Slate has an article out this morning with the title:
Parents Make Better Teachers: Charter schools are hiring young educators who only stick around for a few years. Bad move.
At first glance this looks like flat out age discrimination against people without offspring of their own.
Slate’s is a sensationalist title. The article criticizes an education system which fails to attract and retain older teachers with life experience (and other options, no doubt).
Also this morning I was reading Story by Robert McKee, a writing craft book on the art of storytelling. McKee (himself born in 1941) has this to say about the age of a good storyteller:
You’re willing to risk time. You know that even the most talented writers–Oliver Stone, Lawrence Kasdan, Ruth Prawer, Jhabvala–didn’t find success until they were in their thirties or forties, and just as it takes a decade or more to make a good doctor or teacher, it takes ten or more years of adult life to find something to say that tens of millions of people want to hear, and ten or more years and often as many screenplays written and unsold to master this demanding craft.
This in turn reminds me of something I read in a Guardian profile of Joanna Trollope a few years ago: Don’t seek publishing until you’re 35:
Although the historical romances – published under Caroline Harvey, a combination of her Trollope grandparents’ first names – were an invaluable apprenticeship, she felt they weren’t going anywhere: “It was the wrong genre for the time.” It was her second husband, the playwright and screenwriter Ian Curteis, who encouraged her to “take the gloves off and write about what I knew best”, so she embarked on contemporary fiction, achieving real success in her late 40s. She strongly believes most novelists should wait until they are at least 35 before publishing.
I have to admit, since reading this at about the age of 33, I spent the next three years wondering what glories of insight await me at the ripe age of 35. I turned 35 a few months back, and while I can assure anyone younger that there is no big red button, I do think there’s something to being 35. (So does women’s media.)
When I mentioned this at book club, to a group of women all older than me, the 81 year old listed names of authors who have produced good work well before that age. She mentioned Tim Winton. Actually, that’s all she came up with, and Tim Winton spent the first 7 years of his novelist’s life writing Lockie Leonard, a series for middle grade and young adults. It may be more accurate to say that an author should have either more life experience or more age than the typical reader. It’s easier to achieve age than insight, and publishing is such a competitive industry, why not wait for both?
It does interest me, though, that there is a resistance to the idea that — genius aside — humans do get better at things as we get older. Even the elderly tell themselves the same story, ‘knowing’ that things are easier to learn when you are young. Age is used too often as a reason not to do something new.
Discriminating against anyone’s family status is problematic, even in headlines, but I do take comfort in the idea that it’s not all downhill from 25.
