Dick Jones' Patteran Pages

[2.] TEACHING AS A SUBVERSIVE ACTIVITY

But the educational revolution never happened & the equation calculated by Postman & Weingartner was denied its proof. Suddenly, in one of those quantum shifts that confound historical trends, to be Right was romantic. In Britain Margaret Thatcher happened; in the United States Ronald Reagan happened; that great geyser of legitimised greed that burst in the late ‘70s & engulfed the Western world in the ‘80s happened.  And here we are now on the other side of it but with the ideological wreckage it left behind all around us still.  Within government, within politics in general, we have been freed from the ties, the constraints, the ethical guidelines that once provided some sort of philosophical baseline that might in turn articulate policy.  The natural corollary of such a willing abandonment of ideology in the pursuit of realpolitik is the kind of world upon which so recently Great Britain & the United States opened the door.

Depressed by the news once again & moved suddenly by a sense of what might have been, I took Teaching as a Subversive Activity down from the bookcase the other day.  Flicking through the pages & then sitting down & re-reading more thoroughly, I was struck by the freshness & continuing validity of what had inspired me nearly 35 years earlier.  Where Winston Smith in 1984 speculated  that the only hope for a better world lay with the proles, Postman & Weingartner place their faith in the young & in Teaching as a Subversive Activity they ask of education that most fundamental of questions: What’s worth knowing?

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From Teaching As A Subversive Activity

Thank God there are no free schools or printing… For learning has brought disobedience & heresy into the world, & printing has divulged them… God keep us from both.
SIR WILLIAM BERKELEY, Governor of Virginia, d. 1677

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The institution we call ‘school’ is what it is because we made it that way.  If it is irrelevant, as Marshall McLuhan says; if it shields children from reality, as Norbert Wiener says; if it educates for obsolescence, as John Gardner says; if it does not develop intelligence, as Jerome Bruner says; if it is based on fear, as John Holt says; if it avoids the promotion of significant learnings, as Carl Rogers says; if it induces alienation, as Paul Goodman says; if it punishes creativity & independence, as Edgar Friedenberg says; if, in short, it is not doing what needs to be done, it can be changed; it must be changed.

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In our society, as in others, we find that there are influential men at the head of important institutions who cannot afford to be found wrong, who find change inconvenient, perhaps intolerable, & who have financial or political interests they must conserve at any cost.  Such men are, therefore, threatened in many respects by the theory of the democratic process and the concept of an ever-renewing society.

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The principles of educational process now:

•    Passive acceptance is a more desirable response to ideas than active criticism.

•    Discovering knowledge is beyond the power of students and is, in any case, none of their business.

•    Recall is the highest form of intellectual achievement, & the collection of unrelated ‘facts’ is the goal of education.

•    The voice of authority is to be trusted & valued more than independent judgement.

•    One’s own ideas & those of one’s classmates are inconsequential.

•    Feelings are irrelevant in education.

•    There is always a single, unambiguous Right Answer to a question.

•    English is not history & history is not science & science is not art & art is not music, & art & music are minor subjects & English, history & science are major subjects, & a subject is something you ‘take’ &, when you have taken it, you have ‘had’ it, & if you have ‘had’ it, you are immune & need not take it again. (The Vaccination Theory of education?)

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Alternatives - ‘What’s Worth Knowing?’  [1.]

A questionnaire

What do you worry about most?

What are the causes of your worries?

Can any of your worries be eliminated?

Which of them might you deal with first? How do you decide?

If you had an important idea that you wanted to let everyone (in the world) know about, how might you go about letting them know?

What bothers you most about adults? Why?

How do you want to be similar to or different from adults you know when you become an adult?

What, if anything, seems to you to be worth dying for?

How did you come to believe this?

What seems worth living for?

How did you come to believe this?

How can you tell ‘good guys’ from ‘bad guys’?

How can ‘good’ be distinguished from ‘evil’?

At the present moment, what would you most like to be doing? Five years from now? Ten years from now? Why?  What might you have to do to realize these hopes? What might you have to give up in order to do some or all of these things..?

(To be concluded)   

A BRIEF INTERJECTION.

I'm way behind on both comment responses & blog visits. Apologies all round - domestic labours, school firing up with a vengeance & laptop breakdown. I'll be back on the case asap.

[2.] A MANUAL FOR REVOLUTION

In the late ‘60s & early ‘70s liberation issues were discussed within education every bit as energetically as they were within other social & cultural institutions.  A number of heavy hitters emerged whose work had an acuteness of focus, a substance & a breadth of vision unusual at a time when reason & intellect were taking a back seat to magic & mystery.  Even in these pragmatic, decidedly post-ideological ‘nought-ies’ (yes, that horrific neologism has been used in earnest by the media) the names of Paulo Freire, John Holt, Paul Goodman, Carl Rogers, Abraham H. Maslow, George Isaac Brown still have resonance.

I started teaching in 1967, having drifted into it rather reluctantly after three years of playing in rock bands & abusing my constitution at a prestigious London college.  However, I embraced the Revolution with alacrity  &, teaching being my trade, I read anything that claimed to be a manual for radical change in the classroom & playground.  I managed to get from cover to cover in most of the books written by the New Age warriors above.

But it wasn’t until I’d been teaching for a few years & had had my cherry well & truly popped that I came across a book that really did pull me up short.  After reading it my perspectives on education & schooling – already radicalised by my own childhood experiences - altered irrevocably. Never again did I confuse the two.

In 1969 a small book called Teaching as a Subversive Activity was published.  Although slim, Neil Postman’s & Charles Weingartner’s radical little volume punched way above its weight.  Occupying the same ideological territory as Freire, Holt, Goodman et al, it radiated a freshness & accessibility &, most winningly, a practicality that the others’ books – noble & relevant though they were – didn’t necessarily have.  I was introduced to it in my last term at that jungle outpost &, page-by-page, I realised that not only was I a foot soldier in the most important campaign of the war but that there were strategies being drafted & tactics being planned that would win us that war. Revolutionary change in education, the book told us, will cause ‘everything to change’. I absorbed its erudition, its humour, its poetry, its acute perception of the nature of the lie that is institutionalised education in the urban world. I saw the book as a manifesto, a blueprint that would, when implemented, sweep away for ever the black blazers, the rigid rows of desks, the endless, echoing cream-and-green corridors, the violence, formal & informal, the great swathes of asphalt, the sound of chalk screeching on blackboards, the despair, the apathy, the lobbing of dog-eared books across a classroom, the wielding of bricks in a playground.
(continued)

Passions come & - with kids, mortgages & the passing years – passions go.  But I have held as an unwavering conviction for most of my life that the prime agent of real social & cultural change is the school. Not the political party, the church, the factory or the university, but the school.  And the energy that drives the initiative for change is not to be found within the curriculum. It’s not a function of the product-orientated structures by which data is delivered to our children. It arises from the day-to-day processes whereby their lives are regulated; from the nature & quality of the relationships they have with the adults within the school; from the degree of direct & meaningful participation they have in the running of the community; from the amount of authentic freedom & self-determination they enjoy.

Education is the theme of this month’s qarrtsiluni.  I wrote recently a piece about my experience as a pupil of a distinctly alternative approach to education, which, very gratifyingly, they have published. 

Between the day-in-a-life depicted in that story & now, I spent 35 years teaching in progressive schools.  I retired from the third of them last year (although, in fact, I’m now teaching in a very traditional girls’ school!) so the time seems right for something of a meditation on the fundamentally unchanging nature of schooling & the persistence of revolutionary alternatives.

These are specialist concerns.  Many, maybe most, of those who read the Patteran Pages will have turned their backs on school long since, nurturing the happy memories but – quite rightly – cherishing more the life that has burgeoned beyond. However, this month’s qarrtsiluni is going to provide a fascinating variety of material & I’m hoping that there may be some cross-town traffic between us. 

.o0o.

THE PRACTICE OF FREEDOM

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.
Paulo Freire

[1.] DOWN ON THE KILLING FLOOR

Struggling my way (sometimes literally) through bone-wearyingly long days in a South-East London boys’ secondary school, I was rapidly coming to the conclusion that the teacher’s task was a simple bi-polar process.  At the northern end, where those boys lightly caressed by the penumbra of the curriculum lived, you lobbed the books from desk to desk at 9.00 am & it was heads down until 4.00 pm. Once a year the uniformed drones were herded en masse into a reeking hall to spill the contents of the lobbed books onto file paper & then, after six weeks of exhausted holiday, you resumed the lobbing. 

At the southern end, where the terminally ineducable lived, different tasks were undertaken.  In this realm of shadows much of the time was passed in a climate of threatened or actual violence.  If the boys weren’t pushing each other over banisters or into lavatory bowls, the teachers were using their freewheeling powers of corporal punishment for such infringements of day-to-day protocol as wearing a school cap back to front or a school tie for a belt. The cane was used regularly by the tiny Headmaster, but the preferred tool of correction here was the rubber-soled gym shoe.  There would be intense, even heated debate in the staff room as to whether leaving the laces in provided extra tensile strength or removing them provided added flexibility.

My call to arms came one day on playground duty.  I had positioned myself as usual two thirds of the way up the fire escape steps like a fully dressed lifeguard at the edge of a particularly troublesome sea.  I was, as usual, willing the hands of my watch to clamber up towards 10.40 just a little bit faster so that I could blow the whistle, like a successful Canute, turn back the tide. 

Suddenly, with the inexplicable swiftness of a force of nature, the random, scattered groups of boys coalesced into a uniform mass.  Like iron filings drawn to a magnet, hundreds of black-clad figures were sucked inward towards a central hub of activity. A fight – the duty teacher’s nightmare.  As I flung myself into the imploding throng, seizing boys by their blazer collars & flinging them behind me, a curious booming roar went up all around.  It was like being under water. I knew that my colleagues would be packed around the staffroom window, coffee cups in one hand, crumpled newspapers opened at the jobs section in the other.  They would be watching my action keenly, judging me on speed, style & control. 

Eventually I reached the centre, the eye of the hurricane.  An tight-knit ring of sweating, feral boys held the ring open, giving the combatants just enough room to manoeuvre.  Their feet scuffled for purchase on the tarmac against the mighty press from behind. As I lurched into the circle, carried forward by my own momentum, I nearly stumbled onto Franny Smith. He was kneeling on the upper arms of a terrified smaller boy, his head tilted back, wild-eyed, his arms extended, hands open, screaming: “Give me a fucking brick! Give me a fucking brick!”  And, as I straightened up, Danny Wright broke through  the inner circle, half a house brick proffered in his fist…   
(continued)

I have a fragment of autobiography in the latest, educationally-themed, qarrtsiluni.

We must find ways of reconciling security with liberty, since the success of one helps protect the other.  The choice between security and liberty is a false choice, as nothing is more likely to endanger America’s liberties than the success of a terrorist attack at home.  Our history has shown us that insecurity threatens liberty.  Yet, if our liberties are curtailed, we lose the values that we are struggling to defend.
9/11 Commission Report, 12.4, page 395.

The most difficult thing of all—yet the most essential—is to love life, even when you suffer, because life is all.
Leo Tolstoy

The world is full of suffering; it is also full of the overcoming of it.
Helen Keller

If it were possible for us to see further than our knowledge extends and out a little over the outworks of our surmising, perhaps we should then bear our sorrows with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new, something unknown, has entered into us. The more patient, quiet and open we are in our sorrowing, the more deeply and the more unhesitatingly will the new thing enter us, the better shall we deserve it, the more will it be our own destiny.
Rainer Maria Rilke

RERUM

Internecine strife of the most destructive kind has finally broken surface in the Labour Party. Arguably, a tipping point has been passed & the downhill momentum can only lead to a pile-up with Tony on top of assorted Blairites.  High on the hill will sit triumphant Gordon Brown & a mixed bunch of long-term acolytes, renegades & arrivistes. 

As ever, hubris is the slow poison that is now claiming its victims.  The long-odds gamble that it inspired Blair to make in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq – that the world would both understand & forgive when the removal of Saddam Hussein led to the benisons of Western-style democracy – failed miserably.   And now his persistent refusal to name the day of his departure has provoked even the most purblind of the party faithful to lose patience.

One of the enduring images of the past 30 years is that of Margaret Thatcher’s stricken, uncomprehending face turned to face the cameras probing the rear interior of the car removing her from number 10 Downing Street.  Of all the emotions that might be seen to play across the face of Tony Blair as he is motored away from the same place, phlegmatic resignation is not likely to one of them. I fancy the omnipresent cameras will record exactly the same combination of shock & incomprehension.

.o0o.

“Look! I’ve got two balls!” shrieked Reuben as he stumbled across the lawn with his & Rosie’s footballs clutched to his chest.  Momentarily, the murmurous conversation from the neighbours on either side ceased.

.o0o.

ABOVE MEDBOURNE

The slow hill.
The long wind.
The one cloud,
high-shouldered,
hoarding its rain.

The crooked lane.
The big sky.
The spinning crowd
of rooks, adrift, unpinned,
like a broken wheel.

.o0o.

LARKS ASCENDING

I was 13 & staying with family friends in a damp, dilapidated but beautiful manor house called The Old Hall just outside the village of Reedham in Norfolk.  John & Joyce Jacobs were running it as a combination guest house & small livestock farm, motivated more, I realise now, by a romantic notion of rural idyll than the desire to make fat profits.

And in those days ‘romantic notion’ could get you quite far before the bank foreclosed or you flitted away in the night with your belongings in a couple of suitcases.  And at that time ‘rural idyll’ still had a little currency.  There remained the residue of a working countryside; independent farms with relatively little acreage could just about make a living & the pace of life was still largely dictated by the seasonal tides.  So the raffish, slightly bohemian Jacobs family sat around the Raeburn cooker in the unreconstructed authenticity of a manor house kitchen of a morning planning the day’s events

For me the glory of it all was the freedom. I was left entirely up to my own devices & I roamed for entire days across the endless flat fields, following the lines of the dykes – the deep, carefully maintained drainage streams, that bisected them.   For the first time in my life I was entirely on my own.  I could clamber up onto the railway embankment & trudge along the shingle in between the sleepers for miles in a dead straight line.  I could select a windmill, seen as tiny scribbled letter ‘X’ against the horizon, & make my way towards it across a multitude of five-bar gates & styles to stand beneath its clinker-built bulk, mighty sails locked into position, or, rarely, turning majestically in the breeze that always shifted across the constant plateau.  Or I could simply lie on my back in the dust & chaff of a recently harvested field, staring up at the bubbling summer clouds, watching & listening to the skylarks that wheeled & climbed in such abundance at that time.  And, of that genuinely idyllic six weeks, I remember with most clarity the prickle of the stubble, the throaty dryness of the dust & those soaring skylarks, alone amongst the clouds.

A few years ago, in mid-July, I revisited Reedham. I stood at the edge of the first field, the one that bordered the rambling gardens of the Old Hall & across which I used to stride at the beginning of my explorations. Initially it looked much the same, but a cursory inspection swiftly revealed the changes: the windbreak hedgerows had gone; the crop had been harvested already; & not a single skylark spiralled high into the clear air.

I learned recently that since 1970 the skylark population has declined by 52%.  Major changes in cultivation & harvesting procedures are thought to be responsible for this, notably the switch from spring to autumn-sown cereals, the disappearance of the hedgerows & the vulnerability of birds to the massively increased use of insecticides & weedkillers. 

It would seem, then, that the skylark – a bird whose rural associations transcend entirely the phoney bucolic Merrie England clichés - is another casualty of the late-20th century.  Apparently not.  Although a 52% decline in a little over 30 years is dramatic & alarming, a government-funded study has demonstrated that merely the provision of two small patches left untouched within a hectare of cultivated land can reverse local decline.  Experiments done over a two-year period resulted in an increase of nearly 50% in skylark breeding.  So to encourage the process, farmers are being offered £30.00 per hectare to join a scheme involving small, undrilled patches across their field systems.

A small resistance to an advancing tide. ‘So shines a bright deed in a naughty world’.  If the farmers of East Norfolk are an enlightened crew, maybe I’ll be able to lie on my back in the great fields by The Old Hall, Reedham again in a year or two, watching & hearing the larks ascending.

.o0o.

Dear thoughts are in my mind
And my soul soars enchanted,
As I hear the sweet lark sing    
In the clear air of the day.

For a tender beaming smile
To my hope has been granted,    
And tomorrow she shall hear
All my fond heart would say.

I shall tell her all my love,
All my soul's adoration,
And I think she will hear
And will not say me nay.

It is this that gives my soul
All its joyous elation,
As I hear the sweet lark sing
In the clear air of the day.

(From ‘The Lark in the Clear Air by Samuel Ferguson)

.o0o.

The lark in the morning she arises from her nest
And she ascends all in the air with the dew upon her breast
And with the pretty ploughboy she'll whistle and she'll sing
And at night she'll return to her own nest again

When his day's work is over, oh what then will he do
Perhaps then into some country wake he'll go
And with his pretty sweetheart, he'll dance and he'll sing
And at night he'll return with his love back again

And as they returned from the wake unto the town
The meadows they are mowed and the grass it is cut down
The nightingale she whistles upon the hawthorn spray
And the moon it is a shining upon the new mown hay

Good luck unto the ploughboys wherever they may be
They will take a winsome lass for to sit upon their knee
And with a jug of beer boys, they'll whistle and they'll sing
And the ploughboy is as happy as a prince or a king

(‘The Lark in the Morning’ - traditional English song, this version from The Copper Family of Sussex)

.o0o.

He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake.

For singing till his heaven fills,
‘Tis love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup
And he the wine which overflows
to lift us with him as he goes.

Till lost on his aerial rings
In light, and then the fancy sings.

From ‘The Lark Ascending’ by George Meredith

.o0o.

An easy one for the vicar, this - just Tina & Kevin. Problems ahead, though, if Tina's determined to  line up her maiden name with Kevin' surname. And that goes for either way around.

It's the vicar I feel sorry for. I imagine him pacing the vestry floor the night before the wedding practising alternative pronunciations & then not sleeping a wink that night because there aren't any.