Cutting Edge Thinking from British Fencing

OK, well over 99% of you won't give a damn about this one, but I need a mini-Rant.

I've just read the latest edition of The Sword, British Fencing's quarterly publication. It carries fencing news, results, and sometimes my photos if I've been to a competition recently. The other regular feature is 'Why oh why is fencing in crisis?' (which it usually is).

This time, Ronald Velden, one of the prominent commentators in British Fencing has hit upon a clever wheeze to develop the sport:

improving participation in the independent schools

That's right. When you have no Olympic medals in living memory, and the public perception of your sport is that it's a toff activity, what we really need to do is funnel more cash and attention (including taxpayers' money) to a small percentage of the mega-rich 7% of the school-age population who attend fee-paying institutions. Obviously there must be huge social barriers to their participation which need overcoming. I'm really bothered by the idea that we should recruit from a pool of privileged kids who are largely white and male. That's what led the Amateur Fencing Association's leadership to put on fund-raising events for England epeeist and British Fascist Sir Oswald Mosley: a blinkered, smug and exclusive elitist mind-set.

It may surprise Ronald and his chums in the British Fencing hierarchy, but out here in the sticks we actually do recruit widely and reduce barriers to participation. There are clubs such as Newham, West Fife and Camden which recruit from the local population (very weirdly, Ronald is chair of Camden Fencing Club!). Some of them are even black, which is – sadly – a new experience in the fencing world. Their kids are competitive and hugely successful. Other clubs, like my own, offer free coaching and ultra-low fees (£2.50 for 2.5 hours fencing) but we don't do enough recruitment, relying instead on people finding us.

Other sports, particularly British Cycling, worked out a long time ago that success comes from recruiting from as deep a pool as possible, rather than relying on a traditional circle of insiders. The UK is notably unsuccessful at fencing and I think that's partly because it still recruits from the traditional class-based sources: private schools and the armed forces. In Italy, Germany, France and all of Eastern Europe, fencing is a normal sport open to everyone. It's certainly true that their social elites have a strong historical link to the sport, but participation is open to and affordable by all.

Apart from the argument about medal success, I detest the inward-looking, cosy smugness of the fencing hierarchy. Surely if you believe your sport is wonderful, as I presume we all do, we want to persuade everyone to try it. Fencing requires a set of athletic, mental and social disciplines which are good for individuals and transferable: we should be going in to primary schools and community centres, demonstrating what we do and taking in anyone who wants a go, whether they'll go on to be Olympians or just fat blokes like me.

I was going to say 'imagine going to the Government and saying "give us more money and we'll spend it on private sports"' when it struck me that the current crew would probably open the coffers enthusiastically.

OK, back to the real world shortly.

Today's the day for indoctrination

I've been teaching a module for final-year students called 'Positions' - my role is to lead the strand dealing with class, both in literature and as readers. The idea is that we don't just look at how social class develops as a cultural theme, we take a Gramscian approach to literature as an hegemonic vehicle, and a reader-reception/Barthesian take on the reader's role in creating meaning.

On the course so far, we've done some Chaucer, some extracts from Piers Plowman, an extract from Michael Drayton's interminable Poly-Olbion, and Anthony Munday's The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntingdon, a play which hasn't been revived for the simple reason that it's structurally all over the place, though very interesting in many ways. The Drayton and Munday both feature Robin Hood, because I'm using him as a way to examine class as a site of social anxiety - Robin starts off as a threatening, shadowy figure, before becoming appropriated for aristocratic purposes: Munday is the first to make him a peer.

Today we're taking a different approach to Robin: Geoffrey Trease's Bows Against The Barons, a 1930s children's novel which is a rare example of children's communist propaganda. Last year it got a very good reception as a novel, but the propaganda element went largely unnoticed.

I don't think it's because my class were unsophisticated - they're familiar with the relevant theory and history. Instead, I think it's because the general culture is very disinclined to examine class in a political sense. Downton Abbey and various working-class soaps and comedies prove that there's plenty of cultural mileage to be made out of class differences, but the irresistible tide of individualism, allied to the downfall of mass employment means that political class-consciousness seems to be a thing of the past. We'll boo (or thrill) when a toff behaves arrogantly in Downton, and scoff at Vicky Pollard or the Big Fat Gypsies, but this is all class as lifestyle: the implied audience is securely middle-class, and the ways in which class is portrayed (snobbish, patronising, loud, drunk etc) are viewed as individual choices to some extent. The slew of these shows is meant to discipline us into adopting middle-class values: don't be common, aspire to the Downton lifestyle but don't be arrogant either.

I wonder if this year's class will be different: whether Occupy and Greece and Tahrir Square and bankers' bonuses and a government made up of the landed gentry will alter their positions as readers. I think my generation and the ones after me have lost the sense that we have a collective identity. We consume, usually as individuals. We work as individuals, jealously guarding each demarcation and distinction. Union membership has been crushed outside the public sector - and even in it the least well-paid are excluded by their insecure contracts and fear of victimisation.

After Trease, we're doing two plays about the clash of new and old money - Massinger's A New Way To Pay Old Debts (1625) and Caryl Churchill's Serious Money, a comic and tragic play in rhyming couplets about the clash between aristocratic corrupt bankers and pushy working-class corrupt bankers, from the 1980s. I saw the Birmingham Rep revival a couple of years ago, and was stunned by how prescient the play was.



If you get a chance - go. Then we look at some of Gerard Winstanley's pamphlets, Churchill's play about him, A Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, and end the module with Lewis Jones's misunderstood Cwmardy and - in total contrast - Waugh's Vile Bodies - now adapted for the stage.

Getting down with da kids

In the grand tradition of university lecturers trying to reach out to students via popular culture and getting it completely wrong, I'm going to start my series of lectures on class relations in medieval literature with this 35 years-old film clip.

What do you reckon? Still funny?

Donor Cards: let's be selective

From those good eggs at Class War:

Meanwhile, have some fun with the Daily Mail Nick Clegg Headline Generator!

A Christmas Gift from Peter Mandelson

Lord Mandelson is Secretary of State for the Department of Business and Universities. There's a whole list of reason's why he's an objectionable individual, starting with his status as a peer: he can't be turfed out of the legislature and he's not answerable to the House of Commons.

I also hugely object to the existence of a department which yokes together Business and Universities. Yes, obviously there are shared interests, but there are also (and must always be) conflicts. The role of universities is at least in part to challenge the hegemony, which at the moment is capitalism (despite the total collapse of the banking system - bankers discovered socialism as soon as government handouts were on offer). We shouldn't be content with churning out oven-ready work drones, prepared to do whatever it takes to make money for a bunch of shareholders. In the long term, businesses shouldn't want these yes-men and women either: innovation comes from critical and independent thinking. Sticking 'and universities' on the end of the department's name implies a strategy which sees education as solely training for work, subject to the demands of the market. It's wrong, wrong wrong.

So what's Pete done to us today? He's announced funding cuts amounting to £533 million, including fines for universities which over-recruited this year. What an odd decision: he likes markets, unless universities respond to market demand by recruiting more students. My Hegemon over-recruited, rather stupidly, so we can add another few millions to the several millions we're already being fined for misleading the government over student completions.

I'm not for breakneck expansion of university places. In institutions like mine, where jobs are being slashed, we're already increasing class sizes and losing face-to-face contact with students - this is, without any doubt, worse education. However, I do think that in a massive recession, with jobs being lost, encouraging people to reorient themselves through study is a massive public good. This government has claimed a return to Keynesian economics (spending public money to keep the economy alive during recessions): why not fund more university places as part of this, rather than give it to banks who don't pass it on, but use it to reinflate their reserves? What would these students have done instead? Claimed unemployment benefit, lost skills and motivation, and potentially condemned themselves to a much longer period of unemployment, contributing to the economic slump.

Petey's big plan to square the circle is to massively expand the provision of 2-year degrees. We run a few of these, called foundation degrees. What's missing is the third-year, which should be the culmination of the traditional degree: independent thinking and study, a dissertation, more specialisation. The alternative is three-year courses taught in two years - which obviously means missing out the time required to read, think and discuss ideas. What you'll do on these courses is repeat what the lecturer said, mechanically.

Mandy's plan is to turn places like mine into American Community Colleges - fine institutions in their own right, but a long way from the university ideal. Goodbye, any courses which analyze society or have intrinsic appeal: English literature, philosophy, politics, cultural studies, media studies, blue-sky scientific research, women's studies, most languages, history… all the interesting ones which might generate some critique of what we're up to as a society. Hello nursing, business (great job so far, guys) and legal studies.

Underlying this is, of course, class. Labour's élite are a social élite. They're largely very rich people, often privately educated, and almost all graduates of Oxford, Cambridge or sometimes one of the other élite universities (Gordon Brown was an early entrant to Edinburgh University). I'm completely convinced that - consciously or unconsciously - they have no regard for the legitimate aspirations of the working classes. To them, the poor are call-centre fodder, ASBO-bearers, salesmen and women: an undifferentiated mass who actually shouldn't aspire to a life of the mind, who shouldn't attract the same educational provisions as the traditional middle and upper class university entrants. The political class looks after itself, regardless of party. It sees the poor and can't help thinking that such people must have willed themselves into low status, that they somehow deserve to remain as they are. Its own offspring are encouraged into medicine, the law and other professions, are driven into the prestigious universities, while the proud parents ascribe this success solely to individual effort rather than to the possession of a huge set of advantages derived from wealth and social status.

Once you start from that perspective, you just know that these funding cuts are going to hit institutions which devote themselves to the education of the working classes, the poor and those with chequered educational backgrounds. No Cambridge student will find themselves condemned to tutorials of two students to a tutor. Oxford colleges won't have to forego that desktop hadron collider or the finest wine cellars in Christendom. Their teachers won't find themselves landed with more teaching and less research time.

Here, on the other hand, we will suffer. Already understaffed and undergoing more redundancies, we'll face another round of sackings, course cuts, bigger lectures, larger seminars (already so huge that individual students almost never get to speak), less research time (I haven't done any serious research in two years), poorer libraries, costs passed on to students in sneakier ways, and nastier halls of residence (but you're guaranteed that senior management won't get any less well-fed). Sure, we'll put a brave face on it. We'll pretend that replacing face-to-face discussion with online activity is modern, progressive, go-ahead pedagogy - but we'll all know the truth.

Ritzer was right. Élite-educated politicians are prepared to drop the pretence of humanist education - for the poor. We'll train the poor to do the drudgery, while even the soi-disant representatives of the working classes pull up the drawbridge and entrench their class privileges for ever.

Here's a little project for you. Try to find out how many children of politicians, company directors and other élite people went to a) state schools and b) former polytechnics and non-Russell Group universities. I'd bet a large amount that the answer is 'almost none'.

Ritzer said, amongst many other things, that universities are becoming machines for the consumption of education - whereas the model I hold dear is one in which students educate themselves through lectures, debate, reading and argument. The consumption model is clearly implied in the fast-track system: education becomes a list of facts and a certificate, rather than an intellectual and emotional experience.

You can't unwrap a proper education, shove it into your gob and swallow it. A proper education is upsetting, challenging, difficult sometimes, exciting and passionate. It changes you (hopefully for the better). It's not like a burger, or a spanner, something 'you' 'use'. It's a process in which you discover yourself and your world, and it never ends.

Thanks Peter. You turncoat. You traitor. You sinister functionary for moneyed scum. I know you're just the unconscious mouthpiece of deeper forces, but you seem to relish every attack on humanist values and collective will.

Bye-bye, education. Hello, training.

It's not all doom and gloom though

As George Eliot wrote, 'the world outside books is not a happy place' (or something similar). It's great inside though, and I've just taken delivery of another consignment. A wall is rising around my desk…

Rubio and Waterston's Norton critical edition of Anne of Green Gables;
Lauter and Fitzgerald's anthology Literature, Class and Culture (rather too American for my plans, but fascinating anyway);
Kate Roberts's The Awakening, a new translation by Siân James (whose A Small Country is a wonderful, rich text) which looks excellent.

Bayonets out for the lads

Now we're on to a brilliant paper by Laura Ugolini on 'Middle-class men on the English Home Front 1914-1918'. One of my specialities is proletarian masculinity, so I'm particularly interested. She's working on how middle-class men, particularly those who didn't join the armed forces, redefined masculinity, given that fighting and manual labour were the standard definitions of masculinity.

Despite the huge pressure (white feathers delivered to 'cowards' etc.), these men found ways to defend themselves while remaining masculine in some way: looking after their families, investing in war loans and joining war-related civilian bodies - hoping these would be seen as manly, which they weren't. The volunteer groups, veterans' groups and so on were seen as physically weak, reserved for old people and not very serious. I wonder if the upper- and middle-class striekbreakers in the 1926 General Strike were up to the same thing.

Update: she sees new themes emerging in the General Strike period but isn't sure why. There are loads of ways of looking at these things. Some good questions from the floor (as usual, I ask something dull) which always lead her to more fascinating detail.

She's got some great propaganda and recruitment images too.