Education
by Anthony Thwaite (Collected Poems, Enitharmon)

It used to be learning things over and over again
In a drone round the room repeating the things that were said:
The names of the countries, the names of the famous dead,
The multiplication tables, the figures for sun and rain
On the countries, the dates of the battles won
And the battles lost, the different spellings of words
Sounding the same, and – to make it a bit more fun –
The names of the butterflies, moths, mammals,fish, birds.

And now it is making up shapes and colouring each
For something called Projects, and making up other stuff
For something called Poetry, which no one wants to teach
Because it has rules and no one knows enough
To know how the rules work, and no one can hear
Because of the noise all round and the weight of the stuff
Out there in the world, full of names, dates,figures, fear.

This poem weighs the old-fashioned learn-by-rote manner of teaching, against the learn-as-you-play more liberal style, and finds that poetry, although included as something creative to do along with “Projects” in this new, experimental way of teaching, is not itself actually taught because it has rules, and no one “knows enough/ To know how the rules work”.

When I was at art college a boastful student, who believed himself a brilliant painter, painted distortions of human figures. I asked a friend of mine, who was an experienced artist, what he thought of these paintings. My friend examined them with a critical eye, and explained that the student’s ignorance of how to draw the human figure was obvious in every brushstroke; the human figures were distorted not as a result of experiment, but as a result of an inability to draw. My friend argued that knowledge, once acquired, is unmistakably evident in art as in other disciplines, even in the process of abstraction.

And so it is with poetry. If one knows what the rules are, one can experiment. But if one has never learnt, then one is simply playing. It’s a bit like stacking bricks in the dark and hoping that when the light is switched on you have made a building.

And what is so bad about learning dates and places for history and geography? If it takes repetition to fix information in the mind, then surely the very practice of that repetition is a mental exercise that can only be useful? As is knowing where Hong Kong is on the map, and the history of our own country, from which we derive a basic framework for our own existence; we are more easily able to see what spot we occupy within the wider world.

In almost every aspect of life I can think of, we need some kind of discipline. The act of learning in school gives one the experience of having learnt; having applied oneself and therefore having disciplined oneself, and such an experience becomes a tool we can use in our later lives, even if we don’t use the information we were required to absorb.

We all know that an individual may possess incredible natural talent in art, literature, music or science, but in most cases if that individual cannot take the time to acquire background knowledge or learn to discipline themselves and so direct their energies, nothing happens.

Having described the not-so-interesting lessons of the past where repetition was the method of learning, the poet observes that now it’s all about “making up shapes and colouring” and “making up other stuff/ For something called Poetry”. The dismissive phrase indicates that it’s all about expression without any knowledge of the subject.

So, poetry cancels itself out in the hands of those who have dispensed with the rules of poetry, in order to promote some kind of free-learning, which actually deprives students of the confidence of improvising from the sturdy platform of familiarity with what poetry actually is, and how it works.

At the end, in a world “full of names, dates, figures”, there is also fear of all that information. Fear of the unknown. Better to face it and dismiss fear.

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