James, brother of Jesus, in the Third Chapter of the Epistle of James, and Pete Seeger, socialist folk singer, in his song 'What Did You Learn at School Today?', both offer warnings against taking up the role of the teacher. James cautions that the teacher is presumptive in believing that he (and the role of the teacher is unilaterally framed as male in the Bible) might instruct others and, in so doing, adopt dangerously similar role to God or to Jesus, the Great Teacher. He reminds the prospective teacher that we will all receive a stricter judgment in the hereafter than the teacher presumes to offer. Indeed, like Jesus asking those who are free of sin to throw the first stone at an adulterous woman, James questions whether those who listen to his words are wise or understanding enough to spread wisdom. Unwittingly, the hypocritical teacher might boast and lie against the truth due to speaking from a self-serving or envious place. Today, how often does the pedagogy of the traditional classroom, with its 'three strikes and you're out' consequences system and Socratic style of questioning (on, of course, the part of the teacher!) puff up the teacher into a righteous interrogator, complacent in their own knowledge and self-defensive at any perceived undermining of their authority by their younger, unruly charges? There lies the individual danger. Then, on a broader, more structural level, Seeger implies that the individual teacher may be very good at their job, but teach from a syllabus structured by a society that is jingoistic and destructive.
The hymn we sang earlier, 'Black and White', was first recorded by Pete Seeger in 1956 and was written by David I. Arkin and Earl Robinson to commemorate the United States Supreme Court decision of Brown vs The Board of Education two years earlier, which outlawed racial segregation in public schools. Indeed, the most popular version of the song, the chart-topping 1972 version by Three Dog Night, skips the lyrics that most directly reference the political moment, “Their robes were black, their heads were white/ The schoolhouse doors were closed so tight/Nine judges all set down their names/ To end the years and years of shame”. In is this more de-politicised version that I remember singing in my Church of English primary school in the early 1990s. I can now easily imagine people on both sides of the so-called Culture War condemning this; either as a “woke” attempt at inculcating Critical Race Theory into 5-year-olds or as an example of white paternalism that actually reinscribes the binary of racism. To be fair, reading about the song online led me to an article by a woman called Helen on the blog 'Where Are You From?' who wrote that singing the song as the only black child in her primary school in the 1980s in the West Midlands was mortifying.
Still, speaking personally, the song made on impression on me as a young child to endeavour to not be racist, just as the Quaker hymn 'When I Needed a Neighbour' induced in me my life-long tendency to talk to homeless people on the street due to its accusatory lyrics, “I was cold, I was naked, were you there? Were you there?” However, the song (repurposed once again as a hymn) that I enjoyed singing the most at primary school was Seeger's 'If I Had a Hammer', which I didn't know was written in support of the Communist Party of the USA, and which we'll sing now...
If I had a hammer
I'd hammer in the morning
I'd hammer in the evening
All over this land
I'd hammer out danger
I'd hammer out a warning
I'd hammer out love between
My brothers and my sisters, ah-ah
All over this landIf I had a bell
I'd ring it in the morning
I'd ring it in the evening
All over this land
I'd ring out danger
I'd ring out a warning
I'd ring out love between
My brothers and my sisters, ah-ah
All over this landIf I had a song
I'd sing it in the morning
I'd sing it in the evening
All over this world
I'd sing out danger
I'd sing out a warning
I'd sing out love between
My brothers and my sisters ah-ah
All over this landI got a hammer
And I've got a bell
And I've got a song to sing
All over this land
It's the hammer of justice
It's the bell of freedom
It's the song about love between
My brothers and my sisters
All over this land
All over this land
All over this land
All over this land
All over this land
All over this land
All over this land
Hard Times was one of the novels by Charles Dickens I studied – sadly only in extracts – when I was at secondary school. I can't remember if I learned any especial moral, social, or even literary lessons from it, save for the fact that I felt that Thomas Gradgrind was, in his way, a more terrible figure that even Squeers or Mr Bounderby, and that I should very much not like to be taught by a teacher like him or, indeed, as I grew older, be a teacher like him. I probably needn't have worried though because my students have not shown themselves to be akin to “a plane of little vessels... arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them”. Even Dickens himself has failed to render them into such a state. My attempts to teach Oliver Twist on my Year 9 class's last day of term ended up with some of them linking arms and singing 'Consider Yourself Our Friend' as though they were a group of Victorian Cockney orphans themselves!
I'm sure it was ever thus though. In Proverbs 5, on 'The Peril of Adultery', a father – believed to be King Solomon – warns his son to listen to his teachers lest on his deathbed he ends up proclaiming, “How I have hated instruction and my heart despised correction! I have not obeyed the voice of my teachers nor inclined my ear to those who instructed me!” When the Word of the Lord comes to Jeremiah, God proclaims of the people of Israel that “though I taught them, rising up early and teaching them, yet they have not listened to receive instruction”. Jesus, referred to repeatedly as a teacher in the Bible, faces resistance and disruption at every corner. If King Solomon, Jesus and God Himself struggle to get their students to listen, what chance does a humble secondary school teacher have?
Almost counter-intuitively, the best thing to do to get students to listen and obey instruction is to stop fighting them. This is not to advocate throwing up one's hands and retreating behind the desk, but to teach with the recognition that you and the students are ultimately on the same side and that it is a self-evident truth that they are going to listen. Shouting never achieves this aim except in the very short-term. Far better to have a clear sense of what you need to teach your students (your lesson outcome), hook them in (as well as you can) and then speak quietly, patiently and clearly and only when you have to. It's easier said than done, but I think it's something that almost all of us have the experience of doing, whether officially employed as a teacher or not. Indeed, the traditional classroom can get in the way of remembering that this is a fundamentally human interaction and that we all occupy the position of teacher and student at different points of our lives.
In the wake of the climate and biodiversity crises, it is tempting to proclaim that we must learn from young people, putting all of the responsibility on them to invent and protest and find new ways of living in a world that older generations of those of us in developed countries have hoped to destroy. This is an extraordinary amount of pressure to put onto the young, however, especially as they have grown up within exactly the same systems of extraction and exploitation that we have. Sadly environmental protesting under our current government seems to just fuel the culture wars, as shown by MP Theresa May's response to the Greenpeace protest on the Prime Minister's house. Personally, I took part in Extinction Rebellion until me and my partner felt that it was no longer working. If under a future government I feel protest is an effective strategy I may do so again. In the meantime, however, I am teaching English Literature at Ipswich Academy. Since I am not a head of department, I have no control over the syllabus and cannot fill it with climate change fiction like Octavia Butler's Earthseed books, which I believe might help students prepare for and adapt to the future already here across much of the world and at some point to arrive here in the UK.
However, more broadly, I strongly believe in English Literature as a civic good, which can teach students to more clearly reflect upon themselves and their place within the world. This year it has been my privilege to teach two plays by Willy Russell, Blood Brothers and Our Day Out, which can help students understand class differences in the UK; Dickens' Great Expectations, which might shield students from snobbery and disavowing their family unfairly, as well as being such a wonderful book that it might spur on a love of reading; Bernadine Evaristo's Hello Mum, which brings home to students the dangers of county lines gang warfare in a relatable way; George Orwell's Animal Farm, which introduces students to the concept of allegory and how societies can slide into totalitarianism; and J.B. Priestley's An Inspector Calls, a GCSE text that is incredibly clear-sighted in its moral lessons that are so anathema to the current government's ideology that I find it remarkable that Michael Gove did not remove it from the syllabus alongside Of Mice and Men.
While one has to (rightly) be careful about one's political allegiances when teaching, if you've ever tried to get a teenager to like something you like you know that ultimately students have to be left to come to their own decisions anyway. However, in a country increasingly marked by political tribalism with a government ever willing to use divide and rule to control the population, I am thankful that I can have students read the following words in the classroom and that they are doing so across the country for thousands and thousands of fellow teachers:
“But just remember this. One Eva Smith has gone – but there are millions and millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths still left with us, with their lives, their hopes and fears, their suffering and chance of happiness, all intertwined with our lives, with what we think and say and do. We don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish. Good night.”