I’ve been slowly making my way through Spinster, a novel by Sylvia Ashton-Warner. The book, which was first published in 1959, is a fascinating story about a white teacher of Maori children in New Zealand. The books is really interesting on a number of levels, including its exploration of sexual and racial politics, but what I’ve been most closely paying attention to the past couple of times I’ve sat down to read is its take on pedagogy, particularly early childhood pedagogy. Ashton-Warner was a pioneer in that field. This is from a little less than two-thirds through the book. The narrator, Anna Vorontosov, is meditating on the writing her Maori students have started to do:
I can’t help noticing all the strange writing they do. It must be the beginning of composition; the first wall between one being and another; the putting of thoughts for someone else into written words instead of speech or touch; the graduation of talkers and touchers into writers; the progress of mixers into hermits; the springs of loneliness.
But I didn’t start it: they began themselves. I didn’t tell Twinnie to write onthe wall blackboard “My sister can’t draw for nuts.” She asked me how to spell “sister,” “draw” and “nuts,” and I look up and see it. Then the other twin as always copies, and a few more copy until now among the sixes and sevens we have smart exercise books and it’s all “Sharpen my pencil” and “Where’s my rubber” and “How do you spell ‘ghost.’” Plainly it is another medium of expression and another subject in the creative vent; two actually, writing as well as composition. But I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it. And I am far too removed from the good and real teacher to halt it. I can only say I’m sorry.
Not because it is an offence against current professional method but for another reason. I don’t think it is fortunate to write. Or clever. It’s cleverer to converse. To read the facial expression, to extend the voice, to interpret the intonation, to sense the temperature of the emotion and to reply in keeping. It’s cleverer to make the physical conversation of love-making. For what does it require to sit alone at your little table and write what it is yourself? Not the hazards and glamour of communication itself but technique. Only technique.
Even reading a story rather than telling it is a step apart. Waiwini, anyway, can’t take it. She rises in the middle of it and comes to me for the real thing. She touches me and examines the depths of my eyes and asks questions to which she insists that I reply. It reminds me of love: the absolute encounter. (153–4)
It’s worth noting that these thoughts come to Vorontosov after a colleague who was pursuing her romantically and whom she rejected, and who also wanted to write a book but failed to do so, killed himself. It’s also important to keep in mind that she is “talking back,” so to speak, to the current professional method that would likely have said that what was happening in her classroom when it came to writing was too disorderly, that her students would therefore never be able to learn properly, or some such thing. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting take on what gets lost when writing and, by implication, reading, are privileged as means of communication over speaking and listening.
