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.

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