“‘Aren’t there any grown-ups at all?’ ‘I don’t think so.’” William Golding, Lord of the Flies In an inner-city school beset by truancy, the presence of a 13-year-old pupil an hour before the first lesson suggests something is amiss. “Good morning, Kim,” I said. “What brings you in so early?” Kim didn’t answer immediately. ...
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Synchronized Grinning
The Royal Mint has struck a series of coins to commemorate the 2012 London Olympics. Each depicts a sporting event and a Roman god. No, you have not misread that last sentence, nor have I mistyped it. The Royal Mint doesn’t know its Mars from its Ares. The howler is cast in 22-karat gold for...
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The Lord’s Shepard
We had known it was a “white road” when we had found it on the map, but when my wife and I got to the start of it, we hesitated. There was a sign at the junction, and it made us stop and think: RD 103 EN LACUNE CIRCULATION DANGEREUSE ET DÉCONSEILLÉE. En lacune wasn’t...
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The Communion of Saints
Every one loved St Bridget. Even the sunbeams liked to be near her. One day an April shower came on, and, as she entered her cell, she flung her wet cloak over a sunbeam shining through the window, thinking it was a wooden beam. The bright ray willingly held up her mantle hour after hour,...
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The Abolition of Learning
In 1997, the headmaster of the English secondary school in which I was teaching ordered a bibliocaust. The inspectors were coming, and he wanted our library to look up-to-date. All the old stuff had to go; only bright, modern volumes relevant to the contemporary curriculum were to be on the shelves. Each department was told...
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Saints and Pilgrims
Marie’s walk was an act of prayer for her brother, who had leukemia. Alessandro had recently endured a divorce and was walking to find peace. Klaus was taking time out to decide what to do with his life after losing his job. Sharon and Chris were on the Spanish leg of a three-month tour of...
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Education and Authority
I had taught in private schools for years, but I hesitated before entering the classroom to teach my first lesson in the state sector. I stopped a colleague in the corridor and asked him for advice. Should I expect the children to fall silent and stand behind their desks when I walked in? Thinking I was...
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From the Mountains Above Batumi
The Black Sea city of Batumi used to be beautiful, and, under a foot of freshly fallen snow, Batumi is beautiful again. Stuccoed terraces of tired 19th-century buildings sit doorstep-deep in white. Chuckling gutters trim the softness draped over corrugated iron roofs. Concrete tenements fade out of focus, their drabness merging with the gray of...
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The Hunt Is Up
On September 15, 2004, Tony Blair cried havoc and let slip the dogs of war. They were particularly ugly dogs. Ill-bred, untrained, snarling, spitting, hate-driven mongrels led the pack; half-witted lapdogs yapped along behind, their pampered noses tight up against the backends of those in front—except when taken momentarily away to add a feeble, unintelligent...
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There’s No Place Like Home
Every school has a playground for its pupils; English schools provide a playground for politicians, too. Children seek security, regularity, and continuity: The games they play in the schoolyard observe rules that do not change. Change, though, is the contemporary politician’s reason for existence: He seeks not to hold fast to that which is good...
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Another Untaught Generation
“The careless maintenance from year to year, in this, the capital city of the world, of a vast hopeless nursery of ignorance, misery and vice, a breeding place for the hulks and jails, is horrible to contemplate.” —Charles Dickens, the Daily News, March 13, 1852 When Dickens wrote about the “ragged schools” that so pitifully...
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Children in the Hellmouth
In the week before English schools closed for the summer, three educational news items grabbed the national headlines. This is not especially remarkable in itself: English education has been in a state of revolution for years, and unsettling stories that reflect the unsettled state of our universities, colleges, and schools are featured almost daily in...
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Four Deaths and Three Funerals
It was one in the morning, and my headlights were cutting a tunnel of light above the road through the woods by the Whissonsett turn, when an image suddenly dropped right in front of me like a slide before the lamp of an old-fashioned projector. It was a hare: not a young, sedentary, Dürer hare,...
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Out With the New
On March 12, I was kneeling at the back of the vast 11th-century abbey church of Fontgombault, France, where I formed exactly one third of the congregation at a mid-week, mid-Lent, mid-morning Mass. At the other end of the nave, the monastic community had processed in with identifiably Benedictine decorum, taken their places in the...
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In the Footsteps of St. Francis
I only believed myself close to death once on my Holy Year pilgrimage in the footsteps of St. Francis of Assisi. I had been walking in the sun for seven hours along the ancient footpaths and cart tracks between Gubbio—where the saint tamed the wolf that had been terrorizing the townsfolk—and Valfabbrica, the only village...
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Credit Where Credit’s Due
Tony Blair’s promised target before being elected to his first term in office was “Education, education, education”; some months into his second term, it is clear that his promise has been honored, and that his target has been hit—clean between the eyes. English education lies unconscious on the canvas. If there is any real learning...
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Talking of Ale
“And a few men talked of freedom, while England talked of ale.” —”The Secret People” G.K. Chesterton In 1136, Bishop Henri de Blois, grandson of William the Conqueror, founded the hospice of St. Cross, in Hampshire, to provide for “thirteen poor men, feeble and so reduced in strength that they can...
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The New Millennium
The new millennium is still a year away, but in London, as elsewhere, the moment appointed for its celebration is that marked by the first appearance of those three mystically consecutive zeros in the calendar. Turnstiles at the vast Millennium Dome are oiled and ready to spin on January 1: click, click, click. Rather more...
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Brookfield Revisited
The Golden Year of the Golden Age of Hollywood was, perhaps, 1939. Amongst its many films that have since become classics—including Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights, Stagecoach, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame—was the first (and best) version of James Hilton’s novel Goodbye, Mr. Chips. The film (like the book)...
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State Education in England, or English Education in a State
ut vero aliquis libenter educationis taedium lahoremque suscipiat, non praemiis modo verum etiam exquisitis adhortationibus impetrandum est. —Pliny (I, 8) Those who read my “Letter From Banausia” in the June Chronicles will perhaps recall that it described the studied destruction of the tradition of learning in English schools and its replacement...
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The Aptly Named Woodhead
Lovers of Gilbert and Sullivan will not need to be reminded that the second act of The Gondoliers is set in “Barataria,” a fictional land which is ruled by “a monarchy that’s tempered with republican equality.” The opera satirizes the inflexible social order of Victorian society by turning it on its head and mocking the...