Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of "Spiritus Mundi"
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
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12 comments:
True, sad.
I can't work out why though, S. There are many partial explanations but nothing all-embracingly satisfactory. The turning point must have come some time in the last 30 years when one generation that had been wholly acculturated deliberately denied the next generation any share in their own experience of learning.
That's quite a difficult thing to do in schools I would imagine. It means removing books, altering courses, setting wholly different assessment systems, facing down surprise at these actions. Most of all it means setting new educational goals - but there are none, unless the removal of foreign and classical language teaching is considered a goal.
So: true, sad, and odd.
Examine the people and history at The National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE), and the general inflitration by hippies and Marxists (Classrooms of Resistance etc).
As to the removal of books, I know of three schools where the Head of English (incumbent or outgoing) threw away or burned the school's English coursebooks as a scorched-earth tactic to ensure that only "creative" teaching could happen, with the result that for a long time, there were almost no guidelines, so there was a great unevenness in delivery. Then we got the awful bureaucratic National Curriculum as a reaction, and all our woe.
Back to coursebooks and exrecise books, say I. And Lycidas, Gray's Elegy, Shakespeare, John Clare...
I looked S, and was surprised (among many surprises) that creativity is now one of the four required characteristics of the demonstration of a proper understanding of poetry.
Angels have joined the 'don't know much about poetry but know what we like' category which, incidentally, includes all those who express a faith in or even knowledge of 'old-fashioned poetics'.
Just go for it, right?
More fluffy words. How do you judge a poem's "creativity"? It's like the waffle about "spirituality", or having a "Justice Minister".
I read it as meaning that the student must display poetic creativity, S, rather than judge the creativiness of the poem under consideration. It is expected to get out there and write the stuff. And then the teachers will mark what is written, knowing no poetry, at least in English. Nick Drew would be all right, but what about those who can't write a word without shutting out the notion of outsiders reading it? Shy? Nought out of ten.
My school reports never reproached me on the count of lack of creativity in all and any subjects, but in those days it met with punitive marking.
Materialism reigns. My stepdaughter, a classics lover, has just told us that Classical Greek is no longer to be offered as an A Level. And so few schools teach Latin. Much of my love of the English language comes from learning Latin, and Greek Verse, from the age of 8. The latter until I left prep school at 13.
Similarly grammar. Grammar tells us how to fit the different building blocks of a language together so that we can communicate precisely. No grammar, and a good chance what you say is not what you meant to say. Languages are of course vital and ever mutating, but all of us need to know how they hang together. Like.
No Greek anywhere Elby, or at her school? It's done very well in the classical liceos here. Perhaps she should finish her schooling at the Michelangelo or the Petrarca? Then she could study English as a foreign language and learn masses of formal grammar. Closer to home, I'm pretty sure a classical liceo in any northern French provincial capital, or in Paris, would do as well.
There is a very much stronger case for a voucher system in education than is usually put. It applies only to secondary education, but responds to the enormous differences in educational demand made by differing sections of the tax paying providers of educational resources. Why should educational resources provided by us all be concentrated on such a poverty-stricken and narrow band of learning? Those who wish to devote their post-basic educational time to classical languages, mathematics and harpsichord playing should be as empowered as those who are devoting it to remedial arithmetic, combined science, Spanish, and media studies approaches to English and writing.
It isn't about school uniforms, equality of access etc., the whole country can be dressed in navy-blue pinafores for all I care, and anyone who wants, vouchers in hand, can be admitted to any course of study for which a competence in basic requirements is displayed. It's just to end the hopeless waste of so many school students' time on courses that are made to fit providers not consumers.
There might be some unemployment in the ranks of so-called teachers though.
No more Greek anywhere, I gather. I like your idea for an educational "finishing" school. She's doing her As at what used to be called a crammer - she's had both independent and high class grammar, neither of which engaged her, so had most of this year off and now thriving in one of the many such South Ken institutes. Small classes and good teachers.
She had an interview at Somerville last week, and is awaiting to hear if they want her; though she is not to sanguine about her chances. She's young though, and young for her age in many ways, so a year's delay regardless would be my advice. Smart cookie, though, but an unconventional intelligence for a young 17 year old, bless her.
As for a voucher system, I am in agreement. My ex and I would have profited from it, so must declare an interest; we moved to Bristol from Oxford in 1983 to avail ourselves of the Steiner school there, and all four spent a good chunk of their education in two Steiner schools. None get any state funding, and a stumbling block is the dreadful national curriculum which is diametrically opposed to the Steiner philosophy. All our income for years went on their education, and we lived in a small terrace so as to have a minimal mortgage.
This "kids" are now 32 to 24, and all feel their education to have benefited them; it was grains and veg for many years though, and fit and healthy young adults too they are on it. And now avid carnivores, all bar the eldest!
Not Perugia though Elby; apart from the recent horrid murder, it was never a good idea. A proper liceo, with school rules was what I meant.
Ah, she did her GCSE's at Bryanston. Lovely surroundings, very good pastoral care, but still an exam machine. She's fine, and she ploughs her own furrow. As noted, she has a very sound sense of herself, a rare thing in one so young and it will stand her in good stead.
A fancy she does have - L is a Kiwi, thus her daughter has many relatives out there she is yet to meet, is to gap year out in NZ, and see if she can work in the Foreign Office there. The perfect place for a classics scholar, should that be what she becomes.
Vouchers, yes (including, I suggest, some proportion - maybe 50% of national per capita spending - if you opt for home education); blame it all on the teachers, no, that's far too simple.
Most of what's gone wrong has been the work of national and local politicians poking each other (or rather, their unfortunate constituents) in the eye, plus the (perhaps self-serving, self-aggrandizing) dreams and schemes of well-entrenched rings of (perhaps originally well-meaning) inspectors, advisers etc. Revolutionaries, Merrie Pranksters and people who simply had a low threshold of boredom.
By and large, teachers do what they're told, however daft the latest order, because it's more than their jobs are worth to resist. This is why my mother's teachers in East Prussia joined the Nazi Party, and why in the 70s (if not afterwards) an ambitious teacher needed to be a Labour Party Member in the ILEA and surrounding authorities.
The centralised micromanagement in education is part of the problem, not the solution. I believe Stafford Beer said (and I wish I could find the reference), that you need to devolve management to a degree - set your objectives, provide a budget, and let the department in question work out how best to use the resources to achieve those aims.
A major area in which cost-effective improvement could be made, is the provision of a range of professionally-written coursebooks, for each subject, age and level of ability. These should be available rather than compulsory, but would offer a track to run on. The teacher could be confident that if she stuck to it, the relevant material would be covered; and it would always remain possible to find one's own tweaks and add-ons. With the best will in the world, 300,000 teachers cannot all be superb text-writers, and far too much of their creative energy is going into the immensely tedious and bureaucratic curriculum planning, instead of helping children through the learning. Your energy must be preserved for the classroom. Train drivers aren't expected to lay the rails in front of them as well as drive.
And then there's the plague of absolutely dreadful parenting. Schools are trying to (having to) take over functions and obligations apparently abandoned by a growing number of the population. Coping with the vastly increased numbers of innocent (but awfully unsettled and demanding) cuckoos drains resources from the rest. So what does the government do but try to force every school to have its proportion of disruption. What an unholy mess.
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