Poetry In The Making: fifty years old

Ted Hughesʼs influential book on poetry writing for teachers and school pupils 'Poetry In The Making' is 50 years old this year. But over that period, the education system of the UK has been transformed from one where ʻteachers decided both the content of the school curriculum and how it would be taught,ʼ to the present system in which, ʻa host of external influences dictates the nature of the educational experience….So that those claiming to reform education now focus on measurable outcomes and the answerability of schools to parental and government pressure.ʼ Or, as Roy Lowe has asserted in the subtitle to the book from which the two short quotations above were taken: ʻteachers lost control of the classroomʼ.