15 June 2005

Rosie was 1 year old today.  How swiftly that year has passed.  This is a poem that I wrote when she was just a few weeks old.     ROSIE SLEEPING   Your soft clock scatters seconds like peas on a drum.   A feather pulse stutters in your neck.  Your bird-   breath barely lifts the cotton strand across your lips.    But, as I turn away, a breeze that has yet   to blow touches your cheek and you smile, lopsided,   arch, and life rehearses in your unaccommodated face   .   On the momentous day in four weeks time that my retirement officially begins I shall take a look around the sprawling territory in which I have spent the greater part of my working life.  On one side of it there will be stacked high every inane, pedantic blue or green form I’ve ever had to fill in; every tedious, arid exam paper I’ve ever had to mark; every specious, clichéd, repetitive report I’ve ever had to write; every 3-page set of staff meeting minutes recording interminable discussion of pupil delinquencies & how we’re going to have to tighten up that I’ve ever had to read; every constipated, acronym-ridden, jargon-happy set of new testing procedures that will reveal with uncanny accuracy at age 7 how a child is going to achieve at age 17 that I’ve ever had to study     And on the other side there will stand a bunch of kids – faces familiar even if some the names have gone – each remembered not for their scholarly esteem, or their respectful demeanour, or their selfless service to the school, but for some quirk of humour, bright flare of creativity, conspicuous personal warmth, wisdom beyond years.  These are the ones who have survived the education system – whose way in the world has been of their own choosing, taken in spite of our attempts to impose uniformity, convention & unthinking regard for appointed authority.   There is no sensible argument against the acquisition of skills.  We communicate through language; we calculate through number.  But to my mind education is not a process of forcing in but of leading out & the social, emotional, spiritual, cultural, intellectual context in which it is set is all-important.  Bertold Brecht – no educationalist, but a man passionately committed to learning, to the getting of wisdom, the search for truth – stated that the drive towards the acquisition of knowledge & experience is no less potent & motivating than the sexual imperative.  So let us ensure for the sake of our children & the world that is to come that school is not factory but garden – a place within which young people can grow at their own speed & flourish in their own time, evolving through the natural processes of learning in all its breadth & depth, not the force-fed, the genetically modified, but the organic.     Both in my own education & in the schools in which I have been fortunate enough to teach, these have been the priorities.  But I fear that I may have seen the best of it & that the voracious demands of a ruthless & materialistic society might stifle the natural, the organic in all but a tiny handful of schools.  Well, if that is to be the case, all power to them until – as happens occasionally & all too briefly in the long & turbulent flow of history – the world comes to its senses for a while.    11:34:50 PM    Mmm? []

© Copyright 2005 Dick Jones. Last update: 01/07/2005; 23:32:53.