Leadership and the modern Prince

Machiavelli wrote The Prince to articulate principles of medieval leadership, in which legalised political violence was accepted as normal. Antonio Gramsci wrote from prison as Mussolini's political prisoner "The Modern Prince", set in 1930s Italy (see earlier post on Prison Notebooks, PN). Here leadership is shown as a mixture of consent and force. Consent is needed by key stakeholders - the army, the police, the judiciary for example. Popular consent of the majority is helpful when force has to be exerted against a minority. The implications of this balance in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s was obvious to anyone with even a casual understanding of Nazi and Fascist policies. Gramsci, a Marxist, was in favour of democratic leadership.

I am concerned here with applying the idea of a modern Prince to contemporary leadership issues, including those in education. The leader can offer direction (forced or negotiated) and/or intellectual and moral leadership (PN:57). Leadership in education can be centralised to an individual or devolved to several layers. Parents and staff may be interested to ask whether the current situation is by consent or fiat, and the extent to which consent is sought - that is stakeholder views are valued. This suggests how much ownership the stakeholders feel in the status quo. Pupils are also major stakeholders. We might therefore ask on how the balance between force and negotiation is established, especially in the context of dealings with pupils. A school or college can only run with pupil/student consent (that consent might be freely given or grudging) but they could by sheer numbers sabotage the management of education by refusing to take part. The balance between management by force, by grudging consent and by freely-given consent might be used as a health check for the institution, and strategies to move the balance upwards devised and maintained.
Like the distinction between state and civil society, a school balances central power (the headteacher) against stakeholder competence and enthusiasm, the school equivalent of civil society, where many people work towards the public good. The more these are in balance, the healthier the institution. Leaders in education therefore need to devote energy towards nurturing bottom-up quality, and cannot achieve a quality organisation unless they do. They also therefore need to be the kind of people, in terms of personal qualities and attitudes, to do this well. Then the leader offers negotiated direction to the organisation, without which it is rudderless. The authority vested in the leader rests squarely on the quality of the intellectual and moral direction offered. Direction as to be owned democratically; but it also has to be fair, ethical, properly evidenced, securely conceived and suitably flexible. This then is the person specification of The Prince in education, that is the headteacher, the College Principal the Vice-Chancellor, devolved leader, head of service, or government minister. Today, they should not be bringing in the cavalry to kill opposition but negotiating a win-win situation.

From a school perspective, this means management by motivation rather than by compulsion, force, punishment, and expulsion. From a state perspective, it means working to narrow the gap between the many thousands of young people in prison or detention in Britain, and the remarkable figure of only 3 in Finland. For both school and state, anti-social activity is remedied by appropriate education and not by force.

Ivan Illich and Deschooling

Back in the early 1970s Ivan Illich was persuaded that school education was so bad that the only answer was to scrap them. His book, Deschooling Society was iconic. He contrasted learning with schooling. Schooling is about compliance and obedience whilst learning is about excitement, motivation and empowerment. He referred both to an inappropriate curriculum, and an undemocratic school ethos. Schooling is done to children and not with children. His vision was of a global network of expertise that people could buy into (and offer good or bad feedback) instead of the state providing an education system. To the call to introduce free schooling worldwide, his view that this was the most unhelpful thing to impose onto a developing country. More knowledge, yes, more learning, yes, but NOT more schooling.

This has been a challenging thought. The 1980s UK government imposed a National Curriculum to improve things - it was even called the Education Reform Act in 1988. That was a botched disaster which saw annually revised versions, important afterthoughts such as citizenship, environmental education and careers education. Then a bolted on personal and social education permeation. Angst about standards, behaviour and school quality provide annual post-mortems. Employers still campaign about low literacy and numeracy levels. Campaigns about respect, and 'behaviour modification' are constantly reinvented. Education costs billions, but the problems have not gone away.

Of course, the issue for Illich was what would take the place of schools. He said, a network of expertise. We now have the internet so there is a means for delivering such a network. Of course, the good needs sifting from the awful, but that is not impossible.

It is time to reconsider Illich's arguments. Do schools need to disempower pupils? How could they in contrast empower them? Do schools (or colleges, universities) need to pretend to be the only holders of knowledge? Can education institutions prepare students to become adaptable thinking adults who will live in a world where knowledge is unrecognizably different from what we now think we know? Is the internet the best way of achieving this? Or will other things follow?

So Illich argued that schools made pupils dependent and not independent. That the NHS makes people dependent on experts rather that independent pursuers of healthy lifestyles. That in general all government institutions should empower rather than disempower, and produce motivated and enterprising people. That is still an important national and global aspiration. Schools, Colleges and Universities are only as good as they are at delivering such an enriching agenda.

Mathematics education blog

Can I point those interested to a mathematics education blog from Norway at http://mathedresearch.blogspot.com by Reidar Mosvold at the University of Stavanger.

Middle Ground

The phrase 'middle ground' reminds me of a few things.

First, Homi Bhabha who writes on post-colonial relationships which are full of authority issues, and post-authority issues. He speaks of dialogue between the former powerful and powerless to find middle ground in which authority agendas have been dissolved and the discussion can move forward.

Second, Armitt L (2005:196) Fantasy Fiction: An introduction New York, Continuum. This explores children reading fiction (especially fantasy) in which they enter imaginatively onto another plane, 'middle ground' (through a wardrobe/window/portal) where belief in reality is laid aside. It could also represent the acceptance of drama and soaps as 'real' in the imagination. If you like, children have to lay their agendas, assumptions and dogmas down and enter imaginatively into a new world, first imagined and gradually more and more fleshed out until that middle ground becomes the new reality. The teachers job is involve them imaginatively in this process.

Third, post Vygotskian Socio-cultural Activity Theory. An activity is a deliberate purposeful human set of actions. The subject has a motive which aims at the desired outcome. The middle ground between the intention and the outcome contains 'mediating symbols and tools'. A desired outcome might be post-authoritative self-discipline. The mediating symbols are mostly linguistic, although there may be other rituals and rights of passage embedded. The first mediating tool is the discussion group, which sought to unravel prejudice and dogma and open up new horizons. Such tools will produce argument and conflict - this is essential if progress is to be made, and you have to navigate through conflict and never bury it or avoid it. The new consensus should represent all views broadly, so it should never be s/he who shouts loudest (or most articulately) wins. Everyone needs to be able to agree on the group statement before moving on.

The middle ground is also a kind of consensus in which the different parties or stakeholders seek to achieve a win-win situation. There are pitfalls when an authority figure tries to force a consensus through. Also, a consensus may not provide the best solution, which might have been expressed by one person and been sidelined by vested interests. Consensus might end up being a conservative or reactionary position, as Galileo once found.
Note: this development of a response to a student is to explore the concept of 'middle ground' in interesting ways

Gramsci, hegemony and social complexity

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was born in Sardinia and his work focused on Italy. A marxist, he was co-founder of the Italian Communist Party, working on their newspaper Unita. He was imprisoned by Mussolini from 1928-33 where he produced 'Prison Notebooks' which have turned him into a marxist theorist of some note. On release he continued writing until his death in 1937. A selection in English was edited by G Nowell Smith and Q Hoare in 1971, with a useful introduction. There is also a helpful discussion by Stuart Hall, reprinted in Stuart Hall: critical dialogues in cultural studies, ed David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, Routledge 1996.

He is known for developing the concept of hegemony - that is the authority that sustains people or groups in power. He identified a continuum between hegemony by control/ constraint, and by social agreement. His analysis was at the practical level of everyday life and national policy rather than a high abstraction. He recognised that real life is complex and was against the oversimplifications of scientism, economism, empiricism and positivism, that is that easy answers cannot be produced by science, economics, measurement or sense-evidence. Reality is much more complex, with all these areas, and others, all contributing. Such complexity needs to be factored into our research and analysis of life. He complained constantly that marxism was oversimplifying Marx.

Periodization: Gramsci recognised that there are periods of stability and periods of unheaval. Therefore a long view charts relations between structure and superstructure (that is, how local upheavals affect the social and political structure of the whole. These upheavals are similar to what Kurt Lewin called 'unfreezing'; changes to the superstructure of the organisation or society resembles Lewin's 'refreezing'. For Gramsci, forces are in relationship. The marxist revolution will not be sudden and total but a gradual process over time. A class, whether workers or bourgeoisie, is not united but very varied. Moving either class towards the other is a process of small steps.

Whichever is in control has hegemony and holds it either by force or by agreement, usually a mixture of the two. The ideal is to move strategies towards consensus and away from force. His examples focused on Italy with different hegemonies exerted by Mussolini and the Catholic church, each with privileges and self-seeking agendas. His campaign therefore was to move closer to the hegemony of the people.

This leads to the distinction between state and civil society. Civil society (the accumulation of all non-state activity) provides the way to neutralise any excessive hegemony by the state. In other words we all need to play our part, in our own way and our own fields, in social change.

Stuart Hall took these principles and applied them, as Gramsci had never done, to issues of race, racism and anti-racism. The long view shows gains and losses, and the best we can hope for is gradual progress, so long as everyone with a stake plays their part. The revolution from racism to antiracism creeps therefore along the continuum; racists will stop affirming their racism long before they change their attitudes, if ever they do.

This idea of slow revolution (non-marxists tend to call it improvement or progress, without always defining the criteria) is one we can apply to many aspects of education, attitude and practice. The 'intellectual world' is inclusive of everyone who thinks and articulates clearly, which should ideally be everyone. 'Thinks' means to think about life, experience, society, community, politics, justice and democratic empowerment. That is a challenge, and alas runs counter to the concept of intellectual found in the Academy.
Link: http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-gram.htm

The Banality of Injustice

This means that injustice can appear ordinary and normal. Hannah Arendt, a German Jewish writer, coined the phrase "the banality of evil" in her 1963 account of the trial of the Nazi Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem - Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. There was an expanded edition on 1994 (Penguin). She argued powerfully that we should not regard people like Eichmann, Himmler and Hitler as monsters - they were ordinary people alongside other ordinary people who persuaded each other that evil (murder, grievous bodily harm, causing starvation) is acceptable so that they could feel good after working efficiently for the boss, and guilty only if they let him down. They develop a pride in their work, comparable with any other craftsman. Viewed like this, we discover that similar people are everywhere, fortunately only active when the culture around them allows them to act with impunity. How for example in Rwanda could people turn against their neighbours so quickly, and executioners with machetes kill men women and children in cold blood and then do home for tea because they are tired? And consider it a normal day's work. Eichmann was absolutely normal. The psychiatrists examining him reported he had a good personality and desirable caring attitudes within friends and family. Arendt said, people like him "were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal". At the time he had no concept that he was doing wrong. She called it "the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil".

This can be applied to injustice. Normal people not thinking they are doing wrong by discriminating against people on grounds of race, colour or religion, especially if they feel sure of social approval. If the law of the land promotes it, then confidence grows that there will be no consequences for unjust actions. In other words, we live on the brink of civil war, with normal people viewing others as enemy. The trials of these 'normal' politicians in Nuremburg was in my lifetime. Rwanda and Bosnia have been in the lifetimes of most people reading this. This civil war is happening now.

So what about the 'banality of good' - creating a culture of authentic altruism, a caring society, so helping others is the normality, and selfish discrimination is considered unacceptable. Before we are self-righteous about this, how much are these ideals deep down in people's souls rather than being an unwelcome social constraint. Altruism today has to be informally policed by people prepared to stand up and be counted. Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist, talked of 'the banality of heroism', when being a hero resisting evil is what ordinary people do and not what elite people do.

Preparing children to be heroes is a serious task. Understanding the concepts of justice, altruism, and good as contrasting with unfairness, discrimination and evil are part of it; and challenging unacceptable attitudes and behaviour is the rest. As tools, parents and teachers can use example, stories, discussion and practical action. If being caring is developed as the normal thing to do, we are closer to having a society when kind and just actions become the norm.

Autobiographies and Budapest.

Autobiographies are tricky things. You wouldn't include what you want to keep secret, and would tell your own version of events favourably to you. So they are not the whole truth and may be nothing like the truth. The trouble is we tell ourselves our own autobiographies in our heads, in denial of uncomfortable bits of truth, blaming ourselves for nothing or everything.

I found Sheila Handcock's autobiography The Two of Us touching last year, her description of her life with her husband John Thaw, and his death. The second volume now out is Just Me. I have found it hard going until she arrived in Budapest, on a singles tour. Her account is self mocking, which helps her be more honest than usual. She asks awkward questions, and is not satisfied with unsatisfactory answers. And this embarrassed her fellow travellers, she thought.

So what about Budapest? Her one week tour gave her no answers, just things that people were not saying. First a fellow traveller from Halifax spoke disrespectfully about 'Pakis' and she challenged him: that led to an uncomfortable discussion about immigration. Then she visited and off-tour museum of the secret police, where torture implements were on show and secret files. She asked a guide, who would not talk about it since members of her family had been incarcerated and tortured there.

Unsatisfied, she stayed on a further week. She found the Holocaust Memorial Museum and was greatly moved by its contents, photographs by zealous Nazis of the selection and the whole killing machine. Children being selected for death. Murder on an industrial scale. But no one in Budapest would talk about it; better to pretend it had not happened.

The museums revealed the meaning of public statues that had puzzled her - shoes by the river; she found these commemorated those who had been shot there and pushed in the river. Those who had resisted. Those who had tried and been unsupported.

Sheila had been open to new understanding, and pursued socially difficult knowledge in spite of discouragement. That otherwise civilised people can turn on their fellows so terribly; and that otherwise caring family folk can turn a blind eye so easily. In considering our own autobiographical accounts, there will be things we find uncomfortable, and must not be met with silence but addressed. When did we not support a victim or face a bully, even in some much less offensive situation? And more importantly, how have we learnt from our past so that what kind of people we are, and will be, is transformed.