Diving with great white sharks, speeding round the track at Brands Hatch with the world sidecar racing champion, being eaten alive in an interview with Lou Reed… though I’ve done lots of exciting things in the course of my life as a journalist, none has come even close to matching the visceral thrill of the four days I spent earlier this year as a teacher at my old school, Malvern College.
I don’t mean that the pupils (or whatever grisly term you’re supposed to call them these days: students? clients? learning co-travellers?) were in any way frightening or unnecessarily difficult. Nor that I found the experience remotely traumatic. I’m merely trying to capture the mix of elation, absorption and high-wire danger which teachers experience every day of their working lives but which most of us (unless maybe we’re actors, lion tamers or bomb disposal engineers) will never know.
When I first wrote about the profession in these extravagant terms, a teacher from a northern comprehensive kindly wrote to invite me to try teaching at his school and see how I felt then. I may yet take him up on it — though I can’t see what I’d gain from the experience other than to discover that I’d make a really bad state-school teacher.
This isn’t a snob thing. It’s an ideology thing. The reason I’m a classical liberal is that I believe the leprous hand of the state taints everything it touches because the state’s values are false values. There are one or two excellent state schools out there — the old grammars, the Toby-Young-style free schools, the state boarding schools like Old Swinford Hospital — but such excellence as they manage to attain is invariably achieved despite the state’s influence, rather than because of it.
Let me put it in another way: if you were trying to set up a successful school in an open educational market, here are some of the things you wouldn’t feature in your prospectus: ‘child-centred’ learning; teaching literacy with the ‘Real Books’ method; non-competitive sports days; no school uniform; reports that don’t tell you how well your child is performing academically or their position in the class; a curriculum that majored on empathy, political correctness and information-gathering at the expense of solid knowledge.
All the stuff I’ve just described is the handiwork of ‘progressive’ educationalists, who would never have had anywhere like as much influence in a free-market system because the customers wouldn’t have worn it. How do we know? Because we already have the perfect model of what punters want in education when given the choice: it’s called the private system.
What parents (and schoolkids, if only they knew it) are looking for in a school are the kind of things I saw every day in my time teaching at Malvern: enthusiastic, dedicated staff who don’t just teach the subject but teach round the subject; an ethos which prizes discipline, hard work, competitiveness, aspiration, rigour; smart uniforms proudly worn; sport — lots and lots of sport; and so on.
It’s easy to mock those qualities — which many would have us believe belong to that bygone era when the purpose of our public schools was to train young men to die with dignity in colonial hellholes. Quite possibly, I would once have felt a teeny bit cynical towards them myself: certainly, when the school made the mistake of turning me into a prefect, my only contribution in the tedious, -pretend-grown-up meetings we used to have with the headmaster was to petition for the school’s renowned first XI pitch to be turned into a croquet lawn.
But going back to my alma mater as a teacher enabled me to see this Victorian system in its proper light. I was impressed that all the kids had their ties and buttons properly done up (and were told off if they didn’t) because it presented to the world (notably those all-important fee-paying parents) the image of a tightly run ship. When you’re a schoolkid you scoff at this kind of sticklerishness. I certainly did. But what is going on here, I now realise, is akin to what happens in those wartime units where, no matter how dreadful the conditions become, the officers continue to insist that every man shaves properly every day. It’s the Kohima spirit. And it matters.
Before I had a go at teaching, I’d always imagined I’d be one of those cool, groovy, slacker teachers who is not too hot on discipline but gets away it, just about, because he’s amusingly eccentric. What I learned to my surprise is that I’m much more of a traditionalist. The least I require from my pupils is absolute attention every second till the final bell. You can joke; you can try to digress; but what I won’t tolerate is if you won’t engage. It’s insulting to me and all the effort I’m putting in to making your class as interesting, informative and useful as possible; and it’s insulting to those of your classmates who are making the effort.
God, it’s weird hearing myself saying this stuff. How on earth do I reconcile it with this role I’ve carved out in life as Delingpole the snark; Delingpole the batshit-mad, out-there, no-prisoners revolutionary; Delingpole the tooth flicker at all forms of arbitrary authority?
More easily than you’d think. If you want to be a really top-class rebel, it seems to me, you need a structure to rebel against. You also need the basic knowledge and intellectual grounding to understand why you’re rebelling. Otherwise, what’s the point?
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