Published: 23 March 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
THREE IS A MAGIC NUMBER for Ruth Wilson, who at 88 has completed a PhD thesis that’s been celebrated in mainstream media, following glowing academic reviews.
The title, Milestones in a Reading Life: Jane Austen and Lessons in Reading, Learning and Imagination, is a case in point. Its thinking, Wilson says, is the culmination of her three great interests: the Holocaust, education and literature. Or, you could say, three great loves: Jewish people, how children learn, and the pleasures of reading.
According to her academic assessors, the PhD is “advocating a new kind of reading pedagogy that could be extremely valuable to teachers”.
A teacher by profession, Wilson’s instinct for innovation in education goes back a long way. In the 1980s, she designed an educational program for the Jewish anti-discrimination organisation Courage to Care, which she said was all about “head, heart and action”.
Students viewed a Holocaust exhibition (imparting information/the head), listened to survivor stories (the heart/emotion) and then workshopped their experiences to consider the impact on their lives. “It’s a triangle, bringing the head and heart to the will, to create a sort of agency.”
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But where does that connect with Jane Austen and the University of Sydney thesis, which doesn’t mention Jewish people or the Holocaust? Her work in Courage to Care and other Jewish education programs, Wilson says, had demonstrated that the most effective learning occurs when there’s empathy, which increases curiosity and motivation.
Empathy is the link to Austen, whose position as an enduring “curriculum stalwart”, as she puts it, is testament to that quality. Reading her, we are taken into the detail of the lives and feelings of others, an internal journey (which, of course, is also about the discovery of self). Wilson re-reads Austen’s six novels frequently and finds new truths in them each time.
Because they’re about relationships and romance, Austen’s books can be made relevant even for teenage boys, perhaps regarding how to make conversation, or approach a girl, or even propose later in life. They’re perfect for the classroom, for reading aloud, as Austen did with family and friends after dinner, alive to the nuances and humour, savouring the sounds and emphasis.
“All you want to do is give kids a taste of the best. The complexity and ambiguity in Jane Austen, I think, are like gold standard examples – that’s why she’s still worth reading.”
The great thing about her is you learn your lessons from what she shows you. They may not even be the lessons she wants you to get, but because she has such a gift for seeing what’s happening in front of her eyes
Wilson, who has lived most of her adult life in Sydney, grew up in Griffith in central-western NSW. Both her parents were born in Palestine, her mother into an Orthodox family. “She spoke classical, beautiful Hebrew and was fortunate enough to go a historic girls’ school, Annie Landau’s School for Girls, set up in Jerusalem to ensure that young girls could go to Oxford when they finished,” Wilson says.
Her father, who had come to Australia at the age of four, won a scholarship to a prestigious Perth public school and then studied medicine in Sydney. He went to Griffith for a locum and when the time came for marriage, he approached a marriage broker in Jerusalem, where he was introduced to Wilson’s mother.
After just six weeks he brought her back to Griffith, where they settled and raised a family. He loved Griffith and believed Jews should live on the land.
Born in 1932, Wilson’s upbringing was immersed in European Jewry. “So, although I loved my wonderful Australian country and culture, I had a very Jewish culture, too. By the time I was five or six, I was already having nightmares about Mussolini and Hitler.” So, it was natural that she became interested in Holocaust education.
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On returning to Australia with her family in 1979 after five years in Israel - where she taught at the American International School - she became active in the Jewish community. Over the years, Wilson served on the board of the Australian Jewish Welfare Society, chaired the NSW Board of Deputies education committee and chaired the JCA Women’s Division.
In the early 2000s, health issues forced some time out and she went to Bowral, where she stayed for more than a decade.
While she “met” Jane Austen as a child in through the 1940 film Pride and Prejudice (with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier), it was only during this time in Bowral hat she really discovered the author. She joined the Jane Austen Society and started to put together the value of the novels with her insights about empathy in learning and the Holocaust experience.
In 2012, Wilson returned to Sydney and, after mulling things over for a few years, in 2015, at the age of 83, her four children well and truly grown up, she finally found time to explore her ideas.
Running them past various academics, she was heartened to find her theories well received, considered pertinent and relevant, and sorely needed by a school system focusing on quantifiable outcomes and science-based subjects at the expense of personal creativity.
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In our schools today, data collection has, Wilson says, taken much of the joy out of teaching and is the opposite of the personalised response she advocates.
Once, when she was assisting with NAPLAN practice marking, she found the best piece of writing, “the most spontaneous and creative, on their rubric, got the lowest mark”. While some teachers thrive in that atmosphere, Wilson says many are stressed by a system that rewards the less imaginative.
But back to Jane Austen: unlike Dickens who is “dense and wonderful”, despite being deeply flawed in his personal life and from a feminist perspective, and TS Eliot, whose anti-Semitism is embedded in his poetry (the horrid image of a Jew smoking a fat cigar), Austen has no such ideological slurs.
And unlike Dickens, Austen is not didactic, Wilson says. “The great thing about her is you learn your lessons from what she shows you. They may not even be the lessons she wants you to get, but because she has such a gift for seeing what’s happening in front of her eyes, and she translates that with such purity onto the page, she leaves you free not to carry a message, but enables you to find your own message.”
Between fielding media calls and questions from all over the world from Austen fans, Wilson is negotiating with a prominent publisher to turn her thesis into a book and audio book, a personalised version containing more of her life story. She needs, she says, a bit of a break, and will then be “champing at the bit” to get started again.
Main photo: Ruth Wilson (Richard Rosebery)
