I have a cunning plan. Instead of sending children to school, which is, let’s face it, appallingly expensive and means we need teachers. We can buy them all a smartphone and let the internet do the rest. When you have to rely on Baldrick writing in The Guardian to defend the teaching of art history, archaeology and classical civilisation in schools, the barbarians aren’t at the gate, they’ve dismantled the entire city brick by brick, levelled the ground and are handing out canapés to foreign investors.
In an article some weeks ago, I argued that in the minds of the general public, schools had become the dustbins, not the drivers, of ideas - that as a nation, we had forgotten what they were for. Oh that Cassandra feeling! Professionally, I appreciate, of course, that there are pragmatic and commercial reasons why the exam boards concerned have decided they can no longer support these subjects, but has no one else considered that it is our education system itself that has pushed them to this sad stage? They have insufficient staff, insufficiently knowledgeable or appropriately skilled to manage such a significant responsibility. How did that happen?
Withering curriculum
The state-controlled curriculum has been slowly withering in the stultifying grip of social meliorists, rather than educators, for decades, regardless of which political party forms a government. It’s no accident that for the academic year ending in July 2015, of all the students studying art history A level, 76 per cent did so at private schools. That is 562 students out of 740.
Put all politically motivated prejudices aside. Come on, if that patron saint of political correctness, Shami Chakrabarti can do it, anyone can. Put all that aside, and you’ll realise the reason why the last bastion of art history was in the private sector is the freedom and stability so many of those schools enjoy. Privileges indeed - far above the pampered playing fields or state-of-the-art art centres - compared with the chronic instability, insecurity and febrile trends state schools are subjected to by that same, desiccating, social meliorism.
So here’s my bid for what’s next on the list to cull. English literature’s days are definitely numbered. I mean who needs to read novels? What possible use are they? You can squeeze To Kill a Mocking Bird into a PSHE class. After all, that’s the only book they need to read and that’s where it belongs anyway. Why study - and I mean actually read - all that difficult drama business? Only the old and rich go to the theatre today. A play is just an opera without the band and everyone knows what elite, irrelevant drivel opera is. What on earth could learning about novels, plays, opera have to do with all those 21st-century skills needed for all those amazingly cool jobs that haven’t been invented yet for the equally cool digital natives with smartphones? And as for teaching poetry, words fail me.
Words fail us
Which is, of course, the point. Words are already failing us. George Orwell was far from the first literary genius who understood the fragile connection between language and liberty, but I have no doubt his ghost is aghast with disbelief at the idea that anyone who seriously describes themselves as a “teacher,” enthuses over Twitter, or opts for a leering, lemon emoji instead of typing out those three, slight words, I love you.
If once wasn’t enough, I was blasted by that Cassandra feeling yet again after listening to Howard Jacobson’s brilliant defence of literary difficulty on Radio 4’s A Point of View. Not least because of the unfettered abuse my criticism of shallow young adult fiction in TES provoked during the summer, from adults, who, without a doubt, considered themselves educated. Jacobson praised Tom Stoppard for the way he had attacked audiences of his plays who were ill equipped to enjoy them. “It wasn’t simply that they were uneducated themselves, what was worse, was that they were frightened, and even offended by the evidence of education in others,” Jacobson said.
That offence, the contemptuous touchiness, that miasmatic fear of not knowing, anathema in a real academy, has taken over the educational establishment. It is the distinguishing feature of social meliorism. What Claire Fox describes in her recent book as an academy rotting from within. A book, appropriately called, considering Jacobson’s words, I Find that Offensive.
I remember the day Stoppard came to talk to the pupils at the school where I taught. It was, just to put an indelible stamp on everything I have been arguing here, a private school, free to make its own choices. He was there not because he was paid to be, or because of some old-boy connection (which I’m sure is what anyone describing themselves on Facebook as “stroppy” instantly assumed). It was simply because he knew this was a school that shared his profound belief that literature mattered. He was right.
Rediscover what schools are really for
What, in comparison, does the state offer? My work takes me to a lot of educational conferences and events. In the past few months, I have repeatedly watched teachers, and others working in education, emote effusively about some wonderful project they’re inevitably instrumental in. Normally they are helping seven-year-olds to change the world, become active citizens or find a cure for cancer. How I wish that was parody: it isn’t. It’s never how to relish reading books, write lucid prose or understand the principles of scientific enquiry. Those are at best afterthoughts, fortunate byproducts: unfortunately for the children. We are then treated to a video of children, not because it illustrates the project, but because it’s so easy to pluck at other social meliorists’ heart strings.
It is both naive and foolish to impose such risibly vacuous goals on other peoples’ small children, to preach instead of doing what every teacher is paid to do, to teach children something they didn’t know, so they are free to make choices for themselves. We used to value that freedom to teach so much: it justified without question subjects like art history and archaeology being formally taught, by well-educated adults, in classrooms.
When schools and teachers rediscover what schools are really for, and start to teach instead of preach, this slow culling of the curriculum might just grind to a standstill. Until that happens, I will brace myself for more wincingly saccharine videos of other people’s children, being unwittingly trodden into a rung on the ladder of someone else’s career.
Joe Nutt is an educational consultant and author
