Teacher-training institutions need to be more rigorous—rather as a century ago medical schools raised the calibre of doctors by introducing systematic curriculums and providing clinical experience. It is essential that teacher-training colleges start to collect and publish data on how their graduates perform in the classroom. Courses that produce teachers who go on to do little or nothing to improve their pupils’ learning should not receive subsidies or see their graduates become teachers. They would then have to improve to survive.
Tonight, I abandoned my first Penguin Classic. As you know, I’ve endured some books I truly hated over the course of this project. But this one, I couldn’t do. It’s been weeks since I started reading it, and I got stuck on the first play. So I passed over it and moved to the next. And so forth, and so on, coming back to plays I’d already abandoned in disgust…
There are a number of factors that ended up bringing me to the conclusion that I would be better of without adding this volume to my tally of completed works, but the chief ones were:
I’ve been quite sick of late, and my patience is tried when I’m sick.
My husband and I lost one of our beloved dogs a couple of weeks ago, ditto to patience when grieving.
The racism is so thick you could cut it with a knife, and unlike a book like, say The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which at least has a number of mitigating redeeming factors in the face of its racism, I found that the plays in this collection simply did not.
There are better books waiting for me to read them.
So on that note,
The next book in A Penguin Class will be The Fable of the Bees by Bernard Mandeville.
Mark Ravenhill’s second choice for the short season of classic plays he’s curating for Drama on 3 is ‘The Octoroon’, a remarkable 19th Century drama about slavery by Dion Boucicault. Last night’s ‘Night Waves’ was a fascinating post-performance discussion from the stage at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, where the play was recorded. Read Lucy Collingwood’s blog post introducing the season on the Radio 3 blog and listen to the play itself on Sunday at 8.30pm.
“When the play was performed in England it was given a happy ending, in which the mixed-race couple are united. The tragic ending was used for American audiences, to avoid portraying a mixed marriage.”
How do you rehabilitate your love for art works based on expired and inhuman social values?
As students, when we are asked to read works that include racist themes and language, we are told to either ignore the racism or as a class, we acknowledge the racism with nothing other than disgust. Something that is not often done, however, is discussing why the racism in the work bothers us as a society today, and what that means about how we live our lives. Sometimes, in studying a work, it is better to ask ourselves why we feel a certain way about it instead of how we feel about it.
Then may you say that there is no nobility where there are no titles! But we have kings, princes and nobles in abundance– of Nature’s stamp, if not of Fashion’s,– we have honest men, warm hearted and brave, and we have women–gentle, fair and true, to whom no title could add nobility.
![houghtonlib:
“Mary Marsh as Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, [ca. 1853]
TCS 45
Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard University
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