The 'anxiety culture' in education

Sirdar and The Shed present,
the award winning woolly spectacular:

From the W.I. to the avant garde,
a performance of words, music and knitting..

The Times October 14, 2002

The 'anxiety culture' in education
By Jane Shilling

EVERY SO OFTEN, in the days when I was in full-time education, I used to run up against some intellectual conundrum which I simply couldn't unravel. I remember sitting in the classroom at my primary school - it was breaktime, and every one else had gone out to play - crying over long division, which seemed then, as it does now, as impermeable to the understanding as a lump of polished granite. At big school I had the same problem with quadratic equations and something called valency, about which our chemistry teacher used to get frightfully excited.

Later still, at university, it was a book by Harold Bloom called The Anxiety of Influence that presented a sheer rock-face of incomprehensibility.

Somewhere, I knew there must be a way into the text, but I never found the runic formula with which to unlock it. Mind you, I recently read a piece about the great man in which I think I understood him to say that he didn't know what that book was about, either. I'm not sure if this makes me feel better (because less stupid), or simply furious for having wasted so much time and emotion on it 20 years ago.

Anyway, one of the lovely things about being grown-up and beyond the reach of academia is that I suffer less acutely from that feeling of bottomless intellectual confusion and misery. Grown-up problems may be more upsetting, more dangerous and much more important than structuralism or long division. But they are rarely accompanied by quite the same sense of powerlessness - the feeling that everyone else in the world except you understands how to do this and is now out in the playground, rejoicing in their knowledge, while you are left all alone in the classroom to wrestle with your ignorance.

In fact, I was almost beginning to relax into the idea that I had outgrown the feeling altogether when suddenly, back it came at full strength. I hadn't been making unwise attempts to read one of Stephen Hawking's books, or listening to Melvyn Bragg exercising his mighty brain on Radio 4. I hadn't even been trying to help my boy with his maths homework. But it is the question of his education that is currently making me wretched.

I suppose it should be some consolation that almost all the other mothers of 11-year-old children whom I know are going through the same thing. You can spot us by our haggard expressions and preoccupied manner. And the thought haunting us all is this: that the shape of our children's future depends on the school that we send them to now.

Of course, ours is not the first generation of parents to bear this responsibility. I remember a certain frisson in the air during my last year at primary school: a nervous fluster of mixed messages from parents and teachers about the 11-plus exam, which was, I understood them to say, at once crucially important and nothing to worry about. What I don't recall from my childhood, however, is quite the same feeling of joylessness and dread about what ought to be the next big intellectual adventure.

Dom Antony Sutch, the retiring head of Downside School, defined this feeling most eloquently last week, when he spoke about an "anxiety culture" in education. The source of my own particular anxiety is a dismaying sense of being forced to flog my child along a punishing educational route march that takes no account of individuality, originality or varying rates of development, and strips all sense of joy and intellectual inquiry from learning. My duty, clearly, is to get my son into a "good" school. In order to do this, though, I seem first to have to mould him into a perfect little schoolchild clone: a conventional all-rounder without evident weaknesses or eccentricities, for no "good" school can afford to take a chance, these days, on a late developer or an interesting oddball.

And so I must either follow the Prime Minister's example and employ coaches and special tuition and make my child's evenings wretched with extra homework when he should be playing, or dreaming, or reading for his own amusement. Or else I must take a huge gamble and trust that his strength of character and originality will eventually find their own path through an educational system in which only the conventional are guaranteed success.

Which is it to be? I wish to God I knew.

I'M NOT a huge fan of what you might call novelty theatre. In fact, my idea of an evening of pure hell is a kind friend turning up with an unexpected treat: tickets for The Vagina Monologues.

Still, I was intrigued by reports of a show called Hat, described as "a left-field performance piece in honour of knitting", in which music and narrative are accompanied by a steady click, click of audience participation. Apparently you are encouraged to pick up a bag of wool as you go in, and start casting on. Tuition is available, but advanced knitters have been turning out whole pairs of baby bootees in the cosy darkness of the auditorium.

It is true that there is something strangely captivating about knitting. I spent my childhood winters wrapped in an intricate series of fancy woollies made by my grandmother, to whom knitting was an occupation almost as indispensable as breathing. When she died, she left an unfinished project.

I'd asked her to make me a scarf, and there it was: half-completed; impaled on its own needles, just as she'd left it when she put it aside for the last time. I took it home with me and kept it for a long while, uncertain whether to finish it (but I couldn't knit the way she did) or dispose of it (but getting rid of someone's artefacts is rather like getting rid of them). The one thing I didn't think of doing was writing about it. Until now, that is.

Why knitting is the new rock'n'roll Daily Telegraph 12 October 2002

HAT:

Conceived and produced by Simon Thackray.