Happy Birthday, Will

 

Shakespeare, needed like never before

Nay, upon my word such gross forgetfulness
Betokens deserv’d calamity to this nation.

Just another dead White man?

Shakespeare's work is a crucial component of a child’s journey to full literacy, and love of their own language and culture. Not just for our time, but for all time. And it’s not just me that’s saying that!*

Properly taught, even young children love Shakespeare. Obviously, they love the tales told. But also, delighting in the parsing of even the most flighty of passages. And too, learning them to confident recital – what a power for a child to have and pride for their parent or teacher! I state this as a fact, directly known.

As part of the general educational plan for the English speaking West, it is equally crucial that Shakespeare is kept away from children and that teachers are ignorant, and perhaps even hostile, to our language’s greatest champion. This has largely been achieved, at least in primary schools. Alas, we lose more than Hamlet when we lose Hamlet. For not only is the delight and beauty, wonder and wisdom lost, but also that connection to the world's greatest wordsmith, which is ours by birthright as native English speakers, and thusly a mighty source of pride of kinship. And by the necessary form of this, strength. This is what they are trying to snuff out, and why.

'They' are always the same people. I appreciate that perhaps you cannot see them yet.

We’ve got a fight on our hands, ye celebrants of the numinous turned to word: Once more unto the breach, dear friends. Once more.

*   This learned reference for the delight of the many Shakespearians among the readers.

PS. Our many English readers can, of course, have a double celebration as this date is also Saint George's Day. 

Anonymous Teacher Calls for More Nietzsche in Scottish Primary Schools

 

Lighten Up

Nothing succeeds if prankishness has no part in it.

Looking through, Teaching Scotland, the GTCS’s professional journal, one is struck by the manic marriage of its unrelenting moral censure of Scottish culture with imminent rapture. Magazine after magazine, piling up like pancakes, berates us natives as racial bigots, while holding out the almost grasped promise of excellence to be at last achieved by multiculturalism; itself contingent on us natives removing ourselves from the future. O, and embracing digital solutions, kindly sponsored by the same global cabal that bring you viruses and vaccines. A small price to pay, Teaching Scotland implies, for us losing our patrimony and presence.

All this is very complicated and serious, however. And we wonder if this focus on social targets and political goals is taking light-heartedness and fun out of teaching, as it most definitely has out of the magazine? This observation has led an anonymous teacher* to call for more Nietzsche in Scottish primary schools, apparently as a counter to this seriousness. Despite that stern moustache, it seems that the German overman was a noted advocate of prankishness:

”Maintaining cheerfulness in the midst of a gloomy task, fraught with immeasurable responsibility, is no small feat; and yet what is needed more than cheerfulness? Nothing succeeds if prankishness has no part in it.” — Nietzsche. Twilight of the Idols.

Noting, not only its role as a fun increaser and balance to excessive seriousness, but as an intellectual quality in its own right. For it was ever a sign of intelligence and a lively spirit at work; naturally gathering to itself wit and ironies, self-depreciation and smiling eyes behind the rebuke.  Good old, Nietzsche, always looking for a laugh and in it finding a truth presciently apposite to our Scottish school circumstances. Such prankishness should be encouraged in schools, so naturally it isn’t! Perhaps, rather than more ‘conversations’ about the underlying racist and sexist structures of our schools, we need more prankishness. Especially when such ‘conversations’ begin.

It would be nice to think that Nietzsche would be added to the German wall in our primary class to keep Arminius, Wagner, von Manstein, Beckenbauer and Merkel company.

What think ye?

*   It was me (identity withheld to preserve anonymity).

NB. I’ve described Teaching Scotland as the GTCS’s professional journal, but really it is so much more than that. In fact, mere words cannot convey the vasty extent of my opinion. Perhaps, in a later post, assuming voluminous requests, I may do so. Consider me as Macduff, but yet without the sword.

FOURTEEN

 

Ayont, and quit this place.     

Without a high IQ, by 14 years old school education has reached its limit, and at this age and stage of your life you should be out of school and doing something useful that earns money. Those that want to can stay on, providing they’ve got a reason and the cognitive firepower to back it up. However, as the general level of intelligence declines, we should be adjusting school leaving age downwards to give the less brainy children an opportunity of usefully employing ages 14-18. My mum and dad left school at 14 and this did not harm them. Nor were my grannies rendered deficient by leaving school at 12, indeed, the exact opposite.

This strategy is not insulting to the less intelligent, less academically gifted, or those whose interests lie elsewhere. Such children know themselves well in advance of leaving age. It does them no good to pretend that they have a potential for a certain sort of future, when they have not. Indeed, forcing them (for such it is), to stay on past their threshold of tolerance for school-life does them harm, and often to others who are forced to accommodate the disruptive power of unwilling teenagers. This Quit at Fourteen strategy is thus, realising, not denying, options. 

A very large proportion of jobs, particularly service and support, could easily be done by 14 year olds – as they were in former times. Indeed, many of those jobs could be done just as well by even younger children, and to their pleasure and development. [Perhaps this to be explored another time]

By providing employment for our now school-free teens, this would have the added benefit of reducing the sad need for military-age males from broken countries (perhaps broken by us while wearing our NATO mask) to come here seeking employment or welfare or revenge - the first two categories now being filled with our own young people.

Middle primary should be preparing children for this possible meeting with reality, rather than indulging them in fanciful, if not dishonest, dreams of reaching for the stars, which too often turn out to be black holes.

What think ye?