Look, Ma, I'm Writin'!

"The rotter school teacher is Mr. Holbrook," wrote the daring student. "He is a tramp. He needs a wash and a haircut and a new shirt and he has a big head and beady eyes." The description delighted English Teacher David Holbrook. Only a few months before, the "bottom-stream" British schoolboy of 14 was barely articulate. Now, flaunting a new-found power with words, he groped toward understanding the mystery that transforms murky thoughts into vivid language.

A fellow of King's College, Cambridge, Holbrook, 41, is a teacher who comes straight to the point that "the roots of true literacy are in the child's natural urge to use language to make sense of its life." Scoffing at the "didactic decorum" that dominates English teaching, Holbrook ignores graded vocabularies and grammar drills. "Without 'vocabulary lessons' the child yet extends his vocabulary because he is searching for new concepts. Without lessons in grammar and sentence structure he yet comes to write 'by nature' sentences of such complexity that grammarians would take years to catch up on definitions of his syntactical subtlety."

Say It with Music. Holbrook sometimes sounds more convinced than convincing, but he produces results. Enacting real life in the classroom, he gets grunting students of the twelve-to-15 age range to talk by staging mock employment interviews and playlets that become psychodramas of family problems. Then he makes them write, often by getting them to describe recorded music ranging from Aaron Copland to Jelly Roll Morton. One girl entering Holbrook's class with a reported IQ of 76 turned out a long, sophisticated lovers' dialogue that John O'Hara would have approved.

Holbrook's impact on Britain's educational establishment has been heavy. His five anthologies of prose and poetry are used in thousands of state and private schools. Instead of the usual diet of Wordsworth and Silas Marner, the students get kitchen-sink selections from Hemingway on the birth of a baby, D. H. Lawrence on a son's quarrel with his mother, Koestler on a Communist execution, Joyce on a Dublin funeral. Holbrook's first book on education--combining theory, sample student compositions, and Holbrook's interpretations of their efforts--is required reading at most teacher-training colleges. As his just-published third book, The Secret Places, shows, his instructional message never wavers. Picturing a scrawled page from Picasso's notebooks, Holbrook snaps: "The first problem in creativity is to have material to organize; tidiness comes later."

14th Century Comfort. A man with a big head and hair that needs to be cut, Holbrook turned to teaching out of necessity in order to finance his creative writing of poetry and criticism after a career at Cambridge as a reader in English under famed Critic F. R. Leavis. Now comfortably settled with his wife and three children in a 14th century cottage in a hamlet near his alma mater, Holbrook earns far more in royalties as an anthologizer and educational gadfly (total sales: 80,000 copies) than he ever did as a teacher or fiction writer.

Holbrook's indictment of Britain's elementary-school readers explains why. "Turn to any English book and you will find pious and smarmy passages of moral uplift ('the good citizen is one who takes his jacket off to get down to some really hard work'), passages of irrelevant heroism, and academic poetry and prose from the cloisters. The rich torment of popular life, with all its agony, excitement and teeming warmth, is not exemplified in the school culture. So it promotes ennui and resistance."

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