Prescott: a class act…?

I keep reading reviews of Prescott: The Class System and Me (Mondays, 9pm, BBC2) so decided I should watch it. No great surprises – Prescott is what we all know him to be – proud of his working-class roots but equally proud of his large house (“Prescott Castle”), his Jags and his croquet. What a conundrum the man is! – or so the voiceover kept telling us. I don’t have any strong feelings for the man – good on him for getting to where he is, though he can be rather annoying. The reviews have all raved about the wonders of Pauline Prescott, who seems like a pleasant well-meaning woman, if rather less hard-edged than her husband, who declares “The upper classes are the enemy!” Two scenes seemd particularly revealing: firstly, when he met some teenage girls, who explained to him what chavs were and that they weren’t chavs. Prescott asked what class they thought they were; one of them asserted she was middle-class. Prescott expressed surprise; he thought she was working class. “But I don’t work,” she explained patiently. I presume her trust fund keeps her going while she looks for a job. He seemed proud of his ability to communicate with these youngsters; however, this was based on swapping tales of people they have punched. Not a great role model, then. The other moment was at Henley, where Prescott, clearly uncomfortable among the blazers and Pimms, points out to some young men that “only 7.5% of the population go to private schools, but they occupy 80% of high-level civil service, legal and political positions”. This is wrong, he explains. One of the lads asks if perhaps that’s indicative of the standard of education offered by the private schools. Prescott glosses over this. But surely this is exactly the point. The programme stresses over and over that class is not about money. They don’t consider exactly what it is about, but the essence of it, as Prescott agonises over his grammar and claims to never have read a book, is that education is what makes you what you are. Surely, rather than trying to destroy privilege, Prescott should want to improve education, not destroy what already works. He comes across as a man deeply jealous of those who have had a good education, who speak well and use good grammar. One wonders why, if it matters that much to him, he didn’t try to remedy this years ago. But then, perhaps, he wouldn’t be able to go on about his working-class background and the perceived insidious evil of the middle- and upper-classes so much.

Subversive Reading

The excellent Birmingham Book Festival commissioned the philosopher A C Grayling to give a lecture at the festival this year, entitled “The Good Reader and the World”. This is in part a tribute to the National Year of Reading, which encourages the promotion of literacy for children and enjoyment of reading for everyone. In line with this, Professor Grayling began his lecture by giving a detailed summary of the history of reading, from the earliest known literate communities in Ancient Egypt through to the reading explosion of the autodidacts of the nineteenth century. Grayling particularly emphasised the impacts of the early printing presses, particularly their significance not only in rising literacy, but in the fact that literacy was therefore no longer largely exclusive to the church and the ruling classes. The subversiveness of access to religious texts, for example, is not something we think much of these days, but it meant that more people were able to challenge the church on the basis of their own reading – literacy is pwer, and as it spreads power is disseminated. During the Renaissance the importance of the classical literature of Ovid, Cicero, Virgil etc allowed “insight into the wider mind of Europe”, broadening the views of those who could read them (which was of course still a small minority). By the nineteenth century, however, books were cheaper and more available, and more people could read – especially essays and poetry – and many of the working-class were able to educate themselves through their reading. This is hugely significant for social development of a country as a whole, Grayling pointed out, because those who read are thinking more; for example, revolutionaries in the seventeenth century such as the Levellers and the New Model Army were literate, which is hardly a coincidence.

Grayling emphasised the different modes of reading – passive reading, for plot alone, such as one might with a beach novel, and intensive reading, where one puts thought and consideration into the book, permitting a dialogue between reader and author, disagreeing with it, coming to one’s own conclusions. This, he suggests, is the way to be fulfilled in one’s reading, and it has a transformative effect on the reader. Some books, of course, invite purely passive reading, while others engage the reader sometimes against their will, and it those that are treasures.

Modern British education fosters “literacy” and “numeracy” in the quest to turn citizens into “good foot-soldiers in the economic battle”, but as Grayling says, Aristotle said that the point of education was to make “noble use of our leisure”. Education isn’t about getting a job; it’s about one’s life and what one does with it, and permits one to be a “responsible contributor to public conversation”, and indeed a responsible voter, too. Looking at the future of reading, Grayling is optimistic, suggesting that there will always be readers, and always people who do find necessary stimulation in books, even if the nature of “books” as we know them is overtaken by technology. The content of books “will never be far from the centre of a genuinely civilised society”.