When the dog dies
The field of country music is ripe for parody. It follows such well-trodden paths that a keen observer can anticipate the development of a song never previously heard. The death of the dog, the lover who leaves, ruination of the crops and a Daddy who warns you not to come around are only the big familiar plot elements.
Try this cloze exercise: ‘When you left, I thought I’d lose my .........’. Glasses? Keys? Place in the queue?
How about this one: ‘Well it’s rainin’ down in Houston/ And I got .........in both my shoes’. Wine? Spiders? Small flowering shrubs?
Or: ‘Nights like these were made for .........’. Backgammon? Sleeping? Watching a documentary about the rise of fascism?
Or: ‘That’s how a cowgirl breaks a young man’s .........’. Toaster? Fibula? Portable Global Positioning System?*
Country music doesn’t work in this predictable way because the writers have run out of ideas (although that possibility should not be ruled out). It works as a genre, and the writers accept the conditions of the genre. They agree to use a limited palette of colours, to restrict themselves to familiar language and themes. It is variation within the restrictions that gives a particular song its life and originality—finding a new way to mourn the dog or lament the loss of a lover.
Much writing works like this. The sonnet, the crime or romance novel and the traditional short story work because writers accept a set of restrictions and find a way to go beyond them, to say something fresh and engaging.
The risk with the limitations of a genre arise when it stops being a means for saying something new; when writers are no longer able to invest cliches with dignity, ideas, emotion and meaning; when the dog dies and nobody cares. There are lots of genres which have lost their power—the epithalamion is not much written these days, the epic is rare in contemporary literature and beat poetry seems to have lost its original fire.
Curriculum writing is also a genre, and as much subject to limitations and restrictions as other genres. But the restrictions that apply to curriculum writing do not arise from aesthetic reasons. They come from two sources—its purposes, and the unspoken agreements about what can and can’t be said in a curriculum statement.
Unspoken agreements are powerful in the field of curriculum. Most contemporary curriculum writing is as familiar and routine as any collection of country songs. An alert reader, familiar with curriculum writing, will be able to construct a set of cloze exercises like those above, with the same awful predictability, and without the flashes of linguistic inventiveness that enliven country music. The dog has died, and no one has noticed. Curriculum writing is like every other genre—people will only keep listening if the old ideas feel new again, if they are touched by what we say. We need a new way of writing about what young people learn, a new interpretation of the curriculum genre which is as rich, lively and engaging as the best country music, which has an intellectual and emotional power that almost no curriculum writing now has.
* For those who are not familiar with country music, the answers are respectively ‘mind’, ‘holes’, ‘love’ and ‘heart’. The examples come from actual songs
Bruce Wilson
topEQ Winter 2003 © Curriculum Corporation