Chapter 22 - Education

Summary

This chapter examines the crucial place education occupied in Heaney’s professional experience and literary imagination. His ruminations on teaching and learning in both poetry and prose open up personal, social, pedagogical, and political questions which grant us a richer understanding of the institutional and intellectual forces which shaped his thinking. The chapter begins by acknowledging Heaney’s beginnings as a schoolteacher in Belfast in the 1960s, and the work he undertook for the BBC Northern Ireland Schools Service with his friend David Hammond in the 1970s. His collaboration with another friend, Ted Hughes, on the celebrated Faber anthologies The Rattle Bag (1982) and The School Bag (1997), and his later recollections of this work, are central to this argument, revealing complex and generationally specific convictions about the practices of reading, writing, and teaching, from which we may yet have much to learn.