Us and them: Identity, nationhood and religion

Humans have evolved through pre-history to recognize friends from foes. The knowledge was a potential lifesaver. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time may have resulted in life lost. Friends were ‘us’, enemies were ‘them’. Individuals made marriage choices from ‘us’ and not ‘them’, unless they wanted to end up like Romeo and Juliet. ‘Them’ have no right to life, but can be killed without consequence, indeed with adulation. So, aboriginees, native Tasmanians, first Americans tribes and African bushmen could be wiped out without an uproar.

Have we learnt? World War 2 had a degree of them and us about it, which has been maintained in the infinite appetite for war films and books. Children’s stories have raised interesting angles. Elinor Brent Dyer, writing during the war, distinguished between good Germans and Nazis, and taught her pupils at the Chalet School the principles of working towards peace. Others were content to bathe in German gore. Michael Morpurgo asks ‘Friend or Foe?’ when children find a downed German bomber crew, one injured and the other who saved his life. Where should loyalties lie in such circumstances? After the war, it was assumed that the German and Japanese had a psychological disease from which they could be cured by education (I owe this insight to Wendy Toon). This was to turn ‘them’ into ‘us’ again.

Beyond all that local politicals, ‘us’ and ‘them’ have for long been decided by skin colour. The Victorians filled black and brown skulls with peas to try to provide that white skulls had greater capacity. They failed, so they invented the intelligence test, white biased of course. Racism influenced empire, marriage choices, educational opportunity and for many years even human rights itself. Declaring a race ‘sub-human’ had particular consequences in German Namibia and later Hitler’s Reich, where racial extermination became official national policy.

The half-century after world war 2 has seen a steady process of turning ‘them’ into ‘us’, with, we have to admit, not a little backlash. Probably, and hopefully, two hundred years from now, the entire world population will be various shades of brown and we will wonder what all the fuss was about. That is one thing at least that Star Trek was wrong about. Personally, I thought I was half Irish, half English, but found only recently that I am Anglo Scottish. Friends are British Muslim, British-Indians, British Pakistanis. Nationhood is essentially redundant, despite everything certain fringe political parties tell us. We are humans and world citizens. Full stop.

©Stephen Bigger 2008

Swindon Youth Empowerment Programme

Schools have a dual role: to develop knowledge through the curriculum; and developing pupils’ self understanding so that they can become positive members of the community. The first is measured by tests and examination results; and unfortunately the failure of the second is measured through exclusions. This project has been about turning disaffection into motivation, and thereby strengthen pupils’ knowledge by first addressing their self understanding.

Awareness that raw knowledge is not enough has prompted a range of government demands, the most recent being to emphasise social and emotional aspects of learning. The programme on which this paper is based has been demonstrated as effective through four years of external evaluation. Its financial cost to schools is minimal, and its effectiveness rapid. It has turned around vulnerable children and young people, some of whom have now reached university as self understanding led to motivation, which earned them qualifications – all beyond their initial aspirations and expectations.

There is no magic cure for disaffection and negativity. Disaffected pupils find themselves in a vicious cycle in which bad behaviour causes conflict with adults (parents and teachers) whose dealings with them are then characterised by anger and frustration. There is no progress from this stalemate without breaking this cycle. The consequences of not breaking out of it is total life failure, without qualifications and a worthwhile job. Crime may seem the only visible route to take.

Breaking out of this negative spiral is what the project has attempted to achieve. This requires a radical change of view, a “conceptual shock” to the system, moving young people from negativity and despair to a positive outlook, a vital ingredient towards a healthy human spirit.

The philosophy is summed up through six principles:

• We all have inner qualities, or ‘gems’

• We all have the potential to do good, or to do harm (dual nature)

• Positive speech has power to transform

• We have the potential to transform our lives, whatever our histories

• Positive action brings about change: the community is more united if people work together

• We need, and can be, positive role models

•

This report on the work of the Swindon Youth Empowerment Project (SYEP) between 2000 and 2007 explores how personal and social transformations can take place when young people with social, emotional and behaviour difficulties are encouraged to talk through their life choices using visualisation, symbol and metaphor. They are referred to as ‘dispirited’ as they lacked motivation and ambition. All were failing academically.

The evaluation took place over three years, 2004-2007 with the external researcher working alongside the project team and interviewing a range of people involved. In doing so the team were trained in evaluation techniques in order to encourage a long-term culture of evaluation, in schools as well as in the project. The research demonstrates a clear long-lasting effect on many of the young people involved.

This report discusses a range of factors contributing to this success, primarily relating to trusting and empowering the young people so that they value themselves and their abilities, build positive and caring relationships with others, and work towards creating a better world. It shows that young people can transcend their limited world view, learning to see themselves differently as people with energy, potential, compassion and the ability to affect positive change. In this they can reach out to others and with others, building moral understanding and cascading positive attitudes and energies to those around them.

It has had rapid and lasting results with needy and disengaged children aged nine to thirteen. The processes involved should therefore be taken very seriously by government, schools, and youth services as a powerful intervention that has shown it is able to turn youngsters from actual and potential delinquency to becoming committed to contributing to society as good citizens. The report looks forward to ways of enabling whole classes of children to benefit. It shows how SYEP approaches can become a central strand in citizenship, personal, social and moral education, spiritual education, creative thinking skills, and social and emotional aspects of learning.

Inspired by the teachings of the Bahai Faith, it is non-partisan and works openly and transparently with all faiths and none. It looks forward to expanding its work to other schools.

The full report is available.

©Stephen Bigger 2008

One damn lie after another

This is one of my PhD student's view of science education - that at every level you have to unteach the pupil what you taught at the last level, that we have to teach half truths as the whole truth. The art of simplifying learning to be appropriate for different age levels is a challenging one. We too easily patronise children's ability to understand by palming them off with gross oversimplifications or worse still misconceptions. We all have to come to grips with reality versus fantasy, but adults add difficulty to children's development by lying to them that Father Christmas and tooth-fairies are real, and bogey-men are out to get them. I remember being very indignant about this at the age of three, getting out my soapbox and preaching the gospel of disbelief in Santa to all the local children, to the anger of local parents. Since children expose these lies, they develop a positivist view of the world - 'if I can't see it and touch it, I can only assume that you are lying to me again'. God therefore stands little chance after the age of 8.

Jerome Bruner spoke of the spiral curriculum, in science especially - that you can teach anything to any age so long as you get the level right. This should not mean half-truths and lies, in this or any other subject. It involves building up interest in the world, and curiosity. It requires sharing with children what we don't know as much as what we do. Nothing is worse than an adult giving children a wrong answer to a why question just to shut them up. It closes down curiosity with a statement of apparent authority. That lie may get carried forward into adulthood and be passed on to the next generation after that.
Adults, including parents and teachers, are fellow learners with their children. This involves not only admitting ignorance, but revelling in it - not to know something is an invitation to explore. The child may find the solution first, and become teacher to the adult. Both children and adults have a duty to cross-question in order to test whether something is believable or not. This habit of dialogue - Socratic dialogue, the habit Socrates began - needs to be developed from birth. It is part of the respect we owe to the child, and this includes having our own opinions interrogated by them.

One implication of this is that teachers of young children need to be wise, intelligent, and well-informed. You need to understand something very fully and deeply if you are to put it into simple language without oversimplifying it into a lie. And mostly they are not; we don't pay them enough, or educate them enough. We take the view that you don't need to know much to teach little children.
And by doing so we build the foundations of lifelong failure.

©Stephen Bigger 2008

Imagination

Philip Pullman, in His Dark Materials trilogy, opens windows between worlds because of which Will Parry from our world and Lyra from a parallel Oxford meet. Their adventures resolve inner conflicts, and in the context of the story, universal conflicts also. Then they have to decide to close these windows for ever. Henceforward, these other worlds can only be visited in imagination.
Outside of the story, we are the ones who have to use our imaginations. The worlds we can see are 'real' in the sense of being personally meaningful.
In the story, Will has deep traumas to resolve - a disappeared father, a mentally ill mother, goons and bullies for classmates. He is introverted, liking to blend in so as not to be noticed. The breaking point was the accidental death of a burglar: this caused him to leave home and go on the run, thinking himself a murderer. His best friend was his cat, which he has to abandon when leaving. But he follows another cat into a parallel world and protects it.
Throughout the story he befriends a girl, Lyra, who becomes a significant girlfriend; finds his father, a man he can be duely proud of; he becomes a hero, saving the world many times; and he becomes his own person, someone who makes moral choices even when advised otherwise.
This then is a story of growing up, in which the inner world is more important than the outer world.
How we visualise ourselves plays a key part in our view of ourself, to our ideas of self-worth. Children need to be encouraged to believe in themselves, not to be punished into submission. We are all mentors and role models for each other, to support and assist this growth in confidence, and we ourselves learn from our own mentors. Children's role models are not necessarily positive, and peer pressure can be strong. The confidence to resist is the beginning of autonomy.
Reading stories is an important part of this process; telling them, acting them out and writing them up is even more important. My earliest dramatic role was as story narrator in the infant class, still a very positve memory. To be in control of one's own story is a good way to get through life.

See further:Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials: The Nature of Good and Evil, National Theatre Teachers Website.(2005).
Insight: Self Understanding Through Stories of Parallel Worlds. In: Research Focus, 22 May 2007, University of Worcester. (2007)

©Stephen Bigger 2008

Knowledge

What I know today is different from what I knew yesterday, and will be different from what I will know tomorrow. WHen I was young I knew a lot of things for certain. As I get older I know less and less. However, the knowledge I have now helps me to navigate my world, and I cannot do without it. My knowledge is always transitional, moving from understanding to new understanding. Actually it is doing forwards and backwards in ways which I cannot appreciate till later.
Science is the same. Knowledge exists for others to try to disprove, or modify, in a never ending cycle. Scientific knowledge changes, often dramatically, when old frameworks get completely knocked down. Most don't think out of the box; some do, and change the box. Thomas Kuhn called it a paradigm shift. When everything that used to be believed is now disbelieved.
So what can I rely on as true? Quite a few things are beyond reasonable doubt, but what they might mean is a bit fluid. The only thing I can do is keep reflecting on them.
What does this mean for education? We spend most of our time telling children things that won't be considered true when they leave school. What we teach in primary school we have to revise in secondary school, and keep revising at GCSE, and again at A level, and again at university. We have to simplify, but do we really have to teach lies, knowingly? And then unteach what we have just taught?
On the question, what of all this is true, and how do we teach that in school:
I live (but quality of life is difficult to define)
I will die (but what then, what happens to "me").
Personally I come back always to justice as solid ground. It is an idea, I suppose, of selfless acting, something humans find difficult. It is not an emotion, that can get twisted in different directions, but a standard we can always return to.
Humans are always selfish in the sense of putting our own needs first. We will only become just if we can set this aside and put others first. All others. How to do this is the mystery.
Love is only secure if justice is embedded. That is, it ceases to be self-serving.
Hope is only secure if it is just.
So our critical base line has to be justice.
A child's education should start and end with this.
©Stephen Bigger 2008