The Tyranny of Utility

'Miss... what's the point of learning this?'

Dear friends,

It’s been a while. I’ve tried writing this newsletter several-million times, but long-covid hates me and cognitive dysfunction sucks.

This post finally comes to your inbox courtesy of a really good breakfast and some solar-powering by the harbour.

Warning: dangerous-levels of narkiness.

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The Tyranny of Utility

I’ve had trouble writing this for a while now—not just because long-covid is eating my brain—but because my feelings on this are too huge and my thoughts too expansive to properly tie down and bundle up into a coherent, digestible post. I’ve started several times, motivated by those huge feelings: sadness, anger, frustration and a defensive sort of passion… like the world might end and take everything I love with it if I don’t make this argument… but ultimately my brain hits a brick wall of too-muchness and cognitive dysfunction.

The fact is I care too deeply about this topic.

So, I’ve decided to abandon any hope of writing something concise, intelligent and reasonable, and instead I’m going to word-vomit everywhere until I’ve purged myself of all those big emotions, once and for all, so I can—just maybe—move on with my life and be happy.

Look away now if you’re squeamish.

The Question

There’s this question I get asked every year that I teach English to teenagers. Usually it comes around Year 9 or Year 10, as we’re getting into GCSE territory. The question varies a little in how it’s worded, but the essence of the inquiry is the same:

Why do I have to know this?

How is learning Shakespeare going to help me in life?

How is poetry going to make me money in the future?

What is the point of learning this?

How is this useful?

And every time I’m faced with this type of question—usually at a really inconvenient moment in the lesson—I want to crouch in a corner of the classroom and scream into a text book.

Why do I have such a visceral response to such a query, you might wonder?

It’s a Me problem, really. I figured this out recently and I’ll explain this revelation a bit later. Probably, I need to see a therapist about it, but in lieu of being able to afford one, I’m going to try to explain here why, every time this type of question is asked, it hammers yet another nail into the coffin of my sanity.

What is really being asked?

So… what are my students really asking?

Well, on the one-hand, these questions are their way of justifying not caring about the subject. Shakespeare is too hard. Poetry is boring. They really don’t want to write an essay on the theme of responsibility in A Christmas Carol. And if I, their English teacher—the fool who willingly took on the job of teaching them this stuff—can’t come up with a convincing answer, they can dial out of the lesson and use the excuse that ‘this isn’t useful’ to fail the subject.

Why should I care about studying Macbeth or explaining how Shelley presents ideas about power in the poem Ozymandias if there’s no practical value to it? If it’s not going to get me a reliable job, a decent salary or pay for a holiday, a BMW, or the latest FIFA videogame, why should I have to learn this crap? What has a text from another century got to do with me and my life now?

And, on the one hand: fair question.

Honestly, I’m not interested in making an argument for the value of English Literature to the practicalities of modern living. I do have an answer to this type of slightly petulant question that pops up right before I set an assessment analysing Macbeth’s ‘Is this a dagger…’ soliloquy in Act 2 Scene 1… which I will give in a moment… but I also have a question (or two) of my own in response to this attitude. Because it is a matter of attitude. And it is an matter of culture and values and humanity and what-the-hell-are-we-teaching-the-next-generation-about-life-anyway?

On the other hand, this what’s-the-point-of-Shakespeare? question is also, mostly about what I’m going to call The Tyranny of Utility.

The Tyranny of Utility

The Tyranny of Utility is founded on the ideology that the value of something is centred on how useful it is to us.

What do I get out of this?

How is this helping me?

What’s the point?

Occasionally, there might be an altruistic side to this ideology: How is this useful to other people? How can it help them? How can it save the planet, benefit humanity as a whole and make life better for the less privileged?

There’s nothing wrong with that. I’m a big fan of utility in many ways. I rarely buy material goods unless they’re useful. I like the things I own to mostly have a practical function. Do I need this? Do I have a use for it? This is the question I have to ask myself before I make any purchase.

This is partly because I have a limited budget and if I don’t live within my means there is no safety net to catch me if I over-spend. I really don’t want to stretch the whole starving artist cliché; couch-surfing in my late thirties would suck—for my pride and my back.

I also live in a tiny concrete box that is overcrowded as it is with books, manuscripts, knitwear, mugs and cacti, so the other question I have to ask myself is: do I have room for this? How much more paperwork can I stuff behind the sofa to make room for this new item? Buying things just because they’re pretty and I like them is not an option.

I also have some mild childhood trauma over having to dust extraneous decorative items. If you’ve ever lived with a hoarder of ceramics, furniture and other collectibles, you will know what I mean. Another one for my future therapist.

But, having said that, I don’t believe that everything has to be functional to have value. And I don’t believe that something has to have a practical application to be worth learning.

We could argue all day about practical application and what that actually looks like. I could make an argument for the practical value of English, but I’m not going to… mainly because that’s not really the point I’m trying to make here.

Let’s take the most recent question I was asked, just the other day.

How is poetry going to make me money in the future?

Firstly. Note the material focus. According to my students, the whole point of going to school can be encapsulated in that one word: money.

We’re here to get good grades so we can get good jobs and make money.

I could, at this point, lie to my class and tell them that learning poetry will somehow, indirectly, in a way they can’t easily see, enable them to make money when they leave school.

But teenagers know when you’re bullshitting them. They can smell a weak excuse a mile off.

And also: let’s not be afraid of the truth.

So… how’s poetry going to make you money in the future?

Here’s my answer:

It’s not.

Poetry doesn’t even make most poets any money. Not even the well-known, published poets gain much financially from their work. Hardly anyone who writes actually makes a living from it. Especially if they’re writing fiction. And even more especially if they’re writing poetry. It just doesn’t sell that well.

As a means of paying your rent, poetry is utterly useless.

Shakespeare is not going to help you fill in your tax return.

Knowing what the hell iambic pentameter is, is not going to land you a well-paid job.

English Literature is not going to pay the bills, fix the washing machine when it floods the kitchen or teach you to drive a car. It’s not going to make you rich, famous or successful. It is, in that regards, utterly and undeniably useless.

Here’s My Question

Is utility all that really matters?

Is that the only purpose of education?

Is that the only way to judge the value of something? By how much money it’s going to make me in the long run? By the kind of job it will get me?

Is material benefit all we’re really looking for in life? Is that the message we’re promoting to kids these days?

I’m sure my students aren’t the first generation to ask this question, and they probably won’t be the last either. But since I’ve been teaching (which is only a little over a decade) the attitude behind this question has become more prevalent and more hard-wired into the young minds I encounter each year.  Many of them really don’t see the point of an education that isn’t going to directly affect their future financial status.

And like I’ve said: I could make an argument for why English (yes, even English Literature) can help their chances in landing a well-paid job once they leave school.

But I really don’t want to. I defend the right for some things in life to have no monetary value whatsoever and still be worth learning, having and appreciating.

Screw usefulness—even if it’s not money-orientated. Why should education be dictated by usefulness? How do we define what is ‘useful’ and what is not anyway?

And why do I care so much?

Like I said earlier: this is a Me problem.

At the end of the day, the only answer my students really needs is: you’re going to take an exam on this in two years’ time, so suck it up, buddy.

Which is sometimes what I actually do say—especially when it’s last period on a Friday and I’m seriously reconsidering my own life choices.

But it’s not really a satisfactory response: not for some of them and certainly not for me.

And here’s why…

The Me Problem

As part of the long-covid recovery course I did this year, we covered something called The Science of Character. I recommend giving it a little Google. I’ll put a note at the end of this newsletter if you fancy checking it out—it would take a whole other post to cover the topic, so I won’t get side-tracked here.

In brief, The Science of Character is a recent research project that investigated the most highly-valued character traits across human culture and history. It identified six virtues (wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence), which encompass a total of twenty-four character strengths—and from that, the study created a test you can take which will rank all twenty-four of those character strengths for you as an individual: from the strongest to the weakest.

The idea is that identifying your character strengths can help you understand what drives your own character and values, and from that learn how to lean into these strengths to live your best and most fulfilling life.

It was recommended that we take the test, and I did so with my usual hefty dose of scepticism. The results were definitely interesting and I finally found the answer to why my job as a teacher in the British education system brings me such extreme levels of joy and pain simultaneously.

Apparently, there is a character strength called ‘Appreciation of Beauty & Excellence’. This falls within the ‘Transcendence’ virtue category which describes strengths that help you connect to the larger universe and provide meaning in life (this sounds kind of New-Agey, but it really isn’t).

The label ‘Appreciation of Beauty & Excellence’ is pretty self-explanatory, but the website defines it as: ‘an appreciation of beauty, excellence and/or skilled performance in all domains of life, from nature to art to mathematics to science to everyday experience.’

People with this strength are responsive to three types of goodness: Physical Beauty (producing awe and wonder); Skill or Talent (energizing, compels a person to pursue their own goals, inspires admiration); and Virtue or Moral Goodness (makes a person want to be better, more loving and creates feelings of elevation).

Heck, I thought. If that doesn’t describe me, my love for Shakespeare, and my frustrations with the British education system down to a tea then I have no self-awareness at all. This perfectly explains why I hate that I’m increasingly forced to sell Literature short to my students at: ‘Let’s just focus on how to satisfy the marking criteria and get you a decent GCSE grade to put on your C.V.’.

This is why I suffer disproportionate rage every time the government or SLT enforce a policy that devalues reading, creative writing, and the Arts in general, even more than they already have been over the past few decades. Because heaven forbid we promote imagination, creativity and thinking for your self in the next generation. And let’s make sure hell freezes over first before we let them enjoy anything just for the sake of it.

Nope. Everything must be USEFUL. And by useful, we mean IT MUST MAKE MONEY AND KEEP THE ECONOMY GOING BECAUSE THIS IS THE ONLY PURPOSE OF LIFE.  

Anyway.

Like I said before: this is just word vomit to purge my poor literature-loving heart.

My frustration is a Me problem and I’m probably always going to wage my lonely little war with those ‘How is reading Shakespeare going to help me survive on a desert island?’ questions. It’s the only reason I stick it out in my job—the hope that I can, by a process of enthusiastic osmosis, transfer some appreciation of literature to my students. It’s why I started Friday Freewriting with my Year 7 classes and why I run the Poetry By Heart Competition in school. It’s why I hold a creative writing club in my Friday lunchtimes, even though I never have more than four students who regularly turn up. These are my little oases of resistance against the Tyranny of Utility, and even though it feels like I’m losing every battle, I continue in the hope that I might make a difference, one day, to one student who will suddenly find a positive and potentially life-enhancing answer to the question: what is the point of learning this?

If you made it through all of that—you have my respect and gratitude.

If you’re interested in The Science of Character project or the test, stick ‘the science of character, VIA institute’ in your search engine. You have to register to take the quiz, but it is free.

I also recommend you look up Shawn Achor’s TEDx Talk ‘The Happiness Advantage’ on YouTube, because it gives an interesting insight on happiness and also made me laugh until I hurt.

Let me know in the comments:

1. What do you enjoy that is utterly useless?

2. What are your top five character strengths?

3. Recommendations for a reliable but affordable therapist?  

Take care, friends!

PJ