Diving with great white sharks, speeding round the track at Brands Hatch with the world sidecar racing champion, being eaten alive in an interview with Lou Reed… though I’ve done lots of exciting things in the course of my life as a journalist, none has come even close to matching the visceral thrill of the four days I spent earlier this year as a teacher at my old school, Malvern College.
I don’t mean that the pupils (or whatever grisly term you’re supposed to call them these days: students? clients? learning co-travellers?) were in any way frightening or unnecessarily difficult. Nor that I found the experience remotely traumatic. I’m merely trying to capture the mix of elation, absorption and high-wire danger which teachers experience every day of their working lives but which most of us (unless maybe we’re actors, lion tamers or bomb disposal engineers) will never know.
When I first wrote about the profession in these extravagant terms, a teacher from a northern comprehensive kindly wrote to invite me to try teaching at his school and see how I felt then. I may yet take him up on it — though I can’t see what I’d gain from the experience other than to discover that I’d make a really bad state-school teacher.
This isn’t a snob thing. It’s an ideology thing. The reason I’m a classical liberal is that I believe the leprous hand of the state taints everything it touches because the state’s values are false values. There are one or two excellent state schools out there — the old grammars, the Toby-Young-style free schools, the state boarding schools like Old Swinford Hospital — but such excellence as they manage to attain is invariably achieved despite the state’s influence, rather than because of it.
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