Heroic resisters in rotten systems

Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment in 1971. An experimental prison was set up: carefully screened volunteers were assigned roles either as warders or prisoners. The two week programme would record the interactions between they two groups. Not all volunteers could keep going. The prisoners who did so became increasingly compliant and institutionalised. The warders increased in control and aggression, unchallenged by their fellow warders. A prisoner revolt was met with savage reprisals. After six days the Stanford Prison Experiment had to be halted lest psychological damage ensue. Most of those assigned to be warders became sadistic, revelling in the power they had been given. The researchers had a no intervention policy, and the situation went out of control. In writing up the final form of this experiment three decades later, Zimbardo has the advantage of knowing that the most 'sadistic' warders in the role play had matured into normal good citizens and parents so this was not a diagnostic tool for psychopaths. Ordinary good people became evil when the culture required it. About three quarters of people reacted like this.

Some however resisted the cultural expectations, setting themselves against huge social pressure. These resisters are described as ‘heroes’ as the book overall argues that we should not be pessimistic about humankind, but encourage more people to become resisters through education and other cultural media. The agenda therefore is for the education system to design a plan of action to enable pupils to understand and resist peer pressure. This will include them reflecting on circumstances when they exert pressure on others, as well as when they resist pressure put upon them.

This is serious business. Zimbardo points out that when new staff started work at extermination camps such as Auschwitz, apparently without a full job description, they were inducted with arguments such as 'isn't it better that they die quickly than rot in filth and die painfully of disease?'. Most adapted to their new circumstances.

Zimbardo, in his latest book The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil (Rider) engages with more recent examples of prison extremes - Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. He argues that the system was rotten and evil, and that the so-called 'rotten apples' simply acceded to peer pressure. The system should have ensured that the expectation of the job was humane, and tackled any overbearing and disrespectful assumptions.

Cut out half of the information children are expected to remember - I won't dignify it with the name 'curriculum'. Schools should be encouraging children to consider their actions and the pressures others put upon them, and be strong enough to say 'No'. Schools encourage obedient 'Yes kids' when we need independent 'No kids' - pupils who think clearly for themselves, think ahead, and consider issues, ethics and consequences. Role-play and drama can teach through experience. Literature/stories can help them to empathise with strong ethical characters without being moralising. History and geography can consider social justice and the ethics of ownership, privilege, and governance. Involvement in school decision-making and in the community can underline what we mean by respect and democracy.

Above all, school should be about blame and threat-free discussion about policies, strategies and choices. It should challenge scapegoating and stereotyping, presenting the community as inclusively 'us'. Only then will more people be strong enough and confident enough to object when callousness and disrespect of others is viewed as acceptable.

The school, College or university is also a system with embedded power relationships, which can go sour. There will be bullies, power freaks, managing by sarcasm; the system needs to control such behaviour as unacceptable and to advocate positive and empowering management strategies. Pupils and students should be encouraged to be self-validating and contributing unique individuals (called individuation as opposed the the dehumanising de-individuation (p.242). They need to consider how to cope with peer and power pressure and be able to retain their inner individuality, their sense of meaning an worth, even in dehumanising systems and circumstances. This is a challenging piece of curriculum development. The final chapter is a good starting-point – ‘Resisting Situational Influences and Celebrating Heroism’:

“Heroism supports the ideals of a community and serves as an extraordinary guide, and it provides and exemplary role model for prosocial behaviour. The banality of heroism means that we are all heroes in waiting. It is a choice we may all be called upon to make at some point in time.” (p.488).

This is heroism in everyday life, as a natural moral response to the unacceptable, not the unreachable elite heroes of fiction. I invite you to visit the related websites, www.socialpsychology.org, www.prisonexp.org, www.lucifereffect.com and www.zimbardo.com and explore the downloads.

Barack Obama

Today of all days, and this hour of all hours, noon in the USA on 20th January, 5 p.m. in the UK, the time of the inaugural presidential speech in Washington DC, I would like to welcome the presidency of Barack Obama in the USA. It will be good to have a world leader who appreciates and treasures words, and reads. Also who cares.

Obama has a big job. The USA is in a mess, in crisis, and therefore the world is in trouble. Today, the USA is a little less divided about skin colour, but the gulf between rich and poor remains cavernous. The USA today renews its vows with democracy, we hope sincerely. In Britain, we pride ourselves about our openness, but we are not unprejudiced ourselves. Prejudice and discrimination remain, and scratch the surface a little, people and institutions are happy to connive. Our poor need opportunities too, and our helpless need support. The time for complacency is not yet. We are all at the beginning of a long and winding road, on which we will struggle to go uphill, and hope our brakes work on tight downhill corners. And there will be bandits. A door has been opened, but paradise is not yet.

Today is a threshold, a turning point. Endless possibilities lie ahead, so long as we have the vision and wisdom to see them.

The speech (click for full text).

...For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus - and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

...Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.

I discover this below from the Illinois Center for the Book, and am pleased with the accidental congruence of the words with my ambitions with this blog:

The Hall Branch Library, located in historic Bronzeville, was named in honor of Dr. George Cleveland Hall, a renowned surgeon, social activist and civic leader who was the second African American to serve on the Chicago Public Library Board of Directors. Dr. Hall played a vital role in connecting the African-American community with resources needed to learn, live, thrive and work by convincing a generous philanthropist to support the library by donating funds to purchase the property for a proposed library to serve a predominately large African-American community located on the south side of Chicago. The Hall Branch opened to the public on January 18, 1932, under the direction of Vivian Harsh, the first African American librarian in the Chicago Public Library. During the 1930's and 40's Hall Branch served as a meeting place for young writers such as Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston and Claude McKay. FOLUSA and Illinois Center for the Book designated the library a literary landmark because of its close association with distinguished African-American authors and writers.

Secular Spirituality?

Sage have published a long and detailed Handbook of Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence, and my review has just appeared. Word limits truncated the text; my full text is linked below. This reduction persuaded me to write a separate paper, also linked below.

The Handbook thoroughly confuses spiritual development with religious development. Only a few of the 60+ authors begin to tease out differences. Guidance on spiritual education by NCC and OFSTED make it clear that religious aspects are only part of the whole, but that spirituality is embedded also in creativity, emotions and relationships. The book I edited with Erica Brown (of Acorns Children's Hospices) in 1999 on spiritual, moral, social and cultural education across the curriculum located 'the spiritual', whether in maths, science, history or the arts, in deep 'who am I?' questions, as opposed to the 'how do I relate?' question behind moral education.
For all children, the issue of 'who am I, really, deep down' is of supreme importance. For children who cannot answer 'I am the child of loving and caring parents' the implications are far reaching. Where does their image of themselves come from? Some may find other significant adult role models, including teachers (of both children and adults) who are sensitive to the issues and open hearted. Those who joined teaching to help people and give them a chance in life. But their role model might be a gang leader, or an over-paid celebrity with a drink and drug problem. Their life horizons will be affected - for some, their life ambition is to make money, in whatever way necessary.

Spiritual education is not a textbook curriculum but a state of mind, in adults and passed on to children by infectious example. Children have strong innate curiosity about who they are and what they can become, and if they are negative, then the adults around them have knocked the positivity out of them. They are made disspirited, separated from a spiritual way of seeing in which their lives are, and will become, significant in positive ways which promote relationship and community.

I am not institutionally religious and have no great need for belief in the supernatural. I have no need for pat answers, since I love ambiguity and unanswered questions. Its a good job, since that is all we have in life. Yet I have certainties, about respect, equality of opportunity, social justice, the right to life, community, the support of the weak. This is what I mean by sacred. They are things I would die for.

When I talk with members of the various religions, these things are their sacreds too. So our conversations and relationships are easy and positive. There are shared understandings. There is much to share. I may be not 'in' but I am also not 'out'. I personally do not dignify my sacreds as divine revelations, but they are absolutes for me nonetheless. Arguing for my sacreds is why I write. The best of religious thinkers and writes also start inside the soul with the same issues and do not say, 'You must believe what I do. My way is the only path'. At this deeper level, religions can scarcely be divided. The Sikh scriptures have verses from Muslims and Hindus as well as Sikhs. They differ at a superficial level, tribal differences that can kill. At this level religion ceases to be spiritual.

So children being spiritual means that they think deeply about their place in the community and the world, and how they can promote peace through their actions and attitudes. They show respect for others, and learn to respect themselves. Regarding others as their equals, they support others unselfishly and feel enriched by their success. Peace is something to be fought for, non-violently, opposing both conflict and the root causes of conflict since these threaten safety, security and life itself.

Links:
Review of Sage Handbook
Secular Spiritual Education? , Educational Futures, vol.1, no. 1, pp.49-69.

Revolutionary change in education.

This blog comes at the end of a reading of the works of the anthropologist Victor Turner who engaged with the ideas first of rites of passage (life crises and transitions) and then ritual. He came to see performance today as an evolutionary development from ritual to appease supernatural forces. Now, those forces are seen as psychological forces, no less problematic and no less dangerous.

For Turner, revolutionary change came from ritual, which tackled a breach and found a solution, a Hegelian synthesis. As a Marxist, evolutionary change never brings political progress; it takes direct revolutionary action to overturn the old system and to get rid of old attitudes. There will be a struggle in which blood is metaphorically shed. In his view, ritual is an important mechanism for social change, in that it mobilises whole populations. Calling it ‘social drama’ he broadened the notion of ritual to ceremony and carnival. This interest in ritual caused him to join the Roman Catholic church.

Unfortunately, ritual and carnival can oppose change. The Sussex Bonfire ceremonies such as “Rye Fawkes” perpetuate anti-Catholic rejoicing at a time of cultural tolerance. Ritual can be used to solve social problems; but not all ritual does so and most western ritual does not. In the west, ritual is the problem, not the solution. Reconciliation is not possible so long as the Orange March winds through Belfast or paramilitaries of both sides fire fusillades at the funerals of murderers. It was the grass-roots discussions which dissolved hostilities, Turner’s concept of communitas, that is community positive participation, which made a peace process possible. It is this that provides the revolution, not ritual. When the revolution has taken place, then ritual (performance, participation and publicity) might seal it.

We have long used the language of change in education, whether it be action research, reform, or accountability. The desire for evolutionary change has to face up to the reality of school conservatism, which will return to the old ways as soon as pressure is released. The current period of top-down teacher competency and accountability (as opposed to bottom-up teacher creativity and inspiration) has lasted 20 years since 1988, mostly because that is how new teachers have been trained, and OFSTED has directly or indirectly persuaded those not of this view to leave the profession. These two decades of ‘reform’ have not produced dramatic change, so there are annual post-mortems about standards. Education is heavily structured, with schooling financed by governments, an authority structure, and a rigorous assessment and monitoring system. ‘Progress’ or otherwise, strictly defined, registers on league tables. However there are pressures against these structures both from pupils and teachers, pupils resisting over-authoritarianism, and teachers resisting top-down demands. Schools are judged on achievements at 16, and to a lesser extent on earlier SATs, but the quality of a school requires more than high results. They need to motivate children, add value, and rescue children from deep senses of failure.

Turner's 'liminality', that is the state of being on a threshold, is a bottom-up reassessment of our values and strategies, democratically reached; and communitas is the social partnership process which brings people into positive relationships which encourage change. This encourages debate at its most open-minded, after putting aside status and personal benefit, for the common good. This means putting all perspectives into the melting pot, deciding the mission and vision (no doubt about rescuing desperate children), and then deciding how best to achieve the resulting ambitions, without the distractions of historic agendas and empires. We all see ourselves as at the doorway, the threshold, of a new journey, a crossroads between a fruitful path and a barren policy. The experience of being on that threshold is what we mean by liminality. That gives us a vision of possible futures if we dare to cross over and embrace them. This is exhilarating, but is a counterculture and has its dangers. It exists because it is telling the power in the land that the vision behind the money - that is, education funding - and inspection (that is, policing) is wrong. And, whether Labour or Tory, it has been wrong for some time.

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.