Academics in wartime

An item on today’s Today -- BBC Radio 4 -- described a wartime RAF establishment the name of which I didn’t catch. It recruited archaeologists and other academics, as well as gifted amateurs like crossword geniuses, to interpret aerial photographs taken over enemy territory -- thus detecting from an image a millimetre across the presence of a V2 rocket and estimating from its dimensions its possible range, or inferring from the type of goods trucks in a marshalling yard whether foodstuffs or industrial materials were being transported and working out what the answer might indicate about the state of things in the nearby city.

One of the participants, whose name I also missed, was asked if he and his colleagues resented the lack of any public recognition of the work after the war, in contrast with Bletchley. He answered that they didn’t expect recognition: doing the job was the reward in itself because the work was both worthwhile and interesting and the relationships formed during it were enjoyable.

A constant criticism of public policy under every government since Thatcher has been the failure to acknowledge that the worth and interest of the work can be their own reward, and that the motivation to work hard and to the highest standards can be present when there’s no monetary incentive. This particularly applies to work that people chose because it’s interesting and despite the indifferent pay, such as teaching and research. In teaching it can often be a bad idea to reward good work with marks and grades when you want students to come to believe that the exercise of intelligence and extension of knowledge is a good thing in itself. The same applies to teachers, doctors and NHS managers. Might it not even apply to bankers?

Perfunctory didactics

Outside Hampton Court a couple of days ago, at the gate into the forecourt, a cluster of junior school pupils (aged 9-10) being got into the zone by their teacher: ‘And as you were approaching that massive great gatehouse, what would you be feeling?’ Confused muttering. ‘What would you be feeling?’ Kids indifferent, gazing around at the river and at nothing. A girl offers something I can’t hear. ‘Yes, exactly, that’s a lovely word.’ Not clear that the others find it lovely.

It’s now standard practice to ask, instead of ‘Who was the first Tudor king?’, ‘How would you feel if you had to serve Henry VIII his soup without spilling any?’ But it’s evident that this newer pedagogy, if implemented, as here, in the same perfunctory and ritualised manner, is no more effective. That teacher doesn’t want to know how they’d feel, and they know she doesn’t want to know and there’s no point in expending the effort to satisfy her. Except for the same one or two there still is and always will be.

There are circumstances -- we all know them -- in which A can ask B ‘How would you feel if...?’ and it’s a real and legitimate question, one that puts you on the spot or invites you into interesting speculation. But questions that have degenerated into stock elements in a teacher’s routine don’t work like that. Devising non-routinised ways of eliciting kids’ engagement is a perennial problem for teachers, and one, it seems, as no nearer solution -- or even recognition -- than it ever was.

And how would you feel if you received the following response to your response to such a question?

‘How would you feel if you’d been stuck at home all day with crying kids and dirty nappies and I swanned in two hours after I’d finished work stinking of beer?’

‘Resentful?’

‘Yes, that’s a lovely word, isn’t it! Resentful.’

Dreams of school

It’s nearly 30 years since I taught in a school but it’s amazing what a big role teaching evidently still plays in my psyche. Being in a secondary school classroom in one situation or another, nice and not nice, is perhaps the most persistent component in my dreams. Sometimes I'm brilliant, sometimes none of the levers work and things decline unstoppably into chaos. In reality being out of control was a small part of my experience -- nearly all the time I was ok -- but those occasions must have burnt themselves into the soul.

No other job that I've done gets so deep into one’s sense of self.

Another Brussels encounter

I’ve held off telling you about my second encounter in Brussels while waiting for the person concerned’s ok.

I’d arranged to meet Martin King, who I taught for a year or two in a secondary modern in Wakefield till he left at 16 with one CSE in 1976, after doing a project for me to interview three old men on the village bench about their memories of the First World War (Passchendaele, in fact).

No contact since then until recently I noticed something on Friends Reunited, and as a result we’ve met. Martin drove in from Antwerp one morning to show me Brussels -- expertly (see below) -- and induct me in some unusual beers. (Unfortunately our meeting had to be curtailed so he could get out again: the EU summit was about to open so a ring of steel would come down on the city at 3.)

After leaving school, which he didn’t get on with (for good reasons), Martin went to tech for a couple of years to get more qualifications, joined a band and took off with them to tour Europe. The tour lasted some years, they made records and he was a star in Belgium where he met a Flemish nurse and married. Got into university, ended up lecturing in history and then left when they wouldn’t pass his PhD thesis -- too sensitive, it seems (quite a story there). Off to Hollywood to make a documentary, then Discovery Channel in Canada for another, drawing largely on his specialism: military history -- and especially the First World War. I'm eagerly awaiting his films that are to be on tv, though maybe not here. And he’ll have two books.

In schools nowadays you’re required to write lessons plans that include a statement of ‘learning outcomes’. How about, ‘In 35 years time will pick up this topic again and be inspired to make two documentary series’?'

Here are two clips to give an idea of the them:
<a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F3DtITOOoM” target=“_blank”>Greatest Tank Battles</a>
<a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL5_RZffQ9g” target=“_blank”>Voices of the Bulge</a>

and a notice for the book:
<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Voices-Bulge-Untold-Stories-Veterans/dp/0760340331/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1289310014&sr=1-1” target=“_blank”>Voice of the Bulge</a>.

The trailer from ‘Greatest Tank Battles’ is currently on the ‘Discovery Channel’ in Europe and from January can be seen in the US.

Good sense on teaching

I like the tone of this, from the introduction to Inglis, Fred, and Lesley Aers. Key Concepts in Education. London: Sage, 2008, p.4:

Then, if you are lucky, you will see the art of teaching in action - the art because the practice in question is being displayed with force and complexity, the life of the classroom is being directed with an assurance and subtlety intrinsic to art, the shape of the interior life of the lesson is made beautiful by the quiet animation of its participants, the smooth motion of their study from point to point, and all this lovely life advances to its goal, which is to discover the truthfulness for which class and teacher have set themselves to look.

Nobody talks about teaching like that these days. They never did, very much, in the past. But the predominance of what is called in these pages 'technicism', which is to say the supposition that teaching may be made foolproof by devising impersonal techniques and so-called 'skills' to cover all classroom and curricular life, has led to the treatment of all teachers as fools: creatures to be told what to do and never to be left alone to do it.

It isn't working. It'll go away. The aim of this book is to help dispel the inanities of technicism, the terrible tripe talked in the diction of the management of performance. The faith in this book is placed in certain inherent and indestructible attributes of the human mind which, when awoken, repel cant, mock jargon, deride cliché. These cheerfully oppositional forms of action are what one looks to find (ha!) in university departments of education. The key concepts are those which may so be orchestrated that they work on behalf of some of their best qualities - truth and beauty say; knowledge and freedom; equality and mind.

What it takes to run a good school

Some English schools that had, for whatever reason, experienced disastrous decline in performance have been taken over from their local education authorities and handed to other bodies to be given a fresh start and run as ‘academies’. These academies seem quite diverse, as do the outfits that run them. In some, perhaps most, business has the dominant say: a firm or group of businesses, for instance, might form a trust, provide some of the finance, appoint the head and determine the general character and strategy of the school.

The headteacher is likely to be chosen for being the sort of good manager or leader that businesses respect: one who motivates staff, gives all concerned a sense of having a stake, keeps standards high. In schools that were formerly run down, dispirited and out of control, this sort of new management, when it works, must bring huge relief and hope. In academies that set out to improve the education of children in the poorest and most disadvantaged areas, the importance of that transformation can’t be underestimated. Whether it really takes removal from local democratic control to achieve such change is a contentious issue but not the one that’s concerning me here.

Some academies seem to be doing well under that type of headteacher. In the end, though, that business model of leadership, motivation, purposefulness, determination and so on surely can’t be enough. Schools are about forming persons, and specifically their minds – what they know, how they think, their command of the public discourses of learning. They effect this formation by managing the students' encounters and interactions with knowledge, with the developed intellectual culture of the society and a wide range of its products. Learners have to be induced to move into difficult, strenuous engagement with the academic and arts disciplines; the scope of their knowledge, thinking and response has to be expanded out of all recognition and way beyond what would come about through ordinary exposure to life, television and the internet. School students need to develop along routes that can potentially lead to their being educated and cultured, to use the latter word in the unembarrassed way that, say, Russians do: the resources of intellectual culture – its habits and its knowledge – have to get internalised.

This must mean that besides a generically ‘motivating’ management, schools need intellectual leadership. I don’t know if the head himself or herself has to fill that role, but key teachers if not all teachers need to be philosophers. They need to have thought deeply about the purposes of education and what it is to acquire ease and familiarity within the main arts, science, social science and mathematical disciplines, what’s involved in the transition from being a kid on the street to someone who begins to be a mathematician or classical musician or historian, or at least who reads widely by choice and habitually has recourse to writing as a diverse means of expression, thought, discovery and invention.

Schools won’t get there simply by having some sort of generic ‘high standards’ for behaviour, attitude and assiduity, or even just an unspecified belief in the children (‘Yes, you can’) -- and then, for ‘content’, simply trusting to the government-provided programmes of studying and testing; they need to know what they’re doing in a deeper sense and to engage seriously with the nature of academic knowledge. The teachers need to be educated and cultured people with a desire to induct the young into the worlds in which they lead their own intellectual lives.

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.

Art schools, as was

The climate I was trying to create with my scruffy disaffected 4th and 5th year mixed-ability Humanities groups in 1975-7 (that’s years 10 and 11 for those of you under 85, and humanities was English plus history/ geography/ sociology) was that of an art school of the time.

Art school (old style) was what many of them needed -- not to learn art (lots of art students never did that) but to be in an institution that was geared to their age group, that didn’t force a curriculum on them (no timetable, no absolutely obligatory assignments) and in which interests could emerge and be pursued. Often the art students’ interests were in music: a huge proportion of British pop and rock bands came out of art school. I didn’t particularly want my students to become musicians, but I did want them at 14-15 to choose to learn or, failing that, to live in a civilised environment free of teachers’ shouting and nagging and appeals to duty (to do homework, to pass exams); to talk a lot and have interesting stuff around.

I'm not saying I was right in wanting all that, just that the art schools stood for teachers like me with kids like mine as a symbol of a regime that ran on quite different lines and actually had a chance of getting education to happen -- which the standard curriculum and exams had no hope of achieving with many.

Jarvis Cocker recently had a good radio series about the art schools and pop music. Much of it was about the art schools regardless of music and lots of well-informed commentators featured. Angela McRobbie, a terrific sociologist of, amongst other things, youth culture, described how British art schools came into existence in the mid-19th century largely as a result of the tireless efforts of one campaigner, whose name I forget. The result was a system of art schools (strictly, colleges of art, for students older than the statutory school leaving age) more widespread than in any other European country: every respectable town had its own. You could get in without any academic qualifications right up until, I think, the late 1970s or even 80s -- and they were autonomous institutions and not, as later, departments of polytechnics and then universities with all the deadening academic accountabilities to which undergraduate teaching is subject.

The one constraint on the art schools from the beginning was that they shouldn’t presume to trespass on the Fine Art territory of the posh Schools of Art like St Martin’s, the Slade and the Central School of Art; hence they emphasised design and the craft skills -- printing, pottery, illustration etc. Under that cover plenty of real art went on.

Do you know Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden? Terrific artists.


(Those are all Ravilious : see especially this collection)

Well, Eastbourne College of Art, both of them. Eastbourne! Off the top of my head I can’t reel off many other names -- there are plenty -- but here’s one more, David Hockney: Bradford Art College -- sooty, smoky Bradford, headscarves and flat caps -- and Hockney stalking the Swan Arcade in gold lamee jacket.

Jonathan Gould (Can't buy me love: the Beatles, Britain and America -- see previous entry) has a nice bit about provincial art schools in John Lennon’s time:

One of my teachers

Like many teachers of my generation I went to a grammar school but supported comprehensives as soon as I became aware of them. I still don’t support grammar schools but in recent years have become more and more fascinated by them, and particularly by the tension between the schools’ official, middle-class ethos and the attitudes of many of their (often working-class) pupils—either instrumental (seeking exam passes but not buying into the values) or heavily into youth culture (and not buying into the values).

I'm interested in what the grammar schools achieved and what they pathetically failed to given the intelligence of their students and could never have achieved with so much downright incompetent teaching. Among the teachers, there was an intriguing contrast between the large body of hopeless cases who stayed in the schools for forty years and the brilliant ones, who were of two sorts: one lot remote, unworldly and forceful, teaching their discipline with intensity, high seriousness and exacting standards, and the other, no less serious in their mission, and typically including English teachers (but never science teachers), who were somewhat subversive (obviously despising the stuffy ‘Victorian’ order of the school), whose lessons were full of laughs and who we learned from because they were men we could identify with and were some damned interesting (not that they didn’t work us hard too).

A couple of books boosted my interest, one re-read after many years (Brian Jackson & Dennis Marsden (1962), Education and the working class : some general themes raised by a study of 88 working class children in a northern industrial city) and one old one read for the first time (Frances Stevens (1960), The living tradition: the social and educational assumptions of the grammar school). Sometime I hope to write more about grammar schools and my own schooling.

My school was Bradford Grammar School, a boys’ Direct Grant School. This was a school that had originally (17th century) had endowments, had declined and rotted and then been revived in Victorian times. From 1944 it was ‘aided’ by a grant directly from the government in return for 25% of free places being awarded to scholarship boys. (75% still paid fees and the school was in effect independent, having nothing to do with the local LEA.)

One of my teachers died recently, a good teacher of the first, high seriousness type, and I was asked to write something for an obituary in the school magazine. Here’s what I wrote.

***
H.A. Twelves

In 1958-9 there was an enlightened scheme whereby Sixth Classical took three subjects which were not to be examined and for which little or no homework was required: English literature (Dr B. Oxley), the history of science (Mr W.E. Clarkson) and French (Mr H.A. Twelves). All three were fine courses.

Before that year I knew Mr Twelves by sight and reputation, and because he supervised dinners every other day, alternating with a crude and unpleasant geography man called Downend. Whereas Downend hit a small gong to get silence and invited us to ‘say your graces, please’, Twelves simply beamed authority from his suit and, when response was not instant, uttered a cuttingly enunciated ‘I'm waiting’ (an example in linguistics of what is grammatically a sentence but performs the speech act of commanding)--after which he would say grace himself . (Rowan Atkinson would have done a good Twelves.)

I think we were not pleased when we learned that we were to have a year being taught by Mr Twelves. He appeared to us the embodiment of respectable bourgeois authoritarianness. The Sixties were stirring in their womb and the young, influenced by Sartre, the Beats, Colin Wilson’s The Outsider and the ‘real life’ of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, were becoming openly rebellious against old conformity. Twelves was known to lead a strange church (the Christadelphians) of which none of us had ever met any other member. He was sometimes seen at Saltaire leading a subdued-looking family on a stately Sunday walk along the towpath. On school corridors he would advance prelate-like in a procession of one. The man clearly had contempt for innocent teenage pursuits like going out of an evening, drinking pints and listening to pop music. Of his own youth all I remember him telling us was that while waiting for a train on Sheffield station he would pace the platform reciting French poetry to himself. His self-revelations included the occasional wicked admission of some childish misdemeanour, followed by the injunction, ‘Tell it not in Gath, chaps.’ He would sometimes refer to himself smilingly in the third person as ‘Douze’, his nickname in the school. Such gestures of maty collusion did not come off; he did not do ‘getting on with the boys’. Though he did once, having learned to drive late in life, offer my friend Jim Patchett a lift along Frizinghall Road; as Douze steered the car with erratic determination Jim solicitously asked, ‘Are you getting used to the traffic now , sir?', to which the reply was, 'I have no fear of or concern for the traffic, but I have difficulty controlling the vehicle.’

Of course, we knew nothing about his life. He was not a master one got to know. He was unashamedly a scholar dedicated to the pursuit of humanist learning. It was not an easy time to be living for such ideals (not that it got any easier) and for those pupils who favoured the immediate overthrow of bourgeois society Twelves doubtless remained the sanctimonious generational enemy bent on confining the green vigour of youth in life-denying study. But most of us, I think, while never finding him entirely human or wanting to know him better, came to respect his mind, his seriousness, his knowledge and his passion. It was true that his general manner was stuffy. One did not josh with Mr Twelves on the stairs. He ran a tight ship. To a sixth former who had missed the first week and was slouching in his desk Twelves barked, ‘Mitchell, sit up!’ adding, in that precise articulation and with the smile of a villainous James Bond mastermind, ‘I can see you don’t know our ways.’

He made it clear (though perhaps only afterwards) that it was a pleasure for him to teach classics students; he told me years later that he could tell by our eyes, when we entered the third form (i.e. first year), that we were the brightest and the best (surely a delusion). In the course he devised for us he let himself go and seemed to pile into it everything he loved in French poetry and drama, including texts that he never had the opportunity to tackle in his main O- and A-Level teaching. He taught them with gusto and, for those of us prepared to give literature beyond Hemingway a chance and refrain from leaning against radiators, the year was exhilarating. Our previous experience of French had not got far beyond M. and Mme Lepine going to la gare (and, to be fair, a bit of Maupassant) and here we were being swept along by Racine’s unShakespearian alexandrines, racing through Romantics and Symbolistes and finally reading plays as contemporary and racy as the Beckett and Osborne we were doing with Dr Oxley in English: Anouilh, Giroudoux, Sartre, Cocteau. This stuff was so fresh it was being put on at the Civic (in English) as the latest in French avant-gardism.

The mode of engagement within the lessons varied between arduous mental effort in the face of translation problems, laughter at Cocteau’s jokes, intellectual fascination at Douze’s explanations of Mallarmé’s poetic theory or Sartre’s philosophy and intense, even reverent, attention as when (having first addressed vocabulary and grammar issues) he read the messenger speech in a Corneille play. I recall his barely suppressed anger once when the spell was broken by an interruption from the unfortunate Charlie Sommers [spelling?], another French teacher, who came in with a notice about cross-country. Mr Twelves held an Arnoldian belief, such as we rarely experienced in classics or English, in the high seriousness of the calling of literary study. Seriousness, but not pomposity or hypocrisy; his lessons were lively, even fun. Whatever Mr Twelves’s public demeanour, there was nothing stuffy about his curriculum. He demonstrated and induced in us a vigorous engagement with the texts, into which his insights were sharp. It was he as much as anyone who taught me to read poetry and who turned some, perhaps many of us into people who could and would continue to read French for pleasure and appreciate French culture—a legacy of which I hope he was proud and for which I am grateful.

Teaching—stay or go? Or don’t even start?

A friend, 29 and in his second year as a successful teacher with good prospects for promotion, asked me the other day whether he should stay in teaching. The incentives to stay were enjoyment of the job, the early promise of a head of department post and the security of a regular salary. The disincentives were poor pay (for his age and workload), doubts about the long-term continuation of his current enjoyment (will routinisation set in and will grind outweigh excitement?), lack of time for other things after all the requirements have been met and, related to that, the impossibility of seriously pursuing his other passions—music, writing and academic study.

I could see no obvious way he could improve his income enough to clear his indebtedness--typical of his generation--and buy a house for having a family with his partner. My own story, from another era, was not much help: I left teaching at 36, disillusioned with schools for a variety of unsatisfactory occupations—which ended up as full-time supply teaching as the best paid option; then at 42 I got into full-time academic study and employment, continuing to retirement last year. For my friend in a different historical age, it's late in the day to break into the other fields he mentioned. Music and writing are financial gambles and an academic job would now require a PhD, except in education where jobs seem insecure and it’s hard to find the space to do anything like scholarship.

So moving from school would be difficult. It might also involve a real loss in that no other experience compares with teaching school students. Despite social squalor, tedium and conflict, teaching can provide a unique intensity of experience: the energy and creativity of a full class interacting in barely contained anarchy on the edge of chaos, the purposeful hum of kids engaged with their work, the attainment of a new synthesis of resources in a student’s latest piece of writing. University teaching has its rewards but is not at all the same thing.

On that theme of the satisfactions of teaching, while we were talking I failed to recall one of the main motivations that had kept me in teaching for eleven years (seven plus four, with two years out in the middle on a curriculum project). This was the excitement, intellectual and social combined, of having ideas, putting them into practice and making something new happen.

I would start with an idea--a notion, theory or hypothesis about possible modes of learning or interaction, or a sense of what was wrong with existing practice. My ‘theory’ might be about how informal, assessment-free forms of writing might aid the formulation of understanding, about the need to get aspects of academic knowledge incorporated into the kids’ ordinary conversational genres or about how ‘English' might be more effective if the boundary between it and history and sociology were removed. A new way of doing things would suggest itself; I'd work out how to make it happen, put it into action and then watch a new social reality emerge. I never got another satisfaction like that of seeing so-called non-academic kids engaging with knowledge, getting articulate, developing their thinking and interacting socially in ways they weren’t judged capable of. Possibilities for a different society seemed implicit; embryonic utopias were being born; my working-class students were becoming new sorts of people…

I started in a school in which I was allowed make my own social reality in my own classroom, but the potential for creating something with critical mass, as it were, came when, in my second school, I became head of a ‘faculty’ that contained a group of like-minded colleagues, including a couple of other heads of department; we could rewrite a third of the curriculum for our 14- and 16-year-old students and transform the pedagogy they experienced. (This was 1973-7—an age away from now.) Although we were working against the grain, and in the end the timid conformism of the head, the hostility of other colleagues and a changing political climate defeated us, it was great while it lasted.

So that’s an argument for hanging on at least to head of department stage, assuming some room for manoeuvre still remains in the system.

But what then? In my case, that was it—all over. After school there was nothing to do—nothing, that is, of equal significance. Like a Vietnam vet I was 36 and out in the world, condemned to less meaningful jobs and with no prospect of finding any equivalent excitement. I was too old, too knowing and too knackered: eleven years of trying to teach well had left me exhausted. Since then I have, of course, managed to find things to do, have amused and interested myself and have made a living, but nothing has lived up to those experiences of doing new things in schools with colleagues who were friends and kids who appreciated us. If I'd been interested in policy or management I could have maintained a pleasurable engagement with education, but for me the only point of being a teacher was always putting my own learning and intellect to use in making new things happen with students.

So where does that leave us? If the aim were to gain the maximum possible satisfaction from teaching, my advice to my friend would be to stay the course until he has been a head of department. But after a spell of that, the chances are he will have done his best work and he’ll still only be in his mid-thirties--young enough to have more than half a working life left but too old to start anything else except perhaps lecturing in education or inspecting or consulting: useful work but unlikely to give the same existential buzz. It would certainly be too late to get into the academic disciplines and compete with scholars who’ve been studying and researching continuously from their early twenties.

I wonder now whether the price I paid for those good years of teaching was too high; perhaps it was a mistake to go into teaching? To exaggerate rather, the price was the rest of my life. My initial choice of career meant that I failed to develop any specialised expertise that could keep me active, vigorous and committed for a lifetime--not just to 65 but into old age when I could die in harness like a novelist, composer, artist or architect. (The composer Michael Tippett died aged 90-something while conducting one of his own works in Finland.)

Starting again, would I go for something creative or artistic? Certainly it would need to be something that would keep me out of the clutches of institutions where work gets less and less enjoyable as ‘management’ tightens its microcontrolling grip. Best of all might be to stay outside employment altogether, working for myself.

I reflect: who do I know outside teaching who’s happy in their work? Some journalists and filmmakers, perhaps. Some who once loved their work— I'm thinking particularly of a museum conservation engineer as well as many teachers—have had their jobs ruined by ‘management’. Artists and actors impress me as successfully escaping the general ruination of work—but they don’t earn enough to buy houses to have kids in. Maybe that’s the only choice left—autonomy with poverty, or an income with alienation and a sense of your life dribbling away.

Of course, 30 years (age 35-65) of quiet classroom routine isn’t a terrible fate for everyone. If the school is not a bearpit and the management is sane and unbrutish, the work can be pleasant; there are indeed older teachersfor whom it never gets boring. Even if it does, the work and income are steady; and as one gets more practised and less conscientious the job can be managed without too huge a burden on one’s own time. Your centre of gravity can move away from the job and into family or new interests. (One of my own best teachers bought a hill farm and has run it to this day with his wife while continuing to teach.) In my day, though, and probably still today, such peaceful working conditions were available only in traditional grammar or independent schools, where I assumed I would be bored and where on principle I would refuse to teach.

Meanwhile, those who continue to work in tough classrooms after 35 tend to end up with serious health problems, physical and mental. Body, mind and spirit pay the price.

My advice is--I haven’t got any. Except acquire private means; then, after a stint as head of department, you could cut down to one class a week and teach it well, to your own satisfaction; and spend the rest of the time writing or painting or playing music.