Category: Schools

Positivity. Tell us a happy story, not a negative one.

Keeping positive entails holding both a fixed grin and  troubling intestines in the same social body.  Having a positive attitude is like smiling in the face of adversity, knowing that the train coming down the track is a train, and not the light at the end of the tunnel and yet somehow fixing  the smile to show resilience, pragmatism, an undaunted sense of optimism perhaps in opposition to everything your experience is telling you.  In Rogerian terms, unconditional positive regard is a counseling term used to encourage blanket acceptance and support of a person regardless of what the person says or does – and may have some link with the need to ‘be positive’ and upbeat in whatever situation one finds oneself: redundancy, bereavement, behaviour modification, the works.

The fixed grin of the positive attitude is essential at times when all the other options have been taken away and exist no longer.  Whilst attempting to develop a ‘positive attitude’ may lead to one straying into the realm of self help manuals which can be purchased frequently at motorway service stations, in this context, it might be enough to glance at the work of Dan Berg, Founder of Attitutor Services for the web site http://www.teach-kids-attitude-1st.com to alert us to the perils of mindlessly adopting the fixed grin of the positive attitude: In education positive attitude is not mere obedience. Nor is it unreflective or unthinking conformity. A positive attitude in education is about learning to be in touch with reality, which inherently means a life long process of continuously deepening our practice of disillusionment. (Berg, 2009)

The juxtaposition of education at the start of the phrase as somehow deepening our practice of disillusionment is an interesting one in that it seems counter-intuitive.  Surely education is about not disillusioning people, but about re-illusioning them? About enlightenment through illusion? Not becoming satisfied, becoming more experienced at being dis-illusioned? Of having our dreams and aspirations washed away from us in an inevitable tide of disillusionment due to the workings of some other bigger, more forceful realities?

Artists in schools: Preparing the workforce of the 21st century with the employment practices of the 19th

Employing artists in schools is frequently couched in terms of preparing the workforce of the 21st century (ie children). It’s a pity then that it’s the employment practices of the 19th century which are used to bring about this transformation.  This includes:

  • The absence of any job description or focused person specification;
  • The need to wait patiently at the dock gates (or, in contemporary terms, at the end of phone or email correspondence chain) for the whims, airs and graces of the dockside steward (aka programme co-ordinator)
  • No career structure;
  • Favouritism, lack of transparency about employment practices and avoiding anybody who looks like they might have an opinion, are going to argue back or at the very least critique the so-called work plan.

If you get through the dock yard and onto the boat, you can be confronted with wish lists of multiple dreams which contain all the packaged up school problems, organisational stupidities and blocks which need solving by some kind of outside magic – or failing that, the artist workshop who comes to school for 6 half days a term and is still expected to tolerate the sponsored bouncy castle event intruding into the rare time that has been allocated.

Go on, they say, wow us then… 

What IS the point of school?

What’s the point of schools any more?  Kids are socialites at 7, adults at 12 and doubting everything the teacher and the school stands for. Behaviour is questionable, deference is a quaint notion of a rose tinted past when teachers were head of the classroom and everyone knew and welcomed their places.

Curriculum is irrelevant and has been superceded by the Internet where children work out of their own curriculum and syllabus, perhaps blindly, perhaps intuitively, perhaps guided by who knows what – certainly things we parents and teachers know nothing or little about.

These are desperate existential times when all our purposes reasons and rationales have been thrown up into the air and scrutinised like never before. So what place the teacher? The school? The curriculum even?

For all that despair and deep questioning…there is still the essence of the adult / child relationship at the heart of the learning process – the adult / old knowledge can’t be swept away. There is history -culture – language – the other – to contend with.Stuff which resides in the old, the unfamiliar, the awkward, the stuff the young don’t / won’t access drily through the Internet and the fashionable modes of social networking.

What we are left with -.and what can’t be swept away in a tide of acronyms and text speak – is us – you and me here and now in real time and space and our awkwardnesses and misunderstandings.
What is the point of school, teachers, curriculum? To learn of the other, from the other; to socialise the unsocial and antisocial; to expose our awkwardnesses and differences and to acknowledge, value and celebrate difference and otherness.

No amount of befriending on facebook or googling the worlds ever expanding databases will ever be able to emulate the simple purpose of education and all it’s agents: the ability for me to understand you and you to understand me, in all our differences, three dimensional truths and multi dimensional complexities.