Philistines and other social problems
Civitas, 21 January 2010
It was a depressing moment when this news story made the front page of the BBC website ‘ Pupils forced to listen to Mozart’. The head of West Park School in Derby, Brian Walker, punishes his students in detention by making them listen to classical music, “featuring Elgar, Mozart, Verdi and Bach.” They are often also forced to watch an educational video, such as the ‘story of math’.
As a lover of classical music, and a teacher of students who have been expelled from school, I find this outrageous. At the London Boxing Academy Community Project, where I teach mathematics, students complete their work with Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky and Brahms playing in the background. I find it fills the void of silence, which the students are often otherwise inclined to fill with jibes or meaningless conversation. But equally, I want the students to appreciate the finer things in life. I want them to be able and willing to listen to music that is truly beautiful. To be sure, it was a battle to get them to put up with it in the first place – ignorant students (‘that’s gay!’) that they are – but now they have begun to appreciate it. One of the students always requests Luciano Pavarotti’s version of Nessun Dorma.
What Mr Walker is doing, it seems to me, is putting his students off classical music for life. What young person is going to do anything other than hate classical music for the rest of his days after having it forced down their neck as a punishment? It seems to me a wicked thing to do, to associate something that can bring such joy and calm into life, with the punishment, irritation and anger that pervades detention classes. Instead of inviting the students in his world, where Mozart is a source of pleasure, Mr Walker is imposing it, Gradgrind-like, as something alien to the students. That seems to me to be the worst form of education it is possible to provide.
Classical music is probably mainly the preserve of middle class people in the UK . People of other classes and/or ethnic groups like dozens of other kinds of music .It is snobbery really to assume that classical music is superior to the many other kinds of music . When you consider that musical instrument tuition fees are very high and therefore exclude most pupils from non-rich families , it is not all that surprising that pupils turn to other more available styles of music .
Mr Walker did however say that his model for conducting detentions would likely to be difficult to adopt in other schools. Yes – at most modern state comprehensives with up to 2000 pupils, with disruption common place in every lesson of every day, with 24 hour detention forms thrown back in the teacher’s face, with multiple dotted lines of responsibility for discipline to Heads of Year and Heads of Department, and with senior teachers hiding in their offices spending hours dealing with individual cases against a logjam where the classroom teacher is thus forced to include all sorts of disrespect without any backup from non-implemented whole school approaches to discipline (which only really work in the current political climate where you have a cooperative pupil population anyway).
The reason the BBC covered this story is political bias – it does not accept the notion that problems in schools have increased dramatically over the past fifteen years, and completely rejects the notion that New Labour instigated political correctness instigated from above is largely to blame. This story thus supports this argument by attempting to counter the notion that things can’t go on as they are, or are as bad as they are.
I doubt whether the BBC would cover an unbiased assessment of the modus-operandi and success of the London Boxing Academy Community Project for exactly the same reason.
I have a great deal of sympathy for the position taken in public by the current chairman of BSkyB on the monopolisation of news delivery by this Government subsidised organisation (propaganda).
I agree about the comments on the misplaced association of classical/baroque music with detentions which are seen as punishment, but the pupils at Mr Walker’s school seemed to think that his detentions were a ‘fair cop’ – unlikely in other schools, even if they turned up. He also mentioned making detainee’s details known to all pupils, but preferred not to call this naming and shaming. He also talked about having a graduated scheme of sanctions which all pupils understood and which was implemented fully. Most state comprehensives do not even attempt to do this as they presume that their intake, its size, and the political pressures to include at all costs would result in a lost battle. The battle cannot be won with the current political pressures, but if these were reversed, then it would be possible with better management.
Ironically it was with the introduction to the BBC hosted documentary Great Composers episode 1 covering Bach with Apollo 11 taking off to the music of the first part of the Goldman variations played by Andras Schiff (as it is recounted how one Nobel Laureate suggested filling the disc to be sent into space on Voyager completely with the entire works of Bach) that formed the introduction to many of my science lessons on gravity or SETI, or the atmospheric pieces by Gyorgy-Ligeti in 2001 A Space Odyssey when teaching mechanics, that I found moved the pupils to actually listen and take note.