Telling Tales out of School

The politicians and bureaucrats who control schools are part of a stratified system where 'those at the top have a more complete picture of what is going on than anyone else,' but oral testimony holds out hope of alternative visions. Personal memories are shaped by and within the dominant discourse - oral accounts are produced not by radically free individuals, but by individuals-in-society, and thus reflect the authorship of the situated social group (Popular Memory Group, 1982). In the end, most historians are left struggling with methods of triangulation, and establishing their own hierarchies of credibility - and those struggles go mainly unreported.

The postmodernist argument that an ethnographic account only takes meaning within a context - that description without interpretation is impossible, and all accounts are given additional layers of meaning by both writer and reader - does not disturb the historian. Rather, he or she celebrates this, and seeks to present this interpretation up front, in ways that suggest a genealogy of context surrounding the narrative of action. As Johnson and Altheide (1991) have suggested of ethnography, the authority of history "turns on the issue of context" (p. 53).

From the perspective of the historian, then, what is interesting about the Fallona myth is not so much its content, but the extent to which it illuminates the broader struggles surrounding the school. We have described elsewhere (Goodson and Dowbiggin, 1991; Anstead and Goodson, 1993a; Goodson and Anstead, 1993b) how the early history of the school involved continuous campaigns between interested groups concerned about the promises and repercussions of vocational education. Most of these battles were fought in symbolic language at the level of rhetoric. At the same time, elements in the school mediated and cooperated in the construction of the schooling experience. The teachers and administrators at LTCHS sought, in part, to turn the rhetoric and resources of vocationalism to their own ends.

It is not surprising then that in these wars, heroic and not-so-heroic myths sprang up. For the first two decades of the school's existence, its identity was bound up with that of Herbert Benson Beal, the school's founding principal. Beal's image strode the stage of local education - he was the "Great Man" personified. And it was Beal's personal goal to create in his school a "Workingman's University." From hindsight the familiar Progressive blind spots are obvious; the emphasis on pride in work and the value of labour, and the expectation that working people would have no need to go to a "real" university, all rang true in the world of social efficiency. At the same time, Beal's aggressive campaign to bring status to his school posed a challenge to the supporters of traditional academic knowledge.

By the 1970s though, the school's mythic identity had changed drastically. The school became the lightning rod for concerns over immorality and recreational drug use. To too many people in London, Beal was "Drug City." By the end of the decade, some teachers at Beal, sick of the school's reputation, engaged in a legal battle with the city's newspaper over its alleged expose of drug use at the school. But by then it was too late.

The Fallona myth takes its place somewhere on the continuum that leads from Workingman's University to Drug City. In fact, after Beal's retirement in the mid-1930s, Fallona came to be the central character in the school's historical consciousness. As principals at Beal changed more and more frequently, Fallona spent a forty-year career behind its walls. He rose to Vice-Principal in 1953 and then to a special rank as "Assistant to the Principal" for his last few years before retiring in 1969.

Collective Memory, Dissident Memory

The idea of a school's mythic identity is linked to oral testimonies in another way; in our interviews with students and teachers from the 1930s, we can begin to chart the emergence and maintenance of a "memory" of the school which is collectively and socially processed and constructed (Middleton and Edwards, 1990). The main themes of this sort of interpretation are: students were disciplined and showed respect for their teachers; every teacher - without exception - was good, and many went beyond the call of duty; and all students, whatever their socioeconomic background, were treated the same.

If retired teachers' or former students' stories are similar, we believe it is because they have been collectively constructed, negotiated and reconstructed over time. Why else would so many accounts from identical cohorts in the same school be so similar? In North America the school is one of the last socialising and collectivising public spaces. Here above all we believe collective memories are constructed, before being reproduced in daily discourses and subsequent shared reminiscences.