Education and the Radio

Seamus Heaney was, by first profession, a teacher, and education is an abiding preoccupation in his writing. Rooted in the radio work he undertook in the mid-1970s for the BBC Northern Ireland Schools Service, notably Explorations, a series on which he collaborated with his friend David Hammond, Chapter 3 considers the breadth of his thinking on teaching and learning. As a member of one of the first eleven-plus generations in Northern Ireland, his views on education are conditioned by the political reforms of the era, as they were felt by the nationalist community. They are profitably read through Richard Hoggart’s seminal analysis The Uses of Literacy (1957), and his later collaboration with Ted Hughes on The Rattle Bag (1982).