How does Half Past Two and Leaving School communicate their different views on education?

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 How does Half Past Two and Leaving School communicate their different views on education?                

Karel Kumar 11s11th March 2003.

The two poems I will compare have been written by two different poets, who have very different views and experiences on the education system. Throughout this essay I shall try to bring across their different ideas and how these ideas are shown in two poems, “Half-Past Two” by U A Fanthorpe and “Leaving School” by Hugo Williams.

Leaving school is about an eight year old boy, who has been sent off to boarding school, he finds it hard to re adjust to a military like environment where children are obedient, smart and have a timetable to adhere to. He comes from a small primary school; he is not particularly smart and finds the work he is set very hard. Later on in the poem he feels rather homesick, he misses his family and friends, he begins to forget to “put on the right shoes” for example and “I forgot how to get undressed”; when someone, especially a young boy, is left without the comfort of his family, he can begin to forget simple things, such as how to tie his shoe laces. At the end of the poem our young scholar finds himself running away from school, this however is only in his mind, not in reality. This poem could be a reflection of Hugo William’s life, the boy in this story could be him, going to a boarding school is a scary ordeal. Perhaps he wanted to channel some of his sadness into this poem.

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Half-past Two is about a very young boy, perhaps in his first years of school. This boy crucially does not know the time, which is theme of this poem, he has done “Something Very Wrong”, we are not told what exactly, and he is punished to wait for her till Half-Past Two. His ideas of time are for example “Gettinguptime”, “Timeformykisstime”, and of course “Tvtime”. As he begins to wait for her he slowly slips into a section of time he has never encountered before.  He waits for her and once she comes he is saved as he now ...

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