An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum

Central message: The poem is a powerful social protest against inequality in education and the deprivation of children who live in slums. Spender argues that providing maps, Shakespeare's plays, and pictures of beautiful distant lands to slum children is a cruel mockery unless the children are first freed from poverty and given real opportunities. Depiction of slum children: 1. Physical descriptions of poverty and disease: • 'Tall girl with her weighed-down head' — bent and burdened by poverty and despair. • 'Paper-seeming boy, with rat's eyes' — malnourished, thin as paper, eyes bright with desperation. • 'Stunted, unlucky heir of twisted bones' — a hereditary cripple, born into a body deformed by malnutrition. • 'Gnarled disease is the hereditary fate' of these children — poverty is inherited. • 'Fog' and 'cramped holes' — the atmosphere of slums is suffocating, dark, narrow. 2. Contrast between their world and the classroom walls: • The classroom walls display maps, Shakespeare's portrait, Tyrolese valleys — beautiful, cultured, distant. • But these images are meaningless — even cruel — to children whose world is 'slag heap,' 'narrow street,' 'cramped holes.' • The maps show a 'bad example of their lives' — they chart a world that is not theirs and never will be unless society changes. 3. The image of hope and what it would require: • Spender calls on 'governors, teachers, inspectors, visitors' to open the 'windows' — literally and metaphorically — to let light and freedom into these children's lives. • Only when slum children are freed from poverty, given clean air and opportunity, will language, education, and maps have any meaning for them.

The phrase 'the world in their eyes' refers to the contrast between the world the slum children can actually see (their immediate reality of poverty, disease, and confinement) and the world represented in the classroom by maps, Shakespeare, and pictures. The 'maps' in the poem operate on multiple levels: 1. Literal maps: The physical maps hanging in the classroom show the world beyond the slum — green fields, mountain ranges, distant continents, the sea. They are meant to educate, to broaden horizons. 2. As symbols of a world beyond reach: For slum children, these maps are a cruel irony. They show a beautiful world that these children can never access. Their world is not the one on the map — it is the grey slag heap, the narrow street, the cramped house. 3. The maps as propaganda: Spender argues that showing these children maps of a beautiful world while leaving them in slum conditions is dishonest — even hypocritical. It teaches them to aspire to something while ensuring through social inequality that they can never reach it. 4. The alternative map: The poet says that the children's 'future [is] painted with fog' — the real 'map' of their lives is one of poverty and despair, not the colourful world on the classroom wall. 5. What must change: Spender's solution is that society must break open this prison — 'Break, O break open till they break the town / And show the children to green fields' — allowing the children to actually enter the world of beauty and freedom, not just look at its picture.

The poem uses the classroom as a powerful symbol of social inequality: 1. The classroom as a symbol of inequality: • The classroom represents the promise of education as the great equaliser — the idea that education can lift the poor out of poverty. • But Spender shows that education in a slum classroom is a sham: the children are physically broken, mentally stunted by malnutrition and disease, and the content of what is taught (Shakespeare, maps, beautiful landscapes) has no connection to their lives. • The classroom does not equalise — it underlines the gulf between the privileged and the deprived. 2. 'History is the slave of time' interpretation: • While this exact phrase is not in the poem, Spender's imagery of the spectacles of a 'squinting' boy who 'wears' his father's glasses suggests how history (the past) perpetuates itself — the child inherits not just poverty but also the physical ailments of poverty. • The 'hereditary' nature of poverty and disease is emphasised: 'gnarled disease is the hereditary fate.' 3. 'Civilisation' hanging on the classroom walls: • Shakespeare's portrait, a Tyrolese valley, maps — these are symbols of Western civilisation, culture, and prosperity. • Their presence on the walls of a slum school while the children 'wear skins peeked through by bones' is bitterly ironic — civilisation exists for the privileged and is merely a picture on the wall for the poor. 4. The call to action: • The poem ends with a passionate plea: break the walls, let the children out, give them the sun, the fields, the maps made real. Only then will civilisation have meaning for them.