Every menorah tells a story

Last night was the third night of Chanukah, the Jewish 'Festival of Light', when Jews around the world place candles in a menorah (more properly, a chanukiah). The festival lasts for eight days, and you start lighting one candle on the first night, and end with lighting eight candles on the last night. The candles are lit by a candle known as the shamas.

Menorahs come in all shapes, sizes and materials: from the traditional eight branch candelabra plus the shamas candle made in brass or silver, to ultra-modern designs of great ingenuity and beauty. Essentially anything goes as long as the basics are met i.e. eight candles in some form of row plus the shamas candle, and many designers have taken up the challenge.

We have acquired several menorahs over the years. Some were gifts. Some we've inherited from parents and grandparents. A few we've bought. 

Tonight we lit my favourite menorah.

Several years ago we were on holiday in the far south west of Ireland. West Cork to be precise. We were staying on a very small island in Roaringwater Bay and, as there were no shops, we had to cross over by boat to a small village on the mainland to get supplies. I say 'we', but I have to admit that is was my partner who usually went off to do the shopping while I stayed and supervised - from a very relaxed distance - the children, as they played amongst the rock pools. 

Among the few shops in the village there an 'antique shop', which was actually more of a junk shop. My partner stopped one day, and looked into the shop. And there, amongst the usual bric-a-brac, was a brass menorah. She looked at the label which said: '8 branch candelabra with extra candle holder'. Amazed, and knowing there were very few if any Jews in that part of Ireland, she asked the shop owner where it had come from. The woman didn't know, and really didn't know what it was, despite the Star of David in the centre of the menorah.

So we bought it.

When we got it back to our little holiday cottage and looked at it closely we realised that it was designed to come apart. By turning the Star of David, which was attached to a long, thin screw, we could unscrew it from the heavy base, and then everything came apart. It was, of course, designed to be taken apart, and the various parts placed in a case - which had obviously disappeared somewhere along the menorah's journey to a junk shop window in West Cork.

We reckoned, after a bit of googling, that it was c. 120 years old,  had probably originated in Central Europe, and the chances were that it had belonged to one of the many thousands of families - like our own families - who came to the then British Isles and beyond to escape persecution and to seek a new life.

Of course we'll never really know the real story. But as I watch that  old brass menorah glow as the candles burn and flicker, I feel a extraordinary link to the past: a link in a chain that remains - despite the tribulations and tragedies of history - unbroken.

"O, had I but followed the arts!" - on Government plans to eliminate the arts in schools

Whoever neglects the arts when he is young 

has lost the past and is dead to the future.
                                                     Sophocles

In Shakespeare's 'Twelth Night', Sir Andrew Aguecheek, despairing of his ignorance about most things, cries out 'O, had I but followed the arts!'.

Back in the 16th and 17th centuries he would have had the opportunity, at school, to study them. Fast forward to the early years of the 21st century and, if the UK government, or that bit of it that has control of what happens in schools in England, has its way - which it probably will - that opportunity would no longer be available to him...or any other young person.

Everyone recognises that the education system is complex and messy, due in no small part to constant government meddling over many years.  However, the present Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, though only one of a long line of meddlers, is a definitely a 'Man on a Mission'. 

Actually there are several missions. One of those missions is to streamline the various ways children and young people progress through the school system and into either further or higher education or into work. All perfectly laudable.

But it is not the objective but the means and, particularly, their consequences that threaten the future of any and all arts subjects in schools and, subsequently, in colleges and universities.

Essentially the Government intends to divide the subjects one can study at school into three levels: Academic, Applied General, and Technical.

If a young person wishes to go to university, and particularly a 'good' university - and many do - they need to study Academic Level subjects. The government has decreed that any and all arts subjects in schools do not qualify as Academic Level subjects. The subjects that do qualify are maths and the sciences, english literature, history, geography and languages. 

The consequence, of course, will be that schools that focus on getting their students into universities (and, of course, so few do!) will focus entirely on those Academic Level subjects to the exclusion of almost everything else. Any arts-based activities will be reduced to lunchtime music clubs and after-school drama workshops.

The Government argues that, of course the arts are important, and schools will be free to choose an arts curriculum if they so choose. But don't expect those students - no matter how clever, skilled, committed they might be - who study those subjects to get into university...certainly not a 'good' one.

But if you are a school Head Teacher with an eye on league tables, and committed to the 'higher' education of your students, would you be prepared to threaten the progression opportunities of your students, and their hopes and aspirations (and those of their parents) by offering them arts subjects that are regarded, at best, as second-class subjects and probably worthless?

The awful irony in all this is that many of those 'good' universities offer arts subjects: drama, fine arts, music, etc. and expect applicants to have some knowledge and understanding of their chosen subject. The likely and truly awful-to-contemplate consequence of an arts-free school curriculum will be, eventually, an arts-free higher education system.

That is, clearly, the intended outcome of Michael Gove's mission.

Musings on a 'monsterous' conference call

Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness. . .

(Ted Hughes, "The Thought-Fox")

In the wake of the recent announcement and call for contributions for the HEA's Arts & Humanities 'Heroes and Monsters" conference, there have been a number of posts and blogs on various sites wrestling with what the call is actually about!

One that caught my eye was by Susan Deacy.

Dr. Deacy writes "The particulars make clear that the event is looking for ways to challenge current ways of learning and teaching to 'make strange' academic practice and challenge what is taken for granted by its practitioners. On the conference's definition, monsters dwell in realms just beyond our own; they can come into our world to 'unnerve' us and 'innervate' us, and thus a 'monstrous pedagogy' can 'disrupt habits' and 'articulate...different ways of being'. But who are 'we'?"

There is a strong implication in the conference description, that 'we' are the ones who are disrupted and unnerved. But 'we' are, or can be, or may wish to be also the monsters and/or heroes (heroic monsters? monstrous heroes?). The teacher as Theseus and/or the Minotaur?

What has struck me in recent weeks (and, before I proceed further, I need to declare my interest as a member of the HEA's Arts and Humanities team) is that I have newly encountered and had conversations about not just our own 'Heroes & Monsters' conference, but also the influence of Punk and the punk aesthetic in learning and teaching (did you know there's an active group of scholars called Punkademics?); the establishment of a university Centre for Gothic Studies; and a course entitled Vampire Studies.

I do wonder, as the significant pressures of standardisation, marketisation, consumerisation, etc. in higher education bear increasingly down on us (then again, who are 'we'?), whether this is a form of resistance.

But we don't resist change, per se. We resist loss, and we replace that loss not with the known, the common, the understood, the accepted. We replace it with 'the other' or, better, 'an other': one that has genuine meaning in an environment in which so many things have become de-referentialised, that strikes a chord, that 'chimes with the times'.

It is also no accident that the 'Heroes and Monsters' conference call connects directly with the allure and fascination of the myth and the quest. As I've got a book chapter to write on key aspects of teaching and learning in dance, drama and music, I'll end (I may return, hauntingly) as I began, with Ted Hughes, and this in his essay 'Myth and Education':

"The myths for [Plato] were not very different from what they are for us, imaginative exercises about life in a world full of supernatural figures and miracles that never happened, never could happen. Yet these, he suggested, were the ideal grounding for the future wise and realistic citizen. We can imagine what would happen if we proposed now that all education in England up to the school age of 11 be abolished and there be put in its place a huge system of storytelling.

If we think of that we can see how far the wisdom in our educational system differs from what Plato would have called wisdom. Our school syllabus of course is one outcome of 300 years of rational enlightenment, which had begun by questioning superstitions and ended by prohibiting imagination itself as a reliable mental faculty, branding it more or less as a criminal in the scientific society. And what this has ended in is a completely passive attitude of apathy in face of material facts. The scientific attitude, which is the crystallisation of the rational attitude, has to be passive in the face of the facts if it is to record the facts accurately.

Such is the prestige of the scientific style of mind that this passivity in the face of the facts, this detached, inwardly inured objectivity, has become the prevailing mental attitude of our time. It is taught in schools as an ideal.

The result is something resembling mental paralysis".