Chill Winds and the Spiritual Visions of Maria Montessori and David Blunkett

CHILL WINDS AND THE SPIRITUAL VISIONS OF MARIA MONTESSORI AND DAVID BLUNKETT

Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Conference, Cardiff University, 7-10 September 2000

Symposium: Issues in the Teaching and Learning of Humanities and Citizenship Within the Primary School. Friday 8th September 2000

Dr Martin Ashley University of the West of England Bristol

Introduction: A Believer in Exile.

I have come to regard myself as what John Spong has aptly described in another context as a believer in exile (Spong, 1998). I will borrow his metaphor. For seventeen years I was a school teacher. I still work now in education. However, I am in exile from the land I once inhabited as a school teacher. That was a land in which I had a high degree of professional autonomy, the basis of a creative and imaginative approach which sustained my interest in and satisfaction with school teaching. It was a world in which research and research culture played a significant part. The reflective teacher and action research were significant aspects of my professional life. It was also a land that was centred around children. Their happiness, their enthusiasm for school, their excitement in the activities and adventures I designed for them was my reward.

There may be some here today who recognise this land. There may be some for whom the metaphor believer in exile has some resonance. Inherent in the metaphor is always the hope of a return from exile. I think I nurture such a hope. If I did not, I would by now have given up on education and found an easier way of earning a living. However, there are some difficult questions to face. Perhaps the most difficult is that of how we got exiled in the first place. I think that is a rather profound question when it comes to Citizenship Education. Citizenship Education offers two things. First, it offers the chance to develop something new. We have a framework for PSHE and Citizenship at Key Stages 1 & 2, but we do not have a wealth of experience of “what works”. It also offers us the opportunity to reflect on the nature of teaching as a profession and the reasons why some of us feel that we are in exile. Exile is a key notion in citizenship.

My approach to this issue is through the notion of spiritual visions. Let me define a spiritual vision. A spiritual vision is a profound belief about ultimate value, meaning and purpose. It is a belief that is strong enough to motivate one to work tirelessly and ceaselessly to bring about what one believes in. My aim in this contribution is to facilitate some reflection upon the spiritual visions that may have got us where we are now, and that we may nurture about where we want to go. I begin by contrasting an idealistic vision that has inspired much educational practice in the twentieth century Martin Ashley Chill Winds and Spiritual Visions with a vision that seems to be largely responsible for our current practice. I then reflect upon why I share neither of these visions and offer some thoughts for a way out of exile.

The Priority of Spiritual Visions.

Spiritual visions are profoundly important because they act from the core of our being to form our world view, and our motivation to influence and manipulate the world and our place in it. Spiritual visions govern what we believe to be true and what we believe to be important. They may or may not be associated with religious experience or a religious outlook. They are, however, inseparably and universally part of the human condition. To be human means to be self-conscious and given to the process of believing. Beliefs may be rational or irrational. They may be based upon science or superstition. They are, however, of the utmost importance in explaining our actions as humans. What people believe, as a result of their spiritual visions, is very important.

We all believe something about any situation in which we find ourselves. Beliefs are behind the actions of any human individual or group. Some of us, the majority in fact, are content to reflect upon the range of available beliefs and go along with the ones the seem most appealing or right to us. Some, of course, reflect more than others. Yet others, a smaller number, convinced of the rightness of the particular beliefs they have espoused, feel that they have the authority or the mission to proselytise on behalf of those beliefs. Yet others, even smaller in number, are responsible for original thought and the creation of new beliefs. There is no moral hierarchy here. A curious notion exists amongst the new moral right that the spiritual is “the source of the will to do what is right” (Beck, 1999) A little reflection upon some of the injustice and atrocities of the twentieth century that have been perpetrated by those who felt they had the authority to enforce their beliefs upon whole populations should quickly dispel any notion that the spiritual is prior to the moral. Spirituality must always be subject to moral critique. This is of profound importance for Citizenship Education, and we forget the lessons of history at our peril.

Maria Montessori’s spiritual vision was based upon respect for the child and an awareness of the great potential of the child. She dreamed of a world at peace and the creation of a world that would be remade through the education of children. This dream, rather than the cognitive dimension of her philosophy, was the inspiration for her pedagogy of a social movement embracing peace, the alleviation of poverty and a new status for women. (Kavanagh, 1999). Montessori abhorred the conventional education system of her day, and was particularly opposed to the behaviourist principles which were governing its development. Whilst she placed faith in the child, she also placed faith in the teacher, and in the training of teachers. Careful selection of the right kind of young people to train as teachers was crucial to her vision. Her conception of the teacher as a role model, a facilitator, guardian and philosopher would clearly be quite at odds with the conception of “teacher” that has been arrived at by the Teacher Training Agency today.

These visions occurred before Montessori had lived through two world wars. With the ability that we now have to review the twentieth century and all its horrors,

- 2 - Martin Ashley Chill Winds and Spiritual Visions atrocities and injustices, a Rousseau-like faith in some form of original goodness in nature locked up in the child seems at best naive. The progressive ideals that drove education between the 1944 and 1988 Education Acts certainly did not lead to the utopian conclusions that Montessori and other liberal educators might have hoped for. Montessori, of course, has passed into history, and we can draw upon authoritative biographies such as Standing (1957) and Kramer (1976) as well as the historical record of Montessori inspired education. On the basis of such evidence, we might tentatively claim some insight into the “spiritual” (by which I mean deeply personal beliefs about ultimate meaning and purpose) dimension of Montessori’s mind.

Of course it would be more than presumptuous of me to claim such knowledge of the private workings of Mr Blunkett’s mind. The spiritual vision which I ascribe to him is based simply upon a range of observations from which I conclude that two words seem particularly well suited to sum up his vision, which seems largely to have been realised. These are modernisation and, paradoxically, bureaucracy. (I use the word paradoxically because I observe Mr Blunkett to be both the ultimate source of volumes of paperwork whilst simultaneously the source of promises to reduce bureaucracy.)

For Mr Blunkett, the word “modernisation” seems to imply a movement forwards in time from an existing state of premodernity to the desired promised land of modernity. This is curious, for from the vantage point of the world created by my beliefs, one has to move backwards in time in order to reach the land of modernity. I would not describe myself as a postmodernist. However, when I read what Antony Giddens has to say about late modernity, or what Ulrich Beck has to say about reflexive modernity, I do at least feel that I am not the only believer exiled from Blunkett’s world.

Yates (1999), in commenting on Hargreave’s critique of the secondary school as a “quintessentially modernist institution” observes that the model of the person and what may be of value is severely circumscribed within rational modernity in ways that may fail to address pupils’ actual social and political futures (p 180). The schools that result from the Blunkett vision are, according to Yates, Fordist through their mode of cognitive production and bureaucracy as a model of human relationships. As Woods et al. (1998) suggest, the schools that have been created by QCA and OFSTED still reflect the ideas, basic organisation and technology of the nineteenth century. Little doubt, then, that one must move backwards in time in order to follow Mr Blunkett’s vision.

The modernisation project, to which Mr Blunkett attaches himself with missionary zeal is far from being Mr Blunkett or even Mr Blair’s own creation, however. It was the previous Conservative administration that introduced to this country the principle of curriculum design by nostalgia (Yates, 1999). As Gewirtz et. al. (1995) point out, curriculum specification by the assertion of the personal prejudices held by the incumbent secretary of state seems to be independent of the party of government. If Seymour Papert is to be believed, curriculum design by nostalgia has something of a global trend to it. Certainly, he sees Blunkett style modernisation as a problem in the USA: “Our president is always talking about bridges to the twenty-first century and yet is building bridges to the nineteenth. In the nineteenth century education was structured in certain ways. It was decided what people should know. Even then it

- 3 - Martin Ashley Chill Winds and Spiritual Visions was only a tiny sliver of the knowledge that existed at that time. Today, it is a microscopically small piece of the totality of human knowledge. Why is it argued fanatically that it should be this, rather than that, that is taught? If you push it, you find that they don’t have any reasons.” (Papert, 1998).

I disagree with Papert on one point. I think that if you push it, you find that there are reasons. It is just that they are not ones that have necessarily been demonstrated to be sound. The modernist project seems to foster in politicians of all parties the illusion that their interventions in the curriculum are justified on the grounds that they are “objective” through being “value-free”. It also seems to have created an anti- rationalist culture in which there is an acceptance that those able to reach positions of power through aggressive assertion of their own beliefs must be right. The extraordinary personal sensitivity of the current chief inspector of schools to criticism by certain academics who do not share his particular set of prejudices may be indicative of this tendency. Yet, if we are to criticise the principle of curriculum design by nostalgia, we must not simply replace one nostalgia with another. I am painfully aware that I am not in exile from the Garden of Eden, and it is to this problem that I now turn.

The Democratisation of Spiritual Visions

It hardly needs reiteration that the Montessorian belief in a goodness within the child is firmly rejected by the modernist project which has reached its bureaucratic apotheosis. The modernist belief in a Fordist production line of measured cognitive outputs with targets set by hierarchical supervision and detailed rules is unlikely to compromise with visions based on faith in teachers. However, I think we should treat any tendencies to imagine exile from a golden age with scepticism. It was Braverman (1974) who originated the term “proletarianization” to describe the deprofessionalisation of teaching that seems to have become an accepted part of contemporary culture. Yet I would question the notion that teaching, particularly in primary schools, has ever been truly a profession. The current obsession with target setting and performance management is, after all, nothing new.

Primary school teaching cannot trace its ancestry to the definition of professionalism that is given by James, Ashcroft & Orr-Ewing (1999). There is no honourable history of relatively high financial remuneration supported by a set of skills based on a body of theoretical knowledge; a well-defined and extensive period of education with rigorous testing before qualification; a code of conduct or ethics; self-regulation; altruism (for instance, putting the interests of the client or public first); and control of entry to the profession. Primary teaching may score against some of these criteria (altruism, perhaps) but certainly not comprehensively against all of them. The tradition from which primary teaching stems is that of a subordinate, predominantly female workforce, thought incapable of collegiate responsibility, denied a body of professional knowledge and regulated through such instruments as payment by results and inspection.

The 1944 - 1988 period was a time when it was hoped that this would change, the emergence of the B Ed degree being one of the more visible signs of the academicisation and potential professionalisation of primary school teaching.

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Montessori’s spiritual vision, of course, saw a new status for women and many of the ideas that were to become the professional knowledge of primary teachers prior to 1988 were drawn from the visions of the child-centred progessives. The movement for the professionalisation of primary teaching reached its highest aspirations in such lofty ideals as the activity of teachers as “public intellectuals” (Aronowitz and Giroux, 1991) or even a collegiality which requires autonomy and the synergy of teaching, training, research and consultancy (Parsons & Platt, 1968).

There was no fundamental conflict between my personal spiritual vision and a vision such as this. Hence, I was happy, indeed proud, to study for a B Ed. Over two decades later, however, I find myself wondering whether Critical Social Theory as espoused by writers such as Fien & Hillcoat (1996), and through which the reflective practitioner model is defended against the classroom competency model, ever existed. It is tempting to lay all the blame for my exile upon the present modernist regime, but in truth my exile began before this. It began when I realised that my enthusiasm for research and “public intellectual activity” was not shared by most of my teacher colleagues. I recall an initiative remarkably like the present Literacy Hour which I promoted twelve years ago through an action research project. At the time, it was ignored by colleagues wedded to the “hear every child read every day but never teach the class phonics” ideology. Similarly, I seem to recall something like persecution for suggesting explicit teaching of mathematics rather than “keep quiet and get on with your maths scheme” some ten years before the numeracy strategy.

I recall an expensively funded and visionary action research project on underachieving boys, written a good eight years before underachieving boys became a fashionable panic in education. I don’t think it was ever even read by any of the senior managers who sanctioned the expenditure, even though it said things that have “recently been discovered” by inspectors and education ministers. I hope this doesn’t sound like sour grapes. I have done well enough since then. The first point I am making is the straightforward one that there are many other talented and creative teachers who combine a critical, reflective practice with vocational service and a motivating vision. The second point is rather more sinister. Why have we needed the modernist project to motivate large numbers of teachers to consider changing the ways they do things? Could Mr Blunkett have some kind of a point?

The challenge of citizenship calls us to re-examine rigorously our most cherished beliefs. What is wrong, at the most fundamental level with democracy? Why, in a supposedly democratic country that has previously supported the professionalisation of primary teaching, have we regressed to an undemocratic form of modernism? Why is it that those who are most able to assert their personal prejudice through manipulation of image and media seem to be ascendant over those who reflect critically on their practice and undertake painstaking research? Could it be that there is no effective alternative to modernism?

If education is to progress to late or reflexive modernity, I think we need fundamentally to review our collective spiritual visions with the aim of democratising them. I am in agreement with Newby (1996) that a mature spiritual vision cannot depend upon one master story, still less upon the creation of a cult figure. I could no more become a Montessorian than a Blunkettian (I am aware of precedent for the former word, though not the latter.) Absolutely crucial to this must be the spiritual

- 5 - Martin Ashley Chill Winds and Spiritual Visions development of teachers. By this I mean allowing them to reflect on the ultimate meaning and purpose of the job they do and encouraging them to engage in creative ways of doing it better.

We must recognise collectively that modernism requires the work force that serves it to be broken in spirit. Many of those attracted to teaching have not, traditionally, been the kind of people who are easily broken in spirit. The process can thus be a much more painful, protracted and stressful experience for them that would be the breaking the spirit of those who, by inclination, are quite content to function as robots on a production line. The point I am making here is similar to one that was made by Laurence Stenhouse. “There can be no curriculum development without teacher development” might be reformulated as “there can be no spiritual development of children without spiritual development of teachers”, and this is profoundly worrying for the future of democracy.

We must put our own house in order also. I believe that the creation of “new universities” has exposed the degree to which the feminist academic project has lost some of the vigour and momentum it may once have had. If feminism has reminded us of the possibilities of co-operation, sharing and perhaps a little humility, we should reflect upon the degree to which hegemonic masculine values such as aggressive competition and self-promotion are found in our corporate behaviour. The research community at times seems no more immune from a spirituality that ends in self- promotion than the political community and its acolytes in the enforcement agencies. This is also a key issue for our professionalism. Ainley (1994) draws heavily upon the concept of professional groups as self-serving rather than committed to client welfare when he questions the professionalism of the self-proclaimed academic elite. Professionalism is not of itself benign. George Bernard Shaw reminds us of this in his 1906 play The Doctor’s Dilemma where the line “all professions are conspiracies against the laity” occurs.

Conclusion

The democratisation of spiritual visions in education can only occur if teaching and research are recovered as autonomous moral activities. This requires us to see spiritual visions themselves as a democratic mental function. We cannot hope to progress towards a mature late modernity on the basis of an infantile infatuation with the thoughts of an admired guru. The democratisation of spiritual visions compels us to recover our own confidence and to draw on, respect, acknowledge and affirm the creativity of others. Late or reflexive modernity will dawn in education when we have learned to use modern communications technology as a means of doing this. The formulation of a collective vision must also include a collegial accountability which extends beyond the bounds of defending professional interests.

We must ask ourselves whether our motivation is simply to recover our professionalism from the perceived malign forces of modernity, or whether it is to share what we have with, and to accept critique from, all whose lives are touched by the educational process. Given that that is potentially everybody, progressive forms of liberal democratic citizenship based upon the democratisation of spiritual visions

- 6 - Martin Ashley Chill Winds and Spiritual Visions present us with perhaps the most challenging spiritual vision in history. Would that practice in Citizenship Education should emerge through this vision.

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