ABSTRACT

Hopefully, this scenario is not quite as familiar to today’s English teachers, but it may well still strike a chord. I remember a colleague explaining to me in my early days of teaching that the reason why teachers feel so tired so often is that they are in fact engaged in damming up and holding back a powerful torrent of youthful energy all their working lives. I have often reflected on this, and clearly such energy is unlikely to be expressed in reading or writing: its principal ‘voice’ is oral. The idea of education – or more specifically schooling – as a form of control, even opposition, has always been contested too, of course, and increasingly so. ‘Energy is eternal delight’ wrote Blake: the challenge is to make positive use of this energy and power in our English classrooms.