Woke as a career move

It’s a commonplace that schoolteachers are left-wing. The truth can be more sordid.

In the 80s I worked as an English teacher in a large, well disciplined secondary school. Proportionately there were fewer promoted posts – you can only have one Head of Department and one deputy and both of those knew when they were well off and had no plans to move on.

The other ladder out of the classroom was the pastoral side. There was a comfortable office with several staff, one for each House (Slytherin etc) and they too were in no hurry to leave. It was good, well-paid fun shooting the breeze and listening to children’s problems. Fewer classes on one’s timetable, less dull old marking.

When women English teachers went to another school they sometimes used their leaving speeches to mention the lack of career opportunities especially for females. The headteacher was aware of this as a general problem irrespective of sex but this was before schools had the freedom to manage their budgets as they wished. He had turned his school from an underperformer to a leader and there was an impermeable layer of heads of subject who could not contemplate shifting to one of the dump establishments.

So a couple of my colleagues hit on the idea of using politics to get noticed somehow. One who hadn’t a drop of Celtic blood in her got the department to order a class set of a play about the Irish potato famine. Not many laughs in that and not particularly well-crafted, but you don’t have to be a very skilful and entertaining writer provided the subject is such that we all know what face to pull and attitude to adopt.

Another – white – got onto the anti-racist bandwagon, using what might be a drama slot to divide the youngsters into blue- and brown-eyed and then pretending to play favourites.

English is a fertile hot bed for these shenanigans because aside from grammar (which for a long time was almost verboten) it isn’t a subject. Back in 1857 the Cambridge wit Charles Stuart Calverley set his friends a faux examination paper on Dickens’ ‘Pickwick Papers’ but it took until 1910 for his alma mater to set up a real department in this field (several London universities broke the ground far earlier but they were redbrick, don’t you know, old boy.)

The Gramscian assault on education as a vehicle for cultural transmission succeeded in replacing e.g. Milton’s Lycidas with, well, look at set texts over the last decades for British exams at 11, 16 and 18. At one point radicals were suggesting Shakespeare should be scrapped to which the working-class critic Richard Hoggart replied they “needed their heads read.”

Now whether the hijacking of our culture in the interests of private profit ultimately rewarded these two teachers in the way they wished, I didn’t stick around long enough to find out.

But I suggest that corruption often spreads less from political conviction than from bending with the wind and using it to steer towards one’s personal goals.