The Teacher's Right to Write

By DAVID HOLBROOK WE spend £600,000,000 a year on education. There are tens of thousands of schools, and in them tens of thousands of English teachers who are supposedly trained to express them- selves well. Yet the amount of readable matter published on education is very small—much less, say, than the amount published about the arts, on which we spend far less. There is endless controversy about the arts, to which most of the population are indifferent: yet little articulate discussion about what happens to several million children every day in the classroom. Why is this so?

A professor of anthropology recently made to me the analogy with a field-worker who has chosen to live with a savage tribe, and who writes field-notes, as it were, to himself. My articles on education, he implied, were field-notes. What one needs is a period in which one withdraws from the savage tribe in order to write at greater length and convince others of the things one told one- self in the field-notes.

In England not enough teachers get such opportunities to withdraw into a sabbatical year.

or to an Institute of Education course, so that they may think again at leisure about what they have been doing, and write about it. While they are in school they are invariably overworked, and their professional loyalty to the children is subtly exploited to load them with onerous duties. In- sufficient allowance is made for the exhaustion caused by the emotional absorption in his work which a teacher must accept before he can be- gin., The school teacher enters with his pupils into a complex relationship something analagous to the transference situation in psychoanalysis— the less 'bright' the pupils are, the deeper this is.

And the emotional exchange 'takes it out of him.' Even field-notes are bitterly won from the com- plex—it is so difficult to stand aside and try to consider what one is doing. Classes are too large, free periods too few, staffing ratios too mean. and the pace too restlessly driven.

But there is another reason for the lack of clearly written books and articles about educa- tion. Education, like love, in our society could be a much more numinous affair. In some prim- ary schools it has become, indeed, beautiful. I went to talk at a primary school in Stevenage recently where the corridors were festooned with poems, lined with marvellous children's paint- ings, and shelves of new books. All the children wanted to be poets: 'How long does it take,' they asked me, 'to become a grown-up poet?' To them the outside world should be as school was for them—a civilised pursuit of the meaning of life. The school was a little Athens--the only way to describe it.

What are the resistances to such developments, which could revolutionise our society and restore the central poetic functions, the search for 'a frame of orientation,' and a sense of significance in life? We may take a clue from D. H. Law- rence. writing about 'Sex Versus Loveliness.' To love living beauty you must have a reverence for sex. . . .' Our civilisation has a morbid fear of sex, he says, of 'alive beauty,' of our intuitive faculty, and our intuitive self. But 'sex perpetually inter- feres with the nice money-making schemes of social man so social man, who only wants to be "safe," hates the fires of sex.' For 'sex' one may read intuition—the whole inaccessible area of our make-up, beyond the grasp of conscious- ness and will, where our fantasy plays, and our soul darkly seeks for a sense of significance and inward order. Education only begins to civilise when it touches on these areas of being. Without dealing with this darkness of the intuitive faculty education becomes sterile and, actually, less effective. But to the administrator this raw live process of the classroom, and the cognisance of it in free imaginative work, seem indecent. And so we have the powerful pressure in education, to maintain a respectable façade, to keep to text- books, to suppress experiment, to maintain con- servative routines, and to restrain expression. The teacher cannot avoid the deep relationships with his pupils, such as R. Braithwaite discusses in his sensitive novel To Sir with Love; he will find girls falling in love with him, say, and find fierce hostilities and needs pressing on all his powers of self-possession and maturity. Yet he must seek to maintain values for the sake of the innocent.

The fear of 'criticism,' however, makes 'social man' defensive. Over the dark actualities of human contact in the school community a veil must be drawn. The teacher knows that con- fidential inquiries are made by telephone about his applications for a post—is he a Communist? a pacifist? a Lawrentian? is his wife 'all right'? He suffers many petty tyrannies, such as the opening of personal letters by the school secre- tary. And he knows that if he writes in the press about his work he will perhaps never get another job.

There has been very little 'criticism' caused by the dozen or so articles I have written in the last eighteen months in the Guardian, the Spectator and elsewhere; on the contrary, I have found a great degree of agreement. And now I shall be turning these 'field-notes' into a book. But it is perhaps worth recording that every effort was made to oppose my writing about my work in the national press, and to censor my articles. It is worth giving an account of this, and of some of the related facts I discovered about teachers' rights to write, in order to help other teachers deal with such opposition. I was at one point given to understand, for instance, that unless I accepted certain revised terms of employment unpleasant things would be said on my testi- monials.

The opposition came at its strongest at the beginning of my recent spate of part-time teach- ing. I found the return exciting, and produced two articles, one on a discussion of the marriage service with fourth-year children, and another on work against the rock 'n' roll ethos. We had all signed a paper in the 'Classroom Jungle' days agreeing to send copies of articles to the admini- strator's office, so that it could be seen that they were responsible. It seemed to me acceptable that the administrators should have time to prepare themselves for criticism. I received a letter in reply about my articles which said, 'There are matters in both documents about which I am deeply concerned,' and this was followed by a phone message in which 1 was asked to take out some material because there was 'too much about sex.' The following passages should be deleted: firstly a verse by a girl, which was 'not good' (I thought it very good for a not literate pupil!): His coloured shirts and tight black jeans I always see him in my dreams.

His trembling lips, his tender eyes,

These are the things 1 idolise..

was also wrong to write the following : 1 read them, with some embarrassment to myself (they were not embarrassed). James Joyce's story about an 'arranged' seduction, 'The Boarding House,' and asked, 'Do you think this is a good way for a marriage to happen?'

I was told (a) I should not have read children a story by James Joyce; (b) I should not have read children a story about seduction. They lived (as it turned out) with infidelity, seduction, rape (Did you hear about that girl 'oo got raped last week, sir, in the paper? Police come and took a statement from my bruvver'). But these troub- ling aspects must never, never be mentioned. To 'social man' they are untouchable.

I was told I had no right to set myself up as an authority on English teaching, and the final com- ment was on my article 'The Secret Places' which began thus: 'When I pick up the results of a les- son from the straggling line of desks among the leaky pens my chief feeling is one of awe. ...' I was told that the pens should not have been leaky, and that I should not have used the word 'awe.' He had taught for fifteen years and never felt awe. He claimed a veto on my work, and the whole episode was obviously intended to browbeat me out of writing about my work.

There were other effects A young col- league wrote a very good article on children's ballads, about motor-cycling. When I read his article I suggested that there was a fascinating conclusion to be drawn—the motor-cycle, obvi- ously, for these children, was a symbol of male potency. Why hadn't he drawn the conclusion explicitly? 'I could see that,' he said. 'But I didn't dare say it. You were criticised for writing too much about sex, you know. My wife's expecting a baby—I can't afford to get into trouble with the authority. I shall need a better job one day.' Again, a publisher telephoned me over some quotations from children's work in a teacher's book about Primary English—they heard I had had trouble—would the authority seek to claim copyright of the writing by children? Ought they to ask permission—yet there were criticisms of the authority in the book, and they didn't want to have to fight over these?

Perhaps it will help if I give some of the points found out for mySelf, which may help a teacher defend himself against interference intended to prevent him discussing his professional work. Obviously a great deal more writing by teachers is wanted to irrigate educational notions and practice. If this writing is to go beyond platitude, children's work needs to be quoted. Has the em- ployer any right to seek to censor the teacher's writing, and is children's work the property of the authority?

The answer is that writing done by children is their own copyright. Legally the children should be asked. But, for the purposes of critical com- ment, quotations from children's work come under the regulations established by the Society of Authors which determine what is fair quota- tion. Up to 400 words or forty lines of verse is an unobjectionable amount. Beyond that perhaps the child's permission should be obtained. Attempts by an education authority to alter or censor a teacher's writing should be resisted. The Society of Authors advised me: . It would se. .1 that in the absence of any specific arrangement to the contrary between yourself and the . . . Education Authority you shall he legally liable to resist any interfer- ence.

It seems courteous, however, to send where pos- sible a copy of an article for the authority to see, to prepare itself. But this is a privilege on their part, not a right. Often, of course, alterations are suddenly required, and the periodical or news- paper cannot give time for a copy to be seen. Of course, no one is obliged to submit a book. But the right to publish is in any case the teacher's, as is the right to teach in one's own way. Indeed, as Professor Boris Ford wrote to me, about dis- cussing the marriage service, 'a teacher of English who fails to communicate the moral preoccupa- tions of his subject is simply refusing to face up to his professional as well as his human duties.'

But a teacher who does face up to his duties, and seeks to discuss them in public, may well be attacked with all manner of shabby cunning by 'social man.' A teacher who meets this kind of undemocratic treatment should at once get in touch with the NUT, who watch such matters carefully. Of course, not even the NUT can re store a good testimonial, or prevent other indirect revenges being taken. It would be interesting to hear of other experiences of this kind (strict anonymity, of course, will be observed). This would deny or confirm my impression that ex- periment, and the exchange of accounts of experi- ment in schools, are inhibited by official attempts to cow the teacher into conformity with respec- table lifeless routines. In the end, of course, it is education itself that suffers.