Education and Teaching 2/4

Bringing up children has always been a difficult challenge. How can we love and protect our children, and pass something on to them, and at the same time grant them their freedom, help them to develop a critical mind and sometimes accept that they will reject our received values and even what we pass on to them? How can we help them to become self-confident, dignified and curious? How can we instil into them both courage and a sense of solidarity? These questions have always been there, but in a global age in which traditions no longer provide reassuring points of reference and religious teachings play a dwindling role in structuring relationships between individuals and between the generations, it seems hard to rely upon a definite frame of reference and to refer to collectively accepted norms. We know and sense that our children need communications, limits, references and a sense of direction, but we no longer know just how to set about listening to them, offering them guidance or exerting an authority that gives advice without being oppressive.

The task is even more difficult for families with a spiritual or religious heritage and concerns. How can we transmit meaning, a relationship with one’s being, a relationship with God, a morality and an ethics, and a taste for introspection when the culture of entertainment and mass communications seems to be sweeping everything away? Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian and Muslim parents all share the same haunting concerns with the depositaries of age-old African and Asian traditions: how can we transmit to and how can they educate the children? How can we live out the meaning we have chosen without imposing it upon children who have chosen nothing, and how can we love them without smothering them? The challenge is tremendous, and no model seems to be readily available. Time is short, the danger is growing, and we no longer know just how to handle our authority as parents in contemporary societies.

The pendulum seems to swing from one extreme to the other, and all parents feel their way and experiment, usually with the best of intentions. Some want to listen to their children, understand their needs, meet their expectations and believe that it is important to negotiate with them as to how to meet their requirements, as to how to exercise their authority, and to what purpose. In our day, spaces and demands for freedom have to be managed. That is the argument behind Simon Soloveychik’s famous book Parenting for Everyone (1977), which insists on the need for a ‘negotiation pedagogy’ if we wish to train ‘free people’. The interesting and paradoxical thing about his approach is his preliminary postulate: the essence of pedagogy is not psychology but ethics.. He is attempting to get away from the many psychology-based schools of thought that have become lost in the maze of interiority. We should indeed listen to our children, support them and negotiate with them, but Solovevich also argues that establishing goals and limits is also essential: a pedagogical ethics. Traditional milieus, in contrast, wish to resist and to be stricter about maintaining a conventional sense of respect and authority. Frames of reference are established, norms are known, and children should understand both the rules and the expectations of their parents and teachers. One should Dare to Discipline, to use the title of a book by the American evangelist James Dobson, who associates the breakdown of marriages with a loss of moral sense and of respect for rules and parental authority. In Southern societies and cultures, as in immigrant families in the West and in families with a spiritual and religious heritage, authority looks like a weapon that can provide protection against the excesses of an age that is increasingly seen as having lost its values and principles. Rules are often imposed, and ‘respect’ is what is expected of children: there is little room for freedom and critical thinking. One of the references used by Muslim communities in the West is Meeting the Challenge of Parenting in the West by Ekram and Muhammad Beshir. The authors argue for the need to resist the authoritarian trend and outline a more balanced approach that encourages dialogue and discussion. Others react against this view and argue, often in the name of an excusive love, that children should be protected from themselves by an authority relationship that in effect denies them any autonomy.Once again, a balance has to be struck between respect and critical awareness: genuine respect should be critical, and criticism should remain respectful.

Education is a matter of establishing both a distance and a balance. As we have seen, teachers and psychologists may well argue over priorities, methods and sometimes objectives, but they are all agreed that parenting is very difficult. It is all the more difficult in that our life rhythms, and the choices made by governments, public services and the social organization as a whole do not prioritize ‘education’. Educating children does not make money and is not immediately profitable investment. And when the logic of economics does take charge of family affairs, the outcome is often disastrous. In the West, lifestyles change very quickly, time is short and finding institutional support for families is a problem. As a result, people are having fewer and fewer children. The demographic statistics for the richer and more industrialized countries tell us a great deal about how people’s relationships with themselves, children and education are changing in a world where day-to-day life seems increasingly merciless.

According to the traditional distribution of roles, parents transmit meaning, values, and good behaviour, whilst schools and teachers transmit learning and skills (though in actuality, their respective functions are not, fortunately quite so clear-cut). The same disaffection can be observed in the realm of teaching and parenting: schoolteachers and educationalists seem to have lost their former prestige. Teachers once possessed both knowledge and authority, and were the guardians of the norm. They are no longer acknowledged to have any specific status or real moral authority. People joke that they are ‘overpaid’ and enjoy ‘long holidays’. Their value no longer lies in the noble function of transmitting knowledge, but in economic parameters (or league tables such as in the UK) calculated in terms of labour power and the jobs market. The complaint that teachers are very often overpaid is still heard, but the whole educational system is now being re-evaluated in terms of economic competitiveness. Schools are no longer seen as the exclusive preserve of public service or as a state-funded investment priority. Private investors, multinationals, big companies and financial groups are invited to make up for the state’s shortcomings. The issue is not simply that of the (dangerous) privatization of education. The very function of a public sector that was once responsible for providing universal education and, more important, protecting equality of opportunity, is coming under challenge. The decision to prioritize economic logic can have only one outcome: the aim will always be to encourage competition, to fund the elite and to identify the ‘best’ students . . . or in other words those who do best in the job market. Such is the spirit behind the conclusions of the Lisbon Special European Council of March 2000. The phrasing is quite explicit: the aim was to promote, by 2010, ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth and with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion’. The economic logic and terminology are quite obvious. Campaigns to resist this trend have been launched in the United States, Europe and Africa. Sharp debates and protest campaigns brought together teachers, parents and educationalists in New York when it was proposed to put some state schools under the control of the public management firm Edison (the American system is already highly privatized). French teachers went on strike in 2003 for similar reasons, and rejected a decentralization that would have paved the way for the growing privatization of schools and education. In Nigeria, there were mass political, trade union and popular protests when the government tried to privatize the country’s ‘Unity Schools’. The privatization plan was dropped in 2007. Similar protests greeted the World Bank’s proposals everywhere from South America to Africa and Asia. Education has become a commercial venture, even in those disadvantaged societies where the best elements will benefit from the ‘positive discrimination’ that allows the North to select the South’s best minds or those it needs most in various fields. The South will continue to produce minds at a loss. The South used to be exploited and despoiled of its raw materials; the ageing societies of the North now need its grey matter. Teachers’ loss of status and state disinvestment policies with respect to education both reveal the depth of the crisis affecting educational systems all over the world, East and West, North and South. We have to choose: Schools or Markets? to use the apt title of the collective volume edited by Deron R. Boyles (2004) on the effects of privatization in the United States.

 And yet we are all aware of the importance of both education and teaching. Family breakdown, violence on the streets and in schools, the lack of norms and the flouting or rejection of authority are all phenomena that transform teachers into improvised educators who sometimes take the place of parents. Each group makes the other take responsibility for its own shortcomings. Parents are no longer doing their job! Teachers are lazy! In the meantime, politicians make grand speeches, and there is a plethora of ‘structural’ educational reforms. Our societies, on the other hand, are caught in a deadlock and cannot escape the vicious circle: teachers have a poor image, parents feel guilty, there is a lack of state investment in schools, vast numbers of young people seem to be drifting away, and the social divide is widening. Everything that is said is increasingly contradictory. Everyone wants ‘egalitarian’ state schools for all, but there are already two or three tiers within the state system. Despite the devoted efforts of so many teachers, some schools are second-class institutions, and their pupils already know that the future holds little for them. It is not surprising that secular, faith-based and private community schools are being established in an attempt to compensate for inequalities: we cannot both introduce the market logic of competition into the state system and reject, or denounce, the privatization of education on philosophical, religious or cultural grounds. States no longer offer their citizens much of a choice.

Our relationship with parenting and education reveals the deep contradictions that lie at the heart of the global economy and culture. We speak of protecting families and democratizing schools, but the logics of productivity and competition in fact force us to adopt family and social policies that have precisely the opposite effect. We tend to disparage stay-at-home fathers or mothers who devote their time to educating their children and teachers who do transmit knowledge. Children from richer and better-protected families have little difficulty in acquiring the selfconfidence, autonomy, critical minds and curiosity they need if they are to make progress and find fulfilment. They may well have little sense of solidarity, but that has never been a prerequisite for climbing the ladder to social success. Children from more modest families find that their status poses problems both at school and in society. Injustice is piled upon injustice.

Contemporary societies cannot hope to solve the problems of our age unless they face up to the crises that are inherent within them. A necessary, and complementary approach to education and training means first of all that we must take the role of families seriously and begin to value the status of teachers. The obsession with reforming educational methods and structures must be resisted as a matter of urgency: modern times challenge us to redefine the content of what is taught in our schools and the priorities of what children learn within the family. Teaching, which is both a public domain and a product of public service, must be discussed in terms of those objectives, and in the light of social justice and equality of opportunity. Everyone has the right to be self-confident and autonomous, to think critically and to be creative. That is what allows an individual to become a free citizen: an autonomous conscience as his parents want, a responsible being as society wishes. The choice could not be more political. Surrendering to the logic of economics (and of the advantages offered by the big multinationals) will not produce the desired results. Education ‘under pressure’ and ‘efficient’ teaching will ‘produce’ money-making machines, and not human beings with a propensity to share.