The Most Important School Subject
We are lucky to start our school day in a beautiful building, a Chapel designed by William Butterfield which opened in 1880. The entire school gathers for 15 minutes before the busy-ness starts. Once a week, on Wednesdays, the Chaplain opens up that moment to something different - a music recital, a talk by a pupil or teacher or visitor.
This week I tried to persuade the community that the most ‘important’ subject to study in school is poetry. This is partly based on the ideas in this post.
Good morning. Let’s start with a question:
Of all the subjects you study in school, which is the most ‘important’, the most ‘useful’ and ‘practical’?
I imagine lots of answers are in everyone’s heads right now - Science, Geography, Economics, Mathematics …
I’d like to make the provocative proposition that it is none of these, but instead a subject which seems ‘useless’. And no, as a teacher not even my own subject, but a sub-section of English. The most important, useful and practical subject you can study is … poetry.
Some of you are now thinking, well, that’s silly - what could be more irrelevant? So I had better justify that counter-intuitive idea. Bear with me as I give you two reasons.
Reason 1. The most important thing that the human race has, the skill which has made us the dominant species on this planet, and has been responsible for all human societies, and all human achievements, including technology and art, is communication, and language is the medium of the extraordinarily sophisticated communication system that we have. This is not just true at a societal level: in every one of our individual lives, the way we talk to each other and communicate using language in its written forms is central: it forms our relationships with our friends, our schoolmates, our work colleagues, and most intimately our families.
So studying the form of writing which is language at its most precise and most intense is enormously important: there is a lot of loose language in the world - fake news, outright lying and deception. Think of the last week: how often did you say something that was taken wrongly, or something that was not understood as you wished it to be? And how often did you get something wrong when you were listening? Training ourselves to be hyperaware of language, of using it as precisely and expressively as possible, is what studying poetry does. In the words of the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, it is ‘the best words in the best order’.
Reason 2. Poetry deals with by some distance the most significant things in our lives. That is not schoolwork: it is that which is most personal - love, death, war, the passage of time, our relationship with the natural world. There is a reason why people so often turn to poetry for funerals and weddings and significant public events.
So this morning I am going to read to you two poems which I believe deal with the most profound things in life, but which also are rooted in the most ordinary moments.
Exactly 4 years ago, in May 2020, I spoke in Chapel. But hardly anyone was here, in this space which normally holds 370. It was the beginning of the first pandemic lockdown, but the Chaplain kept services going every morning for 7 or 8 staff who were resident, and he recorded these and put them on a podcast. So pupils, and their parents, and others in our communities, were able to tune in from afar and listen to a 10-minute service - a hymn, a reading, prayers. I know this was comforting for many in those uncertain times.
And one Wednesday morning the Chaplain gave me the opportunity to speak here about the sudden death of one of Ireland’s greatest poets, Eavan Boland. She lived just down the road, and the poem I’m going to read, ‘This Moment’, which is on the Fifth Form Leaving Cert course, is set there, and it’s about what truly matters, and what in May 2020 felt even more important - love, family, what binds us as humans.
It is set at dusk in a suburb. A child runs into a mother’s arms: that happens all over the world all the time, and it deals with the first, the primal relationship we have.
What could be more important?
I will end with a work by an English poet. Philip Larkin’s ‘The Mower’ begins in a terrible moment: he is mowing the grass and realises with shock that he has killed a hedgehog that was hiding in the long grass. He has to confront the absolute finality of death, and the poem ends with a moving insight into how we should live our lives.
What could be more important?
