Personhood, community and social nurture

Thanks to Anna Popova for an interesting discussion of vospitanie or social nurture in Russia.
I suggest the following in applying her description to Britain:

After the Russian revolution, there seems to have been a deliberate attempt to rethink the notions of personhood-in community (as opposed to previously being 'feudal serfs'), and the concept of community (as opposed to hegemony/authoritarianism). The result was grass-roots 'socialist' reshaping or redefining of what it means to be a Russian 'citizen' (and indeed more generally a 'person in community'). The community ceased to be based on patronage and needed to develop cooperatively on self-help principles. Vospitanie ('social nurture' was the means of passing on these new definitions to the following generations, and operated independently of whatever was going on in macro-politics. It became 'tacit knowledge', the common sense of this generation and the last. It is now coming into conflict with chaotic market capitalism and the rise of individualism and the resulting fat-cats, and fuels a backlash which asserts the best values of the soviet years.
In contrast, in Britain there has been no grassroots reflection on citizenship as 'persons in community' or on the nature of community. The Plowdon Report (following John Dewey's philosophy) encouraged primary schools to develop active persons in community, but that was destroyed by our own market capitalist chaos from 1980, the negative consequences of which we are still experiencing in the banking sector. At policy level (top-down) we are trying to assert 'persons in community' and 'social nurture' but without a popular grassroots tradition to support it. We need to consider how to encourage such grassroots reflection on personhood in community, perhaps using vospitanie as a guide.

Social nurture is the responsibiliy of both home and school. It involves 'what kind of neighbour are you?', 'are you helpful to your colleagues?' and other such questions. Social awareness is rooted in an awareness that others have needs and emotions, and that it is better to help rather than hurt. Such a simple start belies the fact that some children grow up to be violent killers or masochistic hoodlums. What went wrong was probably a long time ago, in their childhood. And there has been a continued failure to intevene and put things right. This is a challenge to community, society and the education process.

Our schools are pressed by government and OFSTED to be engaged with citizenship, personal and social education, social and emotional aspects of learning, a wide range of different initiatives which engage in some way with social nurture. This is part of the great concern for schools to produce productive and contributing members of society. The Respect Agenda emphasised that respect for others should be emphasised. This is top-down desperation, generated by teenage murders, muggings, and anti-social behaviour. What is needed is a bottom-up respect process in which pupils generally leave school feeling respected. That is, dialogue and discussion has happened, not recriminations, criticism and sarcasm. Pupils, teachers and parents together need to reflect on what it means to be a person-in community, and for that to be central in the curriculum. It is what we mean deep down by citizenship, but it is much more, it is a moral and ethical way of living in the world.

Restorative Justice and Practice

How do you change criminals, the anti-social, offenders, people who cause conflict? Perhaps you can't with some, and we have locked most of them up in prison just in case. And prison has not improved them. Also, what part does the victim play in the justice system? Nothing, they are entirely sidelined. The offence against them personally, and the compensation that ought to be their due is hijacked to become an offence against the state. The adversarial way the case is heard might mean the best barrister wins and the guilty offender is declared innocent, sometimes to terrorise the victim. So, all is not well in the so-called justice system.
Restorative Justice seeks to make restoration by attempting to resolve the conflict caused by the offence and as much as possible 'restoring' the situation as close as possible to how it was before the offence took place. The offender meets with the victims in the company of a facilitator. Having ascertained the facts from both offender and victim, the facilitator asks the offender firmly and persistently who has been affected by the offence, and how. The victims are asked the same question. Then the offender is asked how the harm can be repaired, and an agreement is made. If this agreement is broken, then the case moves out of restorative justice and into court. It can be used from low level nuisance to violent crime. Research show a high satisfaction rate for victims - 85% - and much lower rates of reaffending. The perpetrator often for the first time understands that his victims have been hurt and can no longer block this out.

In schools, conflicts can be dealt with similarly, by establishing the facts, discussing who has been affected and how, and making an agreement to put right the harm. This turns a situation of conflict and confrontation into a learning experience for the perpetrator, who then has a chance to apologise and make restoration, and build a new relationship with the victim. It is the opposite of a soft option - it destroys any defensive front that perpetrators have been used to hide behind. It makes them very vulnerable, and by doing so enables them to build new values.

The principles of restorative justice can be used to discuss everyday practice - how to behave in a fair and equitable way. There does not need to be an offence, simply the context which allows young people to imagine a scenario and discuss the implications. This would then merge naturally into restorative justice, since this style of questioning simply is applied to any minor conflict that takes place, resolving an issue quickly and without confrontation.

At a conference in Swindon hosted by the Mayor and led by Sir Charles Pollard of Restorative Solutions, supported by headteachers, the police and community justice, applications were discussed and research data given. The importance of adopting this approach in the justice system, and in schools, was described as a 'no brainer' - there are only benefits, in success rates, costs and community cohesion. The only impediment is a conservatism that prefers vengeance and punishment to reconciling the conflict with a long term solution.

Girls' Education

A Commonwealth Foundation report opens with the statistic that 75 million children are “denied their right to an education” and that most of these are girls, using a World Bank report to emphasise the importance of girls’ education. The Millennium Development Goals include one (no.3) to establish equity between girls and boys in primary and secondary education by 2005. This report features four commonwealth countries which are off-target – Cameroon, India, Pakistan and Papua New Guinea. Significant players in these places identified factors which are contributing to the lack of success.

Systemic issues include better access to education (especially having more reachable girls’ schools); the need for more gender-sensitive qualities throughout education; the need for free or affordable education; better infrastructure; more suitable and suitably trained teachers; and the need for a degree of compulsion. Societal issues include parental perceptions; socio-cultural demands for girls to do housework and childcare; security of travel to school; and poverty. A final issue was defined as “the misinterpretation of religion” (p.41), that is keeping girls from school on misplaced religious grounds. Each country is then assessed in depth through the questionnaire returns. Two central issues throughout are poverty and socio-cultural norms. In other words long term solutions need to involve economic and educational components, taking people out of marterial deprivation and ignorance.

These international issues have implications for schooling in Britain – and for secondary schooling in particular. When girls from some ethnic and religious backgrounds reach secondary age, domestic help and childcare are deemed by some families to be more practically useful than schoolwork, so these counter pressures affect progress at school and in qualifications. Early marriage may be encouraged, so girls could be married and pregnant while still at school – which again runs counter to school progress. The knowledge that they will be married at 16 upsets concentration and motivation – the girl barely thinks of the necessity of a career and therefore the relevance of qualifications. The local presence of a girls’ comprehensive can encourage these girls to progress to age 11 and beyond, but the lack or loss of such schools can throw these girls into an educational black-hole if parents do not allow them to attend mixed education. Legal pressures can be averted by sending the girl abroad to family. They simply go missing from social and educational records. This is an unknown and unrecorded failure to comply with the Millenium Development Goal within the UK itself.

Rectifying this situation is partly the responsibility of local authorities to consider adequate provision, and partly the responsibility of the family and community to give a high priority to girls’ education. The World Bank affirms benefits to health, nutrition, mortality figures and family education as immediate social benefits likely to stimulate change. This is apart from issues of general equity between people. Religion can impede progress and so there is a responsibility of religious leaders to represent their faith without prejudice, and the role of the whole community to monitor what is being said and done in the name of the religion. There is thus a need both for the education of children and of their parents and community. Perversely, and under-reported in western news, education for girls in the contested Pakistani hills is seen as western influence so a girls’ schools is burnt down most days, the resulting fear denying children the education that has been provided.

There is a fundamental need for educational quality. The world does not need compulsory inappropriate schooling at great expense. Children deserve appropriate enriching education. Where alternative education is provided by the community, this needs to be appropriate to educational needs rather than being relegated to an instruction into a particular point of view – so even these schools should be exspected to deliver a broad relevant curriculum. The enhancement of education and schooling worldwide, both in terms of spread and quality, is one of today’s greatest development issues. British education is by no means exempt from the lessons to be learnt.

A touching neurosis?

Heather Piper and Ian Stronach have just produced an interesting boot called Don’t Touch. The Educational Story of a Panic. It deals with the “moral panic” about touch in school education. It makes a strong case that this panic has sexualized, even fetishised touch, as even the 99+% of innocent adult staff are left questioning their own and their colleagues’ motives. The result is that the child who needs the consoling cuddle is denied one; and also that older children play on sexual possibilities, misunderstanding or misinterpreting a normal gesture, or making malicious accusations. The panic has played havoc with proper educational practice. Inappropriate fear of risk causes professionals to fear for their careers, and play safe to the extent of creating an emotionally sterile educational environment.

Research ethics committees ‘police’ research but can come to unethical decisions by rejecting research which is potentially beneficial to children, on spurious grounds of child safety coming from a notion of the child as victim. The criminal records bureau activities demonstrate that there are more restrictions on helping children than for buying explosives. Restrictive school and local authority guidelines make irrational and disproportional responses. Then follows case studies from nursery, primary, secondary and special education, and then Summerhill School, the ‘progressive’ democratic independent school. This draws on empirical data from interviews and observations. These give examples of taboos on touch being worked through professional contexts. There is evidence of a mix of defensive and protective behaviours (being accompanied, leaving doors open) and heroic resistance to “the chokechain” (p.7), especially by early years workers. The Summerhill example is interesting in that the openness of the school is declared to be a nightmare for paedophiles. Everything is discussed and debated openly, and positive relationships are promoted. In Ofsted’s concern to close the school down as non-compliant to national standards, one inspector called in the social services when a teacher was observed openly giving a girl pupil a shoulder massage. Such officious behaviour is styled corrupting, making spontaneity in relationship building (within appropriate boundaries) much more difficult, making the good seem evil.

The concluding chapter recommends that touch should be considered as part of relationships. Just as we need ‘good behaviour policies’ instead of focussing on bad behaviour, so we need ‘good relationships policies’ instead of ‘Don’t touch guidelines’ which criminalises innocent touch. Rather, the concern should be to encourage appropriate relationships, child to child and adult to child, in a context of openness to discussion. Most current guidance to schools is viewed as wholly inappropriate, as it treats touch as a problem in itself and not part of a larger concern for good relationships. The democratic and open practice of Summerhill School is presented as the best model for schools to follow.

Most people would agree that paedophiles and other dangerous individuals should not have easy or uncontrolled access to children in school. It is a far cry from this to get to a situation, described in this book, that professionals are not only deeply worried about false unsubstantiated accusations, and begin to question their own motives behind their care of and affection for their charges. This is having the effect that children are denied the physical contact and emotional warmth they need for confidence and consolation, and are becoming part of a generation which sexualises touch, brought up to believe that adult-child touch must always be by definition sexual. Summerhill School is given as a shining example of the opposite approach, where relationships come first and democratic empowering discussion give pupils the skills and understanding to understand when something is wrong, and to take appropriate action.

The tendency to maintain emotional distance between children and unrelated adults brought about by a Don’t Touch culture impedes the development of their relationships with other adults. This diminishes empathy and sympathy for others; this emotional distance makes it easier to victimise and even murder. The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child report (October 2008) complains of negative attitudes to children and adolescents in the UK promoting a punishment culture through ASBOs and detention. These things are linked. Helping children improve relationships with others should be a top priority for education, schools and society at large, which should over time reduce anti-social behaviour. That is, educational and school policies need to be positively proactive rather than negatively reactive, raising intrinsic motivation over punishment as the strategy of choice. This book explores one aspect that will make a difference and should be read by both professionals and policymakers. I applaud it. (Full review on http://escalate.ac.uk/4868).

The Ragwitch 2 - moral development.

A story with a portal to another world borrows directly from C S Lewis's Narnia books. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe even has the evil witch/queen. Written in the 1940s and published in 1951, that story starts with the blitz and evacuation. The witch/queen's destructive domain represents the Nazi preference for power over ethics and her defeat by children is a moral call to arms. C S Lewis in turn borrowed the idea from George Macdonald, whose forays through the portal are highly symbolic - Phantastes, and Lilith towards the end of the 19th century. Macdonald took this idea from German developmental novels. I take it therefore that adventures in parallel worlds represent inner struggles from which personal growth develops. Most deal with struggles between good and evil, wisdom and folly, and loyalty and betrayal.
In The Ragwitch, evil is a reality which can overcome decent people through fear and powerful magic. It exists 'out there' and should be left severely alone if disaster is not to occur. Once awakened, it cannot easily be put back to quiescence. In real life, rage and hate erupt from time to time but are human choices rather than demonic possession. The genocides of the past century have been deliberate political strategies by powerful groups, exerting power through a mixture of fear and persuasion. Humans are apt to lose moral constraints very easily, particularly if the 'other' can be dehumanised as 'the enemy' or 'another race'. Evil is a human direction or set of choices in which selfishness and greed are promoted rather than the common good.
Stories such as the Ragwitch emphasise loyalty to decent people, compassion and the importance of heroic resistance. These are important lessons for children (and adults) to learn.

Garth Nix. The Ragwitch. 1990

Julia picks up a rag doll in rubbish, is taken over by the evil spirit within it, who uses her body to regenerate herself as The Ragwitch, the former banished evil queen. She goes back into her own world, Julia is imprisoned in her mind, to be tormented before becoming totally absorbed. Her brother Paul sees this, follows them through the portal, and starts an adventure trying to rescue Julia. He has Narnia like adventures in this parallel world, whilst Julia inhabits a different world inside the Ragwitch exploring her memories and evil designs as she sets about destroying her world which had previously defeated and banished her into the rag doll.

Inside the Ragwitch is Anhyvar the girl she used to be, a girl who communed with evil forces to better her world. She is imprisoned in an ice restrainer, as evil took her over. Julia finds Anhyvar with Mirran her former lover, also imprisoned in the Ragwitch mind. This little group, with Lyssa, the spirit of the rowan tree, are heroes, heroic resisters of evil forces who attach the Ragwitch from within.

Paul is the hero in the outside world. He is instructed to draw strength from nature, the elemental forces earth, air, fire and water and goes on a quest to meet the personifications of these. He receives from them a token which can help him draw on their powers. At key moments he wins wisdom by planting caggages and picking potatoes. The Ragwitch knows that these elemental forces are her biggest enenmy and pursues Paul relentlessly.

The story is one in which evil is a power which can be destroyed. Julia avoids being overcome by it by holding positive images in her head, of happy moments. The Ragwitch holds her power by bullying, usually making threats she is able to carry out. Her power is maintained by the creatures who through fear support her, and those who are brainwashed to go along with her wishes. These are described as The Glazed.

As an allegory of life, evil is shown as a pervasive temptation that once given into can take over one’s life. However, inside every one is a core of goodness, a paralysed Anhyvar, which can be reactivated to overcome evil with good. We need to recognize evil as actions which harm or destroy others, and become heroic resisters, openly challenging these actions despite the threats against us.

Forests, woodcraft and the human condition

Today we are interested again in conservation and outdoor pursuits, even adventures as an important part of a child's education. The "forest school" has returned to the fore. I am reading two related books currently, Leslie Paul's An Angry Young Man (1952) and Trail of an Artist-Naturalist, the autobiography of Ernest Thompson Seton (1951).

Leslie Paul's title gave rise to the phrase 'angry young men' being used of various writers and playwrights in the 1950s. Leslie Paul, a Londoner, founded "The Woodcraft Folk" in 1925 to introduce inner-city lads to the joys of the countryside, with an emphasis on building inner strengths and on conservation. Now under the wing of the cooperative societies, the movement is still thriving and has many local groups. Paul took many of his ideas from scouting, but without the militarism it had at the time of the first world war. Beyond that he drew on the work of Ernest Thompson Seton who began the Woodcraft Movement in America, and from it developed the American scout movement, of which he became chief scout. Readers are more likely to have heard of his daughter Ann, who wrote fiction as Anya Seton.

As a boy in Canada, Ernest set up his own Indian tribe in 1874 in order to enjoy outdoor activities. Before long it had been renamed as "The Robin Hood Band", and once outgrown the attraction of the outdoor life continued. He made studies of animals and plants, and published many stories based on the forest. He prized the wisdom of the "Indian" first nation tribes on bushcraft, which he called "woodcraft". In setting up an education programme for boys, Robin Hood became replaced with the last of the Mohicans, of Fenimore Cooper's story. The movement was named The Woodcraft Indians. He devised a range of "exploits", each of which had a badge, starting with physical activities, and developing to mental development towards the highest "spiritual" level of "service".

He described his strict Calvinist Christian upbringing which assumed "the total depravity of human nature" [p.291]. He was a rebel, and (happily) thought himself depraved. As a young cowpuncher, he notes that his very rough mates all loved their mothers, and went to church mainly so they could tell their mother that they had been. In one service in a schoolroom, the preacher said "in sin did our mothers conceive us", at which one jumped up saying his mother was a decent woman and if the preacher insult her he would fill him full of lead. Ernest came to the view: "all children come here direct from God and are pure as God can make them. We do not have to reform them, but rather to keep them from being deformed [p.292]. He bought a derelict farm to turn into a conservation area, complete with Indian village, but the local lads declared total war as their age-old haunts were now off bounds. They did nightly damage. Instead of bringing in the law, as advised, he invited them to an adventure weekend with free food and no rules. 42 came, and the Woodland Indians had begun. The area criminal was democratically elected the Chief, and, taking his responsibilities very seriously, this began his transformation. There were rules - mainly for safety and against vandalism. The cardinal virtues were chivalry, kindness, courage and honour. The motto was "The best things of the best Indians". Feathers were awarded for "exploits", 'can do' skills but not competitive. They all received the 'can swim' feather because they could all swim. Fifty years later, all 42 had made something significant of their lives.

Lina and Adelia Beard, promoting scouting for girls in America,produced An Outdoor Book for Girls in America in 1915, recently republished. There is a chapter on ‘woodcraft’ which begins with the importance of the balsam fir tree: like a Christmas tree, it has aromatic needles and makes the best outdoor bedding. These are the trees on the Woodcraft Folk logo. The book teaches girls about how to track, swim, take wildlife photos, camp, find food and cope with accidents.

There are lessons here for families and schools - such personal strengths are not built up in front of televisions or in the back of people-carriers. Skills for life cannot be taught. But they can be encouraged, facilitated, directed, respected and applauded.

Positive and negative delusions.

Reviewing another book (http://escalate.ac.uk/4866) this time a diatribe against 'therapeutic education' (which it only vaguely defines); it turns out to be a polemic against two things - 'positive psychology', and pathologising people and emotions (thus promoting the dependent diminished self). These two points at least I have sympathy with. 'Positive psychology' promotes optimism and happiness as ways of coping with life and thereby living longer. It takes an objectivist realist view of knowledge so they are positive positivists. They see themselves as enemies to constructivist psychologists, who use qualitative methods. Positive psychology promotes the pursuit of happiness into a therapy - the solution to all life's problems is to find a way to make negative experiences meaningful, learn from them and achieve this 'real' contentment. A negative psychology would be to recognise negative emotions as OK and helpful, to accept them and learn from them - not rejecting the negative and turning it to a positive, but learning to relax with it. Research has shown that dreams are full of latent anxieties; a recent BBC competition to write your life in 10 words resulted in most being negative; learning to tackle anxieties and conflicts have the potential for developing growth and inner strength.
Unreasonable optimism is a delusion; it may be helpful but will ultimately disappoint, unless we keep revising our unreasonable delusion. Ambition is full of unreasonable optimism, but the ambitious tend to get more jobs than the unambitious. Ambition which incorporates reasonal optimism keeps its feet on the ground, but may under-estimate what is reasonable.
Many negative emotions are of disappointments or bereavements. Am I to see the death of my child as meaningful? or a premature death to illness as meaningful? Or death by a bomb? I think not. I am left with the sadness, the pointlessness, and have to live with the event without becoming emotionally paralysed. This may be personal growth, but it is not the cause of or reason for the disaster.
Religion it is true has created unreasonable delusions to explain death, such as an afterlife, eternal life, or rebirth; but worshippers normally do not thereby welcome death, unless there is some mental instability or brainwashing.
Our negative delusions may be pictures of ourselves as worthless, or mental pictures of anxieties as entities - demons, the devel, forces of evil. Films and pulp fiction make much of this.
Can I replace a negative delusion for a positive one? To turn an incompetent me into a demigod by dint of imagining 'I can do it' and 'I am special'. To some degree a negative image can be neutralised; but to go further like a Hitler is psychotic and delusional.
There is no wisdom in delusion, only a temporary coping strategy if it is positive delusion, a crutch to help us continue. The wisdom is to see the delusion as delusion, to recognise it and go beyond, to throw the crutch away.

Growing the brain.

When I was young, there was a belief that eating fish feeds the brain, so I guess there are some smart sharks. Today the obsession is that drinking water feeds the brain. The simple truth is that thinking feeds and develops the brain. Over the past decade we have the benefit of various brain scanning devices and are getting to know both what the brain looks like in detail, and how it works. But it is slow business and nothing is definitive yet. So therefore beware of any book or system, especially those over ten years old, that claims to know how the brain works, and worse tells you definitively how to develop it. They are likely to be over-simplistic, or simply wrong.
The brain develops by mental stimulation, by growing connectors between different parts of the brain. The more we think, and the more disciplined we get, the more connections are created and the brain changes as a result. This much is the starting point of modern neuroscience. Children's brains are growing rapidly throughout schooling, and adult brains have a similar potential. Our message to pupils is that their brains are capable of most things, through disciplined hard work, putting their mind to the task. This will permamently make them smarter. It is a message that needs emphasising to children from infancy onwards, by parents, teachers and others; and also that 'can do' attitudes can also be fun and give a great sense of achievement.
See more on: http://www.tlrp.org/pub/documents/
Neuroscience%20Commentary%20FINAL.pdf

Therapy, education and therapeutic education

I have just reviewed a book on "therapeutic education" (http://escalate.ac.uk/4752) which raises issues. The authors mean positive pupil-centred education which is non-conflictual: since the book's educational focus is a special school, this is described as 'healing', hence therapeutic. It is defended through reference to therapists such as Maslow and Rogers. Of course, the authors are describing 'good', motivating and positive education per se and the work 'therapeutic' is a misnomer. A therapist will have had substantial education and training to develop a knowledge and expertise to contribute to health care and child development. A speech and language therapist for example helps children with communication difficulties. Teachers and educational professionals who are untrained in these fields cannot replicate their work. Equally a talking therapist (a psychologist, psycho-analyst or counsellor) work with particular insights and skills which the untrained cannot hope to match.
However, there are few therapists on the ground and their time and involvement is expensive. They therefore can only deal with acute cases. In practice, pupils are referred and join the waiting list. There are general things that teachers can do to help children with non-acute developmental delay or with emotional and behaviour difficulties which are not severe. Indeed this helps the therapist because some ground has been covered and acute cases better identified - there will be some pupils who make progress and don't need to be referred. Although we might call this 'good' education, based on positive relationships, teachers and others do need both training and consciousness raising to change practice.
For example, behaviourist rewards and punishments are often a school's only strategy to deal with challenging attitudes and behaviour. This aims at submission rather than personal growth and actually doesn't work. Punishments escalate to exclusion when the problem gets passed on to others and the pupil remains stuck. Education should be 'healing' in a broad sense, and promote personal growth. This is main focus for the training needed - a simple message to understand but more difficult to put into practice routinely.

Powerful Learning

I am reminded, sorting through my papers, of a paper at BERA in Warwick in 2006 by Peggy Lee (peggy@power-ed.co.nz) from New Zealand. Based on interviews with primary and secondary children, she proposes ten principles of powerful learning:
1. Make learning fun
2. Trust us to choose who we work with some of the time.
3. We need to make some choices about what we learn so we can work on things that interest us.
4. Let us walk around when we are learning. Silent static kids are not necessarily learning best.
5. Learning needs to be hands-on, doing things, even teaching things to others.
6. Using technology helps me - we done use computers enough or properly
7. Let us know how we are doing and how to make better progress.
8. We like to set some learning goals for ourselves.
9. Give us time to do things properly, and don't waste it by repeating over complicated instructions.
10. Make learning more real, going out more, meeting people and linking with children around the world. Learning needs to be communal.

A powerful conclusion is to involve children and young people in their own learning and schooling, and make sure they have a proper voice.
Peggy adds: I have continued to work with these ideas and am currently leading a NZ Ministry of Education project working in 10 rural schools looking at student decision-making: teachers and student views and practices. Our revised curriculum here has allowed this kind of investigation with a focus on ‘key competencies for learning’. I am also working in four other primary/middle schools helping with strategic planning, curriculum & assessment practices and implementing the new key competencies for learning.

Gifted and Talented.

Is it easy to spot a gifted and talented pupil?

Despite mountains of books and papers on the difference between these two words, I tend to view them as meaning the same thing. To be gifted is to have a gift, which might be in a narrow area or across a broader spectrum. To have a talent also can be narrow or broad, and we speak generally of talented individuals. The current educational interest is to try to ensure that any such gifts or talents are nurtured to be able to contribute powerfully to the wider community – of course within a general context of nurturing the abilities of all pupils.

Pupils with high cognitive abilities, measures by IQ, are often singled out as an exceptionally able group. Personal experience can increase or decrease IQ scores to some extent, and lack of stimulus in childhood can be recouped later. Feuerstein’s ‘instrumental enrichment’ for example attempts to promote such cognitive growth.

Tests, SATs and other such things obviously stratify the pupil body to some extent and give a starter list of convergent G&T pupils, that is those who obey the rules. Most are not fit for purpose, especially if the purpose is to identify the exceptionally able. A pupil who is gifted, creative, or awkward might do unexpected things and maybe do badly in formal tests. They might find set curricula and syllabuses far too constraining.

So in identifying gifted/talented pupils, informal indicators are important, the unexpected connections, sudden insights and wisdoms, mental agility and acuity. If we have a mental picture of giftedness that is too narrow, constrained and tame, we could perhaps be blind to the evidence before our eyes.

Disenchantment

Many people are disenchanted with life, and many children disenchanted with school. This reveals itself in demotivation, with a lack of meaning or purpose to life, work and study. A disenchanted person is cynical, and without joy, aspiration or vision of what is possible. It is a kind of personal disintegration. Depression may be a consequence.

So what is the enchantment they have lost? Pooh Bear’s Enchanted Forest is a place where the imagination can run riot, in a place filled with possibilities and potential. In today’s stories of witches and spells, enchantment is caricatured and made ridiculous. Enchantment as a deep and transforming inner experience should not be jettisoned as similar nonsense. We either view our world as enchanted or boringly ordinary. We either see the beauty of the butterfly or flower, or we do not. We either see an animal, a creature, or a pet or pest. We may see our ordinary relationships and friendships as magical and beautiful, or only as useful to our own needs, the same but more so with our special relationships. The magic in the air on any ordinary day has nothing to do with spirits, angels or fairies, but with our responses to beauty, deep meaning and human hope. We have moments of enlightenment, insight and inspiration - thoughts, mental pictures, unexpected connections and links, music, art.

The world in an enchanted place if we are open to joy, curiosity and wonder. It is full of possibility if we aspire to act positively. It is a good place only if we learn to see the good in it. Our relationships will be good and positive if we are respectful and sincere, and receive respect and sincerity in return. The world does not make this an easy path. When respect and sincerity are rebuffed, we may with persistence win respect over time, or we may despite effort fail. This may be our fault, but if we have done our best it probably will not be. We all make positive and negative choices when confronting illness, bereavement, ill will, injury and misfortune. The quality of our lives will depend upon those choices. Even the forgiveness of those who harm or kill those we love are examples of these often difficult choices. We can criticise without hating and work to change the perpetrators.

Disenchantment is the negative choice, a negation of life and of relationship, a refusal to be positive, cooperative or supportive. It is a rut from which it is hard to escape, a habit of disagreeableness and neurosis. To fail to get out of this rut condemns us to unhappy and unfulfilled relationships and experiences.

Natural mysticism.

The trouble with mysticism is that it has been hijacked by supernaturalists – people who believe in non-natural entities such as deities and angels. My question is whether mysticism is necessarily defined by its supernatural content, or whether a natural mysticism is possible.

The mystic sees deep meaning that is personally inspiring and transformational. They see the hidden, that which was previously a mystery. And they wonder why they did not understand it before. The language of mysticism is that of enlightenment – the light dawns, new insights are clearly visualised. When people believed in saints and angels, these might have been viewed as the messengers who sent the new knowledge.

The language of mysticism is that of vision, witnessing something meaningful in the mind. Today we emphasise imagination, that such mental scenarios are created in your imagination and not beamed in from outside. The same with dreams. The singer Christie Moore found an inner ‘meeting’ with his dead father, playing with him on the beach as a child, very helpful therapeutically, enabling him to talk out and think out some issues about how he had not coped with his father’s death. No one suggests that this was a real spirit meeting, that his father had, like the Biblical prophet Samuel, been summonded from death by a modern Witch of Endor. It was imagined, but not therefore ‘pretend’ and not unreal and unmeaningful.

Philip Wexler the Marxist, in Mystical Society (2000) talked about ‘reselfing’, and ‘revitalization’: “the reintegration of active, self-enhancing practices of transformation” (p75). There has been an emphasis in mysticism in seeing beyond ourselves to infinity, and it is important to transcend our own narrow boundaries. That process should not however produce empty individuals seeking for peak experiences like a drug, but people who have re-visioned, and reformulated their sense of who and what they are. In James Fowler’s scheme, the ultimate re-visioned self is the compassionate ‘world soul’, the highest level of spiritual development.

In supporting the learning and development of children, the question ‘Who and what am I, and can I become?’ is top of the agenda. They have many pressures to defend themselves from, and this could well be their most important strategy.

Wisdom

I still treasure a conversation I had twenty years ago with an 8 year old class, on the question, What do we mean by a wise person? I have asked that question many times since of adult audiences, and rarely received sensible answers. If we focus education and schooling on becoming wise, this will last for the whole life of the child; if we focus our curriculum on "stuff" - information and knowledge - much of it will be out of date by the time they leave school, and some of it already out of date when it is taught. Yet the National Curriculum is stuffed with "stuff".

The instant answer of a bright 8 year old to my question was: 'a wise person is someone who knows a lot about most things, but who is humble and not proud and uses what they know to help other people'. This is the spirit of a learning community, a community of contributors, a willingness both to be coaches and mentors, and to be coached and mentored.

We might add other things, that they understand the limitations of knowledge, and its transience; that they understand principles and processes and not just information. An education in wisdom produces worthwhile contributors able to see what needs changing in our world, and willing to have a go.

Wisdom is about the quality of choices, based on respect for others and respect for ourselves. It is a balancing act, weighing up evidence and alternatives before deciding. It is about not assuming too much, or too little. So wisdom is a process, dynamic, a state of mind, and not a possession. Those who think themselves wise are unlikely to be so - wisdom is best recognised in others. It is of course unassessable, because every case is unique and fluid; but it is teachable, by wise teachers.

Te Whaariki , Empowerment Education

Te Whaariki is an educational philosophy in New Zealand based on the empowerment of children. It aims that children are able

To grow up as competent and confident learners and communicators, healthy in mind, body, and spirit, secure in their sense of belonging and in the knowledge that they make a valued contribution to society.

(New Zealand Ministry of Education 1996)

This way of thinking is woven into everything done in schools, homes and care situations – the phrase means in Maori “a woven mat for all to stand on”. Its core principles are:

• empowerment to develop
• focusing on all aspects of children’s needs and requirement
• involving the family and community
• learning through positive relationships with adults and peers

Adults should therefore not be authoritarian. The backgrounds and cultures of all children are respected, and the sense of belonging that go with these. Children should be involved actively in their own learning and development, active learners rather than passive recipients of information. Teachers become fellow learners with the children and with their families and they are free to develop their curriculum and strategies within this framework of empowerment and positivity.

Research

We are asked how research, teaching and learning inter-relate. What is research? It appears in business as 'research and development' (R&D) - that is discovering evidence about products and new products. In University it has a range of meanings, normally distinguished by status. If it attracts money, it has status, but not otherwise.
My view starts with young children.
The five year old who does experiments in floating and sinking, weight, volume and area is doing research. A class I know researched a local map. Each was given a task, one to mark the water metres and hydrants, another to record electricity cables, another to track drains. They put this together into an area map. This is research.
A class of 6 year olds I once met in Oxford were told that the teacher would tell them nothing, but they had to find it out for themselves and check it. They organised their classroom, managed their workload, and were responsible for their own learning. They were involved in a range of research, and we hope that they met similar open minds later in their schooling. Research is the systematic discovery of processes and the construction of knowledge, in ways which makes clear that knowledge is not final and definitive, but has to be revisited constantly. If primary school pupils were enabled to become researchers, rather than recipients of information (some correct and much not) their learning skills would be greatly enhanced.
Later in school they are delivered packages to get to know, remembering without thinking. The purpose of this is exams, and the function of exams is to make the school accountable. This has the side effect of ranking children in order of achievement, that is how well they did in the exams. This follows them for life.
At each stage, the package is learned, and leads to the next stage where that package is unlearnt as too simplistic. The learning of the previous years is thus null, void and wasted. At each stage they start again. The reason for this is "the syllabus", increasingly controlled by GCSE and A level.
If young people instead were on the cutting edge of finding out for themselves, they are more likely to be motivated and life-long learners. Therefore, curricula, syllabuses and exams simply serve to destroy learning in a vain attempt to measure and rank.
If the explorations described with 5 and 6 year olds were continued and deepened, children will grow up as researchers aiming to improve their world. As it is they end up as failures determined only to destroy themselves.
So why can't we see the problem?
© Stephen Bigger.

Us and them: Identity, nationhood and religion

Humans have evolved through pre-history to recognize friends from foes. The knowledge was a potential lifesaver. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time may have resulted in life lost. Friends were ‘us’, enemies were ‘them’. Individuals made marriage choices from ‘us’ and not ‘them’, unless they wanted to end up like Romeo and Juliet. ‘Them’ have no right to life, but can be killed without consequence, indeed with adulation. So, aboriginees, native Tasmanians, first Americans tribes and African bushmen could be wiped out without an uproar.

Have we learnt? World War 2 had a degree of them and us about it, which has been maintained in the infinite appetite for war films and books. Children’s stories have raised interesting angles. Elinor Brent Dyer, writing during the war, distinguished between good Germans and Nazis, and taught her pupils at the Chalet School the principles of working towards peace. Others were content to bathe in German gore. Michael Morpurgo asks ‘Friend or Foe?’ when children find a downed German bomber crew, one injured and the other who saved his life. Where should loyalties lie in such circumstances? After the war, it was assumed that the German and Japanese had a psychological disease from which they could be cured by education (I owe this insight to Wendy Toon). This was to turn ‘them’ into ‘us’ again.

Beyond all that local politicals, ‘us’ and ‘them’ have for long been decided by skin colour. The Victorians filled black and brown skulls with peas to try to provide that white skulls had greater capacity. They failed, so they invented the intelligence test, white biased of course. Racism influenced empire, marriage choices, educational opportunity and for many years even human rights itself. Declaring a race ‘sub-human’ had particular consequences in German Namibia and later Hitler’s Reich, where racial extermination became official national policy.

The half-century after world war 2 has seen a steady process of turning ‘them’ into ‘us’, with, we have to admit, not a little backlash. Probably, and hopefully, two hundred years from now, the entire world population will be various shades of brown and we will wonder what all the fuss was about. That is one thing at least that Star Trek was wrong about. Personally, I thought I was half Irish, half English, but found only recently that I am Anglo Scottish. Friends are British Muslim, British-Indians, British Pakistanis. Nationhood is essentially redundant, despite everything certain fringe political parties tell us. We are humans and world citizens. Full stop.

©Stephen Bigger 2008

Swindon Youth Empowerment Programme

Schools have a dual role: to develop knowledge through the curriculum; and developing pupils’ self understanding so that they can become positive members of the community. The first is measured by tests and examination results; and unfortunately the failure of the second is measured through exclusions. This project has been about turning disaffection into motivation, and thereby strengthen pupils’ knowledge by first addressing their self understanding.

Awareness that raw knowledge is not enough has prompted a range of government demands, the most recent being to emphasise social and emotional aspects of learning. The programme on which this paper is based has been demonstrated as effective through four years of external evaluation. Its financial cost to schools is minimal, and its effectiveness rapid. It has turned around vulnerable children and young people, some of whom have now reached university as self understanding led to motivation, which earned them qualifications – all beyond their initial aspirations and expectations.

There is no magic cure for disaffection and negativity. Disaffected pupils find themselves in a vicious cycle in which bad behaviour causes conflict with adults (parents and teachers) whose dealings with them are then characterised by anger and frustration. There is no progress from this stalemate without breaking this cycle. The consequences of not breaking out of it is total life failure, without qualifications and a worthwhile job. Crime may seem the only visible route to take.

Breaking out of this negative spiral is what the project has attempted to achieve. This requires a radical change of view, a “conceptual shock” to the system, moving young people from negativity and despair to a positive outlook, a vital ingredient towards a healthy human spirit.

The philosophy is summed up through six principles:

• We all have inner qualities, or ‘gems’

• We all have the potential to do good, or to do harm (dual nature)

• Positive speech has power to transform

• We have the potential to transform our lives, whatever our histories

• Positive action brings about change: the community is more united if people work together

• We need, and can be, positive role models

•

This report on the work of the Swindon Youth Empowerment Project (SYEP) between 2000 and 2007 explores how personal and social transformations can take place when young people with social, emotional and behaviour difficulties are encouraged to talk through their life choices using visualisation, symbol and metaphor. They are referred to as ‘dispirited’ as they lacked motivation and ambition. All were failing academically.

The evaluation took place over three years, 2004-2007 with the external researcher working alongside the project team and interviewing a range of people involved. In doing so the team were trained in evaluation techniques in order to encourage a long-term culture of evaluation, in schools as well as in the project. The research demonstrates a clear long-lasting effect on many of the young people involved.

This report discusses a range of factors contributing to this success, primarily relating to trusting and empowering the young people so that they value themselves and their abilities, build positive and caring relationships with others, and work towards creating a better world. It shows that young people can transcend their limited world view, learning to see themselves differently as people with energy, potential, compassion and the ability to affect positive change. In this they can reach out to others and with others, building moral understanding and cascading positive attitudes and energies to those around them.

It has had rapid and lasting results with needy and disengaged children aged nine to thirteen. The processes involved should therefore be taken very seriously by government, schools, and youth services as a powerful intervention that has shown it is able to turn youngsters from actual and potential delinquency to becoming committed to contributing to society as good citizens. The report looks forward to ways of enabling whole classes of children to benefit. It shows how SYEP approaches can become a central strand in citizenship, personal, social and moral education, spiritual education, creative thinking skills, and social and emotional aspects of learning.

Inspired by the teachings of the Bahai Faith, it is non-partisan and works openly and transparently with all faiths and none. It looks forward to expanding its work to other schools.

The full report is available.

©Stephen Bigger 2008

One damn lie after another

This is one of my PhD student's view of science education - that at every level you have to unteach the pupil what you taught at the last level, that we have to teach half truths as the whole truth. The art of simplifying learning to be appropriate for different age levels is a challenging one. We too easily patronise children's ability to understand by palming them off with gross oversimplifications or worse still misconceptions. We all have to come to grips with reality versus fantasy, but adults add difficulty to children's development by lying to them that Father Christmas and tooth-fairies are real, and bogey-men are out to get them. I remember being very indignant about this at the age of three, getting out my soapbox and preaching the gospel of disbelief in Santa to all the local children, to the anger of local parents. Since children expose these lies, they develop a positivist view of the world - 'if I can't see it and touch it, I can only assume that you are lying to me again'. God therefore stands little chance after the age of 8.

Jerome Bruner spoke of the spiral curriculum, in science especially - that you can teach anything to any age so long as you get the level right. This should not mean half-truths and lies, in this or any other subject. It involves building up interest in the world, and curiosity. It requires sharing with children what we don't know as much as what we do. Nothing is worse than an adult giving children a wrong answer to a why question just to shut them up. It closes down curiosity with a statement of apparent authority. That lie may get carried forward into adulthood and be passed on to the next generation after that.
Adults, including parents and teachers, are fellow learners with their children. This involves not only admitting ignorance, but revelling in it - not to know something is an invitation to explore. The child may find the solution first, and become teacher to the adult. Both children and adults have a duty to cross-question in order to test whether something is believable or not. This habit of dialogue - Socratic dialogue, the habit Socrates began - needs to be developed from birth. It is part of the respect we owe to the child, and this includes having our own opinions interrogated by them.

One implication of this is that teachers of young children need to be wise, intelligent, and well-informed. You need to understand something very fully and deeply if you are to put it into simple language without oversimplifying it into a lie. And mostly they are not; we don't pay them enough, or educate them enough. We take the view that you don't need to know much to teach little children.
And by doing so we build the foundations of lifelong failure.

©Stephen Bigger 2008

Imagination

Philip Pullman, in His Dark Materials trilogy, opens windows between worlds because of which Will Parry from our world and Lyra from a parallel Oxford meet. Their adventures resolve inner conflicts, and in the context of the story, universal conflicts also. Then they have to decide to close these windows for ever. Henceforward, these other worlds can only be visited in imagination.
Outside of the story, we are the ones who have to use our imaginations. The worlds we can see are 'real' in the sense of being personally meaningful.
In the story, Will has deep traumas to resolve - a disappeared father, a mentally ill mother, goons and bullies for classmates. He is introverted, liking to blend in so as not to be noticed. The breaking point was the accidental death of a burglar: this caused him to leave home and go on the run, thinking himself a murderer. His best friend was his cat, which he has to abandon when leaving. But he follows another cat into a parallel world and protects it.
Throughout the story he befriends a girl, Lyra, who becomes a significant girlfriend; finds his father, a man he can be duely proud of; he becomes a hero, saving the world many times; and he becomes his own person, someone who makes moral choices even when advised otherwise.
This then is a story of growing up, in which the inner world is more important than the outer world.
How we visualise ourselves plays a key part in our view of ourself, to our ideas of self-worth. Children need to be encouraged to believe in themselves, not to be punished into submission. We are all mentors and role models for each other, to support and assist this growth in confidence, and we ourselves learn from our own mentors. Children's role models are not necessarily positive, and peer pressure can be strong. The confidence to resist is the beginning of autonomy.
Reading stories is an important part of this process; telling them, acting them out and writing them up is even more important. My earliest dramatic role was as story narrator in the infant class, still a very positve memory. To be in control of one's own story is a good way to get through life.

See further:Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials: The Nature of Good and Evil, National Theatre Teachers Website.(2005).
Insight: Self Understanding Through Stories of Parallel Worlds. In: Research Focus, 22 May 2007, University of Worcester. (2007)

©Stephen Bigger 2008

Knowledge

What I know today is different from what I knew yesterday, and will be different from what I will know tomorrow. WHen I was young I knew a lot of things for certain. As I get older I know less and less. However, the knowledge I have now helps me to navigate my world, and I cannot do without it. My knowledge is always transitional, moving from understanding to new understanding. Actually it is doing forwards and backwards in ways which I cannot appreciate till later.
Science is the same. Knowledge exists for others to try to disprove, or modify, in a never ending cycle. Scientific knowledge changes, often dramatically, when old frameworks get completely knocked down. Most don't think out of the box; some do, and change the box. Thomas Kuhn called it a paradigm shift. When everything that used to be believed is now disbelieved.
So what can I rely on as true? Quite a few things are beyond reasonable doubt, but what they might mean is a bit fluid. The only thing I can do is keep reflecting on them.
What does this mean for education? We spend most of our time telling children things that won't be considered true when they leave school. What we teach in primary school we have to revise in secondary school, and keep revising at GCSE, and again at A level, and again at university. We have to simplify, but do we really have to teach lies, knowingly? And then unteach what we have just taught?
On the question, what of all this is true, and how do we teach that in school:
I live (but quality of life is difficult to define)
I will die (but what then, what happens to "me").
Personally I come back always to justice as solid ground. It is an idea, I suppose, of selfless acting, something humans find difficult. It is not an emotion, that can get twisted in different directions, but a standard we can always return to.
Humans are always selfish in the sense of putting our own needs first. We will only become just if we can set this aside and put others first. All others. How to do this is the mystery.
Love is only secure if justice is embedded. That is, it ceases to be self-serving.
Hope is only secure if it is just.
So our critical base line has to be justice.
A child's education should start and end with this.
©Stephen Bigger 2008

Bullying

Bullying not only causes misery but ruins lives. Pupils cannot thrive if others are attacking them, whether verbally or physically. Bullying focuses on difference, maybe racial, maybe religious, maybe physical (for having red hair, or wearing glasses, or being epileptic). It may pick on the victim, a soft target, someone without power who does not defend himself or herself.

In the 1980s, the Commission for Racial Equality wrote a report called Learning in Terror, describing how ethnic minority children had to suffer both name-calling and even physical violence in the playground and in the streets. Times have changed since then, but racist bullying is still around, more subtle. It is easy on the sportsfield to make that over-hard tackle when the referee is not looking. Sport can be a site of intolerance and tribalism, causing fear to its victims.

The mobile phone, texting, and emails have caused other opportunities for bullying, messages of hatred and exclusion, threats, and persistent abusive messages.

Bullying is wasting potential. Victims do less well, and do not achieve their potential. We may never know what that potential is, what benefits to the world might have resulted. It has gone, lost through depression, perhaps suicide. The victims may end up doing jobs beneath their potential.

Victims need supporting. Some of this is shelter, some building up their resilience. Aggressive bullying should not be tolerated in a humane educational establishment. Every effort should be made to ensure that victims are not disadvantaged.

Of course perpetrators should not benefit from their bullying: the reality is that they usually do. Managers and executives might be appointed exactly because they are "strong minded" (often a euphomism for workplace bullying). The bully also needs to engage with personal and social learning. In particular, they need to understand the consequences of their actions, the plight and feelings of victims. They need then to apologise and put things right. This prionciple is used in the justice system - restorative justice, restoring what has been violently taken. In schools colleges and universities, restorative practice allows no ducking of guilt, not being soft, requiring full recognition of pain given, and consideration of how to put right the wrong. The spirit of this is needed in education to ensure that no pupil bullies with impunity, and no victim is allowed to suffer in silence.

©Stephen Bigger 2008

Christians and Muslims

Television is a good way to meet old friends. Last night there was an item from Bristol in which an artist we used to know, Toni Robinson, brought together Muslim and white nominally Christian youngsters to talk to each other about their lives, beliefs and aspirations. As they got to know each other better, they were helped to paint self portraits which will go on exhibition in Bristol. The project is called, Knowing Me, Knowing You.
The lack of contact between communities like these living side by side but apart is a huge social problem so more projects like this should be encouraged. The ignorance of the general population to real Islamic values, beliefs and aspirations is almost total, so they never see beyond the media stories they see. Name-calling on the streets is one symptom, something that every Muslim has to live with here. Where people from different cultures meet and befriend one another, this ignorance disappears and respect grows.

©Stephen Bigger 2008

Muslims and Hindus

Today's task is to get ready some Hindu artefacts for a Muslim friend to use as teaching aids in a Muslim school. If that has made you blink, I am glad.
Hindus believe in one God, Brahma, who cannot be described. God is responsible for life in all its aspects. Hindus picture God through attributes. God is all wise, the solver of problems, the helper, the preserver, the rewarder of good deeds, the merciful, the just. Nothing in this is very different from Muslim beliefs.
Because Hinduism developed at a time when the common people were illiterate, teachings were given in pictorial language, and behind the stories were folk tales. These are symbolic and not to be taken literally as history. To say God is all wise, the picture is of the goddess Saraswati. Both male and female pictures of God are used to demonstrate that God is not one or the other. I asked some 8 year old what wise means, before discussing Saraswati. I will give you one girl's response later. After this discussion, they told me what the Saraswati picture means: she holds a book, to show she is full of knowledge; she holds a sitar, to show that she appreciates music and the arts; she holds a rosary to represent spirituality. She wears a crown, to suggest wisdom is queen, and she rides a swan to suggest grace and beauty. The water is calm, showing that wisdom creates peace. They have understood how to unpack a symbol.
Next I am giving her Lakshmi. The artifact is a wooden lotus bud which opens to reveal a tiny carving of the goddess. Lakshmi represents success and is the patron goddess of shopkeepers and business folk when stocking up and planning their new year. She stands on a lotus, calm on turbulant waters. The lotus is a thing of beauty with roots in the mud and filth, showing how a hostile world can be transformed. Success comes from diligence, hard work and good relationships - it is not magically dispensed from the skies. The new year is a time of healing, paying off debts and a reminder to make sure that bad blood does not hinder prosperity. In other words, we create our own success; and equally we create our own failures.
Next she will have Ganesh, the solver of problems and remover of obstacles. The children can talk about the nature of problems and obstacles and how they are tackled. Ganesh encourages us to draw on inner strengths to find solutions. Again, no magic solutions from above. The problem might be large and require great effort; or it might be small and subtle. The children can discuss examples of these and what might be needed to sort them out. And now the picture (or statuette). The greatest tool in India to remove physical obstacles is the elephant, so Ganesh has an elephants head. Myths have spun various stories to explain the family relationships which caused this, but this is beyond the symbol. If we throw weight against the obstacle, we need the tools - the community, the equipment. Ganesh carries a cake or breadbun, suggesting friends who eat together; a goad, suggesting that great effort will be required; and a rosary, indicating that the effort will be ethical and reflective. He has a broken tusk, as risks are needed. His 'steed' is a little mouse, telling us not to ignore subtle solutions - why knock a wall down when you can go through a little chink?
So religious language is symbolic language. Our solutions to problems, and our way to prosperity and wisdom, are inside us. We should not expect miracles. We have to summon up our inner strengths, be thoughtful, reflective, ethical, work in community determined to have good relationships. If we can achieve that, the world will begin to change.
Our friend will also receive Rama and Krishna figurines, but they are a longer story!

Effective schools?

To know if something has been effective, we have first to know what it ought to be doing, and in the light of that, what counts as success.Crude and superficial measures produce crude and superficial education. Our definition of effectiveness must go far beyond these to address social, moral and emotional issues, aspiration and equity, conflict and anger management, personal responsibility and pupil engagement. For an educational institution to be adjudged effective it has to meet the whole needs of each pupil or student, preparing them for a worthwhile adult life appropriate to their potential (which should never be underestimated). Since what counts as knowledge is constantly changing and we live in a world of information overload, it is more important to be able to test and apply knowledge than simply remember it. Thinking, philosophy and values should grow out of a healthy use of the word ‘why’. Education should enthuse and set up interests for life. The material will not do this by itself but requires adults who are themselves enthused. This enthusiasm may come from teachers, and from adults other than teachers that schools network with. This will provide role models to imitate, and encouragement to aspire. Non-authoriarian positive role-models are of great importance.

Educating the whole person encourages and enhances personal development as an individual, emotional control and maturity, social skills and attitudes, moral awareness of other people’s feelings and rights, cultural appreciation of ways of life different from their own. Education should encourage thinking, reason, rational argument and scrutiny of evidence, encouraging problem-solving, research, investigation and generally thinking things out. Pupils need to become critics in the best sense of that word - media critics, advertising critics, literary critics. Criticism means appreciating the good and recognising the weak, a long term task, not a quick target.

Education should encourage thinking about what sort of people we are and want to be, both in terms of qualities and aspirations. This has to do with personal qualities such as honesty, kindness, generosity, calmness, diligence, patience, resilience, reliability and openness. It also explores attitudes and values, those aspects of life we hold dear which are hopefully more positive than negative. Students need to be encouraged to reflect on these in ways which helps them to reassess the past and their behaviour and performance in the future. The problem-solver is likely to become a dynamic citizen. None of this can be measured by league tables.

Social engagement

The ideal end product of education is that personally, socially and politically engaged and empowered people are able to contribute positively to community development and action. The roots of this lie early in life, where families and schools can inspire children. Equally the roots of disempowerment and apathy lie here too. A great deal of political effort has gone into providing school pupils with knowledge considered appropriate, and compliance is ensured through inspections. However there are in schools some unwilling participants in education who desperately need to make a personal breakthrough to move from a state of disaffection – emotional dislocation from school and from learning – towards motivation and engagement. One 15 year old girl put it this way:

“I was having a lot of problems at the time, my life was basically going downhill every day, I thought that I’d just end it. But … now there’s a reason to live, I am a good person, I can turn my life round. And I did. My friends think I’m more upbeat, my teachers think I’m more confident, people think it’s changed me, I’m more mature…And my behaviour is a lot better. Before I used to wander off I used to think, What the hell am I doing here, why don’t I just go home. But now I feel, I need to go to school, its education I need, and basically I’m a lot more focused in lessons. I’m able to do the work … and I enjoy the work a lot more than I ever did before.”


Emphases on social and emotional education, conflict resolution, circle time, mediation, and enjoyment all point towards that vital other dimension to education which can be described as empowerment, engagement, independent mindedness and emotional togetherness. In this individuals are engaged, feel ownership, feel able to make a difference and to tackle any problems that come their way. Fostering this personal empowerment may require a change of focus, particularly where educational procedures assume learner dependence rather than independence – dependence on materials, and on adults providing answers rather than having to think things out. Telling learners what we think (or what the government think) they need to know rather than encouraging them to explore and think for themselves, is a habit hard to get out of.

Self-esteem, self worth, self confidence

Self-esteem and self-confidence are important in personal success. Personal experience of praise and criticism effects us, but adversity can promote determination in which self-confidence is achieved in the face of criticism. Our internal defences can make us impervious to unfair criticism, or we might be driven back into our shell.
Self esteem might imply that we are successful in our aspirations. What is meant by success is relative and a problem might arise if we or others have too narrow a definition – for example confining success to academic competence – and not recognizing other forms of success and not giving praise where it is due.
High self esteem can come from the praise of others and low self esteem from lack of praise or worse still, constant criticism and sarcasm. Self esteem recognizes that we have worth; it is a self assessment; it is not an obsessive need to be first, or right, or liked by others. We need to be able to admit that we are wrong without this destroying our self-esteem.
Self confidence comes from an awareness that we have particular abilities which we can use to solve problems. We are prepared to have a go; we have ‘agency’, active on our own behalf, self prompting, we are our own agent. If we are adaptable, we can get over inhibitions and nerves, it will be easier next time. Children and young people can be given opportunities to have a go at all sorts of things in safe surroundings.
Critique can be helpful rather than destructive, so even failure can be helpful. All people need aspirations and goals, things to work towards which they would find rewarding and satisfying. These may come from hobbies and interests, or may come from ambition to achieve certain things.
The start of this is for young people to begin to reflect on their abilities and the possibilities that these open up. For some they need their eyes opening that they have any abilities at all, since no one has told them so. Reflection needs guidance – someone to be encouraging, somewhere away from humdrum life that they can be quiet and think. Guidance needs accurate information and the awareness of who else to ask when a question goes beyond our own competence. Many aspirations are killed by an adult giving inaccurate information rather than admit ignorance. In some cases these moments of bad advice can ruin a life for ever.
Race and class have been part of this whole debate – with working class and ethnic minority youngsters feeling they can only have restricted aspirations and not aspire to university education and top jobs. They are wrong. A huge difference can be made with good teachers and powerful role models as early as possible.

Who to turn to

Humans are capable of great cruelty and great kindness. We have to choose which direction to take. Our circumstances may make it easy to be cruel, and difficult to be kind - peer pressure, fitting into a gang and so on. A child has to learn that choosing to be kind is a life choice, not a convenient strategy, and that once chosen there may be difficulties and sacrifices. So, if someone needs help, the positive choice is to offer it, even at personal cost.
Equally there will have been others who have helped us throughout our life, unselfishly and with good intentions. A child in school will have encountered unselfish people to turn to, who deal honestly and expect no return. At moments of crisis, they may have been helped by talking to a relative, or a friend. They have to distinguish between good advice and bad advice by thinking about social justice, honesty and trust. Both families and schools have a role to play, helping pupils to develop positive personal values. It doesn't happen by accident.
Of course, when we need the support, those kindly mentors are not always around. When anger erupts in the playground, the grandfather's reasoned guidance is far away. So the child needs that mentor in his or her head, a mental mentor. This is the social skill of asking, "what would my mentor do in this situation? what would they advise me?". To picture one's mentor mentally helps some. In such a visualisation, we might talk, play and do things mentally with our mentor. Christy Moore the musician described on Radio 4 how meeting with his dead father in his mind, and playing on the beach as though 6 years old, greatly helped him. He was able to have those discussions that he always regretted not being able to have. Children too can enter into similar discussions in their heads as easily as they can enter into a story they are reading. There is a dimension of imagination where such things can take place. The difference is that in fiction they enter someone else's world; in visualisation they enter into their own and can sort out their own difficulties.

Jane's Story

This story features a real girl whom we shall call Jane. She is now 10. Two years ago she was out of control, swearing at teachers, throwing chairs around, not learning anything and not wanting to be at school. Her life prospects were bad. She was very close to permanent exclusion from school. Things had gone wrong at home as well and her mother was in despair. All teachers will recognise the type of child she was. One year later, she was still at the same school and was awarded a prize for good behaviour - a prize fully earned. Her life chances are now good. She is young enough to make up lost ground. She is real, not fictional. Many other children really need a taste of success like this.

A second life story. We shall call him Trevor, not his real name but he is real. At 12 years old, he too was close to exclusion, at least his teachers thought him difficult. Like many boys like him, a future without qualifications lay ahead. That was 2001; but now Trevor is in University, studying computer science and preparing for something he had once never imagined - a career as a graduate.

The simple message is PLEASE do not give up on any child.

Breaking the Vicious Cycle

Our vital task as educators is to break into the vicious cycle, or the downward spiral, which keeps pupils thinking negatively. When? We cannot break through for children, but we can help them to break through. We can lead them to the point of readiness.We can change the picture they have of themselves in their heads.How long does it take to turn pupils around? Daniel Goleman & TheDalai Lama, in Destructive Emotions and Healing Emotions claim breakthrough through meditation to be through an 8-10 weeks programme. Visualisation – creating a positive reflective story for children to use as a mental template, shows similar changes after 6 to 8 weeks.
The example below sees breakthroughs in programmes of around 8 weeks using visualisation and discussion.

Swindon Youth Empowerment Programme – positive principles in education and upbringing
1. We have personal potential / inner strengths, called ‘gems’.
2. Dual nature (negative/positive). We have to choose which.
3. Positive interactions (speech, gestures) resolves conflict builds relationships and creates a positive environment.
4. Social cooperative action enables us to work together to build a better world.
5. Good examples and role models guide the choices we have to make. What would the wisest person we have known have done?
6. We can take control transform ourselves and our world have agency be engaged and empowered.

Mnemonic: GERMINATE (encouraging growth!)

We all have 'Gems', inner strengths;
Examples and Role Models can help;
Interactions (speech, gestures and attitudes) need to be positive
our Nature has positive and negative aspects to choose from;
Cooperative Actions help create a better world;
We can Transform our lives
and be Engaged in the community.

More positive schools?

Emotional well-being is one of the most important factors in school success. In other words, happy children learn best in the proper sense of this word. Of course, pressure-cooked pupils may get better results as “right answers” are instilled into them, but long term learning is something quite different. Therefore, the emotional health of people in school needs to be a top priority.I say ‘people’ because the tone is set by the staff. In a school whose (implicit) purpose is to traumatise pupils emotionally (with thanks to John Holt [How Children Fail] and Ivan Illich [Deschooling Society]) the following might be true:

Staff achieve control by punishment
Threaten frequently
Communicate by sarcasm
Insult and belittle pupils
Shout at pupils
Test what they don’t know as often as possible
Fail to deter bullies
Avoid physical contact when the pupil needs comfort
Encourage competition to show who is weakest
Encourage assertiveness and criticise shyness
Tell children to pull themselves together and grow up
Do not check that children understand
Regard failure as stupidity.

This well describes part of my own school education.
Today, pupils bring emotional traumas from home and from the playground. Sometimes from a young age that makes learning difficult for them. Parents may be part of the problem, but they are also part of the solution. Pupils may be fine at home but be traumatised by school and become school phobic – this might be the result of bullying, or simply an inability to cope socially.
A successful school is one which adults and children are happy and fulfilled. Pupils in this context are likely to succeed and achieve. Emotional well-being leads to self-worth; being provides the foundation for caring for others. Praise leads to a can do attitude; however, especially when unjustified causes a can’t do complex. The latter is more common than the former. The aim of education is to develop habits of enthusiastic and independent learning, which involves a hunger to pass on knowledge and points of view to others. The educated person wants to help others to be educated too. The emphasis, as far as behaviour goes, is to develop self-control, and self-discipline. Education thus is about emotional understanding, self determination and motivation to learn.

Learning at home

What children learn at home will affect them all their lives. Sometimes this is positive. If parents and friends talk often and openly about interesting things, the child will learn to understand and converse quickly. If not, they wont. If parents and others discuss pros and cons, they will learn to make decisions. If not they wont. If children critically discuss TV programmes, they will quickly become TV critics. This is all before they go to nursery school. Throughout the years of schools, discussions like this are important.

If however their experience of conversation is to be told off all the time, they will learn both that they are not accepted and valued, and that the purpose of conversation is mainly to criticise others. If they understand that they will get their own way by blackmail and tantrum, they will become expert at these. This will affect the kind of adults they will become. If you know adults like this, you can guess what their childhood might have been like. By then, it is hard to change.

If your children like themselves, and are helpful to you and to others, you are getting it right. If not, ask yourselves what needs to change for them to become like this.