THOMAS NAGEL, an American philosopher, wants to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Ian Anderson, a Scot who performs with the band Jethro Tull, sang of a slightly less intractable difficulty: “wise men don't know how it feels to be thick as a brick.” In “School Blues” Daniel Pennac, a prize-winning French writer, describes what faces a school dunce when the teacher before him cannot recall what it felt like to be ignorant.
Mr Pennac was once such a child (he uses the French cancre, as in Cancer, the crab: a creature that scuttles sideways instead of advancing forwards). But despite becoming a teacher, he can remember what it was like not to understand lessons. The voices in his head remind him of it. They taunt him throughout his semi-autobiographical novel, which partially traces his sorry academic career as the child of high-achieving parents whose three older brothers excelled at school. Luckily for him, his parents did not let him flee the system but instead persisted in finding a teacher who would help him to succeed. The breakthrough came aged 14 when his latest tutor—“no doubt amazed by my increasingly inventive excuses as to why I hadn't done my homework”—commissioned him to write essays and then a novel.
This achieved, Mr Pennac went on to qualify as a teacher himself. He struggles to help his pupils who misapprehend the world around them. Although he believes that the fault lies with the system and ultimately with the teacher rather than the student, he is no traditional liberal. He insists on precision in his classroom as a result of the confusion he felt as a child: when he was accused of “doing it on purpose”, what exactly was he being charged with? “Such a tiny pronoun, such a vast sense of isolation,” he writes. He pulls up his students for their poor use of grammar. He wants them to recite texts by heart—and many, but not all, of them eventually do so.
As the children return to school in the first few days of September, Mr Pennac watches the swallows congregating on the telephone lines outside his house. His bedroom runs the length of the house, with windows at either end, and every year the swallows try to fly through them. Mr Pennac throws wide the windows to facilitate their passage, but there are always some that hit the thin strip of glass that does not open. Whack! These are the dunces whom teachers must scoop up, locate their spark of life and release them from their educational concussion so that they may fly.
Playfully written—Mr Pennac obviously adores the French language in which his novel was first penned and in which language it has sold more than a million copies—“School Blues” joyously combines the profound with the seemingly trivial. It gently reminds readers how ignorant it is to have forgotten what it felt like to have but little knowledge.