Poet Lau­re­ate Andrew Motion (inci­den­tally, the first Poet Lau­re­ate to not hold the posi­tion for life) sug­gests that the clas­sics and the Bible should con­tinue to be taught in school, as to cease doing so will pre­vent a whole gen­er­a­tion being able to under­stand great lit­er­a­ture and culture.

I can’t help but find myself agree­ing with his argument.

The poet, who describes him­self as an athe­ist, called for an over­haul of the school cur­ricu­lum to reverse the “depress­ing” trend which threat­ened to leave future gen­er­a­tions unable to fully under­stand the works of Mil­ton and Shake­speare or even more recent writ­ers such as TS Eliot.

[…]

He insisted that while sec­u­lar­ist ideas had put many peo­ple off study­ing the Bible, par­ents who do not believe in God should have noth­ing to fear from their chil­dren learn­ing about the Bible.

“If peo­ple say this is about ram­ming reli­gion down people’s throats, they aren’t think­ing about it hard enough,” he said.

“It is more about the power of these words to con­nect with deep, recur­ring human truths, and also the story of the influ­ence of that lan­guage and those stories.”

And he warned that grow­ing igno­rance of the great sto­ries of the Bible as well as clas­si­cal mythol­ogy was becom­ing an increas­ingly seri­ous hand­i­cap for those study­ing literature.

The dis­cus­sion puts me in mind of the lat­est thing to make me laugh on twit­ter: “@pagecrusher: Your inabil­ity to catch ref­er­ences to Greek mythol­ogy is your Achilles’ heel.”