It’s true – ask anyone from the 1570s what the big news of the day was and they’ll tell you it was Sir Walter Raleigh crawling round Camden on his hands and knees all shitfaced on Ketamine with a crazy Marge Simpson wig balanced precariously on top of his head. That’s why Amy Winehouse and Sir Walter Raleigh are so alike.

Oh, and also there’s a Cambridge University English paper asking students to compare Amy Winehouse’s lyrics to As You Came from the Holy Land by Sir Walter Raleigh. Students, here’s a clue – the one that breaks off in the middle to shout “Blakey! My BLAAAAAAAKE!” at nobody in particular probably isn’t Sir Walter Raleigh.

This is turning out to be quite a good week for rock stars in education. First Paul McCartney gets given a Yale doctorate because he wrote Yellow Submarine, and now it turns out that Cambridge University – one of the most prestigious centres of education in the country – is testing its students on what they think of Amy Winehouse.

We should probably point out that the Cambridge exam isn’t about what students think of Amy Winehouse as a person, because if that were the case then anyone who could write ‘Jesus Christ my eyes my eyes no my eyes oh God no’ would end up with first class honours. Instead it’s about Amy Winehouse’s lyrics.

Yes, Amy Winehouse does have lyrics. If you’ve seen Amy Winehouse perform live over the last 12 months you might just think that she just freestyles the sound of a cat getting its tail caught in a waste disposal unit over a Bontempi keyboard’s ‘horn-drenched retro soul’ preset, but you’re wrong.

Amy Winehouse has won Ivor Novello awards and Grammys and Brit awards all over the shop – and if a smug group of self-interested culturally bankrupt music industry insiders think she’s decent, then why shouldn’t the British educational system? BBC News explains in greater detail:

English students at Cambridge University have been asked to analyse lyrics by singer Amy Winehouse in a final-year exam. They were told to compare Winehouse’s Love is a Losing Game to songs by Bob Dylan, Billie Holiday and 16th century explorer Sir Walter Raleigh. They were asked to contrast aspects of the pop song with Bob Dylan’s Boots Of Spanish Leather, Billie Holiday’s Fine And Mellow and Sir Walter Raleigh’s As You Came from the Holy Land in an examination question.

It’s actually quite a hard task for the students to carry out. Firstly, you’ve got As You Came from the Holy Land by Sir Walter Raleigh – a stirring 16th century poem structured as a dialogue between a fearful lover and a pilgrim; and then you’ve got Love Is A Losing Game by Amy Winehouse – which is Amy Winehouse being all sad because she got hammered on crack and her boyfriend scarpered because he was probably scared of getting herpes. Or something. Easy.

But just because Amy Winehouse is figuring in Cambridge exams, it doesn’t mean that the standard of education in this country is dropping – if that was the truth then our recently completed 60,000 word PhD thesis entitled Chico Out Of X Factor: Haha He Did A Song With Some Kids And Everyone Danced LOL! wouldn’t be worth the paper it was written on.