In 1976, the British playwright Arnold Wesker published a small pamphlet entitled “Words as Definitions of Experience.” Wesker, a committed socialist and one of the Angry Young Men who transformed British theater in the 1960s, had grown concerned when his 13-year-old son came home from school one day with a black eye, having been punched by a schoolyard bully. The perplexed young boy had no way of understanding what had just happened to him, no words to encompass the experience of what had occurred.
Wesker’s suggestion, beautifully articulated in his pamphlet, was that schools needed to do a better job of giving children a vocabulary not just to allow them to pass tests but to understand the dimensions of their daily experience. What if, as part of his son’s curriculum, the boy had been asked to make a deep study of a word like “intimidate?” How would an immersion in the full meaning of that word have transformed the boy’s understanding of his experience in the school yard? While Wesker’s son was clearly intimidated by the school mate who had punched him, was there also something in his bearing — his confidence, maybe, even his cheekiness — that had intimidated the bully?
I’ve been thinking a lot about Wesker and his pamphlet over the last several months, as we in Northampton have undergone a sometimes vicious battle of words over the fate of our school budget. I’ve been thinking of him even more intently in the wake of the reporting of an argument between the current mayor’s husband and a School Committee member in an aisle in Stop & Shop. I know nothing about that particular argument other than what’s been reported, and it could well have deserved the condemnation some have heaped upon it. All that said, the discussion around it seems to me the culmination of a long war of rhetoric that has left me feeling we could all — and maybe students especially — use what Wesker suggested — a new immersion in the study of words and their actual meanings, and how the careless usage of those words impacts our understanding of our own experience.
I wonder, for instance, how a current student in the Northampton school system, one who is paying real attention, might feel when being told, as she has been by a current School Committee member, that the city in which she lives is governed as a “neoliberal vehicle of austerity and a link in the chain of systemic oppression.” I wonder how that same student might react to the recent suggestion that the call for civility in civic discussions is a vestige of “colonialism.” Most of all, I wonder how this student might react to the words of a recently defeated city councilor basically imputing a moral equivalency of the current administration’s response to the murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis to an argument in Stop & Shop: “The same day that our country’s executive and their gross abuse of power was on full display, our executive‘s husband was abusing a dissenter.”
Might it be time for a class, or at least a unit, to be taught at Northampton High School with a title like “How to Decode the Language Being Used to Debate the Merits of Your Education?” Having put two children through the Northampton school system, I’ve come to know several excellent English and history teachers more than capable of teaching such a class. Wesker’s list of words that needed to be decoded for students included words like vindictive. Tolerance. Doubt. Freedom. Relativity. Just based on the words of current and former officials in our town, I might want to add “systemic oppression” to that list. And “colonialism.” How about “abuse” and “dissent?” One of the slogans of those advocating for increased school funding has been “children are our future.” True enough, but are we really helping them reach that future by trying to convince them that they are victims of “systemic oppression” without breaking down that phrase and exploring with them what it actually means? Are we pushing them toward their futures by using a word like “colonialist” without inviting them to dig deeply into the specific history from which that
word derives? Or how about “dissent?” When is dissent actual dissent, and when does it veer into becoming something else? When, for instance, does “dissent” itself become a form of “abuse?” And if “abuse” is a word that applies to any unpleasant encounter, does its power become defused by overuse, especially when we try to apply it to what I might boldly call “the real thing?”
“Understanding of the word is so essential,” Wesker wrote. “Evil must be carefully measured and accurately named. We must be absolutely certain the times are evil and not something else or we may find ourselves drawing blood to drown a fly.” Perhaps if we heeded those words a little more carefully, we might go a long ways toward creating, in our schools, minds more subtle and nuanced than the ones commanding metaphorical bullhorns at city meetings these days.
Tony Giardina is a novelist and playwright who lives in Florence.