Oddly, all of this helps me connect with educators, with my students, and in workshops and lectures around the world. After a few public spats about targets and testing, I sang “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” to my colleague and old friend Michael Fullan in a debate in Toronto in front of more than a thousand school principals from all over the world (something he writes about in his own autobiography too!).66 Many years ago now, I received positive workshop evaluations from head teachers back in Lancashire saying, “I really liked the swearing.” After my family and I had become Canadian citizens in the 1990s, I even did a fake striptease in front of a hundred school principals and my visiting mother-in-law to reveal a T-shirt saying “My Canada includes the Hargreaves” (this turned out to be the only thing I ever did to improve my relationship with my mother-in-law).
Some of this is theatre, of course (we will see more of this later), but some is also what I grew up with—being quick on your feet, emotionally direct, and brutally honest; being prepared to stand up for yourself and for others who can’t; kowtowing to no one; telling it like it is; connecting to everyday life; being a bit irreverent or even utterly shameless sometimes; and, as John Lennon once put it in an interview with the Beatles, just “havin’ a laugh.”67 My humour that can be an asset in my presentations has a bit of Monty Python about it but also, like Sir Ken Robinson—if not quite so brilliantly—a touch of the end of Morecambe Pier, a place where in the 1950s and early 1960s comedians would perform for working-class families during their seaside summer holidays.
There are times when I look at the strange skill set I have and rejoice in my Blackpool gene. But the very things that can enamour me to my classes and audiences at home and abroad can, however, also sometimes alienate me from colleagues who express and experience their emotions differently than I. This is my failing as much as theirs. Like the lyrics of an old Everly Brothers song, sometimes people think I “talk too much” and “laugh too loud.”68 In meetings amongst American colleagues, my staccato voice with its northern vowels can sound to me and to them like an interruption and an intrusion, so I sometimes end up contributing less rather than more than I really should. American norms of middle-class conversation, at dinner or elsewhere, are to ask a question, receive a considered response, and politely wait your turn while listening to the next person. Northern-English banter, like French conversation, or chatter between twins, though, is to talk over people, overlap, make a comment, and interrupt, not because you’re not interested but because you are. This can come across as rude or just mansplaining in the United States, but where I come from, the women, including my wife’s formidable sisters, do this as much as or even more than the men.
So now you know a bit about my family and community and the origins of my specious way of being. There’ll be more about them later. But for now, it’s time to go to school.
CHAPTER 3
How the Light Gets In
Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights,
Before the dark hour of reason grows.
—John Betjeman
You don’t see children playing out much unsupervised these days. You also don’t see drivers without seat belts, diners smoking inside restaurants, and teachers going out for lunch and a pint of beer on Fridays before they return to their classes either. So we have to beware of romanticizing the past.
But the truth is, we did play out a lot, and there was nobody to organize us except ourselves. We played football, cricket, and hide-and-seek at night by the lamppost on the street corner. We poked bits of tar between the cobblestones with sticks and collected old cigarette packets and brightly coloured beer-bottle tops from the gutters as our own kind of treasure. Occasionally and mischievously, we also knocked on people’s doors and then ran away. None of this would be acceptable today, of course.
Beyond playing outside, though, my biggest memories were of school. Teachers must be careful what they do with their students. The memories of it can last a lifetime.
Spring Hill and Its Streams
Spring Hill Primary School was in an 1899 stone building, a monument to the start of mass public education, a half-mile walk from home every morning, down the cinder-covered backstreets. There were no buses, cars, or school runs. Most of us walked to school by ourselves, taking in a few puddles along the way and, once we got home, getting scolded for ruining our lace-up shoes.
The infant school, for children ages five through seven, was in a separate, smaller building, a bit further down the hill. Eileen Whittaker was its kind, matronly headmistress. A few weeks before going up to the juniors, at age seven, I was called up to Mrs. Whittaker’s desk at the front of the class, where she gave me, like the students before and after me, a vocabulary test. The words were easy at first and then got progressively more difficult. I received effusive praise when I successfully struggled through the phonetics and even the meaning of pneumonia. Then, after two or three failed attempts to pronounce phthisis, the test abruptly came to an end. (Isn’t it interesting how, for the rest of our lives, we can often recall these moments when we failed a test more easily than we can the times when we passed one?) Why on earth somebody devised a test item that expected a seven-year-old, even a linguistically precocious one, to pronounce a word meaning “pulmonary tuberculosis or a similar progressive wasting disease,” straight after pneumonia, defies the imagination even to this day.69
What I didn’t appreciate at the time was that this test, along with Mrs. Whittaker’s other information and judgements about me, were being used to determine the kind of primary education I would get for the next four years—and probably the kind of life I would have after that. Half of the seven-year-olds, along with me, would go into the junior school A stream, or A class, where we would first encounter the kindly older-sister figure Miss Pope. She was followed by the reality shock of a woman in fierce horn-rimmed glasses who would shake me and anyone else senseless in front of the whole class for merely talking out of turn. The somewhat austere Miss Sutcliffe in year 3 seemed not so bad after this, and as we shall see, the inspired teaching of Miss Hindle in the top juniors, for ten- and eleven-year-olds, was nothing short of an educational revelation that had a profound influence on the rest of my life.
The other half went into the B stream and got a different set of teachers, culminating in the school’s only male teacher, in 4B (the lower stream in the top juniors), a stocky bald man with a built-up shoe on one leg—the result, perhaps, of a war injury or a lifelong disability. We never knew.
I don’t recall being prejudiced about people with disabilities. For instance, a young man in his twenties at the bottom of our street had severe cerebral palsy. Although his limbs seemed to be at war with his mind, and his speech was almost unintelligible sometimes, we marvelled at the ingenious contraptions he invented for playing hands of cards and performing other