What is Children’s Literature For?

I began to think about this in the context of a canon of children’s literature, which I discussed in April. I wasn’t going to blog more about this – blogging time needs to go to my pending teaching and the next Wild Spaces, Wild Magic trip in November. However, three ideas have surfaced this week that need a bit of rethinking for me. I referred on Twitter to the last time the “shouldn’t be allowed” argument drifted my way, which I discussed in this blog post.

The most recent – that is, today, is this Guardian article on children’s literature and empathy by Alison Flood. The research is based on children’s responses to an anthropomorphic Little Raccoon – and I have to be honest and admit that this YouTube representation doesn’t endear me to the text for starters. Note however, (5 min 09 sec) the explicit message “When you share with others they share with you.” So first of all, let’s just get that out of the way: that’s not a moral message, or the moral of the story; it’s an aspiration. The moral of the story is “sharing is good.” It is a heavy-handed delivery at best, and do bear in mind the comments made by @zudensachen on Twitter, his best being, I think

I’m critical of the psychology research approach that expects moral stories to ‘work’ as exemplars. Stories are wriggly.

Wriggly. Brilliant. And here is the first flaw in the research: poor quality literature is no better as a guide to children’s ability to infer, critique and wonder than a bowl of nutritious slop is a guide to their ability to discern healthy food. Bluntly put, there is no wriggle in the cute raccoon.

I do share Dave Aldridge’s general disquiet about the kind of study referred to in the Guardian that explores the tricksy interface between psychology and literature, but that’s my problem. Patricia Ganea’s work is itself interesting (I am in any case grateful for the nudge away from my knee-jerk reaction to actually looking at her work that I got from the inestimable Hamish Chalmers). Her “Do cavies talk?: The effect of anthropomorphic books on children’s knowledge about animals” is a fascinating study, useful for my own research because of the landscape issues it throws up , and I need to come back to her “Toddlers’ referential understanding of pictures” which I have just seen. The problem really comes down to the bigger question about “using” children’s literature. In the article Alison Flood bases her own work on, “Do storybooks with anthropomorphized animal characters promote prosocial behaviors in young children?” – linked here, if it works – Larsen, Lee and Ganea explore issues around children’s understanding of choices and actions through the issues of identity and anthropormphism. It is good to see the Marriott “Red in tooth and claw?” cited; they know their stuff. There is, I think, a big problem with quality: Little Raccoon Learns to Share is, as I’ve suggested, not the best: heavy-handed morality and wordy, and the “humanised” Photoshop version the team produced consequently can’t be much better. The comparability of texts is assured, but only, it seems to me, at the cost of the text being engaging. That the control book is by Eric Carle is almost worth a methodological reflection in its own.

The Guardian article ends with voices from authors. I am unsure whether the article’s author is missing a tone of irony or whether I am searching, desperately, for something that isn’t there, but the final paragraphs suggest we are all a bit lost:

Picture book author Tracey Corderoy said that in her experience, “where the main characters of a moral tale are animals as opposed to humans, the slight distancing that this affords the young child does a number of important things. It softens the moral message a little, making it slightly more palatable. Some would feel that this waters it down and makes it less effective. But the initial ‘saving-face’ that using animals brings quite often results, I feel at least, in keeping a child reader engaged.”

Kes Gray, the author of the bestselling rhyming animal series Oi Frog and Friends, was unperturbed by the researchers’ findings. “Authors and illustrators have no need to panic here, as long as we keep all of the animal protagonists in all of their future stories unreservedly cuddly. Big hair, big eyes and pink twitchy noses should pretty much nail it,” he said.

Here we are into this idea that children’s literature has qualities that are only to be measured by the message, by the use an adult can get.

The second is my finishing (again today, on the bus) Joan Aiken’s personal take on writing. There are things about the child reader’s reading of significance :

…The child may draw conclusions from the actor’s face and general demeanour, but he won’t have any certainty about it And such experience as he has to draw on will be limited…

that I might query, and other pithy comments I want to stick on my wall:

A child reader is very like a wary and agile fish – to keep his attention you have to bait your hook with cunning…

If you can pluck out some small common denominator of experience that will instantly register with the reader, you have made yourself a friend…

Personally, I believe that an overt moral message is to be avoided like the plague… A book is supposed to be for pleasure, isn’t it? Who are you, anyway, to preach morals to the young?

And the third is the arrival of Pam Smy‘s book Thornhill, and the kerfuffle it has caused. This is her blog and Mat’s thoughtful review (avoiding spoilers as Ella in the story avoids brambles) is here and (of course) well worth a read. My comments here aren’t going to contain spoilers either, because I haven’t read it to the end; the thoughts here aren’t about what promises to be (and people warn me that it will be) a troubling denouement, but about the language people are using about the book. It comes down, in many cases, to the notion of suitability – and this in turn seems more to be about classroom use and where it is marketed in bookshops. Fight your way, then, first off, past the BBC sign-in system and listen to this http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07jlm30 posted by @rokewood on Twitter this morning as a timely reminder on the general picture and then consider these statements:

Bloody hell!That is one hell of a book. How to teach with it?

Certainly wouldn’t use at primary; not for whole class and prob not with an individual child unless I knew very well indeed. Powerful though.

Totally unsuitable for under [age range specified].

We read stories precisely in order to help them grow emotionally, morally and spiritually.

Why teach that life is hopeless?

I’ve selected and anonymised them, and they are presented here with only one (sort of) judgmental comment: that under all of them is the assumption that books are there specifically to help adults do something., and that misjudgment around this can be damaging. It is a schoolified view of literature. “We read stories precisely in order to…”

So much here, it’s hard to know where to start, so I shall go back to my beginning. Is the dilemma about “using” Thornhill about the authority and/or moral purpiose of the teacher? Is children’s literature fundamentally a socialisation process involving text? Is it there so that this book or that can be a vehicle for a curricular aim? Where does the responsibility lie in the chain of author/illustrator>publisher>bookseller>adult supplier of money for books (parent, headteacher)>adult chooser/proposer of this book or what? Whose job is it to approve of the books children access? Why ask children to read, to be engaged with narrative and character in fiction? What is literature for?

Answers on a postcard.

Three (sets of) Ravens

Those who know me well enough – and even some people that don’t, becasue I am such a show-off – know that I have three ravens tattooed on one shoulder. I love them, and listen out for the Cronk Cronk of the one that occasionally heckles me on the allotment. They are there because I used to sing the Thomas Ravenscroft song to my children in the hours of walking them back to sleep when they were babies. This link takes you to the text, and this one to the first version I knew, sung by Alfred Deller. One lot of ravens.

The second is the lino cut Corvus Corax my daughter has made:

Full of humour in that beady eye, agile even in print form, it tells me so much about our shared love of the big birds we see at the local Falconry Centre. Corvus Corax: the Common Raven.

The third is another raven from my adolescence (yes I still watched Jackanory when I was in VIth Form) and my children’s childhood, Arabel’s comic and anarchic raven in stories by Joan Aiken, among them the three I know best, Arabel’s Raven, The Escaped Black Mamba (I left that out of the precis below) and The Bread Bin. In the first, the respectable taxi-driver Ebenezer (Ben) Jones picks up a distressed raven which his daughter Arabel names Mortimer, much to her mother Martha’s despair. Adventure follows, as the raven becomes entangled in a kidnapping and bank heist. In the second, Mortimer is firmly established in the Jones’ household, although not without protest from the grown-ups. Chris the babysitter is involved this time as Arabel’s parents go out, and the raven gets stuck in a trumpet, and more gangland involvement ensues. In the third story, Arabel gets bronchitis and goes to hospital, and Mortimer goes missing. There is a happy ending, if you’re worried. Other stories also came out in similar vein: the riotous Mortimer, Carnival in black; robbers; clashes with the establishment in the form of police, librarians, huntsmen and research scientists.

And there we have it with Arabel and The Common Raven. Aiken is careful with her class distinctions, drawing heavily, it seems to me, on the conventions of Ealing Comedy to depict her colourful inhabitants of NW London. What amazes me is her ability to write about an ordinary family in N London and hint at accent and (therefore, indirectly underline) class without becoming incoherent or patronising. There is a wobble, perhaps, in the depiction of the Irish Mr Plunkett who does say “Glory Be!” and “Begorrah” and uses “Ye,” but little else. Much of the comedy that does not come from Arabel’s trust for the raven’s really poorly adapted way of living with humans comes from Mrs Jones and her outbursts:

“Oh good gracious me did you ever see anything so outrageously provoking in all your born days?” said Mrs Jones. “I never did, not even when I worked at the Do-it-yourself delicatessen: don’t you go running after that black feathered Monster, Arabel, you stay right here.”

Notice the punctuation. We are meant, I think, to hear this as a stream of outrage; I can imagine Kenneth Williams in full flood (it was actually Bernard Cribbins who read them on Jackanory and I do recall he was fantastic: here is Cribbins in fine form in a later story). Her annoyance makes her instantly believable, and a true foil for Arabel’s innocence. As with the latest film adaption of Paddington, where his migrant refugee status is played up, there is perhaps a hint that Mrs Jones over-emphasising the blackness of the raven – the “black fiend of a bird” – but ambiguous, and in character, not as narrator, and nothing to compare with the more explicit comments of Roald Dahl. As a final thought, and very revealing of his own processes, Quentin Blake is here commenting on the process of preparing for the illustrations in Jackanory and the printed books.

Where the social distinctions are drawn in the Raven stories, it is mostly in the clashes with authority. The doctors in Rumbury Central are somewhat exempt (except for nervous rashes), but the fierce ward sister Sr Bridget Hagerty and in a later story the visiting GP are not; the police investigating possible GBH in the Jones’ household are stock figures of po-faced ineptitude; bank managers and solicitors all get some sort of come-uppance. We are in the realm of Capt. Mainwaring and the Ealing Comedies. The record shop bosses in Arabel’s Raven, for example, who try and dun the Joneses for the damage the raven causes, employ solicitors to try and recoup their loss; they are described as “that pair of sharks” by Mrs Jones and end up being arrested. Dominant Aunt Olwen in Mortimer’s Cross, a descendant of Saki’s humourless older women bullies, is abandoned unceremoniously in favour of the much nicer Auntie Meg in Bangor. The gentle representation of a Welsh dialect is telling:

“Ben never said anything about sending you, lovey,” she said. “Company for me you’ll be, while Gwennie’s in hospital. Nice, that is.”

Aiken plays with stereotypes skillfully by not over representing them, by hinting through the characters’ use of language. It becomes natural that Mr Jones’ family are Welsh – why would a Jones not be? – and the pomposity of the establishment is lampooned and dismantled – as any comedy from Moliere (and before) suggests they must be. The Raven stories thus represent a first satire for young readers on societal difference, in which the comedy is found in the situations and language of an ordinary family and their interactions with their world, the catalyst for adventure being the Loki-like disrupter, Mortimer the raven. Mortimer is thus the inheritor of the mantle of the divine trickster (a good Wikipedia entry [sic] here). That the Joneses and Mortimer are a far cry – a far Kaaark – from the Wolves of Willoughby Chase and the other, more solemn, work Joan Aiken did for an older audience is only a testament to her skill.

Journeys

With the questing, voyaging Earthsea world rattling round in my head, and the next Wild Spaces, Wild Magic trip in the planning – and the sun from my summer holiday still embedded in my face and shoulders – journeys have been much on my mind. It was natural, then, to look at a new blog review of Francesca Sanna’s wonderfully involved and visually effective The Journey from Simon Smith.

Mat Tobin has been consistent in talking about this book as an example of a complex text, as he says, “it shows how powerful the relationship between words and image can be.” He is quite right, and Simon Smith, acknowledging Mat’s insight, suggests

Sanna plays pictures against words wonderfully. The use of the child as the narrator creates a naivety and innocence to the written narrative that she exploits brilliantly.

Just last month I suggested, drawing on Alan Garner, that the world experienced is given meaning for us through story. The Journey is no simple trip, however: to compare it with, say, John Burningham’s The Shopping Basket (which I use with undergrads to think about the relationship between childhood and ecocriticism without getting into the issues of how much of a catechism ecological literature can be) would be misleading. It does, however, do just what Garner says: moving through the story is moving through the landscape, and gives sense to that environment. Sanna does the same: even though the scale of the figures – especially the menacing ones – is indicative of an internal perception of danger, and the landscapes of forest and mountain are largely schematic, the intention is to help the reader make sense of the world. As Mat points out, this is partly because of the author’s encounter with real refugee children: this is where th power of the author comes from, I think. In the same way, when thinking of the ways that power transfers to the reader, I was shocked – but I’m afraid not really surprised- that Simon was abused for his using this with the children he works with. No matter how symbolic this journey is, it represents a real world, just as the lad in Burningham’s book is going past the “place where the nasty dog lived” and the “men digging up the pavement.” Migrant children need to be kept unreal, otherwise we may have to pay attention to the reality of the loss and difficulty they suffer. Naivety and innocence as Simon suggests are wholly appropriate; they also allow for a direct appeal to the reader. Maybe this is what makes Simon’s use of this book seem threatening.

In this, because of its realist roots, Sanna’s The Journey differs sharply from the well trodden epic-as-journey: as a huge oversimplification, I am edging towards suggesting that traveling to fight Khumbaba, to return to a mythic Ithaca, to found Rome tells us about the journeyer much more than the environment. The ecocritical approach might be to say that the human is at the centre in the epic and in the more intimate books of childhood, the child is part of a much bigger world. It may be that the marrying of text and illustration plays a part in this, too: I need to think this one through a bit more.

That’s grand epic (ineffectively) dismissed, and childhood at least discussed. I am still unsure about Odysseus, and really about the life-and-death questions of Frodo and Gilgamesh. What about Ged, in his little boat, sailing to see dragons and confront death? And where does Frodo fit in all this, with the detailed history and geography Tolkien created?

…and if I’m thinking about Garner Country, what kind of a journey does Gawain go on? To the interior? To dream in Ludcruck?

Partnership, Obedience and Trust

I think the Oxford Reading Spree went well. There were notable stars, of course, and followed some way behind by a man looking like a grizzled version of Basil Brush, rabble-rousing rather than really presenting a case on parents and partnerships and how that might sometimes involve a loss of power for the professional. Me voila, along with many – but alas, not all – the speakers. It has been immensely gratifying to read praise from serving teachers such as Kiran, here. Yes, it really does mean a lot.

What I want to return to is the notion of parents as school agents. I know I was pressing my case too hard in my talk on Saturday – but equally I now see there were people in the audience who do, in fact, keep children in at playtime if the child’s reading record has not been filled in. All I think I could do is point out the ambiguities in both doing this and not doing it – something I had been planning to do until I read Sue Cowley’s reflections on school absence. She has moved the argument on from my moans about whether this action or that in the teaching of reading is in the best interests of the child, in the light of the news that Jon Platt, who in effect queried the use of the word “regular” in “regular attendance,” and whether a school has a right to determine what “regular” means.

I find myself caught. Head teachers sometimes seem like dreadful killjoys – “You know it’s a trend, the Head’s thinking of banning it” – and maybe sometimes they are, seeking an even sailing rather than any choppiness, conformity and compliance rather than real partnership. However, does the perceived need for a big holiday somehow overrule the professional judgement as to what why a child might be in school – still less the organisational complexity of a curriculum in which children may or may not be there for this or that piece of learning? The tensions are – or seem – very either/or in the matter of term-time holidays. As Sue acerbically sums it up, ” your personal circumstances have ceased to matter.” Holidays, healthy packed lunches, uniform, whether you have the time to fill in a reading record, whether your shared reading with a child is about Charlie and Lola, or Smash Hits, or Biff and Chip, whether… Oh, enough. It comes down to the idea that somehow the parents (“the most important job in the world, and it’s left to amateurs”) can have a right to disagree with a professional. Sometimes they do. Sometimes the school makes a mess of the message the team is trying to convey. Been there, on both “sides,” and am always struck, as I look back at the highs and lows of parent-teacher relationships by the dilemma: Does a school demand obedience, or does it inspire (or work to inspire) trust?

In this case, tonight, I think Sue is right: this parent and teacher playground bundle is the wrong battle. Fighting about school term holidays or absenteeism during SATs seems a bit of a distract-and-redirect, if the stories are to be believed (I’m not doubting them) about teacher recruitment, low morale, chronic funding. There are worse ogres to fight than a (perhaps) over zealous head or (perhaps) a belligerent parent. These everyday squabbles need to be seen for what they are, or at least could be: the school-by-school, sometimes family-by-family storming and forming of relationships. We have other dragons hatching, and we will need all the strength we can muster, all the friends we can get.

Memory, Narrative and a Reader

First off, note the title, gentle reader: I am going to avoid the notion of “the Reader.” I simply don’t know what those words mean, although I can see they are a convention for “anyone who picks words off a page, screen, clay tablet, &c.” And I am not talking about the named and nameless writers and readers who have gone before me over 8000 and more years, from unnamed composers of lists and spells through Aeschylus (neatly explored here) to Baudelaire (“Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frere!”). This is a blog post – as I’m afraid they all are these days – about me, a personal snippet of a pale reflection of Francis Spufford’s The Child that Books Built. I have begun this sketchy narrative before.

A reader. Nine, ten, as I said before. His first read of Narnia is still in his mind, as is Batman. He is read Clive King at school (22 Letters) and on TV (Stig of the Dump), likewise Rosemary Sutcliff, and Moomins, Green Knowe, Elidor come into his reading life (enough of the third person: it’s getting tedious), sorry. The children’s librarian in Harlow suggests I try The Hobbit after one of the Sutcliff books – possibly The Shield Ring. She gets special permission, when I finish Lord of the Rings, for me to borrow the LPs of Wagner from the adult library. This much, at least, is in praise of a woman whose name I do not know, whose task was to take an interest in young people’s reading.

I suggested in an earlier post that the rupture of my reading brought me to read and re-read Tolkien because he represented something bookish, grown-up and at the same time a continuation of my “top Junior” reading. Hollindale’s keen eye spots, in Catherine Storr’s use of “childish” a word that makes her sound apologetic. Perhaps when I got to secondary school in Burnley I was apologetic for my earlier childhood, unable to frame myself as a reader as convincingly as I had in Harlow. My reading was wide, or at least quirky, and my clumsy medievalism, founded on a family view of English Catholicism, starts here, as does my reading of Buddhism through the seriously strange writings of Lobsang Rampa: my dad’s influence both times. My mum bought me adult C S Lewis and we read Daphne du Maurier or listened to dramatisations on the radio. I read her Dennis Wheatley stories of demonic rituals and posh people – and the appendices to Lord of the Rings. So I was still reading new stuff when we moved again, back to North London. So much for story, now to some thinking.

What has often struck me is the fact that I had big pockets of my childhood that appear fragmented or unrecognised. Burnley is vivid, with Gilbert and Sullivan, lots of Church, wild countryside and (at the time) troubling explorations of sex. Harlow had retreated into a time I couldn’t quite remember. It was as if I had lost the thread of the narrative, skipped a chapter so that it didn’t make sense. I loved the windy hills, I ogled the harp in a music shop in Blackburn, but as an adult couldn’t quite put these into place. This is where I am struggling at the moment: not the very idea of why I love children’s literature, but why the rediscovery of books from my own past reading are such a revelation. What memories return.

The Shield Ring gives me a clue to harps and wild hills: what astonished me is that I had forgotten my love for the heroes Bjorn the Harper and Frytha through whose eyes we see so much of Lake Land. So – although this really does need to go on and on – I’ll stop with Hollindale’s idea of what childness might do in an author’s purpose. “The past child as a living agent in the adult self” is acknowledged in some authors as part of why they write. Authors from Garner and Sutcliff are explicit about this; it can be guessed (only guessed, I think) in a wistfulness for a past time in Tolkien. I wonder however whether this is also present me for as I read again books I loved before we moved north: they awake for me a real and steady set of pictures of my “middle childhood,” brief years from eight to ten, and they do so because the literature, the text (not the interpretation) remain constant, there for me to discover, at an opportune moment, ideas, story lines, phrases, characters “that I had loved long since and lost awhile.”

Who is the Reader?

I have been reminded today (yesterday as I end this) a couple of times of the ways in which I read and the things I read before I discovered Tolkien. I met Superman, the Fantastic Four in comics, I watched Top Cat… But it was also the time of Jackanory, event television for me often, and (whether these fit chronologically I haven’t checked), hearing Mai Zetterling present the Moomins, or John Grant tell Little Nose, or Kenneth Williams camp gloriously through The Land of Green Ginger suggested to me this book or that to read, to find sequels, follow authors and so on. Lucy Boston came my way because of Jackanory; Elidor remains with me as perhaps the scariest telly I saw as a child. This supplemented the end-of-day class story in the Downs Primary in Essex, the teacher reading to the whole class that still happened in Top Juniors, where I met Clive King’s meticulously researched and exciting Twenty-Two Letters, and Rosemary Sutcliff and, particularly memorably for me, her Shield Wall. I would like to ask Antonio and Elaine and the two Martins what they remember of them: was it just me? Reading was powerful for me: a motivator to do more, an enrichment of my world.

And so I’m nine, then ten. I don’t make it to the end of Top Juniors at the Downs because just as I turn eleven we move to Burnley. I’ve mentioned this rupture before; it comes here again because it marked such an end, and such a beginning, in so many things, not least my obsession with the Hobbit and then Lord of the Rings. Did I stick with the vaguely erudite known because so much, so quickly became unfamiliar? Burnley wasn’t Sutcliff’s Buttermere, and a trip to Manchester brought me no closer to Elidor, although I did look. Tolkien it was, then.

Those authors I loved sustained me, and did, I suppose, help me make sense of my world, before the move: I am sharply reminded of my summer of being ten by Raymie Nightingale, all scrapes and freedom on my bike and friendships made and lost. David Benjamin, whose depiction of growing up in the US is framed by his sport, talks of the segregation between adults and children that was part of that life. I recognised it at once in his Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked as well as in Raymie Nightingale.

But this is my challenge. The writer, writing about the child (and, crudely put, for the child: I know the debate is huge) writes about what Hollindale calls “childness.” The child is encouraged, motivated, to make sense of the narrative by interpreting it in terms of their own lives, and vice versa, to make sense of their lives through what they see in the story. A sort of hermeneutic mutuality. But – but – but where do I fit in, the adult reader of the “children’s book”? Is recognition of past experience enough? Am I a mere intruder? Does the writer “writing back” into their childness somehow expect me to come with them? Possibly: reading Samira and the Skeketons recently reminded me of the horrid thrill of recognising I have a skeleton – so much so, I bought it and shared it with the grandchildren, who love it. Dual audience, where the adult and child are both addressed. But if I am not sharing the story with a child at all, is there any point in talking about dual audience? To push this further, am I a reader or simply a critic? And is there a difference? I feel like my best image tonight is one of the theologian reading the texts of another religion: a set of maybe enlightening encounters, but also a treading on holy ground. I am encouraged by this, but also warned and full of questions of the position of the researcher.

Well, thanks to Peter Hollindale and Mat Tobin and all the other people whose ideas are running round in my head, it’s nearly 01:15. I still am no nearer a solution.

Forsaken

Among the rich threads of thinking in Rick Greene’s latest blog is his account of his own Tolle Lege: I won’t impinge on his post by doing more than pointing to the My God, My God why have you forsaken me? It is a well placed stroke, well written – unlike this, which is just a personal ramble, with no answer.

And I just wanted to add something to that intimation of loss. March is, for me, Theo time, when I remember the little boy who we waited for, and watched grow, and who in the end came and went in a day: born 20th March, died 21st, 2000. We can do the folklore: a child of the eclipse, a child of the vernal equinox. We can do the grief, the anger, the bewilderment.

Today, however, with Lent beginning and the dreadful news of so many children buried in a common grave in Tuam, it was too confused in my mind to make sense of. I am gobby, and it is unusual that words fail me, but I could not finish my bidding prayer at Mass. It was a poor show, a lack of human compassion for all those girls, and for the institutional callous indifference, and for all that human loss. How many children were lost, and died sick or frightened, how many mothers lost and angry and disempowered and bewildered? The only consolation- and it is a thin gruel – was that as I stumbled to silence I looked up at the big, modern cross at the back of church and found that silence echoed back. My silence. Theo’s silence. All his brothers and sisters put away like so much landfill, and then (and now) the sisters’ own silence.

So here’s a blog post that goes nowhere, but which I’m going to post tonight. Tomorrow we go – finally – to see a stone carver to ask for a headstone that reflects the sermon at Theo’s funeral, from Bede’s account of the conversion of the North:

Cuius suasioni uerbisque prudentibus alius optimatum regis tribuens assensum, continuo subdidit: ‘Talis,’ inquiens, ‘mihi uidetur, rex, uita hominum praesens in terris, ad conparationem eius, quod nobis incertum est, temporis, quale cum te residente ad caenam cum ducibus ac ministris tuis tempore brumali, accenso quidem foco in medio, et calido effecto caenaculo, furentibus autem foris per omnia turbinibus hiemalium pluuiarum uel niuium, adueniens unus passerum domum citissime peruolauerit; qui cum per unum ostium ingrediens, mox per aliud exierit. Ipso quidem tempore, quo intus est, hiemis tempestate non tangitur, sed tamen paruissimo spatio serenitatis ad momentum excurso, mox de hieme in hiemem regrediens, tuis oculis elabitur. Ita haec uita hominum ad modicum apparet; quid autem sequatur, quidue praecesserit, prorsus ignoramus. Unde si haec noua doctrina certius aliquid attulit, merito esse sequenda uidetur.’

The text – and more – appear in translation and with comment in Eleanor Parker’s wonderful blog. We have asked for a sparrow for the headstone. The image of one sparrow feels like it stands for so many sparrows, in one window and out the other. Talis vita hominum, such is the life of men.

Still no answer.

Why Education?

Well, there’s a question.
I’ve been asked to be a voice in a school at a presentation for parents:

The core purpose of the event is to help potential applicants to consider more fully what they should ask themselves as they look into the breadth, depth and format of u/g courses available in the UK; and to help parents to understand more fully what students need to be doing doing now and during summer holidays, to strengthen their applicant profile. The sessions also reinforce understanding of personal skills, traits and level of academic ability that universities are looking for.

And so I’m starting way, way back, not at the philosophy per se but at the history that brings me to be back in Dorset over 50 years after I left it.

Schooling began for me in the Reception Class in Blandford Forum, all high-up windows, and time in the sandpit and water tray. I narrowly escaped being registered as Christopher, a hazard I encountered from then on until I hit twenty, for some reason. My friend Paul was crying and I had to be brave for him, something I felt a bit unfair, since I rather wanted a quick cry, too.

Maths and I parted company the following year, when I was kept in for not learning what I would now call number bonds to twenty. Reading and I were already best friends; my mum and dad bought me the next reading book in the scheme we used –The Tip and Mitten McKee Readers – whenever I needed it. I learned to tell the time, learned to hate jigsaws, became a dreadful non-completer throughout my life (as a consequence of the 300-piece jigsaw incident), got engaged to Susan in the year above (it didn’t last)…. I had a wart on my right hand, and still find myself curling my right hand if I’m thinking of directions. My infant career ended and I moved to Blandford Junior, only to make a much bigger move quickly when we moved to Harlow in Essex, but not before learning to hate carrots and football and that I was a bit “behind” for not being able to tie my shoe laces.

And here began my interest in education. No high windows in Harlow New Town. We had books for problem solving, cuisenaire rods (which I never mastered), and the ability to go back to a water tray I had forgotten for three years. I went into the infant wing to help with reading – only to be puzzled by ITA. I learned more about unfairness, I learned some French, some pottery, misread C S Lewis, murdered the descant recorder (but I still play) and got the best school report ever:

Nicholas is a mine of useless information; if he can find a job where he can use all this stuff, his fortune will be made.

And at the end of what would now be Y6 but then was Top Juniors, we moved to Burnley, to Todmorden Road Juniors. I suppose my name is in here somewhere, but I see the school’s closed now. Two months I wouldn’t wish on anyone, despite the kindly interest of Mr Brown, my teacher, who must have seen something worth taking an interest in and who I floored by asking about Elidor. High Windows. Maths in the morning, Maths in the afternoon. Tech drawing for the boys, sewing for the girls. The cane and being beaten up after school.

So my interest in education began from a very practical standpoint. Why is this school like this, and that school like that? Are they all aiming for the same thing?

And what I’d really like to say at this talk I’m giving is this:

If you are interested in what makes schools the bizarre mixture they are of workhouse and adventure park, or if you are interested in engaging with small, lost people who can’t tie their laces – or gnomy little lads who hide in books, or – erm – overconfident recorder players – then education is for you. It could be the mixture of theory and practice that is an Education Studies course; it could be a more profession-facing course like a BA leading to Qualified Teacher Status. But think about why education has the power to fascinate, to engage, to challenge, and maybe think about why is still has that power over me, as I near 60. Just don’t model your UCAS statement on this blog post.

Party Time?

From hearing David Blunkett’s try at silencing criticism by calling those who questioned him “cynics,” to the wobbles, Herschisms and Grammarian Gwynne of Michael Gove, I know I have a long tradition of passive-aggressive sniping, but I don’t – I really don’t – want to be thought of as part of the blobby problem that Nick G sees us belonging to.

And today feels different why?

Because of this article in TES: https://www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-news/stop-after-test-parties-nicky-morgan-tells-primaries and the verbiage round it.

Nicky Morgan is quoted thus:

“It’s the same when we get to the end of primary. I don’t want to see after-test parties being held. I want it to be something that children take as part of their schooling.”

The tone is magisterial, rather than visionary. She walks into Miss Trunchbull’s office and sits down at the desk with “I don’t want to see after-test parties being held.” But she has a point: to normalise these tests would require them to have less fuss made about them, from teachers praising their children’s mindfulness training, to parents and schools celebrating the end of the tests, a bit of a cooler attitude might help the children. The multicoloured ticker tape that floated idly past my office window today – I suppose after someone’s final undergraduate exam- is not a way to make children take the tests without stress. We are only a step away from parents giving fivers for good results. Parties are out, then. So far, so good.

“I want it to be something that children take as part of their schooling.”

Ah.

Now what this seems to me to imply is not that children should not celebrate, nor even that they should take these tests in their stride, but that children should just accept that testing is part of schooling, that the stats-sticky fingers of government can and will come and test them. And this is where the problems begin.

I am caught here between the two (or more) arguments, and I don’t think I’m alone. Are tests there to provide quality-assurance testing like an MOT for schools, or are they there to help teachers, parents and children with the children’s learning?

“Ms Morgan said she would be speaking to headteacher representatives and teachers to explore how best to assess seven-year-olds in the future. More rigorous assessments were “really important” to measure the progress pupils were making in primary school and to hold schools to account, she said.”

So who, at heart, is the audience for test results? If I can find an answer to that I might know which argument to follow. Is testing to become a normal part of school – more rigorous, too – whether children learn from it or no, simply to hold schools to account? Is it there because governments have so little trust in teacher assessment that the rigmarole of national tests is the only way to make sure Miss Honey doesn’t favour Hortensia? Are tests the pike-sergeant way of keeping teachers on the (important) task of -erm – teaching?

I am not helped by the way this article changes tack and looks to Mary Bousted at the end:

“We support the government’s commitments to help schools enable more children to achieve expected standards of English and maths at primary school,” she said. “But continual testing is not the answer…”

What really is the argument about testing here? What is it that raises standards? What does measuring progress do for the individual child? Or should we see children en masse as the product that needs testing? Are tests so important for whatever this purpose is that they should become part of a school’s way of doing things, no more stressful than sharing assembly (yes, I know sharing assembly is not without teacher stress, children over-worrying, parents over-investing: that’s why I chose the example)? It’s hard to tell what is being proposed or opposed here: there are so many voices in this short article, no wonder we are all confused. So here’s a naive plea:

Where is there a clear, single-purpose rationale for the tests?

Pigs and more nonsense, briefly.

Again, little more than a tweet, but this came into my twitter feed from Sheffield: Print, Protest and Poetry 1790-1810.

Then hold not Swine in such disdain,
Since ‘tis by them you have your gain;
But learn to treat them with respect,
Lest they should grunt at your neglect:

It seems to me to be part of the disquiet in my previous blog post – but also, perhaps, part of a Network “mad as hell” moment which may be leading to the “school tests strike” today (which I want to return to when I am in calmer waters after marking). It is also extremely relevant to the research meeting about visual sources and children’s understandings of history that I am going to now.

More later.