At the end of last year, Scotland’s education chiefs announced a new list of approved texts for pupils taking English exams at secondary schools. It represents everything that is wrong with Scottish education and the country’s cultural Establishment.
Ten years ago the SNP government decided there would be only one compulsory question asked in Scotland’s equivalent of GCSEs and A levels in English, and it would be about Scottish authors. It was claimed this would encourage pupils to study the great writers Scotland has produced, from Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson to Burns and Lewis Grassic Gibbon.
There was nothing to stop a teacher teaching other great writers like Jane Austen, but this compulsory question would highlight Scotland’s proud literary tradition. Now, with this latest revision of the list of approved texts, it is clear the country’s education chiefs are on a mission to dumb down. The list, we are told, is all about “increased diversity”.
What is a Scottish text anyway?
Inevitably, then, the list has “queer” authors. It has neurodivergent authors. There’s also a non-binary author, Ely Percy, who prefers to use her own individual spelling for words. I suppose you could say her spelling is non-binary too. Another writer, Duncan Williamson, is a Traveller, but not the kind Robert Louis Stevenson was in “Travels With a Donkey”.
Even more revealing than the many non-entities shoehorned on to this list, are the writers who were excluded. Lewis Grassic Gibbon, an icon of the Scottish literary renaissance after WWI, is junked. And what is a Scottish text anyway? The poet Carol Ann Duffy warrants a place, because she was born north of Hadrian’s Wall yet has never written anything about Scotland, whereas Shakespeare, who wrote the most famous play in the world set in Scotland, suffers “a deadly banishment”.
All this is in startling contrast to when I was taught English in a rough Scottish comprehensive in the late 70s. Not only did we have Shakespeare in abundance, but also Steinbeck and Salinger. No one asked if they were Scottish. I still recall the first time I read in sheer wonder a line from Pride and Prejudice.
Instead of this cornucopia, Scottish teenagers are now being force-fed an impoverished diet of mediocrity such as Ely Percy’s novel Duck Feet in which its twelve year old narrator offers insights like:
Ma da’s got bad feet. He says it’s cause when he wis wee his mother made him wear shoes that didnae fit him. She made him squash his feet intae shoes that used tae be his brother’s cause she couldnae afford tae buy new wans fur the baith ae them.
This gives dumbing down a bad name. At least pupils will get to discuss Percy’s “gender identity”. She recently clarified she was agender, explaining, “For me, being agender falls under the trans and non-binary umbrella.” This is an explanation so opaque we should be grateful Percy writes her books in slang.
Then there’s the blatant political bias. Another newly approved “queer” author Kirsty Logan regularly rails against gender critical women online and single sex spaces. She was one of 11 Scottish authors who wrote a letter of protest when the Scottish Poetry Library dared to defend freedom of expression.
The thinking of the Scottish Qualifications Authority seems to be that Scottish schools can never have too many idiot queer authors who despise free speech.
Ironically, given the petty nationalism of their revised list, the fiercest criticism has come from Scottish nationalists. In addition to the exclusion of canonical works like “Sunset Song,” even Robert Burns has shrunk to two tiny songs: one written entirely in English as opposed to the Scots dialect he so famously made his own.
Old style nationalists used to dream of harnessing education to develop a vital and sophisticated literary culture rooted in Scotland’s distinctive traditions. This was a project, for all its parochialism, which was genuinely progressive since it aimed to lift standards, open children’s minds and build a better society.
That optimism has fallen foul of the gnarled, far left nihilism that now dominates Scottish public life. This views traditional values and even our modern way of life as irredeemably rotten with isms and phobias. Instead the SNP-funded woke nomenklatura wants to use education to promote a beige, disconnected, “queer-friendly” relativism and “intersectionality”.
Scotland doesn’t seem to like work much any more
Defending the new list, Dr Corey Gibson, who helped craft it, accused critics who wanted more classic texts of being “politically hostile to the principles of equality and diversity”. He might as well have shouted, “bigots!” Their criticism, he opined, “has been refracted through the fever dream of “culture war’”. Amongst the research interests listed on Gibson’s Glasgow University site, to no one’s great surprise, is “Marxist Thought”.
The saddest aspect of this story is that Scotland used to be famed for its educational standards. Whatever the political views of the country’s educationalists or their position on independence, they shared a deep respect for the power of education to liberate working people.
They also knew education required hard work — on the part of pupils who had to push themselves and on the part of teachers who had to convince pupils their hard work would be worth it. And there’s the rub: Scotland, once a byword for grafting and ambition, doesn’t seem to like work much any more. Its educational elite respect it least of all.
That’s why this list perfectly embodies Scotland’s new national culture after 25 wasted years of devolution. It’s no accident the bulk of the list is made up of short texts with simple, sometimes even infantile language that require the least possible effort from pupils. Kids are even reassured they only have to study the first section of Duck Feet. Perish the thought they might have to deal with a whole novel!
There is of course one other terrifying possible explanation for the cultural vandalism this list represents. Might many of Scotland’s teachers now be so lazy and so thick this is all they are capable of teaching?
