School’s out forever

“It was my bitter leave taking of England, where I had broken a good many conventions.” — Robert Graves, Prologue to Goodbye to All That.

You can’t judge a book by its cover but maybe, just maybe, you can by the title. More memorable titles include Catch-22 — which everyone has heard of but very few can understand, and fewer can explain, Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, which has the added bonus of the best opening sentence in English literature (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”), Allan Stillatoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, former parliamentarian Erik Neilson’s memoir, The House is Not a Home and, for sheer puckishness, Anthony Burgess’s 1985 (how could the author possibly top that beginning?).

However my favourite alltime title is Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That (1929), a retrospective of his youth in England culminating in an commission with the Royal Welch Fusiliers, where he served with distinction in the First World War, with a discharge in 1919.

While Graves’s wartime service left him with the usual shell shock that scarred so many of his generation, he seems to have been blessed with a robust comic ability to see the absurdity of his situation, and move on accordingly. His prospect of leaving England, for good he thought, was potentially one more trauma. He could not know the best part of his life was actually beginning: a house in Majorca, successful and well-respected books like I Claudius and Greek Myths, and short listed for a Nobel Prize.

What makes for the book’s singular title is the clause “all that”: it’s the et cetera quality to the book that so many of us can relate to. How much of our lives are incidental, nonessential, just so much dross?

This is a question I ask myself as I prepare to leave my job as a principal after working in schools for more than 30 years. There is a narrative to life in schools that privileges a few epiphanic moments, the Robin Williams type teacher, who stands in relief to the prosaic round of blackboards (or for the last several years, whiteboards, which I can assure you are now every bit as obsolete). But of course exceptional moments in the classroom are as rare as they are anywhere else. But with schools, those are the things we remember. That is the standard. Any wonder why Janet Malcolm cited Freud’s view that along with government and psychoanalysis, education is an impossible undertaking (Psychoanalysis: the Impossible Profession, 1981).

So much of our lives are unessential, but the joy and challenge of education is that, for it to succeed, it must do exactly the opposite. Allan Bloom, the 1980s gadfly and all-round curmudgeon, whose Closing of the American Mind (1987) brought pretty much universal disapprobation, put it perfectly when he wrote: “Marlborough said that Shakespeare was essential for his educa- tion. And Shakespeare learned a large part of what he knew about statesmanship from Plutarch. This is the intellectual genealogy of modern heroes.”

I never forgot that, and to this day often ask students, “What is essential about your education?” If a student can ask the question, they have succeeded, if they can actually answer it, they’re well educated.

I was fortunate enough to have Professor Bloom, who taught at the universities of Chicago and Toronto, for a couple of courses. He was a colourful character, fond of wearing blue pinstripe suits, Jermyn Street shirts and silk ties from Paris. Right under the no smoking sign, he’d light up an enormous cigar — Cuban at the UofT and settling for Dominicans at UChicago — and urbanely announce: “if your distaste of tobacco is stronger than your love of ideas, well, you won’t be missed.” How many times had he said that, I thought? Even more personally, he addressed me in a course in philosophical exegesis by saying, “Mr. de Pencier, your

If Robert Graves could find a comic side to the First World War, how easy is it to see a life spent in schools as comedy par excellence

translation of Aristotle’s Politics is the educational equivalent of the Special Olympics.”

The students in my school who leave for university this fall are as likely to court this sort of character or remark as run into the Sun King. Sure, the professor broke all the rules, but having your very own Professor Kingsfield (a.k.a., the Harvard law prof in the 1973 movie The Paper Chase) was not without its consolations; not only did you beat a retreat to the library with alacrity so as to avoid another such shaming, but also grasped in the bargain Willy Loman’s encomium that, “the world may be your oyster, but you don’t crack it open on a mattress.”

I will miss my colleagues and my students. And if Graves could find a comic side to the First World War, how easy is it to see a life spent in schools as comedy par excellence: children are comic creatures by virtue of their exuberance, false starts and deep bathos at the outrageous slings, arrows and, well, all that …

As I said goodbye to teachers and colleagues alike, I told them of my immediate plans: some time spent this summer helping to restore a lighthouse on Lake Superior; a long way from Robert Graves on Majorca, but hey, you have to start a new life somewhere.