There are those films where some people have the nightmare
of seeing the dead. As an agnostic I enjoy the suspense and sometimes the fear
of these dramas but have no belief in life after death.
I have the gift of seeing, not the dead, but the body parts,
and not of humans but of the elephant in the room, though the images are linked
to the suffering of children, and ultimately the ghost of human rights.
As an audience member, and sometimes as a panel member or
speaker, I am always faced with my anger at the vision, and the problem of how
to raise the image of the elephant from the body part.
I was a guest on a panel at one of the world’s most famous
children’s theatres, Teatro Testoni Ragazzi, as part of their annual International Festival of Theatre for Children.
The panel was on the ‘Courageous in Education’, and the members were
educationalists who worked with Mafia children in state schools in Naples, street
children, refugee children. Luckily, for me but not the audience, they were
Italian Academics. They read their talks on the stage. Mainly in the, sadly
over respected, mode that is seen as academic discourse.
I was the last presenter, and had the personal problem of
seeing myself, or my work at a small, democratic private school in Suffolk as
somehow ‘heroic’. Working at the oldest school in the world based on children’s
rights and participation, Summerhill, is a joy and privilege.
One of the Theatre’s founders and the Director of the
Festival, Roberto Frabetti , was inspired by the writings and work of the
founder of Summerhill, A.S.Neill.
I have been so horrified by the dead elephant parts in the many
various rooms of conferences on education, participation, citizenship,
enterprise and European politics, and when listening to all the news items and
discussion programmes about schooling on BBC TV and radio, and even at
workshops and talks on culture at the museums and art galleries, that I started
with the hunt for the elephant.
“Listen. Can you hear it. Bang, bang, bang.” I get up
stomping my feet on the wooden floorboards.
Bang! Bang! Bang! I walk across the stage searching the
ground.
“Look, footprints!” I start to follow them in a circle on
the stage.
“ Now there are two sets of prints.” I proclaim as I finish
the circle and start again…
I indicate to the technician to change the powerpoint slide.
There on the theatre screen, above my head, is Winnie the Pooh and Piglet
following footprints in the snow. As our memories sometimes fit our ideas to
our stories, so powerfully to override the ‘facts’, I told the audience they
were looking for hefalumps…
“What is the elephant in the room? In fact in every room
that discusses education and schooling?” I ask the audience, dominated by women,
many with yellow daffodils on their jumpers and jackets.
I follow the footprints on the floor and indicate for
another change in slides.
“Now there are three pairs of footprints…”
And on the slide Winnie the Pooh and Eeyore realise that the
footprints are theirs.
“The elephant is us, or to be more exact, us as children.”
The issue of education and schooling is, how does it help us
to become ourselves? How does our sense of identity, or who we are, become
built through the visions and models and ideas that we are taught at school? And
how does this identity see its own creation, its own building, as we learn
about our world, our history, our culture, our communities, and how do we see
this teaching?
These were the questions asked in the early twentieth
century, before the start of WWI. The elephant was seen, and it was stated, and
it was used to explore and innovate and develop schools as communities, and
their methods, processes, buildings and relationships with the wider community,
of nature and humanity. The New Ideals in Education community of teachers,
headteachers, doctors, criminal justice workers, artists, politicians from
1915, defined their foundation value at the start of every conference, every publication
and report, ‘liberating the child’.
They affected the 1918 Education Act, whose key politicians,
H.A.L. Fisher and Earl Lytton, were members of the community. They defined the
good primary school as happy, creative, co-operative, embedded within local
culture and history, and child centred.
Why have we lost this elephant? Why have we lost the history
of teachers developing new practice based on this elephant, presenting it to
conferences, publishing it in reports, and distributing it free, with the help
of wealthy industrialists, to thousands of other teachers.
It is the power of the University. The power of the academic
taking over the world of research into schooling practice, and separating this
research from the practitioners, the teachers. The academic educationalists,
the academic pedagogists, the academic historians, philosophers, sociologists
of schooling. The University research departments not only separated their work
from the life of the teachers, turning the schools into a source for research
evidence, but they separated their research from training teachers.
The elephant was killed and dissected into parts, partly as
a struggle for power. This power, rested in the Universities defining the
outcomes of our schools, as the earliest schools were created to train the
future theologians, the politicians, the doctors, clergy, lawyers. The
universities needed a baseline for their entrance. They took control of the
curriculum, the status of the school’s honour’s boards, the status of the
school exam results, and the content of the exams.
They then took control of defining not only the outcomes of
schools but the very identity of the school, the production of teachers, but
also the development and history of teaching methods and schooling systems. For
innovations and their outcomes we must seek research and reports in our
academic publications. The teacher as both innovator and researcher, as
practitioner and reporter, had been destroyed. To be resurrected later, ironically
being portrayed as an innovation in itself, in projects that teamed teachers
with research universities so that teachers could now become, with the
midwifery of the Universities, researchers of their own practice.
The development of the modern school from 1914 onwards
became redefined through the filter of the University system, it cut up a
community of practitioners unified by conferences, publications and their
shared value of ‘liberating the child’ into different classifications;
progressive schools, experimental schools, democratic schools, forest schools,
Montessori Schools, anarchist schools, libertarian schools, private schools.
Successful innovations were defined by their founders and leaders, and their
charisma.
A very powerful myth developed that sustains this history,
that the innovators were isolated, too busy with their own work to share and to
learn about others, too busy ensuring their own small learning communities were
working to allow them time to be
contributors to a wider community. The image reflected the poetic image
developed, now challenged, of the Romantics, as isolated, charismatic,
innovators, heroic in their achievements, but not affecting the practice of
society.
The story of the blind researchers touching different parts
of the elephant, one defining it through its tail, as a piece of rope, another
its ears, as parchment, another its leg as a wide post. The parts are now the
dissected parts of schooling, into emotional learning, academic outcomes,
mental health, physical health, enterprise, creativity, values education,
personal and social education, participation, student voice, environmental
education, learning through play, conflict resolution, anti-bullying, learning
through work, learning through drama, philosophy for children, learning through
discourse, learners as researchers.
This brings me back to the stage at the children’s theatre.
For the other panellists were courageous in their projects, but they were
responding to the lack of the elephant, the lack of ‘liberating the child’.
They were working with children with extreme issues of lack of rights, and were
using methodologies that, though heroic and successful, could continue to allow
the issue for all children not to be addressed.
We, as parents, as teachers, as community members, we have
to be brave. For it is up to us to rebuild the elephant, to challenge all our
schools, all our educators, and to challenge the authority of the universities.
To liberate our children we also have to liberate our schools from the
Universities.
I looked at the audience. I looked at the yellow daffodils,
it was International Women’s Day. I asked them if they believed in the rights
of girls, in the rights of girls to be liberated, to be free to be themselves?
I asked them to stand-up to show their support.
Nothing happened. I sat dispirited. Having been so engrossed
in asking the question I had forgotten the need for the translator. As she
translated, the audience laughed as they realised why I looked so dispirited,
and they all stood-up.
We need every education conference, every event that
explores learning and culture and democracy and schooling to stand-up in recognition
of the elephant, in celebration of the elephant. Without this all our projects,
all our attempts to address issues of mental health, identity, community
cohesion, racism, sexism, bullying, apathy in democratic participation and the
failure of human rights, will be therapy, will be attempts to revive the single
body parts.
Three elderly women, proudly wearing their daffodils, hugged
me emotionally as I left the theatre.
