Training | 2009.10.23
Get off of my tuffet, Muffet | John Harris
I can\'t lament the demise of nursery rhymes when my three-year-old sings rock\'n\'roll classics instead
Not that many people have noticed its decline, but a once-immovable part of our national life seems to be finally on its way out. And there it goes: a whole cast of characters, herded towards the cultural knacker\'s yard like the cast of a geriatric Toy Story: Humpty Dumpty, Goosey Goosey Gander, the Grand Old Duke of York, Jack and Jill, a handful of mangy-looking black sheep and poor old Little Miss Muffet, clinging fretfully to her "tuffet".
Last week, a survey by the reading charity Booktrust decisively revealed the tragic fate of our old friend the nursery rhyme . Of 2,500 parents, only 36% regularly used such folk poetry with their kids, and over 20% said they never bothered at all. Among younger parents, things were even worse: 33% of mums and dads aged between 16 and 24 reckoned nursery rhymes were "too old-fashioned" to interest their offspring,and 20% of the same cohort questioned their educational value. Somewhat predictably, there was also a gender fault-line within the research: whereas, for example, 78% of women knew all the words to Incy Wincy Spider , the figure among men was a miserable 45%. Shame!
There are, of course, a fair few people who have decided to keep the old-school model of British childhood alive, via Cath Kidston fabrics, repro doll\'s houses, limited access to television, and daily recitals of Ring a Ring o\' Roses . They have presumably been cheered up by this newspaper\'s free booklets of fairytales , and may yet find their spirits even more lifted by the arrival of a Tory government (the avowedly traditionalist shadow education secretary, Michael Gove, I would imagine, could do the Incy-Wincy thing as a matter of instant recall).
For the rest of us, however, mention of nursery rhymes will be enough to bring on at least a twinge of generational guilt – for whereas we were raised on the canon, and were at least dimly aware of the roots of some rhymes in the more turbulent bits of British history, we have failed to pass most of them on.
For that, we can surely blame – or thank – 60 years of rock\'n\'roll, and the great irreverent hurricane that is pop culture. Thanks to his grandparents and the staff of the local nursery school, my three-year-old son can do a mean Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star (according to the Booktrust research, the nation\'s favourite childhood classic) and, in the right company, joins in enthusiastically with Humpty Dumpty. I\'m not sure they count as nursery rhymes, but he can also be persuaded to have a go at The Wheels On The Bus and If You\'re Happy And You Know It. But on the whole, the part of his mind that would once have been filled by such orthodox material brims with rather different stuff.
His favourite song, for now, is The Beatles\' I Am The Walrus. Six months ago he managed the whole of the same group\'s Paperback Writer, with its lines about the Daily Mail and the principal character\'s "clinging wife". In the last few weeks, with absolutely no encouragement from me, he has become obsessive about Kraftwerk\'s Autobahn, Alphabeat\'s Fascination, and The Beastie Boys\' Hey Ladies. A straw poll of my child-rearing peers threw up a few other modern toddler-faves: The Jackson 5\'s ABC, Elvis\'s version of Mystery Train – and, for some reason, Razorlight\'s 2006 hit America.
Kidston-Goveists will doubtless think of all this as the very essence of postmodern degeneracy, but I\'m not having any of that. Is it worse to be singing pop songs, or rhymes about war, plague, social strife and worse, replete with the tangle of deference and prejudice that often lies behind them? One thinks, for example, of the aforementioned Goosey Goosey Gander , and its sadistic pay-off: "There I met an old man who wouldn\'t say his prayers / So I took him by the left leg and threw him down the stairs." Like a nice traditional British toddler, I parroted those lines well into my primary school years, though as proved by two minutes of online research, they were written as a celebration of duffing up Catholics, and infirm ones at that. "Too old fashioned"? I\'d say so.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]/humpty-dumpty-children-rhymes
