Lessons from ballet

In an interview with Josie Appleton, dance critic Jeffery Taylor makes many important points about the failure to teach children dance that can be made for teaching in general.

The suspicion around adult-child relationships undermines teachers’ authority and their capacity to transmit their knowledge to children. When teachers have to worry about every word they say and every movement they make and how they could be interpreted by the sick mind of bureaucracy, they are constrained in their efforts to teach their pupils.

Even more importantly, Taylor’s point that learning classical ballet cannot develop naturally but requires discipline – ie. the teacher shaping the student to the rigours of the discipline until the student’s command of it looks natural – is valid for any school subject or academic discipline, from maths and science to language and literature. Just by virtue of living in society pupils will acquire a lot of knowledge – in particular, knowledge of language – whether we teach them or not, almost ‘naturally’, but they are unlikely to learn it in a systematic way and to a decent level. We do a great disservice to our pupils and waste their potential by pretending that they can naturally develop a command of cultural practices.

Today few people recognise that this suspicion of the teacher not just as an adult but also as a person who transmits knowledge is just as misanthropic as our society’s obsession with paedophilia and represents an attack on the very nature of the profession. Jeffery Taylor’s point is just as valid for teachers of any school subject: ‘If kids are worked hard by their ballet teachers, it is not for fascistic kicks but to show them what they can do.’

‘Where are the Margot Fonteyns?’, spiked, 22 September 2006