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Drama, Education, and the Politics of Change: Part Two

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

David Hornbrook
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Abstract

Following his analysis in NTQ 4 of the origins and effects of the ‘philosophy’ of drama-in-education which prevails in most schools. David Hornbrook here complements his critique with specific proposals for a positive future approach – building upon existing teaching strengths, but also giving the subject a greater curricular authority in the present educational climate, while correcting the ‘romantic fallacies’ from which current practice is too often derived. David Hornbrook has himself taught drama in a large comprehensive school, and is currently Head of Performing Arts at the City of Bath College of Further Education, and Special Lecturer in Drama in the University of Bristol.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 2 , Issue 5 , February 1986 , pp. 16 - 25
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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References

Notes and References

1. McGregor, L., Tate, M., and Robinson, K.Learning through Drama (Heinemann, 1977)Google Scholar; Nixon, J., ed., Drama and the Whole Curriculum (Hutchinson, 1982)Google Scholar; Bolton, G., Drama as Education (Longman, 1984)Google Scholar; Wagner, B. J., Dorothy Heathcote: Drama as a Learning Medium (Hutchinson, 1979).Google Scholar

2. The raising of the school leaving age in 1972 provided drama teachers with an opportunity to demonstrate the socializing role of their subject among a newly enforced and highly reluctant fifth year. More recent projects, with not dissimilar functions, such as the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative, have shown drama teachers busy with interview techniques and personal presentation.

3. For the full awfulness of this arid agenda turn to NADA News 1983: Conference Issue, published by the National Association of Drama Advisers.

4. See Socrates' attack on the relativism of the Sophists in Plato's Gorgias.

5. Bolton, G., ‘Teacher-in-Role and Teacher Power’, in Positive Images, report on the 1985 Nottinghan Conference (National Association of Teachers of Drama, (1986).Google Scholar

6. Eagleton, T., Literary Theory (Blackwell, 1983), p. 31.Google Scholar

7. I use the word deliberately: to ‘mesmerize’ is in some significant way to ‘take them out of themselves’.

8. Trilling, L., Sincerity and Authenticity (Harvard, 1971), p. 144.Google Scholar

9. Freud, S., The Future of an Illusion, Standard Edition, Vol. XXI (Hogarth Press, 1961), p. 11Google Scholar. For Freud's most fully articulated statement of what his theory of the mind implies for man's social destiny, first published in 1930, see Civilization and its Discontents, Standard Edition, Vol. XXI (Hogarth, 1961).Google Scholar

10. See Witkin's, Robert criticism of drama lessons in his Intelligence of Feeling (Heinemann, 1974)Google Scholar, in which he castigates teacher interference in ‘the pure expression’ of children (p. 77–85); also, in much the same vein, Malcolm Ross's attack on Bolton, Gavin in his The Development of Aesthetic Experience (Pergamon, 1982), p. 148–52.Google Scholar

11. Geertz, C., Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983), p. 43.Google Scholar

12. Williams, R., Politics and Letters (Verso, 1979), p. 168.Google Scholar

13. Williams, R., Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977), p. 132Google Scholar. See also his The Long Revolution (Penguin, 1961), Chap. 2.Google Scholar

14. Taylor, C., Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers, Vol. II (Cambridge, 1985), p. 27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar