English at Work

Jim Porteous and Nicola Towle Brislington School, Bristol

How English teachers perceive their subject is often made most evident when they are confronted by its supposed antithesis. In the late 1980s English sought to define itself in the face of a new opposition: the threat ofTVEI. The widespread resistance to TVEI, and in particular its empha- sis on work and the workplace, indicated something more than a political distaste for government planning - the values and methodology of TVEI appear to run counter to general liberal English practice. Traditional slogans were paraded: ‘English is not about vocationalism’; ‘English is not a service subject’; ‘English isn’t about producing passive lackeys for the capitalist system’, etc. In retrospect, the initial opposition to TVEI was probably well-founded, but shifts within the TVEI (E) agenda and some recent re-evaluations within English might make a positive synthesis possible, but the history of the subject suggests this is unlikely to occur on a large scale. (ed. Brown et al . , 1990; Medway, 1989)

Reference is frequently made to the ‘bridge between education and industry’, but so far as the bulk of children are concerned the gulf between the two territories of work remains as yet umpanned. (Board of Education, 1937)

‘Work’ or, more expansively, ‘the world of work’, has featured in the English curriculum in a variety of odd, confusing and often totally contradictory and untheorized ways over the last thirty years or so. Two strands emerge clearly:

The first, regarded as something of a necessary chore by many English teachers, involved a brisk set of exercises in ‘business English’ - the writing of letters of application, CVs memos, etc. Such work often featured as coursework in CSE folders. Allied to this, though more ‘personal’, was the ‘write-up of the work experience week’. The second lay much closer to the ‘heart of English’ - a personal response to literary representations of working life.

To an extent this second tradition retained some of the radical impetus - as well as the reactionary flaws - of its Leavisite origins:

A serious educational movement will inevitably, and, as far as I am concerned explicitly, aim at fostering in schools and in education generally, an anti-acquisite and anti- competitive moral bent . . . The teaching profession is peculiurly in a position to do revolutionary things! (Leavis, 1933)

The informing ideology is succinctly encapsulated by D. H. Lawrence, the poetic old mqjor of this ‘revolution’:

A mun should never earn his living, if he earns his lifk he’ll be lovely.

A browse through old English stock-cupboards will turn up anthology after anthology containing sections on ‘work’, contrasting images of sturdy independent labourers with the enfeebled monotonous lives of their urban counterparts. ‘A Living‘ introduces a section of ‘work-related’

32 English in Education

poems in Voices (ed. Summerfield, 1968) which also features Lawrence’s ‘What Is He?’ (- ‘a man, of course’), and elegies for an old-fashioned plumber and a botanist finely attuned to the sensitivities of nature. In Themes and Variations (ed. Heath, 1965) the section ‘Man Himself (sic) has a Work’ selection, including Larkin’s ubiquitous ‘Toads’ and Wain’s ‘Au Jardin du Plantes’. Impact (ed. Poole and Shepherd, 1967) includes extracts from Mayhew‘s London and descriptions of teachers (including Ursula) trying to work, faithful old retainers and dashing matadors. One of the seven Themes in Modern Verse (ed. Wollman, 1968) is ‘Work and Leisure’. In this rather curious collection men are shown to be fulfilled when fishing, playing football or in close touch with another:

He likes having is hair cut and the man Likes cutting it.

Opposed to this there are two poems about denatured commuters (‘I am the man too busy with a living to live’) and a warning about the alienating effects of following a ‘sagacious trade’.

Course-books and manuals training students in examination tech- niques, where they attend to working lives at all, also tend to reflect this perspective. Unit 3 of Full Circle (Black and Finn, 19751, entitled ‘Two Firms of Gloucestershire Dalers’, offers eight composition titles, including ‘How is “Progress” destroying rural communities such as Elmbury?’ and ‘Tell the story of a village threatened by the construction of a motorway nearby’. A unit based on extracts from Blythe’s Akenfield, ‘The Last Survivor from Feudalism’, presents more titles: ‘Do you think that village life has suffered by the disappearance of most of the country squires of the type described in the passage? What are the losses, and what are the gains?’; ‘The village shop - can it survive?’; ‘The rolling English road’, etc. Tossed almost incidentally into this appreciation of English life h la Cder with Rosie is that last question, Why I should like to become a . . . ’ (country squire? village shopkeeper? wheelright? . . . )’ (cf. Worpole, 1989).

Even from this snapshot it is pretty clear that the scrutiny of work on Leavisite grounds is anything but revolutionary: the celebration of good old rural England, non-conformity and heightened individual experience is effectively redundant as a political critique. Even the poetry and prose anthology The Experience ofwork (ed. Marland, 1973) which includes text ‘not easily available in schools so far’ and an imaginative list of resources, restates in its introduction the traditional dichotomy: work in a country village is shared and seen by all, there is ‘no mystery or remoteness about the adult work’. Nowadays, however, the urban young cannot grasp the ‘feel of the work, its human context, its life’; instead people ‘go to work’, away and into a shrouded world. The ‘experience of unemployment’ was rarely considered explicitly, though ‘how to fill your leisure time’ seemed to become an increasingly popular topic in times of recession. Running counter to this great tradition there were isolated outbreaks of work based around class, validating working-class community traditions, and the emergence on the margins of a critical appreciation of ‘women’s work’, as in The Receiving End (ed. Medway, 1973; cf, Kean, 1986)

The contents of a book do not, of course, determine the way i t is used in the classroom, but it is hard to escape the conclusion that the Leavisite ‘revolutionary’ drive must have presented countless children unlikely to end up as thatchers, ploughmen or exotic crowd-pleasers with a stun- ningly depressing vision of what their working lives - and those of their

English at Work 33

parents - might involve; and particularly so for urban working-class children. Furthermore, whilst boys might at least look forward to life as paid automata or Mr Bleaney, in general girls were offered very few representations at all of life as a waged worker, positive or otherwise. Symptomatic of this is the anthology Men at Work, (ed. Jones, 1972) which contains 9 1 texts, five of them by women.

The relationship between classroom English and ‘the world of work’ which governs most of the above anthologies is still in place, neatly summarised in Healey’s 1990 collection People Working. Here we are informed that ‘English offers a window on the world’ (of worWout therehot like work in school) and that the anthology ‘tries to dig below the surface’, so that readers can experience vicariously the ‘real world’: What is it like to go to work? How will it feel? This echoes Marland’s assertion in 1973: ‘In the pieces in this collection it is the people in the work experience that are the focus of attention, and in sharing their experience of work we are sharing their experience of life’. This charmingly naive model of the relationship between experience, language and teachers does, however, ignore the fact that most anthologies feature the writings of poets and authors rather than actual accounts by those whose work is described. As represented in these anthologies and their ‘suggestions for writing’, the English classroom is alive with empathy, unfettered by unimaginative analysis.

A peculiar strategy used to affirm the concrete reality of what went on in the English classroom was to designate the room a ‘workshop’. Indus- trial workshops we have visited tend to be full of metal shavings and unpleasant calendars; clearly English teachers had in mind something more akin to an artist’s studio, this pleasant fiction only disturbed by the ringing of bells, taking of registers, youthful disagreements, etc. Again, the dominant ideological model here is of ‘work’ as a craft, with students expressing themselves through what they make. Amidst this hive of busy little non-alienated workers the teachers could also use literature to represent him or (less commonly) herself as a model of a worker through any one of the ‘class readers’ featuring English teachers as sensitive, caring, organisers and providers.

A more modern image of the English classroom and its processes as a preparatory mirror image of the ‘world of work’ can be derived from a soft- option application of TVEE criteria. Thus, for instance, in a lesson where ‘teams’ of students discuss the question ‘Is Hamlet mad?, they present their opinions, listen to others and then ‘negotiate’ a ‘working title’ for a word-processed essay. I t is somehow obvious that, given the diversity of teachingAearning styles, the problem solving, the high-tech, not to men- tion the European dimension, we are only a step way here from the boardroom at ICI. One component of industrial discourse that has been incorporated into the subject’s vocabulary is ‘negotiation’. This seems a rather odd choice, in that negotiations tend to take place between opposing sides in a dispute, but it does have a certain grainy realism about it.

This spurious and depoliticised enactment of supposed working-place practices is another reflection of the liberal-humanist division between ‘working’ and ‘living‘ exemplified in the anthologies, which in turn is based on the formulated split between the ‘vocational’ and the literary ‘real lived experience’. It’s rather like a weird reworking of the German Ideology, in which the base is entirely secondary to the superstructure. This formula- tion is rehearsed in Holbrook’s English for Maturity (1961):

34 English in Education

Most of the skillsand capacities ourpupils will require when they leweschwl will be learnt after they leave, in the factory, shop, or ofice . . . We have no need, therefore, to concern ourselves, even if it were correct to do so, with education for ‘earning a living’: we educate for living.

Concentrating its energies in this manner the subject has systematically relegated the non-literary, the analytical, the actual practical experience (as opposed to the soft-option W E E fudge) to the realm of the ‘vocational’. Twenty years on from Holbrook, one LEA’S Guidelines for English 13-16 exemplifies this division and the careful balancing act required of teach- ers:

If the primcrcy of literature results in an emphasis on reading the expressive and poetic in English, it is very important that adequate attention is alsogiven to the demands that non- literary sources make on reading techniques . . . there is a paradox here for English teachers. They need rightly to resist being regarded as providing no more than a service, teaching ‘twl skills’, for that undervalues the unique contribution English makes to the curriculum, yet there are many respects in which their work inevitably serves purposes which contribute to learninggenerally, and to this extent a degree of ‘service’is involved. Because of this there may be a tendency to regard anything very obviously mn-literary as belonging ‘downstairs’with the traa!es people, and the literary as belonging ‘upstairs’- a kindofclassdivisionfor the English teacher. That would beunfortunate-all subjects have their particular ‘below stairs’worlds, and certain language and reading issues run across the subject boundaries and must be honestly tackled by everyone as a whole school policy. (Avon County Council Education Authority, 1981)

Having exposed the ‘class division’ the writer proceeds to affirm it in the final sentence whilst simultaneously trying to shuffle off any specific English responsibility for teaching ‘tool skills’. This concept of two strands could perhaps be extended to describe the CSE/O level split and rigorously settled GCSE arrangements, separating the potential ‘tradespeople’ from the cultured literary world of ‘upstairs’, well away from the unpleasant tools.

In its denial of the ‘real world’ and its working practices and processes, therefore, a simply strategy was adopted. In a nifty Hegelian switch, suddenly the English classroom is ‘more real’, ‘living‘, a site of fulfilled labour that, if it does bother to address aspects of the society in which students will go on to become wage earners, it does so in terms of literary themes, whilst the students’ reflections on work experience are diluted down into autobiography. In this classroom we can ‘feel’ through litera- ture what it is like to ‘work out there’, like Orwell, playing at being a tramp, though occasionally we shall have to go through the tiresome grubby business of acquiring a few basic literacy ‘skills’.

Of course, there are examples of English projects that bridge the gulf between the two territories; some of these outlined in Developing English for W E I (ed. Brown et al., 1990). In other cases English has helped prepare students on a conceptual and practical level for work placement, using materials to highlight and analyse certain areas - hierarchies, language use, rituals and routines, etc. -which the students then identify during the week and consider and evaluate back in school. The opportu- nities for LINC-style work are endless, and can be developed further in A level English and communication studies, GCSE mature and specifically vocational courses. The recent NCC document English and Economic and Industrial Understanding at Key Stages 3 and 4 (1992) offers further examples of ways English faculties can develop units to form an integral part of a scheme of work. TVEE’s work-related activities and equal opportunities components can inform the choice of texts for use in class and encourage the introduction of community writing, etc.

English at Work 35

Jus t as there are positive examples like these to be found in English at present, so there have always been exceptions to the grim ideological and pedagogical scenarios outlined earlier. The evidence we have used is necessarily partial and may seem extreme, but we suggest it is none the less representative of mainstream English thinking and practice - much of it we find embarrassingly recognisable.

Learning about, and involving students in, industrial and commercial processes and perspectives is not, in conclusion, a ‘sell out’ by English to the capitalist system. If you don’t engage with what’s actually there you can’t begin to criticise i t from any effective material basis. The real sell out is to ignore it, or t o fool oneself and one’s students into believing that we have a privileged ‘window on the world’ and so offer up a n individualised, depoliticised ‘view’, or to pretend that what goes on in class is a purified version of paid labouring life. The vocationalfliterary divide - English’s class division - is indicative of a massive contradiction, implicating English within capitalist ideology. For, at the very moment we claim to be about ‘living‘ we are actually perpetrating and sustaining - making natural - the class divisions and inequalities of the capitalist state.

References Avon County Council Education Authority (1981) Guidelines for English

13-16. County of Avon Education Department Black, E., & Finn, F. (1975) Full Circle. John Murray Board of Education. (1937) Handbook of Suggestions for Teachers. HMSO Brown, J. et al . (eds) (1990)DevelopingEngZish for TVEI. University of Leedsl

Healey, M. (ed.) (1990) People Working. Longman Heath, R. (ed.) (1965) Themes and Variations. Longman Holbrook, D. (1961) English for Maturity. Cambridge University Press Jones, R. (ed.) (1972) Men at Work. Heinemann Kean, H. (ed) (1986) English Teaching and Class. ILEA Leavis, F. R. (1933) ‘Restatements for Critics’ in Scrutiny, 1.4 Marland, M. (ed.) (1973) The Experience of Work. Longman Medway, P. (1989) ‘Making a Living with Language’ in The Times Educa-

Medway, P. (1973) The Receiving End. Penguin NCC (1992) English and Economic and Industrial Understanding at Key

Poole, R. & Shepherd, P. (eds) (1967) Impact Two. Heinemann Richardson, W. (ed.) (1992) Work Related Teaching and Learning in Schools.

Summerfield, G. (ed.) (1968) Voices: The Third Book. Penguin Wollman, M. (ed.) (1968) Seven Themes in Modern Verse. Harrap Worpole, K. (1989) ‘Village School or Blackboard Jungle’in Samuel, R. (ed.)

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