English at School

Never split an infinity

Never end a sentence with a proposition

Of secondary school teaching in English I can say only from the products; and these do not always delight.  Some there are who have been carefully trained in the teachable parts of language and literature, have a taste sharpened and imagination heightened by meeting a teacher perceptive enough and astringent.  Others (by no means always the worst performers in school examinations) have no sense of language at all: no ear for language, no clear notion of how it works, no competence in handling it, no idea of what actually occurs in language.  Many complain, when cornered at university, that “the subject was killed for me” – as though the use of language were a “subject”, as though the range of literature were trifling and its relation to life nugatory, as though anybody could quench the verbosity of human beings or destroy their concern for the right-behaving of language for their own needs.  At a university the damage may still not be irreparable, given a good teacher and a little time.  The depressing thing is the loss of time, the damaging of delight, the destruction of the sense of discovery, the irrecoverable loss of what could have been gained by reading well, paying attention to the actual way language does and can behave.  But the simple clear style that business men and scientists are always telling us is the least the teachers can be expected to produce, is the end of a process, not the beginning: it takes time, skill, much work, discipline to the marrow-bones, and a light heart.  “Sorry I wrote such a long letter; I hadn’t time to write a short one.”  Some students are incorrigible of course; but only the Declaration of Independence would have led us to expect otherwise. 

Evidence that all is not well is to be seen in the university courses euphemistically called “Remedial English” and the like – a melancholy charade designated to teach students to behave as though they could read and write when they can do neither.  Lessons in English for people who were born to a different language are a different matter; and legitimate.  A first target for secondary school teachers of English could be the elimination of “Remedial English”. 

Some of the things that lead to the inadequacies in teaching English can be set down:

1. A radical misconception of the relation between meaning and language. 
2. The assumption that language can be fully explained as instrumental, as “a medium of communication”. 
3. The assumption that language can be used as some kind of “technique of communication”. 
4. A failure to cultivate a grasp of what actually goes on when something is spoken or written; a failure to pay respect to sound and rhythm as well as abstract “meaning”.  (Most students, even the good ones, are linguistically color-blind: they read and hear in monochrome.)
5. The prescribing of inappropriate reading – of books too trivial to nourish imagination or respect, or of books emotionally and intellectually beyond the possible grasp of the reader; hence in students an uncouth sophistication and weariness of response. 
6. The teaching of certain tricks with a semi-technical vocabulary of criticism so that pupils – trained as though they were dogs jumping through paper rings – can go through the motions of criticizing when they neither feel for nor understand what they are reading. 
7. Setting inappropriate examinations that require pupils to do what they cannot do, to express judgments which they cannot be expected to form, to be factual about things that are not matter of fact.

Probably one could think of other things wrong, but that will do for a start.

Some of these evils – as in all of us – arise from ignorance, some from vanity, some from ambition; and even the best teacher, who will always find the best answer if left alone, may be forced into some of these evils by the exigencies of the profession – the pattern of official examinations, batting averages as a criterion of advancement, and so on.  It is clear however that to be thoroughly drilled in how to excel in a particular kind of examination in language and literature may well not be the same as being thoroughly trained in language and literature.  The aim altogether in teaching English, one imagines, would want to be something like this: negatively, to avoid establishing assumptions and habits that inhibit growth and development, or provide no foundation to build on; positively, to encourage assumptions and habits that will excite the ‘‘vegetating and germinative powers to produce new fruits of thought, new conceptions, and imaginations, and ideas.”  But since language is probably the most subtle thing that anybody handles continuously or with any deliberation more perhaps can be done in an educational way by encouraging an appropriate attitude to language than by any other means.  For literature is the supreme use of language in its closest and richest relations with life, and can be expected to look after itself if the attitude to language is fertile and attentive. 

The question of the health of language is probably the most serious in which academic people are allowed to dabble: the commerce of “ideas”, the various forms of professional training are trifling in comparison.  The movement towards universal education being ideally a movement towards universal literacy is also – unless pupils are extremely good and the teaching excellent – a movement towards universal illiteracy.  The literate, the ones who can read perceptively and sensitively and can write appropriately and with point, are now – as always – a minority.  And there are many potent forces in commerce and other parts of society that would not be averse from a universal gullibility, a universal conditioned-reflex-behavior in the presence of language.  By minute shifts of emphasis serious change can be effected; not all change is natural progress towards good, and grave menace can quietly establish itself as an integral part of the social setting.  It is curious to consider for example that “the press” which Milton defended in the Areopagitica was the means of producing books and so of preserving the freedom and vigor of grave and responsible discourse.  But the phrase now refers to the machinery and techniques of journalism which at best provide partial and usually unauthoritative information out of context, disseminate hastily formulated but provoking opinions, and at worst constitute a form of distracted humming to hold the attention of the public until (with luck) there is something interesting or worthwhile to say.  The emphasis in journalism is upon “information”; what skill there is in the writing (and there sometimes is) is usually directed more towards the palatability of the writing (“audience-appeal” is the phrase one often hears) than towards accuracy or completeness of information.  Truth, much trumpeted though still inaccessible and dwelling among rocks, goes a little beyond the “right” to intrude at will into anybody else’s privacy and the “duty” to write unabashedly about whatever may appeal to the morbid, the partisan, or the prurient.  Truth is not so easily separated from judgment and intention.  Information may be correct or incorrest, but it is not truth; for truth involves judgment, and meaning involves pertinence, and conviction involves commitments – which are personal matters of value.  What we now call “the press” is too much concerned with influence, opinion and power to be continuously concerned with truth.  The disclosure of evil, or scandal, or villainy, though salubrious enough (and huge fun if you can get away with it) somehow lacks the breadth and purity of intention that one associates with truth; neither is it always meaningful.  It was Yeats who reflected sadly of certain event: “If they are bad enough, they must be true.”

The literacy, the simple ability to make out the printed word, so dearly bought from Tyndal’s dying at the stake onward, too often comes to rest (if it penetrates the Van Allen ring of Time and Life) in the grazing ground of some digest, where the shadowy efforts of the hack and the ghost-writer have combined to cover with saliva a bullock of indifferent quality so that a drowsy reader – waiting for nothing so incisive as the dentist’s drill – may absorb it at a single effortless gesture of encompassment, like the dividing of an amoeba in reverse.  Even birds need gravel in their crops; and a diet too bland for too long may lead to decay or loss of the teeth.  It probably doesn’t matter very much what we read or when or where; what does matter is how we read.  No harm is done if we recognise things for what they are: immeasurable harm begins to be done when language is grasped in a slovenly way, when the virtues of precision and subtlety are neglected or ignored, when language becomes so blurred that it can, in the manner of an opiate, distort reality, conceal intention, become a sinister instrument of disingenuousness. 

The question “Why does it matter to be able to read and write?” looks quite simple to answer: by reading and writing we can be informed; we can transfer ideas, wishes, information from one person to another; we can pass the time by reading instead of in some other ways.  These answers cut slightly less deeply than to the bone: as we can see by asking “Why teach language and literature at all?”  Trying to answer that, and going from the most obvious to the less obvious (and so probably from the less important to the more important) these points make themselves. 

1. In language we communicate (whatever that means).
2. By language and through and with language we think and understand.
3. With the help and through the use of language we (learn to) discriminate. 
4. In brooding over the sort of things literature says and exists to say we learn to reflect – a kind of thinking without which discovery tends not to occur.
   That makes four.  But before exploring those, here is a fifth:
5. Literature brings us in touch with things that are not projections of ourselves; things that are not projections of our desires and yearnings and longings and loathings; things that refresh and humble us by asserting that they are not us, proving that they are altogether impervious to anything we may do to them.  Or to put it another way, language has a will of its own; if we try to impose our will upon it, it will quietly lead us into intransigencies that we can resolve only by reconsideration and submission.  Learning to read and write – beyond the most rudimentary level – is not to do with the mastery and application of technique; it belongs to the development of sensibility, the sense of fact, the ability to see things straight, the recognition of the integrity of things beyond ourselves and outside ourselves.  I find it impossible to separate gifts as a reader and writer from a capacity for grace and a capacity for love.  But those are rather large matters.  We may return to the four points that look more manageable. 

Communicate.  In recent years it has become fashionable to speak of language as “a medium of communication”: as though in “communication something (meaning? thought? idea? wish?) is translated (?) from “the mind” into language (as a medium) and so conveyed or transferred to another person, who then translates from language to “meaning”.  Communication in this scheme becomes a sort of semantic package deal in which everything is handed out free and one mustn’t complain (I suppose) because it’s bad manners to look a gift horse in the mouth.  This painful abstraction is about as appropriate to a study of language – or communication – as the Ptolemaic astronomy is to the understanding of subatomic physics.

The irreducible unit of language is not the word but the utterance: what is said.  A person, not language, means.  Language is not algebra, until it tries to serve the descriptive requirements of science; and then it ceases to function as language (and so becomes extremely difficult to write and almost impossible to read).  Meaning is not the sum of all the meanings of all the single words (or phrases) in an utterance any more than the flight of an arrow is all the “points” through which the arrow may be said to have passed.  An utterance takes shape from the speaker’s (or writer’s) intention and feeling because those are essential elements in “meaning”.  So an utterance is shaped and rhythmic, and meaningful as a whole, inventing for itself, as it moves through time, a trajectory – a flight – like Matisse in the act of inventing the line that, when complete, will enclose the form of a woman’s nude figure.  The art of speaking is the art of giving to utterances, in their flight, an appropriate speed, shape, magnitude, gravity, energy.  The art of grammar is the way of getting sentences, as they come into existence, to land on their feet like cats.  To speak of language as a ‘‘medium of communication” is no more help than thinking of the air as the “medium of communication” between the cat and the ground: if we’re interested, that is, in the way the cat lands.  The use of language is the most subtle and flexible activity we are ever likely to engage in, short of conscience.  To pretend that language is simple, or that the relation between language and meaning is easy to understand or control, does less than justice to the intricacies of the matter.  To relapse into archaic analogies and outmoded psychology in trying to “explain” language will arrest rather than stimulate reflection.  “You know what I mean”, a student will say when I object to the imprecision of his writing: “Yes,” I reply, “but I don’t think it’s much worth meaning.”  It may be politically expedient that people should cultivate opinions upon incomplete, inaccurate, and slanted evidence rather than that they should be entirely apathetic.  But blunt and blurry use of language implies blunt and blurry thinking; and blunt feeling will degenerate the thinking and feeling as well as the language.  The pen is a sharp instrument – or was before the invention of that deplorable tool, the ball-point.  Teeth are for biting.  Near enough is never good enough in language though it may be for practically everything else.  If communication is in any sense an attempt to arrive at sharing a thought or feeling or idea, its success will go beyond technique to grace both in the speaker and in the listener, in the writer and in the reader. 

Understand.  Things well spoken or well written bring us to understand; that is, they help us to grasp something(s) as meaningful or as meaningfully related to other things we know or are concerned with.  To understand seems to involve us in grasping some complex as meaningful; but we have to grasp it at a single glance.  A methodical or prolonged analytical approach to the complex may be needed, but the understanding itself, when it occurs, is instantaneous.  It is no accident that “I see” is a synonym for “I understand”.  As far as understanding goes, language is less important in its function of exposition, description, formulation (for even these are not reducible to semantic units) than in its ability to “arrest”, to detain momentarily for inspection or reflection something too complex and quickly vanishing to be grasped at first sight.  Language makes it possible for us to keep the target more or less still, even though it may not be very steady or very clearly defined at the edges.  The ability to hold states of feeling and thought in the matrix of language makes a poet.  So perhaps poetry and understanding join hands; and Coleridge can say that “All men are poets”, even though he adds the qualification that “most of them are damned bad ones.”

This is not the place to consider the relations between understanding and reasoning and knowing, or between reason and knowledge what is understood.  But essential in understanding what is said (and so essential in the just conduct of language) is not only the formulation, pointing out, identification, definition of what is referred to – indispensable though that be – but the imprinting of the speaker’s intention, and his sense of the relation between himself and the things under attention.  This introduces the nature and quality of relation, and so brings language out of the desert that abstraction has perversely invented for it into the promised land of value and life into which in the first place it was born.  In refusing to allow language to become algebra, in insisting that language not only can but must imply value and relation, we preserve not only the health of language but the health of understanding itself.  For language, being infinitely fluid and deft to receive and carry the print of intention and value (often in the form of “feeling”), resists the menial tasks of description and turns to its birthright of symbolic clarity, exacting but nourishing.  “All things truly made preserve themselves through time in the first freshness of their nature.”  Edwin Muir said this of the mysterious vitality of works of art.  But it is true of anything thing well said and suggests why understanding cannot destroy what is understood. 

Discriminate.  An incisive acquaintance with language allows us to discriminate and trains us in the subtlest modes of discrimination.  For value and feeling our descriptive language is wholly inadequate.  To understand, we must embody values and feelings in language.  As our sense of language deepens and becomes the more sensitive, we discern and discriminate intellectual and emotional values with increasing acuity and reverence; we also come to discriminate among the many possible impulses and intentions that lead to the use of language.  An attentive ear for language, a sense of the forms that intention assumes, allow us – if we wish to cast our thought to matters more practical and worldly – to tell the difference between the honest and the dishonest statement; to tell how the rhetorician or propagandist is concerned first for the effect and tries to conceal the cause or his motive; to tell how it is that some writers put everything in the shop window not out of concern for truth but because they are interested in display or suffer from impoverishment.  We may come to see discourse as an attempt to find genuine grounds for agreement, but to see argument as a struggle to impose will rather than to share meaning.  Discrimination is a judging of differences but is not necessarily a comparing procedure: that is, one may be able to recognise an honest man without knowing any rogues, and vice versa.  For the essence of discrimination is recognition, not comparison.  Telling one thing from another is recognizing what each is.  “He knoweth all the stars and calleth them by their names” is a fact of discrimination that shows respect and delight in the act of recognition.  There is no substitute for recognition – a personal experience – any more than there is any substitute for recognition of value – again a personal experience.  Pseudo-criticism, by means of what looks like the factuality of social history and philosophical formulation, tries to provide a substitute for literature (for what is “truly made”) by telling us beforehand what is it and how we should regard it.  But there can be as many things “truly made” as there are occasions for the making, and each different.  We can dismiss them through a generalisation; we can only know them at first hand, discriminately, by recognising what each in its own way is. 

Reflect.  Reflection is the swift searching activity of mind that goes on when we are engaged mentally with a problem or question that matters to us, or when we encounter an obstacle that we are concerned to surmount.  An example of reflection is what happens in your mind when you lose something that matters to you.  Reflection is not in any order sense analysis: it does not proceed by formula but by the nature of the situation in which tentative possibilities are proposed; it is guided by the sense of relevance and value.  If it is looking for something, it is looking for the whereness of what it already knows and values.  Reflection is the heart of literary criticism: and it has the advantage that it cannot occur at all if the person is not concerned for what he is reflecting upon – which is why nobody can take a book by the throat and make it deliver the critical goods on demand.  Reflection brings an acute sense of the singularity and distinctness of a particular work: it avoids generalisation, it outflanks the tendency to think in terms of what is representative rather than of what is unique.  Reflection refrains equally from explaining and substituting: it is an activity of mind that comes to rest only in the resolution of a question of value.  It is unlike ordinary analytical thought in that, having once “loosened” a situation, it goes on to point to that absolutely different process – synthesis. 

Good writing covers an area as wide and various as life itself.  Examples of good writing need to be provided for pupils to read; and they need to have the sorts of writing that are appropriate to their particular stage of development.  There is, Coleridge says of children, “a period of aimless activity and unregulated accumulation, during which it is enough if we can preserve them in health and out of harm’s way.  Again, there is a period of orderliness, of circumspection, of discipline, in which we purify, separate, define, select, arrange, and settle the nomenclature of communication.  There is also a period of dawning and twilight, a period of anticipation, affording trials of strength. And all these, both in the growth of the sciences and in the mind of a rightly-educated individual, will precede the attainment of a scientific METHOD.  But, notwithstanding this, unless the latter [the method] be felt and acknowledged, unless its attainment be looked forward to and from the very beginning prepared for, there is little hope and small chance that any education will be conducted aright; or will ever prove in reality worth the name.”

Good writing?  The love in reading and writing is often killed by feeding specimens of frowsy and musty prose, unduly pompous or ornate; or verse slack-kneed and joyless.  What is needed at all stages is to ignore those great crestfallen modern norms of rhetoric, propaganda, and journalism in favor of what is stronger because more topical, and more persuasive because guileless.  Needed examples of the simplicity of gentleness; writing unpretentious, proper to its purpose, with the ominous crackle of fantastic energy and the fantastic energy of inexhaustible meaning. Listen. 

“In the dream I was walking with some people in the country, when I saw a shining grey bird in a field.  I turned and said in an awed voice.  ‘It’s a heron.’  We went towards it, but as we came nearer it spread its tail like a peacock, so that we could see nothing else.  As the tail grew I saw that it was not round, but square, an impenetrable grey hedge of feathers; and at once I knew that its body was not a bird’s body now, but an animal’s, and that behind that gleaming hedge it was walking away from us on four feet padded like a leopard’s or a tiger’s.  Then, confronting it in the field, there appeared an ancient, dirty, earth-coloured animal with a head like that of an old sheep or a mangy dog.  Its eyes were soft and brown; it was alone against the splendid-tailed beast; yet it stood its ground and prepared to fight the danger coming towards it, whether that was death or merely humiliation and pain.  From their look I could see that the two animals knew each other, that they had fought a countless number of times and after this battle would fight again, that each meeting would be the first meeting, and that the dark, patient animal would always be defeated, and the bright, fierce animal would always win.  I did not see the fight, but I knew it would be ruthless and shameful, with a meaning of some kind perhaps, but no comfort.” (Edwin Muir, An Autobiography (London 1954), p. 65). 

Language changes constantly, but not all change is for the good (though it is popular to think so); and corruption is also change.  Perhaps we are content to make love by cliché­­­; to delegate to gag writers and to professional clowns and confidence men the dominant phrases and rhythms in which we are to think and feel.  The study of language shows us that language can work well only through precision of the highest order; that it can only develop with an acute sense of what exactly, in any piece of language, is going on: that the activities of language refer to values functional, verbal, mental, emotional, and moral, and that not all these values are accessible to children of all ages or to adults of all conditions.  Language can convey information; it can convey “meaning”.  But it can do a very great deal more.  To find what it can do we need a good ear; we need to listen like a robin listening for worms; not otherwise will the benison of full or exact meaning come to us. 

What it comes to in the end is the renunciation of technique and the development of method, the renunciation of an assumed but ill-grounded certitude for a sense of the complexity of human utterance and our inability ever to dominate it.  Even as a product of educational theory and system, we need human beings attuned to the human condition; we need judgment and delight, not opinion and sophistication; we need awareness not the desire for power.  There are too many committees; there is too much rhetoric, too much desire to persuade, too much emphasis on information, too little concern for the precise values of meaning and for the facts that make human discourse possible.  There might be an embargo on public speaking, and some stiff courses in public reticence.  For what is to be known is still to be known; and it is not well to be put off with any old answer when what we are looking for is a good question.