Summary: “Bring back the canon” sounds a bit like a call to return to some unspeakably violent backward social educational practice. But this is about the literary canon - those works that are so clearly central to culture that they have been “canonised”. At the Conservative party conference, Education Secretary, Michael Gove urged; “the great tradition of our literature – Dryden, Pope, Swift, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Austen, Dickens and Hardy – should be at the heart of school life.” This front in the culture wars pits conservatives and traditionalists against a diverse army of feminists, multiculturalists, anti-colonialists and other proud minorities. Another skirmish in this war has been unfolding around Katharine Birbalsingh, once a Marxist teacher who delighted the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham with her very traditional educational opinions. She argued that children are “lost in a sea of bureaucracy”, that teachers are “blinded by leftist ideology” and that children love nothing better than to be told what to do by an authoritarian teacher. She won Michael Gove’s friendship but lost her job as deputy head of a South London academy for her comments about the shocking failures in the school system. So, should the government - or indeed the State - be behaving as super-head-teacher and telling us what to read? And if so, should it be the Govian canon
