Ogion

 It's likely that my blog, inevitably, is likely to turn away from topics of theatre and poetry and more towards the role ( pun intended ) that I'll be spending  my time on in the next few years.

 At times when interviewing, I've been known to ask people to talk about a teacher they have admired, or who has influenced them. Sometimes ( although not always ) it can be a revealing question : a gentler, less direct way of asking "What are you doing here ? What brought you to this place ?"

More to the point, it cuts to the essence of what teaching is. For some of us it's a profession;  but as I often point out to kids, we are all of us at some stage in our lives teachers  : we all get given something by those who walked the road before us, which turn gives us both the opportunity and the obligation to pass it on.

Now there are certainly a number of teachers - three or four in particular - who I admired, and who influenced me, amongst my teachers and professional colleagues. But since today is Book Day, I'd like to write first about a fictional teacher.

Ogion the Silent is a character in A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula le Guin, the first book in her series of Earthsea novels which I first came across in 1976 ( on Jackanory, BBC television , a programme where for 20 minutes each afternoon, an actor sat in front of a TV camera and read out loud from a book. Nothing but words, and the occasional still image. )

A Wizard of Earthsea is wisdom literature for 12-year-olds, a study in power and responsibility,  the story of Ged, Sparrowhawk, a boy with vast but raw magical power, who travels to the centre of the world to study at a school for wizards, where in his pride and desire to show off his power and knowledge he lets loose a dark shadow into the world, and is forced to chase and be chased by it in a series of nightmare adventures across a range of pseudo-Celtic western islands until....well, read the book. You won't be disappointed.


Ogion is a minor character in Ged's story : an archetypal gatekeeper, the mentor-figure who guides the hero at the start of his journey. He is also a teacher, and a symbolic father. He inhabits a space halfway between a Celtic wild man from the age of saints, and a Zen monk. Here is how le Guin introduces him :

" Ged had thought that as the prentice of a great mage he would enter at once into the mystery and mastery of power. He would understand the language of the beasts and the speech of the leaves of the forest, he thought, and sway the winds with his word, and learn to change himself into any shape he wished. Maybe he and his master would run together as stags, or fly to Re Albi over the mountain on the wings of eagles.

But it was not so at all. They wandered, first down into the Vale, and then gradually further south and westward around the mountain, given lodging in little villages or spending the night out in the wilderness, like poor journeymen-sorcerors, or tinkers, or beggars. They entered no mysterious domain. Nothing happened. The mage's oaken staff that Ged had watched at first with eager dread was nothing but a stout staff to walk with. Three days went by and four days went by and still Ogion had not spoken a single charm in Ged's hearing, and had not taught him a single rune or spell.

Though a very silent man he was so mild and calm that Ged soon lost his awe of him, and in a day or two more he was bold enough to ask his master, "When will my apprenticeship begin, Sir ?"

"It has begun," said Ogion.

There was a silence, as if Ged was keeping back something he had to say. Then he said it : "But I haven't learned anything yet !"

"Because you haven't found out what I am teaching," replied the mage, going on at his steady, long-legged pace along their road."

We can certainly draw the conclusion that Ogion is just a bloody annoying Zen-type person and the sooner we get onto the next chapter the better : he probably wouldn't be much use as a line manager, really.This is some distance from Assessment Working Groups and reports deadlines, the type of detail on which we spend much of our working lives. I've re-read this passage many times over 40 years, and it's easy to read too much into it as well.

And yet Ogion remains a powerful archetype, a reminder that we all have gatekeepers and mentors at different points in our lives, that even as we learn we serve as teachers to others in turn, and that progress is not always so simple to measure.

And above all, that sometimes it's impossible to distinguish between the way we do something and the thing that we do. The way that we do the work is the work, and if we think we can set an objective which is somehow distinct and separate from the process we follow to achieve it, we may miss the point - in truth, we may not even be able to see the point.

In the context of twentieth-first century teaching, it's worth considering that the metaphor derives from archery : "point" is an Early Modern English word for "target".