Time and the Bell

Time and the bell have buried the day.
The black cloud carries the sun away. (T.S. Eliot)

In this article I wish only to say a few simple things – to give one man’s point of view on teaching. If I had greater knowledge of educational theory, or ten years’ teaching practice behind me, then I would write a very different article, quoting Plato instead of Eliot and putting forward a new theory of the place of phonics in the reading programme. We tend to see the problems of our profession as a ship’s engineer would see problems of navigation – in terms of fuel pressure, lubrication, the right thing done at the right time. I offer the comment of the ordinary A.B. who has time, between watches, to observe flying fish, quarrel with the cook, and wonder how the engineer gets on with his wife. It is of course an ignorant, prejudiced view. When, for example, I mention Thomas Dewey, I consider only his influence on disciples, not his true status as an educational philosopher. But engineer and A.B. have this in common – they are each involved in a public role which can make or mar them, in so far as they retain their own eyes, their own powers of judgment, or alternatively become robots. On the educational ship we can do more – we can determine a little the course that the ship is to take. I offer these comments to my fellow teachers, on behalf of the children, who will not read them, but who have taught me slowly, over several years, that educational problems are problems of the whole personality, and woke again in me an almost defunct belief in the goodness and sanity of human nature. I will begin with a story.

The electric unit started with a jerk. Then smoothly and swiftly it rushed along the sea wall, scattering the smart gulls who make a fat living at thepage 299 outlet pipe at Ngauranga. A quilt of birds peeled off the rocks as we raced towards them, and settled calmly behind us, each one to its allotted inch. The old man beside me grunted and shifted in his seat.

‘Errhm!’ he said, as the wheels of his mind began to rev. ‘It’s good to relax after the day’s toil.’

‘You bet,’ I replied.

But he was not entirely satisfied. He linked his fingers and drummed them on his waistcoat. The whitish cod’s eye gleamed upon me from a map of wrinkles.

‘It’s a great thing, James,’ he began slowly – ‘It’s a great thing, for a man of my age, to feel that one has the full respect of one’s colleagues.’

‘I’m sure it must be,’ I said. The dry docks slid slowly past the train window, and a heap of rusty girders under a clump of fennel.

‘Respect and trust,’ he said. ‘Do you know how to gain that respect and trust?’

‘No,’ I confessed.

‘Discipline,’ he beamed. ‘Discipline and efficiency. A classroom in order and every child at work.’

‘I thought of my own disordered classroom. I thought also of Celia, seven-and-a-bit years old, who could not write a sentence that made sense, except the one she wrote about her brother ‘My brother is the bravest of them all.’

‘It sounds a bit too simple,’ I said.

The old eye frosted, as if it had seen lunch-paper in the school corridor. ‘Not too simple, my boy, not too simple. You’re only beginning at the game, remember.’ He patted me on the shoulder, while the train jolted to a stop at the Wellington platform. The pneumatic doors opened to let in a drizzly gust. ‘Well, I’ll be seeing you tomorrow, James. No late hours, remember. A teacher must be fresh for the morning.’ He toddled onto the platform, suitcase in hand. The square, old lifeless mouth sank down at the corners as he looked savagely at a bunch of immigrant Dutchmen who chattered and cat-called to their girl-friends. ‘The young,’ he whinnied.

‘There’s great deterioration . . .’.

But I had seen my path to escape through the crowd, and mumbling goodbye I darted to the safety of the bookstall . . .

His composite ghost looks over my shoulder as I write. It protests that I have missed out the touch of human dignity, the privacy which makes any man or woman vulnerable and real. And I answer that this may well be so, since I have not, and scarcely desire the strength to crack the armadillo hide of a private man devoured by a public role.

I write now not as an artist flailing bourgeois society, but as a man who is also a schoolteacher. Against that sketch I could set a hundred better thingspage 300 – the common casual goodwill of the school staffroom, faces and voices one has grown imperceptibly to love and welcome, all mutual help and tolerance within the relationship of the profession. I remember a hot day in November when the smell of children, chalk, and sun-blistered varnish came down like thick fog by mid-morning. At twelve o’clock I pushed heavy and sweating into the staffroom and fell into a tobacco coma. Bill (I called him that in my mind, though in speech it was always Mr Donovan) swam gently in at the door.

‘Hot,’ he said.

That did not need an answer.

‘I’d thought of taking the car down to Lowry Bay,’ he said. ‘There’s a spare pair of bathing trunks in the back. Would you care to come along?’

I would.

At Lowry Bay we swam out beyond the lion rocks and seaweed. Then we lay down to dry in the grass by the bathing shed. He talked of his days as a country teacher – and as always, his genuine care for the children as persons rang out behind the careful phrases. He told me how a Maori girl had played the wag when the health inspector came.

‘At playtime she was missing,’ he said. ‘Out she went and hid in the flax. I sent some of the big boys out to find her. But it was no good, she’d gone to earth like a rabbit. So I went out myself, and I found her in the bushes just above the creek. There was a high bank above it, just like that one’ – he pointed to the crumbling cliff above the bathing shed. ‘Rita!’ I called, ‘Rita!’ But down she ran, straight down, from bush to bush, straight as an arrow. She didn’t come back that day. I found afterwards that she thought a health inspection was something like docking the lambs . . . Here have one of these.’ He offered me a home-grown tomato.

Bill – I mean Mr Donovan – was and is a headmaster.

It is perhaps ingratitude to beat an old tired nurse. There are thousands of men and women in the profession who know more about the handling of children than I will ever know. Yet, ignorant and fumbling, I have gradually become aware of a basic ambiguity in the role of school-teacher, for me, and perhaps for others. On one side stands the world of schemata – the civic offices of Mr Dewey, the grubby cardboard palace of Washburne, the cold dry workshops of syllabus and Infant Training Manual; on the other side, a hot jungle, full of life, colour and noise, smell, violence, joy and grief, where alligators and birds of paradise swap yarns daily. It is no good deceiving ourselves that we are natives there. Once we were; but now we inhabit, as those children will, another world – the adult jungle of difficult love, appalling ambushes, and unintelligible ruins, where light comes, if at all, from a sun beyond our astronomy. So we come to the children’s jungle as explorers, doctors, anthropologists, drawn (if we will admit it honestly) more by its life-giving warmth than by any certainty that the gifts we bring are the gifts they need.

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It seems to me that a great deal hinges on the attitude of the teacher towards this jungle in which he stands as an adult stranger. It is even possible for him to ignore it and bury his head in a bucket of statistical sand – intelligence quotients, tests of vocabulary, charts of reading progress, a mass of exercise books to correct in detail – all the paraphernalia by which we persuade ourselves that we have the situation in hand. ‘This is my job,’ – he will say, ‘to fulfil my responsibilities to the children, to the parents, and to the Board that employs me – to become an efficient teacher.’ I remember going, as a student, to an Infant Room where a female martinet drilled Primer One children by numbers. She had control – God help her. Her grading was, I know, very high. One little Hindu beauty, with a red caste star on her forehead, sat and gazed at her instructor with dark, remote eyes. Every day after school this child wept her way through the words of a language unintelligible to her, while the voice of the big woman rose in anger. Yet she was, I am sure, at heart a woman of goodwill, maimed by circumstances beyond her power to cope. She had lived so long in the cardboard house of educational schemata that it looked like home to her.

Along the corridor, two doors down from this House of Correction, another woman flourished among her tribe. I think she had forgotten even the original missionary intent that brought her to them. Her classroom was a calm island where children ambled about their pursuits as if in a ritual pattern. The jungle of their minds climbed freely from floor to ceiling, in grease crayons, chalk, paint, and coloured paper. No doubt this woman inhabited like a goddess the country of their dreams where tigers lived in wardrobes and goosegirls became princesses at the drop of a gnome’s hat. She too had control.

With infants the inadequacy of a purely schematic approach is very obvious. For those small creatures, still young enough to hide behind their mother when a stranger comes to the house, a man teacher would seem something out of joint, a policeman in the nursery. Their relation in the classroom to their secondary mother reflects the relation to their true mother at home. Hence an Infant Mistress either mothers and teaches or fails to teach.

At the Standard level the role of teacher ostensibly changes. One becomes guide, mentor, counsellor, friend, and adviser to the children under one’s care (I write remembering various brochures in which we advertise our profession to ourselves). The schemata of education become one’s tools of trade. It is at this point that the (to me) dangerous ambiguity of the teacher’s role begins. Though ostensibly a guide, he is ignorant of the terrain of childhood. His very maturity separates him from full identification with a child’s wishes and fears. Ostensibly a friend and counsellor, he remains at a deeper level the father-figure whose edict can crush, not because it is just, but because of who he is. On this foundation – which our schemata interpret variously as ‘reason’, the child’s ‘instinct for justice’, or his ‘naturalpage 302 wish for adult guidance’ – rests the controlling power of a teacher inside and outside a classroom. The child who waits with a hollow stomach in front of the headmaster’s study waits in the grip of an anxiety as primitive as that of a savage at the door of the ju-ju hut. For the child this is no new situation; and in some measure it will recur throughout his life – when he applies for a job to a boss who seems made of steel and liquid graphite, when he stands ‘on the mat’ before a captain or a colonel, when his prospective father-in-law regards him as a robber caught in the act of lifting the jewel from the ring, when conceivably as a grown man and schoolteacher he expects the arrival of a school inspector whose harmless habits disturb him more than those of a cave weta. In later life he will cope with primitive anxiety by aggressive nonchalance, a rational balancing of assets, prayer, or the gift of the gab. But the child at the study door has no weapons but the habit of deceit and the courage of his undoubted crimes.

As unconditioned observers we would very likely identify ourselves most readily with the child outside the door. His state of mind is that of our own anxiety dreams. As schoolteachers we are the man inside the study, whose situation contains the dangerous ambiguity of which I write. If that man were in fact friend and counsellor, the following conversation might occur between him and the culprit:

‘Well, Jack, I hear you pinched a comic from Mrs Taverner’s shop.’

‘Not pinched, Sir – took. I only took one, but Billy took three. It wasn’t worth it either. I got one I’d read before.’

‘I used to like Rockfist Rogan best.’

‘I don’t like Champions much. There’s too much writing and not enough pictures.’

‘Well it’s a bit hard on Mrs Taverner, isn’t it? She’s got enough to do with twelve of a family and Mr Taverner, without having to watch out for you and Billy too.’

‘She’s a mean old b—. She always gives you short weight when you get sixpence worth of caramels.’

‘I see what you mean. You think the comic makes up the short weight in caramels.’

‘That’s right, Sir.’

‘I used to know a storekeeper like that. We stuck a bit of chewing gum under the scales so that he had to give us half as much again.’

‘Cripes, that was a good idea. We might do that too.’ ‘Now about this comic, Jack . . .’.

Unfortunately that kind of conversation never occurs. Instead the teacher, with largely artificial severity, hauls the culprit over the coals. It is, after all, part of his job – by speech and example, to lead the children under his care into good social habits. And as the years go by, the policeman’s overcoat, worn at first uneasily, tends to settle snugly on his shoulders. The severitypage 303 often becomes more real, the sympathy and insight more inactive, till this sad old man sees no absurdity in bullying a child for bullying. He is well versed in the language of the educational textbooks. His favourite phrase has become, ‘Every child needs a helping hand’. Perhaps a classroom teacher, by refusing the role expected of him, can keep his head above water for a few years. But by the time he is first assistant or headmaster, petrifaction is often far advanced.

Our schemata of education gloss over the psychological problems of the man or woman on the job. For a job it is. On the job we have no gospel to preach. We have at best some skills to transmit in the restricted and artificial field of a school classroom or playground. Do what we will, the children will regard us as surrogate parents. Hence we need far more knowledge, whether we ourselves are married or unmarried, of the intricate relation of parent and child than most parents possess; and courage to deflate our role and meet, as learners, the children on their own ground. I have slowly come back to the conclusion, once abandoned, that A.S. Neill was on the target and all the official marksmen are firing in the wrong direction.

Perhaps I have given the impression of not caring much whether our children are educated or not. If so, that is a false impression; I do care. But in looking at the problems of children we teachers tend to ignore the dangers of our own situation, which are considerable. We can become time-servers, going through the motions of classroom instruction, without heart in it; we can become idolaters worshipping schemata. But if we remain critics of our educational system, critical of the society we live in, if we remain aware of our own incompleteness, we will be more tolerant of the incompleteness of children. The best teachers are still the revolutionary ones, the so-called eccentrics; for they bring into the classroom the thoughts and actions of whole people, and to these the children can respond freely.

Some questions must be asked before one can begin to think as a whole man. Kierkegaard held that a religious man needs to ask the question, ‘Is God in fact wholly good and loving?’ – or else remain perpetually in a no-man’s land of doubt and aridity. There are certain questions that seem to me just as necessary for a schoolteacher to ask and try to answer. The stock answers can be found by recourse to educational schemata. They will resemble in kind the answer of a soldier in the trenches who, when asked why he is fighting, replies, ‘For my King and Country’. In the obscure war on ignorance, in which our classrooms are trenches and the Department of Education perhaps a supply depot, we need to ask ourselves, ‘Are the war aims meaningful or meaningless? Who are in fact the enemy? Why am I teaching at all?’ The real answers may be surprising. And at least the man who questions his role is not so likely to be destroyed by it.

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