The Teacher's Lot

(I) Does Nobody Care?

By CHARLES BRAND

LOOK. This is you, in front of twenty sixth- formers in a grammar school. We are going to `do' the Romantics for an 'A' level English Paper.

In this form are three outstanding young people, a credit, so far, to the educational system of this Country, as they are from poor homes and have few privileges. They should get to Oxbridge with ease, but it all depends on the quality of their sixth-form teaching. In the same form are four or five who have struggled up from B or C streams; they might get to a university—the next three years are crucial.

It is the beginning of the year. You cough, the murmur stops, we begin. Begin what? The Romantics. How? Well, no doubt for the first few lessons it is general guff from you about the ideas of the time and the principal practitioners —easy, if you've got the knowledge. Impossible, if you haven't. Absolute hell if you think you have and then in the middle of a sentence find that you don't know some fact which would Illuminate the whole thing, but had never occurred to you before—say, whether Hazlitt ever actu- ally recorded his opinion of Lyrical Ballads, or even something much more basic, such as what Wordsworth said of Keats : there is no limit to What it might be, just as there is no limit to ideas which will start lights flashing in the form's minds. Words don't just come out of the air. You've got to say something, or that inner voice will record another crime against humanity : Oxbridge will never see your three young people.

What makes the difference? Reading. Reading books. Privately, at home. Reading what the Romantics wrote, and what other people thought they meant, and what they wrote in letters and Journals, and what their enemies said, and how they lived and died, and what sort of imitators they had, and all about the cluster of lesser men who were so important at the time, but faded as soon as they died, and so on. Only this per- sonal private study is going to make you effective. Dragging up the remembered fragments of uni- versity lecture-notes is not a scrap of use; you're a different person now, and the needs you have here are unique to this particular moment. It doesn't matter if you're not a whit interested in Education with a capital E. You're excited about your subject, and you have a wealth of knowledge and wisdom built into you. They will take it, neat.

Imagine now that you are a graduate with a good degree, capable of being of immense help to the nation simply by developing your potential for knowledge and truth, and using it to influence others. Broadly, there are two ways in which you can do this most effectively : as a don, or as a grammar school master responsible for some of the 170,000 university places talked of for the near future.

As a don, however junior, you will find academic standards are a matter of course, and everything is helping you to achieve them, includ- ing ready access to books, the assumption that you will build your own library, and the means to do it. As a grammar school master you will have a succession of shocks. Unless you are near a city (and the vast majority of grammar schools are not) you will find hardly any access to books. You will certainly not be able to afford any. There may perhaps—a big perhaps—be an adequate school library, but the books there should circu- late among your pupils, not be hogged by you. They want to read them; you want to brood on them. And you can't afford them.

The biggest shock, however, will be to find that while you are trying to point your pupils on ahead, to `A' level, university and beyond, so that from the one seed of your learning and experience twenty healthy plants start growing, your salary and all the control of your profession is in the hands of the people who taught your pupils when they were under ten. Worse, far from sympathis- ing with your position, they will howl with anger at the very suggestion that you are doing a different job from theirs, and that your job makes demands of quite a different order.

You find, for example, a correspondent in a recent Spectator, herself a teacher, writing, `No teacher should have more money just to buy books. . .

She added . . . 'or a new car,' and the game is given away. Books, for her, and for thousands of others like her who are not facing the upper forms of grammar schools, are an optional extra, a status symbol, like a new car. (Great heavens, I only mentioned cars before to explain that every single car in our grammar school car-park was the result of exceptional circumstances, lest anyone should try to use them as an argument for prosperity.) Since I wrote 'The Teacher's Lot' some weeks ago, two things have happened to show that the situation, bad as it was, is far, far worse than I thought.

The first was the correspondence which appeared in the Spectator after my first article, especially the letters from aggrieved primary and secondary modern teachers, where I appear as a snob, ignoramus and several other things. The tragic thing about the letters was that underneath the howls of protest there was a complete failure to understand what I had been talking about. Foolishly, I see now, I had taken it for granted that everyone would understand that the function of a grammar school is academic training, and that this makes particular demands which the Burnham Committee does not recognise.

The people who control Burnham, are, on the Teachers' Panel side, the vast majority Of primary and secondary modern teachers. Out of 272,403 teachers in England and Wales, 217,068 are in primary or secondary modern schools and half of these are women teachers in primary schools, many of them married. These make up the over- whelming majority of the NUT, which dominates the Teachers' Panel. What the NUT says, goes.

The overwhelming majority of these are train- ing-college-trained. Now let us be quite clear that I have great admiration for these people, who do a necessary job under great difficulties, and who generally deserve more pay than they get now. But let us also be quite clear what their job is. They have the unenviable job of teaching some moderately bright children and a large number who are flatly opposed to any form of learning at all. It is very difficult. Conscientious teachers work hard. But there remains a large number who do not need to do hour after hour of slogging study at home, for it is not a question of pour- ing out knowledge and comment to ferociously hungry children at a high academic level, but of daily overcoming opposition. (And I'm sorry, but nine-to-half-past-three for many is not a sneer, but the truth.) On the other hand (and you can watch the hackles rise as you say this, but it has to be said) the vast majority of the 35,239 grammar school people have been to a university, and are primarily concerned with being specialists, not general practitioners. It is a very different job. To carry the medical analogy on, a GP does a fine job, and a surgeon does a fine job. No one would dream of saying that the GP should dictate to the surgeon. But that is in effect what happens here.

The other side of the Burnham Committee, the

'We haven't decided which why we'll vote. We're awaiting instructions from our home government.'

Authorities' Panel, represents the Local Education Authorities, who employ the teachers. Here again it is too hopeful to look for much more than a smattering of understanding of the peculiar needs of that tiny minority. the teachers of senior forms in grammar schools. It may be true, as a corre- spondent suggested, that there is overlap between the lower streams of a grammar school and the upper streams of a secondary modern school. But there is also a far more significant overlap between the upper forms of a grammar school and the first year of a university. Yet the universities are right outside Local Authority jurisdiction.

The only solution, which should have been implemented years ago, is to take the whole matter of the control of the profession from The Burnham Committee, and make it a Treasury affair. There could then be an advisory body representing all the sections of school education, with no regard for numbers. There is little varia- tion in need among the 141,000 primary school teachers, though at the moment they dominate by weight of numbers. There is immense variation at the other end. Every further year in a sixth form doubles the academic standard, and the load on those teaching them becomes immeasurably wider and heavier.

The second disturbing event was the NUT conference at Brighton over Easter. There, amid scenes of wild enthusiasm, a resolution was passed promising strike action unless . . . guess what? Unless the Minister would guarantee an inquiry into the standard of academic ability in university entrants, in view of Britain's lagging place in the leadership of the world? NO. Unless the Minister would personally conduct an inquiry into the state of learning in England? NO. Unless every possible step were taken to get the best graduates back from industry? NO. Unless within a few years no one would be allowed to teach who had not done specialist teacher-training.

So much for the welfare of the grammar schools! That knocks off three-quarters of our school's staff at once. What confidence it gives us in the NUT! Just now it is making a great noise about us all going the same way. That way? Yet I am implored not to interfere with the solidarity of the profession.

The NUT is formally committed to pushing for this piece of inverted snobbery. Grammar schools are crying out for good science and maths gradu- ates; these people realise that they can earn double a grammar school master's salary all their lives in industry, and stay away. A few straggle back, and very good they are too. They have the grasp of the subject, and broad sympathies. This trickle will stop at once and for ever if the thirty- five-year-old plant manager finds that before he can get into a grammar school—which is desper- ate for him to begin—he has to spend a com- pulsory time learning a lot of totally unnecessary Method, and go through the Education mill, and dance about with students again, putting chamber-pots on statues.

In the upper forms of a grammar school, you don't want 'The Art of Teaching.' All that is wanted is the knowledge of the subject and a capacity to get excited about it. A training year or a Dip. Ed. is a waste of time at this level (howls of protest from 'Educationalists'). We don't want `Education'; we want people with fine minds and good knowledge and a sense of humour. Hitch-hiking round the world or writing a book is a far better training at this level. The best thing you can bring is the broadest pos- sible knowledge of human nature and the ways of the world, and a good liberal background, pre- ferably from some other profession.

Finally, I have a friend who teaches in Kenya. He is four years younger than I, but with similar qualifications and job. He receives £1,491 a year, rising in twelve further increments to a top of over £2,300. He gets four months' home leave- every two years, with air passages paid. He is single, and loses only £180 a year in tax. The cost of living is about the same as in England. Because the colonial rule is not going to last much longer, he and his colleagues will be looking around. 'Can you wonder,' he wrote recently, 'that few of us would consider returning to England. when salaries such as this are common overseas—in West Africa and Hong Kong rather better?'

I get £13 a week.

Does nobody care that wisdom and learning are vanishing right at the most vital point of British education? By 1984 it will be too late.