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…   
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