Cancelled, the Canterbury Tales
As university axes Chaucer to focus on ‘diversity’, Education Secretary calls it ‘absolute madness’
A UNIVERSITY was accused of ‘absolute madness’ yesterday over plans to drop Geoffrey Chaucer from its teaching.
Education Secretary Gavin Williamson called on Leicester University to ditch moves to stop teaching medieval English in favour of a ‘decolonised curriculum’ of studies in race, gender and diversity.
He said Chaucer – the 14th century writer long-hailed as the ‘ father of English poetry’ – should be celebrated as part of Britain’s history.
Leicester denied wanting to drop Anglo-Saxon and Middle English works such as Beowulf and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales for being ‘too white’. But critics accused it of ditching centuries of English heritage.
Mr Williamson told the Daily Mail: ‘For Leicester University
‘Part of our inheritance’
to ban Geoffrey Chaucer from their literature syllabus is a terrible idea. Absolute madness.
‘I hope Leicester University will see that they should be venerating our rich history and have it at the heart of teaching. They should not be banning the best but celebrating the best.’
Sir Anthony Seldon, former headmaster of Wellington and vice-chancellor of Buckingham University said: ‘To ban Chaucer on an English course is lunacy. It means you cannot understand the essence and origin of English language and literature.
‘ Chaucer is irrepressibly naughty, crude, direct, poetic, insightful and exciting. The language is so raw with compelling stories and which students love and learn from. He brings alive late medieval England by opening a window into all that is vital in our lives then and today.’
Richard North, a professor of English at University College London, who helped to launch a Chaucer smartphone app last year, said: ‘Chaucer is called the father of English literature for very good reason. He is part of our inheritance.
‘The dialect of English we use today stems from him; our modern literature would not be the same without him.’
Chaucer (1343-1400) is best known for the Canterbury Tales, a collection of stories about pilgrims on their way to visit a religious shrine, and was the first author to be buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. Yet Leicester plans to stop teaching him and other classic works written before 1500. In an email to staff – some 60 of whom now face redundancy – it said it wanted to ‘refocus’ the English department with ‘ excitingly innovative’ new modules.
Academics were told: ‘The aim ... [is] to offer a suite of undergraduate degrees that provide modules which students expect of an English degree.’
The email set out plans for ‘a selection of modules on race, ethnicity, sexuality and diversity, a decolonised curriculum, and new employability modules’.
That would mean an end to teaching on epic poems such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain And The Green Knight, the Viking sagas and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. Shakespeare would remain on the syllabus.
In a statement, the university said: ‘There is no truth to the suggestion that certain modules are being eliminated for being “too white”. We want to offer courses that match our students’ own interests and enthusiasms, as reflected in their own choices and the feedback we have been hearing.
‘Students will continue to study some of the best-loved authors in the English language.’
ONE of the core obligations of the state is to ensure children are properly educated.
Yet during the pandemic, our young people are being hurled on the scrapheap.
Boris Johnson insisted keeping classrooms open was a moral duty. But we now learn they could in fact stay shut until Easter.
That would be nearly two years’ education down the pan. Not since Victorian times have pupils missed so much learning.
The prospects of a generation – and, therefore, the future of this country – are being squandered, all for a virus that poses a minuscule risk to them.
By blocking the return to school, ministers harm the educational, social, physical and mental well-being of every pupil.
Better-off youngsters, whose parents can afford laptops for online learning, and who step in to read books and do simple sums, will not suffer most.
No, that fate will befall disadvantaged children, stuck in cramped, often chaotic, homes, for whom school is a safe haven.
Decades of progress closing the academic gap is being undone.
Ministers should allay teachers’ fears about Covid, either by testing or jabs.
And the Government must face down the scientists and teaching unions hindering the unlocking of classrooms.
Schools are the ladder up which children climb to achieve their dreams. It is shameful that ministers are kicking it away.