A member of the New North London Synagogue writes:

[I'm reproducing this letter with the permission of its author Jack Shamash, who had posted it on Facebook.]




I've just written this letter to my rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg at the NNLS ( New North London Synagogue). He's actually a very nice man and very genuine. Anyway, this is what I wrote.



Dear Jonathan, I hope all is well.

I have never discussed politics with you - deliberately. As a rabbi it must be hard to retain neutrality in such issues and to reconcile the widely different views of the congregants. I didn't see any point in trying to elicit your political viewpoint.


However I am deeply upset by recent events. As a Jew in Southgate Labour party I have never been made to feel uncomfortable. I have never heard any antisemitic expressions. But as a labour supporter in NNLS I feel very uncomfortable.

Even by the figures produced by the Jewish community, there is almost no antisemitism in this country. (check out the annual reports of the CST) In 2017 and 2018 there was only one serious antisemitic incident in which a jewish person was nearly beaten up - that's all! Yet the chief rabbi - who only represents a small proportion of Jews - is trying to scare his own community and trying to put the blame on the Labour party. I think this is a very dangerous game and entirely irresponsible.

If he succeeds in swaying a large number of Jews, there will almost certainly be a backlash which will affect the community. Rabbi Mirvis, who you suggest is a fine and compassionate man, has claimed that Corbyn supports people who kill Jews. It would just as true to suggest that Mirvis and the Jewish community support people who kill Palestinians and other Arabs. It would even be true to suggest that Mirvis and the Rabbinate idolise people such as Menachem Begin who murdered British soldiers. It seems utterly foolish for a Jewish leader to embark on this conversation.

I was deeply upset to hear one of your younger rabbis, denouncing labour antisemitism in his sermon on shabbat. I attended the meeting at the synagogue when a young member of the labour party burst into tears claiming that he was victimised by labour members. He never told us who had said these bad things or what had been said. I have never heard of an incident of a labour MP saying anything antisemitic. By contrast we have Boris Johnson talking about arabs looking like pillar boxes, black people being picannnies and tank topped bumboys. And unlike Mr Corbyn, he has never apologised for any hurt he has caused. Maybe your rabbis should show more solidarity with the 'picanninies, bumboys and letter boxes'.

I realise that in your letter on facebook site, you have tried to retain a sense of perspective. But unless you take a stronger stance on these matters, it will be very difficult to heal the divisions and make NNLS - once again - welcoming to all sections of society and Jews of all political viewpoints.

yours sincerely

Jack Shamash

If the polls are right...

If the polls are right

and the Tories win

and the last leftist antisemite

the last alleged leftist antisemite

and the last friend of the last alleged leftist antisemite

has been removed from the public stage

there should be no antisemitism left

to worry about.

Is that right?

In power will be Boris Johnson

closely working with Dominic Cummings

who talks of  'the likes of Goldman Sachs

writing cheques for Remain'

with 'fingers in every pie'

in the 'cess pit' of the EU

splashing cash around for their own benefit;

Dominic Cummings 

who tells us how Brexit will free Britain

from this corruption.

The 'likes of Goldman Sachs', he says?

The 'likes of'? 

Whatever could that mean?

Circling around will be 

Jacob Rees-Mogg

with his gags about his Jewish colleague

Oliver Letwin being one of the 'illuminati',

his concerns that Europe is dominated by

Soros - the much-loved antisemitic trope of his 

east European antisemitic friends, 

his retweet of a tweet from the 

far-right Alternativ für Deutschland

his dining with the Traditional Britain Group.

Suella Braverman who used the alt-right 

antisemitic jibe about 'cultural marxists'.

Or Toby Young, educationalist, and 

controversy-lover 

projecting on to Philip Hammond

his thought

that the word 'banker' means 'Jewish.

This is how the Right racialises banking
and racialises a criticism of banking.

But the Right has no problem with banking. 

They hi-jack our fears of what happens

when banks crash

and hitch them to who they think

is the wrong sort of banker.

The problem for them seems to be if it's 

Jews doing the banking. 

They seem to think that Jews get in the way

of some kind of national economy 

that they want to create. 

An economy that is no better for the mass of people

than the one they claim is so bad. 

And this

we shouldn't worry about?

This has no echoes from the past

from people who came to power

claiming that it was the internationalism

of Jewish finance that had brought

their country to its knees?

But when the last leftist antisemite

the last alleged leftist antisemite

and the last friend of the last alleged leftist antisemite

has been cleared away

there will be no more antisemitism to worry about?

Is that it?

And if by chance the eyewatering amounts of 

debt left over from the last crisis

and the eyewatering amounts of debt

that we have as we buy the stuff we

can't buy with our depressed incomes

leads to another bankers' crash

we won't see Johnson, Cummings, Rees-Mogg

and others

telling us that the problem is 

say, the 'likes of Goldman Sachs'

the 'illuminati,'

Soros

or the corrupt influence

of 'cultural marxists'? 

Is that it?

Antisemitism will have left the stage

will it?

But then let's ask what forces might they want to unleash

to create their corruption-free

national economy?

Who will they tell us are in their way? 

How the Right racialises banking

A pattern is emerging of powerful right wing people making persistent antisemitic jibes and slurs.

Let's put some of these together: Rees-Mogg talking about Oliver Letwin (Jewish Tory MP) as one of the 'illuminati' - an obscure reference (wink wink) to an elite 'cabal'; accusing the anti-Brexit movement of being financed by Soros, a Jewish financier who has become a focus of hate for some antisemitic forces in Eastern Europe; Suella Braverman MP talking about the need to fight against 'cultural marxists' (again a nudge-nudge term implying 'Jews' on account of the fact that the real cultural marxists of the Frankfurt School were mostly Jews); Toby Young (right wing 'thinker') projecting his own antisemitic assumptions on to Philip Hammond. Young did this by accusing Hammond of antisemitism as Hammond had mentioned that bankers and speculators might benefit from a hard Brexit. But Hammond hadn't mentioned Jews! The notion that bankers and speculators benefiting from Brexit were 'Jews' was in Young's mind alone. Now we have Dominic Cummings, one time senior adviser to the Tories talking about the Remain campaign as being financed by '...the likes of Goldman Sachs writing cheques for Remain'. (What could he mean by 'the likes of...' What or who are the 'likes of' Goldman Sachs?!). There's also a video doing the rounds on twitter of Cummings talking to a House of Commons Select Committee about Goldman Sachs in Europe with 'their fingers in every pie', conjuring up an image of a svengali banker pulling all the strings, preventing good honest national capitalism from doing its own thing. It's a classic fascist image of the idea that Goldman Sachs are creepy and corrupt getting in the way of a Cummings alternative of what? A clean, national, uncorrupt finance. It's racialised, bogus and Hitlerian.

Now put this little sequence together and we have well-known and powerful right wing figures floating classic Hitlerian ideas about how their ambitions to run the system their way, being thwarted by Jews.

It's a way of racialising the problems and crises of capitalism and racialises criticisms of capitalism.

This is what the classic antisemitism of France in the 1890s, 1930s fascism, US Henry Fordism, Nazism, neo-Nazism and all their spin-offs do. They all have their own vision of 'national' capitalism and use the image of the Jewish banker as the obstacle that prevents them from achieving their vision. In fact, Steve Bannon talks openly of 'economic nationalism'. (see his long interview with Emily Maitlis). What is this if it isn't a cry for an end to trading blocs and 'global finance' because it gets in the way of his vision of a US-dominated national capitalism (the nationalism ('America first') is bogus because the genie is out the bottle - capitalism can't go back to being city-state small scale production)?

What is significant is the way these voices that I've identified are trying out sticking Jewish names on to the 'global' and international obstacles that these right wing figures have identified.

All this poses a particular problem for the left. The left usually doesn't want to be in a position of defending bankers, speculators, and international traders. But let's run a scenario in which the next crash that happens is because a) the big debts from the last crash haven't gone away and b) a huge amount of private debt is being piled up to make up for the shortfall in demand caused by low wages.

If I've smelled this correctly, the Right will not pull back from blaming Jewish international finance (as they see it) for the credit crisis and possible slump, and the vulnerability caused by our private debts, in order to win power for their 'national' model of capitalism.

We will have to say over and over again that to racialise the economic crisis is to beckon in discrimination, persecution, pogroms and worse. If there is a problem with international finance - that is the problem - in those terms. It's not that there are some Jews involved in banking. It's not the supposed, alleged Jewishness of banking that causes a crisis. Of course not! It's the system that has in-built problems to do with the drive for profit and the cut-throat competition between chunks of business and capital.

We may well find ourselves arguing with people who are not well-off who have bought into national and racialised views of what's wrong with rich people screwing up the system and giving them debts.

I believe that these attempts by Rees-Mogg, Cummings, Young, are them flying a kite, just looking to see if people nibble on their racialised view of what stands in their way. They watch what Bannon is on about. They watch what's going on in Eastern Europe and the whole blame-Soros game which has had traction in Poland and Hungary (where the most savage aspects of the Holocaust took place!).

In the short term, we need to be vigilant and vocal about the drip-drip feed of these racialised attacks on bankers and 'intellectuals' because sure as hell, they're mostly being given a free pass by the very people who've been most vocal in their accusations of Labour Party antisemitism.

I'm very curious and slightly alarmed that very few people have picked up on Cummings' Goldman Sachs jibe.

The usual alarm-ringers - Jonathan Freedland, Robert Peston, John Mann - haven't said anything.

I'm Jewish. I'm voting Labour.

1. I've met people who think that there are no Jews left in the Labour Party.
2. I've met people who think that the Chief Rabbi is in some way or another in charge of, or a representative of all Jews in Britain.

Neither of these statements is true or anything like true.

There are several Jewish candidates for the Labour Party. There are thousands of Labour Party members who are Jewish. Several times in the media people have said how it's impossible or 'not safe' for Jews to stay in the Labour Party. It's not impossible. If the media had wanted to, they could have asked Jewish MPs, Jewish candidates in this election 'Is it impossible or unsafe for you to be in the Labour Party?' It has been dishonest of them to have not done that.

There are also Rabbis who have either said that they will vote Labour and/or have expressed great concern over the way Jewish religious leaders (Rabbi Romain and the Chief Rabbi) have intervened in this election. You can read about these Rabbis in the Jewish Chronicle online: Rabbi Danny Rich and Rabbi Howard Cooper.

This tells us that within the religious part of Jewish life, there are people who are worried about how religious leaders have politicised religion. In the past this has been levelled at Muslims for having brought in 'communalist politics'. Commentators like Nick Cohen were particularly scathing about this at the time of, say, George Galloway being elected. The silence in the mass media about the dangers of a religious group saying, in effect, 'don't vote for Party X' are very great. Howard Cooper could see a danger that it could invite persecution.

In this particular election, it is also particularly dangerous because it is a two-horse race. Saying 'don't vote Labour' is in effect saying, 'Let's have a victory for the Tories'. This is no surprise, as the Chief Rabbi welcomed the election of Boris Johnson to the leadership of the Tory Party and blessed him.

Johnson is a bigot and a liar. He and the Tories have been quite content to snuggle up to extreme right wing and antisemitic parties in Europe - like Orban in Hungary. He has also kept quiet about the pattern of antisemitism coming from Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has talked of his Jewish colleagues in the House of Commons as 'illuminati', questioned whether they 'understand' the constitution, he has done the 'Soros jibe' (this is an antisemitic 'trope' about the financier Soros deemed to be an international wheeler and dealer); Rees-Mogg has also retweeted a tweet from the Alternative für Deutschland - the far-right organisation in Germany and he has had dinner with the far-right British organisation, 'Traditional Britain Group'. There are other incidents of antisemitism in the Tory party that Boris Johnson has 'kept silent' about (Crispin Blunt, Suella Braverman, Toby Young).

Yet, the Chief Rabbi is in effect entrusting those who regard him as their figurehead to a Johnson Tory government!

For clarity's sake, the Chief Rabbi may 'speak for' a majority of Jews in the UK but he does not 'represent' them. He is the leader of the United Synagogue which has a congregation of around 40,000. According to the Board of Deputies there are 284,000 Jews in the UK. Half of us are affiliated to synagogues, half of us are not.

In all the surveys of Jewish opinion in the UK, I have never been sure of how the survey of the 142,000 non-religious Jews is done. How do they find us? One survey created a 'panel' having found secular Jews by focussing on Jews in areas where there is a high Jewish population and people having 'Jewish names'. Ahem ahem - apart from Hebrew and Hebraic names there are no Jewish names. Most Jews in this country have German, Polish (if they (we) are 'Ashkanzim' or Sephardi names which may be e.g. Italian or Spanish) and/or we have English names! What's more, since the arrival of many EU citizens, there are many Germans and Poles who have names that before were considered to be 'Jewish' like 'Meyer' - a standard German name that some Jews have.

The surveys may be accurate - perhaps - but this method of polling looks decidedly dodgy. I have challenged this many times on twitter and no one has successfully defended it so far.

I have been asked several times to come on the radio and TV to talk about supporting Corbyn. I have refused. I have said to the producer - 'Do the honest thing, talk to a Labour voting rabbi, and/or a Jewish Labour candidate and/or a Jewish Labour Party member.' The reason why I do that is because
a) I can't answer any questions that the interviewers ask all the time 'Is enough being done? Are Jews being bullied in meetings etc' I don't want to screw up this matter by appearing on programmes and saying 'I don't know...' or 'some of my best friends are Jewish and they tell me....x' It's a trap.

b) The times I have appeared e.g. on al-Jazeera, the method of dealing with me (or Miriam Margolyes or Alexei Sayle) is to say that we represent no one. At one level, I have to say that that is true. I have never pretended and can't pretend and would never pretend that I 'represent' any other Jews. I have no trouble making another claim that I am entitled to have the my views but again, is not great TV in a 2 minute interview!

For the record, for people who are not Jewish: I am no less Jewish than the Chief Rabbi. I was brought up knowing that I was Jewish, and have participated in all my life (read, studied, reflected on, been particularly interested in ) secular Jewish activities to do with Jewish writers, artists, and Jewish history and have of course reflected on this in my writing in hundreds of different ways. I see myself as a poet and performer who has absorbed many traditions one of which is 'aggadic' - that of Jewish story-telling.

To say these things has invited Jews and non-Jews on twitter to call me a 'kapo' (a Jewish concentration camp guard), a 'used Jew' (that from the editor of 'Jewish News'), someone who 'dons the cloak of Jewishness' (a Jewish DJ and actor), one of the 'useful Jewish idiots' (from the commentator Dan Hodges, 'a cheerleader for Soros' (from Lee Harpin political editor of the Jewish Chronicle), and a plea to the BBC to not employ me to present 'Word of Mouth' (from the QC Simon Myerson and the campaigner against antisemitism (!) Euan Philips.

Clearly some people think that the best way to combat antisemitism is to be antisemitic.

Further: the whole question of 'antisemitism' has been fogged by an unknowing or unwilling lack of clarity over distinctions between slurs, prejudice, bias, discimination, persecution, incitement to antisemitic violence, and the violence itself. There are times when you might have thought that UK Jews were experiencing a pogrom.

Secondly, the minimum requirements for a claim that there is a 'problem' in a given area (e.g. antisemitism in the Labour Party) is that it is distinctly and measurably worse than in other places or in society as a whole. If that hasn't been shown , (and it hasn't been) it's not a Labour Party problem it's a societal problem.

I've known Jeremy Corbyn for 30 years. He is no antisemite. He has put his neck on the line hundreds of times in opposing racism, antisemitism, far right fascism, holocaust denial.

For the record the sudden loss of Jewish support for Labour came when Miliband was leader who the Jewish Chronicle described as 'toxic' for Jewish voters. MIliband is Jewish. It was his support for recognition of Palestine before negotiations that did for him, they said. Being Jewish was no shield against this hostility.

Ask me, who am I 'safer' with: a Johnson-led government with its record of the 'hostile environment', persecution of Windrush generation, and persistent antisemitic jibes from leading party members or this Labour Party, and I say, Labour every time.

But I don't look at the election purely through a Jewish prism. It is a clear class issue: a Tory government will continue to ravage the lives of of working class people through attacks on wages, public services, and the disabled. A Labour government will halt these and start to reverse them.

World business ('capitalism') is in crisis: huge levels of debt, massive 'productivity' problems (in their frenzy to compete with each other) a slew towards 'economic nationallism' (the Bannon philosophy ) and Johnson is riding the Bannon bus which is driven by the US. The US are desperate to create a bogus 'free trade' world, which in actual fact is a US-protectionist world. Johnson is backing this as a 'solution'.

I'm voting Labour.

Spoken language: written language

The written language is not the same as the spoken language. Even if we can decode each word, it doesn't mean that we understand the syntax, sequences, clause structure, paragraph structure, narrative methods of continuous prose. How is all that learnt?

When we speak, we do a lot of things that we don't do when we write or read continuous prose (the language of stories, non-fiction, journalism, articles, reports and the like). 

When we speak and chat we do any or all of the following:

not finish the phrase, clause or sentence that we are saying;

hesitate, leaving pauses;

interrupt each other;

complete what the other person is saying or trying to say;

speak in short utterances that are not full 'grammatical' sentences (e.g. when we answer with a 'yes' or a 'perhaps' and the like but there are thousands of other examples);

repeat ourselves in many different ways;

use 'fillers' like, 'you know', 'I mean', 'you know what I mean', 'what it is, yeah' and many others;

use gestures to indicate places, people and even time;

use more pronouns without indicating immediately who we mean (he, she, it etc);

use in general fewer clauses up front in a sentence before we get to the main clause - ie not starting a piece of talk with several clauses that begin e.g. with 'when', 'if', 'although'. We find it easier when we talk to put these after the main clause (or main thought);

use fewer relative clauses (clauses that begin with e.g. 'who' or 'which' etc). We find it easier when we're speaking to start a new sentence and begin these with e.g. a 'This...' or a 'That...' or an 'It..' etc;

use intonation, volume, rhythm in our speech which we can't easily reproduce on the page- this is part of the meaning of speech; 

use many 'contractions' and shortened forms of words which in standard English we are expected to put in their full form e.g. 'I'd've' and many others that we hardly notice;

For anyone interested in this, the best thing to do is to e.g. record some people chatting about something, and then transcribe it, looking out for the details and features that I've mentioned. 

Then, compare what you have transcribed with a piece of continuous prose taken from a book, newspaper, article etc.

In the continuous prose, for example you will find that one of its key features is the way it's constructed around this thing we've invented: the sentence. This is something that was created out of the technology and history of putting argument, science, and story into written prose - especially by the ancient Greeks and Romans. Each sentence was constructed according to rules. 

One of the key features of this complex and sophisticated way of expressing ourselves is that any single given idea can be 'modified' or 'qualified' by other thoughts which tell us such things as when, where, why, how, under what conditions, under what logical contexts, and under what relative additions the single 'main' thought happens. Because these conditions are held within the sentence, there is a way in which the very idea of the sentence is to say that no single thought exists purely on its own. It is always within the circumstances, under the conditions that we add by using these other clauses of time, causation, contradiction, condition, concession and the like. 

This makes continuous prose an ideal vehicle for showing things like logic, abstract ideas, causation in history and science, and flows of feeling full of complexity, and shifts in time-frames that you find a lot in fiction, interior thought as it tries to figure out things - again, as you find a lot in fiction. 

Continuous prose in books can also sustain a longer sequence of thought than we usually do in speech: a kind of arc in meaning where events, characters, structures, narrations, patterns of language and image  are carried through over several or even many pages. We pick up clues, remember stuff that was related several or many pages earlier in order to understand what's going on as we read. We make connections that aren't necessarily stated specifically. We 'pick up' on these so that we 'get' the plot, or 'get' the shifts in character, or understand why a character is doing something based on the motives or history of that character from before. These are, if you like, the longer strategies of continuous prose. 

We can do most - if not all of this in speech but it's much harder to do it, without repeating ourselves, hesitating, interrupting ourselves or other people, asking questions of listeners as to whether they are following etc. Instead, continuous prose, avoids that stuff and just presents these logical sentences as finished and complete. This is usually done through revision: the writer revises as the writer writes and then again through re-drafting. If we revise in speech, we do it in addition to what we've just said, not instead of it. Once it's been said, it's been said. Writing therefore has an artificiality about it, in that appears to be more complete than speech and conversation - but that's only because we eliminated the revision prior to anyone reading it. 

Given how far this type of language is from the everyday speech of children and young people, I find that what I'm talking about here is what many find hard about 'reading for understanding'. 

Continuous prose is in its own way a bit like another dialect: you know it's in your own language (we're talking about English here), but these structures and operating methods seem unfamiliar or hard to follow. 

What are the consequences of this?

Some say, that the key thing to do is teach 'sentence grammar' - and loads of it, and that's how you get to learn the process. Then you import what you learnt from the sentence grammar into writing. 

Some say, me included, that the most crucial thing to do is immerse children and young people in a lot of continuous prose in its most accessible form for the children and students involved: this means as much story, and accessible non-fiction as we can get them to read. That's why it's important to encourage children and young people to read for pleasure in their spare time. 

This way, they are immersed in what I'm calling the 'strategies' of continuous prose, in enjoyable and interesting ways. Those children and young people who read widely and often find it that much easier to access the continuous prose that is given them in all school subjects.  

Talk about the arts in schools for the Royal Academy.

Let’s begin by looking at these two pictures. The one on the left is called 'Thor battering the Midgard Servant' and the one on the right is a scene depicting some of the characters from Shakespeare's 'The Tempest'. 

They belong right here in the Royal Academy. Thanks to the RA for reproducing them. 

They’re both by the artist Henry Fuseli. He lived from 1741 to 1825.

He was born in Zürich, Switzerland, the second of 18 children.

In, 1765, he visited England, where he supported himself for some time by miscellaneous writing. Eventually, he became acquainted with Sir Joshua Reynolds, to whom he showed his drawings. Following Reynolds' advice, he decided to devote himself entirely to art. In 1770 he made an art-pilgrimage to Italy, where he remained until 1778, changing his name from Füssli to the more Italian-sounding Fuseli.^[1]

Early in 1779 he returned to Britain, In 1788 Fuseli married Sophia Rawlins (originally one of his models), and he soon after became an associate of the Royal Academy.^[1] The early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, whose portrait he had painted, planned a trip with him to Paris, and pursued him determinedly, but after Sophia's intervention the Fuselis' door was closed to her forever. Fuseli later said "I hate clever women. They are only troublesome".^[2] In 1790 he became a full Academician, presenting Thor Battering the Midgard Serpent as his diploma work.^[3] In 1799 Fuseli was appointed professor of painting to the Academy. Four years later he was chosen as Keeper, and resigned his professorship, but resumed it in 1810, continuing to hold both offices until his death.

What has this got to do with anything we’re discussing today?

Well, one of my key words for this talk is ‘interpretation’. 

We might say that all art, and all commentary about art involves interpretation. By filling you in on a few details about Fuseli I have already affected your interpretation of the pictures. I’m guessing that now I’ve told you Fuseli’s dates, some of you are slotting the pictures into your mind’s filing systems to do with the years around 1800, other artists you know of. You might be thinking about Switzerland, or about Joshua Reynolds. You might be thinking about what dangers - or perhaps what delights -  lay in his way by way of clever women.  Or what a jerk he was to say that thing about clever women. 

There’s another aspect about these two pictures that I can mention: - as with thousands of others in the western traditions - Fuseli has used the medium of graphic art to interpret two works of literature. 

I’m guessing that most people here will be familiar with at least something of the literature that Fuseli has interpreted in these pictures. Thor is very popular these days because he’s one of the Avengers. In another form, he was the Norse God of War. His name was taken to make Thursday - Thor’s Day. 

The other day I watched the ‘Graham Norton Show’ and Chris Hemsworth, who plays Thor in the Avengers,  was on the couch talking about how he has collected three or four of the hammers that he’s wielded in the films. Also on the couch was Paul Rudd who plays Ant-Man in other movies , Kit Harrington who plays Jon Snow from the TV film-series, Game of Thrones and Julianne Moore who plays all sorts of people in many different types of films. (I wonder if Fuseli would have thought her clever and troublesome.) Kit Harrington said that he has a giant statue of himself which he doesn’t know what to do with. Graham Norton said he could bury it in the garden and years later people might come along and find it, and wonder what had been going on. Thor said that he tries to put the hammers on the mantlepiece but his wife takes them away. He then said his son picked up one of the hammers and asked him if it was a toy. ‘No,’ said Thor, ‘that’s the real one.’ 

So, the Norse myth was meeting Marvel Comics meeting Game of Thrones, and the relative reality or unreality of film-set props from the Hollywood version of the Norse myth. There are a lot of intertwined narratives going on there.

I’m not sure how the Norse myths made their way into Fuseli’s consciousness. I knew them well from one of my favourite books as a child, an anthology of the tales by Barbara Leonie Picard. I can re-tell - or interpret - them because of my memory of them. In fact, when I’ve been put on the spot by my children to make up a story I’ve secretly plundered the myths for story-lines and motifs. Rather as Hollywood does - and if there’s time - schools can help children do: be like Shakespeare - steal a story, adapt it, change the setting, switch the gender of one of the lead characters, add in a sub-plot and you’ve got a hit. My favourite Norse Myth when I was a boy, was the one sometimes known as the Binding of Fenrir. Fenrir is a giant wolf, and a key moment in the story involves a test of courage: the god Tyr puts his hand in Fenrir’s mouth as evidence of the gods’ good faith in binding Fenrir with what looks like nothing more than a garland of flowers. I won’t spoil the story other than to tell you that Tyr’s name was taken to give us Tuesday - Tyr’s day. 

These little interconnected anecdotes tell me that stories don’t just begin and end. They exist in chains of memories, re-tellings and interpretations even to the point where some end up on our tongues every day - quite literally as days of the week.

Fuseli painted this picture in 1790 and it was, as you heard,  the one that enabled him to become an Academician right here. 

Let’s look at the Tempest.

Here we can see Prospero in the middle and the two natives - and two slaves - Ariel and Caliban. 

Can we take it that that’s Prospero’s daughter standing behind Prospero there? She’s called Miranda, who gives us the famous phrase ‘Brave new world’ - which in the play is a line of great irony as the world she is looking at is  neither ‘brave’ or ‘new’. It’s made up of people full of old world cowardices, rivalries and treacheries. 

In both pictures Fuseli has interpreted stories. 

This was a high status activity. 

Because Fuseli was so good at it, according to the tastes and attitudes of the day, it enabled him to be accepted in the top artistic institution of the day: this one we are in right now. 

I’ll ask a rhetorical question here: if what Fuseli was doing was a high status activity then, why isn’t it a high status activity now in education? 

What else might we say about these pictures? Do you think both have a heroic tone?   These heroes, (both in their own ways magical beings - can we say ‘super-men’?)  have been positioned centre stage, mid-action, one striking down the serpent, the other commanding his slaves, the heavens and the seas. 

If you know The Tempest or the Norse myths you’ll know that other scenes and interpretations are available. The myths offer us the figure of Loki who as the god of fire can create mischief and wreak havoc. The Tempest gives voice and space to a native’s slave revolt which draws into the rebellion the servants of the aristocrats who are occupying the island. Several times I’ve put Caliban’s words ‘This island’s mine’ in poetry anthologies and I’ve written about Caliban in my book about Shakespeare that I wrote for young people.  

These are all interpretations of mine. 

I’ve just demonstrated then in the first minutes of this talk how looking at these pictures has set off trails of thoughts and opinions about the Norse myths and The Tempest. 

----

My central argument today is to say that: 

a) what Fuseli has done here by painting scenes from literature, 

b) what I’ve done in the past with the stories that Fuseli has drawn on

and 

c) what I’ve done right now, musing on how these stories exist in me and in popular culture

are the kinds of activities that are being squeezed out of primary and secondary education. 

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How is this being done?

It’s mostly as a consequence of what the government calls ‘accountability’. Schools are locked into a system of testing, inspections and league tables. These are all high stakes because the governance of a school depends on them: children’s scores in tests are aggregated and tracked over time. If a decision is made that the school is inadequate, it can be forced out of local authority control and become an academy. Or, if it’s already an academy it can be forced to become another academy. 

No matter what one thinks of this as a way of managing schools and managing standards, you can see that the whole apparatus rests on testing children. 

It’s legitimate then to look at the tests themselves and ask some questions:

I’ll restrict this for the moment to primary school children. 

Firstly: What kinds of knowledge do the tests test?

Secondly: What kinds of effect on education do these tests have?  

This may sound tautological but I’ll start by saying that the tests only test what is testable according to the kinds of test they are. By this I mean that they are pencil and paper tests which ask children questions for which there are only right and wrong answers. 

This tells us straight away that there are whole areas of knowledge that are excluded. (Just to be clear I mean knowledge that is both know-what and know-how.)

I’m sure you could think of some too. Here are mine: 

How to save someone’s life

How to feed someone

How to be compassionate

How to co-operate with others

How to be brave in the face of people being over-bearing, bullying or who persecute you.

How to hold two equally valid ideas in your head at the same time. 

How to plan.

More specifically, if you look closely at the questions on a SAT paper you’ll see that quite specifically, there is only one possible answer for any one question. This is from last year’s SATs paper for 10 and 11 year olds. 

The children were asked to read a poem. They were asked: 

“The experience of the last line could best be described as: amusing, or shocking, or puzzling, or comforting?” 

The marking guide that the teachers use to mark the test show that only one of these words is “right”. Notice  in the question there’s a passive construction:  ‘could best be described’. Could best be described by whom? Who is this Best-Describer Person? On what basis does Best-Describer Person come to their conclusions? I’m getting a picture here of a great god Best-Describer roaming the world of poetry tests who always knows best. Perhaps Fuseli could draw it for me. 

It is through passive constructions like ‘best be described’ that passivity is taught. The passive teaches passivity. Children are asked to accept that an unknown, unchallenged and unchallengeable authority runs poetry. 

Hey, I thought it was poets who run poetry but what do I know? 

Actually, when I read the test question,  I had two subversive thoughts:  first that none of the words on offer “best described” the last line. I could think of some others that I think are better. But as it was me doing the test (in my mind) I remembered the rule: I must not think of other words. I must not think of other words. 

My other thought was, those words on offer in the question could  - at a push - all describe the last line. That’s what poetry is like. The words in a poem slide about, full of ambiguity, suggesting one thing which, if true, might suggest something else which might suggest something else on down a chain of meaning. 

In fact, nearly 90 years ago, William Empson wrote a book which showed us just how ambiguous poetry can be and often is. 

Poetry is not a store of right and wrong facts. To treat it as such - which this SAT test does - is to distort and wreck poetry. 

The reader of a poem is not someone who takes specific lumps of meaning out of a poem as if they are taking eggs out of an egg box. If I take that metaphor further, I’d say, well if they are eggs, you can’t actually use the egg for much until you open the egg up and cook it according to your taste and culture - what are you going to have: scrambled, poached, fired, boiled, omelette? 

In other words, interpretation. We make meanings. 

That’s just one question. 

Multiply that many times - not just in terms of that test. Think now of the second of my questions:

What kinds of effect on education  do these tests have?

One direct effect is that children spend hours and hours and hours doing practice testing. In other words, the test-method (or test way of thinking) is instilled into children as being the best way, the only way, the authoritative way of doing things. 

Here’s my ‘Guide to Education’

Guide to Education

You get education in schools.

To find out how much education you get,

the government gives you tests.

Before you do the tests

the government likes it if you are put on 

different tables that show how well or badly

you are going to do in the tests.

The tests test whether they 

have put you on the right table. 

The tests test whether you know what you’re 

supposed to know.

But

don’t try to get to know any old stuff like

‘What is earwax?’ or ‘how to make soup’. 

The way to know things you’re supposed to know

is to do pretend tests.

When you do the pretend tests

you learn how to think in the way that tests 

want you to think.

The more practice you do, 

the more likely it is that you won’t make the mistake

of thinking in any other way other than in

the special test way of thinking.

Here’s an example:

The apples are growing on the tree.

What is growing on the tree?

If you say, ‘leaves’, you are wrong.

It’s no use you thinking that when apples are on a tree

there are usually leaves on the tree too.

There is only one answer. And that is ‘apples’.

All other answers are wrong.

If you are the kind of person that thinks ‘leaves’ is a 

good answer, doing lots and lots and lots of practice tests 

will get you to stop thinking that ‘leaves’ is a good answer.

Doing many, many practice tests will also make it

very likely that there won’t be time for you to go out

and have a look at an apple tree to see what else

grows on apple trees. Like ants. Or mistletoe. 

Education is getting much better these days

because there is much more testing.

Remember, it’s ‘apples’ not ‘leaves’.

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But there’s another effect:

i) how this kind of testing, 

ii) the preparation for this kind of  testing, 

iii) and the accountability model of testing, inspection and league tables

 are transforming the timetable.

Here are some observations from some teachers I asked:

My college has cut A level Dance, Film Studies, Music... more pressure on working class students to take business type subjects, and more academies with 6th forms hanging on to a level students.

Our college has cut btec music, and A-level music, dance, drama, textiles and graphic design. Combination of factors including low recruitment (as a knock-on from smaller number of students taking up creative subjects at GCSE) but probably other factors too.

I’m not a teacher but my year 4 son’s English is only marked for spelling, grammar and neat handwriting. Ideas and creativity are never commented on so it’s hard for me to persuade him its worth bothering. And art projects seem designed only to provide classroom decoration. Kids are given very specific instructions, so are basically just colouring in.

As a child aged 10 we did pottery with a kiln and glazes, acrylic moulding cutting and polishing, watercolours, woodworking, marbled paper making and calligraphy. My daughter at the same age does colouring in. They made something out of air dried clay but it broke by the time she got home.

They brought in EBacc which excluded the Arts, and Progress 8 which all but eliminated them. The schools that have struggled the most to retain the Arts are the same ones that struggle to achieve the limiting data figures that are supposedly so important. The greatest threat they have is one that has been wielded across all disadvantaged areas, if you don't meet the data targets then Ofsted will tell you you're failing your students, place you in special measures and the DfE sell you off to the highest bidder.

I work in a special school and have been pressured to cut out creative arts almost completely. A few years ago, my timetable included plays, music, art, reading and writing for pleasure and fun poetry. Now my managers want evidence of progressive writing and worksheets, as these can be assessed for data.

My secondary school, in a socially deprived area of Newcastle, now has NO music at KS3 or 4 and no music teachers employed, for the first time in my 23 years there ...

In 2014 3 pupils took A level music. One was my son. Two others transferred in from elsewhere. By 2014 A level music was cut altogether. Because of this my younger son went to a large non selective state sixth form college to do music. This establishment has mow cut it. The other large state sixth form college in our town to offer A level music still offers it but it is highly selective. Neither one of my boys would have done well there yet one is currently working in the creative industries as a musician/creative, and the other is doing a music degree at university. They got their A level music qualifications ‘just in the nick of time’. They would not have the same opportunities if they were a year or two younger.

My secondary school tries to still offer creative arts GCSE and A level, and to offer extra-curricular music and drama. But, due to pressure mainly from the English department, students in yrs 11 and 13 were banned from taking part in productions. The last year they were allowed to take part, when they missed part of an English lesson for the dress rehearsal, when they got back to the lesson they were told how many marks they were likely to have lost as a result of missing a lesson. No credit given for the benefits to their English development of taking part in a performance.

In Y11 students not achieving targets just get Maths, English and Science lessons.

I'm a secondary Art teacher and we have had KS3 art lessons reduced from 50 minutes a week to an hour a fortnight. Additionally from next year there will be a 2 year key stage 3; in total this means that students will receive 36 hours of art if they don't opt for it at GCSE. They will also have a 2 year GCSE which means that they will complete their GCSE in year 10. Obviously as students mature they are capable of higher level skills. I'm not looking forward to being invited to explain why the results are poorer than previous years....😠

So what are these children and school students missing out on? 

Or put this another way: 

what can arts in education, arts in schools offer children and school students:

In an ideal world they can offer:

trial and error without fear of failure

a chance to explore materials or aspects of the material world,  whether that’s your own voice - through eg singing and speaking

your body - through movement, dance and acting

or the materials like clay, wood, iron, plastic, stone,glass

or materials like pencil, charcoal, paint, pen, ink, paper, canvas, film, video and so on. 

or language which can only manifest itself materially through  voice, print, digitally produced signs and so on.

every artistic act starts with possibilities for change, it enacts change, it changes materials, it offers possibilities to the maker and to the viewer.

By the way:

I tried to express this idea with a little poem:

Take a brush:

the sky is green

the grass is blue

you are purple

the house is silver

the river is gold

the sun is black

the world has changed.

Did you do that?

What I didn’t express in the poem is that in changing things we change ourselves. We are never the same as we were. 

We discover that we are not passive receptacles, we discover that we have the potential to change things.

A good deal of art involves co-operation of some sort - some more than others. 

A good deal of art involves us seeing things as others see them. It often involves making comparisons between how we see things and how others see them. The events of the 20th century tell us that this is desperately necessary if we are to avoid destroying each other or the planet or both. 

And let me come back to that word ‘interpretation’. All art - not just Fuseli and the rest who interpret across art forms, involves some kind of transformation of what’s already there whether that’s language or all the different kinds of materials I mentioned earlier. 

But interpretation is also a totally valid practice that takes place off the back of art. 

This is not the ritual of what the exam boards call retrieval, inference, chronology and presentation.

Interpretation involves using the available resources of our experience and, more specifically, our experience of other art forms and texts. 

One of the key parts of this is what we might call ‘storying’. You show me a story - or fragments of a story - as with Fuseli’s pictures - and I’ll tell you a story. This exchange of stories that goes on every day of our lives is how we form the foundation of our abstract thoughts. In fact, it’s not just storying, it’s analogising. In order to story off the back of one story, I have to select one aspect from the story in front of me, and compare it with one aspect of a story that is in the story-library in my mind. I make analogies. The moment I make analogies, I am beginning to categorise, generalise and classify.  

I would suggest that that is precisely what Fuseli has done here. He has categorised Prospero or Thor as a type - as selected from Fuseli’s library of types sitting in his head. 

Categories, generalisations and classifications are highly prized in education - at least at the level of being told what they are, as when we are asked to read and learn:  “The following are types of erosion, the following are types of triangle, the following are types of figurative language.”

But what value do we put on the ability to do this through interpretation, through storying and through the arts?