Edexcel GCSE English Language: Paper 2 Q7(b): Comparison

Text 1 — from Reflections on the City, by the (fictional) writer Augusta Vane, 1862. The writer gives her view of London.

I am told I ought to find the city monstrous, and I cannot oblige. To stand upon the bridge at evening and watch the lamps come up along the water, one after another, like a sentence being written in light, is to feel that one is at the centre of the age. Here is every trade, every nation, every appetite, jostling within a mile. A man may dine on oysters and a woman sell watercress within a single street, and both are part of the same vast, breathing machine. I do not deny the smoke, nor the noise, nor the poverty that no honest eye can miss. But I would not trade this clamour for all the green silence of the shires. The country is where one waits for life to begin; the city is where it is already, gloriously, underway. Let others sigh for meadows. I will take the crowd, the lamplight, and the sense — found nowhere else — that something tremendous is always about to happen, and that I shall be there to see it. A great city is not a place. It is a promise, renewed each morning, that tomorrow need not resemble today.

Text 2 — from a (fictional) blog, Why I Left, by Connor Birtwhistle, 2021. The writer explains leaving the city.

For eleven years the city had me convinced it was the only place worth living, and for eleven years I was exhausted and did not notice. You do not notice, that is the trick of it. The noise becomes normal. The crowd that lets nobody in becomes normal. Paying half your wage for a room the size of a garage becomes normal. I told myself the buzz was worth it, right up until the morning I stood on a packed platform, pressed on all sides by strangers, and could not for the life of me remember the last time any of them had been kind to me, or I to them. So I left. I moved to a small town where the loudest thing at night is an owl, and where the woman in the shop knows my name and asks after my mother. People warned me I would be bored. They were wrong. It turns out what I had mistaken for excitement was mostly just adrenaline, and what I have found instead — quiet, space, time that belongs to me — is not boredom at all. It is the thing the city kept promising and never once delivered.

Compare how the writers of Text 1 and Text 2 present their ideas and perspectives about city life. Support your answer with detailed references to the texts. (14 marks)

Text 1 — from On the Education of Boys, by the (fictional) writer the Reverend Josiah Crale, 1858.

A boy is a vessel made for filling, and the schoolmaster's task is to fill him, by main force where persuasion will not serve. Sentiment is the enemy of learning. The child does not know what is good for him; if he did, he would not be a child. He must therefore be governed, his hours ordered for him, his idle questions set aside, and his lessons driven in by repetition until they are as fixed in him as his own name. The rod is not cruelty but kindness wearing a stern face, for the boy who is spared correction now will be broken by the world later, and will curse the gentleness that left him soft. I have taught for forty years, and I have never yet met the pupil who was harmed by discipline, though I have met a great many who were ruined by the want of it. Let the modern reformers prate of the child's nature. I prefer the child's future.

Text 2 — from a (fictional) magazine article, What School Forgot to Teach Me, by Priyanka Sethi, 2020.

The most important thing I ever learned at school, I learned by accident, in the ten minutes a teacher once spent simply asking what I thought. Everything else was delivered to me, a great conveyor belt of facts I was to memorise, repeat in an exam, and immediately forget. We were not, I think, being educated so much as processed. Nobody asked what lit us up; nobody had the time. And so the quietest, most curious children — the ones who might have become anything — learned the single quiet lesson the system teaches best: that their own questions did not matter, and that wonder was a thing to be done after the bell, if at all. I do not blame my teachers, who were drowning. I blame a machine built to produce results and not people. Children are not vessels to be filled. They are fires to be lit, and you do not light a fire by standing over it with a list of things it must memorise by Friday.

Compare how the writers of Text 1 and Text 2 present their ideas and perspectives about how children should be educated. Support your answer with detailed references to the texts. (14 marks)

Text 1 — from An Ascent of Scafell, by the (fictional) writer Reginald Frost, 1871. The writer describes climbing a mountain.

We set out before the sun and were rewarded for our discomfort beyond all deserving. There is a moment, near the summit, when the labouring body is forgotten and the spirit alone seems to climb. Below us the valleys lay drowned in white mist, from which the higher peaks rose like islands in a sea of cloud, and I confess I removed my hat, as a man does in a great cathedral. Here, I thought, is the proper school of the soul. The mountain asks everything of you and flatters nothing; it does not care for your rank or your purse; it returns you to yourself, scoured and humble and more alive than the comfortable man can ever know himself to be. We descended in silence, each of us, I think, a little altered. A day so spent is not a holiday but a sacrament, and I pity the man who passes his whole life upon the level ground and never once looks down upon the clouds.

Text 2 — from a (fictional) blog, I Hate Hiking and I Said What I Said, by Danielle Okafor, 2022.

Let me be the one person brave enough to say it: walking up a hill is not a spiritual experience. It is just walking, with the added insult of a gradient. I have been dragged up three mountains by enthusiastic friends, and each time I have arrived at the top cold, blistered, and unable to feel my own feelings, mostly because I could not feel my feet. Everyone else stands at the summit going on about the view and "finding themselves", and I am thinking about the flask of soup at the bottom and whether my socks will ever dry. And here is the thing nobody admits: the view is usually a cloud. You climb for four hours to look at the inside of some fog, take a photo for proof, and climb back down. Give me a warm cafe, a good book, and a window, and you can keep your sacred summits. The only thing I have ever found at the top of a mountain is the strong desire to be at the bottom of it.

Compare how the writers of Text 1 and Text 2 present their ideas and perspectives about climbing mountains. Support your answer with detailed references to the texts. (14 marks)