Plumb Bored with Study

Britain's chief inspector of schools, Chris Woodhead, said the other day that pupils aged 14 who are bored with academic work should start training for jobs such as plumbing while still at school.

Mr Woodhead is a very well-known figure in the world of British education. In his teaching days he was regarded as a liberal, but he has since become a strict disciplinarian. He remains most famous, however, for having had a well-publicised affair some 23 years ago, when he was a teacher of English, with a sixth-former of his in a Bristol school, Amanda Johnston. When the news reached the public domain some four years ago (courtesy of the News of the World), Mr Woodhead repeatedly denied that the affair began while Ms Johnston was still his pupil at school, though his former wife Cathy insists this was so. Indeed, she said so in a lengthy and squirmingly detailed newspaper article.

Mr Woodhead has stated that the affair was "educative" for both himself and Ms Johnston.

Next, Mr Woodhead is famous for hanging on to his job in spite of the ceaseless ongoing scandal. He has the unfailing support of Tony Blair, of Education Secretary David Blunkett and indeed of Prince Charles, whose hospitality he has enjoyed on a number of occasions in the Highgrove pad.

Thirdly, he is famous for being hated by more teachers than possibly anyone else in the world. This is not too surprising, since he has said he wants to see 15,000 of them sacked for incompetence.

Despite his high-profile friends, the man probably has more enemies than anyone else in today's Britain.

But let us leave all that aside.

To support his views on plumbing, Mr Woodhead quoted the writer D.H. Lawrence, who said that every teacher knew it was "worse than useless trying to educate at least 50 per cent of scholars." It was "dangerous", Lawrence said, to drag people with no capacity for learning through education, because it produced a "contempt for education and for all educated people."

Chris Woodhead seems actually to thrive on trouble, and by calling on D.H. Lawrence as an authority on education, he would seem to be deliberately courting controversy yet again. How exactly is Lawrence linked to the world of education? His mother was a teacher, and he himself taught briefly in Croydon before devoting himself entirely to writing. And that's about it, unless you count his elopement with Frieda Weekley, who was married at the time to his former teacher at Nottingham University.

However, Lawrence certainly saw himself as an educator as much as a writer, and it could be said that he was intent in his work on educating not merely a few classes of young people, but the entire Western world, his basic philosophy (much simplified, admittedly) being that the instincts of the blood are superior to the reasonings of the mind. ("My religion is in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect").

This is the kind of notion that makes polite English people very, very nervous indeed. Indeed, it is partly why Lawrence, one of the finest writers of this century, has never received his proper due in the country of his birth, and why you never hear anyone in England suggesting that Lawrence's remains be transferred from his grave in New Mexico to Westminster Abbey.

Where Lawrence is concerned, in England, the embarrassment factor is high. Many British academics hate even the mention of his name, and are much more likely to be heard denigrating his supposed views on the place of women (and men) in the world than praising the tenderness of his writing, his courage in the face of life-long illness, his rare feeling for nature and the beauty of his poetry.

The other Lawrence-related issue that may yet cause Chris Woodhead to regret bringing up the writer's name is that of class, or class consciousness. Though too much has probably been made of the contrast between Lawrence's coarse miner father and genteel schoolteacher mother (a recent biography suggested the pair were much more compatible than hitherto suggested), and its effect on the writer himself, there is no doubt that Lawrence had a lifelong obsession with class that permeates a great deal of his writing.

Chris Woodhead admitted that he would not want non-academic young people to leave school at 14 - he believes they should continue to study English and mathematics. And it would be difficult, he has acknowledged, to achieve parity of esteem between academic and work-related courses. For parity of esteem, read elimination of class consciousness, and for difficult, read well-nigh impossible.

Brendan Glacken can be contacted at bglacken@irish-times.ie