IN how many British schools might you hear “Good King Wenceslas” sung in
Ancient Greek? After Thursday evening of last week’s
It’s My Story — the Retiring John McKie (Radio 4), I can name one:
Hutcheson’s Grammar School in Glasgow.
Except, now that John McKie has retired (or, should I say, been retired), I
doubt the corridors of this distinguished institution resound to the strains of
19th-century Christmas carols in ancient tongues.
It seems a long time ago that school curriculums — and particularly those of
private and grammar schools — were being mocked for their obsession with dead
and apparently useless languages. In It’s My Story the implication is quite
different.
Latin and Greek here are representative of a quaint, and exceedingly
valuable, educational ideology that nurtures knowledge for knowledge’s sake.
This is contrasted with an emphasis by the Government on targets, grades, and
vocational training. Mr McKie is one of the old school, and a victim of
modernisation.
If you think all this sounds a lot like Goodbye, Mr Chips or
The Browning Version, you’d be right. Indeed, we were treated to
extracts from the Gielgud film of The Browning Version during this supposed
“audio diary” (in fact, only a half-hearted attempt at the genre, since we
heard from several of Mr McKie’s colleagues and pupils).
All of which made one think that Mr McKie’s “story” was not really his at
all, but the story that some producer fond of Terence Rattigan wanted to tell,
and that Mr McKie — far from being representative of an older generation of
teachers — was, in fact, an ahistorical type who might crop up in any period of
literature.
That is not to say that Mr McKie’s qualities — his gentleness and gentility,
his thoughtfulness and sincerity, and his obvious love of children — were not
remarkable and genuine. Adopting a metaphor once applied to Socrates, one of
his students described him as a gadfly, biting his subjects’ intellects so as
to wake them up.
The programme was billed as a tear-jerker. But Mr McKie’s egregious
qualities as a person — rather than as a representative of some mythical dying
breed — inspire the hope that there must, and will be, others like him.
Strolling with Sartre (Radio 4, Saturday) was another show that
didn’t quite deliver what it promised. And I’m glad it didn’t, because a
half-hour of intellectual sight-seeing with Miles Kington is no way to remember
Jean-Paul Sartre, the centenary of whose birth is commemorated this year.
For many, Sartre is known through pretentious student productions of Huit
Clos, and dusty thick tomes on the shelf. For those in this category, Mr
Kington’s survey of the man, philosopher, politician, dramatist, and novelist
provided a stimulating bluffer’s guide.
It was particularly interesting to hear what had led him to try to
encapsulate his thoughts on the stage (something that any self-respecting
philosopher of the Anglo-American school would despise). It was a means, we
heard, of enforcing concision on a mentality that — as Iris Murdoch described
it — “can’t say anything without saying everything”. What a strange and
beautiful curse that is.