The crucial discovery

Reflecting on the post-war history of English teaching (my current research project) I've come up with this brief formulation of perhaps the most important thing that happened:

The content of English had been stuff and a skill: texts and grammar, writing well. Suddenly the discovery was made in the 1950s that the stuff didn’t all have to be imported and introduced from outside the pupils’ world; it could be what they already had, what they could bring in from their worlds. A minority of teachers learned how to work with this (the pupils' ‘experience’) through a newly intensified and protracted way of talking together (‘discussion’) so as to elicit spoken utterances from the pupils that had, at moments, the poetic intensity of the English and Scottish Ballads; and that this generativity in speech could in turn be redirected into the production of poetic written texts.

Two further points:

(1) The discovery was made not in one leap but gradually and in two or three stages. The elicitation of talk in a newly determined spirit and in a new direction--towards the pupils' experience--was developed first as a means of making the ‘stuff’--literature: class readers, literary extracts, poems--more accessible, and then (or perhaps at the same time in some classrooms) of provoking more thoughtful and more deeply felt writing. But it was ‘realised’ (imagined?) finally by some teachers that the pupil experience that was capable of being dealt with in this new way was itself ‘stuff’, a second stuff alongside literature that was potentially of equal value and importance.
Thus a new, more inventive way of pursuing the traditional elements of English--the literature side of the ‘stuff’ and the ‘skill’ of writing well--led to a transformation of the structure of English in two ways: a new stuff was added (in fact displacing the time that had been spent on grammar) and also a new ‘skill’ alongside writing well: talking well, orality, spoken production.

(2) What excited teachers was in part their sense of glimpsing the survival of something thought long lost, the voice of the people, the folk, in that least promising quarter, the ‘degraded’ urban working class--‘mass-media-corrupted’, ‘remote from their roots in the land’. Here in the run-down classrooms of shabby city schools it was as if there was an echo of the world as it had been before ‘disenchantment’ (the effect of print, Reformation and science), even though rationally, as De Certeau says (1984: 131), ‘We no longer believe, as Grundtvig (or Michelet) did, that, behind the doors of our cities, in the nearby distance of the countryside, there are vast poetic and “pagan” pastures where one can still hear songs, myths, and the spreading murmur of the folkelighed (a Danish word that cannot be translated: it means “what belongs to the people”). The poetry was still there, lying dormant in ‘ordinary people’ and waiting to be brought into the open, into speech and then writing, by primary school teachers and English teachers. It was what Charles Parker realised on listening carefully to the field recordings that he made in the 1960s and displayed to the public (not without some manipulation to remove ‘corruptions’) in his Radio Ballads of the 1960s.

Moor Fields and writing-- further

I said (previous Moor Fields posting) that I couldn’t agree with Harold Rosen that in writing about it I was ‘structuring my experience’ of playing on Moor Fields when I was 9. If I was structuring anything, it was a representation of that experience; the experience itself was something quite distinct from a piece of writing that I might do about it. It seemed to me that my experience had not originally registered and had not persisted primarily in words, though it might have been partly shaped by my literary experience.

(I'm aware there’s an argument to be made that even the original experience, or what ‘registers’ and leaves a memory from it, was constituted in language or some semiotic based on language:

“[Wilfrid] Sellars rejected any non-cognitive, non-linguistic conception of conscious experience and awareness: ‘all awareness’, he said, ‘is a linguistic affair.’ There is no such thing as simply taking in the world in experience, as if the senses themselves had some kind of magical ability to latch onto the world: this is the myth. Every episode of taking something in is really a case of conceptualising it, and conceptualising requires being subject to the norms which can only come with the acquisition of a language.” (Tim Crane, 2008, ‘Fraught with Ought’, London Review of Books, 30(12), 33-35.)

Nevertheless, I should have said that Harold was quite right in a more general way: in writing that piece, I wasn’t just producing a composition, doing something nice with words, I was doing something to my experience, or rather on my experience or in relation to it; I was going back to it and working on it, or with it. This work was mainly looking hard at it to ‘catch’ its character and important elements. ‘Putting the experience into words’ meant scrutinising.

Ted Hughes, commenting on the best children’s poems submitted to the annual Daily Mirror Children’s Literary Competition, remarked that they were typically characterised by fresh, sharp observation; the kids were looking at flowers and animals and people working as if those sights had never been described before.

To produce a symbolic correlate for an experience, for instance in words, involves looking at it hard and coming to know it better. In fact, can’t we even say that to penetrate and gain a deep knowledge of something means producing an equivalent in a semiotic medium? It’s most plainly true of painting. Van Gogh invented a new ‘language' of colours and brush strokes, one in which the world looked different from how it had ever looked before. But that’s not what he was most aware of doing; his letters make it quite clear that what obsessed him was what the corn was like. What he was doing, in his own eyes, was identifying the colour and texture of a field of cornflowers disturbed by wind and catching them in paint. The two were the same thing: to identify was to catch in paint -- or vice versa. Van Gogh knew there was something out there that existing visual languages had failed to register and to address which he had to innovate; but his focus was corn and cornflowers, not paint. Painting was the means of observation.

Writing about Moor Fields -- as Harold Rosen rightly saw -- was a cognitive operation, an operation on knowledge, on the state of my head in relation to the phenomenon; it could be said that as a result I knew the experience better, or differently. Moor Fields would henceforth feature somewhat differently in my inner landscape. ‘Sunsets, broad views, wind, street lighting, clear water, the way turf came up in whole sections when you pulled’, which I'd put side by side in a list for the first time in the writing, would from then on be connected, if only in some barely perceptible resonance.

Rosen’s general point -- a true one -- was that writing can have cognitive effects; it’s not just working with words, it’s working on something that’s already in some way in the mind (by virtue of its having featured in experience), in such a way that our knowledge of it is changed, refocused, selectively sharpened, rearranged. (I'm aware I haven't quite got that issue sorted out.) On occasion the change that the writing process induces can be important -- the writer can arrive at a new perception that makes a difference to his or her life; so that English teachers should always reckon with the possibility that the effects of writing can potentially be transformative and ensure that assignments and environment always open up opportunities for that to happen.

At the very least, what I think we learned from Rosen, Britton and Martin was that writing, if engaged in wholeheartedly, could be a process of exceptional intensity and could change one’s mind: we should not fritter away those few opportunities for intense cognitive activity by setting compositions that were trivial or merely conventional.

But Rosen et al, John Dixon, all that generation of theorists of English, also missed something crucial. At one point in my little composition I wrote:

‘from our fields we looked down particularly on one cluster of mill buildings with lines of sloping glass skylights, big ventilation cowls, a square dam walled round and a great chimney--the predominant architectural feature of Bradford was chimneys -- from which the smoke rose vertically and undisturbed above the buildings, above the trees at the back, above the distant glowing moors which seemed like the Scottish border, and into a grey and then a blue sky.’

That strikes me as a nice sentence. I like the concatenation of syntactic subordinations and additions: the chimney from which… , and then the adverbials with both repetition and variation: ‘vertically’ (adverb), ‘undisturbed’ (participle), ‘above the…, above the…, above the…’ (adverbial phrases) -- the last with a dependent ‘which’ clause; and finally ‘into a grey and then a blue sky’ (two adverbial phrases, the second with the conjunction omitted). I could also point to felicitous sonic effects: smoke rose glow, moors border , smoke sky -- and I like ‘smoke rose vertically and undisturbed above the buildings’ -- the two stressed monosyllables followed by three poly- and duo-syllables. What stops one calling that effect ‘aesthetic’ is that the sound connections also bring the meanings into connection.

So, yes, I agree that in the process I'm working on my experience -- reworking it, if you like -- but mainly I think I'm trying to write a good sentence. The urge that motivates writing may often be less the desire to learn (by making ‘more adequate representations’ as part, ultimately, of our adaptation to our environment in the interests of surviving and prospering) than the impulse to create satisfying verbal artefacts; in writing, the thinking (scrutinising, learning) may be less important than the making. It’s the distinctive nature of literary art that those early theorists of English never adequately faced up to.

Moor Fields, experience and English

As a kid I played on Moor Fields, a piece of still unbuilt-on waste land on the borders of Wibsey and Great Horton on the hilly western edge of Bradford.

Recalling something I once wrote about those times but of which I hadn’t kept a copy, I turned again (as in a previous entry) to Harold Rosen’s writings, this time because he’d quoted my piece in a 1970 article on ‘The Professional Education of the Teacher of English’. I'd written it for him in 1963 as my first assignment on the PGCE course: write about a childhood memory. The assignment was Harold’s well-judged attempt to snap us out of thinking in English degree lit crit mode. But he also wanted to use our efforts to make a theoretical point about the teaching of English.

Here’s my composition, as he reprinted in; after, I'll explain what he wanted to make of it.

Fears were disappearing fast at this age. We were still scared of big and rough boys, but not inordinately; we were now prepared to take the risk of exploring their territory. We were sensual, keenly aware of smells of new mowed grass, bonfire smoke and tree bark, which we were now
continually in intimate contact with. We took a Wordsworthian joy (though we never talked about it) in sunsets, broad views, wind, street lighting, clear water, the way turf came up in whole sections when you pulled. My present mental images of times of the year date mainly from this period - late October with dark evenings and the smell of smoke and mist and air still warm; raiding gardens in the dark for wood and dragging it fearfully past lighted kitchen windows and through deserted allotments where cats ran about; then the smell of the smoldering mill band we used to light fireworks, and the huge untidy piles of wood, bits of canvas, branches, old doors;
the lights of the whole city spread out beneath us in the dark, with the last of the sunset silhouetting Beacon Hill or the moors over beyond the Horton Bank Top reservoir; and Saturday mornings at that time of the year were mild and smoky; from our fields we looked down particularly on one cluster of mill buildings with lines of sloping glass skylights, big ventilation cowls, a square dam walled round and a great chimney--the predominant architectural feature of Bradford was chimneys -- from which
the smoke rose vertically and undisturbed above the buildings, above the trees at the back, above the distant glowing moors which seemed like the Scottish border, and into a grey and then a blue sky. Then winter evenings, wet nights, cold, when the streets, snickets and allotments were excitingly stark and forbidding; we explored them in the knowledge that we would return to lighted windows and fires; or we would sit reading piles of old comics by candlelight in the hut where Mr. Livesey kept his painting and
decorating equipment. At night we would take forbidden short cuts across forbidden fields with horses in and through people's gardens; we would prowl round their houses and look in their dustbins and watch them through their windows; we would lie behind walls and listen to men talking and imagine they were plotting a murder.

From school I remember the teachers, the playground, and the building. I remember the atmosphere in the hall at prayers at the end of the day, and the way we had to walk round the edge of the hall. I don't remember much about what went on in lessons, but I remember the classroom and the sort of decorations we used to have. Plants of all sorts were very popular; nature was considered a most important topic, and sticky buds and conkers were always welcome for the nature table. The other important things in education at the age of nine were Where Things Come From (a map of the world on the wall with strings leading to oranges, rubbers, empty cocoa tins, pictures of elephants and seals, all laid out on a table and getting moved so that the strings went slack and got tangled) and Our Lord's Land, from one of the big educational magazines; pictures of soft looking Englishmen with beards and striped robes and donkeys; little white houses with a woman with a pitcher on her head; and then the multiplication tables. Geography was characterized by pictures of cotton plants, eskimos, and Africans in dug-out canoes; it was very unreal, particularly those pictures which showed one ageless-looking child from every land, each in national dress, including
a Welsh girl; to me all except the English child were in fancy dress, and I couldn't believe that these clothes were what they actually wore.

The cloakrooms and lavatories are quite memorable -- dark green paint, low hooks on iron stands and cracked wash basins with special taps you had to press that you only found in schools.

One of the few incidents I remember was when a jet flew overhead -- it must have been one of the early Meteors-and Kenneth Widdowson shouted 'It's the North Koreans' and got under his desk. That had me quite worried.

Harold had been at the Institute of Education for only a year or two and I assume was still pretty much following the intellectual lead of James Britton, the head of department, who at the time was claiming that the job of English was to help pupils make sense of or ‘come to terms with’ their experience. Britton’s articles expounding this view made a plausible case; he’d found, for instance, that junior school children had greatly enjoyed a poem he’d read them about a shepherd who has to leave his warm fireside and go out on a snowy night to look after his flock; the poem worked, he claimed convincingly, because it gave expression to a deep theme of even urban children’s experience, the comforts of security and the need nevertheless to venture outside the zone of familiarity and safety.

Although he doesn’t go into that in his article, in the seminar in which he gave back our essays Harold presented a version of the same argument. What we’d been doing, he explained -- and continued to explain in different contexts throughout the year, as did Britton in his lectures -- was ‘structuring our experience’; experience that had been ‘structured’ could be done more with, was more of a resource for thinking and judging. At the time I sort of went along with it but didn’t really get it and didn’t have the confidence to try to articulate my confusion and doubts. But in retrospect I can see that I had two reservations, both of them right.

First, my experience wasn’t structured or restructured by the writing. It was still there in memory unchanged except for the usual loss and distortion -- though it’s probably true that over time the aspects of the scene that I’d put into the writing thereby got confirmed in memory to the exclusion of others. What I'd structured wasn’t experience but language, leaving the ‘experience’ unaffected. Rosen almost seemed to be making a naïve error.

The second reservation relates to pedagogical principle. If this process of selecting experiences and structuring them through writing (or talking, he added) was so valuable developmentally, what about all those experiences we’d never get round to processing in that way? How many memories could we get through in a school career’s English lessons? Were some experiences in more need of being ‘structured’? (They had an answer to that, at some point: Yes, those that caused us more perplexity -- but on those grounds my playing on Moor Fields at the age of nine would hardly qualify as needing the treatment.) And what about all those people in the world who had had English lessons before writing about remembered experience became a key element? Were they doomed to be deficient, like souls who had died before they could be redeemed by the birth of Jesus?

I don’t think that act of writing sorted anything out in my mind. The reason Harold liked it wasn’t because it had changed my consciousness but because it was, relatively speaking, a nice bit of writing. Its value, if any, was as a literary artefact, not as the trail of a valuable mental readjustment. What lay behind it was my literary reading as much as my memory. In fact I'm prepared to believe that the experience itself had been to some degree structured from the start by my reading, which had been full of accounts of boys doing things away from adults in dramatically appealing settings -- natural and built environments; weathers, seasons, times of day. I was probably being William and the Outlaws.

It was a besetting fault of English teachers like me in subsequent years that we fooled ourselves into believing, or at least claiming, that what we valued in children’s writing was their ‘organisation’ of experience, with consequent benefit to their souls, whereas actually our criteria were straightforwardly literary. What we purported to see as psychological readjustment was in fact literary artifice.

What a precarious base of ‘theory’ on which to go out and teach English. Fortunately, it was supplemented, I presume, by some more reliable feel for what was worthwhile. While it’s clearly true that, in some ways and on some occasions, in writing we do something new to the contents of our heads, no one could ever satisfactorily explain to us why this memory rather than that should be chosen or show that any particular psychic or cognitive benefit had been gained by a particular experience of writing. And the Institute position had no good explanation for why I was right in valuing my second years’ poems about a Viking ship burial.

Nevertheless, I believe that the impulse behind that position was sound. In insisting that what writing could do for an individual was potentially much more than developing an acceptable style Britton, Rosen and Nancy Martin were right. Writing was educationally valuable as more than a clerkly or academic skill for future deployment. The argument about bringing into order something that in the mind was disorganised or vague or ill-defined led us at least to operate with some sense of the difference between trivial and worthwhile writing; we were in far less danger than previous teacher generations of regarding belletristic whimsy or pretentious and insincere (yes) Times-like pontificating, or for that matter escapist adventure and pony stories, as acceptable products of our teaching.