Rod Liddle says that we should leave teaching to the professionals, however much they annoy us, and stop pretending that children benefit from learning obscure languages or how to paint like Cézanne at home
I think it was the bit about Cézanne which really got to me. It came early on in last week’s article. Perhaps you read it; my colleague James Bartholomew was explaining how he had intended to tutor his daughter Alex, now that he had taken the liberating decision to remove her from school because the teachers and everybody else were useless. From now on he’s going to teach her at home, or in agreeable bits of the world where there is usually a nicely crisp dry white wine available and a modified peasant cuisine. The Cézanne bit followed a short passage wherein James bemoaned Alex’s shortcomings in the grammatical department and how he intended to put that right. Here goes:
‘I don’t want to give the impression that I will be a Gradgrind. We will have some fun, too. Alex loves to paint. We will go to the major Cézanne exhibition in Aix and see his paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Then we will see the mountain itself from the same viewpoint that he used. I hope we will settle down to paint it ourselves — perhaps copying Cézanne’s technique.’
Those are my italics, although one fears that, in time, they may well become the italics of Alex Bartholomew. She is nine years old. Perhaps she will enjoy being marched to a mountain and charged with the task of replicating a Cézanne, and even consider it ‘fun’, if she is a bit weird. Hell, perhaps she will knock off a quick Velázquez on the train back to Avignon, before preparing a perfect supper for the family in the rustic tradition of the Cévennes, translate a few pages of Job back into Greek and Hebrew, posit a new theory which unifies quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of relativity, and explain to the entire family why Dvorák is, melodically and structurally, an also-ran. And she may think all that is fun, too.
Nine years old! The Department for Education and Skills estimates that there are some 90,000 British people who have taken their clever, beautiful children out of the politically correct, quasi-Trotskyite, bearded and often lesbian clutches of our state and private school teachers in order to drag them up mountains to paint stuff and tell them, on the way back down, why the Romans were great. There are no official figures for the working-class equivalent of these recidivists, which is to take their hideous, obese, thick children out of school and let them watch TV all day (and risk prosecution for it). That business is called ‘truancy’ rather than ‘home education’. But the individuals within that official 90,000 — and the number grows by the week — are almost exclusively middle class, well educated themselves and maybe a little nostalgic about their schooldays. One should wonder why this state of affairs has come about.
Two thoughts immediately occur: first that the education system is somehow alienating a growing number of parents each year, perhaps partly through its self-evidently dumbed-down curriculum and also through its leftish interpretation of history and culture (read James Bartholomew’s piece again and you will see that he is implacably Eurocentric and even Euro-supremacist, as your modern educationist would have it). Second, that a growing number of parents from the middle class — and especially the media-monkey, metropolitan middle class — are incalculably pleased with themselves and think that they know everything; enough, at least, to think that teachers are useless and that they can do the job themselves a damned sight better.
Are they right? The obvious answer is a resounding ‘no’ — and simply because a thing is obvious does not mean that it should be treated with suspicion. It is a colossal arrogance — and a self-indulgence — on the part of those 180,000 parents that a) their knowledge of such diverse disciplines as, say, fine art and pure maths should exceed that possessed by the specialists; and b) that even were they to possess such encyclopaedic knowledge, they may not have the necessary skills to impart the ground rules of those disciplines to children. Up Mont Sainte-Victoire indeed. The point, surely, is to entice, to cajole the child with the most primitive tools of artistic technique before charging them with the task of vaulting 10,000 years to a state of exquisite post-Impressionism; the job of the art teacher is to bring out any latent ability within the child, to develop it — and make it truly compelling: i.e., ‘fun’.
Do we know better than the teachers? There’s another section of James’s piece which is interesting, the bit where he is aghast that no school is prepared to teach Italian as a foreign language. Well, let us look at this problem rationally: there is a limited opportunity for children to learn foreign languages, particularly at such a young age as nine, and a finite number of languages; say, in Alex’s case, 30. So you have to make your choice. Should Alex be taught a foreign language which figures in the top five of the world’s most widely spoken tongues (Hindi, Mandarin, English, Spanish and Bengali)? Or maybe be a little more lateral, a little less prescriptive — the top ten, which include Malaysian, Portuguese and Russian, the chance to read Turgenev in the original! — but, alas, no Italian. Or the top 20, which include Turkish and Arabic and (at last) French — but no Italian. Or the top 30 — we get to German and Tagalog now, but still no Italian. Who is right? James, with his insistence that Italian is essential — or everybody else? My suspicion is that the National Curriculum has it right and that Italian is about as much use in the wider world as Inuit or Welsh — although, of course, your perspective will be very different if you rent a villa in Lucca every year, hunting for post-Impressionist mountains that one can render in vast swaths of blue and red. And, obviously, ordering an organic gelato afterwards in the town square — we must have ‘fun’, remember.
We will never agree with the teachers. They will always have it wrong, one way or another. They will never quite match up to how we expect them to be, the sort of people we could reasonably entrust to educate our precious, brilliant children. Inevitably the teachers will, as James asserts, suggest that capitalism has been iniquitous; it is not enough that we should be able to explore this analysis with our kids at home, over tea (or high tea, whichever). We should instead excise it from our children’s experience altogether; as brilliant as they are, they should not be expected to retain an open mind. Teach them at home — tell ’em capitalism’s great. The empire was unequivocally great, too. So is Biggles, C.S. Lewis before he drifted leftwards, ‘The Lark Ascending’ and the Goon Show. Italy — especially that nice bit in the mid-north with the golden hills and the vineyards and the sluggish rivers and the tough, pungent cheeses — is great. This is a particular view of education which would accord with the likes of Chesterton and Belloc. It is not a wholly ludicrous view of the world, I admit — but it is at best a mere margin of the world. There is much more of which we do not know.
I am not immune to the sort of worries, the irritations, the outrage about which James Bartholomew writes. My kids come home from school and report to me that a friend of theirs, who cruelly slighted a child from an ethnic minority, had ‘done a racist’. I am not sure what annoys me most on such occasions: the parlous grammar, the reflex political correctness, or the fact that my kids have a racist for a friend. But I have also listened to a heated — and, in the end, extreme ly violent — debate between my two boys, aged eight and seven — about who were the better, the Tudors or the Romans, which revealed a depth of knowledge I either never had or had forgotten. It doesn’t matter that it ended with Tyler saying, ‘It was the Tudors, you spastic’ and punching his younger brother in the kidneys. It matters that they were so enthused.
My kids go to a state school; I am in awe of their teachers’ ability to convey knowledge and get them enthused about such a vast array of subjects. I attempt to add to that knowledge, by telling them that Valletta is the capital of Malta, and stuff like that. But I would not for a second suppose that I could replace the people who teach them professionally — and who know what they’re doing.
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