The Man Who Was Period Five

A door creaked open. Deep inside its yawning mouth there was a soft, eerie fluttering. Old copies of The Morning Star tumbled to the floor, as Gabriel Shelley brushed past them and into the gloom. A narrow wooden shelf ran around the limits of the room and cardboard boxes full of leaflets announcing a rally in support of a Free Palestine littered the floor so that crossing it became a game of chequers where the winner was always Red. There was a soft click as Gabriel's guide eased the door behind them shut.

Without a word he raised his hand and beckoned through to the back of the office.

He knocked on a concealed door and Shelley wondered, for the first  time, if he had made the right decision accompanying him to tonight's meeting. He had heard the rumours. The Enemies of Promise met in complete secrecy, and that no outsider had ever been admitted to their meetings, but there were always rumours: some said that they kept a dungeon full of children who had not been told their level since 2003. Others spoke of an unspeakable ritual involving group discussion, musical plenaries and differentiation by (Shelley remembered how his informant had shuddered) outcome. It was said their leader had trained in the Seventies, that she had once eaten an OFSTED inspector's right arm and Required Improvement in all areas except for Having Something on the Head, it was said...

"Enter."

The voice boomed from the inside the door, and Gabriel Shelley, a young Inspector freshly plucked from the classroom (which he had loved, honest, and he still had lots of friends who he kept in touch with still "hard at it") wandered blinking like a young lamb into the gloom. Would his superiors be pleased that he had penetrated the secret heart of the determined conspiracy to deny the Education Secretary a better job and thousands of children a brighter future through testing? He could not say.

His first impression was one of the massiveness. As he stepped into the Temple of Failure his eyes adjusted and he made out a sixty-foot high ceiling on which was painted - well, he couldn't tell but it looked like it had been done with finger paints. He made out what he thought might be a house, and noticed that nobody had marked it.

Around the room was rack upon rack of "groovy" textbooks. Some he recognised as notorious texts with Ethnic protagonists and lefty morals...there were also sets of games for teaching maths through social construction and a complete set of Vygotsky. The stench of Failure hung in the air, and there were no Standards anywhere.

In the centre of the room a round table was laid out with some Pritt Sticks, a pot of board markers and some sugar paper in the middle. Around it sat four people, five with his guide joining them. He saw an empty seat and wondered for the first time why he had been brought here.

"Greetings" said a hooded figure, "I am Period 1. We have heard much about you"

Another spoke up. This was a cheerful looking man with a tweed jacket who looked like he had never in his life been near a randomised control trial. He bent back his knuckles until they cracked and peered down his nose at Shelley.

"We have heard that you deplore modernity and have expressed the belief that Entrepreneurship should not necessarily be taught at five. Good show, good show. Are you by any chance a Trotskyist?"

A woman with brightly coloured beads, a hemp skirt and zero professionalism Smiled broadly from the right hand side of the table,

"They call me Period 4: feel free to use this time to just emote about your experience of coming here today: and don't mind Period 3, he never wakes up unless it's to agitate for unnecessary strike action which will cost the economy millions, or do the crossword."

A large man with a Che Guevara badge and no drive to raise attainment whatsoever snored beside her.

Suddenly the one they called Period 1 banged a metre rule loudly on the table (though he made no move to enter the incident on SIMS).

"SILENCE!  In the name of Piaget, Marx, The Miners' Strike and Billy Bragg are you prepared to make a solemn oath this night to join The Enemies of Promise?"

Shelley gulped. "You mean..."

"I do. Are you prepared to become Period Five?"

Presenting at the "State of Education" conference, March 1st

I will be presenting at the one day "State of Education" conference on March 1st 2014 at Oxford House, Bethnal Green.

To Book: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/state-of-education-conference-1-march-2014-tickets-10238604943
Programme Details: http://stateofeducation2014.wordpress.com

I will be running an interactive session, The Trend Away from Freedom, on contrasting Enlightenment ideas of Liberty and how they relate to participants' practical experience. It will ask participants to consider what autonomy for teachers and students really amounts to today.

The rest of the programme looks great too, with workshops on alternatives to school, arts education and the place of trade unions in the sector. I am delighted to be involved.

See some of you there, perhaps.

The Empiricist and the Philosopher: a modern unromance

It has lately come to my notice that a lot of people are distinguished (if that is the right word) by an inability to differentiate between these two types of academic work: Philosophical and Empirical. I thought I would try and do everyone a favour by drawing some dividing lines here, before anyone else says anything embarrassing.

Before I start it is fairly axiomatic to me that the truly scientific outlook is indispensable if we are going to survive then next thousand year plus on this planet or indeed any other. If you at any point think you detect me neglecting the principles of repeatability of result, basis of belief in evidence, the separation of matters of faith from matters of knowledge then please, point out to me where I have misstepped and send me an email. I will be really happy to reply.

Secondly, and unhelpfully in my profession (education) as in every other there is the question of certain words acquiring meaning that they do not have outside if that field. One such example is "differentiation". Over time "to differentiate" has come to mean something we do with our plans, resources and delivery in order to make those with specific barriers to learning better able to access the work. Its non specialist meaning is simply to draw a line between, rather as I am doing with this piece of writing. This does not mean that either of these meanings is incorrect: rather it means that we are dependent on the context to work out what reading we are supposed to infer. Of course even then this is language, so nothing is foolproof. Write to me if you need anything clarified, please.

And so to the matter at hand:

The recent controversy sparked by the theoretical piece from Andrew Davis, written as a member of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (of which I may as well say I am a member) caused a great deal of confusion. I was struck in discussion with perfectly pleasant individuals by the great confusion about a number of points. Three main ones:

The claim the pamphlet was not peer reviewed
The claim the pamphlet did not contain empirical data
The (related) claim the pamphlet was mere speculation

All of these claims seem to me reruns of the same kind of claims which were made when Michael Hand (in fact the general editor of this series) ran his own pamphlet about patriotism and whether it should be taught in schools. Please do keep the word "should" in mind, it will be important.

In a piece in Philosophy Today, Professor Hand reflected on the fallout from writing that article and the fact that, for all the media hoo-ha thus caused he at no point found a newspaper willing to take the fact that a theoretical piece or work had been written seriously on its own merits. That, it was claimed, was mere Opinion. Did he not have some facts, some data, a graph? Something for the headline writers to latch on to.

Now you may sympathise! What right after all does this man have to put out (Profess) his opinion? And this is the situation that Davis found himself in with the publication of his own pamphlet "To read or not to read".  His central claim, to my mind, was that if we are teaching students to do something which has no meaning outside the educational context then we are not teaching them at all. This definition of the limits of the category called "teaching" seemed to some, however, ludicrous. Hence the claims made above.

To claim the pamphlet was not peer reviewed was objectively wrong. The editorial team connected to the publication comprised 11 academics with many years experience between them including eight Professors and advisors to governments past and present. What lies behind this claim is a deep suspicion of theoretical work which amounts to  a virulent anti intellectual positivism which currently blights the sciences.

The second claim, that the pamphlet does not contain substantially new empirical data is true. However, empirical and philosophical questions have important differences between them which are the subject of this essay. Andrew Davis is a philosopher. The type and scope of his research is defined by the limits of his discipline. This is also my response to the third objection: he is a philosopher, this work is theory. Therefore, it is not "speculative" to write what one thinks because in this field what one thinks is precisely the research itself. When Davis says what he has written is the result of three years' work we have no reason to doubt him unless we believe that mental work is not meaningful or real, and if we believe that then quite frankly we should never be anywhere near a classroom.

So, the distinction between the Empirical and the Theoretic then, finally is something like this.

To simplify greatly, scientists produce data based on studies which are repeatable. This data is based on the measure of what we know is measurable. It does not, of course, step into the field of unknown unknowns because nothing does, at least consciously. However, a tree that falls in the forest with no one around to hear it isn't even a Subject so somebody actually has to analyse that stuff. If you show me a bunch of numbers being spat out of an electron microscope or an FMRI scanner I am going to shrug and go "uh?" So it must be admitted that we need analysis.

Now, analysis of data cannot of course be done by laypersons. Various problems will prevail, such as lack of knowledge of terminology, prevalence of personal prejudice, lack of common Lexis to debate findings with and so on.

Partly what Davis was doing was trying to rework the definition of "teach" to prevent abuse of the term. Once the term is abused then it becomes easy misuse it to abuse people. We could think of the bullying cry of "I am just teaching him a lesson" here. One student tried to excuse slapping another in the back of the neck to me recently by saying "I do it every time he makes a mistake...I am helping him become the best version of himself." This appeal to the notion of teaching was supposed to get me on side, but precisely because I do not regard that as teaching or learning I was not vulnerable to the sophistry. This, in very practical terms, is one way to use philosophy in education.

When we discipline ourselves within institutions to improve our theoretical instruments we are doing Philosophy. We owe a debt to that discipline and its contribution to understanding not of what is but of terminology which is meaningful and conceptions of what is ethical, thinkable and non contradictory. These I would placr under the heading of Meaning. An example: I think the nihilism of any view which says that "Numbers go up" is synonymous with progress, not to mention the magical thinking that goes along with it, should be obvious. A philosopher wants to ask "Numbers of what? What's the distribution? What categories are you using? Is there reason to believe this source? What prejudices operate commonly in this area?" Their specialist training invites them to suspend judgement and pass the data through transformative steps so as to view all the currently thinkable possibilities (ideally). Yet people persist in asking philosophers to provide evidence or "prove it". Headline writers want things boiled down. Busy ministers want the "key points". But these are not statements which can be cramped and offered into inspirational quotes for your Facebook wall. Rather they are systems of thought which, once inducted into them, we have historically found to be useful when it comes to reading and making sense out of evidence. It is a dirty trick to try and ask someone to justify themselves with evidence when, for example, they are discussing ethics. If you are in Rwanda during a genocide and somebody asks you to show what evidence you can find that the genocide should stop you are going to be stumped. There is only evidence of genocide! As Hume observed though, no is implies an ought. Theoretical work continually asks what we should do, what we should say, how we should interpret the world. It is a naturalistic fallacy to expect the way of the world to always tell us everything we need to know.

Of course if theory never links up with data then that is a terrible shame, but it is a failure which damages both the facts and the ideas. "So much the worse for the facts", as Vygotsky writes.

In education right now test data is produced at a very impressive rate which computers only serve to speed up. There is an absence of high quality public analysis precisely because the production of data has become the objective, rather than the synthesis of the two disciplines of theory and practice: Philosophy and Evidence Gathering. Computers can't do theory, so it is impossible to expect analysis to keep pace with data. This means certain key areas of professional and public life need to slow down if we are going to make sense of what is happening. That very modern phenomenon, the "man in a hurry" is going to have to learn that some things don't come in ticker tape, news feed form.

And this must happen, if we believe in a future. We cannot expect progress in human knowledge and understanding without the proper marriage of evidence and analysis. It is to everyone's detriment if our suspicion of "mere" opinion is allowed to stifle public reason, the selfsame public reason the exercise of which has, for some*, been synonymous with Freedom

*Kant

Debts to: Jan Derry, Vygotsky, Hume, Kant, Michael Hand, Andrew Davis

The Child is the God of Capitalist Man

The Child is the God of Capitalist man.  What does this imply?

One consequence of ceasing to care for eternity is imprisonment in the present. This gives the busybody, the overworked go getter who can no longer enjoy their life and bustles frantically hither and yon,  a problem. They are of an instant vulnerable to a simple question, that being

"Why do you do it all?"

As they hurtle towards burnout these useful nodes in the corporate machine do not, of course, have the notion that they might want the whole beastly business over and done with. So they say, as Weber observed, not 'for the glory of God', which was the serf's answer, but "I am doing it for my kids".

Tricky situation for a six year old to find themselves in, sitting on the heavenly throne; is it any wonder that they get confused?

Of course it is hardly the case that we treat them as divinites all the time. There is nothing so disappointing as a failed God,and so the Child has scorn poured on it when it fails to act as the Almighty ought (and who decides how the Almighty ought to do anything? That's Capitalism, folks).

Thus just as the real God of the Feudal age was the Agricultural year, the Child is only a sacrificial Corn God of the Aztek year. The youth is worshipped and then consumed in fire and sacrifice. The whole cycle is played out on the symbolic plane within the ritual circle of celebrity. Pity the poor things and, for that matter, the adults who, their time of divinity long over, instead wander the plains of cultural desolation, worshipping what they used to be, unwilling to leave it behind.

When The Grade isn't worth it

The dubious present state of the labour market makes it apparent to those from low income backgrounds early on that their options even within an affluent society like Britain are extremely limited.

In such circumstances it seems to be the case that the right response is to compete harder for jobs. Within collective enterprises like classrooms or even macro environments like nations the idea that some are not "pulling their weight" is therefore a potentially frustrating turn of events.

I once set a class the task of giving group presentations. One group delivered theirs and, as sometimes happens, one student had evidently done the majority of the work. At the end we reflected on the presentation as a class and tried to work out what we thought had happened and why. The student who had done least I will call Tobi. Tobi had said nothing whatsoever during the presentation. During the reflective questions at the end he also said nothing. Others were more vocal, they spoke of the frustration of being in a group where one member is not pulling his or her weight., and the language was very reminiscent of anxiety around "benefit cheats".

"They just take everyone else's hard work"
"Lazy"
"If they can't be bothered..."

I didn't share my view but I was sympathetic. Perhaps because I was silent one girl, Senay, spoke up dissentingly. To my regret I can only paraphrase from memory her extraordinarily original point.

"Sometimes you are in a group and someone wants a level six (equivalent of an A grade in this class) and they want it sort of TOO much and they are rude to you and you just think 'get it in your own then I won't help' if it means that much to them"

This sophisticated introduction of a categorical imperative, a refusal to be treated as a means to an end, completely altered the room. Even those who had previously towed the line now revised their views in some cases, agreeing that being decent to one another actually came before success. Senay had successfully reasoned an alternative interpretation of Tobi's nonparticipation, one that convinced her whole class including me.

At this point and without introducing any big theories I would like to quote Paul Willis on counter-school culture amongst students. Willis was studying working class male students in the Midlands in the 1970s, but his sympathies are recognisable in Senay's point:

"It is through a good number (of the working classes) trying (to succeed in high stakes certificate testing) that the class structure is legitimised. The middle class enjoys its privilege not by virtue of inheritance or birth, but by virtue of an apparently proven greater competence and merit. The refusal to compete...is therefore in this sense a radical act: it refuses to collude with its own educational suppression."
- Willis "Learning to Labour" 1978 p.128

I do not mean to suggest that counter school culture or idleness is any kind of useable programme. Tobi does not have the answer. I do deliberately imply, however, that in the words of one contemporary writer "The only way to win is not to play".

Anna Karenina - an early critique of celebrity?

Anna and Vronsky's affair does not run contrary to social mores but rather, for Tolstoy, is produced by them.  The 'spirit of lies' (pt 2 CH 27) is Society itself. His profound distrust of Society  makes AK a prototypical critique of the media and of celebrity. It can be conceived of as part of McLuhan's project as much as a general ethical or theological work.

Furthermore it is important to collect examples of where Vronsky and Anna are read as being straightforwardly in love, straightforwardly "star crossed lovers".

They are false because the Society that produces them is false, not because they must necessarily deceive Karenin, Anna's husband. The real target of Tolstoy's critique is Society which, like Heidegger's "Das Man" merely hands on received opinions and petty falsehoods.

It is not therefore a simple and straightforward injustice which distinguishes Oblonsky's affair from his sister, Anna's: he is morally less in love with the truth than she is (hence her "straight backed" appearance in Society prior to her fall). The corrosion of her behaviour is a byproduct of her immersion in a society built on lies. Her personal anguish is the unique subject of the novel and not her love for Vronsky. Paradoxically, then, it is Levin who is her nearest analogue in the novel rather than her opposite. His withdrawal to the country, a self imposed exile of which we are constantly reminded, has presumably saved him from the same fate as Anna: succumbing to Society; madness at his inability to reconcile with it and, eventually, death.

Be Like Huck

It'll happen when it happens.

One of my students, a fantastic writer, could not put a word down on paper.

He obviously had a head full of ideas that was driving him, if not insane, then at least to the point of a mild hysteria. And yet every time he would sit down to write he would freeze up. He couldn't get them out of his hand and down on the page.

It took a long time for me to work out that the key was just to give him the option of writing and walk away. He's fifteen years old, he will do it if he wants to. Although he is writing his coursework and I know that time is running out, I also know that yelling at him about deadlines won't help. Instead, I have found that I just need to suggest that some work might happen in the time available, and prepare the resources and a bit of encouragement.

"You can write, you just don't think you can write."

That sort of thing.

Today he wrote four pages in an hour and a half and said, "You know, the reason I can do this is because there's no pressure."

I agreed that there was, in fact, no pressure.

And then he carried on writing, before checking it carefully and handing it in.

There is, in fact, no pressure. What is the worst that can happen? Somebody in authority might not be happy with you? Boo Hoo. As Huck Finn said, "Sometimes I'd play hooky, and when I came back to school somebody would have a good holler at me, and I'd always feel much better."  Twain's Huck is capable, fearless and, most importantly of all, feels all the pressures of the adult world to be mildly amusing distractions from real life. Which is what they are.

We should aspire, teachers and students, to be like Huck. There is no pressure. If you want to write it, write it. If the class wants to be quiet, let them be. If they won't let you start the lesson, what will do more harm: screaming at them? Terrifying them? Piling on the pressure in all its "you will never amount to anything" intellectual shabbiness? Or waiting an extra five minutes? Sometimes in teaching, wrote Rousseau, you have to be ready to waste time to save time.

There's no pressure. Sometimes, we forget that.