Hi Alison, long time since we spoke - if you call this thing speaking.

Agree with what you say actually, especially the Dr. Seuss thing, but  
I don't think that is what Peter was referring to, or me. Two things  
though...
You mention the fact that, "there are always going to be people who  
are just not
interested in poetry, no matter what acrobatics one performs,
including, sadly, many teachers"
- however, 'interested' is exactly what teachers are supposed to be,  
or to act out at least. A teacher, particularly a primary teacher (I  
was one for too long) has to teach all kinds of subjects, whatever  
their personal favourites or dislikes etc, and I don't see why the  
teaching of poetry should be any different to Maths or science or  
whatever, not in that sense anyway.

Secondly, your point about the good teacher who tells the class that  
if anyone is not interested they can drop out. Oh if only. Such an  
anarchist inclined thing has been anathema to the system here for  
years and years now, and that happened even before the first inklings  
of the National Curriculum, let alone by the time of the 90's when the  
reactionary formalist sods got their ways again, supported by New  
Labour and the Guardian, and turned our schools once more into tedious  
fact factories but with the added burden of endless tests and  
psychotic checks on 'progress' with children no longer trusted to  
learn and teachers no longer trusted to teach. And as I said, even  
before that, before the NC, any teacher within the state system who  
took such an approach as your example was committing professional  
suicide. The speed with which the radical child-centered ideas of the  
late 60's/early 70's fossilized into a compromised bourgeois ideology  
was extraordinary. What was happening in reality, underneath the  
disguise of a bogus child-centered ideology, was an increasing  
programme of authority-led prescription that made things look as  
though things were being done one way when in fact they were being  
done another way - hence the obsession with the way things 'looked'.  
It's a long and complicated story, and one which nobody has ever tried  
to tell - I might have if I hadn't got sidetracked by poetry.

Cheers
Tim