Co-Ordination by E.M. Forster (1928)
"Co-Ordination," a short story by E.M. Forster, satirizes an educational fad through interlocking scenes on earth and in a whimsical heaven. At a girls' school, the elderly and self-doubting music teacher Miss Haddon supervises a succession of pupil pairs—Mildred and Ellen, Rose and Enid, Margaret and Jane, Dolores and Violet—as they clumsily hammer out a duet arrangement of Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony. The Principal has adopted a "co-ordinative system": the entire school studies Napoleon for the year, so every subject is forced to relate to him. Literature reads "War and Peace," recitation learns Wordsworth's political sonnets, drawing copies David's paintings, needlework designs Empire gowns, and music practices the "Eroica," composed in Napoleon's honor. The other mistresses praise the system's coherence, but Miss Haddon, untouched by such enthusiasm, only fears that her declining musicianship will soon get her dismissed. The narrative then ascends to heaven, where Beethoven presides over clerks who log every earthly performance of his work in ledgers. Learning that Miss Haddon's pupils perform the "Eroica" continually and, per his flattering but deaf and misinformed clerk, with deep insight, Beethoven decrees that the household shall that evening hear a perfect performance of his A minor quartette. Simultaneously, Napoleon holds court among his own vast bureaucracy of clerks, tracking every tribute paid to him on earth—recitations, drawings, even a spontaneous singing of the "Marseillaise." Pleased and increasingly grandiose, misled by his clerks' eager reports, Napoleon decrees that the school shall "participate" the next morning in the victory of Austerlitz. Back on earth, these celestial decrees manifest not through mystical insight but through accident and coincidence. During evening preparation, a cavalry regiment passes the school with a band, and the bored, restless girls erupt into ecstatic noise and play, unsupervised because Miss Haddon has stepped out to fetch a genealogical tree of Marie Louise for the history lesson. Searching among papers under a Napoleonic relic (a shell from St. Helena) sent by the Principal, the despairing Miss Haddon, contemplating her own inadequacy and mortality, absentmindedly raises the shell to her ear as her sailor father once did. She hears the sea in all its moods and finally recognizes it as irrevocably her own. The Principal enters, scolding her for neglecting supervision, but then also picks up the shell and, listening herself, hears a nocturnal wood filled with quietly hunting friends and horn-calls. While each woman listens with one ear to her private vision, Miss Haddon speaks into the other: she confesses she has never truly been musical, that she has deceived everyone for the sake of a living, and she resigns. Moved by the strange murmuring in her own ear, the Principal, instead of reacting with her usual sharpness, gently asks Miss Haddon to rest and takes over supervision of preparation herself—during which the cavalry passes again. The next morning, Miss Haddon reveals extraordinary news: a man her father once saved from drowning has died and left her a cottage by the sea along with money enough to live without working. She regrets not having waited a day to resign more graciously. The Principal, deeply affected by her own experience with the shell, embraces her, calls her resignation "a word of truth," and declares a school holiday. The pupils are sent out for treats and organized into a chaotic, joyous, rule-free outing—games with no clear sides or order, mixed and improvised freely. The co-ordinative system itself is abandoned and mocked, culminating in a mocking children's song about "Silly old Boney." At the day's end, the Principal admits to the whole company that she secretly despises the co-ordinative system too, having adopted it only to satisfy the Board of Education's bureaucratic expectations. Everyone laughs, uniting in relief and irony. The story closes with a metaphysical coda: Mephistopheles, delighted, brings the whole affair before the angel Raphael as proof of his case against cosmic harmony, arguing that genius is always misunderstood and that great men's intentions—Beethoven's and Napoleon's—were comically distorted by flattering, dishonest intermediaries into a legacy and a school outing. Raphael listens patiently, then overturns Mephistopheles' triumphant logic: rather than proving that co-ordination fails, the chain of accidents—the passing regiment, the shell, the confessions, the holiday—demonstrates that true co-ordination has, in fact, occurred, achieved not through doctrine or forced curricular unity but through Melody and Victory reaching people authentically, sideways, and unexpectedly. The devil, mistaking his evidence for indictment, is sent back to observe the truth he failed to see: that genuine human connection can still occur despite—and through—misunderstanding, artifice, and accident.
By E.M. Forster · First published 1928 · Genre: Satire, Philosophical Fiction, Magical Realism