ABSTRACT
In the introduction to his first book, Basil Bernstein (1971) described one of the experiments he undertook as a teacher at the City Day College in London. The students were on one-day-a-week release from work as messenger boys or from various industries and the London Docks. Bernstein wrote:
During the first two years I realized that the problem was, in Forster’s phrase, ‘Only connect’. Not being a born teacher, I had to learn by sensing that structure of meanings which were latent in the speech and writing. All this may seem to be an exaggeration. One day I took a piece of a student’s continuous writing and broke it up into its constituent sentences and arranged the sentences hierarchically on the page, so that it looked like a poem. The piece took on a new and vital life. The gaps between the lines were full of meaning. I took a Bob Dylan ballad and produced a second version in which the lines were arranged continuously as in prose. I invited the students to read both versions. I then asked whether they felt there was any difference between the two versions. Yes, there was a difference. Poetry among other things has something to do with the hierarchical, and so spatial, ordering of lines. The space between the lines, the interval, allowed the symbols to reverberate against each other. The space between the lines was the listener or reader’s space out of which he created a unique, unspoken, personal meaning. This may be bad aesthetics, but we experimented, putting together often weird or bizarre, sometimes unexpectedly beautiful series of lines, and exploring the symbolic nature of the space. I became fascinated by condensation; by the implicit. In my teaching I covered a range of contents and contexts, and yet, despite the variations, I felt that here was a speech form predicated upon the Implicit. (1971:5-6).
