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Teaching, minus the grisly bits.
(article written for and published in The Weekend Telegraph)
I was recently invited by Wellington College to spend a term as artist in residence. I am a singer/songwriter by trade, with one foot in the theatre, and my remit was to exercise my enthusiasms within the Berkshire school. By the end of term we had just about got the measure of one another and a further term was deemed a good idea.
The post struck me as a very satisfactory and civilised arrangement. Artists need a sustaining environment, institutions need points of stimulation.
Besides plying his trade, the artist will inevitably perform a social function. Not being one of the staff, he is yet of them and among them. He is not a teacher and the pupils do not relate to him as such. They know he is a wild card, there to share his expertise but not to exercise authority.
One view of education visualises a process in which everything goes one way, from teacher (or computer screen) to pupil. Feeding time at the nest. If the pupil fails to learn it is the teacher's fault for not dishing up the right food in the right way. In this scheme of things, education is a right rather than a privilege. It can also be a bit of a battle. With pupils expected to swallow all manner of data in which they may have no interest, force feeding is inevitable.
I have always felt the ideal process to be rather different; the teacher educating himself, the pupil enjoying the privilege of listening, observing and questioning, with only himself to blame if he fails to make good use of his opportunity.
The artist in residence enjoys exactly this position.. Nobody is forced to learn from him. Only those who want to share his experience do so. He does not have to mark papers, take detentions, set tests or supervise excursions, unless he chooses to. He has, in effect, all of the pleasures of teaching, without any of the grisly bits. He is a lucky chap.
I am writing as though the artist were always a man. He isn't, of course. Potters, painters, playwrights, composers and, for all I know, jugglers, of either sex can find fulfilment in the modern school.
My tenuous link with Wellington was through the outgoing Headmaster, Jonty Driver who, 40 years ago, was such a thorn in the flesh of the old apartheid gang in South Africa (where I had gone to teach) that he was banged up in solitary for five weeks.
About the same time, I began writing satirical songs which became popular and had me banished nine years later. A change of regime in 1979 saw me readmitted and for the next 15 years I chronicled the country's contortions in a series of one man shows, songs and short stories. I returned to Britain seven years ago to lecture in schools on my experiences there and so linked up with Jonty again.
Getting started was a problem, resolved by the chaplain who invited me to sing at morning assembly, thereby allowing me to advertise my presence and the fact that I would be offering songwriting workshops twice a week. Schools always harbour a number of casual guitar- strummers who dream of stardom, but find it hard to come up with anything approaching a finished song.
My task was to take their various bits and pieces of song and show them how to corral these into a finished song. They grew jollier by the week and were soon churning out songs at a rate that put me to shame. At their end of term concert they performed like hardened professionals. I was immensely proud of them.
To my alarm, I discovered that I was down in the school calendar for a production in chapel on the theme of Advent. I fell to brooding over my obsession with Crow, Ted Hughes's magnificent vision of hell on earth, and began pairing it in my mind with the only equivalently powerful antidote I know, namely Christ the Redeemer.
I juxtaposed poems with liturgy, carols, plainsong and prayers, co-opted the school choir, dragooned three boys and three girls into being readers and persuaded the head of music to improvise punctuation at the organ. With barely three hours of rehearsal, we were on.
Wellingtonians excel at 'getting on with it' whatever 'it' is, with the minimum of fuss. Nowhere else could I have called upon so much expertise (from staff), so much youthful enthusiasm (from pupils), such a fine venue and such easy access to office equipment.
In the following term my band of songsters was able to make good use of the school's recording studio. Pupils doing studio engineering as part of their music A-levels worked with us to produce a CD.
One formal music student expressed an interest in arranging songs for strings and flute. I was able to offer him some compositions by the late Georges Brassens who, during my years of learning French, has been a songwriting inspiration too, and with the help of a member of staff who suddenly remembered he was an accordion player, we gave my farewell concert.
I was sad to go. Things had been accomplished which otherwise would never have happened. And this, surely, is the point of the exercise. I hope schools up and down the country and the artists who are lucky enough to work in them feel the same way.
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