[2.] A MANUAL FOR REVOLUTION

In the late ‘60s & early ‘70s liberation issues were discussed within education every bit as energetically as they were within other social & cultural institutions.  A number of heavy hitters emerged whose work had an acuteness of focus, a substance & a breadth of vision unusual at a time when reason & intellect were taking a back seat to magic & mystery.  Even in these pragmatic, decidedly post-ideological ‘nought-ies’ (yes, that horrific neologism has been used in earnest by the media) the names of Paulo Freire, John Holt, Paul Goodman, Carl Rogers, Abraham H. Maslow, George Isaac Brown still have resonance.

I started teaching in 1967, having drifted into it rather reluctantly after three years of playing in rock bands & abusing my constitution at a prestigious London college.  However, I embraced the Revolution with alacrity  &, teaching being my trade, I read anything that claimed to be a manual for radical change in the classroom & playground.  I managed to get from cover to cover in most of the books written by the New Age warriors above.

But it wasn’t until I’d been teaching for a few years & had had my cherry well & truly popped that I came across a book that really did pull me up short.  After reading it my perspectives on education & schooling – already radicalised by my own childhood experiences - altered irrevocably. Never again did I confuse the two.

In 1969 a small book called Teaching as a Subversive Activity was published.  Although slim, Neil Postman’s & Charles Weingartner’s radical little volume punched way above its weight.  Occupying the same ideological territory as Freire, Holt, Goodman et al, it radiated a freshness & accessibility &, most winningly, a practicality that the others’ books – noble & relevant though they were – didn’t necessarily have.  I was introduced to it in my last term at that jungle outpost &, page-by-page, I realised that not only was I a foot soldier in the most important campaign of the war but that there were strategies being drafted & tactics being planned that would win us that war. Revolutionary change in education, the book told us, will cause ‘everything to change’. I absorbed its erudition, its humour, its poetry, its acute perception of the nature of the lie that is institutionalised education in the urban world. I saw the book as a manifesto, a blueprint that would, when implemented, sweep away for ever the black blazers, the rigid rows of desks, the endless, echoing cream-and-green corridors, the violence, formal & informal, the great swathes of asphalt, the sound of chalk screeching on blackboards, the despair, the apathy, the lobbing of dog-eared books across a classroom, the wielding of bricks in a playground.
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