Blind alleys

Discussion with friend the other day: blind alleys, the value of, how we prize getting side-tracked in the library by something one hadn’t gone in there to find, or at home by taking down on impulse some book one hasn’t read for years, or ever, and settling to read it. In our version of the intellectual life (if we can pretentiously so dignify it) there has to be an oscillation between focused and specific study on the one hand and browsing on the other. Just as a species stays vigorous by mixing and breeding outside the family circle, and people stay interesting by the range of conversations and encounters they let themselves in for, so the way we think needs constant, unprespecified stimulus by what we find up ‘blind alleys’.

Blind alleys look blind because we can’t when we enter them see any way out that connects with where we ‘should’ be going. And indeed there may be no connection, or it may be years before we see one. We go up blind alleys when we ‘should’ be doing something else -- something on our to-do list (or, more likely, these days, on someone else’s to-do list they kindly maintain for us). Think of everything you need to do, write it down on a list -- then heed any strong impulse to do something else completely, something that presents itself as exactly what your soul needs you to do at the moment. I think our instinct for what alleys are worth going up gets pretty reliable with experience.

Giving in to such impulses may make us less productive in terms of turning out articles and getting our marking done for deadlines, but I think it makes us in certain respects better teachers and researchers, as well as more interesting people, because of the range of reference we can bring. We can draw on a rich and unique tissue of semiotic connections; everything has more connections in our minds.

A colleague’s son found school physics boring because the teacher knew only the syllabus and then found university physics inspiring because the teacher made links to the whole universe of knowledge and ideas that he knew about in his/her bones.

We were in Vienna for the history of education strand of a conference -- so went off on a blind alley that had nothing to do with education or with the supposed purpose of our stay; we spent a day investigating ‘Red Vienna’, the public housing schemes built under the socialist city government of the 1920s and early 1930s, the most famous of which was Karl Marx-Hof.






But of course Rotes Wien wasn’t in the end unrelated to our ‘real’ business, which was the teaching of English in the post-war years in a Labour London that was building its own new housing -- into which many of the pupils we’re now interviewing as older adults moved with their families. On the fourth year English curriculum at Walworth (Comprehensive) School in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, public housing was a topic for writing, reading and discussion -- and Simon Clements, one of the instigating teachers, had been going to be an architect. What animated some key English teachers of the 1950s was a similar spirit to that of the Vienna architects and planners of the previous post-war period.

In Saturday’s Guardian (p.12) physicists express their worry that the freedom they prize to explore blind alleys, a liberty to which they attribute many of the great discoveries of British science, is under threat from a government requirement that to get funding research projects must be likely to benefit the economy. ‘The university’s role of pulling in and nurturing deep thinkers will be sidelined in favour of people who can turn profit by making better widgets’. Moreover, recruitment will suffer because current students went in for physics ‘because they wanted to do pure knowledge and curiosity-driven work...’ (survey quoted) -- and such pursuits require permission precisely to pursue curiosity.

It goes without saying that the same goes for the humanities and social science.

The death and revival of intellectual curiosity

I was thinking this morning - I’ve already forgotten why: I think my education killed my intellectual curiosity.

I'm aware of this through comparing myself over a whole adult lifetime with my friend X who came from a working-class family with no history of education beyond elementary school and who attended the local grammar schools and London University. I went to a posh, three-quarters private grammar school (Bradford Grammar, a ‘direct grant’ school) and Oxford. Because I was considered a clever pupil, in the way of that school I was directed at 12, when we specialised, into the most moribund and intellectually dead subject, Latin and Greek classics, which I exchanged for English – not much better -- only in my second year of university.

X always saw himself as being in a social class and a particular social location and his ‘project’ was always to understand the situation of his class and himself. When I from time to time happened to mention in an off-hand way some particular state or condition I'd identified in myself (medical, psychological, social) he’d be saying, ‘Bloody hell, if that was me I'd be reading everything I could lay my hands on about it.’

That wasn’t my response. I basically didn’t believe in understanding, outside physical science. I'd had learning piled on me right through my childhood and only occasionally (and never in the classics) felt it revealed anything of how the world worked. I had no trust in explanations. X’s academic work was to construct people’s life stories, identify their informing themes and trajectories. I never believed in them and thought they were just stories. I could never tell my own biography as a coherent narrative that made sense. For anything I could say about myself, I could find something opposite that was equally true.

The same has been my experience in any attempts I've made at historical work. I despair at giving any account that’s true above the level of the particular event: I find no convincing ‘causes’ or overall narratives.

For a time I did find sociological explanations credible and exciting, as a result of hearing lectures by Basil Bernstein, Brian Davies, John Hayes and Michael Young at the London Institute of Education: sociology, at last, seemed to be a discipline that could show the hidden workings of society. Increasingly, though, I ceased to be convinced that the structures they described were really there; I failed to detect them close-up in my experience of social reality, in the social transactions I was part of and observed; they seemed more like loose-fitting nets thrown over society and missing all the real diversity.

Although I don’t find sociology’s big stories compelling, or X’s tidy narratives of himself and others, I believe I did regain my intellectual curiosity, after university, through working in a school with intellectually lively colleagues and preparing topics to teach comprehensive school kids in an accessible but academically respectable manner. But I almost had to learn intellectual curiosity again, from scratch, deliberately. I'd find my thoughts and attention engaged by something I had to teach and would tell myself, ‘I could take the initiative and find out about this, I could make this an intellectual pursuit. I could learn for myself.’ Then I'd get the books and read them. I learned again what I think I knew when I was young, that I could pursue interests through inquiry, for myself, and I was able to apply to my own ends the facility with reading and study that I'd acquired from my education.

Thus my curiosity eventually revived, snatched late in the day from the jaws of education.