Education needs to be long

In order to flourish, some people need to continue in education beyond 18, but the education that group needs is often neither of the alternatives on offer in England: vocational, for trades or professions, and academic, for induction into university disciplines.

A case in point. In Canada I was able to take over and run for ten years an undergraduate course in which I had considerable freedom. It wasn’t a required element for qualifying in my department’s discipline of linguistics and it was taken by students from a variety of programmes, from second year to fourth. The course was called ‘Writing: Theory and Practice’. You could summarise it as Writing: What it is, how it’s done, what it does, how it’s learned.

Though elementary school teachers on day release from local schools had been the original intended clientele, they had (thankfully for me) stopped being released and no longer attended in any numbers; instead, regular undergraduates flocked in -- a far more appealing group to work with. Gearing the course primarily to the teaching of children in classrooms no longer seemed appropriate so while retaining the material on research into the writing process, together with theories of writing, I tried to make it relevant to students studying university disciplines and, above all, to enable students to understand and extend their own writing, and realise how writing can be a means of making ideas come and getting thoughts into order. That is, to experience the heuristic function of writing.

I devised occasions and tasks that would get the students writing in a variety of genres. Some students claimed at the end that this had resulted in their papers/essays in their other courses improving, while some discovered a talent for short stories. Most significant, I think, was my encouragement of the regular production of unspecialised informal writing on the content of the readings and lectures. Such productions are often called logs or journals but what I was after was something more intellectual and more intelligent than the familiar work that comes under those labels, having had a bellyful of the usual wordy and self-indulgently expressive gush in too many summer courses. I was after ideas and thought.

Some found this sort of writing liberating and claimed it was their first experience of doing writing into which their thoughts could flow. It seemed to accompany an intellectual awakening, a broadening of vision beyond disciplinary boundaries and a taking hold of education as something one was doing for oneself -- though I realise it’s easy to claim too much and there was no proper evaluation.

This relatively unregulated writing, while it had its moments of sparky perceptiveness and rhetorical brio, was not what anyone would call ‘good writing’. It was, however, good mental activity and educationally valid in that students began to learn to connect their writing to their minds. The experience started to make writing an intellectual resource -- with effects, too, I thought, on how the students read the prescribed texts.

As tends to happen with me, I found that I continued to have contact with students who’d proved particularly interesting or on a roll, the ones (by no means all) for which this sort of course was just right at this point in their education. It was right because of those features that made it not a conventional university course, though I’d claim it was just as intellectually demanding. What it didn’t do is teach people how to write the approved political science or English Literature or psychology essay.

One student for whom the course apparently worked went on to take one or two graduate courses, having time on his hands over the summer. One was taken by a professor (North American usage: = any sort of university teacher) for whom I had great liking and respect, as did his students who had a good time with him and learned a lot. Having flourished throughout the course with my colleague, this student did his final assignment which was predictably lively and personal -- along the lines I’d been hospitable to -- but got back, along with an appreciation of the thinking, an adverse comment on the writing: observance of conventions, referencing, marshalling of evidence and arguments. All absolutely valid points to pick up in a graduate course -- but baffling to the student who legitimately asked, though not to the teacher and perhaps not explicitly to himself: ‘Who but a specialist in a discipline, which I'm not trying to be, would care about such stuff? what matters is the ideas and the thinking I do around them. I'm not submitting an article to an academic journal.’

The prof did his job superbly, to teach a Masters level course in Applied Language Studies. The young man, though, was into getting a broad education, and developing as someone who could use writing to further his thinking and learning. As someone for whom the world of ideas with its vistas and excitements was just opening up, he was back with the sort of mismatch that had characterised his experience in all his academic courses: they simply weren’t what was needed by a mind developing as his was after emerging from a narrow high school curriculum and needed, above all, free play in the domain of ideas and knowledge. The suggestion that he conform to academic writing standards was simply irrelevant to someone who was a way off from even contemplating a higher degree of the sort the course was located in -- though he found the ideas and texts in the course stimulating and mind-enhancing.

There thus needs to be a way for young men and women who leave high school -- and indeed, in England, who leave year 9 or 10 (at 13 or 14) -- to do something that is not a disciplinary induction and socialisation but yet is rich in ideas and knowledge. Does such an education anywhere exist?

Ted Hughes' Letters

I had three good English teachers. The rest were awful, as were perhaps half of the teachers at that posh grammar school. One thing the best did was read the latest stuff, bring it in, read bits to us and make sure it was in the library. I remember being introduced by Neville Newhouse and Dr Oxley to Sartre’s Roads to Freedom trilogy, Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy and Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders. Iris Murdoch too, I think.

If I was that sort of teacher now – which I'd want to be -- I'd be going to town on Letters of Ted Hughes, selected and edited by Christopher Reid, Faber, 756pp, £30 and worth every penny. For those who mainly associate Hughes with Sylvia Plath’s suicide, you get his side of the story, very convincingly, but for me that was a minor interest. (If you’re teaching Plath you’ll need to read the relevant letters.) If you know and like his poetry there’s a mass of stuff about his writing of it; if you don’t know his poetry, you’ll want to after reading the letters.

The stuff about his wild boyhood is fascinating (these are letters that include long, long chunks of what could have gone into his autobiography): having vast stretches of fields and woods completely to himself and his brother, apart from the farmers who adopted him, round first Mytholmroyd, then Mexborough, shooting, trapping and fishing.

Gerald, Olwen and Ted Hughes, late 1940s

There’s lots about his relationships with wild animals: they stood for anything that was untouched by culture, which he experienced as restrictive; he tackles head-on the fact that he killed so many of them. Hughes comes across as sympathetic and, unexpectedly for me, funny and playful – some letters are hilarious. He’s also strange: serious believer in astrology and Robert Graves’ theories about the Muse (key book, The White Goddess). Terrific stuff about Shakespeare; Hughes knew several plays by heart (and Yeats’ collected poems).

What would I do with the book as an English teacher?

(1) I'd read passages with the whole class and get them to talk about them. (Older groups, that is: Y10 upwards. I might give entire long letters to sixth formers to read for homework. But there are also lovely passages about animals, and fishing, that younger students would enjoy.)

(One particular long letter is that to Anne-Lorraine Bujon, starting p621, an account of his development as a poem. It would go better with students who have read a fair bit of Hughes’s poetry, but even without it’s interesting as a poet describing what he had felt he had to do and why at different stages.)

(2) Copy different chunks and give to groups: read this & prepare a presentation that will get the class talking.

Through what I got them to read I would want to convey a sense of what it’s like to be a poet (or at any rate one sort of poet); what poetry is (one version); and what it’s like to be swept away by literature and poetry as an adolescent. For the more academic students, you can track in the letters the stages of Hughes’ poetic development: when he achieved take-off, when he was stuck, false turnings, sterile periods and re-emergences, his own overall sense of his achievements and failures.

Many adolescents will sympathise with Hughes’ determination not to get a proper job and not to waste his life (as he saw it) performing conventional duties. (In the end he had to waste great tracks of time making a living – teaching, readings etc; other time he saw afterwards as a waste – writing prose, working on dramatic productions, farming.)


Hughes is interesting on the teaching of English. (He had a go in a secondary modern school and found the experience ‘salutary’.) He writes to Kenneth Baker, the Secretary of State for Education who introduced the National Curriculum, advocating the practice of memorising poetry and even prose (p546).

Here are a few selections:

University English Departments – the enemies of English

This is a great rant against English academics, 1950s to 1990s, and how they kill any creativity that students bring with them from school -- of which there is plenty, he knows.

The question is: Are university English departments any better now? Has the rot of spurious academicisation and denial of creativity in fact spread downwards, right through the secondary school? Seems to me school is now too often a hostile environment for young people who are seriously drawn to either reading or writing; if they pursue those needs, it's against the grain of English, not with it. Am I right?

Note: Hughes knew all about children's writing from his work as judge of the annual Daily Mirror Children's Writing Competition. Brian Cox wrote the Cox Report on the proposed National Curriculum for English.