Essays in Idleness

Re-introduced to Canadian schooling, circa 1967, I first became aware of our national anti-poetry project. This was when the childers were introduced to Shakespeare, tragically late in the day. For English class, teachers were assigned to show how boring he could be. By paraphrasing coruscating verse, the writers of high school textbooks could also show a more or less complete incomprehension, and criminal indifference to poetical effects. They did this on purpose, in the cause of crippling poetry, music, and art. Now, of course, they do it with “artificial intelligence.”

Fortunately for me, I had already discovered How To Read, by Ezra Pound, while living abroad. Also Homer, &c. This made Canadian schooling entirely unnecessary, except perhaps for the sadistic topics: chemistry and math.

I was going to quote, for an example, a flagrantly otiose paraphrase of “Blow, blow, thou winter wind,” Lord Amiens’ song from As You Like It. The meaning of this lyric is so clear, that any Shakespeare scholar should be able to understand it, several days after being shot to death. With the help of Google, gentle reader may compare AI paraphrases. But read such things longer than it takes to make you angry, and you begin to see why violence is a necessary component of educational reform.

Let me confess that on more than one occasion I stooped to English perfessing, for money. This seemed to me not necessarily evil, if I taught as well as I could. This required that I frequently shock my students, and traumatize the slower ones. Attempts at singing and declamation were part of the instruction. I tried to maintain an Elizabethan dramatic voice. Also, through his Histories, to communicate the fact that Shakespeare was a quite livid and admirable “fascist.” My teaching experience went fairly well; and I was never arrested.

While the cold wind blows, I am enjoying an act of gratuitous destruction. I am removing from the High Doganate all those beuks in which I find stupid paraphrases and “feelings.” C. S. Lewis once began a very useful beuk, The Abolition of Man, with an vigorous attack upon a textbook author: arriba!

We should be doing more to prevent the employment of useless teachers in our schools. It was a sound mediaeval principle that the incompetent craftsman should starve.