education (2) turnvater
jahn
If you have the same teacher for
years at secondary school and the man is a complete cretin, you’re unlucky. But
if such a man has something to say you find relevant, then you’re lucky all those
years. I had such luck with my history teacher. I had lessons with him from
class one to class six and a couple of times a year he said something that even
now – thirty-five years later – I can still remember. That’s a score very few
achieve. Nowadays I maybe doubt a thing or two he said back then (I am slowly
growing up), but out of deference I withhold my scorn. He said, for example,
that history moves step by step to the left, but when I hear Reagan, Botha or
Bukman, not unimportant men in our world, doubt steals over me.
He gave proper
lessons, at any rate. He sat behind his desk and told us things, fifty minutes
out of every hour; we listened and wrote down what he said. Nobody was
interested in educational innovation or other such crap. One of the persons he half-smilingly
talked about was Turnvater Jahn. I don’t know if my aversion to all that fuss
about the human body took shape then. Perhaps his words fell into already
fertile soil.
Good and bad were
distinct, uncompromising concepts, and Jahn became a gymnastics teacher who
wanted to bring up German youth in such a sphere. If you were to sum up his
philosophy good-naturedly, you could say: cold showers, no moaning, up-and-doing.
A mentality with which you can construct the Delta Works or wage a war
(actually, the natural dream of every boss when thinking of his workers – no
nonsense). War? What, less good-naturedly, a contemporary and fellow-soul of
Jahn, the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, had to say in his ‘Reden an die
deutsche Nation’. The young German was to be so well trained in his gymnastics
lessons that at any desired moment, without any additional training, he could
be employed as a soldier.
So it is not
strange that since the age of sixteen I have seen Turnvater Jahn grinning
behind every gymnastics teacher. And this prejudice has in fact been confirmed spine-chillingly
often. As a teacher myself, I have seldom met a gymnastics teachers who were worth
their salt. They had admittedly little chance with me, since I felt it was
unjust they earned as much as we did, since we had to correct and prepare
lessons in the evening, while they only had to spend a few hours in the daytime
in a hall shouting out orders and lie on their stomachs once a week, grab their
ankles and rock like a swan. I have personally devised a manageable theory: the
body is to the right. It is limited and restricted, orderly and easy-to-grasp.
The mind is to the left, chaotic, volatile, ungraspable. Using my mind, I can
cover ten kilometres in the fraction of a second, while my body needs four
hours to do it. Those only concerned with their unwieldy bodies must therefore
be to the right. I don’t take offence at them for this, though it sometimes
calls for quite an effort. In addition I also try to be stoical about it. For
me, this means: if someone says something incredibly stupid, I don’t get angry
even so.
I’m nearly always
successful, you could indeed say: that Snijders man is a real stoic. When my
daughter was sent home from school because she had had a difference of opinion
with her teacher about the universe, I didn’t get annoyed, well, not for long
at any rate. But on one occasion it was touch and go. I thinking of something
eight years back. All of our kids – we have five of them – are still at home. We’re
having our evening meal, lots of talking and arguing as usual. I pay no
attention and spoon my soup. Suddenly I hear the word ‘concentration camp’. That
afternoon my sixteen-year-old son has had a trivial tiff with his gymnastics
teacher on the playing field and the man has said to him: For the likes of you
they ought to reopen the concentration camps.
I put down my
spoon in the soup and go over to the phone. When I have the headteacher on the
line, I tell him that the following day I will be handing in an official complaint
to the inspectors. This is bluff – I don’t know what an official complaint is
or how to make one. Fifteen minutes later the telephone rings. It is Turnvater
Jahn, who is of course only scared when your threaten him with someone higher
up the hierarchy. My wrath has evaporated, I don’t listen to him, I hold the receiver
half a metre from my ear, and when I can’t hear anything more, I hang up. I
hope he reads this little piece, but its unlikely – he naturally sub-scribes to
one of the major morning newspapers.
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