Newcastle University 1969
Education towards a New Britain
I realise that my the title of this address is an unsatisfying one: vague, almost empty. But I always have this trouble when I am asked to give a title to a lecture a long time in advance. I never know what I shall want to talk about when the time comes. So I look for a title that still leaves the choice wide open.
However, I realised later that the words “New Britain” were an echo from the past. It was the title of a weekly or monthly journal published in the thirties. Together with many others during that terrible period of economic depression and mass unemployment I was caught up in all sorts of activities for relief and local production and with this went a great deal of new political philosophical thinking.
Those who are too young to have known that period will not realise what a traumatic experience we went through. It really did seem to us that the capitalist economic system was crashing in ruins around us. That we were really seeing the end of it. Not only did we spend much of our spare time helping unemployed men to dig new allotments to grow their own food, but we were immensely stimulated intellectually and met in conference after conference to try to see the way ahead to a new social and economic order we had seen millions of men cast out of industry as unwanted as empty oil drums. We saw them year after year propping up the walls in idleness while they drew their unemployment pay. We saw youngsters grow right through their teens and into adulthood without ever having a job to give them a place in the world.
We dreamed of a New Britain in which men would know once more they were wanted and valued and we dreamed of an economic system in which workers would be valued as persons, not as spare parts to be discarded when a new process made them redundant.
But in fact of course, though Well, we had our journal, and its front page had a map of Britain in bright green. Perhaps the editor was thinking of Blake’s Green and pleasant land. But we did not cure unemployment by getting a New Britain. We had a war instead. Hitler was the first to re-employ workers by making munitions and the rest of us followed suit.
Now we have a very different situation. It is one in which very many people spend a great deal of money and very many people also save and prosper. In spite of the evidence of continuing poverty in patches in spite of “Cathy Come Home” ours is a very affluent society. Those who know what economic collapse is like continue to fear it, but it doesn’t come. When I was a child I lived in a working class district in South London – Battersea. We all used our feet or public transport. Now the streets in the district are packed tight with cars, parked outside the houses of their owners. The owners, many of them coloured immigrants, come out on Sunday mornings to shampoo their cars. Indeed they almost kneel down and pray to them.
Now this is a much more difficult situation in which to find a point of action. There is an enormous volume of discontent, but it is not a creative discontent. In the thirties there were sharply defined reasons for discontent; there were clear and just reasons for vehement protest. There was dismay, there was bewilderment, there was shock, but also a great impulse to do new things and think new thoughts; there were grounds for hope.
Now the discontent seems to be only a despairing irritability, leading to actions that are often irrelevant and irrational. Alongside prosperity we have no meaning and no direction nothing beyond the present for which we can hope. Where there are protests they seem to arise out of meaninglessness, indeed to be meaningless protests against meaninglessness. The existentialist despair that first came into the minds of philosophers and writer’s, seems now to have gone deep into the soul of the ordinary man. It may be that this explains the irrational element, what seems to us a total lack of foresight, in wildcat strikes.
And we have a medium of communication now that mercilessly exposes our failure and despair – television. Now all those apparently powerful men are brought to the screen who hold our destiny in their hands – we see them more than life size, we see their coarse skin, the pimples on their cheeks, the spots the razor missed, the too great regularity of their false looks, the uneasy shifting of the eyes when they try to answer questions that can’t be answered.
Or we see printed on their faces resentment, hostility, or overconfidence. These men may be politicians, trade-union leaders, directors of industry. But as we look these angry or smiling or nervously twitching faces, aren’t we driven to the conclusion that often these men are trying to deal with situations that are beyond their understanding or control. In other words we are aware of pitiful human inadequacy.
Now when I see men grouped around in masses, trousered and coated, I think the human race in bulk is very unlovely. And I remember the words of Sir Walter Raleigh those famous words
I wish I loved the human race
I wish I loved its silly face
I wish I liked the way it walks
I wish I liked the way it talks
(Russian Chinese teacher’s automobile workers).
Others long before our time have had this sense of revulsion when contemplating humanity in the mass. Remember the words put by Swift into the mouths of a man in in the people of Brobdingnag.
I cannot but conclude the bulk of your race natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.
And in his letter to Pope:
All my love is towards individuals. I have ever hated all nations, professions and communities. But principally I hate and detest that animal called man.
When I think of the hunger marches of the thirties the columns of ill-nourished, ill-clad men that converged on London, I think of tragedy, poverty, perhaps ugliness or squalor – but nevertheless there was a residue of human dignity in these movements of masses of men. Today there seems no dignity in any industrial or mass action.
Is this because behind them there is now no direction, nothing to believe in? I do sometimes think that behind the glitter of modern affluence nearly everything is in ruins. But if this is so, is it a bad thing.
There is so much else in our world that is deplorable; we know it to be deplorable yet we can do nothing about it
The progressive destruction of natural beauty Our inability to protect what remains of our coastline.
In spite [of] the Planning Acts, the steady spread of characterless jerry built houses wherever a landowner can make a profit by selling land.
I could go on endlessly revealing the absurdities of our present situation, but I’ll leave Malc.[olm] Muggeridge to add say the last word enter the discussion at this point.
Now I don’t think we have said given a really true picture of our world when we refer rather moralistically to dope and bed and slobbering debauchees, or if it makes us alternate between a sense of absurdity and a desire to escape into eternity.
I think I see evil as clearly as M.M. but although I am the same age as he is and I have no desire to get out of this world. There is another picture I have of this world: a picture of endless opportunity. To use Werner Pelz’s expression: life is a vast bundle of opportunities - Never so many as now.
The world has changed profoundly in the last few decades because we now have such a tremendous mastery over matter and over our environment that we can have what we want and do what we want. We are no longer the victims of our environment. If we discover what we really need we can have it. The means are at our disposal. But how can we find what we need?
I find in myself a sense of exhilaration at the thought of living in this world as it is now. I would not have preferred to be alive at any other time.
This feeling of things having come to bits, however, is very widespread. Although I am a Quaker at the opposite side of the theological spectrum, I know a good many Catholics and I can therefore get a measure of the upheaval in that church. There are some who view it with dismay and almost despair, but most of my Catholic friends see it as the long-awaited opportunity. I spent a few days recently in one of the monastic orders – an order that includes some of the Church’s most distinguished thinkers. One evening I was sitting with two of them in an Oxford pub discussing democracy and authority in the Church (They had taken off their robes and had become members of the proletariat in old trousers and sweaters). There came a point when one of them turned to me and said “Do you know, the fact of the matter is that the whole outward structure of authority has collapsed, It is round us the institutional Church is in ruins. But this is a good thing. Only when it is completely in ruins have you got space in which to rebuild – build something that is truer.
Well let’s take a leaf out of their book of hope and don’t lets unnerve ourselves by comparing our condition to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire or what M.M. calls the Gadarene Slide.
There are many people looking with great perception at our world, looking at it calmly and without dismay. Laurens Van de Post is a writer I greatly enjoy and it was very satisfying to watch him on the TV screen recently. It made me turn once again to his book “Venture to the Interior”.
As the preface to one of his chapters he uses a paragraph from a letter written by his wife: [“]It seems to me that people’s private and personal lives have never mattered as they do now. For me the whole of the future depends on the way people live their personal rather than their collective lives. It is a matter of extreme urgency. When we have all lived out our private and personal problems we can consider the next, the collective step. Then it will be easy, but before it will not even be possible.[“]
At a first glance that would seem to mean this: Give up all attempts at political action, give your whole attention to getting everybody perfect, then return to political effort.
If ti meant this it would be asking for something quite unrealistic. Political conditions and political decisions are all the time conditioning our private lives. Often teachers teachers (sic) and parents have reason to say that all that they do for their children is undone by the impact of the world outside the school and the family.
Take one of L.v.d.P’s own statements. The title of the book Venture to the Interior has a double meaning. It is a venture into the interior of Africa but also to the interior of the human personality. He is standing high up on a plateau in Nyasaland thinking about conflict, about the outward and the inward conflict. He is aware both of the tremendous amount of destruction of personality that goes on in society and the destruction that goes on inwardly because we do not know ourselves.
Seen in the light of this, the statement by his wife is a true one – but one of the two aspect of the whole problem. And her statement is one to which we as teachers can give special attention. We mustn’t give up using our judgment and our influence in politics, but necessarily we are more concerned with private and personal life and we can do some of the preparatory work that will make the men and women of the future more effective.
Recently a young American woman, Janet Daley, left the U.S.A. to come and live in Britain. She wrote some articles in the Guardian and concluded with the judgment that much more could be done here than in the U.S.A. She first explained the significance of ‘Hippyism’ – [at this point in the left margin appears the statement “17 mins] this it appears is much more than drug-taking – it is a last ditch protest in a country where ordinary political action has become totally ineffective, when there can be no political choice because there is no essential difference between the parties. The young people are driven to express their feeling of impotence in a complete repudiation of the American way of life.
As she writes:
[“]To be a drop-out is a meaningful thing in America because this is the last ditch for those who would choose to be honest and good. When nothing constructive can be done, it is far more useful to drop out and illustrate the futility of constructive action than to keep up the pretence that there are still things which can be accomplished.[“]
I do not know whether this is true but am encouraged by what she then says about Britain. She is emphatic that such a movement is irrelevant in Britain because, she says, “There is so much that should and can be done here. To opt out in a place where there is so much to do, so much that is anything but futile, is to be self-indulgent and wrong-headed at best, fascist and decadent at worst.”
With that encouragement, let me begin to look more closely at what we can do in education. We’ve got to help people as persons to be more adequate, so that the TV screen of 30 or 40 years hence will be less depressing.
Two things we can think of, and they are closely related to each other:
- We should find out how to set free the emotional life that underlies all our mental activity – get it free so that it can be recognised, understood, developed, discipline and discover its own appropriate discipline.
- Set free and encourage the power of imagination and originality so that we shall have in a new generation of people an adequate vision of what can and should be done in our confused and befogging world situation.
Take the first of these. What is painfully app There is something painfully obvious in the conduct of nearly all our leaders and all our revolutionaries. They all seem desperately earnest to achieve something good for society or for themselves, but in themselves there is a devil at work which contradicts their assertions and negates their apparent intentions. This is true in some measure of every one of us. Put in Jungian terms, we all have a shadow-self, a dark side – which represents the opposite of the good self we want other people to see. And if we don’t know that we have this devil in us, it will be he that will pull the strings when we imagine we are being well-intentioned. This is why the leaders of the world who consciously seek for peace, inst in fact create the condition that leads to disaster.
Laurens v.d.p. puts this symbolically by thinking of the dark African as symbolising the dark shadow side of ourselves, and I think he would explain this fear and hatred of the negro as an unconscious a projection of our hatred and fear of the devil inside us dark forces inside us – forces that we do not want to recognise. So we push them away repudiate them.
Remember that statement about murdering forces that I read. He goes on from this:
[“]There is no great harm ......... survival.[“]
First we can recognise what is in ourselves and we can help those whom we educate to discover what is in themselves. And then a reconciliation with the hidden self becomes possible.
Laurens v.d.Post goes on
[“]Yet this need not be ......... embrace.[“]
Don’t forget that the word demon or daemon is used both for a destructive force and also for the passion of the creative genius. The energy that animates both has the same origin. We can take the destructive menace out of our demon if we rec first recognise him and then allow him to become our friend instead of our enemy. And if we give him the chance to stir us with creative activity, we may say that one of the reasons why there is so much destructive irritability among workers and students is that both in their respective systems have been treated as things, not persons Things subject to the domination of systems, not human beings who know the freedom of creative activity.
In the very confusing third program discussion printed in this morning’s Listener about the American student revolt there was one particular significant point made by Daniel Bell of Columbia. He refers to the demand for freedom of curriculum, what he calls a cafeteria system.
“I don’t think the word ‘freedom’ in curriculum to that extent make much sense, and in any case what these people want is not curriculum. It’s really a search for their own identity.”
A search for their own identity; this is what I am talking about when I refer to freeing, understanding and developing the underlying emotional life, coming to terms with what we are. So long as we are shaped and conditioned by what we think we ought to be – which is really what our aggressive teachers and parents and society have forced upon us, then we do not know ourselves. We have no identity; we are only things – things with however a faint restless awareness that all is not well.
What can we as teachers do? We can begin by getting rid of all unnecessary and false authority, all bogus assumptions about our own position and our own knowledge. Generally speaking it is still true to say that in education school we assume that we the teachers are the people who know and the children come to school so that we can pass on our knowledge to them. If we assume this, it means that we pass on to them not only what we call our knowledge but also our bad habits of thought, our fears and our frustrations, our prejudices and our obstinacies. This situation becomes worse the higher up we go in the age range and the academic status. It is least in the primary schools; it is at its worst in the grammar schools, where the pride of the academic creates a fog that obscures the truth about persons.
We must abandon the pretence that we are in any essential way different from our children. We must stop thinking of ourselves as instructors bus see ourselves as people still very ignorant – who can engage, with our children, in a common search for truth. If we are really willing to take the tremendous impact of the energy of children we may go through a traumatic experience of self-revelation. We shall have to start growing up ourselves.
And when I talk about a search for truth I am talking about something that can be expressed in action, not merely written in a book or tossed to and fro in discussion.
We must, in a sense, expose ourselves, become vulnerable. We must throw off our armour. That means discarding the academic cap and gown. Mine went into the school theatre property cupboard about 40 years ago and there is remained, the most appropriate place for it.
When we look at each of our pupils we must see not primarily a candidate for O level or A level or university entrance. Not that at all. No – a person, a complex of urges and impulse clear or obscure feelings, obvious or latent powers, someone struggling to establish himself in a difficult and frightening world, someone who needs to know others and needs to be known by them. What happens to him in school and home and street will largely determine whether he is a creator or a destroyer, metaphorically a life-giver, or metaphorically a murderer.
To take off our own actors’ clothes and to see the child also as he is, will make a personal encounter possible, an intimate encounter out of which a form of love can grow. By love I mean nothing cosseting or sentimental or indulgent but a capacity for enjoyment, enjoyment of each other, enjoyment of the world and its opportunities, enjoyment – the tremendous enjoyment of discovering what we want to do and doing it.
I can surely say that fear dominates the whole world situation and causes us to waste our human and material resources to an extent that is lunatic. Only love can overcome fear – this love that is linked to the enjoyment of being alive and aware in the keenest sense.
A few minutes ago I referred to the experience of truth that is expressed in action. I don’t think any experience of truth is real that is not seen in action or that has the potentiality of action. This is good Marxism, but it is equally good Christianity (That is often true; I am fascinated by the way the Catholic left-wing has rediscovered Karl Marx).
This means that we must stop the worship of books in school, at its worst in the grammar school and the University. Books are only a means to communication; they are not repositories of truth. They only become true when their communication is re-expressed in the action of the person who reads them.
The worship of the book – and the thesis – is one of the evils of academicism. It stands in the way of original thought and action. That brings me to my second point. It is pathetically evident how unable our leaders are to see their way through, to think originally – to think of new approaches that will be constructive. Their public statements, and their very language exposes the lack of imagination and originality. Often they are long strings of clichés, tired phrases, held together by conjunctions and prepositions.
To remedy this we should stop encouraging children merely to accept established truth but encourage them to be critical of its limitations. We should encourage every kind of genuine questioning. Our classes should be a lively dialogue in which the unexpected can happen and questions in which questions can suddenly appear that make us confess our own ignorance.
We must never ask our pupils to accept a statement because the authorities say so – the authorities may be wrong. One of the most significant experiences came to me early in my teaching career. A 14 year old boy questioned a statement in a science text book written by two Fellows of the Royal Society and in fact he said that they were plainly wrong. I said “Oh heaven, two such eminent scientists couldn’t be wrong. But I examined the book carefully they were wrong and the boy was right. They had failed to notice the existence of a certain component in a force diagram and had come to a conclusion that was the opposite of the truth.
Now when I ask for originality and questioning I am not asking for something entirely new – as might have been the case 50 years ago. I am asking for the acceleration and spreading of what is already happening.
As a science teacher my mind turns at once to the Nuffield Project. The establishment of this was a great joy to me because I had worked in two of the schools from which the impetus came. Christ’s Hospital was the home birthplace of the heuristic method and some of the approaches in the Chemistry section of the Nuffield Scheme are almost exactly as I used them at CH in 1925. And Professor Eric Rogers – perhaps the dominant figure in this educational revolution both in the States and this country – was educated at Bedales and a science teacher there just before I took over the department.
Exposition
But any new educational method is subject to corruption. The N. Project can become a gimmick. It can become a system to which the child in which the child is once more a slave. But those who thought it out are emphatic that it is not a plan but an approach, a way of developing and assimilating scientific experience. It has room for the unexpected, you can deviate from any planned route and you must, if it is going to be scientifically and educationally profitable. You mustn’t just accept the N.P. as an adopted child. It has got to be born from inside you. The spirit of it must inform all your relationships in the laboratory.
Now I see no reason why this approach to educational experience shouldn’t sweep right through the school curriculum. The N.P. in science doesn’t necessarily affect judgments of ethical and moral values (It can). In English and History and Geography these values would necessarily come right into the foreground.
May I mention just one other experience I have recently had?
Drama
Recap
a) A release of the emotional life so that it may grow up from beneath the soil and flower.
b) A release from crippling habits of thought and encouragement of questioning and daring and original thought and action.
Recap. of my TWO OBJECTIVES
There are two last points I want [to] make – both have a feed-back to the two objectives that I have stressed.
One concerns the education of girls and women. We suffer from a patriarchal male-dominated world. Right through it we see aggressive thrusting impulses of the male at work, so vehemently that the very existence of civilisation is threatened by them.
Now I want to see women taking a much larger place in the direction of the affairs of the Country and the world. But - not NOT as imitation men. So few at present that they can only survive by becoming imitation males. I want to see them taking part as women with the particular kind of concern, insight, sensitiveness that women have. I’m not sure that there is any special significance in the fact that India and Israel have women prime ministers, but I’m watching with considerable interest the activities all Barbara Castle and Shirley Williams.
Now this I think implies coeducation. The valuable differences between boys and girls, men and women are best developed when they are together, caring for and challenging each other. Now merely putting boys and girls together, men and women teachers together is not what I call coeducation. It must be conducted by someone who knows what the new opportunities are. Otherwise it may still mean the subjection of the female to the male pattern. Girl’s education has suffered intensely from being a mere imitation of boys education. It seems to me to be of tremendous symbolic significance that almost everywhere schoolgirls are made to wear male shirts and ties, and even when they go to co-educational schools. Coeducation can provide the profound modification of the education of both boys and girls - in the direction I seek. This beginning; to understand the inner self, the self of longings and impulses, of passion and creation.
The second point can be seen as arising in the conduct of international affairs. Some years ago Herbert Butterfield in his History and Human Relations pointed out this fact. It was easier to make adjustments in international strategy in the 19th century because of the relative absence of ideological conflict. To put it in my own words the nations were all acknowledged gangsters all of them seeking for power and loot. Now today the nations are imbued with ideology which has all the fervour of religious passion. With this goes a passionate moralism which makes it intensely difficult for them to get together. The other nation is bad, mine is good. The other nation is unholy, mine is a holy, the other nation is corrupt; my people are the people of integrity. That kind of judgement makes conciliation almost impossible.
Moralism is a deadly enemy also in social life and the most intimate relationships. It is the enemy of Christianity. Teachers are prone to become moralists. The teacher forgets that he has a demon inside his own personality when he calls his pupil a little devil. A great deal of delinquency is caused by the moralistic use of authority in schools. We cannot help people or help our children if we insist in standing in moral judgment on them, or if we give them the impression that the aim of the good life is to fit in to a moral pattern, however good. The concept of creativeness carries us far beyond concepts of right and wrong. This is recognised by Paul Tillich Of all the theologians of this age I think Paul Tillich is the one who has the most to say to me. He gives us the alternative to moralism in what he calls the existentialist attitude. This is one of involvement in contrast to a detached attitude of judgment. Existential in this sense can be defined as participating in a situation with the whole of one’s existence. With every kind of awareness that is possible to us.
For teachers this means not standing aside from our pupils but being personally with them in a mutually creative situation such as I have already described.
When I was working with other Quakers on the notorious pamphlet “Towards a QVS”[1] we found reason to condemn moralism as sterile and destructive. We quickly found that others were doing the same; that remarkable group of Cambridge Anglicans, specially including Harry Williams. The Bishop of Woolwhich. John Wren-Lewis read his contribution to the Penguin “Psychoanalysis Observed”. I found that rather more quietly a number many independent minded Catholics were moving in the same direction.
Rosemary (sic)
More recently there was a Guardian article by that interesting man Werner Pelz; Jew turned Christian, vehemently anti-moralist. It included this:-
Archive reference PP/KCB 6/6/4 document 16