Should we stop searching for a Utopia because it is unattainable?
It’s raining! Again! In my Utopia it wouldn’t rain like this. You would never have to wake up to the sound of miserable dripping on the panes of glass in your bedroom that fills you with an impending doom before you’ve raised yourself completely from slumber.
Of course, I’d want it to rain at some point in the day, occasionally. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to look out of the aforementioned window and see the delight of the richness of greenery in my garden. At this time of year it is beautifully vibrant.
I’ve just noticed on the news that they are reporting weather conditions in the UK in the year 2080. Apparently, it is going to be 45 degrees on a June day 2080. Our forthcoming generations will be basking in glorious heat here in the UK on a regular basis, so may be my Utopia is realistic after all. Sadly, I won’t be around to feel it, and I may even wish for the morning rain when I am 92 and unable to muster enough energy to rise from my bed due to heat exhaustion as we head towards that date.
My Utopia would include plenty of other things. It would essentially enable my passions to flourish and be realised. There would be honour and reason in individuality. There would be liberty of thought and no fixed ideas on how one should live one’s life – Utopian anarchy, I guess.
In my Utopia, every house would be filled to the brim with books that everyone wanted to read, hungrily eager to learn about the world around and beyond them. There would be opportunity for all to express themselves in whatever way they chose and there would be love; plenty of love.
I could carry on talking about my Utopia. I could hope for all sorts of things. I could be more realistic and state other more attainable aspirations for my ideal world; small changes that could actually happen, recognising little steps towards an ideal.
It would take reams of paper to express my Utopia and I presume that is why Thomas More wrote his book because he couldn’t explain his idealism in a simple essay – it was too complicated for that.
Talking of Thomas More, I am not sure that I would want to live in his Utopia. Women are subservient; individuality in parts seems to be discouraged. More suggests that people should worship different Gods and there are other quotes that don’t lead me to wanting to share this vision. However, there are exceptional parts of his vision that I definitely buy into.
Take this quote.
"The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul."
I don’t think I could argue with that.
Or with this one either.
"For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.”
Of course, if I believe in individualism, then I cannot criticise another person’s Utopia for it is precisely that; their own, just as my idealism is personal to me, and I guess herein lies the problem in achieving one’s personal perfection.
If I espouse freedom, another’s Utopia is possession. If I favour equality, others want domination. If I want wall to wall sunshine, others want inclement weather conditions.
Each individual has an idea of what they want for their ideal world but they are all too frequently incompatible with the views of people that one has to or chooses to live with and amongst.
Whilst healthy debate is part of my Utopia, one thereby has to assume that people have differences, which indeed is exactly as it should be. But if people have these differences, even if they are slight and difficult to differentiate, there is always the potential for total anarchy and discord.
My Utopia and your Utopia are mutually exclusive for all their similarities and therefore, neither of them, if working in parallel is achievable.
Here is another quote from one George Orwell, one of our greatest Dystopia writers.
“Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache.... Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.”
This is a rather negative view of aspiration but of course, there is a strong element of truth in it. Often people aspire to the one thing that they cannot have or the direct opposite of what they do have without thinking of the repercussions of this alleged perfection on both themselves and others.
However, I worry about this phrase and I can hardly believe that I am sitting here writing and about to challenge one of the greatest writer’s of our time.
There is a certain amount of truth in that final phrase. If one imagines “perfection” then there is the implication that one is not experiencing the ideal, and therefore by aspiring to perfection one is certainly revealing elements in their lives that are not fulfilled.
Herein lies my concern and the purpose of my writing. If an ideal is unachievable, if aspiration is exaggerated beyond the attainable then should we simply give up and accept life the way that it currently is?
Yesterday, I read a comment stating that the current mess that we call the Labour Party was not an issue about ideology but about dysfunctional politics. It wasn’t that there was a problem with the vision but how it was being developed in flawed policies.
Whilst at face value, this makes sense there is an assumption that there is any vision or purpose in the first place. The commentator in this case clearly said “It is not about ideology”. How can fundamental changes to our society not be about ideology? The very problem with this government at the moment is that it has lost all sense of ideology, all rational thought, all substantial vision. It has no Utopia in mind whatsoever other than the Utopia of continual governance at all costs, and that is no vision in my opinion.
Returning to Orwell, one could certainly argue that the government has shown one hell of a lot of “emptiness”. Disappointment after disappointment has led me to take drastic steps that included voting for another political party this week but the sadness of all of this is that the void and emptiness doesn’t come from an “imagine(d) perfection”.
Maybe I am too steeped in ideology. Maybe my belief system is beyond reason and by that I am clearly showing the emptiness of my aspiration. But if you don’t have vision or aspiration or hope then where on earth does that leave you?
If a vision is seemingly unachievable should we really just shrug our shoulders, turn away and give up? Should we allow the status quo or even worse, let reactionary negativity prevail?
In times such as these, it is all too easy to be dejected, depressed and dull. There is plenty to angst about. There is too much inequality and injustice in the world but to merely sit and accept this is not feasible.
It is way too important for that.
Even if the only thing we can do is sit in sedentary silence contemplating or writing about our grievances, then that is far better than lapsing into inertia unable to even think about alternatives to the current state of affairs.
I live my life in a certain way. I make choices based on need and greed and hope and aspiration. I have my vision of how I want to live my life. I have my aspirations for others; those I know, those I am yet to meet and those that I will never meet. And of course, there are times that this reveals a major emptiness in my life and those of others. It saddens me and even hurts me when I know that my Utopia is a pipe dream, an unattainable desire but that does not and will not deter me from walking along my own path. It will not prevent me from thinking about what could and indeed should happen to myself and my world.
Take this writing lark. I never believed that I was a writer. I never believed that it was possible for me to spend my days thinking in any sort of coherent manner that could be placed on a piece of paper or keyboard for others to read, and yet, for the majority of my adult life, I have subconsciously wished to write. My imagined perfection, in my opinion, was never achievable and therefore definitely revealed an emptiness. Nobody was going to want to read my inexperienced, grammatically incorrect, content impoverished drivel but that hope never went away. It never disappeared.
I didn’t ever, and still don’t believe in my ability to write but even this does not deter me from wanting to do it, and plucking up enough courage to place it in a domain whereby others can also read it.
Without my vision and ideology, I wouldn’t be doing this. Without encouragement and criticism, this hope of mine would have remained unachievable.
It is but a small example of what I am trying to say but it does, I think, show that you should be able to dream. You should be able to think about an ideal and take small steps along a pathway to the fulfilment that you desire.
And it can happen!
Of course, the other problem with Utopia’s is that there are some who think in the terms of Utopia where others can only see the exact opposite. Despots; the likes of Hitler and Pol Pot had their Utopia. It was and is deeply flawed, abhorrent, vile, oppressive.
Their dystopic Utopia’s would have succeeded if enough people had been persecuted and indoctrinated. Flawed vision, I suspect, is stronger than no vision at all.
Yet, their vision didn’t work. Did it not succeed because it was unattainable or did it not succeed because there were more people with stronger visions that were simply not prepared to allow this demonic form of existence?
What would have happened if those who opposed Hitler had not had an ideology and a Utopia that they so believed? What would have happened if they could not use these thought to counteract the hideous alternative? Where would we be now?
Having a vision is vital. Working towards that vision is purposeful. Being overridden by that vision to the point of absolutism can incur depression and repression.
As with so many things in life, it is all about balance but a world without ideology isn’t one that I want to be a part of, and even if in having an ideology it reveals life’s setbacks and emptiness, then I would still rather have the vision in the first place.
But then I always was comfortable in Fantasyland!
Sunday, 7 June 2009
Thursday, 28 May 2009
The Dehumanisation of Work
The Dehumanisation of Work
Reading the paper yesterday, I sadly trawled through an account of some burned out, helpless, frazzled young teachers who have been overburdened by the doctrine or rather indoctrination that we call our education system. Set impossible targets, given a curriculum that they have to teach without any additional flair or innovation from their alleged educated selves, teaching according to attainment graphs and statistics rather than considering the individual needs of the young people in front of them – they’ve lost the plot! According to the writer of this piece, a teacher himself, they probably lost the plot in December, exhausted by the lengthy term, never really regaining their equilibrium and purpose. Sapped, lost, forlorn.
Some people don’t appear to believe there is any correlation between this sorry situation and the pupil attainment. Some people don’t seem to get it that if the teachers are disillusioned and bored with what they are offering to the children, it is expecting a hell of a lot from the young people themselves to suddenly be inspired.
Some people have not looked at the neurological evidence about social interaction and mirrored behaviour – boredom breeds more boredom and multiplies plenty fold.
There are many ways of improving the educational experience for our young people. Giving them an exciting, innovative curriculum is one way. Getting them out of the classroom and experiencing the world around them is another. Giving them a truly broad and balanced curriculum that reflects their entire needs and not just the straight jacket of intellectual standards is yet another, and supporting the emotional wellbeing of their carers, their teachers is another.
One solution won’t work. Holistic change, supporting all within an institution, nurturing and guiding, caring and feeling, educating and giving opportunities to extend learning are all part and parcel of organisational change, and this cannot be restricted to the pupils alone.
What we have done is forget that these are real people. They have real lives, real needs, real desires and passions. Try being passionate about anything when your work schedule and expectations are unrealistic, unachievable and unworthy!
I am not saying that attainment is unworthy. Learning to read, to write, to become numerate is vastly important. But there is more! There is a hell of a lot more, and to leave teachers in situations such as these is abhorrent.
By giving them unrealistic “floor” targets, by categorising the children as though they were a piece of statistical data that they have to manipulate, by constraining their innovation and curbing their imagination, we have made these teachers androids.
The irony is that there are actually some people who enter into education for genuine vocational reasons. They want to make a difference but the current system negates any possibility of doing just that. The TDA advertising slogan “Use Your Head – Teach” would be laughable if it wasn’t so bloody tragic!
And that is just the teachers.
My mother has just been telling me about my cousin’s child who is currently doing her GCSEs. Prior to her exams, she started getting unusual headaches, tremblings, fainting fits and general obvious signs of angst. The school, fearful for the wellbeing of this straight A student, asked her parents to take her to the doctor. Checked out for signs of diabetes, eating disorders etc, she was declared physically fit but clearly reacting emotionally, mentally to the strain of examination and expectation.
Such is her ailment, such is she a precious being to their league table, the school is bending over backwards to support her needs. They have graciously decided that she requires an individual room and a personalised invigilator in order to take her exams.
Ironically, she is not alone.
You hear the occasional horror story of the child led to suicide due to the pressures of the exams. You hear the more frequent stories of self-harm. You can see the harried look on many sixteen year olds faces as they feel the needs of the world, their world, on their shoulders. They don’t want to let their school down. It has been their home for five years. It is important to them, and that is before they begin to worry about themselves, their parents, their teachers, their futures.
We have dehumanised these children, for that is what they are, and have forgotten in the league table mentality that we are not talking about a 0.535% or 2.75% of a league table point but a real person; a real living thing.
The eighteen year olds are no better. The additional two years has not made them more realistic about the burdens of examinations. They have narrowed their education to such an extent that it is wholly restricted to the three or four subjects that they are taking for formal examination. Choose French, English and History and you can forget about the joys of walking along Chesil Beach, understanding and appreciating the magnificence of this incredible geological formation. You can forget about the love of reading a book because you damn well want to. Rather, you have to confine literature to the course books, inwardly digesting every line, quoting and contextualising, analysing and interpreting. You may be studying 1984 but there’s no time to read around at Blair’s other books, unless it will make a difference to the paper. And if you are studying Orwellian theory and dystopias in general, there’s no point in having time off to watch an unrelated, peripheral film. You haven’t got either time or energy for such distractions.
You might, just might learn a musical instrument if you are lucky, if your parents are well off and see the benefit, but you’re probably only doing this to single you out on the UCCA form.
Dehumanisation! Work, work, and more work. That is all.
What an indictment! What is this teaching our children?
But it doesn’t stop there.
I have just come back from spending a few hours with my brother; my bright, funny, clever, thoughtful brother who has always bucked the trend and done things his very own, unusual way.
As a toddler, he developed a debilitating disease that he still suffers from today. Somewhat mummy coddled by parents and elder siblings alike, he ‘enjoyed’ his status as “the little one”. One could certainly argue that he abused this role and still does; having us all running around after him in good times and bad.
We lovingly oblige and he rewards us with untold gratitude.
He was a born actor, a great orator, an intellect with a huge amount of wit. To this day, he charms people, plays the networking game to perfection.
Struggling in an education establishment where previous siblings had made their mark and suffering from absurd comparisons, he underachieved academically. With little or no qualifications he went to a local college, only to be embroiled in Student Union politics to the detriment of his own learning. I was going to explain his every step to his current position but do not want to risk his anonymity. Needless to say, he employed his over exaggerated gift of the gab and took a meritocratic rise without the need for the qualifications that would label and categorise his capability.
He then went to work as the head of a national organisation, saving the company from oblivion, providing financial and strategic lead that was admired by all concerned within and beyond the company. He had vision, based on an egalitarian ideology that one could loosely relate to socialism!
All sounds good. He cared, he cares. He thinks and wants to make a difference, just like the aforementioned teachers who are washed out and wasted.
Only my brother is washed out and wasted too.
He got angry with someone at work because they weren’t as competent as they should be, and did not live up to his expectations. He was asked to take some gardening leave, fully paid until the matter was sorted. Only the company found other things to worry about. Nine months later, there is no solution. He has neither been fired nor reinstated. He is living in a land called Inertia in the continent of Limbo.
And guess what? He is a diagnosed depressive.
He cannot cope.
Now of course, one could argue that in this particular case, he has brought some of the sorry situation upon himself. But that is somewhat immaterial. Guilty or not, the company has forgotten that he is a human being, with relationships and feelings and a life. He cannot function at present because he is stymied. He cannot apply for other jobs and has been sapped of energy by the indecisiveness and inability of his employer’s to bring some sort of conclusion to this issue.
Being selfish, not only has the company forgotten that my brother is a human being, but they have detached themselves from the idea that this human has connections with others and that what they do to this man is then transferred to those who are caring for him with his many needs.
Obviously, companies employing people cannot be responsible for an entire extended family of people but they lose sight of the humanism involved.
I have a friend who was treated unfairly beyond belief in a contemptible manner that would probably stand in a court of law in his favour, should litigation ever be considered. Steadfastly, innovatively, determinedly shaping a place of work where clients and employees alike would benefit from the insight and forethought that my friend had to offer. Vision? Oh yes, there was plenty of vision and a damn good one at that. People? Yes, they were catered for in a wholehearted holistic way. The organisation had evolved and developed despite external constraints that attacked and belittled, always considering the needs of every human being who lived, worked and was associated with the place. Environment? Thoughtful, considered, needs led that once more accounted for individuals and their requirements.
Such organisations do not make themselves. They grow under great leadership and skilful management and they cannot be disentangled and eradicated in a hurry. Recent history is showing this to be the case.
My friend worked studiously, vociferously, selflessly, with an extreme focus on the needs of the people involved. He gave abundantly more than was necessary in the two decades and more that he lived at this place, and I choose the word “lived” quite deliberately.
And how did his employer thank him? They bombarded him with impossible targets that he managed to achieve without diluting his true purpose and ideology. They robbed him of the opportunity to complete the task in hand, ridiculing his methodology and placing unnecessary and deliberately contemptuous obstacles in his way. They plotted and schemed to be rid of this maverick that wouldn’t play their tired and sorry little game.
They tried to dehumanise both my friend and his organisation.
There is an important differentiation here. I did not state that they dehumanised my friend. They tried, and they would have succeeded had it not been for his strength and resilience in ensuring the bastards wouldn’t finish him off completely. They tried to dehumanise the situation by replacing him with a zombie devoid of thought who didn’t “do” vision, and whose methodology was so diametrically opposed to my friends that again, it would be laughable if it wasn’t so utterly despicable. His clients were resistant to change, even though the Zombie’s ways were supposed to be transferrable to any organisation; tried, tested and signed off with a big congratulory tick. They were resistant to change because my friend had showered them with the knowledge, skills and values of humanism that will not be eradicated if understood, appreciated and enacted. And love. Yes, they were loved.
What they did do was ignore that there are human beings involved, or in this case, they were probably very sure that there was a human being involved but they didn’t give a toss about him. But just as with my brother, they didn’t consider the other human beings involved; the clients, the employees, the family, the friends who were all deeply affected by this travesty.
And then there is me.
I work in a factory. I try my best to humanise the system but it is too big for me to take on. It is too flawed and corrupt. It is too resilient to change, unless that change is sprung upon them from way above in No Man’s Land.
My factory has produced improvements. It has refined its product and automated its employees. It has taken away individual thought and yet again ridicules those who think. Or even worse, it pretends that the thoughtful are considered but provides no infrastructure to enable them to put their vision into practice.
My factory is soulless, spiritless, emotionally bereft, intellectually incompetent.
It is dehumanising me……. if I let it.
So what does this all mean?
Work is an exceptionally important part of our lives. We spend a considerable amount of time, and possibly even more energy and thought on our work. Why the hell should people settle for a dehumanised existence that saps them as soon as they walk into the working environment? A work place is frequently full of people. They are places that should be about people, about humanity, about humane-ness.
We lost our mining industry some decades ago. I think that is a job that I couldn’t bear to have done but the camaraderie, the collegiate mentality, the community that sprang from such devastatingly difficult places to work shows that at the heart of even the most trying jobs, there is humanity. Why did the miner’s strike last so long? Because that woman and her cronies had not accounted for their inability to dehumanise the situation. In the depths of despair, they would not let work dehumanise them, though some sadly succumbed.
Work is important but so is the rest of life. Balance is important and we are not giving our children and young people balance. They look around and see the dehumanisation of work, exacerbated in the type of economic climate in which we now live. The functionality of exams and processes of employment and working is a straight jacket that our young people are slowly slipping into, often devoid of the skills and values of real living.
I mentioned Orwell’s dystopia earlier. To misquote a pretty dire film “You don’t believe in dystopia my dear….. believe me, you’re in one!”
And what of the commonalities? What do the teachers, those pupils, my cousin’s daughter, my brother, my friend and I all have in common?
Pretty obvious really – we all work in education.
We all contribute to the development of young people. We all work in the most human being orientated place of work feasible. We work in an environment that helps people to learn and grow and “prepares them for life”. Some of us like to think we are helping them to enjoy their childhood too but the essential issue is that we are in the people industry in a way that no other job is. Others such as the health service work on people, keep people alive, but it is the educationalists who have the wonderful challenge of shaping our future.
And dear Lord above, are we letting them down?
How can we break the dehumanisation of the workforce if we are constantly showing the next working generation the dehumanisation of people through the very system that is supposed to nurture and humanise them? How can we sit by and watch disillusioned, dehumanised teachers teach our restricted, dehumanised pupils with a contrived, narrow and dehumanised education system?
How can we revolutionise ways of the (w)bankers and the politicians if we are controlling and dehumanising the next generation? How can we make work better places if we do not give our young people the opportunity to be fulfilled as youngsters?
We need to consider this very carefully. The revolution that is being whispered about in Middle England needs to think. And think now!
It doesn’t start with toppling a few errant politicians because they bought a wooden spoon too many for their second home. As much as electoral reform would be welcomed, our future does not depend on this and this alone. It doesn’t start with making the much needed workforce reform to ensure rights of pay and working conditions are considered, though this too is also extremely important.
The dehumanisation of work will only come about if our young people are educated in a manner that considers the whole of the child, the entirety of the young person, the needs of the individual and the collective. Unless we look at the social, spiritual, emotional needs of these young people, unless we drive their passions and nurture their ability to empathise, unless we give them the intellectual and creative and physical stimulation they deserve, unless we allow them to look up and see and think and feel, we will perpetuate this dehumanisation, this lack of consideration, this thoughtlessness, this contempt.
Unless we act now, there will be more disillusioned teachers in the next batch they churn out from colleges around the country. Unless we consider now, we will have more bosses, like those responsible for my brother, my friend and I, that don’t give a damn about the human factor. Unless we think now, we leave a legacy of dehumanisation in work for our children, their children and further generations to come.
Reading the paper yesterday, I sadly trawled through an account of some burned out, helpless, frazzled young teachers who have been overburdened by the doctrine or rather indoctrination that we call our education system. Set impossible targets, given a curriculum that they have to teach without any additional flair or innovation from their alleged educated selves, teaching according to attainment graphs and statistics rather than considering the individual needs of the young people in front of them – they’ve lost the plot! According to the writer of this piece, a teacher himself, they probably lost the plot in December, exhausted by the lengthy term, never really regaining their equilibrium and purpose. Sapped, lost, forlorn.
Some people don’t appear to believe there is any correlation between this sorry situation and the pupil attainment. Some people don’t seem to get it that if the teachers are disillusioned and bored with what they are offering to the children, it is expecting a hell of a lot from the young people themselves to suddenly be inspired.
Some people have not looked at the neurological evidence about social interaction and mirrored behaviour – boredom breeds more boredom and multiplies plenty fold.
There are many ways of improving the educational experience for our young people. Giving them an exciting, innovative curriculum is one way. Getting them out of the classroom and experiencing the world around them is another. Giving them a truly broad and balanced curriculum that reflects their entire needs and not just the straight jacket of intellectual standards is yet another, and supporting the emotional wellbeing of their carers, their teachers is another.
One solution won’t work. Holistic change, supporting all within an institution, nurturing and guiding, caring and feeling, educating and giving opportunities to extend learning are all part and parcel of organisational change, and this cannot be restricted to the pupils alone.
What we have done is forget that these are real people. They have real lives, real needs, real desires and passions. Try being passionate about anything when your work schedule and expectations are unrealistic, unachievable and unworthy!
I am not saying that attainment is unworthy. Learning to read, to write, to become numerate is vastly important. But there is more! There is a hell of a lot more, and to leave teachers in situations such as these is abhorrent.
By giving them unrealistic “floor” targets, by categorising the children as though they were a piece of statistical data that they have to manipulate, by constraining their innovation and curbing their imagination, we have made these teachers androids.
The irony is that there are actually some people who enter into education for genuine vocational reasons. They want to make a difference but the current system negates any possibility of doing just that. The TDA advertising slogan “Use Your Head – Teach” would be laughable if it wasn’t so bloody tragic!
And that is just the teachers.
My mother has just been telling me about my cousin’s child who is currently doing her GCSEs. Prior to her exams, she started getting unusual headaches, tremblings, fainting fits and general obvious signs of angst. The school, fearful for the wellbeing of this straight A student, asked her parents to take her to the doctor. Checked out for signs of diabetes, eating disorders etc, she was declared physically fit but clearly reacting emotionally, mentally to the strain of examination and expectation.
Such is her ailment, such is she a precious being to their league table, the school is bending over backwards to support her needs. They have graciously decided that she requires an individual room and a personalised invigilator in order to take her exams.
Ironically, she is not alone.
You hear the occasional horror story of the child led to suicide due to the pressures of the exams. You hear the more frequent stories of self-harm. You can see the harried look on many sixteen year olds faces as they feel the needs of the world, their world, on their shoulders. They don’t want to let their school down. It has been their home for five years. It is important to them, and that is before they begin to worry about themselves, their parents, their teachers, their futures.
We have dehumanised these children, for that is what they are, and have forgotten in the league table mentality that we are not talking about a 0.535% or 2.75% of a league table point but a real person; a real living thing.
The eighteen year olds are no better. The additional two years has not made them more realistic about the burdens of examinations. They have narrowed their education to such an extent that it is wholly restricted to the three or four subjects that they are taking for formal examination. Choose French, English and History and you can forget about the joys of walking along Chesil Beach, understanding and appreciating the magnificence of this incredible geological formation. You can forget about the love of reading a book because you damn well want to. Rather, you have to confine literature to the course books, inwardly digesting every line, quoting and contextualising, analysing and interpreting. You may be studying 1984 but there’s no time to read around at Blair’s other books, unless it will make a difference to the paper. And if you are studying Orwellian theory and dystopias in general, there’s no point in having time off to watch an unrelated, peripheral film. You haven’t got either time or energy for such distractions.
You might, just might learn a musical instrument if you are lucky, if your parents are well off and see the benefit, but you’re probably only doing this to single you out on the UCCA form.
Dehumanisation! Work, work, and more work. That is all.
What an indictment! What is this teaching our children?
But it doesn’t stop there.
I have just come back from spending a few hours with my brother; my bright, funny, clever, thoughtful brother who has always bucked the trend and done things his very own, unusual way.
As a toddler, he developed a debilitating disease that he still suffers from today. Somewhat mummy coddled by parents and elder siblings alike, he ‘enjoyed’ his status as “the little one”. One could certainly argue that he abused this role and still does; having us all running around after him in good times and bad.
We lovingly oblige and he rewards us with untold gratitude.
He was a born actor, a great orator, an intellect with a huge amount of wit. To this day, he charms people, plays the networking game to perfection.
Struggling in an education establishment where previous siblings had made their mark and suffering from absurd comparisons, he underachieved academically. With little or no qualifications he went to a local college, only to be embroiled in Student Union politics to the detriment of his own learning. I was going to explain his every step to his current position but do not want to risk his anonymity. Needless to say, he employed his over exaggerated gift of the gab and took a meritocratic rise without the need for the qualifications that would label and categorise his capability.
He then went to work as the head of a national organisation, saving the company from oblivion, providing financial and strategic lead that was admired by all concerned within and beyond the company. He had vision, based on an egalitarian ideology that one could loosely relate to socialism!
All sounds good. He cared, he cares. He thinks and wants to make a difference, just like the aforementioned teachers who are washed out and wasted.
Only my brother is washed out and wasted too.
He got angry with someone at work because they weren’t as competent as they should be, and did not live up to his expectations. He was asked to take some gardening leave, fully paid until the matter was sorted. Only the company found other things to worry about. Nine months later, there is no solution. He has neither been fired nor reinstated. He is living in a land called Inertia in the continent of Limbo.
And guess what? He is a diagnosed depressive.
He cannot cope.
Now of course, one could argue that in this particular case, he has brought some of the sorry situation upon himself. But that is somewhat immaterial. Guilty or not, the company has forgotten that he is a human being, with relationships and feelings and a life. He cannot function at present because he is stymied. He cannot apply for other jobs and has been sapped of energy by the indecisiveness and inability of his employer’s to bring some sort of conclusion to this issue.
Being selfish, not only has the company forgotten that my brother is a human being, but they have detached themselves from the idea that this human has connections with others and that what they do to this man is then transferred to those who are caring for him with his many needs.
Obviously, companies employing people cannot be responsible for an entire extended family of people but they lose sight of the humanism involved.
I have a friend who was treated unfairly beyond belief in a contemptible manner that would probably stand in a court of law in his favour, should litigation ever be considered. Steadfastly, innovatively, determinedly shaping a place of work where clients and employees alike would benefit from the insight and forethought that my friend had to offer. Vision? Oh yes, there was plenty of vision and a damn good one at that. People? Yes, they were catered for in a wholehearted holistic way. The organisation had evolved and developed despite external constraints that attacked and belittled, always considering the needs of every human being who lived, worked and was associated with the place. Environment? Thoughtful, considered, needs led that once more accounted for individuals and their requirements.
Such organisations do not make themselves. They grow under great leadership and skilful management and they cannot be disentangled and eradicated in a hurry. Recent history is showing this to be the case.
My friend worked studiously, vociferously, selflessly, with an extreme focus on the needs of the people involved. He gave abundantly more than was necessary in the two decades and more that he lived at this place, and I choose the word “lived” quite deliberately.
And how did his employer thank him? They bombarded him with impossible targets that he managed to achieve without diluting his true purpose and ideology. They robbed him of the opportunity to complete the task in hand, ridiculing his methodology and placing unnecessary and deliberately contemptuous obstacles in his way. They plotted and schemed to be rid of this maverick that wouldn’t play their tired and sorry little game.
They tried to dehumanise both my friend and his organisation.
There is an important differentiation here. I did not state that they dehumanised my friend. They tried, and they would have succeeded had it not been for his strength and resilience in ensuring the bastards wouldn’t finish him off completely. They tried to dehumanise the situation by replacing him with a zombie devoid of thought who didn’t “do” vision, and whose methodology was so diametrically opposed to my friends that again, it would be laughable if it wasn’t so utterly despicable. His clients were resistant to change, even though the Zombie’s ways were supposed to be transferrable to any organisation; tried, tested and signed off with a big congratulory tick. They were resistant to change because my friend had showered them with the knowledge, skills and values of humanism that will not be eradicated if understood, appreciated and enacted. And love. Yes, they were loved.
What they did do was ignore that there are human beings involved, or in this case, they were probably very sure that there was a human being involved but they didn’t give a toss about him. But just as with my brother, they didn’t consider the other human beings involved; the clients, the employees, the family, the friends who were all deeply affected by this travesty.
And then there is me.
I work in a factory. I try my best to humanise the system but it is too big for me to take on. It is too flawed and corrupt. It is too resilient to change, unless that change is sprung upon them from way above in No Man’s Land.
My factory has produced improvements. It has refined its product and automated its employees. It has taken away individual thought and yet again ridicules those who think. Or even worse, it pretends that the thoughtful are considered but provides no infrastructure to enable them to put their vision into practice.
My factory is soulless, spiritless, emotionally bereft, intellectually incompetent.
It is dehumanising me……. if I let it.
So what does this all mean?
Work is an exceptionally important part of our lives. We spend a considerable amount of time, and possibly even more energy and thought on our work. Why the hell should people settle for a dehumanised existence that saps them as soon as they walk into the working environment? A work place is frequently full of people. They are places that should be about people, about humanity, about humane-ness.
We lost our mining industry some decades ago. I think that is a job that I couldn’t bear to have done but the camaraderie, the collegiate mentality, the community that sprang from such devastatingly difficult places to work shows that at the heart of even the most trying jobs, there is humanity. Why did the miner’s strike last so long? Because that woman and her cronies had not accounted for their inability to dehumanise the situation. In the depths of despair, they would not let work dehumanise them, though some sadly succumbed.
Work is important but so is the rest of life. Balance is important and we are not giving our children and young people balance. They look around and see the dehumanisation of work, exacerbated in the type of economic climate in which we now live. The functionality of exams and processes of employment and working is a straight jacket that our young people are slowly slipping into, often devoid of the skills and values of real living.
I mentioned Orwell’s dystopia earlier. To misquote a pretty dire film “You don’t believe in dystopia my dear….. believe me, you’re in one!”
And what of the commonalities? What do the teachers, those pupils, my cousin’s daughter, my brother, my friend and I all have in common?
Pretty obvious really – we all work in education.
We all contribute to the development of young people. We all work in the most human being orientated place of work feasible. We work in an environment that helps people to learn and grow and “prepares them for life”. Some of us like to think we are helping them to enjoy their childhood too but the essential issue is that we are in the people industry in a way that no other job is. Others such as the health service work on people, keep people alive, but it is the educationalists who have the wonderful challenge of shaping our future.
And dear Lord above, are we letting them down?
How can we break the dehumanisation of the workforce if we are constantly showing the next working generation the dehumanisation of people through the very system that is supposed to nurture and humanise them? How can we sit by and watch disillusioned, dehumanised teachers teach our restricted, dehumanised pupils with a contrived, narrow and dehumanised education system?
How can we revolutionise ways of the (w)bankers and the politicians if we are controlling and dehumanising the next generation? How can we make work better places if we do not give our young people the opportunity to be fulfilled as youngsters?
We need to consider this very carefully. The revolution that is being whispered about in Middle England needs to think. And think now!
It doesn’t start with toppling a few errant politicians because they bought a wooden spoon too many for their second home. As much as electoral reform would be welcomed, our future does not depend on this and this alone. It doesn’t start with making the much needed workforce reform to ensure rights of pay and working conditions are considered, though this too is also extremely important.
The dehumanisation of work will only come about if our young people are educated in a manner that considers the whole of the child, the entirety of the young person, the needs of the individual and the collective. Unless we look at the social, spiritual, emotional needs of these young people, unless we drive their passions and nurture their ability to empathise, unless we give them the intellectual and creative and physical stimulation they deserve, unless we allow them to look up and see and think and feel, we will perpetuate this dehumanisation, this lack of consideration, this thoughtlessness, this contempt.
Unless we act now, there will be more disillusioned teachers in the next batch they churn out from colleges around the country. Unless we consider now, we will have more bosses, like those responsible for my brother, my friend and I, that don’t give a damn about the human factor. Unless we think now, we leave a legacy of dehumanisation in work for our children, their children and further generations to come.
Wednesday, 20 May 2009
Passion
On my way to work this morning, I listened to a podcast that I had downloaded some time ago but never got around to actually listening to. I’m rather good at that.
Currently, I have about eighty podcasts that I have on a series loop download and yet I never allow enough time to sit down, stick my headphones on and listen to these great and sometimes inspiring pieces of broadcasting.
There are plenty of people out there who constantly gripe about the BBC and its media services. Yet simultaneously, the BBC iPlayer service has been reported as having something 1.5 billion downloads for 2008 and that is before you get onto the brilliant podcasts that are available for regular radio enthusiasts who cannot get to listen to their favourite programmes at the time when they are initially broadcast, and I am not sure it includes all the listen again services on the BBC website either.
In fact, I am beginning to think that I am rather passionate about the BBC, and that statement in itself contains a small error.
Does passion need a pre-fixed descriptive word; an emphasising word? Can you be ‘somewhat’ or ‘very’ or ‘mildly’ passionate? Isn’t passion a stand alone word that conveys its entire meaning in its seven simple letters?
The podcast that I was listening to was a Soapbox by David Mitchell – he of “Peep Show” and “Mitchell and Webb” fame.
I have to admit that I had somewhat dismissed this man as “the posh one” who had nothing really to say to me as his life and upbringing clearly had no resonance with my own. However, in recent months I have been reading his choice and amusing articles in the Observer on a regular basis. He has an acute wit and is an extremely good observational writer, and his short three to five minute podcasts are in a similar vein.
This one was title “Passionate”.
He started by standing in front of a still of a group of professionals stating how small he felt in comparison with these carefully chosen, aesthetically pleasing and gloriously PC bunch with the token woman and Asian man amongst them. He said that these people were passionate! What were they passionate about? Tax – but not any tax! No, they were passionate about tax optimisation.
He went on to say that his local council were “passionate about providing customer focused services for residents” and he imagined a scenario whereby they were at first keen about services, then very excited about customer led services and are now in an orgasmic shriek about their “better customer focused services”.
He continued to say that an upholstery firm were “passionate about sofas….. and we hope you will be too”. But as David points out, he isn’t passionate about sofas and he is never likely to be passionate about sofas because he cannot eradicate that “damnable sense of perspective”. He is interested as to why these people are passionate about sofas and not about quality art or social injustice or fine wine and food.
He asks a simple question. If these people are passionate about these things, then what must it be like to have sex with them? Are they as passionate with their lovers or have they exhausted all their passion on their professional passion?
One quote came from an organisation that was “passionate about helping small businesses and that is an understatement”.
“An understatement?” retorts David, “what would be an accurate statement if passion is too meagre a word?”
He concludes with a statement from John Hopkins University Student’s Union where apparently the incumbents are “passionate about everything”.
“Blimey” he says, “they must be exhausted!”
And indeed they must.
Can you actually sustain a passion for everything or is it rather like the happiness issue whereby constant happiness can neither be sustained or realistic nor even measured and understood if you do not know and experience the opposite at least some of the time.
A natural high is an excellent state of being but stuck on a natural high for a constant period of time is hardly a way to really appreciate life in any form or reality. Passion is something that everyone should have in their lives but you cannot live 24/7 consumed by your passion, in your passion, ignoring every other mundanety of life.
It simply doesn’t work like that.
Constant passion like constant happiness negates is very existence and diminishes its grandeur.
But there is something else that can diminish passion, and I think this is clearly something that Mitchell was trying to convey.
If we overuse the word in contexts that do not justify the magnitude of the word, then aren’t we doing it a disservice?
Can you truly be passionate about sofas? Can that passion be comparable to the passion of seeing a newborn enter the world, or the passion of sexual arousal that is so overwhelming that words cannot truly be used to express its intensity?
Some might argue that this is perfectly plausible, for each person’s passion is their own individual passion, and to some extent to cannot argue with that.
For me though, it has made me think about how we should use the word ‘passion’, how I should use the word ‘passion’ for some of the wonderful things in my life are exciting and wonderful and incredible and enjoyable but are they all passions?
Off to the dictionary and it is clear that this word has so many meanings and interpretations that one could also argue there is no purpose in trying to break it down into one single definition, but the word itself is so full of strength and vibrancy that I fear we do overuse it in a similar way to its sister word of “love”.
The dictionary says that passion is, and I quote, a powerful emotion, boundless enthusiasm, a deep and overwhelming emotion, something that is desired intensely, an irrational or irresistible motive for a belief or action, ardent affection, etcetera.
But is passion an emotion or is it an overwhelming feeling that comes from a powerful emotion? Or has it become a word that cannot be clearly defined due to its overuse and miscomprehension?
What is passion or a passion? What is passionate or being passionate compared with loving or adoring or liking or getting excited or energised by…?”
What am I and others passionate about? Can passion and passions fluctuate in the way that other preferences alter over time? Can you be passionate in a negative form, passionately hating something or should ‘passion’ in this context be replaced with a word such as ‘avidly’?
I don’t write this in the hope that I or others are going to come up with a definitive answer. I am merely writing to convey and think about the word and its uses. But more and more, I return to the idea that passion is about a personal feeling; a strength of feeling that drives and sustains you, your beliefs and your actions. Passion is an intensity that is on a higher plane that a simple liking or an alternative abhorrence to some stimulus or another.
Passion is about you, about me, about an individual’s response.
And of course it is about much more. It links to your soul, your purpose. It feeds and is fed from adrenalin.
Passion is something that every person should have in their lives to give meaning to the things they do, the people they choose to do them with, the surroundings they either have to or choose to live within.
Life without passion, without thought and feeling, without fire and vibrancy would be dull, and for me, pretty meaningless.
So, I now have to consider what my passions are.
And at first glance, they seem extensive. Is this because I have done the same thing as David Mitchell suggests other people have done, by placing the word ‘passion’ against everything I feel strongly about or that I like more than ‘a lot’? Or is it because I am a fortunate person who can find passion in an abundance of things because I am open enough to feel?
I cannot write about all of my passions because as I have been thinking about this writing, more of the things that I deem to be my passions keep springing to life, and I am now consumed with the thought that some of my passions are mere likings.
So I am starting a list that is neither complete nor static. Writing this piece tomorrow, I may have come up with different passions, not because I am so fickle as to change my passions overnight, but because through different circumstances and different impetus one specific passion may be more prevalent on that day.
To be preoccupied with passion can be exhausting and I do not want to be debilitated by my passions. I want to positively embrace them and experience the passion in its truest form. A constant and perpetual arousal is simply not sustainable, nor should it be.
And so to start the list of passions……
I thought I was passionate once about football. I’m not. I love my football. I have affection and fondness and loyalty for my football team, but I am not passionate about it. The pleasure that I get from my ongoing support to a ludicrous team is not all consuming. It does not overtake or interrupt my life.
My brother is passionate about football. He really is. It’s not just a hobby or some interesting way of spending a few hours. It is indeed his passion. So maybe you can be passionate about sofas after all?
I’m passionate about learning. I am passionate about the fact that every person should be open to and have the opportunities for continued learning throughout their lives. They should be riddled with the bug to look around and read and consider and think and find out and form opinions and views and values. They should be taught to see and hear and taste new experiences and indentify the glorious learning that this world has to offer. They should be able to feel passion in the experiences they have, learning to connect spiritually to the incredible beauty and earnest simplicity of the natural world.
I am passionate about books and the internet as a source of learning and enjoyment in that learning.
One of my proudest moments as a parent was walking up the stairs one night to check that my child had gone to sleep, only to find a two year old lying fast asleep in bed with an open book covering his face and a further thirty or so scattered around his bed. My passion had clearly been passed on – a two year old, unable to read yet already experiencing and beginning his intrepid steps to what I hope is a lifelong passion for the written word.
I am passionate about how much more I want to read, both fiction and non fiction, making up for the sparser times in my life when reading has fluctuated and vied for time with competing priorities.
I am passionate about people, especially the important people in my own life. I am passionate about empathising, understanding and responding to their needs, their drive, their passions, as in understanding and appreciating the things that overwhelm and enamour then is mutually beneficial. I am passionate about love and care and thoughtfulness and I feel passionately that I have plenty to give as well as receive.
I am passionate about people that I don’t even know, to some extent, as my passion moves me to hope that those without love and warmth and understanding will be fortunate enough one day to really understand and experience the joy of being passionate about humankind. Please note that this passion of the unknown bod doesn’t extend to fascists and thoughtless idiots and those that should know better!
I’m passionate about music; most kinds of music come to think of it. Maybe I am not discerning enough but I adore listening to and playing music, intrigued and invigorated by an individual’s ability to compose and create and convey meaning through the songs they have written or the instruments that they play. It is an immense joy to feel the warmth and fulfilment that a single composition can have. I love disappearing into the depths of my soul as I am carried away by the simplest or the most complex heart wrenching or heart warming melodies, where other people’s passions are so apparent. Yes, other people’s passions really inspire and feed my own passions. I am passionate about other people having passions and how I use their passions in my own passions!
I’m passionate about intimacy. I am passionate about the ultimate bliss that sexual expression and emotional togetherness can bring. How wonderful it is that something as instinctual as making love can be a passion and also be passionate, sending two people into a state of Satori that is immeasurable in its complexity and indescribable in its simplicity.
And I am now passionate about writing, not always for the content of the writing itself but for the opportunities it affords me to sit for a few hours, reflecting and meditating, conveying and expressing, stimulating and encouraging the thoughts that have laid dormant throughout the mundane features of the daily chores.
Passion needs definition. Passion needs thought. Passion needs to be a part of people’s lives as much as food and warmth and clothing and love.
A world without passion is not a world that I want to be part of, and I truly hope that everyone can find something to be passionate about, even if it is sofas!
Currently, I have about eighty podcasts that I have on a series loop download and yet I never allow enough time to sit down, stick my headphones on and listen to these great and sometimes inspiring pieces of broadcasting.
There are plenty of people out there who constantly gripe about the BBC and its media services. Yet simultaneously, the BBC iPlayer service has been reported as having something 1.5 billion downloads for 2008 and that is before you get onto the brilliant podcasts that are available for regular radio enthusiasts who cannot get to listen to their favourite programmes at the time when they are initially broadcast, and I am not sure it includes all the listen again services on the BBC website either.
In fact, I am beginning to think that I am rather passionate about the BBC, and that statement in itself contains a small error.
Does passion need a pre-fixed descriptive word; an emphasising word? Can you be ‘somewhat’ or ‘very’ or ‘mildly’ passionate? Isn’t passion a stand alone word that conveys its entire meaning in its seven simple letters?
The podcast that I was listening to was a Soapbox by David Mitchell – he of “Peep Show” and “Mitchell and Webb” fame.
I have to admit that I had somewhat dismissed this man as “the posh one” who had nothing really to say to me as his life and upbringing clearly had no resonance with my own. However, in recent months I have been reading his choice and amusing articles in the Observer on a regular basis. He has an acute wit and is an extremely good observational writer, and his short three to five minute podcasts are in a similar vein.
This one was title “Passionate”.
He started by standing in front of a still of a group of professionals stating how small he felt in comparison with these carefully chosen, aesthetically pleasing and gloriously PC bunch with the token woman and Asian man amongst them. He said that these people were passionate! What were they passionate about? Tax – but not any tax! No, they were passionate about tax optimisation.
He went on to say that his local council were “passionate about providing customer focused services for residents” and he imagined a scenario whereby they were at first keen about services, then very excited about customer led services and are now in an orgasmic shriek about their “better customer focused services”.
He continued to say that an upholstery firm were “passionate about sofas….. and we hope you will be too”. But as David points out, he isn’t passionate about sofas and he is never likely to be passionate about sofas because he cannot eradicate that “damnable sense of perspective”. He is interested as to why these people are passionate about sofas and not about quality art or social injustice or fine wine and food.
He asks a simple question. If these people are passionate about these things, then what must it be like to have sex with them? Are they as passionate with their lovers or have they exhausted all their passion on their professional passion?
One quote came from an organisation that was “passionate about helping small businesses and that is an understatement”.
“An understatement?” retorts David, “what would be an accurate statement if passion is too meagre a word?”
He concludes with a statement from John Hopkins University Student’s Union where apparently the incumbents are “passionate about everything”.
“Blimey” he says, “they must be exhausted!”
And indeed they must.
Can you actually sustain a passion for everything or is it rather like the happiness issue whereby constant happiness can neither be sustained or realistic nor even measured and understood if you do not know and experience the opposite at least some of the time.
A natural high is an excellent state of being but stuck on a natural high for a constant period of time is hardly a way to really appreciate life in any form or reality. Passion is something that everyone should have in their lives but you cannot live 24/7 consumed by your passion, in your passion, ignoring every other mundanety of life.
It simply doesn’t work like that.
Constant passion like constant happiness negates is very existence and diminishes its grandeur.
But there is something else that can diminish passion, and I think this is clearly something that Mitchell was trying to convey.
If we overuse the word in contexts that do not justify the magnitude of the word, then aren’t we doing it a disservice?
Can you truly be passionate about sofas? Can that passion be comparable to the passion of seeing a newborn enter the world, or the passion of sexual arousal that is so overwhelming that words cannot truly be used to express its intensity?
Some might argue that this is perfectly plausible, for each person’s passion is their own individual passion, and to some extent to cannot argue with that.
For me though, it has made me think about how we should use the word ‘passion’, how I should use the word ‘passion’ for some of the wonderful things in my life are exciting and wonderful and incredible and enjoyable but are they all passions?
Off to the dictionary and it is clear that this word has so many meanings and interpretations that one could also argue there is no purpose in trying to break it down into one single definition, but the word itself is so full of strength and vibrancy that I fear we do overuse it in a similar way to its sister word of “love”.
The dictionary says that passion is, and I quote, a powerful emotion, boundless enthusiasm, a deep and overwhelming emotion, something that is desired intensely, an irrational or irresistible motive for a belief or action, ardent affection, etcetera.
But is passion an emotion or is it an overwhelming feeling that comes from a powerful emotion? Or has it become a word that cannot be clearly defined due to its overuse and miscomprehension?
What is passion or a passion? What is passionate or being passionate compared with loving or adoring or liking or getting excited or energised by…?”
What am I and others passionate about? Can passion and passions fluctuate in the way that other preferences alter over time? Can you be passionate in a negative form, passionately hating something or should ‘passion’ in this context be replaced with a word such as ‘avidly’?
I don’t write this in the hope that I or others are going to come up with a definitive answer. I am merely writing to convey and think about the word and its uses. But more and more, I return to the idea that passion is about a personal feeling; a strength of feeling that drives and sustains you, your beliefs and your actions. Passion is an intensity that is on a higher plane that a simple liking or an alternative abhorrence to some stimulus or another.
Passion is about you, about me, about an individual’s response.
And of course it is about much more. It links to your soul, your purpose. It feeds and is fed from adrenalin.
Passion is something that every person should have in their lives to give meaning to the things they do, the people they choose to do them with, the surroundings they either have to or choose to live within.
Life without passion, without thought and feeling, without fire and vibrancy would be dull, and for me, pretty meaningless.
So, I now have to consider what my passions are.
And at first glance, they seem extensive. Is this because I have done the same thing as David Mitchell suggests other people have done, by placing the word ‘passion’ against everything I feel strongly about or that I like more than ‘a lot’? Or is it because I am a fortunate person who can find passion in an abundance of things because I am open enough to feel?
I cannot write about all of my passions because as I have been thinking about this writing, more of the things that I deem to be my passions keep springing to life, and I am now consumed with the thought that some of my passions are mere likings.
So I am starting a list that is neither complete nor static. Writing this piece tomorrow, I may have come up with different passions, not because I am so fickle as to change my passions overnight, but because through different circumstances and different impetus one specific passion may be more prevalent on that day.
To be preoccupied with passion can be exhausting and I do not want to be debilitated by my passions. I want to positively embrace them and experience the passion in its truest form. A constant and perpetual arousal is simply not sustainable, nor should it be.
And so to start the list of passions……
I thought I was passionate once about football. I’m not. I love my football. I have affection and fondness and loyalty for my football team, but I am not passionate about it. The pleasure that I get from my ongoing support to a ludicrous team is not all consuming. It does not overtake or interrupt my life.
My brother is passionate about football. He really is. It’s not just a hobby or some interesting way of spending a few hours. It is indeed his passion. So maybe you can be passionate about sofas after all?
I’m passionate about learning. I am passionate about the fact that every person should be open to and have the opportunities for continued learning throughout their lives. They should be riddled with the bug to look around and read and consider and think and find out and form opinions and views and values. They should be taught to see and hear and taste new experiences and indentify the glorious learning that this world has to offer. They should be able to feel passion in the experiences they have, learning to connect spiritually to the incredible beauty and earnest simplicity of the natural world.
I am passionate about books and the internet as a source of learning and enjoyment in that learning.
One of my proudest moments as a parent was walking up the stairs one night to check that my child had gone to sleep, only to find a two year old lying fast asleep in bed with an open book covering his face and a further thirty or so scattered around his bed. My passion had clearly been passed on – a two year old, unable to read yet already experiencing and beginning his intrepid steps to what I hope is a lifelong passion for the written word.
I am passionate about how much more I want to read, both fiction and non fiction, making up for the sparser times in my life when reading has fluctuated and vied for time with competing priorities.
I am passionate about people, especially the important people in my own life. I am passionate about empathising, understanding and responding to their needs, their drive, their passions, as in understanding and appreciating the things that overwhelm and enamour then is mutually beneficial. I am passionate about love and care and thoughtfulness and I feel passionately that I have plenty to give as well as receive.
I am passionate about people that I don’t even know, to some extent, as my passion moves me to hope that those without love and warmth and understanding will be fortunate enough one day to really understand and experience the joy of being passionate about humankind. Please note that this passion of the unknown bod doesn’t extend to fascists and thoughtless idiots and those that should know better!
I’m passionate about music; most kinds of music come to think of it. Maybe I am not discerning enough but I adore listening to and playing music, intrigued and invigorated by an individual’s ability to compose and create and convey meaning through the songs they have written or the instruments that they play. It is an immense joy to feel the warmth and fulfilment that a single composition can have. I love disappearing into the depths of my soul as I am carried away by the simplest or the most complex heart wrenching or heart warming melodies, where other people’s passions are so apparent. Yes, other people’s passions really inspire and feed my own passions. I am passionate about other people having passions and how I use their passions in my own passions!
I’m passionate about intimacy. I am passionate about the ultimate bliss that sexual expression and emotional togetherness can bring. How wonderful it is that something as instinctual as making love can be a passion and also be passionate, sending two people into a state of Satori that is immeasurable in its complexity and indescribable in its simplicity.
And I am now passionate about writing, not always for the content of the writing itself but for the opportunities it affords me to sit for a few hours, reflecting and meditating, conveying and expressing, stimulating and encouraging the thoughts that have laid dormant throughout the mundane features of the daily chores.
Passion needs definition. Passion needs thought. Passion needs to be a part of people’s lives as much as food and warmth and clothing and love.
A world without passion is not a world that I want to be part of, and I truly hope that everyone can find something to be passionate about, even if it is sofas!
Thursday, 30 April 2009
Rose and his Wise Men
Sir Jim Rose announced his recommendations for the review of the Primary Curriculum today. Asked to summarise his recommendations, he said that the primary curriculum was reliant on “Good parenting, good teaching, good curriculum”.
This is a decent start and to some extents is not questionable, and one could argue that it is rather difficult to summarise the purpose of primary education in one ‘off the cuff’ strap line. However, for me there is one very important word missing in this simplistic summary. The missing word is ‘learning’.
As a teacher, I could be merrily ‘teaching’ in what I consider to be a meaningful and engaging way. I could be enthusing about my subject. I could even be inspiring the odd one or two pupils in my class who are engaged in the subject matter, but unless they are ‘learning’ anything, then I may as well be sitting on my bottom or twiddling my thumbs.
Unless the pupils are inspired to want more, to think about how they can extend their own learning from what I am teaching, then I am not doing my job. Unless there are potential behavioural or attitudinal changes that have transpired from the core values that I have been aiming to instil, then a ‘happy and active’ lesson is worthless.
The key is in the learning.
There is no point in bombarding young people with facts if they have no idea how to transfer that knowledge into an understanding of themselves, others, their world and the world beyond their immediate experience. There is no point in giving them facts if they do not want or know how to do anything with them. Neither is there any purpose in getting them active and engaged in an energetic and creative lesson if there is no learning taking place.
As ever, it is all about balance.
Nobody is saying that we need to eradicate all factual learning – far from it. Nobody is saying that there are not times when some key facts and processes need to be ‘taught’ but having an emphasis on learning has got to be the crucial component, and one has to ask, why the hell we are even commenting on such a concept.
Surely to goodness, it is the ‘learning’ that is the entitlement of every young person, and for that matter, the entitlement of any person of any age who wants to expand their vision, understanding, attitudes and values.
Sir Jim Rose’s quote on the radio was incomplete. Looking at the BBC website, there is, I hope, a more accurate reflection of his intentions.
“The touchstone of an excellent curriculum is that it instils in children a love of learning for its own sake.
From what I have seen on my visits, the best schools demonstrate that these priorities - literacy, numeracy, ICT and personal development - are crucial for giving children their entitlement to a broad and balanced education."
One could quite understandably turn around and say to Sir Jim that if he had always felt this way, then why the hell has he been so quiet over the last few years when schools have been mindlessly charging forth with a standards led agenda which almost disregards learning and wholly concentrates on what is being taught, i.e. the straightjacket of the National Curriculum and Strategies, with their tedious and disputable (or should that be despicable) pedagogy?
One could understandably say to Sir Jim that if he thought that the curriculum was “too fat” then why did he not notice this despite the fact that he has been a key player in educational strategy since his heady days as the co-author of the “Three Wise Men” report?
One could understandably ask whether Sir Jim has had a Damascus experience upon receiving a letter of instruction from Ballsup himself inviting him to review the primary curriculum (incidentally, simultaneously with another Wise Man deciding to take the bull by the horns and provide an extremely intensive and thorough review of the very same subject) whereby he suddenly realised that some of the recommendations from the aforementioned 1992 report had been misconstrued?
And at this point (oh dear, failed my Level Four by using a conjunction at the beginning of a sentence), I would like to return to that Wise Men report. Sir Jim Rose, Sir Robin Alexander and the other one who shall not be named did not completely contradict some of the key elements of the Plowden report but that was not the conceived opinion at the time or indeed afterwards.
There was a clear focus on three elements of teaching (and learning); whole class, group and individual. They did not go along with their Education Minister at the time who was keen to introduce streaming to every class in the country. They acknowledged the “understandable aspiration” of individual teaching.
Let us consider some of the key pointers from the report with some comments from yours truly to illustrate a subsequent point. Please note, I could have chosen many other quotes but I wanted to comment on these in reference to where we are seventeen years on.
This was extremely detrimental to all professionals who realised the importance of developing a programme of teaching that was centred on the individual needs of the child. Child centred education was never supposed to be a free for all. Plowden didn’t suggest it was and neither did these three men. There were practices that were questionable but the question was in people passing off their poor teaching as a doctrine or pedagogy that had been recommended by Plowden. No such recommendation of losing sight of teaching and learning ever existed in the Plowden report.
However, the extent of subject knowledge required in order to teach the National Curriculum is more than can reasonably be expected of many class teachers.
Sir Jim, these are your words. The argument at the time was that there should be more specialist teachers, particularly in upper Key Stage Two but this thankfully didn’t happen. However, the inescapable “fattiness” of the curriculum remained and appears to have gone unnoticed by Sir Jim until this moment in time.
The organisational strategies of whole class teaching, group work and individual teaching need to be used more selectively and flexibly. The criterion of choice must be fitness for purpose.
And here is what the Plowden report says.
Whatever form of organisation is adopted, teachers will have to adapt their methods to individuals within a class or school. Only in this way can the needs of gifted and slow learning children and all those between the extremes be met…………..We recommend a combination of individual, group and class work and welcome the trend towards individual learning.
And the difference please? Both the Plowden and the Three Wise Men reports clearly advocated a variety in teaching methodology and allegedly did so in order to consider the needs of the individual child and their ‘learning’.
Effective teaching, regardless of the strategy used, requires the teacher to deploy a range of techniques. It is particularly important that the potential of explaining and questioning is realised.
And Plowden? 'Finding out' has proved to be better for children than 'being told'.
Something that Sir Jim is returning to in his current review.
Standards of education in primary schools will not rise until all teachers expect more of their pupils. Assumptions about pupils' abilities should be treated as working hypotheses to be updated in the light of new evidence.
Return again to the Plowden report, this is exactly what she said too. Now Rose is still pushing forward the notion that we must consider the individual child. But here is a key issue in this quote. Of course we need to understand where pupils are in their learning. The Wise Men report continued to say that the “working hypotheses” continues and fluctuates. Children learn at their own pace and need to be guided and extended but the hypotheses change according to the needs of the pupils. What this is saying, for me, is that pupils should be tracked and that the teaching should come from knowing where children are and where they could or should be. What this was interpreted as of course, is that there was a single significant form of “new evidence” being the outcomes of SATs.
The National Curriculum Orders should be regularly reviewed to ensure that they make appropriate demands on pupils of different ages and abilities and, individually and collectively, are manageable in terms of the time, resources and professional expertise available in schools.
Again, I have to ask the question, where has Rose been? Has he not seen the vast difference between this statement and what has actually happened? When has the National Curriculum with its thousands of statements ever been manageable? When have the National Curriculum orders been reviewed to consider the needs of the child other than instructed more didactic teaching through the tedium of the Literacy Hour and subsequent trendy literacy techniques? And that is before we even get onto the question as to whether the curriculum has ever been reviewed to see if it is relevant and interesting to our children – the last review being nine years ago, and even that was hardly giving any life shattering changes to content.
Well, apparently standards have been raised so the first level has been dealt with (question marks indeed) but where did this “wider concerns” disappear to? Placing no statutory requirements on the teaching of quality personal, social and health education certainly didn’t help, and because schools and teachers are now so used to core learning outcomes that are measurable immediately, it is going to take a huge shift in the understanding of what quality education is about to raise the importance of this key second level from the Wise Men report.
The reporting on the television today is indicitative of this very point. We have become obsessed with knowledge and cognitive development so that these are seen by the media, and therefore parents and carers, as the be-all of education. On reporting about the Rose Review, the emphasis was, to some extent correctly, on bringing the curriculum into the 21st century with an emphasis on computer technology. However, there was another key area about the health and wellbeing of pupils that, as ever, got slightly sidelined. Please see the quote below……
Parents and employers alike continue to place considerable emphasis on the development of values and socially responsible attitudes, and this is an area where the vast majority of primary schools are markedly successful.
Ask a parent what they want for their child, and the very first statement that comes out of their mouths is that they want their children to be happy. They, like many teachers around the country, have been indoctrinated into believing that the attainment of average or above levels in Literacy and Numeracy is the crucial and in some cases only purpose of education. Can no one see the hypocrisy and contradictions that have been taking place in our education system in recent memory? The Wise Men report clearly indicated that there are concerns about the wider concerns of demands for living in a modern world and this is rightly being addressed by putting wellbeing ‘up there’ with the bog boys. But again, in 1992, this phrase was interpreted as “preparing pupils for adult life”.
IT WAS A WRONG INTERPRETATION – borne out in the fact that Rose has clearly stated that the primary curriculum should have, as one of its six key components, an emphasis on health and wellbeing, and one’s interpretation of health should not be limited to the physical. This is clearly talking about the social, emotional, spiritual and physical development of the child and there is a huge urgency to ensure that we are not just preparing children for adult life but we are working with them, encouraging, guiding and supporting them in being children and all the “demands of life in modern society” that this entails.
The first, and longest established, focus of enquiry is the empirical study of how primary pupils develop and learn. To teach well, teachers must take account of how children learn. We do not, however, believe that it is possible to construct a model of primary education from evidence about children's development alone: the nature of the curriculum followed by the pupil and the range of teaching strategies employed by the teacher are also of critical importance. Teaching is not applied child development. It is a weakness of the child-centred tradition that it has sometimes tended to treat it as such and, consequently, to neglect the study of classroom practice.
There we have it – a simple paragraph that has shaped the way our education has evolved over the last seventeen years, totally forgetting that key underlined statement. This was the excuse that the Tories and the subsequent Tories in rouged clothing required, interpreted according to their political needs, ignoring the plight of needy children.
So why have I included some of these comments?
I think there are a few reasons.
Firstly, I suppose it is to show that interpretation is so significant. For decades we have allowed the layperson to dictate the content and philosophy of education. They have been allowed to interpret key reviews of primary and indeed other education according to their own political mantra. These reports have been manipulated in the way that any statistic can be. It is not the recommendations from the report that have formed policy. It is the interpretation thereof.
Secondly, I wanted to consider the cyclical nature of educational thinking, and that it isn’t really that cyclical at all. There will be people saying today that Rose is considering some namby pamby 1960s teaching methodologies. He has already been criticised for not emphasising subject teaching sufficiently despite his protestations to the contrary. The ideas in this review are not returning to an unfocused child centred education. Sadly, they are not as progressive as to even warrant the label of child focused education, but it is a start. He has emphasised quite strongly the needs of the individual and the fact that this need is not wholly a cognitive need. But he, like all of us, has to be very careful about how this entire report is interpreted by Ballsup and his colleagues. They should not be allowed to be dismissive about some key findings here and within the Alexander review. This is not a time for ‘slipping back’ in time but for moving forward with the significant and essential elements of 21st century, outlined in books such as the New Learning Revolution.
We are in different times, and this requires different learning. Unlike the esteemed colleague from the Campaign for Real Education, who said she was concerned that children would forget how to communicate with one another, the use of computers in learning is not scary and will not create a generation of automatons because they will not be sitting at computers all day. They will interact as well in other activities – remember, balance, variety?
Finally, although there are many more reasons for looking at these documents, there is the issue about the authors themselves and what they have been doing since 1992.
I am delighted that Alexander has been forthright and opinionated in his review. Ever since 1992, he has pleaded that his views within the Wise Men report have been misconstrued, and even if they weren’t everyone has the right to change their opinion with emerging “hypotheses ….. updated in the light of emerging evidence”. Looking at his website, you can see he has been working over the last decade or so on considering and re-evaluating decent pedagogy.
The Wooden one, well we all know where that opportunistic wally went. He decided to go along with all the conservative interpretations of the Wise Men report, challenging the very nature of individual learning. He swallowed the standards agenda as the key to quality education and I don’t really want to talk about the man any longer.
Which leaves us with Rose.
He has been the middle man – neither positively revolutionary in his thinking as Alexander, but strangely quiet when Woodentops was spouting his sick and deeply flawed interpretation on the value and purpose of education.
He has been the middle man, middle of the road, middling in thought and action, middle ambivalence, middle
He appears to have lost interest in being proactive. He has been around. He has been working in education all of this time but he has also played a slight opportunistic role too.
What he hasn’t done is either stand by or deny the views and interpretations of the 1992 report. To some extents he appears to be rather like the Fast Show character in the pub who cannot make his mind up and is swayed in his affirmation by the two contrasting arguments of his mates, constantly contradicting himself.
And it is this that rather worries me.
The Rose Report itself has some positives, many of them. There is an acknowledgement that the curriculum is over crowded, that too much emphasis has been placed on knowledge, that IT should be more prevalent, that wellbeing is as significant in the development of the whole child as to their literacy and numeracy capabilities. But as soon as critics commented on the fact that the report was placing the curriculum in six key areas rather than subjects, he emphatically denied a return to topic based learning. He emphatically pleaded that this was not the end of subject based learning. When others concerned themselves with a dilution of factual information, he emphasised the need for children to know their facts.
He has to be very careful that he doesn’t sit on that fence so often that people begin to wonder what he actually stands for, what he believes in, what he is advocating as quality primary education.
Despite all of this, I remain hopeful. I feel that there is a tide turning and I look forward to the interpretations in tomorrow’s papers to see how the review has been received.
I suppose it will be most interesting to see how the Tories interpret this for by the time this is to be implemented; I think Ballsup and his cronies may be on the other side of the house.
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