And so to the non-fiction reads of this spring, so far:
I’d read and loved Mangan’s previous book, Bookworm, which was a highly enjoyable trot through the children’s literature she’d loved growing up, and so naturally I was keen to read (or in fact listen to) the sequel. I loved the start of this, particularly her account of finding transitional books before the advent of YA, and reading English literature at university. She can be extremely amusing and it was all very jolly and fun. After graduation, she took a false turn into the law before eventually realising that she hated work as a solicitor and switching careers into journalism. Then, also entertaining, she met a man who she knew was the one when he took her on holiday to Norfolk for the secondhand bookshops (apparently she’s written a whole book about this, who knew?). Then, undeniably, more difficult life experiences took over, including post-natal depression, the pandemic and finally the death of her father. During all these times of stress, books were her mainstay and her passion for them remains fierce and undiminished.
I had two main niggles with this book. The first is that whilst I enjoy reading about books that I’ll never personally choose to read (it can be restful), Mangan has a love of children’s literature that far surpasses my own, and I might have wished for a little less of it. If I’d been reading the book, I could have skipped these sections, but listening to an audiobook it’s much trickier to do. (Oddly, I find I’m struggling to recall any of the authors she wrote about, apart from Jane Austen. the Brontes and Norah Lofts.) The audiobook also forcibly made me aware of the incredible length of many of Lucy’s sentences. It was entertaining for all the wrong reasons to hear her trying to gabble her way to the end of her third or fourth extended subclause before she finally ran out of breath. Generally, there’s a lot to enjoy in this book, but it doesn’t quite reach greatness, though I can’t really put my finger on why.
The following three books were joint reads with Mr Litlove, and this one we both loved. It’s the extraordinary story of Stephane Breitwieser, a young Frenchman who stole an estimated $1.4 billion in artworks from museums and galleries over Western Europe. Throughout this time he was living with his mother, cramming more than 200 key pieces of art into his attic bedroom. Because Breitwieser was that supposedly impossible creature – a thief who stole because he loved art and only wanted to enjoy it. He never sold a single piece. He was aided by his then girlfriend, Anne-Catherine Kleinklauss, who would keep watch while he undertook the most audacious heists. Poor museum security is clearly at issue here, but Breitweiser’s skill and innovation was undeniable. He would throw objects out of windows and retrieve them later, hide silverware up the back of his jacket, small sculptures up his sleeves and stuff paintings into Anne-Catherine’s handbag. He took things in broad daylight, waiting for crowds to disperse and museum guards to go on their breaks, sometimes forced to remove screws from display cases one at a time in unobserved moments before making off with their contents. Finkel does a great job of showing how skill and success went to his head, and how a lack of coordination between the international art theft squads allowed him to keep stealing far longer than seems possible. The story of how he was finally caught, and what happened after that was gripping and sad. We both thoroughly enjoyed this and are planning on reading more by Michael Finkel.
Oh gosh I’ve been putting off reviewing this because I have a lot of criticisms and I’m not sure of their validity. Anyway, this is a book whose premise I was completely behind, as I thought I understood it. Wright argues that exams have become far too important in the education system, to the point that they do a disservice to pupils. He splits his book into three parts – the first asks what school is for, considering the history of education and the political and pedagogic factors that have gone into the current curriculum. The middle part considers what school is actually like, which has a more memoir-y feel as Wright travels around visiting different and innovative kinds of schools, and in the final part he lays out his own plan for how education ought to change.
As a former teacher, I wholeheartedly agree that our insistence on grades and exams has sucked the lifeblood out of education, and placed the weight of its judgment on one single skill that not very many possess and which subsequent life will rarely exploit. I think the over-insistence on exams has destroyed the one thing that really matters in education – intellectual curiosity. It’s the essential factor that brings real joy to learning. When I was working at the university, a whole variety of different ways of assessing students were introduced, including the portfolio option, where students in the Easter term could elect to put forward three essays (unaltered) that they’d written during the year rather than sit the exam. I understand that the rise of Chat GPT has made this kind of assessment problematic. But my feeling is that we need alternatives to the current two hour pressure cooker format because it does little more than check a student’s short term memory, usually at the long term cost of their nervous systems.
Wright’s premise has nothing to do with getting rid of exams or finding alternative ways of testing. His argument is that exams as they stand do a disservice to the kinds of kids who aren’t academically minded. Well, fish, gun, barrel. My growing distaste for exams comes from the fact that they aren’t serving the kids who actually ARE academic. There has to be a reason why something horrific like a quarter of students at Cambridge are on anti-depressants, and the suicide rate goes up and up. Wright’s book to my mind remains part of the problem. The word ‘privilege’ is used repeatedly and pejoratively, and not just to mean financial advantage, but also a happy or stable home life, and innate intelligence. It seems to me that the more privilege is associated with kids who do well, the more the concept creeps so that ANY child who does well is simply assumed to have benefited from its unequal boost. This is not at all true and it blindsides and negates how much hard work children put into their studies. Wright doesn’t have a single thing to say about children who are clever, which is about par for the course. They are usually dismissed by teachers as being able to just get on with things alone, aren’t they lucky, they don’t need help. Well, maybe not, but it’s amazing how many of them don’t get encouragement or recognition either. They are simply expected to achieve, and when they do, nothing to see here – it’s just privilege doing its thing. I saw how confusing and stressful it was for my students to slave at their studies, often with parents on their backs, fretting about their grades, and suffer all manner of anxieties around exams because of the high expectations on them, and then receive the weird mix that is the manic, over-adrenalised relief of their parents and complete silence from their teachers. These are the kids who beat themselves up over B grades – they are legion.
Now we’re making it harder than ever for children who do well. They go to university where they will rack up enough debt to cripple them for the next two decades, and then there are no entry level jobs into any career that’s even slightly interesting. We live in the era of the unpaid internship. This whole process is awful, self contradictory and absurd, and I’m not in the least surprised that so many children are suffering with their mental health. None of it makes the least bit of sense and kids know nonsense when they see it.
I held other things against Wright, too. At no point in this book does he ever consider that the quality of teaching is paramount in education. The possibility of bad teachers, teachers who take against students irrationally, boring teachers, teachers who can’t keep control of a class, these never appear on the pages of his book. And yet they are responsible for a lot of dissatisfaction in school. I have much sympathy for teachers, who are ludicrously overworked and put under a ton of stress. Teaching is hard and I’m not sure whether there are opportunities for teachers to work on their skills over the course of their career like there are in other professions? I also felt that Wright had a thing against clever girls. The only females who get a properly positive write up from him are the kind who are resolutely non-academic, forthright, jolly women. But whatever. Where he finally ends up, with his alternate vision of the exam system, is to have a kind of basic school certificate at 15, a year earlier than the current GCSEs, and to keep the next year sort of open and fluid for children to try out classes in subjects they may take further. I honestly think that kids who really aren’t academically minded (or who are suffering hardship at home) are a hard sell on even this reduced program, and I predict dire boredom for all the children who are the least bit able.
My alternative scenario, for what it’s worth, would involve revolutionizing the early school years. There was a psychological experiment that was reasonably famous in which young children who liked drawing and colouring were split into three groups. The first group were told that if they drew well, they would get a reward. The second group were given the reward as a surprise afterwards. The third group just drew, with no rewards. What was the outcome? All but the last group subsequently lost all interest in drawing unless there was a reward in it. That last group kept on drawing simply because they enjoyed it. I think the way we’re going about teaching is wrong from the ground level up. We want to find ways to instill intellectual curiosity into children, ways to make them enjoy their learning and understand how useful it is, right from the get-go. I think we have this fear that people won’t do things unless we MAKE them with either a carrot or a stick. I don’t agree. I think it’s a kind of generational trauma handed down through the teaching system. Well, I’ve been banging on and on for ages now and I must finish this post, but I spent a lot of time arguing with this book and Mr Litlove would eventually keep reading over the top of my protests. So I have learned I’m irrational on this subject!
What a waste of potentially excellent material this book was. Setting out to explore the various categories of monster who has created art – from the Woody Allens and Roman Polanskis, through the Nazi sympathisers and abandoning mothers, etc, etc – with the aim of getting to the bottom of this problem that is great art produced by dodgy people. But it’s a tissue of inconclusive wittering in which Dederer can’t bear to come down against anyone’s opinion, really, but thinks if she goes on and on enough, she’ll somehow produce an overview. There must be so many theoretical sources she could have called on to bulk out her arguments or view the dominant arguments in new lights. But no. She lost me after a long chapter on critics in which she argued at great length that it was dreadful to assume your readers held the same opinions and that the use of ‘we’ was a kind of cultural bullying, only to embark on the next chapter saying ‘We think this…’ ‘We experience that….’ without the tiniest bit of self-awareness or regret. Mr Litlove and I felt worn down and unenlightened and we abandoned it after about four or five chapters.