The Academy of Joy

Thursday 6 February 2025

Eskişehir, Türkiye

The former head teacher, dismissed and disillusioned, lay in his restless bed, his limbs heavy with exhaustion, his thoughts a storm of injustice and regret.

Losing your job can be a hideous blow, both to the pocket and to the ego.

The best way to deal with it is to try and see it as an opportunity – a chance to take a break from the daily toil, reconsider your options and perhaps expand into new territories.

Rather than conclude that you were a bad fit, decide that the job was a bad fit for you.

If you are not convinced, consider all the occasions on which, in your job, you did not want to do the things you were asked to do.

As I tell the Tale of the Terminated Teacher, I find myself thinking of Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener.

A scrivener (or scribe) was a person who, before the advent of compulsory education, could read and write or who wrote letters as well as court and legal documents.

Scriveners were people who made their living by writing or copying written material.

This usually indicated secretarial and administrative duties such as dictation and keeping business, judicial and historical records for kings, nobles, temples and cities.

Scriveners later developed into notaries, court reporters, and in England and Wales, scrivener notaries.

They were and are generally distinguished from scribes, who in the European Middle Ages mostly copied books.

With the spread of printing this role largely disappeared, but scriveners were still required.

Styles of handwriting used by scriveners included secretary hand, book hand and court hand.

Above: Telling a problem to a public scrivener. Istanbul (1878)

Bartleby is a scrivener and when he first arrives for duty at the narrator’s law office, “pallidly neat” and “pitiably respectable“, his employer thinks his sedate nature will have a calming influence on his other employees.

And at first Bartleby does seem to be the model worker, industriously copying out letters in quadruplicate.

But then he begins to rebel.

When his employer asks him to check over his writing, Bartleby gives the response:

“I would prefer not to.”

It soon becomes apparent that he will do nothing beyond the most basic elements of his job.

If asked to do anything more, “I would prefer not to.” comes the inflexible reply.

A dire impasse develops in which the employer cannot bring himself to fire the scrivener because he is so meek and seems to have no life whatsoever beyond his desk.

Bartleby will do only what he wants.

Be inspired by Bartleby’s act of resistance.

To what degree did your job entail compromising over what you really wanted to do?

Bartleby’s rebellion saw him refusing to leave his desk at all.

You, however, now have a chance to move on and find pastures new.

But the dismissed teacher’s despair is too fresh.

He had been asked his opinion how should the teachers be paid.

The boss has the idea of saving money on taxes by shifting some of the expected salary onto a food voucher card – a card not universally accepted nor universally functional.

He had given his opinion, had offered other options, had expressed his concern that by forcing the teachers to spend their hard-earned salaries on a card not wanted would remove from them the dignity of choosing to spend their salary in the manner in which they so desired or needed.

He had gone to work hopeful that his arguments had swayed the boss, that his opinion was as truly respected as the boss had claimed it was.

But the boss had made up his mind and had paid the salaries between bank account and food voucher card.

The morning came and he was greeted by a group of unhappy teachers.

Yet, he felt that perhaps the afternoon meeting – a meeting of teachers and boss – would result in open communication that would lower the temperature of heated tempers.

Those hopes were dashed.

The teachers expressed their concerns as did the head teacher.

The boss rattled on and on as to his difficulties of financing the school, only listening for the opportunity to speak again.

No thought is given to the teachers’ difficulties trying to make ends meet in a disintegrating economy and soaring prices.

He heard their arguments, but did not listen.

He saw their faces, but would not observe their dissatisfaction.

One teacher speaks his mind and something snaps inside the boss.

Debate decays into diatribe.

How he had given them the opportunity to work for him, how some were less competent than others, how he was transparent – not seeing the hypocrisy that was belied by his already done deed – with everyone, how they were ungrateful and disrespectful, how easily they could be replaced – it is an employer’s market – and they had the choice between his way or the highway.

The thought that it was their quality of teaching and their dedication to their craft and their devotion to their students made his wealth possible would never cross his mind.

The meeting had ended.

What had been a bad situation had turned worse.

Some had stormed off.

Some had cried.

The head teacher had held some in his arms seeking words of solace in a desert of despair.

The head teacher was handicapped by a lack of Turkish to communicate with a boss lacking English – a sad reality that the owners of English language schools cannot speak the language they are selling – and so had remained silent in the communal teachers’ room, while the boss had spoken with those who shared his language.

The head teacher had then been taken from public view and summarily fired, with the blame of the teachers’ negativity placed squarely upon his shoulders.

The disgraced dismissal had then returned to the communal room, had announced his sudden departure and had gathered his possessions from his locker and the common table and was then gone.

He blamed himself.

He had openly questioned his boss’ judgment and to save face the boss had fired him.

He had stood by his principles and had paid the price.

The powerless rarely persuade the powerful.

Those in power must quelch dissent, must assert authority, regardless of the damage to the institution or to his reputation.

Better to be feared than to be loved.

He was not their friend.

He was their boss.

The teacher knew that his dismissal did not diminish his experience, did not detract from the dedication he had brought to his role.

He had acted with the best of intentions and it had led to this – sudden unemployment and uncertainty about the future.

He knew it was natural to feel sad and disappointed – he had put his heart into the position.

I find myself thinking of Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim.

Perhaps you can even begin to celebrate the demise of your job.

When Jim Dixon is appointed lecturer in Medieval English History at a nondescript university in the Midlands.

Jim has no intention of messing things up.

He duly accepts his boss Neddy Welch’s invitation to attend an “arts weekend” in the country, realizing that he needs to keep “in” with Welch, but once there, he cannot seem to avoid getting himself into trouble.

Farcical scenes ensue, including burning bed sheets, drunken madrigal singing and various sexual entanglements.

It is when he gives his lecture about “Merrie England“, however, that he blows things most spectacularly delivering the final moments “punctuated by his own snorts of derision“.

Have a much-needed laugh, then start looking for the job that is even more suited to you.

Because there is an unexpected denouement to Jim’s very public disgrace.

Seeing someone make a pig’s dinner of their job – and still come out on top – will boost your morale no end.

Once again, he had fallen into a cowboy school where teachers were disposable pawns and students merely ATMs.

His dedication to real education — not just profit — makes him stand out as a good teacher, a good man, but sadly, integrity often clashes with systems that prioritize money over learning.

He felt that he deserved better, a place that values what he had to offer.

He had acted out of care — not just for himself, but for the teachers and the integrity of education itself.

And yet, instead of appreciation, he had been met with authoritarian indifference.

That kind of leadership only breeds resentment, and while he felt like he had misread the boss, the reality is that he had been simply holding onto the hope that reason and empathy would prevail.

He told himself that this was not a failing, but rather a mark of his character.

What saddened him the most, though he told himself that from this moment on the school was “not my circus, not my monkeys“, but he had quickly grown fond of these people and that loss felt like an exile from those whom he was beginning to love.

Sleep came reluctantly, creeping upon him like a thief.

And in that uneasy slumber, the world dissolved, reforming into something else entirely — a place not of punishment, but of reckoning.

He found himself standing in a vast hall of stone and light, surrounded by high archways that defied gravity, their keystones inscribed with words he had once cherished:

Libertas, Sapientia, Veritas — Freedom, Wisdom, Truth.

At the heart of this hall, a great round table, where ghostly figures conversed with the urgency of men whose warnings had gone unheeded.

He knew them at once, not by sight, but by the weight of their words in his bones.

The teacher recognizes Ivan Illich.

Ivan Dominic Illich (1926 – 2002) was an Austrian Catholic priest, theologian, philosopher, and social critic.

Above: Ivan Illich

His 1971 book Deschooling Society criticises modern society’s institutional approach to education, an approach that demotivates and alienates individuals from the process of learning.

His 1975 book Medical Nemesis, importing to the sociology of medicine the concept of medical harm, argues that industrialized society widely impairs quality of life by overcommericalizing life, pathologizing normal conditions, creating false dependency, and limiting other more healthful solutions. 

Illich called himself “an errant pilgrim“.

Deschooling Society begins as a polemical work that then proposes suggestions for changes to education in society and learning in individual lifetimes. 

For example, he calls for the use of advanced technology to support “learning webs“, which incorporate “peer-matching networks“, where descriptions of a person’s activities and skills are mutually exchanged for the education that they would benefit from. 

Illich argued that, with an egalitarian use of technology and a recognition of what technological progress allows, it would be warranted to create decentralized webs that would support the goal of a truly equal educational system:

A good educational system should have three purposes:

• It should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives
• Empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them
• And, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known.“

Illich proposes a system of self-directed education in fluid and informal arrangements, which he describes as “educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring“.

Furthermore, he states:

Universal education through schooling is not feasible.

It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools.

Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom) nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue’s responsibility until it engulfs his pupils’ lifetimes will deliver universal education.

The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse:

Educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring.

We hope to contribute concepts needed by those who conduct such counterfoil research on education — and also to those who seek alternatives to other established service industries.”

Illich’s view that education’s institutionalization fosters society’s institutionalization, and so de-institutionalizing education may help de-institutionalize society.

Further, Illich suggests reinventing learning and expanding it throughout society and across persons’ lifespans.

Once again, most influential was his 1971 call for advanced technology to support “learning webs“:

The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple.

The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer.

A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description.

It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity.“

According to a review in the Libertarian Forum (1969 – 1984):

“Illich’s advocacy of the free market in education is the bone in the throat that is choking the public educators.“

Yet, unlike libertarians, Illich opposes not merely publicly funded schooling, but schools as such.

Thus, Illich’s envisioned disestablishment of schools aimed not to establish a free market in educational services, but to attain a fundamental shift:

A de-schooled society.

In his 1973 book After Deschooling, What?, he asserted:

“We can disestablish schools, or we can de-school culture.” 

In fact, he called advocates of free-market education “the most dangerous category of educational reformers.“

Developing this idea, Illich proposes four Learning Networks:

1. Reference Service to Educational Objects – An open directory of educational resources and their availability to learners.
2. Skills Exchange – A database of people willing to list their skills and the basis on which they would be prepared to share or swap them with others.
3. Peer-Matching – A network helping people to communicate their learning activities and aims in order to find similar learners who may wish to collaborate.
4. Directory of Professional Educators – A list of professionals, paraprofessionals and free-lancers detailing their qualifications, services and the terms on which these are made available.

Ivan Illich spoke first, his voice carrying the sorrow of lost possibility:

“You see, my friend, schools were never meant to liberate.

They were built to enclose, to regulate, to ensure that the mind does not wander too far.

De-schooling is not destruction.

It is the path to knowledge unchained.”

Above: Ivan Illich

The teacher sees Paulo Freire.

Paulo Reglus Neves Freire (1921 – 1997) was a Brazilian educator and philosopher who was a leading advocate of critical pedagogy.

Above: Paulo Freire

His influential work Pedagogy of the Oppressed is generally considered one of the foundational texts of the critical pedagogy movement. 

It was the third most cited book in the social sciences as of 2016 according to Google Scholar.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Portuguese: Pedagogia do Oprimido) is a book by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, written in Portuguese between 1967 and 1968, but published first in Spanish in 1968.

An English translation was published in 1970, with the Portuguese original being published in 1972 in Portugal, and then again in Brazil in 1974.

The book is considered one of the foundational texts of critical pedagogy, and proposes a pedagogy with a new relationship between teacher, student and society.

Dedicated to the oppressed and based on his own experience helping Brazilian adults to read and write, Freire includes a detailed Marxist class analysis in his exploration of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized.

In the book, Freire calls traditional pedagogy the “banking model of education” because it treats the student as an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge, like a piggy bank.

Above: The banking model of education often places learners in a position to receive lectures by the teacher positioned as expert.

Freire argues that pedagogy should instead treat the learner as a co-creator of knowledge.

As of 2000, the book had sold over 750,000 copies worldwide.

Due to the 1964 Brazilian coup d’état, where a military dictatorship was put in place with the support of the United States, Paulo Freire was exiled from his home country, an exile that lasted 16 years. 

Above: M41 tank and two jeeps of the Brazilian Army in the Ministries Esplanade, near the National Congress Palace (background) in Brasília, Brazil, 1964

Above: Flag of Brazil

After a brief stay in Bolivia, he moved to Chile in November 1964 and stayed until April 1969 when he accepted a temporary position at Harvard University.

His four-and-a-half year stay in Chile impacted him intellectually, pedagogically, and ideologically, and contributed significantly to the theory and analysis he presents in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 

In Freire’s own words:

When I wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed I was already completely convinced of the problem of social classes.

In addition, I wrote this book on the basis of my extensive experience with peasants in Chile.

Being absolutely convinced of the process of ideological hegemony and what that meant.

When I would hear the peasants speaking, I experienced the whole problem of the mechanism of domination.

Certainly, in my earliest writings I did not make this explicit, because I did not perceive it yet as such.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed is also completely situated in a historical reality.

Above: Flag of Chile

Freire wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed between 1967 and 1968, while living in the United States.

Originally written in his native Portuguese, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was first published in Spanish in 1968.

This was followed by an English version, in a translation by Myra Bergman Ramos, in 1970. 

The Portuguese original was released in Portugal in 1972 and in Brazil in 1974. 

Though Ramos’ translation has received some degree of criticism, Freire approved of it and was involved in consultation during the translating process.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed is divided into four chapters and a preface.

The front matter includes an epigraph that reads:

“To the oppressed, and to those who suffer with them and fight at their side“.

In the preface, Freire provides a background to his work and outlines potential opposition to his ideas.

He explains that his thinking originated in his experience as a teacher, both in Brazil and during his time in political exile.

During this time, he noticed that his students had an unconscious fear of freedom, or rather:

A fear of changing the way the world is. 

Freire then outlines the likely criticisms he believes his book will face.

Freire’s intended audience is radicals — people who see the world as changing and fluid — and he admits that his argument will most likely be missing necessary elements to construct pedagogies in given material realities. 

Basing his method of finding freedom on the poor and middle class’s experience with education, Freire states that his ideas are rooted in reality—not purely theoretical.

In the first chapter, Freire outlines why he believes an emancipatory pedagogy is necessary.

Describing humankind’s central problem as that of affirming one’s identity as human, Freire states that everyone strives for this, but oppression prevents many people from realizing this state of affirmation.

This is termed dehumanization. 

Dehumanization, when individuals become objectified, occurs due to injustice, exploitation, and oppression. 

Pedagogy of the Oppressed is Freire’s attempt to help the oppressed fight back to regain their lost humanity and achieve full humanization. 

Freire outlines steps with which the oppressed can regain their humanity, starting with acquiring knowledge about the concept of humanization itself.

It is easy for the oppressed to fight their oppressors, only to become the opposites of what they currently are. In other words, this just makes them the oppressors and starts the cycle all over again.

To be fully human again, they must identify the oppressors.

They must identify them and work together to seek liberation.

The next step in liberation is to understand what the goal of the oppressors is.

Oppressors are purely materialistic. 

They see humans as objects and by suppressing individuals, they can own these humans.

While they may not be consciously putting down the oppressed, they value ownership over humanity, essentially dehumanizing themselves.

This is important to realize, as the goal of the oppressed is to not only gain power.

It is to allow all individuals to become fully human so that no oppression can exist.

Freire states that once the oppressed understand their oppression and discover their oppressors, the next step is dialogue, or discussion with others to reach the goal of humanization.

Freire also highlights other events on this journey that the oppressed must undertake.

There are many situations that the oppressed must be wary of.

For example, they must be aware of the oppressors trying to help the oppressed.

These people are deemed falsely generous, and to help the oppressed, one must first fully become the oppressed, mentally and environmentally.

Only the oppressed can allow humanity to become fully human with no instances of objectification.

In chapter 2, Freire outlines his theories of education.

The first discussed is the banking model of education.

He believes the fundamental nature of education is to be narrative.

There is one individual reciting facts and ideas (the teacher) and others who just listen and memorize everything (the students).

There is no connection with their real life, resulting in a very passive learning style.

This form of education is termed the banking model of education.

The banking model is very closely linked with oppression.

It is built on the fact that the teacher knows all and there exist inferiors who must just accept what they are told.

They are not allowed to question the world or their teachers.

This lack of freedom highlights the comparisons between the banking model of education and oppression.

Freire urges the dismissal of the banking model of education and the adoption of the problem-posing model.

This model encourages a discussion between teacher and student.

It blurs the line between the two as everyone learns alongside each other, creating equality and the lack of oppression.

There are many ways the banking model of education aligns with oppression.

Essentially, it dehumanizes the student.

If they are raised to learn to be blank slates molded by the teacher, they will never be able to question the world if they need to.

This form of education encourages them to just accept what is thrust upon them and accept that as correct.

It makes the first step of humanization very difficult.

If they are trained to be passive listeners, they will never be able to realize that there even exist oppressors.

Chapter 3 is used to expand on Freire’s idea of dialogue.

He first explains the importance of words, and that they must reflect both action and reflection.

Dialogue is an understanding between different people.

It is an act of love, humility and faith.

It provides others with the complete independence to experience the world and name it how they see it.

Freire explains that educators shape how students see the world and history.

They must use language with the point of view of the students in mind.

They must allow “thematic investigation“:

The discovery of different relevant problems (limited situations) and ideas for different periods.

This ability is the difference between animals and humans.

Animals are stuck in the present, unlike humans who understand history and use it to shape the present.

Freire explains that the oppressed usually are not able to see the problems of their own time, and oppressors feed on this ignorance.

Freire also stresses the importance of educators not becoming oppressors and not objectifying their students.

Educators and students must work as a team to find the problems of history and the present.

Freire lays out the process of how the oppressed can truly liberate themselves in chapter 4. 

He explains the methods used by oppressors to suppress humanity and the actions the oppressed can take to liberate humanity.

The tools the oppressors use are termed “anti-dialogical actions” and the ways the oppressed can overcome them are “dialogical actions“.

The four anti-dialogical actions include conquest, manipulation, divide and rule, and cultural invasion.

The four dialogical actions, on the other hand, are unity, compassion, organization and cultural synthesis.

Paulo Freire nodded, his hands folded as if in silent prayer.

“And what has become of the students?

They do not learn — they store.

They do not think — they recite.

The oppressors have convinced them that their worth is measured in certificates, in letters on a page, rather than the fire of their own questioning.”

The teacher acknowledges John Taylor Gatto.

John Taylor Gatto (1935 – 2018) was an American author and school teacher.

After teaching for nearly 30 years he authored several books on modern education, criticizing its ideology, history, and consequences.

Above: John Taylor Gatto

He is best known for his books Dumbing Us Down: the Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling and The Underground History of American Education: A Schoolteacher’s Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling which criticize the modern education system and promote the concept of unschooling and a return to homeschooling.

Gatto asserts the following regarding what school does to children in Dumbing Us Down:

• It confuses the students.

It presents an incoherent ensemble of information that the child needs to memorize to stay in school.

Apart from the tests and trials, this programming is similar to the television. It fills almost all the “free” time of children.

One sees and hears something, only to forget it again.

• It teaches them to accept their class affiliation.

• It makes them indifferent.

• It makes them emotionally dependent.

• It makes them intellectually dependent.

• It teaches them a kind of self-confidence that requires constant confirmation by experts (provisional self-esteem).

• It makes it clear to them that they cannot hide, because they are always supervised.

John Taylor Gatto leaned forward, his eyes alight with the mischief of a man who had long since abandoned decorum.

“Obedience, my dear friends, is the currency of modern education.

We do not create minds.

We manufacture cogs.

The schools are not broken — they function exactly as they were designed.”

Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell, rose to his feet.

Eric Arthur Blair (1903 – 1950) was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell.

His work is characterized by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism (both authoritarian communism and fascism), and support of democratic socialism.

Above: George Orwell

Orwell is best known for his allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), although his works also encompass literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism.

His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the industrial north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics, literature, language and culture.

Orwell’s work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective “Orwellian” — describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices — is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as “Big Brother“, “Thought Police“, “Room 101“, “Newspeak“, “memory hole“, “doublethink“, and “thoughtcrime“.

In 2008, The Times named Orwell the second-greatest British writer since 1945.

Above: George Orwell

Orwell stated in “Why I Write” (1946):

“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.“

Down and Out in Paris and London is the first full-length work by the English author George Orwell, published in 1933.

It is a memoir in two parts on the theme of poverty in the two cities.

Its target audience was the middle- and upper-class members of society — those who were more likely to be well educated — and it exposes the poverty existing in two prosperous cities: 

Paris and London.

The first part is an account of living in near-extreme poverty and destitution in Paris and the experience of casual labour in restaurant kitchens.

The second part is a travelogue of life on the road in and around London from the tramp’s perspective, with descriptions of the types of hostel accommodation available and some of the characters to be found living on the margins.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying, first published in 1936, is a socially critical novel by George Orwell set in 1930s London.

The main theme is Gordon Comstock’s romantic ambition to defy worship of the money-god and status, and the dismal life that results.

The Road to Wigan Pier is a book by the English writer George Orwell, first published in 1937.

The first half of this work documents his sociological investigations of the bleak living conditions among the working class in Lancashire and Yorkshire in the industrial north of England before World War II.

The second half is a long essay on his middle-class upbringing, and the development of his political conscience, questioning British attitudes towards socialism.

Orwell states plainly that he himself is in favour of socialism, but feels it necessary to point out reasons why many people who would benefit from socialism, and should logically support it, are in practice likely to be strong opponents.

The book grapples with the social and historical reality of Depression suffering in the north of England – Orwell does not wish merely to enumerate evils and injustices, but to break through what he regards as middle-class oblivion – Orwell’s corrective to such falsity comes first by immersion of his own body – a supreme measure of truth for Orwell – directly into the experience of misery.

Coming Up for Air is the 7th book and 4th novel by the English writer George Orwell, published in June 1939.

It was written between 1938 and 1939 while Orwell spent time recuperating from illness in French Morocco, mainly in Marrakesh.

The story follows George Bowling, a 45-year-old husband, father, and insurance salesman, who foresees World War II and attempts to recapture idyllic childhood innocence and escape his dreary life by returning to Lower Binfield, his birthplace.

The novel is comical and pessimistic, with its views that speculative builders, commercialism and capitalism are killing the best of rural England, and that his country is facing the sinister appearance of new, external national threats.

The book’s themes are nostalgia, the folly of trying to go back and recapture past glories, and the easy way the dreams and aspirations of one’s youth can be smothered by the humdrum routine of work, marriage, and getting old. It is written in the first person, with George Bowling, the forty-five-year-old protagonist, who reveals his life and experiences while undertaking a trip back to his boyhood home as an adult.

At the book’s opening, Bowling has a day off work to go to London to collect a new set of false teeth.

A news poster about the contemporary King Zog of Albania sets off thoughts of a biblical character Og, King of Bashan, whom he recalls from Sunday church as a child.

Along with ‘some sound in the traffic or the smell of horse dung or something‘, these thoughts trigger Bowling’s memory of his childhood as the son of an unambitious seed merchant in “Lower Binfield” near the River Thames.

Bowling relates his life history, dwelling on how a lucky break during the First World War landed him a comfortable job away from any action and provided contacts that helped him become a successful salesman.

Bowling is wondering what to do with a modest sum of money that he has won on a horserace and which he has concealed from his wife and family.

Bowling decides to use the money on a ‘trip down memory lane‘ to revisit the places of his childhood.

He recalls a pond with giant fish, which he had missed the chance to try and catch 30 years previously.

He, therefore, plans to return to Lower Binfield, but when he arrives, he finds the place unrecognizable.

Eventually, he locates the old pub where he is to stay, finding it much changed.

His home has become a tea shop.

Only the church and vicar appear the same, but he is shocked when he discovers an old girlfriend, for she has been so ravaged by the time that she is almost unrecognizable and utterly devoid of the qualities he once had adored.

She fails to recognize him at all.

Bowling remembers the slow and painful decline of his father’s seed business – resulting from the nearby establishment of corporate competition.

This painful memory seems to have sensitized him to – and given him a repugnance for – what he sees as the marching ravages of “Progress“.

The final disappointment is that the estate where he used to fish has been built over, and the secluded and once-hidden pond that contained the huge carp he constantly intended to take on with his fishing rod but never got around to has become a rubbish dump.

The social and material changes experienced by Bowling since childhood make his past seem distant.

The concept of “you can’t go home again” hangs heavily over Bowling’s journey as he realizes that many of his old haunts are gone or considerably changed from his younger years.

Throughout the adventure, he receives reminders of impending war, and the threat of bombs becomes real when one lands accidentally on the town.

“Politics and the English Language” (1946) is an essay by George Orwell that criticized the “ugly and inaccurate” written English of his time and examined the connection between political orthodoxies and the debasement of language.

The essay focused on political language, which, according to Orwell, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind“.

Orwell believed that the language used was necessarily vague or meaningless because it was intended to hide the truth rather than express it.

This unclear prose was a “contagion” which had spread to those who did not intend to hide the truth, and it concealed a writer’s thoughts from himself and others. 

Orwell encourages concreteness and clarity instead of vagueness, and individuality over political conformity.

Orwell relates what he believes to be a close association between bad prose and oppressive ideology:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.

Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties.

Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets:

This is called pacification.

Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry:

This is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers.

People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps:

This is called elimination of unreliable elements.

Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”

One of Orwell’s points is:

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.

When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”

The insincerity of the writer perpetuates the decline of the language as people (particularly politicians, Orwell later notes) attempt to disguise their intentions behind euphemisms and convoluted phrasing.

Orwell says that this decline is self-perpetuating.

He argues that it is easier to think with poor English because the language is in decline.

And, as the language declines, “foolish” thoughts become even easier, reinforcing the original cause:

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.

It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language.

It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier to have foolish thoughts.“

Orwell discusses “pretentious diction” and “meaningless words“.

“Pretentious diction” is used to make biases look impartial and scientific, while “meaningless words” are used to stop the reader from seeing the point of the statement.

According to Orwell:

“In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.“

Orwell notes that writers of modern prose tend not to write in concrete terms but use a “pretentious Latinized style“.

He claims writers find it is easier to gum together long strings of words than to pick words specifically for their meaning — particularly in political writing, where Orwell notes that “orthodoxy seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style“.

Political speech and writing are generally in defence of the indefensible and so lead to a euphemistic inflated style.

Orwell criticizes bad writing habits which spread by imitation.

He argues that writers must think more clearly because thinking clearly “is a necessary first step toward political regeneration“.

He later emphasises that he was not “considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought“.

As a further example, Orwell “translates” Ecclesiastes 9:11:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill, but time and chance happeneth to them all.

– into “modern English of the worst sort“:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.“

Orwell points out that this “translation” contains many more syllables but gives no concrete illustrations, as the original did, nor does it contain any vivid, arresting images or phrases.

The headmaster’s wife at St Cyprian’s School, Mrs. Cicely Vaughan Wilkes (nicknamed “Flip“), taught English to Orwell and used the same method to illustrate good writing to her pupils.

She would use simple passages from the King James Bible and then “translate” them into poor English to show the clarity and brilliance of the original.

Orwell said it was easy for his contemporaries to slip into bad writing of the sort he had described and that the temptation to use meaningless or hackneyed phrases was like a “packet of aspirins always at one’s elbow“.

In particular, such phrases are always ready to form the writer’s thoughts, to save the writer the bother of thinking — or writing —clearly.

He did conclude though that the progressive decline of the English language was reversible and suggested six rules he claimed would prevent many of these faults, although “one could keep all of them and still write bad English“.

• Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(Examples that Orwell gave included ring the changes, Achilles’ heel, swan song and hotbed.

He described such phrases as “dying metaphors” and argued that they were used without knowing what was truly being said.

Furthermore, he said that using metaphors of this kind made the original meaning of the phrases meaningless because those who used them did not know their original meaning.

He wrote that “some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact“.)

• Never use a long word where a short one will do.

• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

• Never use the passive where you can use the active.

• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

“The Prevention of Literature” is an essay published in 1946 by the English author George Orwell.

The essay is concerned with freedom of thought and expression, particularly in an environment where the prevailing orthodoxy in left-wing intellectual circles is in favour of the Communism of the Soviet Union.

Orwell introduces his essay by recalling a meeting of the PEN Club, held on the 300-year anniversary of Milton’s Areopagitica in defence of freedom of the press, in which the speakers appeared to be interested primarily in issues of obscenity and in presenting eulogies of Soviet Russia and concludes that it was really a demonstration in favour of censorship.

In a footnote he acknowledges that he probably picked a bad day, but this provides an opportunity for Orwell to discuss attacks on freedom of thought and the enemies of intellectual liberty.

He declares the immediate enemies of freedom of thought in England to be the concentration of the press in a few hands, monopoly of radio, bureaucracy and the unwillingness of the public to buy books.

However he is more concerned with the independence of writers being undermined by those who should be its defenders.

What is at issue is the right to report contemporary events truthfully.

He notes that 15 years previously it had been necessary to defend freedom against Conservatives and Catholics, but now it was now necessary to defend it against Communists and fellow-travellers declaring that there is “no doubt about the poisonous effect of the Russian mythos on English intellectual life“.

Orwell cites the Ukrainian famine, the Spanish Civil War and Poland as topics that the pro-Soviet writers fail to address because of the prevailing orthodoxy and sees organized lying as integral to totalitarian states.

Orwell notes that prose literature is unable to flourish under totalitarianism just as it was unable to flourish under the oppressive religious culture of the Middle Ages.

However, there is a difference which is that under totalitarianism the doctrines are unstable, so that the lies always have to change to keep up with a continual re-writing of the past.

This is leading to an age of schizophrenia rather than an age of faith.

Orwell suggests that, for various reasons, poetry can survive under totalitarianism, whereas prose writers are crippled by the destruction of intellectual liberty.

Speculating on the type of literature under a future totalitarian society Orwell predicts this to be formulaic and low grade sensationalism, but notes that one factor is that general populace is not prepared to spend as much on literature as on other recreations.

In criticising the Russophile intelligentsia, Orwell complains of the uncritical and indifferent attitude of scientists, who anyway have a privileged place under totalitarian states.

For Orwell, literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes, but the direct attack on intellectuals is coming from intellectuals themselves.

“In our age the idea of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions.

On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy.

Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution.

The journalist is unfree, and is conscious of unfreedom, when he is forced to write lies or suppress what seems to him important news:

The imaginative writer is unfree when he has to falsify his subjective feelings, which from his point of view are facts.

He may distort and caricature reality in order to make his meaning clearer, but he cannot misrepresent the scenery of his own mind.

Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child’s Meccano set.

It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship.

To write in plain vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.“

At Gatto’s remark, George Orwell let out a quiet, knowing laugh.

“And do you expect the system to correct itself?

Corruption is not a flaw — it is the foundation.

The administrators, the politicians — they know precisely what they do.”

Christopher Hitchens is in the room.

Christopher Eric Hitchens (1949 – 2011) was a British-born American author and journalist.

He was the author of 18 books on faith, religion, culture, politics and literature.

Above: Christopher Hitchens

He was born and educated in Britain, graduating in the 1970s from Oxford with a degree in philosophy, politics and economics.

In the early 1980s, he emigrated to the US and wrote for The Nation and Vanity Fair.

He gained prominence as a columnist and speaker. 

His epistemological razor, which states that “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence“, is still of mark in philosophy and law.

Hitchens’s political views evolved greatly throughout his life.

Originally describing himself as a democratic socialist, he was a member of various socialist organizations in his early life, including the Trotskyist International Socialists.

Above: Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky (1879 – 1940)

Hitchens was critical of aspects of American foreign policy, including its involvement in Vietnam, Chile and East Timor.

Above: Flag of Vietnam

Above: Flag of East Timor

Above: Flag of Kosovo

However, he also supported the United States in the Kosovo War.

Hitchens emphasized the centrality of the American Revolution and Constitution to his political philosophy.

Above: Flag of the United States of America

He held complex views on abortion:

Being ethically opposed to it in most instances and believing that a fetus was entitled to personhood, while holding ambiguous, changing views on its legality. 

He supported gun rights.

He supported same-sex marriage, while opposing the war on drugs.

Beginning in the 1990s, and particularly after 9/11, his politics were widely viewed as drifting to the right, but Hitchens objected to being called ‘conservative‘. 

Above: Images of 11 September 2001

During the 2000s, he argued for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, endorsed the re-election campaign of US President George W. Bush in 2004, and viewed Islamism as the principal threat to the Western world.

Above: Flag of Iraq

Above: Flag of Afghanistan

Above: US President George W. Bush (r. 2001 – 2009)

Above: The Kaaba, Mecca, Saudi Arabia, during Hajj

Hitchens described himself as an anti-theist and saw all religions as false, harmful and authoritarian. 

He endorsed free expression, scientific scepticism, and separation of church and state, arguing science and philosophy are superior to religion as an ethical code of conduct for human civilization. 

Hitchens notably wrote critical biographies of Catholic nun Mother Teresa in The Missionary Position, President Bill Clinton in No One Left to Lie To, and American diplomat Henry Kissinger in The Trial of Henry Kissinger.

Hitchens died from complications related to oesophageal cancer in December 2011, at the age of 62.

Above: Christopher Hitchens

Letters to a Young Contrarian is Christopher Hitchens’ contribution, released in November 2001, to the Art of Mentoring series published by Basic Books.

Inspired by his students at The New School in New York City and “a challenge that was made to me in the early months of the year 2000“, the book is addressed directly to the reader — “My Dear X”  — as a series of missives exploring a range of “contrarian“, radical, independent or “dissident” positions, and advocating the attitudes best suited to cultivating and to holding them.

Hitchens touches on his own ideological development, the nature of debate and humour, the ways in which language is slyly manipulated in apology for offensive and ridiculous positions, and how to see through this and recognize it whenever it arises in oneself.

Throughout, Hitchens makes reference to those dissenters who have inspired him over the years, including Émile Zola, Rosa Parks, George Orwell, Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke, and Václav Havel.

Above: French writer Émile Zola (1840 – 1902)

Above: American activist Rosa Parks (1913 – 2005)

Above: English poet and courtier Sir Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke (1554 – 1628)

Above: Czech President Václav Havel (1936 – 2011)

The book also contains some of the critiques of religion and religious belief which Hitchens would later develop in his polemic God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Why Orwell Matters, released in the UK as Orwell’s Victory, is a book-length biographical essay by Christopher Hitchens.

In it, the author relates George Orwell’s thoughts on and actions in relation to: the British Empire, the Left, the Right, the United States of America, English conventions, feminism, and his controversial list for the British Foreign Office.

Orwell never traveled to the US as he had little interest in it.

He was suspicious of the consumerist and materialistic culture.

He was somewhat resentful of its imperial ambitions and overly critical about its size and vulgarity.

Orwell did take American literature seriously, he recognized its success with the incomplete struggle for liberty, and discussed it on the BBC.

Near the end of his life when his health was failing due to tuberculosis, he began to have a change of heart towards America.

Orwell wrote about Jack London’s life and works and had a great appreciation for them.

Above: American writer Jack London (1876 – 1916)

He began to realize the appeal for North America’s vast land and fierce individualism.

Orwell’s admirers from the States urged him to visit them.

There were many suitable climates for his health and the streptomycin that might have healed his lungs was only manufactured and easily distributed in America.

Orwell briefly contemplated spending some time in the South writing, but he was too weak to visit.

Hitchens thinks that if Orwell had lived another ten years he would have visited the US after being persuaded by his friends in New York.

Orwell understood the importance of Thomas Paine and having a constitution.

His references to American history and American ideals are scarce but quite accurate. 

Hitchens writes:

‘The American subject was in every sense Orwell’s missed opportunity.‘

Above: English writer Thomas Paine (1737 – 1809)

According to Hitchens, Orwell is still very modern because he writes about things relevant to today like machinery, modern tyranny and warfare, psychiatry.

Orwell’s style is fresh, clear, and persuasive. He managed to do this while dying of tuberculosis.

Hitchens:

“Power is only what you allow it to be.

You can resolve not to be a citizen like that, not to do the work of power for it.

The reading of Orwell is not an exercise in projecting blame on others but is an exercise in accepting a responsibility for yourself and it’s for that reason that he’ll always be honored and also hated. I think he wouldn’t have it any other way.“

Christopher Hitchens, glass in hand, tilted his head, unimpressed.

“The real tragedy is that we have allowed education to become a commodity, a product to be purchased.

The higher the fee, the greater the illusion of enlightenment.”

Above: Christopher Hitchens

The teacher sees Noam Chomsky and the writer does not seem happy.

Avram Noam Chomsky is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism.

Sometimes called “the father of modern linguistics“, Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science.

He is a laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and an institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Above: Seal of the University of Arizona

Among the most cited living authors, Chomsky has written more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, and politics.

In addition to his work in linguistics, since the 1960s Chomsky has been an influential voice on the American left as a consistent critic of US foreign policy, contemporary capitalism and corporate influence on political institutions and the media.

Above: Noam Chomsky

Born to Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City.

Above: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

He studied at the University of Pennsylvania.

Above: Banner of University of Pennsylvania

During his postgraduate work in the Harvard Society of Fellows, Chomsky developed the theory of transformational grammar for which he earned his doctorate in 1955.

Above: Harvard University coat of arms

That year he began teaching at MIT, and in 1957 emerged as a significant figure in linguistics with his landmark work Syntactic Structures, which played a major role in remodeling the study of language.

From 1958 to 1959, Chomsky was a National Science Foundation (NSF) fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study.

He created or co-created the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program.

Chomsky also played a pivotal role in the decline of linguistic behaviorism.

He was particularly critical of the work of B. F. Skinner.

Above: US psychologist Burrhaus Frederic Skinner (1904 – 1990)

An outspoken opponent of US involvement in the Vietnam War, which he saw as an act of American imperialism, in 1967 Chomsky rose to national attention for his anti-war essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals“.

Above: A female demonstrator offers a flower to military police on guard at the Pentagon during an anti-Vietnam demonstration. Arlington, Virginia, USA – 20 October 1967

Becoming associated with the New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism and placed on President Richard Nixon’s list of political opponents.

Above: US President Richard Nixon (1913 – 1994)

While expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also became involved in the linguistics wars.

In collaboration with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky later articulated the propaganda model of media criticism in Manufacturing Consent, and worked to expose the Indonesian occupation of East Timor.

His defense of unconditional freedom of speech, including that of Holocaust denial, generated significant controversy in the Faurisson affair of the 1980s.

Above: US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 – 1962) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Above: Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson (1929 – 2018)

Chomsky’s commentary on the Cambodian genocide and the Bosnian genocide also generated controversy.

Above: Skulls at the Choeung Ek memorial in Cambodia

Above: Memorial stone at the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial Centre, Bosnia

Since retiring from active teaching at MIT, he has continued his vocal political activism, including opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq and supporting the Occupy movement.

Above: US Marines with Iraqi POWs – 21 March 2003

An anti-Zionist, Chomsky considers Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to be worse than South African–style apartheid. 

He criticizes US support for Israel.

Chomsky is widely recognized as having helped to spark the cognitive revolution in the human sciences, contributing to the development of a new cognitivistic framework for the study of language and the mind.

Chomsky remains a leading critic of US foreign policy, contemporary capitalism, US involvement and Israel’s role in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and mass media.

Above: A Palestinian child sitting on a roadblock at Al-Shuhada Street within the Old City of Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Palestinians have nicknamed the street “Apartheid Street” because it is closed to Palestinian traffic and open only to Israeli settlers and tourists.

Chomsky and his ideas remain highly influential in the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements.

Since 2017, he has been Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona.

Chomsky is a prominent political dissident. 

His political views have changed little since his childhood, when he was influenced by the emphasis on political activism that was ingrained in Jewish working-class tradition.

He usually identifies as an anarcho-syndicalist or a libertarian socialist.

He views these positions not as precise political theories but as ideals that he thinks best meet human needs:

Liberty, community and freedom of association.

Unlike some other socialists, such as Marxists, Chomsky believes that politics lies outside the remit of science, but he still roots his ideas about an ideal society in empirical data and empirically justified theories.

In Chomsky’s view, the truth about political realities is systematically distorted or suppressed by an elite corporatocracy, which uses corporate media, advertising, and think tanks to promote its own propaganda.

His work seeks to reveal such manipulations and the truth they obscure. 

Chomsky believes this web of falsehood can be broken by “common sense“, critical thinking, and understanding the roles of self-interest and self-deception, and that intellectuals abdicate their moral responsibility to tell the truth about the world in fear of losing prestige and funding. 

He argues that, as such an intellectual, it is his duty to use his social privilege, resources, and training to aid popular democracy movements in their struggles.

Although he has participated in direct action demonstrations —joining protests, being arrested, organizing groups — Chomsky’s primary political outlet is education, i.e., free public lessons. 

Chomsky’s political writings have largely focused on ideology, social and political power, mass media, and state policy.

Above: Noam Chomsky

One of his best-known works, Manufacturing Consent, dissects the media’s role in reinforcing and acquiescing to state policies across the political spectrum while marginalizing contrary perspectives.

Chomsky asserts that this version of censorship, by government-guided “free market” forces, is subtler and harder to undermine than was the equivalent propaganda system in the Soviet Union.

As he argues, the mainstream press is corporate-owned and thus reflects corporate priorities and interests. 

Acknowledging that many American journalists are dedicated and well-meaning, he argues that the mass media’s choices of topics and issues, the unquestioned premises on which that coverage rests, and the range of opinions expressed are all constrained to reinforce the state’s ideology.

Although mass media will criticize individual politicians and political parties, it will not undermine the wider state-corporate nexus of which it is a part. 

As evidence, he highlights that the US mass media does not employ any socialist journalists or political commentators. 

He also points to examples of important news stories that the US mainstream media has ignored because reporting on them would reflect badly upon the country, including the murder of Black Panther Fred Hampton with possible FBI involvement, the massacres in Nicaragua perpetrated by US-funded Contras, and the constant reporting on Israeli deaths without equivalent coverage of the far larger number of Palestinian deaths in that conflict. 

Above: American activist Fred Hampton (1948 – 1969)

Above: Flag of Nicaragua

Above: Flag of Israel

Above: Flag of Palestine

To remedy this situation, Chomsky calls for grassroots democratic control and involvement of the media.

Chomsky considers most conspiracy theories fruitless, distracting substitutes for thinking about policy formation in an institutional framework, where individual manipulation is secondary to broader social imperatives. 

He separates his Propaganda Model from conspiracy in that he is describing institutions following their natural imperatives rather than collusive forces with secret controls. 

Instead of supporting the educational system as an antidote, he believes that most education is counterproductive. 

Chomsky describes mass education as a system solely intended to turn farmers from independent producers into unthinking industrial employees.

Noam Chomsky sighed, his fingers tracing unseen patterns on the table.

“And yet, the greatest minds do not emerge from these gilded institutions.

They emerge from the cracks, from the margins, from those who see the lie and refuse to submit.”

Above: Noam Chomsky

The teacher can taste the restlessness of Jonathan Kozol.

Jonathan Kozol is an American writer, progressive activist, and educator, best known for his books on public education in the United States.

Above: Jonathan Kozol

Death at an Early Age, his first non-fiction book, is a description of his first year as a teacher in the Boston Public Schools.

It was published in 1967 and won the National Book Award in Science, Philosophy and Religion.

It has sold more than two million copies in the United States and Europe.

Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools describes Kozol’s first year of teaching a 4th grade in one of the most overcrowded inner city schools in the Boston public school system. 

Kozol recounts the deeply entrenched policies of racial segregation and inequality on the part of Boston Public Schools and testifies to a crumbling infrastructure in his Roxbury, Boston, neighborhood.

The “classroom” he was assigned turned out not to even be a room at all but a corner of an auditorium where other classes were also held.

One day a large window collapsed as he was teaching his class.

The book also documents the public outcry after his dismissal for teaching the Langston Hughes poem “The Ballad of the Landlord” to his reading class, which portrays the exploitation of black tenants by white landlords. 

Landlord, landlord,
My roof has sprung a leak.
Don’t you ‘member I told you about it
Way last week?

Landlord, landlord,
These steps is broken down.
When you come up yourself
It’s a wonder you don’t fall down.

Ten bucks you say I owe you?
Ten bucks you say is due?
Well, that’s ten bucks more’n I’l pay you
Till you fix this house up new.

What? You gonna get eviction orders?
You gonna cut off my heat?
You gonna take my furniture and
Throw it in the street?

Um-huh! You talking high and mighty.
Talk on-till you get through.
You ain’t gonna be able to say a word
If I land my fist on you.

Police! Police!
Come and get this man!
He’s trying to ruin the government
And overturn the land!

Copper’s whistle!
Patrol bell!
Arrest.
Precinct Station.
Iron cell.
Headlines in press:
MAN THREATENS LANDLORD
TENANT HELD NO BAIL
JUDGE GIVES NEGRO 90 DAYS IN COUNTY JAIL!

Above: US writer Langston Hughes (1901 – 1967)

The day after presenting the poem to the class an official from the school district informed him that:

“No literature which is not in the course of study can ever be read by a Boston teacher without permission from someone higher up“.

He was fired from his position.

Among the other books by Kozol are Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America, which received the Robert F. Kennedy Book award for 1989 and the Conscience-in-Media Award of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools, which won the New England Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992.

Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools is a book written by Jonathan Kozol in 1991 that discusses the disparities in education between schools of different classes and races.

It is based on his observations of various classrooms in the public school systems of East St. Louis, Chicago, New York City, Camden, Cincinnati, and Washington DC. 

Above: East St. Louis, Illinois, USA

Above: Chicago, Illinois, USA

Above: New York City, New York, USA

Above: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA

Above: Washington DC

His observations take place in both schools with the lowest per capita spending on students and the highest, ranging from just over $3,000 in Camden, New Jersey to a maximum expenditure of up to $15,000 in Great Neck, Long Island.

Above: Camden, New Jersey, USA

In his visits to these areas, Kozol illustrates the overcrowded, unsanitary and often understaffed environment that is lacking in basic tools and textbooks for teaching.

He cites the large proportions of minorities in the areas with the lowest annual budgets, despite the higher taxation rate on individuals living in poverty within the school district.

Kozol cites various historical cases regarding lawsuits filed against school districts in East Orange, Camden, Irvington and Jersey City in which judges have sided with the children and concerned locals in a given district instead of adhering to state law concerning the taxation and distribution of funding.

Above: City Hall, East Orange, New Jersey, USA

Above: Jersey City, New Jersey, USA

He additionally goes into detail comparing the current conditions poor, minority children are expected to learn in, and the findings of the historical case Brown v. Board of Education and Plessy v. Ferguson.

He also mentions other such historical cases in which the outcomes have supported what he views to be an unjust system of funds distribution and taxation in Milliken v. Bradley, San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, and through the overturning of State Supreme Court decisions in both Michigan and Texas by the Supreme Court of the United States.

Kozol argues that racial segregation is still alive and well in the American educational system, due to the gross inequalities that result from unequal distribution of funds collected through both property taxes and funds distributed by the State in an attempt to “equalize” the expenditures of schools.

His 1995 book, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, described his visits to the South Bronx of New York City, the poorest congressional district in the US.

It received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1996.

He published Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope in 2000 and The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America was released September 13, 2005.

Kozol documents the continuing and often worsening segregation in public schools in the US and the increasing influence of neoconservative ideology on the way children, particularly children of color and poor children of urban areas, are educated.

Kozol advocates for integrated public education in the US and is a critic of the school voucher movement.

He continues to condemn the inequalities of education and the apparently worsening segregation of black and Hispanic children from white children in the segregated public schools of almost every major city of the nation.

Kozol’s ethical argument relies heavily on comparisons between rich and poor school districts.

In particular, he analyzes the amount of money spent per child.

He finds that in school districts whose taxpayers and property-owners are relatively wealthy, the per-child annual spending is much higher (for example, over $20,000 per year per child in one district) than in school districts where poor people live (for example, $12,000 per year per child in one district).

He asks rhetorically whether it is right that the place of one’s birth should determine the quality of one’s education.

Jonathan Kozol stood, pacing.

“The poor are told that education will free them, yet the very system ensures their servitude.

The wealthy buy their knowledge.

The rest are left with scraps.”

Above: Jonathan Kozol

The teacher quietly waited for William Deresiewicz to speak.

William Deresiewicz is an American author, essayist, and literary critic, who taught English at Yale University from 1998 to 2008.

He is the author of A Jane Austen Education (2011), Excellent Sheep (2014) and The Death of the Artist (2020).

Above: William Deresiewicz

His criticism directed to a popular audience has appeared in The Nation, The American Scholar, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Atlantic and Harper’s.

In A Jane Austen Education, a memoir of a sort, Deresiewicz admits that he was initially resistant to reading 19th-century British fiction.

Soon, though, he discovered that Austen’s novels are valuable tools in the journey towards becoming an adult.

Above: English novelist Jane Austen (1775 – 1817)

Deresiewicz juxtaposes his reading of Jane Austen with insight into his own life.

For example, the reader learns about his controlling father, a series of girlfriends that come and go, and the struggles of being raised in a religious household.

In the summer of 2008, Deresiewicz published a controversial essay for The American Scholar titled “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education“.

In it, he criticizes the Ivy League (an American collegiate athletic conference of eight private research universities in the Northeastern United States) and other elite colleges and universities for supposedly coddling their students and discouraging independent thought.

He claims that elite institutions produce students who are unable to communicate with people who don’t have the same backgrounds as themselves, noting as the first example his own inability to talk to his plumber.

Deresiewicz then uses Al Gore and John Kerry, graduates of Harvard and Yale (respectively), as examples of politicians who are out of touch with the lives of most Americans.

Above: Former US Vice President Al Gore (r. 1993 – 2001)

Above: Former US Secretary of State John Kerry (r. 2013 – 2017)

The article became the groundwork for Deresiewicz’s book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (2014). 

This work had a mixed response.

Dwight Garner, writing for the New York Times daily book review, praised it as “packed full of what Deresiewicz wants more of in American life:

Passionate weirdness.”

He characterized Deresiewicz as “a vivid writer, a literary critic whose headers tend to land in the back corner of the net“, one whose “indictment arrives on wheels:

He takes aim at just about the entirety of upper-middle-class life in America.”

Other responses, however, were more critical.

In the New York Times Sunday book review, Anthony Grafton conceded that “much of his dystopian description rings true” but argued that:

“The coin has another side, one that Deresiewicz rarely inspects.

Professors and students have agency.

They use the structures they inhabit in creative ways that are not dreamt of in Deresiewicz’s philosophy, and that are more common and more meaningful than the ‘exceptions’ he allows.“

In the New Yorker, Nathan Heller was critical from another corner, arguing that the “quandaries” Deresiewicz describes are “distinctly middle-class“. 

Heller says that Deresiewicz argues the liberal arts “will help students hone their ‘moral imagination‘” but:

“The advice seems cheap.

When an impoverished student at Stanford, the first in his family to go to college, opts for a six-figure salary in finance after graduation, a very different but equally compelling kind of ‘moral imagination’ may be at play.

(Imagine being able to pay off your loans and never again having to worry about keeping a roof over your family’s heads.)”

Above: Seal of Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA

Despite this mixed critical response, the book was a New York Times bestseller.

In October 2009, Deresiewicz delivered a speech titled “Solitude and Leadership” to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point. 

Above: Coat of arms of West Point Military Academy, New York, USA

It was later published in The American Scholar and went viral online. 

In it, he makes the case that leadership entails more than just success and accomplishment.

Above: William Deresiewicz

Citing observations he made of students at Yale and Columbia, Deresiewicz discusses the ubiquity of “world-class hoop jumpers” who “can climb the greasy pole of whatever hierarchy they decide to attach themselves to“. 

Above: Logo of Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA

Above: Coat of arms of Columbia University, New York City, USA

Instead, he argues, true leaders (such as General David Petraeus) are those who are able to step outside the cycle of achievement and hoop jumping in order to think for themselves.

Above: Former CIA Director David Petraeus (2011 – 2012)

Deresiewicz claims that solitude is essential to becoming a leader.

William Deresiewicz added:

“And even those who pay find themselves trapped.

They are not thinkers — they are performers in a game rigged against the soul.”

A hush settled, and then, from the shadows, stepped others —figures older, wilder, unafraid.

The teacher waited for Évariste Desiré de Forges, Vicomte de Parny (6 February 1753 – 5 December 1814), French Rococo poet, to speak.

Above: Évariste de Parny

De Parny was born in Saint-Paul on the Isle of Réunion (formerly Île de Bourbon).

Above: Saint Paul, Réunion

He came from an aristocratic family from the region of Berry, which had settled on the island in 1698.

He left the island at the age of ten years to return to France with his two brothers, Jean-Baptiste and Chériseuil.

Above: Location of Réunion

He studied with the Oratoriens at their college in Rennes and decided to enter their religious order.

Above: Place de la Mairie, Rennes, France

According to the historian Prosper Ève:

“A tradition developed by his enemies has it that at the age of 17, he considered embracing an ecclesiastical career with the firm intention of locking himself up in the convent of La Trappe“.

Above: Abbaye of Notre Dame de la Trappe, Soligny la Trappe, France

In fact, he had already “lost a faith that had never been very strong“.

He studied theology for six months at the Collège Saint-Firmin in Paris.

Catriona Seth’s thesis shows that the archives confirm the future writer’s stay at Saint-Firmin.

He officially left because of illness, but it may have been a diplomatic illness.

He decided finally instead on a military career, explaining that he was not religious enough to become a monk.

He was attracted to Christianity mainly by the poetic imagery of the Bible.

Above: College Saint-Firmin, Paris, france

His brother Jean-Baptiste, an equerry of the Count of Artois, introduced him at the French Court at Versailles, where he met two other soldiers, who, like him, were from the French colonies, and would make their names in poetry: 

• Antoine de Bertin (1752 – 1790), also from the Isle of Bourbon 

Above: French soldier / poet Antoine Bertin

• Nicolas-Germain Léonard (1744 – 1793), from Guadeloupe

Above: French poet Nicholas Germain Léonard

In 1773, Parny visited his father and family on the Isle of Réunion.

During his visit, he fell in love with Esther Lelièvre, but her father forbad them to marry.

Missing Paris, he returned to France in 1775. 

Soon after he left, he learned that the Esther Lelièvre had married a doctor on the island.

His unhappy romance inspired his first published poems, Les Poésies érotiques, which appeared in 1778, where Esther appeared under the name of Éléanore.

The collection of poems brought great success and celebrity to its author.

On 6 November 1779, Parny was named a captain in the Queen’s Regiment of Dragoons.

In 1783, he returned to the Isle of Réunion to settle the estate of his father, who had died, and also visited the Isle de France.

In 1785, he left the Isle of Réunion for Pondicherry in India, where he became an aide de camp to the Governor-General of the French colonies in India.

He was not at all happy in India, but he gathered a part of the material for his Chansons Madécasses (Songs of Madagascar), one of the first prose poems written in the French language.

He soon moved back to France, where he left the Army and moved to a house he owned in the valley of Feuillancourt, between Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Marly-le-Roi.

The house was named La Caserne (The barracks), and with Bertin and Léonard, they formed a literary club called “The Society of the Barracks” which met regularly at the house.

When the French Revolution broke out, Parny, who did not receive any pension from the King and was not particularly interested in politics, played no part.

He did, however, have to settle the debts left by his brother Jean-Baptiste.

In 1795, these debts nearly ruined him.

He was forced to take a position in the offices of the Ministry of the Interior for 13 months.

He then worked in the administration of the Theater and the Arts.

In 1804, the Count of Nantes found him another government position.

In 1802, Parny married Marie-Françoise Vally.

The following year he was received into the Académie française, where he occupied the 36th armchair.

In 1813, Emperor Napoleon I granted him a pension of three thousand francs a year, but this was stopped under the Restoration of the monarchy in 1814.

Abovr: French Emperor Napoléon I (1769 – 1821)

Parny died on 5 December 1814, in Paris.

Above: Grave of Parny, Père Lachiase Cemetery, Paris, France

Parny became known for his Poésies érotiques (1778) a collection of love poems which brought a breath of fresh air to the formal academic poetry of the 18th century.

He is also known for his Chansons madécasses (1787), which he called translations of songs of the island of Madagascar, which are considered the first prose poems in French.

They were illustrated by artist J-E Laboureur (1920) and some of them were set to music by Maurice Ravel (Chansons madécasses, 1925).

Above: French composer Maurice Ravel (1875 – 1937)

Parny’s early love poems and elegies are characterised by the combination of tenderness, fancy and wit.

One famous piece, the Elegy on a Young Girl, is an example.

He also published: 

• Voyage de Bourgogne (1777)

• Épître aux insurgents de Boston (Letter to the insurgents in Boston)(1777) to express his solidarity with the Boston Tea Party insurgents, who were demanding freedom. According to Prosper Eve:
  • “This love of freedom certainly came to him from reading the philosophers, but it could only have been born and grown through the spectacle of the excesses of Bourbonnais society.” 
    

Above: Boston Tea Party – 16 December 1773

It was an American political and mercantile protest by the Sons of Liberty in Boston in colonial Massachusetts. 

The target was the Tea Act of 10 May 1773, which allowed the East India Company to sell tea from China in American colonies without paying taxes apart from those imposed by the Townshend Acts.

The Sons of Liberty strongly opposed the taxes in the Townshend Act as a violation of their rights.

In response, the Sons of Liberty, some disguised as Native Americans, destroyed a shipment of tea sent by the East India Company.

The demonstrators boarded the ships and threw the chests of tea into the Boston Harbor. 

• Opuscules poétiques (1779)

• Élégies (1784)

• Le Portefeuille Volé (The Stolen Wallet)(1805) containing:
  • Les Déguisements de Vénus (The Disguises of Venus) 
  • Les Galanteries de la Bible (The Gallantries of the Bible)
  • Le Paradis perdu (Paradise Lost) a poem in four songs

• Les Voyages de Céline (The Voyages of Celine)(1806)

In 1799 he published La Guerre des Dieux (The War of the Gods), a poem in the style of Voltaire’s Pucelle, directed against the Church.

Above: French writer / philosopher François-Marie Arouet (aka Voltaire)(1694 – 1778)

The book was banned by the French government in 1827, long after his death, but still appeared in many clandestine editions.

Parny devoted himself in his later years almost entirely to religious and political burlesque.

In 1805 he produced an extraordinary allegorical poem attacking George III, his family and his subjects, under the eccentric title of “Goddam! Goddam! par un French-dog“.

Above: British King George III (1738 – 1820)

The poems of De Parny were extremely popular in France and as far away as Russia in the beginning of the 19th century.

“I learned by heart the elegies of the Chevalier de Parny, and I still know them,” wrote Chateaubriand in 1813.

Above: French writer François René de Chateaubriand (1768 – 1848)

The Russian poet Alexander Pushkin wrote:

“Parny, he’s my master.”

The 20th-century Russian poet Anna Akhmatova recorded Pushkin’s admiration for Parny in a poem:

“There lay your three-cornered hat and a dog-eared tome of Parny.“

Above: Russian writer Alexander Pushkin (1799 – 1837)

His Œuvres choisies (Selected Works) were published in 1827.

There is a sketch of Parny in Sainte-Beuve’s Portraits contemporains.

Above: French literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

Évariste de Parny lamented in verse, mourning a world where poetry was bartered like grain, where the beauty of learning had been whittled down to market value.

“A Poet’s Lament

Once, verse was spun from dawn’s first breath,
A whisper soft, defying death.
Yet now, like grain in merchant’s hand,
It’s weighed and priced, a thing so bland.

Where once a scholar drank the stars,
Now ledgers dim their golden bars.
No longer beauty, bright and free,
But worth assigned in currency.

O halls of learning, hollowed bare!
Where wisdom fades in weighted air.
Not love of words, nor truth’s embrace—
But numbers carved in coldest place.

I mourn the quill now clipped and sold,
Where minds once soared, now caged in gold.
Yet still, I whisper, frail but true:
A poet’s soul will break through, too.“

The teacher shook the poet’s hand and exclaimed:

“If ever the world forgets the value of poetry, let us be its last defenders, standing firm against the tide of commerce with ink-stained hands and hearts full of verse.”

A cruel chortle then caused the teacher to turn and face Julian Niemcewicz.

Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz (6 February 1758 – 21 May 1841) was a Polish poet, playwright and statesman.

He was a leading advocate for the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth’s Constitution of 3 May 1791.

Above: Julian Niemcewicz

As a writer, Niemcewicz tried many styles of composition.

He left behind a rich and diverse body of work.

Many of his works were innovative in Polish literature, including 
Jan z Tęczyna (1824) which is considered the first Polish historical novel.

His fairy tales, dramas (especially The Return of the Deputy, 1790), the cycle of poems Śpiewy historii (Historical Songs)(1816) enjoyed enormous popularity and often had a great influence on public opinion and politics.

In his works, Niemcewicz addressed political (patriotic) issues, dressing them in a historical or satirical form, which often determined their success and influence.

His political comedy, The Return of the Deputy (Powrót Posła)(1790), a political comedy in three acts, was a reaction to the external and internal political situation in Poland and enjoyed great acclaim.

The piece confronts supporters of two political camps: conservatives and reformers.

The most ardent representative of the first group is Gadulski, who insists on free elections, the principle of liberum veto and is against giving more rights to peasants and townspeople.

He insisted on a passive attitude of Poland in foreign policy.

Above: Flag of Poland

The reformers are represented by Podkomorzy, his wife and Walery.

They want to end the arbitrariness of the nobility, which mostly cared only about its own interests, not the fate of the state.

They demand the abolition of free elections and the principle of liberum veto.

They want to increase the rights of the townspeople and peasants.

In their understanding, Poland was to take an active part in foreign policy and fight for its own interests in the international arena.

In political matters, Starościna and Szarmancki can be considered neutral figures in the comedy, who only care about what is fashionable and elegant, and the fate of the state does not concern them at all.

Another theme of the comedy is the fight between Walery and Szarmancki for Teresa’s hand, which is ultimately won by the Chamberlain’s son (Walery).

Śpiewy historii (Historical Songs) was a collection of historical-patriotic songs, creating an idealized vision of Poland’s past.

The songs were intended by the author to have a primarily didactic function and were aimed primarily at young people.

Niemcewicz repeatedly emphasizes this fact in the preface to the work:

“To remind the youth of the deeds of their ancestors, to let them know the most brilliant Nation of the era, to associate love of the Fatherland with the first impressions of memory, is an infallible way of instilling in the Nation a strong attachment to the country:

Nothing can then erase these first impressions, these early notions, they grow stronger with the years, dispose them to brave defenders for battle, to the counsel of virtuous men.

I want the knowledge of the history of the Fatherland to become charming to the youth, universal to all, through the coherence of rhymes and above all through the charm of song.“

Each of the songs was accompanied by Przydatek (historical commentaries), which placed the content of the songs in the appropriate context.

An equally important element were the engravings, which presented scenes described in the songs.

The whole was preceded by a preface, in which Niemcewicz explained the goals and motives that guided him in writing the work, and also mentioned the difficulties related to its publication.

An interesting addition was a glossary, which explained “Expressions that are familiar to me today“.

The first edition also included a list of subscribers, thanks to whose support it was possible to publish the songs.

One of the more interesting fragments of the publication is the final part of Śpiewy, entitled Notes on the Fall and Character of the Polish Nation.

Niemcewicz sees the causes of the fall of the Republic rather in systemic errors than in national character.

By pointing out certain features of that character that could be assessed negatively, Niemcewicz nevertheless tries to show them in a positive light – he writes, for example:

“Even in the very abuse of wealth, a noble and warlike mind shone in the Poles, they destroyed themselves more for others than for themselves, not inventions, not vain creations, but the splendor of armor, armor and horses, the splendor of national gatherings, the generosity of hospitality in receptions, such were their excesses:

Prostitution could have lulled the warlike spirit in the Poles for a time, nested in them a habit that may have lasted until now, idleness, a distaste for constant work, an unbridled desire for fun and pleasure, but, giving faults, it preserved in all its strength the boldness, the noble dedication to the country, to freedom, and this, so to speak, iron will to be a nation.“

The popularity and patriotic impact of the publication were quickly noticed by the partitioning governments.

Already in 1822, the president of the Austrian Oberste Polizei und Censur-Hofstelle, Count Sedlnicki , intervened in the matter of the publication, who was worried by the reports of one of the informants.

The secret collaborator with the pseudonym “D’O” reported, among other things, that the work “is full of invectives, sarcasms and accusations against Austria, hostile to Poland, ungrateful for the services rendered to it by the Sarmatian courage of Jan Sobieski – Austria, which ultimately repaid Poland with partition.

The role of the collection of songs, set to music, scattered all over Poland and breathing hatred towards Austria, can only be compared to the hatred of the French revolutionaries, who wrote the words “Fight and death to the Austrian court!” on all gates”.

Above: Flag of Austria

The first editions did not arouse any interest among the Russian occupiers, but already in 1827 the infamous Nikolai Novosiltsov (1761 – 1838) ordered the removal of the Songs from libraries.

Above: Flag of Russia

Particular repressions followed the November Uprising (1830 – 1831). 

Above: Taking of the Warsaw Arsenal, 20 November 1830

Dwaj panowie Sieciechowie (Two Sieciechowie Gentlemen) was a novel, first published in 1815.

The novel is structurally composed of two separate parts.

The first is the narrator’s account, which describes a meeting with Florian Sieciech, his mother, and the discovery of the diaries.

The second consists of fragments of the diaries of members of the Sieciech family:

• Wacław Sieciech (who was Florian’s grandfather)
• Stanisław Sieciech (who is Florian’s son).

Wacław Sieciech’s notes cover the years 1710 to 1717, while Stanisław Sieciech’s from 1808 to 1812.

The notes of Wacław and Stanisław Sieciech, written in two different eras, a whole century apart, are juxtaposed alternately.

After the fragment written by Wacław, a fragment by Stanisław Sieciech is quoted.

The notes differ in many respects, both in language (the text written by Wacław contains a lot of macaronic words (foreign words tossed into one’s native language), while the language of Stanisław Sieciech is devoid of them) and style.

They also present a completely different view of matters related to the homeland.

The narrator, driving through a certain town near Warsaw, meets Florian Sieciech, who was a friend of his father.

Sieciech invites the guest to his home for dinner, where he stays for some time, discovering notebooks with the Sieciech family notes.

With Florian’s permission, the narrator takes the diaries to read and copies fragments of them.

The content of the diaries included in the novel are the fragments “copied” by the narrator.

His novel, John of Tenczyn (1824), written in the style of Sir Walter Scott, gives a vigorous picture of old Poland.

Above: Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott (1771 – 1832)

He also wrote a History of the Reign of Sigismund III (three volumes, 1819) and a collection of memoirs for ancient Polish history (six volumes, 1822 – 1823).

Above: Polish King Sigismund III (1566 – 1632)

Niemcewicz’s 1817 pamphlet Rok 3333 czyli sen niesłychany (The Year 3333, or an Incredible Dream), first published posthumously in 1858, describes a Poland transformed into a sinister Judeo-Polonia.

The pamphlet has been described as “the first Polish work to develop on a large scale the concept of an organized Jewish conspiracy directly threatening the existing social structure.”

(Somehow I don’t think Chomsky and Niemcewicz would have liked one another.)

His collected works were published in twelve volumes at Leipzig in 1838 – 1840.

Julian Niemcewicz laughed bitterly.

“Ah, but is this not how it has always been?

The wise serve fools, and fools grow fat on their wisdom.”

Above: Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz

Undaunted, Ugo Foscolo addressed the assembled.

Ugo Foscolo (6 February 1778 – 10 September 1827), born Niccolò Foscolo, was an Italian writer, revolutionary and poet.

He is especially remembered for his 1807 long poem Dei Sepolcri.

Above: Ugo Foscolo

Foscolo was born in Zakynthos in the Ionian Islands.

His father Andrea Foscolo was an impoverished Venetian nobleman and doctor, and his mother Diamantina Spathis was Greek.

Above: Zakintos City, Zakintos Island, Greece

In 1788, upon the death of his father, who worked as a physician in Split, Croatia, the family moved to Venice.

Above: Grand Canal, Venezia (Venice), Italia (Italy)

Foscolo completed the studies he began at the Dalmatian Grammar School at the University of Padua.

Above: Seal of the University of Padua

Amongst his Paduan teachers was the Abbé Melchiore Cesarotti, whose version of Ossian was very popular in Italy, and who influenced Foscolo’s literary tastes.

Above: Italian poet Melchiorre Cesarotti (1730- 1808)

Foscolo knew both modern and Ancient Greek.

His literary ambition revealed itself in the appearance in 1797 of his tragedy Tieste — a production that enjoyed a certain degree of success.

Foscolo, who, for unknown reasons, had changed his Christian name Niccolò to that of Ugo, began to take an active part in the stormy political discussions which the fall of the Republic of Venice (697 – 1797) had triggered.

Above: Flag of the Republic of Venice

Foscolo was a prominent member of the national committees, and addressed an ode to Napoleon, expecting Napoleon to overthrow the Venetian oligarchy and create a free republic.

The Treaty of Campo Formio (17 October 1797), under which, the French having indeed forced the dissolution of the ancient Republic of Venice, then handed over the city and the Veneto to the Austrians (in exchange for the Austrian Netherlands) gave a rude shock to Foscolo, but did not quite destroy his hopes.

Above: French troops enter Venice, 12 May 1797

The state of mind produced by that shock is reflected in his novel The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis (1798), which was described by the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica as a more politicized version of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther:

“For Foscolo’s hero embodies the mental sufferings and suicide of an undeceived Italian patriot just as Goethe’s hero places before us the too-delicate sensitiveness, embittering and at last cutting short the life of a private German scholar.”

Above: German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832)

The story of Foscolo’s novel, The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis had a groundwork of melancholy fact.

Jacopo Ortis had been a real person.

He was a young student from Padua and committed suicide there under circumstances akin to those described by Foscolo.

Foscolo, like many of his contemporaries, had thought much about suicide. 

Cato the Younger and the many classical examples of self-destruction described in Plutarch’s Lives appealed to the imaginations of young Italian patriots as they had to the heroes and heroines of the Gironde in France.

Above: Bust of Roman politician Cato the Younger (95 – 46 BC)

Above: Bust of Greek philosopher Plutarch (46 – 120)

Above: Jacques Pierre Brissot (1754 – 1793) and 20 other Girondin members before the Revolutionary Tribunal, 1793 (The Girondins were a political group during the French Revolution (1789 – 1799).

From 1791 to 1793, the Girondins were active in the Legislative Assembly and the National Convention (1792 – 1795).

Together with the Montagnards (1792 – 1799), they initially were part of the Jacobin movement (1789 – 1794).

They campaigned for the end of the monarchy, but then resisted the spiraling momentum of the Revolution, which caused a conflict with the more radical Montagnards.

They dominated the movement until their fall in the insurrection of 31 May – 2 June 1793, which resulted in the domination of the Montagnards and the purge and eventual mass execution of the Girondins.

This event is considered to mark the beginning of the Reign of Terror (1792 – 1794).

The Girondins were a group of loosely affiliated individuals rather than an organized political party and the name was at first informally applied because the most prominent exponents of their point of view were deputies to the Legislative Assembly from the département of Gironde in southwest France.)

Above: Flag of France

In the case of Foscolo, as in that of Goethe, the effect produced on the writer’s mind by the composition of the work seems to have been beneficial.

He had seen the ideal of a great national future rudely shattered, but he did not despair of his country, and sought relief in now turning to gaze on the ideal of a great national poet.

After the fall of Venice, Foscolo moved to Milan, where he formed a friendship with the older poet Giuseppe Parini, whom he later remembered with admiration and gratitude.

Above: Italian poet Giuseppe Parini (1729 – 1799)

In Milan, he published a selection of twelve Sonnets, blending the passionate sentiments shown in “Ortis” with classical control of language and rhythm.

Above: Milano (Milan), Italia (Italy)

Still hoping that his country would be freed by Napoleon, in 1799 Foscolo enlisted as a volunteer in the National Guard of Napoleon’s Cisalpine Republic (1797 – 1802), was wounded at Cento, near Bologna, and taken as prisoner to Modena.

Liberated after the French armies took Modena, he took part in the Battle of the Trebbia (1799).

Above: Battle of the Trebbia (17 – 20 June 1799)

He was wounded again in defence of the siege of Genoa (1800). 

Above: The siege of Genova (Genoa) (25 May 1800)

Following the Battle of Marengo (1800), he returned to Milan, and there gave the last touches to his “Ortis“, published a translation of and commentary upon Callimachus (310 – 240 BC), commenced a version of the Iliad and began his translation of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. 

Above: Battle of Marengo (14 June 1800)

Above: Papyrus fragment from the Aetia of Callimachus

Above: Wooden writing tablet inscribed (Greek) in ink with lines from Homer’s Iliad

Above: Irish writer Laurence Sterne (1713 – 1768)

Foscolo also took part in a failed memorandum intended to present a new model of unified Italian government to Napoleon.

In 1804, Foscolo returned to military service in Napoleon’s cause, attached to the Italian Division of Napoleon’s army, based in Boulogne-sur-Mer, as part of Napoleon’s invasion force against Britain.

Above: Boulogne sur Mer, France

Foscolo himself was stationed in Valenciennes, where he fathered a daughter, Floriana, by Sophia St John Hamilton, daughter of Lady Mary Hamilton.

Above: Hotel de Ville (City Hall), Valenciennes, France

Following the defeat at Trafalgar (1805) and Napoleon’s abandonment of his plans for invasion, Foscolo returned to Italy in 1806.

Above: Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805

Before leaving France, however, Foscolo once again met Alessandro Manzoni in Paris.

Some seven years younger, Manzoni was still living in the house of his mother Giulia Beccaria.

Studies have noted very close analogies (textual, metrical and biographical) between the poetry of Foscolo and Manzoni in the period 1801 to 1803, such as those between Foscolo’s All’amica risanata (“To the healed friend“), an ode to Antonietta Fagnani Arese, and Manzoni’s Qual su le cinzie cime (“Who, on the peaks of Cynthus“)

Above: Italian writer Alessandro Manzoni (1785 – 1873)

In 1807, occasioned by Napoleon’s 1804 decree forbidding burials within city limits, Foscolo wrote his Dei Sepolcri (“On Sepulchres“), which may be described as his sublime effort to seek refuge in the past from the misery of the present and the darkness of the future.

The mighty dead are summoned from their tombs, as ages before they had been in the masterpieces of Greek oratory, to fight again the battles of their country.

In January 1809, Foscolo was appointed to the chair of Italian rhetoric at the University of Pavia.

In Pavia, Foscolo resided at the Palazzo Cornazzani.

His inaugural lecture “On the origin and duty of literature” was conceived in the same spirit as his Dei Sepolcri.

In his lecture, Foscolo urged his young countrymen to study literature, not in obedience to academic traditions, but in their relation to individual and national life and growth.

The sensation produced by this lecture played no small part in provoking the decree of Napoleon by which the chair of rhetoric was abolished in all the Italian universities under Napoleonic control.

Above: Seal of the University of Pavia

Soon afterwards, in 1811 Foscolo’s tragedy of Ajax was presented at Milan, with little success.

Because of its supposed allusions to Napoleon, he was forced in 1812 to move from Milan to Tuscany.

Above: Figure of Ajax, a Greek mythological figure who plays an important role in the Trojan War

The chief fruits of his stay in Florence were:

• the tragedy of Ricciarda, the Ode to the Graces, left unfinished
• the completion of his translation of Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey
• his own fictional memoir Notizia intorno a Didimo Chierico (“News concerning Didymus the cleric“) (1813), covering much of the same ground as that of Sterne’s main character, the Reverend Yorick, which Foscolo had begun during his service at Boulogne-sur-Mer

Above: Firenze (Florence), Italia (Italy)

In his account of Didimo Chierico, Foscolo throws much light on his own character.

His version of Sterne is an important feature in his personal history.

Foscolo returned to Milan in 1813, until the return of the Austrians in 1815.

From there he passed into Switzerland, where he wrote a fierce satire in Latin on his political and literary opponents.

Above: Flag of Switzerland

Finally he sought the shores of England at the close of 1816.

During the 11 years spent by Foscolo in London, until his death there, he enjoyed all the social distinction which the most brilliant circles of the English capital could confer on foreigners of political and literary renown, and experienced all the misery which follows on from a disregard of the first conditions of domestic economy.

Above: Blue plaque, Edwardes Square, London, England

His contributions to the Edinburgh Review and Quarterly Review (1809 – 1967), his dissertations in Italian on the text of Dante Alighieri and Giovanni Boccaccio, and still more his English essays on Petrarch (1821), heightened his previous fame as a man of letters.

Above: Italian writer Dante Alighieri (1265 – 1321)

Above: Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio (1313 – 1375)

Above: Italian poet Francesco di Petracco (aka Petrarch)(1304 – 1374)

However, Foscolo was frequently accused of financial ineptitude, and ended up spending time in debtors’ prison, which affected his social standing after his release.

According to the History of the County of Middlesex, the scientist and businessman William Allen hired Foscolo to teach Italian at the Quaker school he co-founded, the Newington Academy for Girls.

Above: English scientist William Allen (1770 – 1843)

Foscolo’s general bearing in society had not been such as to gain and retain lasting friendships.

He died at Turnham Green on 10 September 1827.

He was buried at St Nicholas Church, Chiswick, where his restored tomb remains to this day.

It refers to him as the “wearied citizen poet“, and incorrectly states his age as 50.

Above: Former tomb of Fosoclo, Churchyard, St. Nicholas Church, Chiswick, England

Forty-four years after his death, on 7 June 1871, his remains were exhumed at the request of the King of Italy and taken to Florence, where with all the pride, pomp and circumstance of a great national mourning, found their final resting-place beside the monuments of Niccolò Machiavelli and Vittorio Alfieri, of Michelangelo and Galileo, in the Church of Santa Croce, the pantheon of Italian glory he had celebrated in Dei Sepolcri.

Above: Italian philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli (1469 – 1527)

Above: Italian writer Vittorio Alfieri (1749 – 1803)

Above: Italian artist Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (1475 – 1564)

Above: Italian scientist Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642)

The glorification of Ugo Foscolo in the 1870s was part of the effort of the Italian government of this time (successful in completing the Italian unification but at the cost of a head-on confrontation with the Catholic Church) to create a gallery of “secular saints” to compete with those of the Church and sway popular feeling in favor of the newly created Italian state.

Above: Basilica di Santa Croce, Firenze, Italia

“A Zacinto” (“To Zakynthos“) is a pre-Romantic sonnet written by Ugo Foscolo in 1803.

The sonnet is about the poet’s feelings:

When he wrote the poem he was in exile, so he knew that his remains would have been buried far away from his natal island, Zante, and nobody would have cried on his grave.

Above: White cliffs on the coast of Zaknythos

The poet compares himself to Odysseus and finds a difference:

The Greek hero, after the Trojan War and his long travel to home, returned to Ithaca and was buried there.

The word giacque, that is “reclined, lay” (second line), is an anticipation of the theme of death, which the last stanza focuses on.

In the sonnet there are both neoclassical and romantic elements:

References to the classical tradition (Aphrodite, Homer and Odysseus) are typical of neoclassicism and the focus on the poet, the theme of graves and remains and the homesickness are typical of romanticism.

Never will I touch your sacred shore again

Where my young form reclined at rest,

Zakynthos, regarding yourself in waves

Of the Greek sea, where Venus was

Virgin born, and made those islands bloom

With her first smile; nor did he bypass

Your lacy clouds and leafy fronds

In glorious verse, the one who sang

Of fatal seas, and of the broad exile

After which, exalted by fame and by adventure,

Ulysses kissed his rocky native Ithaca.

You will have nothing of your son but his song,

Motherland of mine: and our fate already

Written, the unmourned grave.

“Dei Sepolcri“ (“Sepulchres“) is a poem written by the Italian poet, Ugo Foscolo, in 1806, and published in 1807.

It consists of 295 hendecasyllabic verses.

The carme (as the author defined it) is dedicated to another poet, Ippolito Pindemonte, with whom Foscolo had been discussing the recent Napoleonic law regarding tombs.

The idea behind the poem can be traced to 1804, when the Napoleonic edict of Saint-Cloud was issued.

On 5 September 1806, the edict was applied to Italy.

In short, it stated that all burials must take place outside the city walls, that, for democratic reasons, the burial monuments must all be of the same size, and that their inscriptions would be controlled by a special commission.

The edict’s implementation caused Foscolo to meditate upon the nature and philosophy of death.

Irreligious, Foscolo did not share the view of his fellow poet Pindemonte, who defended the Christian view, as opposed to the new Enlightenment ideas introduced by the French regime.

Above: Italian poet Ippolito Pindemonte (1753 – 1828)

Even so, Foscolo was critical of the decree, mostly for civic reasons.

He acknowledges that human beings aspire to transcend death.

Tombs, monuments for fallen heroes and virtuous men from the past, may inspire those living today, including artists and poets.

He affirmed the value of tombs as memorials to noble souls or bright intellects.

Long after the marble monuments are destroyed by time, those memorialized can survive in artworks they have inspired, and can in turn inspire virtue in new generations.

Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis) is an epistolary novel written by Ugo Foscolo and published in 1802.

The model was Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).

Another influence is Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise (1761).

Above: French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778)

Foscolo’s work was also inspired by the political events that occurred in Northern Italy during the Napoleonic period, when the Fall of the Republic of Venice and the subsequent Treaty of Campoformio forced Foscolo to go into exile from Venice to Milan.

The autobiographic elements reflect into the novel.

Ortis is composed of letters written by Jacopo to his friend Lorenzo Alderani.

The last chapter is the description of the young man’s last hours and suicide written by Lorenzo.

The plot is located in the countryside near Padua and takes place between October 1797 and March 1799.

Jacopo Ortis is a patriot who must retreat in a village in the Colli Euganei (Euganean Hills) to escape political persecutions.

Here he meets a girl, named Teresa, and her family.

The two youths fall in love, but this love is impossible, since the girl is fiancée to Odoardo, and Jacopo is in no condition to offer her a marriage.

Above: Monte Gemola seen from Monte Rusta, Italia

In despair, Jacopo travels through Italy (then divided into various little states) and visits many cities, among them Firenze (with the historical tombs of Santa Croce), Milano (where he meets Giuseppe Parini), Genoa and Ventimiglia.

Above: Italian writer Giuseppe Parini (1729 – 1799)

Above: Skyline of Genova, Italia

Above: Ventimiglia, Italia

After a deep meditation about nature, history and human fate, he resolves to go back to Veneto.

He visits Teresa, then his mother.

Finally he commits suicide.

Above: (in red) Veneto, Italia

Ugo Foscolo clenched his fists.

“Then must we exile ourselves?

Are we forever to be wanderers, seeking truth in lands that will not shelter us?

Oh, wretched halls, where once the sacred lamp of knowledge should have burned bright!

Where youth, eager and unformed, seeks the fire of wisdom, yet finds only the cold ash of deception!

These are not temples of learning, but dens where the ignorant barter labor for pittance, where truth is weighed not in the balance of justice, but in the avarice of unworthy masters.

Behold the cowboy school — an edifice built upon falsehood, where teachers are not sages but chattel, driven to toil without dignity, their minds chained like Prometheus to the rock, their passion for instruction devoured daily by the vulture of profit.

Above: Figure of Prometheus tortured by an eagle – Prometheus, a god of fire,  is best known for defying the Olympian gods by taking fire from them and giving it to humanity in the form of technology, knowledge and, more generally, civilization.

The master, no philosopher-king, but a tyrant draped in the garments of an educator, speaks of duty while mocking its name, demands loyalty yet bestows none, proclaims excellence yet cultivates mediocrity.

And what of the students, those unwitting pilgrims upon the road to knowledge?

They are promised golden vistas, yet led into deserts of futility, where diplomas are forged in haste and learning is but a shadow on the cave wall.

Their minds are filled not with the treasures of thought, but with hollow echoes of lessons barely understood, dictated by men who do not teach, but only command.

Oh, Italy!

Oh, world!

How far have we strayed from the noble lyceums of old, where Socrates and Cicero once shaped the minds of free men?

Above: Bust of Greek philosopher Socrates (470 – 399 BC)

Above: Bust of Roman philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)

Shall we let these mercenary halls persist, these charlatans mock the very spirit of enlightenment?

Or shall we raise our voices, like Spartans before the onslaught, and cry:

“No more!”

I say, let the cowardly merchant of education tremble!

Let the false teacher fear the weight of his own conscience, if ever he still possesses one!

For though gold may fill his coffers today, the winds of truth shall scatter his ill-gotten gains like chaff before the storm.

The scholar, though oppressed, shall endure.

The noble teacher, though scorned, shall be remembered.

For knowledge is eternal, and those who pervert it shall not be forgotten in infamy.

And to those who still burn with the fire of learning, who resist the debasement of our sacred art, I say:

Endure, persist, and know that the spirit of wisdom cannot be bought nor sold, only lived, only honored, only taught with the devotion of the righteous.“

Though the teacher was somewhat bothered by the accusations of buggery that surround his reputation, he tentatively approached John Henry Mackay.

John Henry Mackay (February 6, 1864 – May 16, 1933) was a Scottish-German egoist anarchist, thinker and writer.

Born in Scotland and raised in Germany, Mackay was the author of Die Anarchisten (The Anarchists, 1891) and Der Freiheitsucher (The Searcher for Freedom, 1921).

Mackay was born in Greenock, Scotland.

His mother came from a prosperous Hamburg family.

His father was a Scottish marine insurance broker who died when Mackay was less than two years old.

Above: Greenock, Scotland

Mother and son then returned to Germany, where Mackay grew up.

He gained fame as a poet and author of naturalist novels.

Some of his earliest poems attracted the attention of censors for their socialist sentiments, so Mackay republished them in Switzerland.

During a one-year stay in London (1887- 1888), he discovered the works of Max Stirner, whose book Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum (The Ego and its Own) had nearly been forgotten in the second half of the 19th century.

Stirner soon became his life’s topic.

When an English translation of Stirner’s work was published in 1907, James Huneker wrote:

“To Mackay’s labors we owe all we know of a man who was as absolutely swallowed up by the years as if he had never existed.“

The publication of the novel Die Anarchisten: Kulturgemälde aus dem Ende des XIX Jahrhunderts in Zurich in 1891 and in an English translation as The Anarchists: A Picture of Civilization at the Close of the Nineteenth Century the same year brought him far wider fame. 

The novel “tirelessly championed” the ideas of Stirner. 

He further lifted this 19th century philosopher from obscurity by writing the biography Max Stirner – sein Leben und sein Werk (1898).

His novel Der Schwimmer: Die Geschichte einer Leidenschaft (The Swimmer: The Story of a Passion) (1901) was one of the first sports novels, set in the world of competitive swimming and diving.

Mackay described himself as “always a passionate swimmer” thought not a sport for him.

He dedicated the book to “my beloved art of swimming“.

The novel describes “the rise and fall of an individual who prides himself on his individuality, but who finally comes to see that individuality by itself is not enough to sustain him“.

He published the novel Der Freiheitsucher (The Freedom Seeker), a sequel to Die Anarchisten, in 1920.

It failed to achieve the earlier volume’s success and Mackay was ruined financially by the inflation of the early Weimar Republic years (1918 – 1933).

Mackay died in Stahnsdorf, a town not far from Berlin, on 16 May 1933. 

His will asked for his manuscripts and letters to be destroyed, and for one of his creditors to receive his unsold books. 

A brief notice of his death in the New York Times noted he became famous in the 1890s for Anarchists and Storm (his poetry collection) and said that in Germany he was called “an anarchistic lyricist“.

Above: Village church, Stahnsdorf, Deutschland (Germany)

Mackay lived in Berlin from 1896 onwards and became a friend of Benedict Friedlaender, a scientist and the co-founder of the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen.

Above: German polymath Benedict Friedlander

Mackay was published in the US in his friend Benjamin Tucker’s magazine, Liberty.

Above: American writer Benjamin Tucker (1854 – 1939)

John Mackay roared:

“No! We do not exile ourselves — we build anew!

We raise our own banners!

If the schools are prisons, then we must be the architects of their ruin!

In the shadows of our cities stand the great prisons of the mind — not the fortress of the state, nor the barracks of war, but the schools that claim to enlighten yet serve only to subjugate.

These are not institutions of learning, but factories of deception, where the teacher is not an emancipator, but a laborer bound to the yoke of a master who values only coin and compliance.

Let there be no mistake:

The cowboy school is no more than a mercenary enterprise, its purpose not to instruct, but to exploit.

Knowledge, which should be as free as the wind upon the heath, is here reduced to a commodity, sold to the highest bidder, while those who would impart it — the true educators — are shackled like beasts of burden.

Their labour is drained, their voices stifled, their dignity crushed beneath the heel of unscrupulous men who claim dominion over learning yet know nothing of its worth.

And the students?

They are the great dupes of this cruel machinery.

Sold the illusion of education, they are led to believe that a certificate —ink upon cheap paper — is the same as wisdom.

But what wisdom can be found in a place where teachers are stripped of their freedom, where learning is dictated not by curiosity, but by the greed of men who see in each student not a mind to be nurtured, but a pocket to be emptied?

What, then, is to be done?

Are we to submit?

To bow our heads and say:

“Thus it is, and thus it must be”?

No!

Let us tear away the mask of false authority and expose these charlatans for what they are!

Let no true teacher lend his mind to such an enterprise.

Let no honest student be deceived by its empty promises.

Let us reclaim learning — not as a trade, not as a transaction, but as the free and unchained pursuit of truth that no man, no system, no tyrant of industry can own.

For freedom is not found in the halls of the merchant-school.

It is found in the hearts of those who refuse to kneel, in the minds of those who refuse to be bought.

And to the cowboy schoolmasters who believe they hold dominion over learning, I say this:

You are nothing but jailers, and we — teachers, students, thinkers — shall not be your prisoners.“

Above: John Henry Mackay

Then the teacher heard the tromping of boots enter the assembly hall.

Geo Bogza  (born Gheorghe Bogza) (February 6, 1908 – September 14, 1993) was a Romanian avant-garde theorist, poet, and journalist, known for his left-wing and communist political convictions.

As a young man in the interwar period, he was known as a rebel and was one of the most influential Romanian Surrealists.

Several of his controversial poems twice led to his imprisonment on grounds of obscenity, and saw him partake in the conflict between young and old Romanian writers, as well as in the confrontation between the avant-garde and the far right.

At a later stage, Bogza won acclaim for his many and accomplished reportage pieces, being one of the first to cultivate the genre in Romanian literature, and using it as a venue for social criticism.

Above: Geo Bogza

After the establishment of Communist Romania, Bogza adapted his style to Socialist realism, and became one of the most important literary figures to have serviced the government.

With time, he became a subtle critic of the regime, especially under the rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu, when he adopted a dissident position.

Above: Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu (1918 – 1989)

Beginning in the late 1960s, Bogza publicized his uncomfortable attitudes as subtext to apparently innocent articles and essays.

An editor for Viața Românească and România Literară magazines, Geo Bogza was one of the leaders of the Romanian Writers’ Union and a member of the Romanian Academy.

He was the older brother of Radu Tudoran, himself a known writer, whose political choices were in stark contrast with those of Geo Bogza, and made Tudoran the object of communist persecution.

Above: Romanian writer Radu Tudoran (1910 – 1992)

Bogza had lifelong contacts with some representatives of the Romanian avant-garde.

Above: Flag of Romania

Geo Bogza was born in Blejoi, Prahova County.

Above: St. Nicholas Church, Blejoi, Romania

At one point during the late 1930s, Bogza was irritated after reading an article authored by one of his fascist adversaries, Alexandru Hodoș (aka Ion Gorun) (later a member of the Iron Guard).

Hodoș implied that Bogza was not an ethnic Romanian, which prompted the latter to elaborate on his origins and his name. 

Above: Romanian writer Ion Gorun (1863 – 1928)

Bogza refuted the allegation by indicating that his father was originally from the village of Bogzești, in Secuieni, Neamț County, and that his mother (née Georgescu) was the daughter of a Romanian Transylvanian activist who had fled from Austria-Hungary to the Kingdom of Romania. 

The lineage was confirmed by literary critic George Călinescu as part of a short biographical essay.

Geo Bogza, who indicated that he was baptized Romanian Orthodox, also stressed that his given name, Gheorghe, had been turned into the hypocoristic Geo while he was still a child, and that he had come to prefer the shortened form. 

Above: Romanian literary critic George Călinescu (1899 – 1965)

Bogza attended school in Ploiești and trained as a sailor at the Naval Academy in Constanța, but never sought employment in the Romanian Naval Forces.

Above: Parcu central, Ploieşti, Romania

Above: Casino, Constanța, Romania

Above: Naval Academy, Constanța, Romania

Above: Coat of arms of the Romanian Naval Forces

Until the age of 28, he made part of his income as a sailor on a commercial vessel. 

He returned to his native Prahova County, lived in Buștenari, and eventually settled in Bucharest.

Above: Bucharest, Romania

In 1927, he made his debut in poetry, writing for the Prahova-based modernist magazine Câmpina, which was edited by poet Alexandru Tudor-Miu.

The following year, he contributed to Sașa Pană’s avant-garde magazine Unu, edited a short-lived (1928 – 1932) Surrealist and anti-bourgeois magazine that drew inspiration from Urmuz, and published in Tudor Arghezi’s Bilete de Papagal.

Arghezi admired the younger writer.

He is credited with having suggested the name Urmuz for the magazine.

Above: Romanian writer Dimitrie Ionescu-Buzeu (aka Urmuz)(1883-1923)

During that period, Geo Bogza became one of the most recognizable young rebellious authors.  

In time, he became a noted contributor to the leftist and socialist press, and one of the most respected Romanian authors of reportage prose.

One of his articles-manifestos read:

“I always had the uncomfortable impression that any beauty may enter the consciousness of a bourgeois only on all fours.”

Writing for Urmuz, he condemned convention as “a false sun” and “intellectual acrobatics“, depicting his magazine as “a lash that whips the mind“.

It was during the late 1920s that Bogza began touring the Prahova Valley, becoming a close observer of local life in the shadow of the oil industry. 

Above: Valea Prahovei, Amadeo Preziosi (1868)

Early in his youth, while in Buștenari, Geo Bogza met and fell in love with Elisabeta (also known as Bunty), whom he married soon after. 

Their love affair was celebrated by Bogza’s friend Nicolae Tzone, who also stated that she “lived simply and without any sort of commotion in his shadow“. 

Initially, the couple lived in Sașa Pană’s Bucharest house, and, for a while afterwards, at the headquarters of Unu. 

In old age, he spoke of one of these lodgings as “an unsanitary loft, where one would either suffocate from the heat or starve with cold“.

Above: Geo Bogza

Bogza’s work was at the center of scandals in the 1930s:

He was first arrested on charges of having produced pornography in 1930, for his Sex Diary, and was temporarily held in Văcărești Prison, until being acquitted. 

At the time, he responded to the hostile atmosphere by publishing an article in Unu which included the words:

“ACADEMICIANS, SHAVE YOUR BRAINS!” (also rendered as “disinfect your brains!“). 

In reference to his trial, the magazine Unu wrote:

“Bogza will be tried and receive punishment for having the imprudence of not letting himself be macerated by «proper behavior», for having dunked his arms down to the feces, for having raised them up to his nose, smelling them and then spattering all those who were dabbling with their nostrils unperceptive of his exasperated nature.“

Other positive reactions to his writings notably included that of teachers at a high school in Ploiești, who invited him to attend a celebration marking the start of the school year.

Reportedly, Bogza asked to be defended by Ionel Teodoreanu, a known writer who had training in law, but he was ultimately represented by Ionel Jianu.

Above: Romanian novelist/lawyer Ionel Teodoreanu (1897 – 1954)

After his success in court, he issued business cards reading:

“GEO BOGZA/ACQUITTED/NOVEMBER 28, 1932“. 

Late in 1933, he edited a new magazine, titled Viața Imediată (“The Immediate Life“), of which only one issue was ever published.

Its cover photograph showed a group of derelict workers (It was titled “Melacolia celor șezând pe lângă ziduri” / “The Melancholy of Those Sitting by the Walls“).

The same year, he was taken into custody for a second time, after publishing his Offensive Poem — which depicted his sexual encounter with a servant girl — and was sentenced to six days in jail.

In 1937, Bogza again served time for Offensive Poem, after the matter was brought up by Ioan Alexandru Brătescu-Voinești on behalf of the Romanian Academy.

Above: Geo Bogza

Above: Romanian writer/politican Ioan Alexandru Brâtescu-Voineşti (1868 – 1946)

Similar demands for punishment were voiced by historian Nicolae Iorga and by the poet and fascist politician Octavian Goga.

Above: Romanian Prime Minister Nicolae Iorga (1871 – 1940)

Above: Romanian Prime Minister Octavian Goga (1881 – 1938)

Bogza was frequently attacked by Iorga’s nationalist magazine Cuget Clar. 

Writing for Azi, Bogza dismissed the accusation as a cover-up for an increase in authoritarianism as King Carol II was attempting to compete with the fascist Iron Guard. 

The latter’s press welcomed the move and instigated the authorities to intervene in similar cases of alleged obscenity.

Above: Romanian King Carol II (1893 – 1953)

In 1934, while visiting Brașov in the company of his wife, Bogza met Max Blecher, a young man who was beddriden by Pott’s disease and had started work on the novel later known as Întâmplări din irealitatea imediată (“Events in Immediate Unreality“). 

The three were to become good friends.

Bogza encouraged him to continue writing.

Above: Cetăţuia Brasov, Brasov, Romania

Late in 1937, Geo Bogza travelled to Spain as a war correspondent in the Civil War, supporting the Republican side.

Above: Flag of España (Spain)

His position of the time drew comparisons with those of other leftist intellectuals who campaigned against or fought Nationalist forces, including W. H. Auden and George Orwell.

Above: English poet Wystan Hugh Auden (1907 – 1973)

Bogza was accompanied on this journey by Constantin Lucreția Vâlceanu, who had ambitions of becoming a writer, and whom Bogza asked to contribute to a never-completed novel inspired by the war.

Soon after their return, in what was a surprising gesture, Vâlceanu split with the leftist camp and rallied with the Iron Guard.

Above: Logo of the Iron Guard (1927 – 1941) – a Romanian militant, revolutionary, religious, fascist movement and political party

A member of the Writers’ Union leadership board after 1965, he was editor of the influential literary magazine Viața Românească.

Despite his official status, Bogza himself was critical of the adoption of nationalist themes in official discourse after the ascendancy of Nicolae Ceaușescu in the 1960s.

The new doctrine, eventually consecrated in Ceaușescu’s July Theses, saw him taking the opposing side:

During the early 1970s, Bogza published pieces in which he voiced covert criticism of the new policies.

Bogza was among the most important intellectuals of various backgrounds to have done so. 

His nonconformist stance drew comparisons with that assumed by his generation colleague, the ethnic Hungarian poet and prominent Writers’ Union member József Méliusz. 

Above: Geo Bogza

In 1976, Bogza discussed the issue of disappointment, stating:

“Life is not like a tournament, but like an outage.

From the first to the last day.” 

In reference to such an attitude, which believed was related the political context, literary critic and novelist B. Elvin, himself a former leftist and dissident, saw in Bogza a symbol of “verticality, refusal, contempt“.

Bogza was nonetheless often ambiguous in his relations with the authorities, while his public statements oscillated between covert satire and open praise.

Between 1966 and 1973, he was a contributor to Contemporanul magazine.

He was well known in Romania for regularly publishing short essays in that magazine (some of them were also read on national radio). 

Bogza also had a permanent column in the influential magazine România Literară. 

His gestures of defiance include his display of support for Lucian Pintilie, a director whose work was being censored.

In 1968, having just seen Pintilie’s subversive film The Reenactment shortly before it was banned, Bogza scribbled in the snow set on the director’s car the words:

“Long live Pintilie!

The humble Geo Bogza“.

The statement was recorded with alarm by agents of Romania’s secret police, the Securitate (1948 – 1989), who had witnessed the incident.

Above: Coat of arms of the Socialist Republic of Romania (1965 – 1989)

In the 1970s, Bogza and several of his Writers’ Union colleagues became involved in a bitter conflict with the nationalist Săptămâna magazine, which was led by novelist Eugen Barbu (who was also one of the persons overseeing censorship in Communist Romania).

Above: Romanian writer Eugen Barbu (1924 – 1993)

Bogza was also close to the outspoken dissident Gheorghe Ursu (who, in 1985, was beaten to death on orders from the Securitate), as well as to filmmaker Mircea Săucan, himself an adversary of the communist regime.

One theory attributes Ursu’s violent death to him having refused to incriminate his writer friends during interrogations — among those whose activities may have interested the investigators were Bogza.

In late March 1989, ten months before the Romanian Revolution overthrew communism, Bogza, signed the Letter of the Seven, addressed to Dumitru Radu Popescu (head of the Writers’ Union) in protest over poet Mircea Dinescu’s house arrest by the Securitate. 

Above: Romanian writer Dumitru Radu Popescu (1935 – 2023)

Yosef Govrin, who served as Israel’s Ambassador to Romania during that time, commented on the document, which was sent to members of the diplomatic corps and to other circles:

“Despite its restrained style, the letter sharply accused the Writers’ Union for not having defended its members and for the alienation rife between Romanian culture and its themes.“

Above: Yosef Govrin (1930 – 2021)

During the final stages of his life, Geo Bogza granted a series of interviews to journalist Diana Turconi, who published them as Eu sunt ținta (“I Am the Target“). 

He died in Bucharest, after being hospitalized for a while at the local Elias Hospital.

Much of Bogza’s work is related to social criticism, reflecting his political convictions.

This was the case in many of his reportage and satirical pieces.

In reference to this trait, Mihuleac commented that the 20-year-old Bogza was in some ways a predecessor of later generations of protesters, such as the American Beatniks and the United Kingdom’s “angry young men“.

In 1932, Bogza stated:

“We write not because we wish to become writers, but because we are doomed to write, just as we would be condemned to insanity, to suicide.“

Above: Geo Bogza

As a youth, he extended his protest to the cultural establishment as a whole — while visiting the high school in Ploieşti, where he was supposed to address the staff, he attacked local educational institutions for “taking care to castrate the glands of any outright affirmation“, and for resembling “the Bastille“. 

Above: Bastille Saint Antoine (1370 – 1790), Paris, France

The Bastille was a fortress in Paris, known as the Bastille Saint-Antoine.

It played an important role in the internal conflicts of France and for most of its history was used as a state prison by the kings of France.

It was stormed by a crowd on 14 July 1789, in the French Revolution, becoming an important symbol for the French Republican movement.

It was later demolished and replaced by the Place de la Bastille.

Above: Storming of the Bastille, 14 July 1789

In his early prose poems, Bogza addressed workers in the oil industry in his native Prahova, claiming to define himself in relation to their work (while still appealing to the imagery of filth).

The series has been defined by critic Constantin Stănescu as poems “rehabilitating, among other things, the compromised «genre» of the social poem“.

One such piece, published in 1929 and titled Poem cu erou (“Poem with a Hero“), documented the unusual death of a roughneck named Nicolae Ilie, who burned after his clothes caught fire.

The incident was discussed in the press of his day, and the poet is credited with having personally aided in publicizing it.

He extended an appeal to the oil industry workers, in which he identify oil with foulness and with himself:

“I, who am black and ugly,
who, like the oil-bearing hills,
have always had something horrible smoldering in my innards,
I, who soil and destroy everything I touch,
who am as foul, fervent and ignorant as oil
and, like it, explode
without caring about the calamity my words bring into the world.
That’s me. Now I will tell you about oil and its crimes.”

In another one of his earliest poetry works (Destrămări la ore fixe, “Unravellings at Pre-Convened Hours“), Geo Bogza elaborated on the theme of melancholy and loss:

“Big and small alike, we are destined to the same program;
a school bell was sounding the geography class;
nowadays the cathedral bells decompose in the air
they bewail calling, to the melancholy class.

My notebook that you signed hurts me presently
in it, I wished to contour a nebulous soul
— if you should knock on the door — I will shout: NO!
because you would find me scattered, splintered, on the ground.“

One of the first and most acclaimed authors of reportage in Romanian literature, Bogza was credited by journalist Cătălin Mihuleac with establishing and “ennobling” the genre.

Mihuleac, who noted that Bogza was “unnervingly talented“, also argued that:

“Romanian journalism is indebted to Geo Bogza more than to anyone else.“

Also according to Mihuleac, Bogza went through a radical change around 1935, when his writing turned professional and his subjects turned from “himself” to “the multitudes“.

These writings were eventually structured into two main series: 

• Cartea Oltului (“The Book of the Olt River“)

• Țări de piatră, de foc, de pământ (“Lands of Stone, Fire, Earth“). 

The writer traveled the land in search of subjects.

The results of these investigations were acclaimed for their power of suggestion and observation.

One of his reportages of the period notably discussed the widespread poverty he had encountered during his travels to the eastern province of Bessarabia, and was titled Basarabia: Țară de pământ (“Bessarabia: Land of Soil“). 

In it, the writer spoke of how most tailors were almost always commissioned by locals not to produce new clothes, but to mend old ones (at a time when the larger part of family incomes in the region were spent on food and clothing). 

Bogza toured the impoverished areas of Bucharest, recording activities around the city landfill and the lives of dog catchers who gassed their victims and turned them into cheap soap.

A reportage authored after Bogza visited the town of Mizil was a study in experimental literature. 

Titled 175 de minute la Mizil (“175 Minutes in Mizil”), it has been summarized as “the adventure of the banal“, and credited with having helped impress on the public Mizil’s image as a place where nothing important ever happens. 

Similarly, his travels in Bessarabia saw him depicting Hotin as the epitome of desert places and Bălți as the source of “a pestilent stench“.

Above: Khotyn Fortress, Hotin, Romania

Above: Bălți, Romania

In one of his satirical pieces, Bogza mocked the Romanian Post seemingly excessive regulations to have writing utensils made available for the public, but secured in place with a string:

“A million penholders stolen in Romania would almost be an act of culture.

And one would consequently forget the degrading spectacle of people writing with chained penholders.

Of what importance would any loss be, compared with the beauty of penholders having been set free?“

The next stage in Bogza’s literary career was “embarrassing“. 

This was in reference to his assimilation of Communist tenets, and his willingness to offer praise to the official heroes of Communist Party history, such as Vasile Roaită (a participant in the Grivița Strike of 1933). 

Above: Romanian railway worker Vasile Roaita (1914 – 1933) was shot dead during the strike of the CFR Gravita railway workers on 16 February 1933.

The CFR Grivița Workshops Strike was a strike by railway workers that took place at the Grivița Workshops in Bucharest on 
16 February 1933. The strike was due to the increasingly precarious working conditions of the railway workers, in the context of the Great Depression, which had significantly affected Romania. It quickly turned into a riot and led to clashes between railway workers and 
gendarmes, as well as the deaths of seven people, including 
Vasile Roaită , a young worker whose image was later used in 
propaganda by the early Communist regime.

In one such article, Bogza claimed to have witnessed the sight of proletarians who were living in “new and white-painted houses” and had manufactured business cards for themselves, proudly advertising their qualifications in the field of work and positions in the state-run factory.

More controversial still was his agitprop piece of 1950, Începutul epopeii (“The Start of the Epic“).

The text praised the regime for designing and ordering work to begin on the Danube – Black Sea Canal, which, in reality, was to prove one of the harshest sites for penal labor, where thousands of political prisoners were to be killed. 

Above: (ın blue) The Danube River / (in red) the Danube – Black Sea Canal

Historian Adrian Cioroianu cited the reportage as an example of “mobilizing-deferential literature“. 

He summarized the content of such texts as claiming to depict a “final battle, of mythological proportions, between the old and new Romania — offering a clear prognostic in respect to who would win.“

Above: Danube-Black Sea Canal near Agigea, Romania

During the Ceaușescu years, Bogza developed a unique style, which, under the cover of apparently insignificant and docile metaphors, hid subversive messages. 

According to Mihuleac, the writer was critical of his own position in relation to the Communist Party and explained it as a compromise —he believed this message to be evident in Bogza’s poem Treceam (“I Was Passing“):

“I was passing among tigers
And was throwing them carnations
I was passing among leopards
And was throwing them chrysanthemums
I was passing among cheetahs
And was throwing them roses
And they, taken over by perplexity
Allowed me to move on.“

Above: Emblem of the Communist Party of Romania (PCR) (1921 – 1989)

Bogza thus wrote a piece entitled Bau Bau (“Bogeyman“), telling of how his parents encouraged him to fear things watching him from outside his window as a means of ensuring he behaved himself while they were absent — the subtext was interpreted as an allegory of Ceaușescu’s anti-Soviet policies (which attempted to prevent opposition by, among other things, alluding to the threat of Soviet intervention). 

Above: Geo Bogza

At some point during the second half of 1969, instead of his usual column, Geo Bogza sent for publication a drawing of three poplars, with a caption which read:

“The line of poplars above is meant to suggest not just the beauty of this autumn, but also my sympathy towards all things having a certain height and a verticality.”

The poplar metaphor was one of Bogza’s favorite:

He had first used it in reference to himself, as early as 1931, in an interview with Sașa Pană. 

Facing a jail term for his scandalous poetry, he spoke of the tree as a symbol of both aloofness and his own fate.

His subtle technique, like similar ones developed by other România Literară contributors, was at times detected by the regime.

Thus, a secret Securitate report of 1984, made available ten years later, read:

“The present line-up of România Literară magazine is characterized by a gap between the political content of its editorials (perfectly in line [and] in which declarations of adherence are being made in respect to the state and party policies) and the content of the magazine which, of course, is different.

The criticism of content which is discussed on România Literară’s front page grows aesthetizing through the rest of the magazine.“

Above: Coat of arms of Romania

Geo Bogza stepped forward last, eyes sharp, voice like flint striking steel.

“Enough lamenting.

Enough hand-wringing.

The only way forward is to tear down the old and carve something new from its bones.

A school should be a cathedral of thought.

A school should be a furnace where young minds are shaped, where the fire of knowledge sears away ignorance.

But these are not schools — no, they are graveyards where wisdom is buried beneath profit.

They rise, brick upon brick, built not from stone and vision, but from the sweat of the deceived.

Their foundations are not knowledge, but contracts written in bad faith, their walls not bookshelves, but ledgers, where learning is weighed against money, and always found too light.

The cowboy schoolmaster walks its corridors, a merchant with a whip, counting his earnings, measuring the worth of men and women not by the depth of their understanding, but by how cheaply he can buy their time.

And the teachers — those weary souls who dreamed once of awakening minds — now sit hunched over their desks, hands trembling with fatigue, voices hoarse from reciting hollow lessons.

They are not educators, but prisoners, condemned to the slow death of the spirit.

And the students?

They enter with hope and leave with paper.

Not knowledge, not fire, not the trembling ecstasy of discovery — just paper, stamped and worthless, as lifeless as the walls that surround them.

They were promised a ladder, but were given a treadmill.

They were promised wings, but left with empty hands, watching their dreams dissolve like mist above the factories and the streets, where they will soon toil, unprepared, unarmed, unknowing.

I have seen these schools.

I have walked past them at dusk, when their windows glow with the exhausted light of those who labor inside.

I have seen the faces of teachers — pale, drained, eyes flickering between despair and duty.

I have seen students — bright-eyed at first, then dulled, their souls eroded by lessons that mean nothing, by promises that will never be kept.

And outside, the cowboy schoolmaster laughs, drinks, counts his money.

He does not see the ruin he has made, or if he does, he does not care.

He is a builder of ruins, a dealer in falsehoods, a peddler of futures that will never come to pass.

But let him laugh while he can.

The world remembers its deceivers, and it remembers those who resisted.

The day will come when his schools crumble, when the true voices rise, when the smoke of burnt-out dreams clears, and we see the sun again.

The day will come when teachers are not slaves, when students are not customers, when knowledge is not weighed in gold but carried in the bones of those who thirst for it.

Until then, the lights burn late.

The weary voices echo in the halls.

And outside, in the cold night, the city breathes, waiting.

Waiting.

Waiting.“

Baby, I’ve been waiting
I’ve been waiting night and day
I didn’t see the time
I waited half my life away
There were lots of invitations
And I know you sent me some
But I was waiting
For the miracle, for the miracle to come

I know you really loved me
But, you see, my hands were tied
I know it must have hurt you
It must have hurt your pride
To have to stand beneath my window
With your bugle and your drum
And me, I’m up there waiting
For the miracle, for the miracle to come

Ah, I don’t believe you’d like it
You wouldn’t like it here
There ain’t no entertainment
And the judgments are severe
The maestro says it’s Mozart
But it sounds like bubble gum
When you’re waiting
For the miracle, for the miracle to come

Waiting for the miracle
There’s nothing left to do
I haven’t been this happy
Since the end of World War II

Nothing left to do
When you know that you’ve been taken
Nothing left to do
When you’re begging for a crumb
Nothing left to do
When you’ve got to go on waiting
Waiting for the miracle to come

I dreamed about you, baby
It was just the other night
Most of you was naked
Ah, but some of you was light
The sands of time were falling
From your fingers and your thumb
And you were waiting
For the miracle, for the miracle to come

Ah baby, let’s get married
We’ve been alone too long
Let’s be alone together
Let’s see if we’re that strong
Yeah, let’s do something crazy
Something absolutely wrong
While we’re waiting
For the miracle, for the miracle to come

Nothing left to do
When you know that you’ve been taken
Nothing left to do
When you’re begging for a crumb
Nothing left to do
When you’ve got to go on waiting
Waiting for the miracle to come
When you’ve fallen on the highway
And you’re lying in the rain
And they ask you how you’re doing
Of course you’ll say you can’t complain
If you’re squeezed for information
That’s when you’ve got to play it dumb
You just say you’re out there waiting
For the miracle, for the miracle to come

Above: Canadian singer/poet Leonard Cohen (1934 – 2016)

The teacher, silent until now, felt a strange heat rise within him.

He had been cast out, discarded, dismissed as an inconvenience.

But was he not free?

Was this not his moment?

And as the first rays of the sun crept through the arches of that impossible hall, he knew.

There was only one path before him.

To strive to build or serve an institution which valued its teachers – both native speakers and foreigners – as necessary and precious.

To see students not merely as providers of money but motivated pursuers of hope and wisdom.

He would seek an Academy of Joy — or build one himself.

With the sun at his back and the voices of ghosts in his heart, he woke.

The sun rose over the citadels of ignorance, where the faceless merchants of knowledge count their silver.

Behind their polished desks, they smile with teeth honed to razors, whispering promises they never mean to keep.

Above: Christianity’s Jesus throwing out the moneychangers at the Temple in Jerusalem, Israel

I am reminded of A. J. Cronin’s The Citadel, groundbreaking in its treatment of the contentious subject of medical ethics.

Above: Scottish novelist Dr. Archibald Joseph Cronin (1896 – 1981)

Dr. Cronin drew on his experiences practicing medicine in the coal-mining communities of the South Wales Valleys, as he had for The Stars Look Down two years earlier.

Specifically, he had researched and reported on the correlation between coal dust inhalation and lung disease in the town of Tredegar.

Above: Town clock, Tredegar, Wales

He had also worked as a doctor for the Tredegar Medical Aid Society at the Cottage Hospital, which served as the model for the National Health Service (NHS).

Cronin once stated in an interview:

“I have written in The Citadel all I feel about the medical profession, its injustices, its hide-bound unscientific stubbornness, its humbug.

The horrors and inequities detailed in the story I have personally witnessed.

This is not an attack against individuals, but against a system.”

Türkiye is a wonderful country to travel in, with a wealth of historic sites such as Troy and Ephesus, marvelous food and warm friendly people, but a decimated tourist industry, terrorist attacks, coup attempts, COVID and earthquakes coupled with questionable federal financial management have resulted in a spiraling economy and rising prices.

Above: Flag of Türkiye (Turkey)

Above: The ruins of Troy, Hisarlik, Türkiye

Above: The Library of Celsus, Ephesus, Selçuk, Türkiye

Every ESL teacher has tales of employers breaking promises and run-down accommodation.

Turkish people are amazingly hospitable and the country is fascinating….

But because of the ever-increasing demand for English language instruction, there are many dodgy school operators and swashbuckling unscrupulous employers.

They will sack teachers to save money.

They will slash wages or pay late.

They will fail to honor contracts.

They will assign inflated marks to students to keep or attract custom.

They will withhold certificates or money to prevent staff from leaving prematurely.

They will expect teachers to work on a tourist visa.

Often salaries are as minimalist as the employer can legally get away with.

They should be named and shamed, but because of legal difficulties and costs for the accuser, the robbers continue to profit unharried.

Above: US crime writer Mario Puzo (1920 – 1999)

Students can be motivated, conscientious and well behaved but along with the eager are the lazy and the shy.

What sets Turkish students apart from their international counterparts is their passivity.

Turks grow up in an incredibly teacher-centred learning environment so that is what they expect to find in an ESL school.

Having them participate in a far more student-centred communicative course can be frustrating.

A motivational teacher can change this.

The primary incentive for Turkish ESL students is hope – hope that English will create more opportunities for their future – hope that the English they will learn will have practical applications for their lives.

School owners capitalize on this hope, but far too few deliver on this promise.

Far too many school owners offer teachers a career, but instead deliver only disappointment.

A school?

No, a soulless exchange, where the currency is not wisdom, but illusion.

We, the weary scribes of thought, step into the arena, our ideals folded like worn-out parchment.

We are not mentors, not guides — we are fodder for the insatiable beast of profit.

The students, eager but unknowing, march through the halls, not as seekers of truth, but as coins that clink in the tills of deception.

Here, learning is a script, rehearsed and sold, stripped of passion, reduced to a mechanical echo of knowledge once meant to enlighten.

Above: Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times (1936)

Évariste de Parny weeps for what was lost, the poetry of the mind now exchanged for hollow recitations.

Education, once a temple, is now a marketplace.

Beauty has fled, leaving behind a barren husk of bureaucracy.

Above: Évariste de Parny

Julian Niemcewicz laughs, but it is the laugh of a cynic who knows that corruption festers in the veins of this system, its roots entwined with the greed of men who see schools not as sanctuaries, but as investments.

Above: Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz

Ugo Foscolo rages — where is the fire, the devotion, the sacred duty?

The teacher is an exile in his own classroom, his voice drowned beneath the dictates of those who fear intellect and worship obedience.

Above: Ugo Foscolo

And what of John Henry Mackay?

He would rally, he would fight, his voice a hammer against this edifice of deceit, but even his cry is stifled by the iron grasp of administrators who see rebellion as an inconvenience rather than a necessity.

And then, Geo Bogza.

Oh, Bogza!

His words are a clenched fist, a dagger plunged into the rot.

He does not weep.

He does not plead.

He exposes, rips apart the veil, shows the bones of this grotesque machine where men in suits sign the fates of teachers with the flick of a pen, where knowledge is not nurtured but butchered, where students are not souls but figures on a ledger.

Above: Geo Bogza

Yet still, we stand.

We, the forgotten teachers, the disposable sentinels of thought, stand not for the charlatans who mock our purpose, nor for the thieves who cheapen our craft.

We stand for those who still dare to listen, who still dare to learn.

And for them, though the citadel is crumbling, we whisper what truth remains, lest it be lost forever.

Don’t you know
They’re talking about a revolution?
It sounds like a whisper
Don’t you know
Talking about a revolution?
It sounds like a whisper

While they’re standing in the welfare lines
Crying at the doorsteps of those armies of salvation
Wasting time in the unemployment lines
Sitting around waiting for a promotion

Don’t you know
Talking about a revolution?
It sounds like a whisper

Poor people gonna rise up
And get their share
Poor people gonna rise up
And take what’s theirs

Don’t you know you better run, run, run, run, run, run
Run, run, run, run, run, run
Oh, I said you better run, run, run, run, run, run
Run, run, run, run, run, run

‘Cause finally the tables are starting to turn
Talkin’ ’bout a revolution
‘Cause finally the tables are starting to turn
Talkin’ ’bout a revolution, oh no
Talkin’ ’bout a revolution, oh

I’ve been standing in the welfare lines
Crying at the doorsteps of those armies of salvation
Wasting time in the unemployment lines
Sitting around waiting for a promotion

Don’t you know
Talking about a revolution?
It sounds like a whisper

And finally the tables are starting to turn
Talkin’ ’bout a revolution
Yes, finally the tables are starting to turn
Talkin’ ’bout a revolution, oh, no
Talkin’ ’bout a revolution, oh, no
Talkin’ ’bout a revolution, oh, no