Childhood in suburb and city

The town I live in is a Victorian suburb that owes its existence to the railway line into Waterloo. This morning being springlike (birdsong, flowering trees, no leaves yet) I walked down to the river thinking how pleasant it was. One road was lined with 1930s semis which, though of unusual design, reminded me of where I lived in Bradford to the age of 12. The district was called Great Horton by the Post Office though it was on a plateau looking down on Great Horton, on what had recently been fields between the top of the slope and the old village of Wibsey. So Wibsey Infants was my first school, Horton Bank Top Junior my second. Where we lived was a 1930s lower middle class suburb of semis -- acres of them, all privately owned. Apart from the occasional doctor or dentist the highest status occupants were browbeaten teachers.

So, not posh--not the jasmined and aubretiaed fairy land with detached houses ‘Ewbank’d inside and Atco’d out’ and with roads lined with cherry trees described by J.M. Richards in Castles on the Ground of 1946. Still true suburb nevertheless from which all men disappeared into town by the morning bus or tram and archetypal in its monotony of low buildings and wide, underused roads with grass verges. The gardens were small; big enough for a privet hedge, small lawn and the odd laburnum but nothing like the landscaped grounds of more upmarket suburbs on the road to Ilkley near Harry Ramsdens. There was little call for Atcos.

Moore Avenue, though now I look they seem to be groups of three, not semis. 

In this world which seemed short of children of my own age the play was desultory among the bland, underpopulated spaces. To either village on foot was a long and boring drag. The only excitement was the leftover wild patch of Moor Fields on the edge of our plateau, and there at about age 8 a critical mass of boys was to be found ready for building dens and starting fires.

Widdy's house (on the left) from Moore Avenue where it goes down steeply to Great Horton Road.  Now those are semis. The front of Widdy's house looked onto Moor Fields.  Kenneth Widdowson was my best friend but we went to different secondary schools and I don't know what became of him.

There was also a quite unsuburban edge of dangerous reality: an unprotected quarry edge, with a path to one side down a less steep slope, at the bottom of which was the quarry (disused, with pools) and beyond that The Slums, packed Victorian terraces blackened with the smoke that poured from the chimneys of houses and mills. And here lived the Quarry Gang who we'd have called feral if we'd know the word. We occasionally caught glimpses of them careering about the spoil heaps in the quarry or converging up the separate cobbled streets under the gas lights. They may have even ventured up the slope onto our territory, causing us to flee into the snickets between the blocks of semis.

Great Horton from Moor Fields.  The grass is where the quarry has now been filled in and the slums (terraces with stone roofs, outside lavatories, one cold tap) are long gone and replaced.  All the buildings were as black as that church, including the giant Lister's Mill in the distance, above where we moved when I was 12.

The contrast between the classic working-class life of those kids and my own was brought to mind earlier this morning by reading the transcript of one of our research interviews. A former pupil of Walworth, from a peaceful and stable working-class home, refers to friends who often came to the sanctuary of his house from unhappier lives that were troubled by neglect and violence. Children growing up in that area knew things that I never did. Our play reflected our reality, bland, innocent and cocooned. They lived among men whose work, mainly manual, was nearby and visible, and some of whom got drunk, spent the housekeeping money, fought and beat their wives. None of those features entered my childhood. I never saw adults fighting or even seriously arguing, or drunk except when we came out of the Cosy Cinema on Wibsey from an evening show, hastening out of the village to safety on the boring 1930s Moore Avenue with its sodium lights and reassuring Tudorbethan frontages with lit windows showing placid family scenes.

What it means to be working-class

I thought Lynsey Hanley, as so often, hit the nail on the head:
The iron rule of being working class in today’s Guardian. She explains that for a kid to get on and get into the sort of education -- the sort of degree in the sort of university -- that will mean you’re on a steady £30,000 at 30 is these days a hopeless prospect. Hanley puts it in a way we seldom hear:

While in government, Labour consistently missed the point about the demoralising nature of low-paid insecure work, which, unless they are superhuman (as business and government demands of them) traps people in crisis-management mode: bills, debt, childcare, housing, on a rota of uncertainty. It may well be the case that flexible jobs are better than no jobs; the question is whether children whose parents are barely getting by can see a real and concrete route to a more comfortable life.

English and the ordinary

In his book Wordsworth and the Formation of English Studies (2003) Ian Reid argued that what we do, or until recently did, in school English had its origins in Wordsworth. Wordsworth, that is, rather than Matthew Arnold, as has often been claimed.

I felt a bit uncomfortable in acknowledging that there was truth in what Reid said since I've never felt much in sympathy with the Romantics. (Just lately I've begun to find Wordsworth both more interesting and more rewarding as a poet, not least thanks to Stephen Gill’s biography.)

Reid seemed to be right: even English at the London Institute of Education in the 1960s, emphasising as it did the importance of language in mental development and saying little about schools of literary study, owed more than a little, perhaps by way of F.R. Leavis, to Wordsworth and the Romantics. Parts of that Romantic heritage now look worth reasserting.

***
What triggered this posting is a coincidence of reading some Wordsworth and talking to a friend who’s been teaching the Welsh Board A Level Lit that allows the teacher to choose – freely, not from a list -- a group of thematically linked books for a big coursework assignment. This year Richard has had outstanding work from an unpromising group around the theme of Madness (with a feminist or gender edge) and the books Jane Eyre, Emily Dickinson’s poems, Syvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Ken Kesey’sOne Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, all works he values highly. When I heard that list, I found myself feeling uneasy, despite the scheme’s evident success. Something quite deep in my formation as an English teacher was objecting. So what I'm doing here is examining my reaction.


In the second, 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads (in which his contribution outweighed that of Coleridge) Wordsworth included what he claimed were innovative lyrics and ballads such as Simon Lee, Old Man Travelling, The Last of the Flock, The Old Cumberland Beggar, Goody Blake and Harry Gill and The Idiot Boy. According to Gill (pp.140-1) these were innovative in relation both to his earlier poetry and to popular works that were full of incident, sensation and colourful character (though doesn’t add that poetry of the type Wordsworth was promoting wasn’t lacking in the magazines of the time). Whereas his own poetry had in the past followed eighteenth century models in ‘work[ing] from the general to the particular’…. [t]he ‘figures and incidents’ serving identified abstractions such as ‘Truth’, ‘Justice’ or ‘Freedom’, ‘[the] new poems… originate in a particular observation of a figure or an incident and they concentrate on it intensely, as if depicting it in all its particularity will unveil its significance’ (quotes from Gill, p.140).

Those ‘figures and incidents’ were, moreover, ordinary, as Wordsworth saw it: regular, uneducated rural people doing and experiencing things (including economic and political oppression) that were part of normal life outside the cities. Part of his purpose was pedagogic, in a moral and political sense: the audience in whom he sought to ‘raise awareness’ was ‘the legislating, voting, rate-paying, opinion-forming middle class’, and ‘…what the reader’s awakened sensibility was asked to comprehend was the pathos, tragedy, or dignity inherent in the burbling of an idiot boy, in the gratitude of an enfeebled old man, or even in the shuffling gait of an old Cumberland beggar.’ It was necessary to look to unsophisticated people in their ‘natural’ (i.e. rural) state (in ‘”low and rustic life”’) to discern ‘”the primary laws of our nature”’ (188).

He had to explain this purpose in his Preface because readers ‘who had thrilled to fast-moving incident, machinery [of plot, presumably], and colour in translations of German ballads or in Gothic fiction such as Lewis’s The Monk’ would not understand the point of poems about ordinary characters and unsensational incidents. For Wordsworth, it represented a corruption of taste that readers’ emotional responses could be aroused only by striking incident (so that even Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner was open to objection). We should learn to be moved by the sort of ‘”human passions, human characters, and human incidents”’ that could be found in ordinary people and ordinary lives, and a job of poetry, beyond ‘”producing immediate pleasure”’, was to help to teach us: ‘Wordsworth could never have spoken of a purely literary act. For him poetry was a moral agent or it was nothing’ (189).

Wordsworth explains that, in Gill’s words, ‘[h]is work will be found unlike the poetry of the day…in language, in subject-matter, but above all in its tendency to disclose the quiet, the simple, the unregarded aspects of human nature. It is a poetry of discrimination, in which “the feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and situation and not the action and situation to the feeling.”’

By that he means, I imagine, that the situations engage us not because they are in themselves noteworthy but because they happen to characters with whom and to worlds in which we have, through the poetry, become involved. ‘”For the human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants.”’


NOW note the connections with the English taught in schools in the 1960s and 70s. The first was a pronounced favouring of ordinary life over exotic incident, of relations and transactions in the familiar urban neighbourhood rather than thrilling action and spectacular evil in the imagined worlds of detectives, spies, ghosts, pirates, space, boarding schools and stables.

Second, the point in addressing characters and situations from ordinary life was to observe them with some intensity so that ‘depicting [life] in all its particularity [would] unveil its significance’. Bad secondary modern textbooks of the 1950s contained scenes from ordinary (usually rural or small town life) [1], but in the children’s writing valued by the ‘New English’ of the grammar and comprehensive schools and in the favoured authors such as Lawrence the descriptions were so vivid as to appear charged with significance, suggesting a sort of transcendence in the way that descriptions of nature had in Wordsworth and still did in Laurie Lee, Ted Hughes and writing from progressive primary schools (Oxfordshire, Hertfordshire, the West Riding). You didn’t have to go to the worlds of heroes to escape banality: wonder and marvellousness was there all around you if you only looked.

Third, there was a moral and political agenda, and I think a decent and admirable one. In Southwark and Bermondsey, for instance, where I started teaching in Walworth School, the working class kids in the schools, were, many of them, like their families, quite simply ‘the salt of the earth’: honest, generous, warm, responsible, intelligent. (You can get the flavour of them from Tommy Steele’s terrific autobiography, Bermondsey Boy.) But nothing that was around for them to read reflected them and their lives. What they read from popular literature and saw on television related to worlds other than theirs and people unlike them and it could often be through an English teacher that they first encountered anything representing scenes that felt closer to home (even though they might be geographically distant, as in extracts from Sons and Lovers).

In English the lives they knew, including their own, could be their own subject-matter as writers and in writing about them they could confirm and reinforce a belief that the everyday qualities of people you knew embodied values that counted.

We don’t now use the term ‘virtue’ without embarrassment except in philosophical circles, but the concept is valid and necessary. Without being preachy, good teachers still teach virtue by setting examples, acting as models and creating a moral climate in which good qualities are valued. It seems right also that English should still, as literary education always did, induce reflection on virtue and promote it by representations in books; and, since we’re not educating Roman aristocrats or Renaissance princes, that the models should include admirable people and behaviour from ordinary life.

In fact one could argue the need is now all the greater since the qualities that make figures from popular culture into young people’s models often have little to do with virtue.

Certainly, the lives of ordinary people are now more widely and adequately represented than they were sixty years ago, in television and film as well as novels, but the need for working class school students to write themselves into a conviction of their own people’s worth is as pressing as ever. (The fact that the working class is now far more ethnically diverse doesn’t remove the issue but calls for a principled emphasis on those qualities that count as virtues in enlightened -- i.e. Enlightenment-derived -- philosophical traditions.)

So I still value books that confer dignity on ordinary lives and that teach children to find significance in the ordinary as well as the extreme and exotic, and to find pleasure and stimulation in depictions of regular existence – in relationships, settings, dialogue – and not just in action and incident, in ‘fast-moving incident, machinery, and colour’. For its espousal of those aims the ‘New English' of the 1960s retains my respect.

In university English studies, meanwhile, I rather get the impression that it’s been precisely ‘action and incident’, or at any rate ‘colour’, that’s been getting the attention: plot, in which Leavis showed little interest; the melodrama of Gothic; revenants, cyborgs and dopplegängers; the marginal and abnormal: madness, deviance... The ‘quiet, the simple, the unregarded aspects of human nature’ no longer get much of a look-in.

I've indicated why I think that loss could be unfortunate: it’s important that literature take interest and recognise value in the lives of people who are not rich, privileged or powerful.

But some considerations weigh the other way.

First, granting that it’s a good thing for literature and English to remind us of what’s admirable in the ordinary that’s under our noses, the qualities of ordinary people in their ordinary lives, we no longer have the equivalent of Wordsworth’s simple, good rustic existence to point to. The virtues no doubt still exist but no discrete group is their reservoir. The working class is criss-crossed with divisions of many kinds and everybody has influences and discourses flowing through them from all over the place, not least the global media and internet. You can’t now have a working class English curriculum that draws in the same unproblematic way for its moral exemplars on a single shared community and its values.

Second, what literature does an adolescent need? It’s still true, on the one hand, that Lawrence is worth reading, at least for me (I don’t know about today’s school students). Recently, impelled by something I read about him in the paper and curious to know how he’d read now after many years, finding I still had Sons and Lovers, I turned to a random page, started reading and found an hour had passed in complete absorption. I was struck by how real, how vivid, how definite and specific the people and relationships were, and how clear Lawrence was about what being a strong woman meant in terms of her responses, initiatives, offerings and refusals. That and the electric tension in the dialogue. In fact, the dialogue and, more generally, the drama, were what made the book a terrific read.

That can’t be said, on the other hand, about much that’s been written about growing up in working class communities. The prose is often drab, the world evoked banal and petty – and unexciting for both students and me. Sometimes, reading such stuff, I feel a terror of ever being trapped inside such petty, restricted, claustrophobically local worlds and long for a dose of Shakespearean kings, Byronic adventurers, Huckleberry Finns, Augie Marches (that’s Saul Bellow’s magnificent novel), little Oskars (The Tin Drum) and Midnight’s Children. The values behind Wordsworth-Lawrence-Leavis-Sillitoe-New English are Protestant -- and inclined to be dour. The books are short on comic exuberance. The carnivalesque humour and wildness of Shakespeare and Dickens has disappeared. The fecundity and richness of life manifested in Wordsworth’s natural world (though hardly his human one) and in English nature poetry generally aren’t mirrored in those accounts of mother getting ready to go out or father on his allotment: ‘from his pocket he drew the many-coloured seed packets…’ – who cares?

As a teenager I didn’t on the whole read the books Leavis would have wanted me to. Rather what I was after was precisely other worlds, worlds different from mine, those of Steinbeck, Iris Murdoch, Sartre’s France under occupation, Hemingway’s Spain, Holden Caulfield’s family-free adventure (including prostitute). It was a bit later that I read The Bell Jar and that was equally powerful. As for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I've read that for the first time in the last week and my friend is right: it’s a great novel, in the exuberant Huckleberry Finn, Catch 22, Saul Bellow tradition – and a terrific moral exemplar. I'd give that to adolescents with no hesitation. And be confident I was doing my job as an English teacher. (American Psycho still to go.)

Yes, these books explore experiences and situations outside the run-of-the-mill ordinary and so violate the pedagogic programme of Wordsworth and of aspects of 1960s English. But so they need to, even within the terms of English as a moral education, not simply because of the appeal to students of the extreme and outré but because knowing the human condition includes seeing it in extremity.

[1] Medway, P. (1990). Into the sixties: English and English society at a time of change. In I. Goodson & P. Medway (Eds.), Bringing English to Order: the history and politics of a school subject (pp. 1-46). London: Falmer.

Personal and positional authority

In interviewing former teachers about what English teaching was like in schools in the period from the end of the war to 1965 we’ve heard that in the 60s, if not earlier, there was a divide in approaches to teaching working class children.

This isn’t news, of course; it’s the divide to which the terms ‘traditional[ist]’ and ‘progressive’ have often been applied. It seems to have been real: while the first group favoured strict control over classroom behaviour, silence from pupils except when answering questions or reading aloud, the explicit teaching of grammar and, perhaps above all, an emphasis on correctness in written English (grammar, punctuation, spelling), the second believed that above all pupils should be encouraged to put their thoughts, observations and experiences into words, and thus become confident and articulate in speaking and writing; the best way to get language working in a motivated way (self-motivation -- i.e. interest -- was crucial) was to encourage discussion and writing about topics that engaged them; that often indicated topics from their own real lives.

The latter is the line that was promoted to graduate trainees on PGCE courses, first at the London Institute of Education (Britton, Rosen, Martin) and eventually nearly everywhere. But the argument put to us in some interviews is that it was middle class Institute graduates who as English teachers carried their respect for the language and culture of their working class pupils to the point where it placed in jeopardy the pupils’ chances of passing O Level and meeting employers’ expectations. Those who made this argument were non-graduate teachers of working class origin who had won their education and qualification the hard way and who wanted to give their own pupils what they needed to get on.

I was one of the Institute-trained graduate teachers to whom such criticisms might have applied. There is truth in them in that we did believe that an ability to express oneself in language -- to generate discourse, written and spoken, that used linguistic resources to good effect -- was more important initially than Standard English grammar and correct orthography. And if ‘initially’ meant ‘until they could express themselves effectively in language apart from the written conventions, that period might well not end until after the age (16) at which the public exams were sat.

According to linguistics, we maintained, no variety (dialect) of English is inherently better than another but only looks that way because of what it is used for and by whom -- for the communications of those who run things. We therefore regarded the imposition of standard grammar on non-standard-speaking working class pupils as, ultimately, class oppression, and O Level’s stress on grammar and spelling as an unjustified barrier to working class advancement into higher education and professional careers. (Hence we championed the proposed CSE -- Certificate of Secondary Education – which we saw as both more permissive in respect of conventional requirements and more reliable in terms of sampling candidates’ general written abilities.) Maintaining these beliefs was, I still think, more or less right in principle: if English teachers weren’t going to oppose the stupidity of the old O Level -- which had to be seen to be believed -- who would? We may, though, have put them into practice without enough thought for the consequences.

Some brilliant English teaching was achieved by both camps, and teachers from both retain to this day the respect and gratitude of former pupils, as we’re also finding in our study. The practices of each were sometimes caricatured by the others; good teachers from both sides got good exam results. The traditionalists made reluctant and lazy kids work; the progressives sometimes got them interested enough to choose to work under their own steam; both sides failed with many kids who just didn’t want any of it. It’s also true, though, that students who were engaged by each type of teaching got a different education out of it – but that’s a story for another time.

Was it caricature when they said we were experimenting with working class kids, in a way we couldn’t have got away with in middle class grammar schools? Perhaps; but experiment was badly needed. The men and women who trained us at the Institute had themselves been pioneers in drawing attention to the resources and often the poetic beauty of working class speech and the qualities of children’s writing, and, a bit later (Rosen in particular) the way that it often fulfils functions of abstracting and theorising within its familiar frames of narrative and enactment. English teaching had never hitherto attempted to treat the qualities of vernacular language as a resource on which to build, and we needed to work out how to. Our experiments were about creating new possibilities for students to put their native intelligence and linguistic capacity to productive use, to the end of getting into both more analytic and more literary forms of discourse, and of coming to grips with school knowledge. We were pioneering forms of learning that were viable alternatives to just ‘being told’, and made to work, by a strict – if sometimes charismatic -- teacher.

But if we ask how many of our pupils in a working class school with hardly any ‘grammar school’ intake we got into that ‘more analytic and more literary forms of discourse’, we have to say, not many. But did the others do any better?

We Institute graduates, I believe, knew more about language. We saw more in the children’s language than those without that training, who often missed the qualities on which one could build, seeing only correctness or its absence, and perhaps a good word (‘Nice adjective!) or turn of phrase here or there. We got excited about what the kids were able to achieve in relatively informal genres of writing and in discussion -- perhaps so excited that we were apt to forget the huge gap that remained to be bridged between those achievements and the level and type of linguistic virtuosity, as well as conventional competence, that were demanded for higher education and professional employment.

But there was something else behind this split, and it went deeper. At some point on the PGCE I learned (from a Bernstein lecture?) a distinction between two types of authority, positional and personal. Positional authority derived from a person’s position, such as mother, grandmother, teacher, police officer – or, in relation to children, adult. Personal authority was accorded to a person on the basis of personal qualities. The working class non-graduate traditionalists I've been referring to tended to exercise positional authority: they may have cared for the students and liked them, but they expected the outward forms of respect and formal modes of address, and maintained a distance. This form of authority was held to be consistent with that found in typical working class families.

Some teachers like me had come from homes where authority was often more personal and, as we saw it, more humane and less demeaning. For my university-educated generation it went against the grain to make demands by right rather than negotiate and reason; we wanted pupils to go along with our regime because it was clearly reasonable. In our own grammar schools we’d experienced plenty of traditional authority exercised in a curriculum and pedagogy that often made little sense, and we’d had enough of it. We weren’t going to treat kids like that and didn’t want positional adult authority, though of course we often had to fall back on it. Culturally, too, we often felt closer to the kids than to our older colleagues – and in those days a high proportion of the teachers was a lot older.

To the argument of the traditionalists that working class children needed positional authority (showing respect etc) because that was what they were used to at home, our answer would have been that our duty was to liberate young people from unthinking obedience and teach them to make their own minds up. If they were to become rational, autonomous learners they had to be treated as such. That implied our starting from a position of initial respect for what they brought to school with them by way of language and values, though we knew that in the end it wasn’t enough. Better to begin that way than to tell them theirs was not to reason why but only to get on with learning what they were told, the reasons for which they’d appreciate later.

Our intellectual position seemed and seems quite strong, though what lay behind it was as much a generation’s sense of itself and its role in progress as a rationally worked-out principle. But I think, too, of Mr Twelves’s teaching (see my earlier posting, 5 January 2008 ), and of all those European biographies of poor boys who got into gymnasium or lycée and thrived on the beauty of abstract disciplines and of language far removed from that normally experienced.

Ernie Bevin and English

My scholarly productivity (i.e.publications) isn’t what it was but I've managed to get one thing together recently, for those who might be interested. It’s about Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary in the post-war Labour government, who left school at 11 and worked in succession as agricultural labourer, carter, leader of the TGWU and wartime Minister of Labour. The article asks how he managed to reach the highest level of government (where he was brilliant, by all accounts) with so little formal education—and draws implications for the ways we should think about education, and about English.

It’s called ‘The Groves of Academe and the 'edgerows of Experience’ and can be got (I hope) from

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a793161852~db=all~order=page

Sorry – I can’t get this Blogger software to do a link to long URLs.

The publishers require me to add the following:

Author Posting. (c) Peter Medway, 2008.
This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Peter Medway for personal use, not for redistribution.
The definitive version was published in Changing English, Volume 15 Issue 2, June 2008.
doi:10.1080/13586840802052146 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13586840802052146)