatre, Shakespeare, television or radio?
All the things we see and hear in those different media are made by creative people – most of whom have been inspired by the arts at a young age. He would be very hard-pressed to find a celebrity who can't cite a teacher or a lesson that made them pursue their dream, thus enriching all our lives as well as their own.
If he needs one, how about our very own Jack O'Connell, who currently is in a film with Angelina Jolie, and was a pupil at St Benedict?
Aside from this, attacking subjects arbitrarily on the basis that they do not contain demanding and fulfilling content is utter hogwash.
A performance studies A-grade at A-level is actually harder to achieve than a maths A-grade.
It is a rigorous discipline that requires much more written work and analytical thinking than a lot of other subjects.
The essays and exam that our performance studies students have to sit requires them to assess and understand not just the performing arts but an all-encompassing knowledge of the history of the 20th century.
Perhaps Mr Gove could try to sit the performance studies exam and see how he gets along.
In Hard Times, Dickens gives us the first Mr G (Gradgrind) who transforms from a fact-obsessed utilitarian determined to quash the imagination of his young charges to a kind and benevolent man able to see that the arts are the thing that make us human.
I sincerely hope that this Mr G manages to undergo the same transformation before the boundless imagination of our children is confined and constrained by his obsession with facts and figures.
Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, art, music, love – these are what we stay alive for.
HARD TIMES (FOR MISTER G) – THE POEM DAVE CULLING WROTE TO EDUCATION SECRETARY MICHAEL GOVEMister G! Mister G! Hear this howl from the heart:
With draconian hands please don't let fall the axe
To surround us with numbers, confound us with facts
Swapping science for Knowledge, statistics for Art.
In Orwellian slumber our future will lie
When you've pared down the dictionary, made it efficient,
Left lexicons Arctic-cold minds deem sufficient
To suckle; to live; to toil; to die.
Mister G, by the circus you'll find a lost child
Peeping through red tarpaulin (despite stringent bans)
At the John Singer Sargents, unripened Cezannes,
At the rampaging lust of the heart running wild.
Look! Tchaikovsky!
Gasp! Wagner!
Gulp! Shelley!
Gape! Keats!
Kerouac on the high wire near Turner's trapeze!
Eyes and mind ever-widening the child's eyes sees
And the adult inside, like a chrysalis, beats.
But you'd wrench that child's head from the tent of temptation,
From the crude cornucopia dazzling like Doom,
Nail the child to a desk in an autopsy room
To consider flint fractions in sole contemplation.
WE ARE POETRY, trumpeting soldiers to battle!
We who walk the municipal parks after dark,
Who see Eden in shreds and, lamenting, we hark
To an age before humans were herded like cattle.
Mister G! We're in Rockland and always shall be
If you venerate sums, that report, this amount,
Take away sculpting clay, use love's fingers to count,
Put in straitjackets children who burst to be free.
In that world of your making (a future bereft)
No more odes, no gavottes, just your steel calculation
Sucking sap from the pumping-gut-heart of the nation
Mister G, will you see when you glimpse what you've left?
A muse with no music.
Paradigms with no poetry.
Trapped pain with no painter to soothe with the palette.
Instead of life's ballet
The gleam of the bullet
Shining forth from the gullet.
And grey. Grey. GREY. GREY!
Mister G! Mister G!
Hear this howl from the heart!
By the gifts of the pupils the teachers are taught.
And those gifts linger long though our lives are so short.
And what's left when we die is our CHILDREN –
And ART.
