THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH
Competition report by Ferdinand Mount
Heads of English in secondary schools were asked to write on how the teaching of English could be improved, in a competition organised by the Centre for Policy Studies. The prizes were presented by Sir Keith Joseph on Tuesday.
`I GOTTA use words when I talk to you.' That was the starting point of the competi- tion - how to foster the love and under- standing of words. John Parry, of King George V Sixth Form College, Southport, thought English teachers used too many of them. 'They talk too much. They write the longest end-of-term reports, say most in staff meetings, swamp their students with words. They admire university lecturers who talk for hours at a time to make a couple of points and fail to discriminate between a neat advertising slogan and Othello's dying words, because, to a struc- turalist, rhetoric is all.' All the same, Mr Parry, like almost every one of the 61 teachers who entered from secondary schools all over the country, took a high and serious view of his calling; in a world stunned by disc jockeys, distorted by politi- cians and drained of magic, the English teacher alone was in a position to act as a cleanser of thought and speech and a messenger of delight. There was plenty to arouse the enthusiasm of Lord David Cecil as well as the approbation of Dr Leavis. And the judges - Michael Church, literary editor of the Times Educational Supple- ment, Penelope Fitzgerald, the Booker- Prize-winning novelist, and the present writer — had an uphill struggle to sort out a £500 winner and three £50 runners-up for the prizes.
To those who remember English lessons as a dekert of parsing, the emphasis on the pleasures of reading will come as a re- freshing surprise. Mrs Katherine Huggett, of Rosebury School, Epsom (runner-up), insisted that there is only one criterion of what to read in class: 'what the teacher cannot read without supreme delight. We do not have to say this, indeed it is far better not - but if the choice is genuinely made, something magic will happen some- where in the classroom. There are certain passages which I cannot think of without a frisson which I cannot explain: when Har- dy's Emma "Draws rein and sings to the swing of the tide" or Yeats recalls "The light of the evening. Lissadell" . . . . The communication of delight is not a didactic "skill" but a tenuous approach by the teacher which here and there will take root in the listener's memory.'
At the same time, there was an equal insistence on the need for application to and concentration on the subject. J.H.Worthen, of the Sandon School, Great Baddow, Chelmsford (runner-up),.recalled Lawrence's poem 'The Best of School': `This classroom scene does. not match up with many of the criteria so beloved of much recent educational thinking. The room itself is gloomy; there are no bright pictures speckling the walls; the boys are working individually, in total silence, look- ing only either at their writing or at the teacher: and the teacher himself is distant, "alone", possibly even seated upon a dais above the class. Hardly the conditions for "pupil-teacher interaction", the modern jargon might well have it. Yet how utterly fatuous such a comment would be, how completely blind to the relationship be- tween pupil and teacher that Lawrence evokes here:
Touch after touch I feel on me As their eyes glance at me for the grain Of rigour they taste delightedly.
Mr Wrothen laments the increasing ab- sence of 'the disciplined submission that is necessary for the study of great literature', and in particular the virtual disappearance of learning by heart, 'for to learn by heart is to take to heart'.
Entrants offered a variety of methods to encourage their pupils to swallow the grain of rigour. C.B.Winder, of Bolton School, suggested miming adverbs and wHipping up enthusiam for the study of punctuation by showing how Marshall Hall saved a man's life by thinking of an alternative pause in an incriminating sentence and how the difference between the punctua- tion of 'Friends, Romans and countrymen' in a modern edition and the Folio version affects the sense. Mrs Pamela Henderson, of the Burgate School, Fordingbridge, Hampshire, transports her class to a new island or a new planet to make them see how people are the makers of their lan- guage. Barry Smith, of Bishop Luffa Com- prehensive School, Chichester (runner- up), takes a book - for example, Rosemary Sutcliff's Dragon Slayer breaks it down in episodes, each of which is allotted to a pupil who then draws it, paints it and turns it into a poem, thus composing a Beowulf saga which can then be compared with the Old English one. Mrs Sophia Williams, of Waingel's Copse School, Woodley, Surrey, gets pupils at the lower end of the secon- dry school to write books for infants which are then catalogued in the school library, much enhancing the writer's status. A.C. Porter, of the Perse School, Cam- bridge, sets his pupils to act playlets, interviews and discussions, perhaps leaving them only with an outline or a title or a snatch of music to stimulate their imagina- tions. But for one lesson a week, his `mummery', as he calls it, is turned into a forum of which Mr Amis would be proud where he fights battles against the misuse of 'hopefully' and for elegance in punctua- tion and correct punctuation.
B. A. John, of King Edward VI Gram- mar School, Chelmsford, reminds us of the importance of what books look like. `Schools which squander thousands on playing fields, fast food cafeterias and instantly obsolete computers begrudge buying books. Who does not recall their school Shakespeares with bleary texts sub- merged under a palimpsest of departed pupils' pencilling? Children disdain so shabby-genteel a discipline. A love for books begins, like all affections, from the outside; Chaucer's "twenty bokes clad in blak or reed", or Leigh Hunt as a child doting over the rich ornaments and type of Cooke's sixpenny poets.' Mr John argues that 'multicultural education' sustains linguistic ghettoes and perpetuates the lack of social mobility. `Those denied High Culture soon find other heights denied them. It is undemo- cratic to offer the poor anything but the best. In a certain religion they have been promised the Kingdom of Heaven. It is an insult to give instead gutted editions of Goldfinger and Jaws . . . . Children should be exposed to difficult writers, particularly Shakespeare, while they are young enough to feel it a compliment rather than an imposition. Children enjoy what they don't fully understand, that's how they come to understand it . . . Too much English is devoted to Comprehension instead of Apprehension, stale thought for fresh feel- ings. . . . Words are often seen as a means of eluding reality. But escapism is often a healthy desire, frequently a moral necessi- ty in preserving the young from the mean- spirited tyranny of this year's "relevance": I enjoyed Mr John's rebarbative piece so much that he wins a special prize of £100 awarded by the Spectator.
Our overall winner, John Cole, of Priory School, Lewes, offers a gentler approach which beguiled us by its modesty and candour and seemed to breathe the dedica- tion of the true English master.
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