At Bradford Grammar School the headmaster and ‘second master’ (deputy) maintained strict order and were feared. That went also for a fair proportion of the ‘masters’, but not all. One of the oddest features of the grammar school was that for all its lofty academic aspirations a teacher once recruited had a job for life. Quite a number were more or less incompetent; some couldn’t control the boys, some simply didn’t do their job. Yet I don’t recall any being sacked. You could be incompetent or lazy for forty years, no questions asked.
I suppose complaining parents, even three-quarters of them (I think) were paying fees and might be thought to have had the whip hand, could simply be told, ‘Well, take your child elsewhere if you don’t like it.’ An effective threat in that there wasn’t an elsewhere within reach that was thought to be as good.
I've just thought of a couple of other instances, to do with the morning assemblies when many hundreds of boys were seated in the faux-Tudor hall. With the head and prefects on the stage and the masters seated at the ends of each row in the body of the hall, the possibility of major disorder was effectively closed off. However, there were two sorts of occasion when it could at least feel real. One was when a master was retiring after long service in the school. The custom was that at the end of an assembly the head and staff would withdraw while the head prefect addressed an appeal to the school to contribute to a collection for a present. (One suspected this may not have reflected a spontaneous upsurge of affection and gratitude from the boys.) Though the prefects were re-positioned in the place of the masters down the sides, but standing not sitting, containing the erupting din of shouts, stamping, clapping and hilarity was a hopeless task and I imagine the head prefect simply terminated the proceedings and got everyone out as fast as possible. With a less constitutionally docile pupil body, the disorder might have bordered on the dangerous. Why was this practice tolerated by the head?
The other moment of potential carnival was when both the head and second master were off sick or otherwise absent. Then it was revealed there was such a being as a previously unsuspected ‘third master’ who -- his sole function in the post, it appeared -- had to take the assembly, marching through the back doors and down the middle of the hall to gasps and titters, then mount the stage and, when the prefects had peeled off one by one from their positions in the aisles and taken their seats up there with him, find a voice unshaky enough to announce that we would sing hymn number X.
An intimidating assignment for the poor fellow thus tasked, especially since he had evidently attained the post not on the basis of competence -- often severely lacking -- but of seniority, whether of age or service. The unenthusiastic quality of the singing was an index of the lack of esteem in which this person was held. So on one occasion I recall it was Mr Witham, the ancient, ineffective, boring and nose-dripping Spanish and French teacher, and on another Reggie Maddox, the unimposing senior art master. The situation was saved from disaster, however, by the continued presence of the masters in the body of the hall, a stare from some of whom -- the ones from whom the third master would have been chosen on any rational system -- was quite enough to quell any incipient uprising.
What’s interesting about these strange occurrences is that since the school was purportedly placed on, precisely, a rational modern basis in the 1880s, ending the long decline from its Tudor origins and its Stuart charter, the maintenance of what seem like ancient customary practices was a glaring anomaly. No comprehensive school of the time (there were a few), let alone an efficient business, would have ran such risks, or indeed have tolerated hopeless teaching and the promotion of people on long service alone.
But -- and this seems to be the key (I’m guessing) -- it was the decent thing to recognise long service, and allowing the boys to be on their own as a full body while not normally policed was a civilised procedure. In some nook of the official thinking these values must have still counted; to give them up would have been to surrender something important. These odd practices represented a minimal and symbolic resistance to the logic of enlightened progress. The retention of gowns and ritual assemblies were perhaps in the same class.
Perhaps, then, the way to see these these prestigious grammar schools might be as hollowed out shells of archaic custom in which lively and up-to-date proceedings could securely thrive in the odd classroom and some atypical teacher-pupil relationships.
Wednesday, 30 March 2011
Closing public libraries
On the Today programme this morning (Radio 4) Zadie Smith had these things to say amongst her comments about the closure of public libraries:
I would never have seen a single university carrel if I had not grown up living 100 yards from the library in Willesden Green.
[It’s] difficult to explain to people with money what it means not to have money. ‘If education matters to you, they ask, if libraries matter to you, why wouldn’t you be willing to pay them if you value them?’ They’re the kind of people who believe value can only be measured in money.
Like many people without money, we relied on public services... as a necessary gateway to better opportunities. We paid our taxes in the hope that they’d be used to establish shared institutions from which all might benefit equally.
Community is a partnership between government and the people and it’s depressing to hear the language of community, the so-called big society, being used to disguise the low motives of one side of that partnership as it attempts to renege on the deal.
To listen look for ‘People voting with their feet’ on library cuts Wed, 30 Mar 11 here.
I would never have seen a single university carrel if I had not grown up living 100 yards from the library in Willesden Green.
[It’s] difficult to explain to people with money what it means not to have money. ‘If education matters to you, they ask, if libraries matter to you, why wouldn’t you be willing to pay them if you value them?’ They’re the kind of people who believe value can only be measured in money.
Like many people without money, we relied on public services... as a necessary gateway to better opportunities. We paid our taxes in the hope that they’d be used to establish shared institutions from which all might benefit equally.
Community is a partnership between government and the people and it’s depressing to hear the language of community, the so-called big society, being used to disguise the low motives of one side of that partnership as it attempts to renege on the deal.
To listen look for ‘People voting with their feet’ on library cuts Wed, 30 Mar 11 here.
Boris bikes
Iain Sinclair, on a Thinking Allowed podcast, speaking of the London bike scheme introduced by mayor Boris Johnson and sponsored by Barclays Bank: something to the effect that ‘The bikes have a big sign on so we ride around advertising Barclays like sandwich-board men, and what's more, have to pay for the privilege.’Image from http://www.google.co.uk/images?client=safari&rls=en&q=boris+bikes+photo&oe=UTF-8&redir_esc=&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&sa=X&ei=eQOTTbPtBIaWhQfz9cSJDw&ved=0CCwQsAQ&biw=988&bih=849
Jacob Behrens and my education
Behrens, Jacob: 19th century Bradford wool man. I'm finding myself, after my recent couple of days in Bradford, interested in the city’s 19th century history, to which Behrens was important. (He was apparently involved in reforming Bradford Grammar School and putting it on a modern footing.) An intelligent, vigorous, warm and humane man, it appears. I vaguely knew that the Behrenses were one of the German families who moved to Bradford and contributing to building up the wool trade and city.
I’ve just bought his biography second-hand and have read the first part, about his early life (born 1806), up until I think his late 20s, in Hamburg, and emerge from this with a few miscellaneous observations.
Germany at the time was a mess of small states run for the most part by an outrageously rich, privileged and reactionary class of nobles. I hadn’t realised, a point the book makes clear, what a huge improvement Napoleon’s administration had made in that, what -- decade? --of occupation: abolishing arbitrary customs levies, banning discrimination against Jews (the Behrens family were Jewish, hence in trade, practically the only occupation that had been permitted for Jews), providing schools, building bridges. (I knew something of this in relation to the French occupation of Yugoslavia, from Rebecca West’s Black Lamb, Grey Falcon, and have since looked for a book on Napoleon’s administrative innovations in France and beyond, but haven’t found one.) And then the callousness and stupidity of the restored princely and aristocratic regimes after Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna (did I ever do that in history?) -- under the ‘Austrian Peace’, so-called because it was mainly Metternich’s doing, and he was an Austrian -- I didn’t know that either. Not only the rulers but the old ways and privileges and bans were restored -- to the extent of pulling down the French-built bridge in Hamburg so the ferrymen could resume their customary trade and the people could resume their hazardous and expensive half-hour crossings in open boats in wind, rain and snow. (Big society?)
I also realise I know nothing about Germany. All those names: Pomerania, Saxony, Hanover, Silesia, Prussia... I've very little idea where they are. Nor could I draw a map of Germany which always seems to me to be a featureless mass without anything to get your bearings with. Well, just some rivers, I suppose, and the Black Mountains. So I need a geography book and atlas as well as a history. Come to think of it, we only did one year of geography in grammar school, and I think that was the British Isles -- which I'm glad to have done but it wasn’t enough.
Now a pedagogic observation. I sort of knew before opening the book that the Behrenses had been in textiles in Germany, and, having in mind I suppose that Jacob Behrens had a mill in Bradford - still there in my youth, perhaps it still is -- or I thought it was a mill (it may have been a warehouse) I simply assumed that the family manufactured yarn or cloth in Hamburg. Then I read without paying particular attention something about the firm importing its cloth from England, and only afterwards registered the significance of that statement: so they weren’t manufacturers, they were merchants, buying and selling.
Now: imagine -- I'm a teacher and my class has been ordered to read the chapter. When they’ve finished I might normally be inclined to ask them, ‘Where did they get their cloth from?’ ‘England, sir’ -- no problem. After the reading I’d actually had, in which on reflection I’d noted a particular significance in what I was being told, I might ask them rather, ‘What business were the Behrens in in Hamburg?’ -- in order for them to realise that, whatever they might have unquestioningly assumed, like me, it wasn’t manufacture. But what I should be trying to do is bring about in my students the sort of learning that I experienced -- and the difference is that no one asked me the question that made that happen. My learning, in fact, was precisely realising that there was a question to be asked.
A huge part of my effort in teaching humanities in school , including English, was to get the kids to have questions.
I was reminded of this the other day when Simon Clements, recalling his time as an HMI (inspecting schools, not just English), said that if he had one fundamental question for teachers in relation to their teaching, it was ‘Whose questions?’ Exactly right.
I’ve just bought his biography second-hand and have read the first part, about his early life (born 1806), up until I think his late 20s, in Hamburg, and emerge from this with a few miscellaneous observations.
Germany at the time was a mess of small states run for the most part by an outrageously rich, privileged and reactionary class of nobles. I hadn’t realised, a point the book makes clear, what a huge improvement Napoleon’s administration had made in that, what -- decade? --of occupation: abolishing arbitrary customs levies, banning discrimination against Jews (the Behrens family were Jewish, hence in trade, practically the only occupation that had been permitted for Jews), providing schools, building bridges. (I knew something of this in relation to the French occupation of Yugoslavia, from Rebecca West’s Black Lamb, Grey Falcon, and have since looked for a book on Napoleon’s administrative innovations in France and beyond, but haven’t found one.) And then the callousness and stupidity of the restored princely and aristocratic regimes after Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna (did I ever do that in history?) -- under the ‘Austrian Peace’, so-called because it was mainly Metternich’s doing, and he was an Austrian -- I didn’t know that either. Not only the rulers but the old ways and privileges and bans were restored -- to the extent of pulling down the French-built bridge in Hamburg so the ferrymen could resume their customary trade and the people could resume their hazardous and expensive half-hour crossings in open boats in wind, rain and snow. (Big society?)
I also realise I know nothing about Germany. All those names: Pomerania, Saxony, Hanover, Silesia, Prussia... I've very little idea where they are. Nor could I draw a map of Germany which always seems to me to be a featureless mass without anything to get your bearings with. Well, just some rivers, I suppose, and the Black Mountains. So I need a geography book and atlas as well as a history. Come to think of it, we only did one year of geography in grammar school, and I think that was the British Isles -- which I'm glad to have done but it wasn’t enough.
Now a pedagogic observation. I sort of knew before opening the book that the Behrenses had been in textiles in Germany, and, having in mind I suppose that Jacob Behrens had a mill in Bradford - still there in my youth, perhaps it still is -- or I thought it was a mill (it may have been a warehouse) I simply assumed that the family manufactured yarn or cloth in Hamburg. Then I read without paying particular attention something about the firm importing its cloth from England, and only afterwards registered the significance of that statement: so they weren’t manufacturers, they were merchants, buying and selling.
Now: imagine -- I'm a teacher and my class has been ordered to read the chapter. When they’ve finished I might normally be inclined to ask them, ‘Where did they get their cloth from?’ ‘England, sir’ -- no problem. After the reading I’d actually had, in which on reflection I’d noted a particular significance in what I was being told, I might ask them rather, ‘What business were the Behrens in in Hamburg?’ -- in order for them to realise that, whatever they might have unquestioningly assumed, like me, it wasn’t manufacture. But what I should be trying to do is bring about in my students the sort of learning that I experienced -- and the difference is that no one asked me the question that made that happen. My learning, in fact, was precisely realising that there was a question to be asked.
A huge part of my effort in teaching humanities in school , including English, was to get the kids to have questions.
I was reminded of this the other day when Simon Clements, recalling his time as an HMI (inspecting schools, not just English), said that if he had one fundamental question for teachers in relation to their teaching, it was ‘Whose questions?’ Exactly right.
Saturday, 19 March 2011
Stuart Hall idea
Stuart Hall, interviewed by Laurie Taylor on Thinking Allowed, said revolutions are not to be judged solely by their outcomes (assuming we are in a position to know what they are). 1968 may not have ‘succeeded’ -- but after it the world was different in various ways. So it was with 1848, and so it will be with the current Arab revolutions, whatever the ‘outcome’.
A hopeful message, no?
A hopeful message, no?
Monday, 14 March 2011
Arendt and English
Been re-reading The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt. I say re-reading because marginal marks indicate I've read it before, but for all the memory I have of it I might as well not have bothered -- these days I have to make notes if I’m to get anything out of a book.
A big theme in the book is the idea of the public sphere, as opposed to both family and intimate relations on the one hand and, on the other, the general mainly work-based swirlings around that constitute ‘society’, a formation and a notion that have emerged only in modern -- post-Renaissance, scientific etc -- times. In ancient Greece, she says, there were only the prized public sphere of the polis, where men (only) could be fully human, and the despised family or household sphere where women and slaves performed the labour (including that of procreation) necessary to sustain mere animal life. Virtue, honour, morality all related to one’s conduct in the public sphere, one’s action (e.g. in war) and one’s speech (in legislative and judicial deliberation).
It’s surely those features of Greece (and of Rome -- essentially similar in its ideas and values, she says, apart from eventually losing democracy) that made classical education so irrelevant to people of my generation who got a load of it at grammar school. The likes of us were a good two centuries into a world -- society, capitalism, individualism, prizing of intimacy -- to which ancient social structures and values were irrelevant. Horace feeling fulfilled because in his poetry he’d ‘built a monument more lasting than bronze’ -- how could a British teenager be expected to care about that? Or glory in war?
The British ruling class in the 18th and 19th centuries still, it’s true, maintained its adherence to classical ideals: politicians wearing togas in their statues, Parliament seeing itself as the equal of the Roman Senate and so on. But that adherence was already being undermined by the quite different set of ideas, values and preoccupations embodied in the new novels, such as those of Fielding and Richardson.
So, classics being no longer capable of performing its traditional educational function, English had to be invented -- though it took some time for novels to gain the valued position within it that they now, rightly, hold.
A big theme in the book is the idea of the public sphere, as opposed to both family and intimate relations on the one hand and, on the other, the general mainly work-based swirlings around that constitute ‘society’, a formation and a notion that have emerged only in modern -- post-Renaissance, scientific etc -- times. In ancient Greece, she says, there were only the prized public sphere of the polis, where men (only) could be fully human, and the despised family or household sphere where women and slaves performed the labour (including that of procreation) necessary to sustain mere animal life. Virtue, honour, morality all related to one’s conduct in the public sphere, one’s action (e.g. in war) and one’s speech (in legislative and judicial deliberation).
It’s surely those features of Greece (and of Rome -- essentially similar in its ideas and values, she says, apart from eventually losing democracy) that made classical education so irrelevant to people of my generation who got a load of it at grammar school. The likes of us were a good two centuries into a world -- society, capitalism, individualism, prizing of intimacy -- to which ancient social structures and values were irrelevant. Horace feeling fulfilled because in his poetry he’d ‘built a monument more lasting than bronze’ -- how could a British teenager be expected to care about that? Or glory in war?
The British ruling class in the 18th and 19th centuries still, it’s true, maintained its adherence to classical ideals: politicians wearing togas in their statues, Parliament seeing itself as the equal of the Roman Senate and so on. But that adherence was already being undermined by the quite different set of ideas, values and preoccupations embodied in the new novels, such as those of Fielding and Richardson.
So, classics being no longer capable of performing its traditional educational function, English had to be invented -- though it took some time for novels to gain the valued position within it that they now, rightly, hold.
Sunday, 13 March 2011
Manningham & Heaton (Bradford) photos
I've posted photos of my recent Bradford trip here, entirely buildings and views. Since photos are poor (dull weather, new camera) this is only for those with an interest in Bradford or architecture. Not sure how to suggest you view it: slide shows are nice but you have to set the time per slide and some of my captions are longer than others. So perhaps best to view one by one, on Full Screen setting. (The album title is wrong, by the way: my visit was at the end of Feb, not in March.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)