{"id":11439,"date":"2008-09-06T14:27:48","date_gmt":"2008-09-06T18:27:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2008\/09\/06\/11439.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:49:16","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:49:16","slug":"education-for-leisure-leisure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2008\/09\/06\/education-for-leisure-leisure\/","title":{"rendered":"Education for Leisure, leisure for what?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Just seen in the Guarniad<\/a>: when the examination board in England had a poem by Carol Ann Duffy removed from the standardized tests because of its violent imagery, Ms. Duffy viciously and with malice aforethought wrote a poem about it.
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The poem is called Mrs. Schofield’s GCSE<\/a>. The GSCE is the General Certificate of Secondary Education<\/a>. Pat Schofield is an invigilator, which is an awesome word, and is what we might call an external examiner. Or a tester. I prefer invigilator. The Invigilator<\/strong>. Well, never mind. Ms. Schofield was the person whose complaints about the earlier poem caused the ruckus in the first place.
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I haven’t read that poem, which is called “Education for Leisure” and is (from analyses available on-line) a first-person narrative of a profoundly disturbed person who, faced with another day of unemployment and general worthlessness, and without any other way to fill up his day, begins by killing the household animals and then takes a knife to go out into the streets. The poem’s main figure shrugs at the first killing (of a fly), connecting it vaguely to King Lear<\/i> (IV,i Gloucester: As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods\/They kill us for their sport) which he had studied in school; one of the points of studying such a poem in school seems to be to bring up the entire concept of education, of why we study Shakespeare at all, or Ms. Duffy for that matter.
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Our current poet’s current poem is also about Shakespeare and education. It consists entirely of questions, as it might be an exam. The first seven are short-answer questions, to make sure that the pupil has in fact read the plays, or at least the Cliff Notes. That seventh—To whom did dying Caesar say Et tu?<\/i>—is followed by an open-ended eigth: and why?<\/i> The ninth is also open ended, and a bit disturbing, but although one could apply it more widely, it could be taken as narrowly asking about the quote from a Shakespeare play and its meaning. The tenth, then, starting in the tenth line and extending to the thirteenth, the longest question in the poem, ends with a full stop rather than a question mark, and begins with a command: Explain<\/i>. The line to be explained is not Shakespeare’s, though, but is the poet’s own metaphor for poetry itself. Then, without transition, we are in King Lear<\/I>; the quote is given and followed by the eleventh and last exam question, to identify who said them.
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It is the King who says it to Cordelia, in the very first scene, when he is giving is own and very nonstandard test to his daughters: “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?\/That we our largest bounty may extend\/Where nature doth with merit challenge.” The first two pupils give pat answers, telling the examiner what is needed to get the certificate. The last, Cordelia, finds she cannot speak. “What can you say,”asks her father, and she says “Nothing.” He repeats the word, and she does as well, and then the invigilator king says the line that Ms. Duffy puts near the end of her poem: Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.<\/i>
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I generally dislike exams. I was good at them; I was a Goneril rather than a Cordelia. I could tell the invigilator what was necessary for a grade. It seemed pointless, though, other than that grade, and it still seems largely so. I’ve come to accept that of the ways for teachers to determine whether the students have mastery of their subjects, it is moderately efficient in a cost-benefit sort of way; it only somewhat works, but it’s comparatively quick and easy, and the better ways are prohibitively difficult and time-consuming. The test is a tool, and a clumsy one at that, for measuring the thing that’s important, which is the mastery.
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Or, perhaps, not. Perhaps the test and the reward and punishment that follow on it are the tools for getting the students to master the subject, not the tools for measuring whether they have. Perhaps when Cordelia was a child and her not-yet-old father held her to his embrace and said I love you, daughter<\/i>, she should have replied, Is this going to be on the test?<\/i>
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We are, of course, educated for leisure all our lives. We are trained for it, poorly or well, by whatever we do and see, whatever we read and hear. On those occasions when we get leisure, we make of it what we can. That’s the test. When the children are in bed for the evening, or when you have a lunch break. We face a series of Sunday afternoon tests, one a week, for the rest of our lives. There is a pop quiz when the waiter has taken your order and you look at your spouse across the table and silence falls. And there’s the long, dark teatime of the soul, which is self-graded. And the tests prepare you for more tests, too, just like in school. You can develop techniques and study habits for your life. A truly general certificate.
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I can’t get too excited about removing “Education for Leisure” from the curriculum, perhaps because I haven’t read the poem. I do get upset about removing education for leisure from the curriculum, because I do have some of that, and I think it’s important.
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Oh, and you know where I said up there that “Mrs. Schofield’s GCSE<\/a> consists entirely of questions”? That’s not technically true. After the eleventh question is a sentence that is, perhaps, permission, or a command, or a ritual utterance, or even a prediction. You may begin<\/i>. Or, perhaps, it is a question after all.
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger reads a poem, closely. Well, closely-ish.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[199,202],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-litchrachoor","category-news-item"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11439"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18494,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11439\/revisions\/18494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}