Mr Stephen Woods, Director of English
Among the ivy-clad port racks and cloistered demountables of my old alma mater, we enjoyed a multi-sensory educational experience long before these things were pedagogically trendy. As I close in on a significant chronological milestone, I have been reminiscing, Proust-like, on the smells of my Dalby High days. I intend to torture this smell analogy mercilessly to make a point about how English goes about teaching young people the essential skill of sniffing out the truth.
In the days before photocopies, we used to get our handouts in the form of spirit duplications, also known as roneographs or stencils. It livened up a dull lesson no end when the teacher produced a freshly stencilled batch of these purple-fonted, fast-fading resources. It was not our appetite for instruction that gave rise to this enthusiasm; the key to their appeal lay in the ‘spirit’ used in the duplication process — they smelled wonderful, and were always greeted by a collective inhalation from an appreciative class.
But this was not the signature scent of my high-schooling. My school was and is located on the main highway, which meant a soundtrack of semi-trailers working through their gears having been stopped at the second of our four sets of traffic lights. But the growling engines were merely the sensory entrée. In those pre-mining days, most of the trucks
were carting livestock, and these were the fragrances that occupied our olfactory senses as we diligently read our novels, pored over cos and tan tables, or got our trial balances wrong. Over the course of five years of high school, each of us — even ‘townies’ like me — became adept at discerning by smell alone whether a truck was carrying cattle, sheep, or pigs. (‘PALER, that’s Profits, Assets — sniff: pigs — Liabilities, Expenses — sniff: cattle — Revenue’)
I developed, through these daily exposures, a nose for manure, a latent skillset that has been put to the test mightily of late as we endure elections here and abroad, and a media and political landscape far richer in methane than my high school days ever were. Ekka Week aside, the girls of Brisbane Girls Grammar School are not treated to the same earthily instructive aromas as they attend their lessons. To fill this sensory void, English exposes the girls again and again to truckloads of language that has a whiff of cowpat about it, in the hope that they will develop a keen nose for hyperbole, flattery, obfuscation, empty rhetoric, and downright mendacity.
The Year 9s, for example, rollick in the comical lies and duplicitous subterfuges of Oscar Wilde. The world of The Importance of Being Earnest is pervaded by lies and deceptions, so much so that Jack Worthing apologises, ‘it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?’. Jack leads a double life pretending to be his own fictitious wastrel brother, Ernest, while his friend Algernon invents a dependent invalid friend, Bunbury, whose demands excuse him from attending tedious social engagements, leaving him free to ‘bunbury’ as a verb. These genteelly entertaining lies are elaborate and risky, but undetectable to everyone but liar and reader.
The beauty of literature is that audiences, from the vantage point afforded by dramatic irony, know that the characters are lying, and can — from this privileged position — feel either frustration, glee, or smug scorn for those who fall for their stories. Dramatic irony handily screens us from the risk of our own credulity, and lets us study liars and dissemblers like a naturalist does; learning the ways and habits of the mendacious (and the credulous) from the Attenborough-like safety of a literary ‘hide’.
In Year 10, the lies get darker. This year, the girls have already encountered Squealer, the propagandist of Orwell’s perennially topical Animal Farm, and the Macbeths, tragic victims and wicked perpetrators of lies, half-truths, and equivocation. Again, the girls get to watch knowingly as Squealer fudges the Animalist Commandments from ‘All animals are equal’ to ‘but some are more equal than others’, and feel visceral frustration at the animals’ inability to see that they have been duped.
We teach the girls to extrapolate from the books they are studying to today’s world, not Orwell’s or Shakespeare’s. The point of studying Animal Farm and Macbeth in 2016 is not to hop in the DeLorean1 to warn historico-fictional Russians and Scots that their leaders are gulling them, but to be on the lookout for demagogues and spin-doctors who are trying to do the same to us now. Several come to mind straight away. By the play’s end, Macbeth has learnt tragically late not to believe those who ‘palter with us in a double sense;/ That keep the word of promise to our ear,/And break it to our hope’ — sage advice as we endure a long, hyperbolic, promise-crammed, and metaphorically bellicose election campaign.
In Years 11 and 12, the girls continue their exposure to prodigiously talented and tragically influential liars, including most of the cast of The Crucible, and perhaps ruling over them all, Hamlet’s murderous and fantastically disingenuous uncle, Claudius, but they also get to try their own skills in demagoguery. The persuasive speeches in these Years are exercises in being creatively economical — or profligate — with the truth. The girls consciously slant their word choices so that GM crops become Frankenfoods and transplant tourists become vivisectors. They are tasked with slipping past our logos and plying our pathos with lashings of rhetoric and ‘sincerity’. The cloyingly truthful Atticus Finch was right: if we want to really understand how language is used to persuade, dupe, or control us, we have to climb into the skin of someone who does just those things. So, having learnt the art of cowpattery from literary giants, the older girls get to try it out for themselves. Perhaps disconcertingly, the grades for the Year 12 Persuasive Speech are consistently the highest of the year.
There are lots of lists and taxonomies of ‘21st Century Skills’ doing the rounds in education now — a wise head opined to me recently that these are in essence the same skills that built the pyramids — but none of them mentions noses, even metaphorically. I would argue that the ability to sniff out bovine scat should be added to these lists if today’s young scholars are to become savvy citizens not persuaded by whiffy rhetoric, fragrantly delectable promises, or pungently vacuous hyperbole of the ‘there has never been a more exciting time’ variety.
1 Vehicle immortalised as time travel machine in the 1985 film Back to the Future.