For These Times

It has been 20 years since I read Hard Times as a set book at my bog standard comp.

Polly Toynbee writes:

Michael Gove is Mr M'Choakumchild and Thomas Gradgrind personified: "What I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else." In Gove's schools, whatever might seize the imagination, give pleasure and stay in the heart and mind for a lifetime longer than rote-learned facts is being rooted out.

When he has done with cleansing the curriculum, it may be the case that fewer people know who Gradgrind and M'Choakumchild are. Dickens and much of literature will be a closed book to those not lucky enough to encounter them outside their exam-crammed education. English literature is to be stripped out of the core English GCSE exam, leaving nothing but grammatical correctness and straitjacket language reduced to right and wrong answers.

Literature is to become an optional extra, and probably not a highly regarded one, for fear it might let the imagination roam dangerously free. English language, maths, three sciences, a foreign language and history or geography are the core English baccalaureate subjects. The rest is silence, more or less. (But soon few may recognise that reference.) In a world of harsh exams, with the screw tightened down to factual rigour, league table tyranny will increasingly sideline optional extras.

An array of writers, artists and academics fired off a letter of protest to the Sunday Times, including Michael Morpurgo, Robert Harris, Sheila Hancock, Miriam Margolyes and professors John Carey and John Sutherland. The new English literature exam will become more rigorous, concentrating on pre-20th century texts, which may deter all but enthusiasts: when everyone had to do some literature, it was more accessible to all. Prof Sutherland talks of how "the humanities humanise us".

No doubt Gove thinks that soft-headed, but he might ponder the conservative values of preserving the best. If few read literature together, the idea of a canon vanishes. The Bible has all but gone in a generation, a deep cultural loss: apart from the nativity, there is no common reference point, no chill to the marrow at God telling Abraham to cut his son's throat, no common understanding of a reference to Lazarus.

Another term of Gove-ism, and Jane Austen, Dickens, Orwell, Wilfred Owen, JD Salinger and all the rest will go the same way: it doesn't take long. Pupils may groan at literary texts, but books stay in the mind for further exploring. Whatever is unexamined with marks and tables is unvalued under the Gove whip.

The consultation in progress is unlikely to change the plan. Gove pretends it's for schools to choose – but drama, dance, art and now literature will slip away. Confident top schools may keep these subjects, but average schools, under intense pressure to perform in core EBacc exams, will let the rest slide. The Cultural Learning Alliance argues passionately for the cause of arts in schools. The Arts Council is negotiating valiantly behind the scenes with Ofqual about how to ensure arts exams are as rigorous, and so of equal status, as the rest.

In Gove's groves of academe, high achievers will be more clearly set apart, laurels for the winners in his regime of fact and rote, 1950s grammar schools reprised, rewarding those who already thrive under any system. The UK always scored well with top students: it is the long tail of those falling behind who drag down our ranking in PISA tables.

He is giving this unequal society, made more so by this government, schools better honed to reflect that social difference. The hurdles are set higher, the fallers will fall further and harder, with fewer paths into education for those not fired up by a strict diet of maths, grammar, physics and French.

Rudely Gove dismisses the education world as "the blob" – but if he asked further education colleges, those havens of second and third chances, what best rescues students failed by schools first time round, it is often those other doors into the many gardens of learning.

Schools need friendly secret niches with different kinds of teachers: for some children it might be sport, for others design, art, music, dance or drama where other talents and enthusiasms are welcomed to draw a child in, not propel them out. New GCSE codes downgrade all these, urging schools to discourage them. Under Gove's tutelage 14% fewer pupils are taking arts GCSEs.

The Commons education select committee reports that the EBacc effect narrows options away from the arts, affecting disadvantaged children most. An Ipsos Mori report finds that schools with a high proportion of children taking free school meals are more than twice as likely to abandon arts subjects as are privileged schools.

Gove boasts: "We've rewarded schools that teach traditional subjects, which help all students get into university." Liz Truss, his minister, parrots: "We are rebalancing the curriculum towards high-value subjects – in maths, sciences, DT, computing, English and languages."

What is "low value" about drama? Small children learn through acting out imaginary roles. There is no discipline tougher than putting on a play, relying on one another, learning a part, hitting a cue, in mortal peril of failure and hope of triumph before an audience. Anyone who ever acted in a school play remembers it for ever. Ability to speak out, perform and pretend is essential for most jobs, from estate agent upwards.

Employers complain that young people mumble, slouch and don't look them in the eye, prizing the "soft skills" that elite schools teach through drama and debating. Emotionally, drama teaches children lacking in empathy to put themselves into others' shoes, to express fears.

But ever fewer schools employ specialist drama teachers: English teachers may or may not have an aptitude. Shakespeare is on the curriculum, no longer to be examined, but dead on the page without performance to breathe life and sense into it.

The RSC sends out a toolkit to help-teachers teach Shakespeare. The Shakespeare Schools Festival is in progress, a thousand primary and secondaries performing in real theatres everywhere, a brilliant project – but drama should be the right of every child. No school should be judged good or outstanding unless it's good at arts: the Arts Council awards an "Artsmark" to schools that do well, but only a quarter earn it.

My guess is Gove wouldn't send a child of his to any school that regards arts as a waste of time.