Parrot Fashion Disaster

Education Secretary Michael Gove has announced that teenagers will now be encouraged to learn, by heart, some of the 130 poems in a new anthology for a nationwide competition. Parrot fashion we called it at school. Not an enlightening way for a young mind to learn anything because they end up with as much understanding of Chaucer, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats and Hardy as, well, parrots.

Gove claims that this "policy" is intended to help "pass our cultural legacy on to the next generation", but in reality it'll only mean that our literature education regressing to the days of fold-up desks, ink wells, chalk boards and clips around the ear; but as most of our older generation remain utterly clueless when it comes to Shakespearean language or the works of Shelley, it obviously didn't work back then either. Does he not have any advisors who care (know?) about education enough to tell him that this is an ill-considered substitute for teaching, and that learning poetry, or pretty much any subject worth studying, is more to do with developing an understanding, not memorising by rote?

What next for the self-interested point scorers who want to take us back to some mythical golden age of education? Returning imperial measurements to the classroom alongside metric because that’s the way it was when everybody had rickets?

Oh dear.
Apparently that's already another "policy" with no obvious benefit to future of the nation....