Babel Tower (33 page)

Agatha has written clear reports on the visits they have made. Arthur Beaver, who was not present on the visits, remarks that the Star Primary School and Freyasgarth represent opposing ideas of primary education. He is interested to know if the visiting party has formed any views about their relative merits.

Hans Richter says that it is autumn. He says he says this because in summer the Star School, which appears to be so airy and light, will become intolerably hot, and both teachers and children will be simmering with discomfort. He says architects often ignore people.

Alexander says that that school contains no private places.

Magog says most schools do not contain private places. He asks Hans Richter if his observation is a metaphor.

Richter says no, it is a physical observation. But that mental states flow from physical states, and that when the children are too hot, they will learn less well.

Steerforth recalls his committee from architecture to the teaching of language.

Auriol Worth says that both primary schools were good schools; that the children in them were learning and were happy. She says that unfortunately, perhaps, the good teaching depended in both cases on individual teachers. The headmaster of the Star School had eyes in the back of his head and an unusually good organisational brain. Another
head in his place might well, with the same principles, preside over aimlessness and chaos. Equally, Miss Godden was a teacher capable of holding the attention of several age and ability groups at once, and exercising their minds. But a teacher less gifted and inventive could simply lose their attention.

Arthur Beaver says that the committee’s report must contain a chapter on the activity of the teacher; the language teaching depends on the ability, and indeed the philosophy, of the teacher.

Magog says that what strikes him is the hatred of grammar demonstrated by the debate at the comprehensive school. It appears that no amount of good teaching can make grammar other than repulsive to the vast majority of kids and probably teachers. When he was a boy—

(All the committee members, all through the committee’s deliberations, refer in a certain tone to when they were a boy, or a girl. They trail clouds of past life, glorious or cramped, through the dusty official room. Alexander watches them. He imagines the boy Magog was: fat, thick-kneed, curly, sulky, aggressive, never the
best
boy at anything in the class, always near the best.)

—when he was a boy, grammar was experienced as a trap set to catch you out, as a series of gates in a maze for rats, as an instrument of absolute power and punishment by teachers, as a series of nasty interruptions to any creative flow your writing might get up, as oppression, in short.

He says it doesn’t seem to have got much better. He says he is sympathetic to the abolitionists. What that boy said in the debate is true. We speak grammatically without learning grammar.

Naomi Lurie says that without grammar no child can unravel the sentences of Milton, or Donne.

Walter Bishop says most kids will never read Milton or Donne. There is no reason why they should suffer parsing and clause analysis for the sake of the few privileged ones who will. They need to be able to write a job application. To read a government form.

Guy Croom says that human beings, like it or not, need rules. No community can operate without a few simple rules according to which it conducts its business. He is not in favour of new educational methods which attempt to promote discovery at the expense of learning a few facts. He thinks children are being cheated by being made to
discover
all sorts of things they could actually simply learn about and then go on to discover more interesting things. Rules facilitate. Rules create order, and without order is no creativity. The
poor little children who didn’t know the alphabet are wasting
hours
looking through their dictionaries at random. There is a pleasure in learning ordered rules which seems now to be despised. He thinks no one can cope with the world who hasn’t internalised a few simple rules of mathematics. He thinks that football and tennis and games of cards would be intensely boring without rules. Anyone who has a child, he says, who has tried to make up a new card game as it went along, and has been subjected to the
total boredom
of the
ad hoc
and the random, will know that the need for rules is a deep human need.

The poet says, “That’s what the Fascists said.” He says, “If you
make
people learn old poems they hate them. You should let them just find them. You should perhaps prohibit them, outlaw them. Then they’d be hungry for poems.”

The chairman asks Wijnnobel what he feels about rules.

Wijnnobel says that he does not think it is helpful to draw an analogy between the rules devised for political or social control of group behaviour and the forms of the structure of language which can be observed and described in all societies. He says, rather carefully, that he believes in the teaching of the forms of language, because if we have no words to describe the structure of our thoughts, we are unable to analyse their nature and their limitations. Nietzsche, he says, claimed that all Western philosophy studies variations on the same problems in recurring circles because all ideas are “unconsciously dominated and directed by simple grammatical functions” which are in the end, Nietzsche also says,
physiological.
This is not the same as saying that philosophical problems are “only language”: it is a claim that
what we can think
is a function of our linguistic competence. He himself—unlike some others in the room—is of the opinion that the grammatical forms and structures we use are innate, are part of the structure of our brains informed by our genes, and that the extraordinary subtlety and reach of human intelligence—
and
its limitations, its recurrent worrying at insoluble “problems”—are a function of this innate order. He also believes that studying this order is hard, and contemplating it is repugnant to many. But if we do not teach words to describe the structure of language, we have no means to consider the structure of thought. This is not a defence, he adds, of the ornate Latinate grammatical exercises now taught, which should be scrapped.

Magog says he agrees with this, and that the rules of grammar desired by Mr. Croom do indeed often turn into petty rules of social oppression and alienation. He believes that the relations between
teachers and children are what is wrong. When he was teaching, he got the confidence of his children, he persuaded them to write more and more truthfully, more and more passionately, about the conflicts in their family life—their hopes and desires—as he has recorded in his book
True Life Stories
(an ironic reference to the Agony Aunt magazines, as he is sure he has no need to tell this distinguished gathering)—“and the vocabulary and complexity
and punch,
Mr. Chairman,
and punch
increased with the truthfulness—”

“And after,” says Auriol Worth. “After you had stopped teaching these children, whom you had encouraged to speak in this way—to reveal things—I have read your book—afterwards, what happened to them? How long did you stay with them, after you had inspired them to write about abuse and hatred and tension?”

“I was there for a full
two terms.
Before I—before I sold my book. They were strengthened by facing their conflicts.”

“A teacher is not a psychoanalyst.”

“I have had a lot of flak from people like you, who do nothing much for those
in their care
—”

“I teach them, Mr. Magog. I teach them to read, to write, to think. I teach them
to look outside themselves.
I respect my position. And theirs.”

“You are simply an authoritarian—”

“All authority,” says Miss Worth sadly, “nowadays, seems to be wrong.”

Arthur Beaver says that the present lively exchange of views exemplifies some of the problems he wants to put to the committee about the philosophy of teaching. Martin Buber, he says, claims that the teacher in past times had an accepted authority derived from his culture. He was, in a fine phrase, “the ambassador of history, to this intruder, the child.” And the sickness of this system, which intensified as the cultural authority crumbled and was called in question, was a “will to power” which could become domineering and cruel as it became more uncertainly individual. The contrary fault Buber called “Eros,” the degeneration of authority into an idealised reciprocity and affection, of a professional relationship into a personal one. Which is not sustainable between all teachers and all children, for it depends on honesty and durability, and all teachers
do not feel
genuine affection for all children, nor do their pseudo-parental relations endure beyond the inevitable parting at the year-end. It is a kind of
buddy-buddy relation, which some people believe to be part of child-centred education.

“I see what you are saying,” says Magog. “But I can assure you I felt
real love
for every child in my class.
Real love.
”

He glares about the table. Alexander believes him. He also knows that there are charismatic teachers who do occasionally inspire by love.

“For two terms,” says Auriol Worth, acid, headmistressy. “You felt real love for two terms. You translated the love into your written words, and you made their private pains public.”

“With
every care
—”

“I am sure. Every care the reading public and the law could expect.”

A line of division, a set of terms, are set up. The committee will divide, will see its own divisions, in terms of Eros and
Wille zur Macht,
the buddy and the boss. Alexander is fascinated.

After the meeting there is sherry. Alexander moves to the side of Agatha Mond and helps her to hand round glasses. The scientist, Hans Richter, taps Professor Wijnnobel on the shoulder.

“I liked what you said. About order. About describing thought. If
that
is what we are doing, this whole undertaking looks quite different. I thought I was just here to see if science teachers could be got to explain themselves a bit better, in better English, and so on. But what you said changes everything. You said something very fine about the limitations of our thought.

“I am convinced,” he continues calmly, as though he were discussing the structure of salts, “that there are intelligences in the universe of which our own are only a very small sub-set.”

Gerard Wijnnobel is startled. He has a momentary vision of huge angelic heads, spanning the visible heavens, of an order of serried wings, at once feathered and glassy, at once living forms and geometrically intricate patterns.

He inclines his great head and strokes his thick moustache.

“As to that,” he says, “I do not know how we could have any evidence of that. As a two-dimensional paper man could not see or address a three-dimensional clay or flesh man.”

“But he could intuit his presence. As we intuit the possibility of solutions to problems before we solve them.”

“Or fail to solve them,” says Wijnnobel.

“We intuit probable failures, also.”

“It is certain that we cannot imagine the languages of such intelligences.”

“I shall apply my own intelligence to the language we have. It is more interesting than I supposed.”

“Indeed,” says Wijnnobel.

VI
 

Gerard Wijnnobel sits in his official car and thinks about language. He thinks about order and disorder, about form and chaos. He has thought about these things all his life, always with a sensation of an impossible endeavour. His thought is a raft of parallel planks on a darkly swelling sea, it is a most beautiful cone of light around which is the formless, or maybe only invisible and unmapped, dark. He is Hans Richter’s paper man, floating on his two-dimensional kite on currents of air, of force, he cannot describe or explore.

He grew up in Leiden, the son of a Protestant theologian, a Calvinist who puzzled, who agonized, daily over the exact relations between virtue, predestination and the words of the one Book. He is not wholly and purely of Dutch Calvinist descent: his mother’s father was half-Jewish, a child of a Talmudic scholar and a Dutch Catholic lady who had come to believe that the Church was guilty of terrible cruelty to the Jews, which had come from a misreading and misuse of the Scriptures. Gerard Wijnnobel’s grandfather, in his turn, had become obsessed with the language of the Book. He had set out on a doomed attempt, part mystical, part historical, part exegetical, to find the traces of the Ur-language, the original speech of God, spoken by Adam in Eden, and indeed by God, the Word Himself, when He called the universe into being out of chaos, simply by naming it. In the days before Babel, before God punished the human race for its presumption in raising its winding structure towards Heaven by dividing its tongues, by setting confusion amongst its speech—in the days before Babel, the occult tradition went, words had been things and things had been words, they had been
one,
as a man and his shadow perhaps are one, or a man’s mind and his brain. Afterwards, after the fall of the tower, language
and the world had not coincided, and the languages of men had become opaque, secret, enfolded in an incomprehensible and unpierceable skin of idiosyncrasies. After the fall of the aspiring tower (almost all mythologies held), the original, divine, single speech had been shattered like a smashed crystal, into seventy-two pieces, or into a number which was a multiple of seventy-two. Various words and letters could be read as splinters of this original sphere—each Hebrew letter, each word, each grammatical form. Kabbalists, Hermetics, Hasidic students of the Torah and the Talmud tried to reconstitute the Old Speech, the
Ursprache,
from these lost fragments. Gerard Wijnnobel’s grandfather spent his days on the search for this ancient order, occasionally disputing with his grave Calvinist son-in-law over whether or not the Tongues of Flame which descended on the apostles in the upper room at Pentecost had caused them to be able to speak, amongst the unknown tongues in which they babbled, a version, a fragmentary part, of the original Tongue. The fact that Kees Wijnnobel believed that Joachim Steen was doomed to burn in eternal flames after Judgement did not prevent him from finding his linguistic speculations interesting. Kees Wijnnobel was not convinced that the original Tongue had been Hebrew. He thought it was something more natural, more intrinsically part of the nature of things, a tongue in which there were words for
lion, lamb, apple, snake, tree, good, evil
which wholly contained and corresponded to
all
their power and meaning. Elephant spoke elephant, earwig spoke earwig.