If the product description assures ‘safety’, beware.

 

The safety of our children in schools is a very tender subject, where honest and exploratory discussion is proscribed by automatic fearful reactions. To discern what are non-negotiable standards of safety and what are valid and acceptable risks is an obligation which is impossible to fulfill if the public dialogue is characterised by preemptive righteous indignation.

 

A regime of 100% safety for anyone, including our children, is an undesirable and neurotic ideal which will have (is already having) far-reaching consequences in education and society at large.

 

The traditional teacher/pupil relationship is analogous to a consciously engaged marital or parent/child relationship. In the best instances of any such relationship the boundaries of minds, and bodies, self identification and self interest can expand and contract to include and exclude ‘the other’ without the individuals relinquishing their own centres of gravity.

 

 

The unspeakable fact is that we may have to accept a level of negative experience and harm in our educational life if we are not to prevent a robust and functional educational result.

 

Our current attitudes to education are a blurring of a sentimental and ephemeral idea of ‘democracy’ and of infantile consumerism. As students we seek to purchase an end of our ignorance, but as consumers we simultaneously assume our competence to assess the product (and those providing it). We pay for a ride, but then requisition the driver’s seat.

 

Disastrously, our contemporary generation of teachers have either already been cultured and conditioned by this dynamic, or have been forced to accept it. They are now the passive/reactive partner in the educational relationship.

 

So the ignorant partner is now claiming the democratic right to define the bounds and parameters of their education, and the informed partner is in the position not of setting the rhythm, the volume, the depth of the learning experience, but of reacting to the uninformed and undirected reactions of the student. A closed reactive loop is not a healthy situation.

 

Good learning experiences are rhythmic, textured, lyrical, dramatic, inspirational, comic, humbling, ennobling. None of these qualities coexist easily with reactions based on inexperience, fear, and infantile self-aggrandizement. (Nor with educational league tables). A good teacher’s first impulse will be to calm these knee jerk reactions and establish rhythm and harmony. This allows the student to recognise and enjoy the ebb and flow of syncopation and dissonance without fear and disorientation. By definition the student shouldn’t be expected to manifest these qualities themselves, even if  they were capable of doing so. They are there to develop their own learning capacities using the reflection of the clear mirror of their teacher.

 

This can’t happen within the trust-free zone of our current educational institutions. As all institutions are in their way educational, this argument could have relevance to health care, the law, penal policy, religion, journalism, and economic, artistic and political life. Unjust litigation, paranoia, malice, and grotesque over-reactivity are the background to relations between pupil-teacher, patient-doctor, citizen-politician, consumer-supplier, reader-journalist.  

 

All power is susceptible to corruption, and whatever can be done to avoid exploitation of power should be done. The abuse of authority is iniquitous. It’s also a commonplace target of our news media (who manage to practice moral ambivalence and experience moral indignation simultaneously).

 

But to dissolve the psychic glue that binds human experience into a useful social, personal, and spiritual metaphor? And simply out of fear? It’s an astonishing act of adolescent arrogance.

 

Modern teaching policies and methods seem largely to rise from fear of those who have personal power. But to think that we will gain our educational ends by outlawing the sweet intimacy between the wisdom of the experienced and the cheerful humility and receptivity of the inexperienced is blindness.

 

Education in all areas and relationships is largely an outcome of the practice of Love. Love can never be eliminated, thank God, but it can be hobbled and driven to desperate and inappropriate ends. This is almost worse.

 

The bath water may be dirty and cold and need to be changed, but the baby won’t survive the journey out the window – and the baby is the whole point of the exercise.