Now then, mardy bum

Michael Gove gave a long speech to Cambridge University - presumably not all of it - recently in which he set out, well, I'm not sure what he set out, really. Perhaps he was saying that an education today should be more like a Victorian education, or perhaps that our aspirations for education today should be more like Victorian aspirations for education. At any rate, he was encouraging children to read more challenging books, which I suppose is a good thing.

I always want to give politicians the benefit of the doubt, I really do. I want to think that they are trying their best for us, that they aren't evil or malicious, driven by an unhealthy desire for power or some dark conspiracy. But there were a couple of things that made we wonder:

And there is such as thing as the best. Richard Wagner is an artist of sublime genius and his work is incomparably more rewarding - intellectually, sensually and emotionally - than, say, the Arctic Monkeys.

It's the "incomparably" that gives me pause - "In an incomparable manner or degree; in a way that does not admit of comparison; beyond comparison" says the OED. Thanks for pissing in the Arctic Monkeys' cornflakes, Michael.

It just feels too much, particularly given that, when Michael Gove's car was stolen, the contents included not only Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (unabridged), Wagner's Parsifal and the collected speeches of Ronald Reagan, but also Sigh No More by Mumford & Sons and a Best of The Smiths collection. Hang on, that seems to me like a mixture of the "best" and the, well, incomparably not the best.

And then again, he said

Conventional grammar - as we understand it here and as Simon Heffer lays it out masterfully in his wonderful book Strictly English - doesn’t feature in the English curriculum.

This was the bit that really struck me, because Strictly English is a book about something that doesn't exist, even in Heffer's book. The idea is that all beautifully written English follows a set of precise rules. Except that it doesn't, even in Heffer's book. The boys over at Language Log have done a much better job of skewering these ideas than I ever could. As one of their reviews said

...setting out a cavalcade of rules that standard English does not comply with and never did, and representing them as instruction in how to write today, is dishonest. Some linguistic masochists may delight in letting Heffer bully them into compliance with his whims and peeves; but I see this obtusely atavistic book as a perversion of grammatical education.

I'm not really sure what that means, but it can't be good, not a "perversion of grammatical education", surely. How would you develop a marking scheme for that?

And I wonder if this is a problem at the heart of Michael Gove's ideas about education too. I think he wants to make things better, he really does. But he couldn't bear it if, even if it made things better, the education system had in it things that, though "self-evident" to him, weren't actually true. It's the desire to give freedom while exerting control that may prove too difficult. I just hope it doesn't leave him

Pulling that silent disappointed face
The one that I can't bear