IN PRAISE OF
TEACHERS
I didn’t mean
for my memoir of loathing school (see last blog) to be slagging off teachers. Many
of my teachers got me through by skill and tact within a system I hated, not them individually. They weren’t all inspiring
by any means but then being John the Baptist or Joan of Arc was never a
teaching qualification. Both my parents and my maternal grandparents were schoolteachers
so I never even got the chance to nurture a festering hatred for the profession
as a whole.
Education has
been bedevilled in England (I exclude Scotland from this discussion) by a
top-down class system and the cyclical movements of political ideology nearer
to the top or nearer to the bottom at one time or another. Grammar schools and
11-plus against comprehensives; academies and ‘free’ schools against state,
etc. League tables and endless tests and exams exemplify an obsession over
grades, as if grading made up for lack of educational strategy and vision. Another
obsession amongst the English is the one over school uniforms, which most other
European countries don’t appear to suffer. The Finns enjoy the highest
educational standards in Europe with neither private schools nor uniforms. As someone wrote
perceptively in a recent Letter to the Editor: uniforms are necessary for
identifying certain personnel, such as police, security, medical and rescue
workers, military and so on. Uniforms serving no such purpose have only one
other: to internalise the conformism in the person who wears one, like a
schoolchild, and to legitimate the control held over schoolchildren (or certain
kinds of employee). Meanwhile teachers are leaving in droves exhausted and
frustrated by time-consuming and endless bureaucratic procedures and the
constant testing drive demanded by politicians. All made worse when a new set
of politicians comes into power and turns the procedures around, though never
reducing them. It turns out that Britain has no actual, conceptually consistent
policy on education – or on pensions,
prisons, hospitals, railways, and the environment for that matter.
The bedevilment
of education in America is I think more down to civic graft and corruption,
since the public education system is operated at city or county level. Years
ago Ivan Illich, in De-Schooling Society,
seized on statistics showing that US educational standards were declining
against ever higher educational appropriations. Illich didn’t say so, but this
would seem to point to largescale misappropriation
of funds more than to inappropriate
methods of teaching: graft works best at the lower and more local levels of
governance where secrets are easier to keep. A high school principal cannot
obtain necessary funding, say, for up-to-date textbooks because the city hall
monies are appropriated along old-boy network lines. Teachers generally are not
held in very high esteem by citizens especially of the more rural states
anyhow, so their agitation is ignored and there are few votes in the advocacy
of better public schooling with appropriate pay levels for teachers as a
profession. George Bernard Shaw did a terrible thing when he said: ‘Those who
can, do; those who can’t, teach.’ Very witty. An iniquitous and untrue saying
which has stuck with people who never heard of Shaw. Especially since teaching
may be an even more challenging and demanding - indeed draining - line of work
than brain surgery. We pay loads to those
who operate on brains but not so handsomely to those trying to put something in
them. And so we have a US statistic apparently showing that 49% of all Americans
believe Satan is a real person.
Somehow
teachers manage to carry on under whichever system. My best teacher ever, who taught
me history, was a quiet and kindly encouraging mentor who certainly inspired me
– the only teacher I really loved as a person. So one Saturday afternoon I go
to the pictures to find him tearing tickets at the door in a movie usher’s
uniform, replete with cheap epaulettes. We both had the grace not to recognise
each other, he standing there gazing into the middle distance tearing tickets. I
do not mean to denigrate theatre ushers, but this wonderful man had to endure
the sniggering of pupils he taught as they streamed past, in order to secure a
decent living by taking a second job. I was deeply ashamed for my town and its
politicians who denied him a proper salary in his own profession. The seeds of
socialism were sown.
By contrast I
was taught English grammar and literature by a terrifying ogre in his sixties,
tall, distant, grey and gaunt, with a face as inviting as Eamonn de Valera’s
(look up Eamonn in Google). Teaching had made him entirely cynical about young
scholars though perhaps his cutting sarcasm – and he ruled by sarcasm in a
drawling English accent – derived from what I later decided must have been a
minor public boarding school education in England (‘public’ of course means ‘private’
in higher-class British education). He never actually banged his ruler down on
anyone’s knuckles, which would have been beyond the pale at least in high
school even in those years, but it seemed possible at any moment, for he
maintained a constant presence of menace and malice. His pupils repaid him in
their adoration by once setting fire to his front porch, which no doubt
confirmed him in his opinion of them. Perversely, I was rather fond of him,
which would have shocked him to the core if he’d ever known since his tactics
would thus have failed, at least the once. His contempt, though more thoroughly
soused in brine than my own, was a bracing corrective to all the optimism
otherwise being showered on us. But the real reason for my liking was his
inability to conceal a sharpness of mind and thorough grasp of his subject. He got
me through 17th- and 19th-century sonnets and Shakespearean
soliloquies and I never forgot how to parse a sentence. His sarcasm was worth
listening to. And from him I learned something even more valuable: that life is
a bum deal if the world is full of people like him in it. It has held me in good stead ever since, as the
world is indeed full of such people.
His son, who
taught maths in the same school, could scarcely have been more different:
friendly, informal, with no hauteur and desperate to instil the humbler
branches of mathematics into me which failed as my brain was and remained
numbers-dead. From his infinite patience and kindness I learned that
trigonometry would never be for me.
An even more
obliging teacher, in woodworking, was young Mr Anstey. Our class projects were
the making of a coffee table of a wood surface with wrought-iron legs. I could
no more have made a coffee table than skinned a goat. But Mr Anstey did not
believe in failure. More to the point: he did not believe in his boys failing
on him. I soon learned that if I
asked him about anything he would show me by doing it for me. I asked him how
to plane the boards so they would fit together, and he showed me by planing the
boards. I asked about varnishing, so he varnished the boards, that is, after he’d
glued them together and sanded them down. I didn’t even have to ask about the wrought-iron legs: he just took it all in
hand without complaint. In the end I had a splendid table and got an A for it. I
took it home to my father who was delighted at my newfound talent for
craftsmanship. I never disabused him. As Kate Chopin wrote: ‘The storm passed
and everybody was happy.’ From Mr Anstey I learned another thing: when in
doubt, Always Ask.
Eventually I landed
a swell part-time job on the local newspaper with a weekly ‘school’ column
saying what went on around the school, the athletic and sporting events and so
on. I felt like Clark Kent - a real smartypants. My editor was a genial soul
who knew many of the teachers well. So when he subbed my articles he would
change my ‘Mr’ or ‘Mrs’ or ‘Miss’ for the teachers to their Christian names: ‘Sam,’
‘George’, ‘Jimmy’ or ‘Rosie’. The articles were published under my own by-line
and so suggested a chummy over-familiarity with my academic betters. One old
biddy rounded on me in the corridor one morning for my daring to refer to her
as ‘Nancy’ instead of ‘Miss’ Thingamajig. In vain did I try to explain to her
in her fuming the ways of editors, and of this one who had beefed up my piece
without my knowledge. It is horrible to go around knowing all the teachers hate
you. Surely it’s meant to be the other way round? I laid low thereafter for a
while. My ‘Eamonn’ had struck again.
Teachers taught
me, one way or another, far more than they ever knew, or I knew at the time.
Another
objection to my previous blogs might be to the fatuity of a Marxian socialist
who can’t stand participating in organised or agenda-driven groups. But it’s
okay to hate the water and still cheer on champion swimmers and divers and
their teams! Or to follow Andy Murray or Roger Federer without having played a
stroke of tennis in one’s life. Spectators, yes, but the champions need their
cheerers as much as the other way round. I cheer on the socialist movement from
my particular sidelines and I hope that in some way it helps things along. Better
than keeping shtum altogether I’d say.
Perhaps one day
I will find myself marching shoulder
to shoulder with others in an organised grouping – with or without pitchfork –
as conditions worsen to prise me out of my splendid isolation. Once, while
suffering from a very bad back, I took myself on my motorbike to the theatre. It
was even painful to ease myself into my seat. Then – fortunately near the interval
– I realised I had left the keys in the ignition. At the first opportunity I sprang
from my seat and sprinted off through the streets to rescue my machine if I could.
With relief I found nothing had happened and my keys still dangling there. But what
had happened to my back pain?
Circumstances can alter all of us however ingrained the condition.
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