There are a number of educational issues that will get me agitated and animated when being discussed and espousing views contrary to my entrenched own. There are many, but key ones are: testing in English Keys Stages 2 and 3; the damage done to GCSE English by Michael Gove; the academisation programme, and selection/privilege in education, either through grammar schools or public schools.

The current agitation-inducer is Theresa May’s political quest to reinstate grammar schools in this country and her truly unbelievable attempt to re-define them as agents for social mobility and a succour to the poor. My prejudices against this are primarily though my actual experience: having taught English for 30 years in an 11-18 comprehensive, and within this institution almost always teaching mixed-ability classes – certainly under my HOD control. I will also include my own secondary modern school education of two years [CSE and GCE].

As a student, I know I benefitted entirely from the quality of most teachers I experienced and the leadership of my secondary modern school Headmaster. It was a good, happy school where I always felt valued, and when challenged, was allowed to assert my independence to meet that. As a teacher, I always valued academic success and worked hard to encourage and support those who had the aptitude for it, and this was matched by my equal support and encouragement for those who excelled in other ways: neither trajectory taking precedence over the other. But I believe they and I had the greatest possible educational experiences by that very mix of trajectories and an ethos which did not give primacy to either [well, that is until a target culture corrupted that ethos by its insidious focus and demands]. And of course that teacher reflection is a snapshot summary of a far more complex and dynamic experience.

So I am bound to disagree with May’s proposals to re-establish grammar schools in this country. I would in whatever guise she attempts to frame their future existence and purpose because they are quite simply selective and therefore divisive. What I am genuinely finding impossible to understand and accept, over and above my clearly stated prejudices against in any shape or form, is her assertions that grammar and public schools can become a panacea for social mobility.

Because I am agitated and animated I don’t think I can proffer the most expansive and fully reasoned rationale against, but I do feel quite able to challenge and unpick a number of her quite random claims for a shake-up of our education system. In no particular order:

• May wants private schools to do more to help the state sector and therefore help to deliver a ‘great meritocracy’. How does she propose to instruct the sharing of what it is that makes private schools ‘successful’ when this is so irrefutably and inextricably linked to their privilege? The privilege of selection, the privilege of small class sizes [often ridiculously so], the privilege of resources paid by extravagant fees, the socio/economic privilege of most students, the privilege of examination ‘success’ that can only ever be relative to those many stated privileges? This is a sweeping aside from May which is totally bonkers.
• May wants independent schools to offer the same ‘support’ to state schools in order to earn their charitable status, but surely their apparent success is built on the same privileges as those of private schools [indeed, perhaps she is confusing the two and really thinking of a single entity]. The implication is she thinks that teaching and the curriculum are somehow superior in such schools. Well, it might be more wholly academic because of its many routes to being selective, but yet again, its successes in examination results [presumably the touchstone] are for those privileged reasons, not teaching and curriculum design.
• May wants private schools to sponsor and/or set up state schools and provide direct teaching support. I don’t understand the financial implications of this at all. Do private schools pay for this? Does the government finance this but private schools exert their private control? Can this be done with taxpayers’ money? Setting this nonsense aside, where is the proof that private school teachers/teaching is more effective than others? Surely, the privileged environment in which their teachers teach contributes hugely to any apparent overall successes?
• May wants new grammar schools to make places available to students from disadvantaged backgrounds. But will there still be academic selection? So we can have poorer children who are not the failures of some richer children? How do students from disadvantaged, low-income backgrounds compete/gel with/ feel inclusive within the social milieu of grammar schools? That’s a hard question to ask let alone answer. What does ‘disadvantaged’ really mean? What kind of disadvantages can be overcome by the experience and tradition of grammar schools and those who work in them? That’s a hard question to ask let alone answer.
• May wants grammar schools to open feeder primary schools in disadvantaged areas. Will the primary school students for these be selected? How does this address disadvantage?
• May claims her proposals will not establish a binary system of grammar schools and secondary moderns. But will it still establish a bifurcated system of those selected and those who are not? How can this not be the case? That’s an easy question to ask and a bugger for May and Greening [and others] to answer, surely?
• May wants to open up the education system to greater diversity. Why? Are a preponderance of faith schools, for example, the best way to help nurture a cohesive, inclusive society? Isn’t the core principle of comprehensive education that it is diverse? Diverse for all? Isn’t ‘diverse for all’ the definition of diversity?

I’m not sure I feel any less agitated but I am less animated because I am exhausted. All of the questions I have asked are genuinely born of my complete incredulity about May’s rhetoric of producing a ‘great meritocracy’ through her proposed ideological adjustments to the education system we have now. I’m sure I should be relieved and reassured when so many in her own party do not seem to agree with her vision, or that rhetoric, and even when Michael Wilshaw criticises it. And this will, I know, be open to debate before it ever becomes a reality. As I have been saying in previous posts and repeat this one last time [perhaps…], if May was being honest about wanting the privilege of grammar schools expanded and offered as a part of the education system, we could debate the issue more clearly and directly. My fear is that many people might be fooled by her rhetoric about the promise of offering social mobility and justice. It does seem that the electorate in this country, the majority who do not share in the prosperity and privileges of the very few for whom the Tory Party exists, are increasingly duped and deluded by the fancy talk about caring.

Theresa May today described public schools as follows:

‘Most of the major public schools started out as the route by which poor boys could reach the professions. The nature of their intake may have changed today – indeed these schools have become more and more divorced from normal life’

This is the definition of a public school from the Encyclopedia Britannica:

‘The term public school emerged in the 18th century when the reputation of certain grammar schools spread beyond their immediate environs. They began taking students whose parents could afford  [my highlighting] residential fees and thus became known as public, in contrast to local, schools. By the late 20th century the term independent school was increasingly preferred by the institutions themselves’

It has always been about selection and privilege. May’s consistent promotion of her current ambition to help the poor and generate social mobility is not supported by fantasy views of a past or the future.

According to The Guardian, Theresa May will be saying today: “For too long we have tolerated a system that contains an arbitrary rule preventing selective schools from being established – sacrificing children’s potential because of dogma and ideology. The truth is that we already have selection in our school system – and it’s selection by house price, selection by wealth. That is simply unfair.”

That pairing of dogma and ideology would prove an interesting question on any future 11+ selection test by asking how its contextualisation today makes it the epitome of irony.

I mentioned in my previous posting how May’s own ideological stance seeps through the holes in her argument advocating the return of grammar schools. The sickliest ooze is how she uses the term ‘selection’, appropriating and defining it as her version being somehow more prevalent and divisive than that of the 11+ itself – a linguistic shifting that surely beggars belief?

Labour has in its own history in government when it sullied the situation with the promotion of parental choice, though this did not include the encouraging to build and promote grammar schools. In this respect, they facilitated precisely what May rightly points out in wealthier and/or middle class parents having the means and motivation to select the ‘better’ school for their children to attend. It always seemed risible to me for Labour to argue about the philosophical point for parental free choice when it could so easily be undermined by the simple inability of a parent to afford and be able to transport their children to a school other than their nearest.

A succinct comment on the contradictions prompted by parental choice in education in the UK is contained in the following paragraph by Sonia Exley, Lecturer in Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science, from a chapter in the 28^th edition of ‘British Social Attitudes – School Choice’:

The fact that majorities in Britain support both a parental right to choose and greater educational equality sit in obvious contrast with the literature on school choice discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Such literature presents parental choice in the current British context as being in clear tension with educational equality, but this tension appears to go unrecognised by many, and there seems to be some disconnect in the public mind between inequality in the school system overall and an exercising of extensive parental partiality. Perhaps a greater role for academics, then, in drawing attention to the contradictions between school choice and social justice, is needed.

What I most abhor is May’s [and presumably her policy-making scribes’] language perversion of what ‘selection’ does fundamentally mean. The wealth and motivation I have acknowledge is divisive enough, but a selective testing at quite an arbitrary age of 11 which positively labels and nurtures one set of students against the negative labelling and potential disadvantaging of others is insidious.

At the fundamental core of the selection on ‘intelligence’/IQ and similar, is the inherent and arrogant classification of worth and value in terms of educational promise. This itself is undermined, further ironically, by those wealthy and motivated parents who pay to coach and train their children to pass the 11+ examination, and can then make sure they are able to be transported to a grammar school. Test questions like,

English: Select the option which has the sentence with the most suitable grammar.

• Was it he whom had a house burn down?
• Was it he whose house burnt down?
• Was it he that had a house burn down?
• Was it he who’s house burnt down?

As I said in my previous posting, this is no more than the perusing of the poles of the argument, but I therefore repeat how I wish May and similar would be honest and acknowledge that grammar schools are being promoted for the privileged and that this is an intrinsic ideology of the Tory Party. To keep dressing it up as a concern for social mobility and justice is – even where held as some honest purpose – minuscule within that larger political dogma that favours the few.

I don’t believe for a nano-second that Theresa May and her right-wing followers [Fallon et al] believe grammar schools provide social mobility for everyone, this being the pseudo-philosophy behind promoting them as opposed to the honest argument that they provide for the privileged, and provide a formal ‘golden age’ academic education. Immediately upon her appointment [not election] as Prime Minister, May stood outside No 10 and claimed she as a leader would be most concerned about ‘social justice’. It was clear that the lie was firmly planted then.

May has claimed that selection already exists with the post-code non-lottery of wealthy parents buying houses and living near the ‘best’ state schools. This in itself flouts the principle of even her government that all state schools [but more-so as academies] should be of the same high standards. So much of the evidence is that state comprehensives have indeed made huge improvements and attained these national high standards, many, perhaps most, ironically not as academies. And despite so much withering political interference with the curriculum and assessment.

There are countless more holes easily drilled in her argument about provision for social mobility, and what seeps through these is May’s and others’ blind adherence to a grubby ideology. Having had a ‘successful’ grammar school education herself, she like so many before her – notably Michael Gove – make the simplistic extrapolation that what was good for them is therefore necessary for others.

I know this is one opinion simply set against another, but I genuinely cannot see the promotion of a return to grammar schools as anything other than ideological – and working in essence quite knowingly against equality in provision and outcomes. Why not be honest about this and make claim to a philosophy that the apparently more intelligent/academic deserve an environment and curriculum targeted at that presumed excellence? At least we can then challenge the educational claims on both sides of the argument. But to assert this political policy – so symptomatic of a PM wanting to make an entirely personal mark – is for a universal greater good is woefully disingenuous.

No, I mean a lie.

I am enjoying the reading ride on my Jim Thompson-as-writer learning curve, and having just finished The Getaway I now better understand the praise he has received from critics – as well as fellow writers, for example Stephen King – and of the three novels I have read this is clearly the best.

Calling a book the ‘best’ is simply an expression of opinion, but it seems to be the most assured of the three I now know [those other two being, as previously reviewed, Savage Night and The Grifters]. Its most impressive feature is the plot with its clever twists and turns, these still surprising despite my having seen the film versions [both the Baldwin/Basinger remake and the more notable, original McQueen/MacGraw]. I mention for obvious reasons: with reading The Grifters, I found my memory of that film version produced a slightly negative impact, with the role of Roy played by John Cusack and retaining in my mind’s eye too much of that actor’s disarming charm and amiability in the context of the book’s more discomforting context; whereas with the original film The Getaway the variances in that and the book’s storytelling/events were enough to differentiate, thus keeping the reading largely fresh and immediate, though it was at times still impossible to disassociate film characterisation and memorable scenes completely from the book’s originals.

I will begin my comments on the writing by looking at the book’s end because this is the most unusual, perhaps disturbing – though the nastiness of the killing throughout is hard to trump in this respect – and it is certainly an aspect of the novel that generates much critical discussion. Without spoiling for new readers, the ending presents a scenario that surprises by its existence as much as it insinuates an otherworldliness. It is without question narratively at odds with what precedes this, even though Thompson has indulged similar in the other novel I have read Savage Night, accepting here the peculiarity is an extension of the first-person corrupted narrative. In The Getaway, there is an unsettling move at the end of the story to a resolution that will fully challenge readers’ varying expectations and desires.

In other ways the assuredness of the writing is evident in the actual lack of quips I have been highlighting in his other work. There is one, however, that stands out when we first meet Mrs Clinton [Fran, the veterinarian’s wife], and it reflects similar sexist descriptions/assertions Thompson has written elsewhere – a vestige of the gangster noir/pulp fiction in which all his books reside. I quote as a striking contrast to the other kind of writing that will follow as illustration:

He’d seen this babe before – her many counterparts, that is. He knew her kin, distant and near. All her mamas, sisters, aunts, cousins and what have you. And he knew the name was Lowdown with a capital L. He wasn’t at all surprised to find her in a setup like this. Not after encountering her as a warden’s sister-in-law, the assistant treasurer of a country bank, and a supervisor of paroles. This babe got around. She was the original square-plug-in-a-round-hole kid. But she never changed any. She had that good old Lowdown blood in her, and the right guy could bring it out.

As I build up my personal view of Thompson as writer – still only based on three texts – another aspect I will comment on here, but referenced before about The Grifters, is his cynicism, a little of that evident in the quote above. Whereas I have called it ‘redneck’ before, I do sense a wiser and more universal, psychological expression in the extract that follows, and it is more knowing about the human psyche than cynical about the human condition. Here is the passage about Doc’s wife Carol, and the complexity of its thinking, reflected in the complexity of its structuring, demonstrates that stark contrast when compared with the preceding quote:

Her mind moved around and around the subject, moving with a kind of fuzzy firmness. With no coherent thought process, she arrived at a conviction – a habit with the basically insecure; an insecurity whose seeds are invariably planted earlier, in under- or over protectiveness, in a distrust of parental authority which becomes all authority. It can later, with maturity – a flexible concept – be laughed away, dispelled by determined clear thinking. Or it can be encouraged by self-abusive resentment and brooding self-pity. It can grow ever greater until the original authority becomes intolerable, and a change becomes imperative. Not to a radical one in thinking; that would be too troublesome, too painful. The change is simply to authority in another guise which, in time, and under any great stress, must be distrusted and resented even more than the first.

This is I feel a compulsive authorial expression of knowing. It isn’t critical to the storyline at this moment. Far from it. That storyline, by the way, with its exploration of confinement, is one of the most gripping in the whole novel. There is no need to understand the human condition as reflected in this: the vivid description of that internment shows us all we need to know, though we might wish it hadn’t.

There are many more telling, understanding observations in this book as Doc and Carol in particular make their getaway journey [Rudy’s is more rudimentary; his behaviour as inexcusable but I think we care less] and one of the other memorable ones is when Thompson spends narrative time with the sharecroppers. The brutal world in which they live is one of many presented in the story, but theirs is in a number of ways made appealing.

Savage Night was written in 1953, The Getaway in 1958, and The Grifters in 1963. The ten years between the first and third wouldn’t seem to account for the narrative differences between those two, considering how The Getaway is, as I have stated at the start of this review, superior in style and effectiveness – though one could argue that the at times superficiality in Savage Night is the very essence of Carl Bigelow.

And now having arrived at this surer appreciation of Jim Thompson as writer – though still early days in overall reading of his output – I have returned to reading The Killer Inside Me. I said in a previous posting that I couldn’t get into this novel. I have now. Very much so.

This Sunday’s Observer – The New Review has a collection of commentaries on the Obama presidency by five authors who deliver a collective, uplifting read. Each is essentially positive about Barack Obama as president, but they are not by any means totally uncritical.

I want to entice with three brief quotes that provide a succinct narrative thread for the whole. Presuming you too would be a fan, or at least supporter of Obama’s time as President, they offer honest and knowing affirmations of what we all share as fond and respecting regard, but also a sense of what is bound to be lost when he is no longer in office. Especially if…

Above and beyond the sad reality of losing Obama as a memorable leader, the first quote sets the incredulous setting for this imminent change to the presidency when Jayne Anne Phillips observes how this election year has been a psychedelic nightmare. The next by Hari Kunzru, the more ‘critical’ in the context of generally positive observations, is a comic but also incisive comment on Obama and how out of his extensive rhetorical tool kit, the president pulls a weird folksy tone, a subliminal suggestion of Merl Haggard, designed, no doubt, to sooth the terror induced by his blackness. The final quote is from the last author writing in this feature, Attica Locke, and it resonates having read the others because she offers us the most hope about Obama and after he leaves the presidency with We’re just seeing the beginning of Obama’s power as a human being.

He Thinks He Is

Extracts from Nick Clegg’s book Politics: Between the Extremes – No Mea Culpa [or something like that] are published in today’s Guardian, and these focus on then Education Secretary Michael Gove, as if Clegg’s self-righteous and self-excusing revelations that Mikey was a Machiavellian megalomaniac need telling since the very public Brexit-Boris stabbed-in-the-back treachery. How Clegg must have winced when this occurred and he knew his observations in the already completed book had instantaneously become redundant.

Of course, I have only read today’s extracts, and I can’t imagine I will want to read any more of the whole book. Part of that reason is for a couple of illustrative examples I will mention shortly, but the other is the expectation that this tome is in essence a self-indulgent self-justification for being an alleged radical coalition partner ultimately helping to support the Tory government [despite the claims otherwise] and by doing so to make their current and future existence secured. I do accept that Labour of late has helped considerably to also consolidate this likelihood.

What I found boorish in these few extracts were Clegg’s little humorous asides about Gove whilst essentially sticking his own knife in the man – though Mikey deserves whatever corrective stabs he receives. The first of these is when Clegg writes about the pair disagreeing over the future of A levels, and Nick observes of Gove: He didn’t agree – but he disagreed with amusing verve and flair, over a couple of bottles of wine. So Nick gets a little pissed and finds Michael attractive. It always seemed to me that an element of this kind of excusing caveat about Gove was consistently the significant problem: he was known to be a bastard, but he had such wit and charm and intelligence…. Yet now we all know with absolute certainty the Bastard was the primary personal characteristic.

The other attempt at comic deflection is an observation about Gove in Cabinet: Gove provided regular entertainment at cabinet meetings, with his florid, if unreasonable condemnations of the civil service. Well, yet again we all now know how much more than ‘unreasonable’ Mikey’s thoughts and feelings about others would manifest themselves. This is exactly the ruthless way in which Gove behaved when legislating for his education reforms without any regard whatsoever to opinions other than his myopic own.

No Nick, I don’t find any of this amusing. The nation’s students will always be held to account for changes Gove made to what they study, but as you are no longer in government, you would appear to feel absolved from any such responsibility.

I was surprised and pleased to see a book of mine suggested as useful reading in the ‘Section 6: Literature’ part of the current MMU PGCE English Subject Guide.

Referenced as ‘Ferguson, M (2000) Poems in your Pocket: Imaginative Approaches to GCSE Poetry, Longman’, I am proud of the poetry I was able to have used as stimulus and illustration for teaching. There is more than in most similar texts [at a huge cost to the publisher] and I believe a true eclectic mix, though this was also necessarily linked to familiar poems used in examination. The focus then was on approaches to teaching in preparation for students having to tackle a significant amount of poetry in their English Language and Literature GCSEs.

This genuinely isn’t intended as a sales pitch, but in many ways what I was presenting then is going to be very relevant to the commitments students have under the new curriculum to respond to poetry in examinations that are closed-book and entirely terminal, no clever pun intended.

I was most pleased with the Teacher’s Guide that accompanied the student book, not least the creative writing ideas, though I am only too aware that there will be even less time now in a GCSE course to feel able to spend any on this – if there ever was.

They lived without electricity.
Their water came from a hand pump
at the base of the windmill.
A Nebraska farm, 1935.
She said, you can’t miss what you
never had. Drugstore goldfish
in the water tank turned into
giant orange and white carp,
Koi prized in another country,
another class. Her father threw them
out into the prairie claiming
they’d poison the cattle.
Rattlesnakes, a way of life,
careful checking before eggs
were gathered from the darkness
of nesting boxes. Everywhere, heat.
Gone with the Wind
in 1939. She was fourteen.
During the war, she looked like
one of the Andrews Sisters.
First child at twenty, last at thirty-nine.
All survived save one, gone
at thirty. The death of her daughter
turned her hair white.
Eighty-four and she’s lived alone
for longer than she was married,
her husband a man with a wild imagination
but a weak mind. He was born
the year the Titanic sank.
That should have told me something.
Now, central air for the worst
of the heat. In her lifetime:
organ transplants, space flight,
television, artificial hearts.
On still nights she sleeps with
just a sheet, the window open wide,
summer’s heat hard and dry.

 
– from Two Men Rowing Madly Toward Infinity © Broadstone Books, 2016

I like this poem, as with so much of the best poetry, for its apparent simplicity. This is indeed a portrait, one that is swelled with detail prompted by its many specific references: the ‘Koi’ carp that signify insularity and stubbornness; ‘Andrews Sisters’ and their wholesome personas; births and death; the uncertainty of her husband – and throughout this, Viola as a still-point of endurance, carrying on and on like the expansive landscape that doesn’t change.

No, there probably aren’t any ‘good’ characters in this novel. Roy Dillon is the nearest. He certainly isn’t evil. After a tough upbringing by an indifferent, even harsh mother, he has done well to get where he is in life. This has included criminal activity, but he plays the short con rather than the long and this wouldn’t seem to cause his victims any major harm. In most cases they would seem in fact to be victims of their own naivety which Roy merely exploits. And for one brief moment Roy might have achieved the morally sound life of an ordinary person, yet this just doesn’t work out.

But Roy is likeable. This isn’t the case with Lily, his mother, for factors I have already mentioned. Bobo Jusus demonstrates his brutality and thus we aren’t going to warm to him. Moira is more complex, at first, and I don’t want to spoil things too much by elaborating. Some of the happiest moments in the book do occur between her and Roy, sexually; however, this is not enough for her to attain an enduring status of goodness. At all.

Carol, on the other hand, must be a ‘good’ person. She is honest and hard-working and caring. But she is a victim too, horrendously as a child, and then later as an adult when working as a nurse. Roy would appear to have tender thoughts towards her – an act of goodness, perhaps – though these may be more to do with guilt. Finally, there is the minor character Perk who is ironically responsible for Roy seeing a way to another life, but Percival Kaggs is essentially a smartass.

The Grifters is not pulp fiction. As I have written previously, Thompson’s writing here is imbued with a knowing tone about the realities of the human condition, delivered at times through the kind of ‘quips’ I have already quoted in two previous references on this blog, and of course through the narrative arc of the story and all that happens. There are also moments, albeit brief, of poetic observation that capture a significant idea, signals it seems to me of deeper thought about the world we live in than the superficial preoccupations of a pulp narrative.

I have compared this with his other novella Savage Night – indeed, the only other one I have read with which to compare – so that is limited to a slight judgement on Thompson overall as a writer. I have referred to what I called a ‘redneck cynicism’ in at least one observation he makes in The Grifters, and in his reference to Carol and a concentration camp there does seem to be a ruthless element of the gratuitous over the meaningful. But these are snippets from the whole. And these are aspects of the effective storywriting, obviously. It is a very good story.

I have read about Thompson’s use of the unreliable narrator, and I have already challenged this is connection with Carl Bigelo from Savage Night. Although The Grifters is written in the third person [so perhaps this is the key stylistic caveat here!] I don’t see how Roy Dillon can ever be regarded as this when we are having his thinking presented to us. He is always shown as being totally straight about thoughts and feelings – including doubts – and what he sees. Indeed, returning to this question of any inherent goodness he as a character might possess: his candour in the reported admission of a complete lack of emotion for the soldiers he grifts on the train later in the story is crystal clear on both aspects of respectively reliable narration and any urge to being ‘good’.

My next Thompson read will be The Getaway. I am looking forward.