TEACHING AS A SUBVERSIVE ACTIVITY
In the late ‘60s & early ‘70s liberation issues were discussed within education every bit as energetically as they were within other social & cultural institutions. A number of heavy hitters emerged whose work had an acuteness of focus, a substance & a breadth of vision unusual at a time when reason & intellect were taking a back seat to magic & mystery. Even in these pragmatic, decidedly post-ideological ‘nought-ies’ (yes, that horrific neologism has been used in earnest by the media) the names of Paulo Freire, John Holt, Paul Goodman, Carl Rogers, Abraham H. Maslow & George Isaac Brown still have resonance.
I started teaching in 1967, having drifted into it rather reluctantly after three years of playing in rock bands & smoking dope at a prestigious London college. However, I embraced the Revolution with alacrity &, teaching being my trade, I read anything that claimed to be a manual for radical change in the classroom & playground. I managed to get from cover to cover in most of the books written by the New Age warriors above. And, displaying that omnivorous lack of discrimination that marked the times, I even gave houseroom to a very dodgy pamphlet proclaiming the virtues of ‘child-love’ (a delicate phrase attempting to sanitise paedophilia, that word itself something of a euphemism) as an essential part of the educational agenda.
But it wasn’t until I’d been teaching for a few years & had had my cherry well & truly popped that I came across a book that really did pull me up short. After reading it my perspectives on education & schooling altered irrevocably; never again did I confuse the two.
First, a fragment of professional autobiography. Struggling my way (sometimes literally) through bone-wearyingly long days in a South-East London boys’ secondary school, I was rapidly coming to the conclusion that the teacher’s task was a simple bi-polar process. At the northern end, where the boys who had some dim, flickering sense of motivation lived, you lobbed the books from desk to desk at 9.00 am & it was heads down until 4.00 pm. Once a year the uniformed drones were herded en masse into a reeking hall to spill the contents of the lobbed books onto file paper & then, after six weeks of exhausted holiday, you resumed lobbing. At the southern end, where the terminally ineducable lived, different tasks were undertaken. In this realm of shadows most of the time passed in a climate of implied or actual violence. If the boys weren’t pushing each other over banisters or into lavatory bowls, the teachers were using their freewheeling powers of corporal punishment for such infringements of day-to-day protocol as wearing a school cap back to front or a school tie for a belt. The preferred tool of correction here was the rubber-soled gym shoe. There would be intense, even heated debate in the staff room as to whether leaving the laces in provided extra tensile strength or removing them provided added flexibility.
My finest hour (a mere three minutes, in fact) came one day on playground duty. I had positioned myself as usual two thirds of the way up the fire escape steps like a fully dressed lifeguard at the edge of a particularly troublesome sea. I was, as usual, willing the hands of my watch to clamber up towards 10.40 just a little bit faster so that I could blow the whistle & unleash the tide. Suddenly, with the inexplicable swiftness of a force of nature, the random, scattered groups of boys coalesced into a uniform mass. Like iron filings drawn to a magnet, hundreds of black-clad figures were sucked inward towards a central hub of activity. A fight – the duty teacher’s nightmare. As I flung myself into the imploding throng, seizing boys by their coat collars & flinging them behind me, a feral roar went up all around. It was like being under water. I knew that my colleagues would be packed around the staffroom window, coffee cups in one hand, crumpled newspapers opened at the jobs section in the other. They would be watching my action keenly, judging me on speed, style & control. Eventually I reached the centre, the eye of the hurricane. An inner sanctum of sweating boys held the ring open, giving the combatants just enough room to manoeuvre. Franny Smith was kneeling on the upper arms of a terrified smaller boy & as I lurched into the circle, carried forward by my own momentum, Franny was craning upwards, wild-eyed, arms extended, hands open, screaming: “Give me a fucking brick! Give me a fucking brick!” And, as I arrived, Danny Wright was just turning towards him, half a house brick proffered in his fist…
In 1969 a small book called Teaching as a Subversive Activity was published. Although slim, Neil Postman’s & Charles Weingartner’s radical little volume punched well above its weight. Occupying the same ideological territory as Freire, Holt, Goodman & Co. it radiated a freshness & accessibility &, most winningly, a practicality that the others’ books – noble & relevant though they were – didn’t have. I was introduced to it in my last term at that jungle outpost &, page-by-page, I realised that not only was I a foot soldier in the most important campaign of the war but that there were strategies being drafted & tactics being planned that would win us that war. Revolutionary change in education, the book told us, will cause ‘everything to change’. I absorbed its erudition, its humour, its poetry, its acute perception of the nature of the lie that is institutionalised education in the urban world. I saw the book as a manifesto, a blueprint that would, when implemented, sweep away for ever the black blazers, the rigid rows of desks, the endless, echoing cream-and-green corridors, the violence, formal & informal, the great swathes of asphalt, the sound of chalk screeching on blackboards, the despair, the apathy, the lobbing of dog-eared books across a classroom, the wielding of bricks in a playground.
(Continued)
11:09:44 PM 
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