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Page 1 I come to a discussion about education from the perspective of one who was rather unsuccessfully schooled. That is to say I remember school days with pain, not with pleasure, school learning as an impossible job of ingesting and regurgitating facts, school as an authoritarian structure which inculcated the rules of class society, school as the place where one was always in trouble, usually for asking why. As I was leaving school in the mid sixties, it was clear that the educational philosophy and practice I had been exposed to was on the way out. Schools were becoming places in which children's curiosity could flourish, where hierarchies were questioned, where teachers' love of children was put towards creating co-operative classrooms in which the development of the whole child was seen to derive not from the rote ingestion of material but from an understanding of a child's developmental needs, its interpersonal needs and its curiosity about the world. Teachers were respected, or so memory serves. In between that time and this, theories of child-centred education, of the emotional needs of children, teachers and parents; of the potentially progressive role of the school and schooling; of the challenge to gender stereotyping; of the interrelatedness of all aspects of the academic curriculum; of how to achieve the potential wonder of multi-culturalism on this island, have occupied the minds and energies of educators and educational theorists so that there is a considerable body of expertise about what education could and should be about. Page 2 But as a parent approaching schools some 25 years after my own formal education, eager to find a situation that would reflect these concerns, I found myself, like many hundreds and thousands of other parents, subsumed in an education debate that dismissed these theories in the most derisory manner, insulted the work of countless educators, and instead was insisting that a national debate about education needed to be about the three R's, uniform, selection, discipline, stiffer marking, and how many minutes per day were spent on homework. The agenda of progressive education - which was being dismantled by serious underfunding an attack on teachers, and an attack on pupils - became a derided agenda. The public conversation was squeezed into a very small box in which league tables and exam results were the way in which education was being talked about. If one read the Guardian or the Independent one might feel that there was a consensus that progressive education had failed, that we were naïve and idealistic and too bad that if hadn't worked but now we had better grow up and realise what really creates excellence. If one read the Daily Mail or The Times one might wonder why educators were being slammed all the time. What on earth had they done that was so terrible. Part of what educators had done that was so terrible was that they had dared to innovate and successfully run programmes that were more inclusive, that didn't depend upon rigid boundaries between children of different backgrounds, that helped children to think, that allowed them to grow in situations in which grown-ups held authority without being authoritarian, that gave children spaces in the class room to integrate the enormous cultural changes going on in society, that helped them develop their individuality and so on. Page 3 People inside education who are here today will have a much more comprehensive list to show the achievements of progressive education than I can generate. I raise just a few to suggest the kind of difficult situation we are in now. For what I believe has happened over the last decade and a half has been a kind of backlash against many of the best ideas in education before these practices could be so firmly established as to become the foundation and the norm. It's rather like the backlash against feminism. On the face of it, things look a lot better for women and girls (and in some ways they are) but the general climate in which sexual politics is discussed means that New Man is derided, Laddishness is condoned and women are seen as sexual objects. So many of the issues within education, as within sexual politics, have to be argued again and again without being able to advance things. Because it is hard to advance things, it has been difficult for arguments about the importance of emotional development and schooling to find a place on the agenda. Emotional development has been seen either as an extra that's just too hard to fit in given the constraints of the National Curriculum; as unnecessary; as already existing in Circle time or Personal and Social Development, or as something that relates exclusively to children in difficulty. I'm not an educator of children so I can't speak from that perspective, but as a psychotherapist I've learnt a few things about the relationship of emotional development and learning, and about emotional development and social structure. From the evidence of my field, emotional development in these two ways needs to be an essential, integral part of the school curriculum, school ethos and school life, just as it needs to be an integral part of child rearing, family life, work life, the health services, in short wherever people congregate. Page 4 There is a huge body of work which suggests what makes individuals and groups psychologically capable and robust. And there is a consensus that emotional well-being stimulates the capacity for learning, creativity and human exchange. As a psychotherapist I see daily the cost of emotional damage in terms of individuals' inability to harness their resources, develop their talents, believe in themselves, receive or give support, take or give straightforward feedback and so on. The implications of what I see in the consulting room and how learning and emotional development are related, is not unknown or unthought about. But we act as though it were arcane knowledge, impossible to translate into policy initiatives, educational philosophy, family or work life. There is no such thing as a child without emotional development. Emotional development occurs whether we want it or don't want it. Emotional development is part of what constitutes us as human beings. Emotional development in its broadest sense means individuals' attempts to fit themselves into the experiences they are offered at a feeling level; to make their world personally meaningful for them. The question then is not, Do we or do we not want emotional development? Rather it is, What kind of emotional development would we wish to foster? The economically disenfranchised young men whom Beatrix Campbell writes about in Newcastle have emotional development; they fit themselves into the experiences they are offered at a feeling level, they make the world meaningful for themselves at an individual level. They act on the world with reference to how they experience it. They experience much of what comes at them as destructive, as bypassing them or as being without much personal relevance. They experience fragmentation, social despair, individual frustration, rage and helplessness. The circumstances of their emotional development incline them to a variety of responses. Page 5 They may try to transform what they experience, they may try to deny it, they may try to protest effectively or ineffectively about what they are faced with. They may emulate and act out on their local environment a version of the destructiveness they have felt, they may reject the world as they perceive it. They are many responses will reflect in some way the individual and social level of these young men's emotional development. Our question then is, what kind of emotional development do we want to create? There is a relationship between social institutions, the values of a society and the individual and collective psychology of its members. We know this about other societies, we often abhor their social practices and the mentality it feeds but we seem especially dense when it comes to our own society; what we have created or what we could create. So what kind of society are we trying to create? We've been very successful in the UK historically at creating a society in which people belonged by knowing their clearly defined place. Behind this arrangement is a society of potential disenfranchisement and exclusion for those who do not fit in. Our psychologies, our emotional development has to a large extent embodied these divisions and this insecurity without our even realising it. We've learnt to cope with difference by in the worst case hate, in the best `tolerance'; we've internalised social inferiority in complex ways in which only some people from some social groupings feel able to express and fight for their points of view and so on; we've learnt how to deal with bullying by bullying others, with being hurt by hurting others. We've learnt to manage social oppression by feeling alternately angry and unentitled and so on. Page 6 If we are trying to create an inclusive society, one in which the best that we are and can be is the social ethos and the goal, then we need a very different agenda than the one we seem to be plodding forward on at present. We need an agenda that recognises social inequality as repugnant; that understands the emotional costs of malicious division; that knows the cost to the individual and to society of disregard and abuse. This different agenda has to pay attention to the emotional capacities and the emotional needs of all of us : children, parents, educators, employers. It suggests that in education, we require a notion of learning which includes emotional knowledge of the self, of the self in relation to others and a facility with emotional knowledge about groups. And we need a learning environment which is not our enforcing, but about challenging, division. I believe that many of us want a society in which individuals know what they feel, feel legitimate about their needs and wants, feel capable of acting in the public and private arena to express their desires while knowing that often they cannot be met but nevertheless are valid. I believe many of us want to create a society where people count, where they, not just what they produce, are part of GNP, a society in which people are regarded as the wealth of the society, where the individual from whatever circumstance is treasured, where respect replaces degradation, where encouragement replaces the put down, where support and delight in the achievements of others replaces scorn and contempt, where what one person achieves is a manifestation of human potential and human endeavour and releases all of our longings rather than binds them up with envy. I believe that many of us regard a just and moral society as one where morality and ethics springs organically out of our regard for one another rather than being a morality imposed like a fig leaf to cover up the injustice, the deceit, the dishonesty that exists at the heart of the nation's institutions. Page 7 I believe that many of us want a society capable of looking at its not inconsiderable problems; a society which can face complexity, difficult decisions, ambiguity; a society that can face its pain, its changing circumstances, the pain of its members without trivialisation; a society that can take on board the many-sided voices in any issue whether of a public or private matters so that individuals can find themselves included within the public and private conversation. I know that such sentiments can be written off as naïve, ungrown up and utopian. Perhaps, But I personally do not think they are. I think rather that we know how hard it is to achieve positive change in the face of opposition and we become cowed by the task. In the past eighteen years the vision for public and private space has been set too low. The vision has compressed and the achievements have contracted. We've been unable to feel exuberant, strong, capable. But things have begun to change. Educators are charged with making society for the next generation. They are charged with making a viable environment for children from all sorts of different circumstances for several hours every day. The emotional aspects of the environment that children experience in school is one that becomes deeply imprinted on them. It affects their relation not only to study but to work, to community, to the wider society, to peers as well as intergenerationally. Post-school experiences may be approached with excitement, confidence or dread depending in part upon what has happened in the school environment. The emotional climate of the school can mark us for a lifetime. What educators do deeply affects a society's ability to bring together disparate voices or to have them set apart from one another. What and how teachers teach, the stance they take towards their students and their students' parents, the way they manage difference in the classroom, the way they enable children's development - the emotional and academic development - all set a tone for the future. Educators here today know how desperately ill served we all have been by the prevalent educational ideologies, and they know a lot about what's missing, what's been subverted. Good work has had to take place in the cracks between, rather than in the forefront of, the curriculum, in the relentless move towards making education market accountable. In the struggle for a new agenda, we need to insert our vision, a vision of an emotionally literate people, a vision absolutely necessary for the achievement of a robust and emotionally literate society. We need a sustainable economy, a sustainable environment and an emotional field in which all manner of feelings can be sustained. Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 |
EMOTIONAL EDUCATION FOR ALL
EMOTIONAL EDUCATION FORUM
STRATEGY FOR EMOTIONAL LITERACY IN OUR SCHOOLS
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