‘Testing fouryear-olds is madness’
Children’s author Michael Rosen tells Paul Kendall how state schools are failing their pupils – and why Eton has the right idea
If ever there was someone who can be said to possess “funny bones”, it is Michael Rosen. The former Children’s Laureate has written poems about some of the most mundane activities known to man: washing up, blowing on hot food, the different ways people wipe egg yolk off their plates. But, somehow, when he recites them children – and adults – crease up with laughter.
His cartoonish features help; Rosen is the master of the boggle-eyed stare. But he also has an instinctive grasp of what makes people laugh. Go to his Youtube channel (46million views and counting) and watch his imitation of his father bobbing his head up and down after putting a chunk of hot potato in his mouth, and you’ll see what I mean. The writer and broadcaster knows where the humour lies in everyday things, and zeroes in on it like a laser beam.
“I like to explore the absurdity in life,” he says, when we meet in a London restaurant. “But I’ve also realised, from going into schools, that comedy opens the lid for children to talk about many of these ordinary things – that stories don’t have to be about dragons and giants and huge spaceships. They can actually be ‘The time we went to Alton Towers and lost your wallet’, which is a huge drama if you’re a kid.”
Now 71, Rosen has published something like 140 books during what he calls his “patchwork” career, the most famous of which, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, has sold more than eight million copies worldwide. He is also a professor of children’s literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, a passionate schools campaigner and the presenter of Radio 4’s Word of Mouth.
But we have met, ostensibly, to talk about the new stage version of his 1982 poem Chocolate Cake. A typical Rosen-esque story about a boy who creeps out of bed and eats his mum’s chocolate cake while his family are sleeping, it’s currently playing at the Polka Theatre in Wimbledon.
Like many of his poems it contains shades of Rosen’s own family: the relationship in the poem between Michael and his bossy older brother Joe echoes the childhood one between Rosen and his older brother Brian.
“Joe is so like my brother,” says Rosen. “Any time my mum or dad said ‘I think it’s time for a bath’, Brian would look at his watch and say, ‘Yeah, it is.’ It was like he was the third parent.”
Rosen often reads the poem aloud to schoolchildren, talking to them about the little boy’s midnight theft and how they imagine their own parents would react if they committed the same crime.
“Fiction is incredible for teaching you abstract thinking,” he says. “You make analogies between your experience and the experience in the book. Once you have two instances of similar things, you have the possibility of an abstraction.” A Christmas Carol, for example, can lead to a discussion about miserliness; the Greek myth of Persephone and the pomegranate seeds might prompt a conversation about getting lost.
“It teaches empathy,” he says. “How did your mum feel when you got lost? Great stories invite you to think about these things.” He also draws on personal experience: his 18-year-old son Eddie died of meningitis in 1999 and Rosen keeps his memory alive in his work and talks honestly with children about grief. “Sometimes it’s about holding a hand out and saying ‘I’ve been through this too’,” he says. “My poems go into homes and schools where instead of [the poem] just being ‘the end’, there is a conversation afterwards that happens.”
Are young children who study literature better equipped for the challenges of adulthood? “If you engage with literature at the right level, then the amount of thought and reasoning and empathy will benefit you throughout your life,” he replies.
But in Rosen’s opinion, that’s a big “if ”. Schools, especially primary schools, no longer have time to debate literature, he says, because teachers are under so much pressure to ensure their pupils pass national tests. And the system requires these tests to contain questions that have either a right or a wrong answer, so that the school can then be evaluated and placed in the corresponding position in the league tables. Rosen believes children should be encouraged to discover and interpret information, not just memorise lists.
“The need for data is determining far too much what is being taught.”
The latest example of this, he says, is the Government plan to introduce “baseline” literacy and numeracy tests for four-year-olds at the beginning of primary school.
Rosen thinks the idea is barmy. “Children of that age need to be exploring a full range of physical, mental and artistic activity to help them develop their bodies, their co-ordination, their creative potential and their curiosity, all the qualities that are vitally necessary for individual and human progress,” he says. “Baseline will just hinder that. It will also lead to more setting and more segregating of children, and there is no evidence this helps anyone at any level do better.”
Like his parents before him, who were both communists, Rosen is politically engaged – a proud supporter of Jeremy Corbyn and a constant thorn in the side of the Department for Education. So it has been painful, he says ruefully, for a man of his socialist leanings to discover in recent years that it is private schools which have realised the folly of over-testing pupils and who have started placing more emphasis on “the all-round child”.
“Have a look at how Eton describes its mission statement,” he exclaims. “You would have thought it came out of progressive education in the Sixties. It sounds like me!”
Rosen is a fascinating mix of contradictions: a man-child who can talk about the savagery of NHS cuts one minute, and getting told off for pulling funny faces the next; a student of Chaucer, Dickens and Shakespeare who writes books called Centrally Heated Knickers.
After our interview he is meeting a Polish woman who has agreed to help him record an audio version of his 2017 memoir, in which he told the story of his ancestors who died in the holocaust. But he must also finish a story about two ginger cats.
“I’ve been doing it in my show,” he says. “One of the bits the kids find funny is when I tell them that the cats used to lick each other’s faces. I turn to my wife and ask why they are licking each other’s faces. She says, ‘Because they’re brothers,’ and I say, ‘Well I don’t lick my brother’s face’. That gets a big laugh.”
Rosen chuckles. And then he crinkles up his face and does an imitation of a roomful of disgusted children: “Eughhhh!”
‘If you engage with literature at the right level, it will teach you empathy and reasoning and benefit you for your whole life’