There’s no rhyme or reason for children to be taught violent, ridiculous and outdated historical falsehoods, says Chris Game .
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Remember Baron (Digby) Jones, lifetime member of the House of Lords through his brief career as a GOAT – a junior minister in Gordon Brown’s Government Of All the Talents?
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Just one reason why the PM’s trawl for administrative talent from outside Labour Party ranks got a generally cynical reception.
Still, credit where it’s due.
Buckingham Conservative MP John Bercow’s appointment to chair a review of services for young people with speech and learning needs was controversial, but commendable.
His report was authoritative, critical, and heavy with recommendations, many of which are included in the Government’s recent action plan, Better Communication.
One initiative involves systematically monitoring two-year olds’ language development.
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Again commendable.
But why, in emphasising the importance of parents talking with their toddlers, are the promoters of such programmes – and especially Labour ministers – always so enthusiastic about reading them nursery rhymes?
Apparently, a quarter of 海角视频 adults can’t recite a single whole nursery rhyme, and – shock, horror! – those who sing to their children prefer pop songs to nursery rhymes.
Well, even speaking as one who achieved 14 out of 15 correct answers in the Nursery Rhymes Trivia Quiz (http://www.rhymes.org.uk/nursery-rhyme-trivia-quiz.htm), good for you.
When I was young, pop songs sadly were uninvented, and the contemporary literature for pre-school children was minimal.
Today it’s a massive, high-quality industry. Choice is almost infinite, so why would any sane parent pick nursery rhymes?
OK, I shouldn’t generalise.
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There are several different types – lullabies, play and number rhymes, and so on.
But even these apparently harmless ones must sound pretty weird to today’s children.
‘Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man’; ‘I love sixpence; jolly, jolly sixpence; I love sixpence better than my life’. Oh dear! ‘Eeny, meeny, miney, mo; catch a ……’ – well, let’s not even go there.
Besides, I mean ‘real’ nursery rhymes, the ones allegedly about historical stuff.
They’re virtually all senseless, scary or sadistic, frequently all three, and utterly unfit for purpose.
Not surprisingly, for most weren’t originally composed for children at all.
They were more the equivalent of today’s football chants and drinking songs, as evidenced by their extraordinary language.
Where not simply bizarre, it seems calculated to offend every liberal cause imaginable: from child welfare to feminism, animal rights to penal reform.
Malnourished children live in conditions resembling those exaggeratedly recounted by Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen, their days ending by being “whipped soundly and sent to bed” (Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe).
Still, with boys being made out of “slugs, snails and puppy dogs’ tails”, their life prospects aren’t exactly great to begin with.
Girls too are worryingly built, from “sugar and spice and all things nice”, and directly one “spoils her nice new clothes” – possibly by bursting out of them due to her high body fat percentage – she earns another whipping (Little Polly Flinders).
Then as now, women and the elderly get the rough end of the stick, sometimes literally.
Judy receives “a blow in the eye” merely for fancying a piece of pie (Punch and Judy). Margery Daw is labelled a “dirty slut” for selling her bed and sleeping on straw.
And an old man is thrown down the stairs, left leg first, for not saying his prayers (Goosey, Goosey Gander).
Animals and birds receive pretty arbitrary treatment.
A cow jumps over the moon (Hey Diddle Diddle), but a weasel suffers the fate of another Monty Python character, Mr Creosote, exploding seemingly from an over-indulgence in cheap rice and treacle (Pop Goes the Weasel).
A frog in an opera hat goes a-wooing, with some success until he is suddenly gobbled up by “a lily white duck” (A Frog He Would A-wooing Go).
Cats get thrown down wells (Ding Dong Bell), and visually impaired mice are further victimised by having their tails docked (Three Blind Mice).
And of course numerous blackbirds are baked alive in pies purely for the amusement of the monarchy (Sing a Song of Sixpence) – although rough justice ensues here when one spirited bird pecks off the Queen’s nose.
This is an insane, class-ridden world permeated by motiveless violence – hardly the social values that ministers applaud in other contexts.
At which point I just know someone will say that I’m missing the whole essence of nursery rhymes: their half-concealed references to episodes in our great nation’s history, passed down through generations in a unique oral tradition.
Oh no, I’m not.
This defence is as desperate as the idea that this playground nonsense constitutes an important strand of our national literature.
Name me a single nursery rhyme that beyond reasonable doubt describes an historical event worth knowing about today, and that you’d want to explain to young children.
The purported evidence is thin, frequently modern, often contradictory, and sometimes simply crude.
Take Ring-a-Ring o’ Roses, which everyone knows refers to the Black Death and the circular red rashes that afflict bubonic plague sufferers before they sneeze themselves to death and “all fall down”.
Sorry, no.
Plague symptoms included fever, headaches, nausea, blood-tinged sputum, and swollen glands – but no rosy rashes.
Which is why early versions of the rhyme had no sneezing or falling down, and why the plague theory is less historic than I am.
It’s more likely just a circular playground game devised by children to circumvent 19th century religious dancing bans.
Is Goosie, Goosie Gander about the Reformation and a Catholic priest (gander) persecuted after being found hiding in a ‘priest-hole’ in a lady’s chamber?
Or a daddy-long-legs (‘old man’) persecuted by children pulling its legs off?
Or prostitutes (geese) spreading venereal disease? Which would your children fancy?
Lucy Locket and Kitty Fisher were prostitutes too – sorry, ‘courtesans’ – in 18th century London.
Lucy lost, or stopped servicing, a customer (‘her pocket’) who could no longer afford her.
Kitty Fisher, being either kinder or cheaper, was more obliging. Perhaps.
Then there’s Jack and Jill suspiciously fetching water by going uphill, rather than down.
Is that the French Revolution, with Louis XVI losing both his crown and head, and Marie Antoinette’s head tumbling soon after?
Or just some youth called Jack losing his virginity?
And Humpty Dumpty – a powerful, but evidently fragile, cannon used by the Royalists in Colchester during the English Civil War that fell, irreparably, off a church tower?
Or is the falling egg some unfortunate woman’s unwanted pregnancy?
And which Duke of York was notably grand, old and indecisive?
Prince Frederick, son of George III; or James II, son of Charles I?
And which Mary was so contrary? Mary I, daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon; Mary Queen of Scots; or even the Virgin Mary?
And were the 24 baked blackbirds real birds, bird-shaped clay whistles baked into the pastry, or metaphors for the concealed deeds of some of Henry VIII’s dissolved monasteries?
No one knows for sure, and no one cares.
Let’s see Humpty dumped, along with the rest of his ghastly nursery rhyme chums.
Our two-year-olds need and deserve better.
* Chris Game is a lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham