ABSTRACT
‘Education is not filling a bucket but lighting a fire’ said W. B. Yeats and most English teachers would agree with him in principle, if not always in practice. The reason for this practical qualification, of course, is that educational legislators over recent years seem to have been far more concerned with emphasising ‘bucket filling’ in schools and telling teachers what should and should not go into the bucket than with safeguarding and developing the inspirational. Perhaps this is inevitable, in that it is far easier to legislate for the tangible, but it sometimes seems as if counting and measuring the components of the curriculum have endangered our sight of the whole process and its purposes. The ‘Standards’ may themselves be regarded as one more example of this preoccupation. It is likely to be in the broad field of ‘literature’ teaching (we shall return to the contentious nature of what exactly constitutes literature) that the inspirational aspects of English teaching are likely to be most keenly felt and it is here that the philosophical distinction alluded to by Yeats often may be transformed into a struggle for supremacy.
