Terence Blacker: Spelling out an unfashionable message

COMMENT

LONDON - Anyone who has the good fortune to visit schools and talk to classes quickly becomes used to surprises. Children, particularly those in their last two years at primary school, can be breathtakingly imaginative, as if benefiting from a last flaring of enthusiasm before teen moodiness sets in.

Working with one group at a school in Hertfordshire, I received a genuine shock. The stories written by the children, who were 10 or 11 years old, were of a high standard but, almost uniformly their spelling - "freind", "althow", "creacher" - read as if the class was in the grip of collective dyslexia.

Later I asked their teacher if these were children with particular problems.

"The school believes in putting creativity before textual correction," she told me. "Spelling and grammar can come later. Now it is all about encouragement."

Creativity, that liberating and yet stubbornly vague concept, is at the centre of the great education debate for which the Government can take both praise and blame. The word seasons the speeches of Charles Clarke (Britain's Secretary of State for Education and Skills), even as he is proselytising on behalf of a national curriculum that squeezes out the imaginative and individual in favour of a materialist emphasis on league tables and prescribed reading lists.

Arguing on behalf of the creativity lobby this week, the author Philip Pullman pointed to a typical effect of what he calls the "brutal" testing regime. When the National Theatre's Nicholas Hytner invited schools to a series of workshops and performances, several teachers turned down the offer on the ground that time out from regular lessons would risk their school slipping down the local league tables.

Children, Pullman says, are now seen as "bright little units of production and consumption. That's not what education is about; education is about developing the whole. It's not like investing in a company where you expect a regular dividend."

With perfect timing, the American documentary Spellbound, just released here as a feature film, has landed like a small but deadly explosion. Following the progress of eight 12-year-olds as they attempt to reach the finals of a national spelling competition called the Spelling Bee, it has rightly been praised as a moving, life-affirming and surprisingly exciting insight into a side of American life that is rarely exposed to film.

One girl in the film is the daughter of a Mexican couple who had entered the States illegally, who now worked on a farm but were still unable to speak English. Another is the daughter of a black single mother. Two of the boys seem behaviourally odd but are brilliant students. One fiercely competitive Asian family coaches their son around the clock, bringing in French and science coaches to cover specialist areas of spelling.

These are the children that Hollywood forgot: bespectacled, nerdish, competitive swots. Certain scenes suggest that, in studying around the clock for the Spelling Bee prize, worth US$10,000 ($16,600) and a fair degree of national celebrity, the children are at risk from the unusual pre-teen illness of logorrhoea (the spelling of which word, incidentally, lands the big prize), but on the whole the film is kind to the families.

Mothers and fathers (six of the eight children benefited from conventional nuclear families) are as anxious and engaged in the process as their children.

What makes Spellbound subversive is that it presents, with general approval, the values of the American dream so often included in the speeches of right-wing politicians and so regularly dismissed or satirised by film-makers and novelists.

For these families, the majority of whom are first-generation immigrants, America really is the land of opportunity where, if you work hard, anything is possible. Teachers are important but the family is the wellspring of success and happiness. Mothers and fathers working around the clock to advance their children are loving and conscientious, not the "pushy parents" so often decried in English middle-class circles.

This brave, old-fashioned ethic is expressed through a process which would have most of our teachers reaching for the smelling salts before ringing social services. The brutal Spelling Bee competition, with its money prize and high risk of childish disappointment, trauma and humiliation, involves the very antithesis of creative work - learning the dictionary by rote.

The film's conclusion is particularly discomfiting for those of us who believe, like Philip Pullman, that there is more to education than tests and lists. Far from emerging like "bright little units of production", the eight stars of Spellbound give every indication that they have gained emotionally and intellectually from the experience. Their logorrhoea, it seems, was not a dead end but a door leading to other areas of learning and those could well include creativity.

- INDEPENDENT