This paper is intended to provoke discussion about the role of education in a democracy, by drawing some parallels between dilemmas faced by educators and dilemmas faced by democracy. It is thus about educational leadership, but not in the sense that is common in public debate in Scotland at the moment. It is not about management structures, or meeting targets, or how to respond to or circumvent the latest in the avalanche of circulars that cascades from the education ministry. Nor is it directly about the activities that are usually intended by the term ‘leadership’ in the recommendations of the education inspectorate, where it is essentially a matter of providing good models for teachers and students in a school so that learning may be more effective. That kind of leadership (unlike responding to circulars) is important, and what is said here does have some implications for how it is exercised, but it is not what this is about. We are discussing here leadership looking outward from the school. Indeed, if there is one grand aim behind this paper it is to argue that we need to recover the idea that teachers are community leaders. With the decline of the social influence of churches, trades unions, locally owned business enterprises, and other traditional community organizations – and with the catastrophic fall in the authority which democratically elected politicians have suffered – it may be that the teacher is now, in many communities, the only person who can carry the weight of ethical and even political leadership in the face of the kinds of problems that are sketched here.
Three Educational Dilemmas
Gerald Grant and Christine Murray, in their fascinating account of the history of teaching in the USA over the past century, conclude that all teachers – in whatever sector, from university to nursery – face three absolutely inescapable dilemmas. Are they there for their expertise or to provide nurture? Is their role to transmit existing culture or to transform it? And is their effectiveness due to their own individual charisma or to the collegiate strength of their school? We deal with each of these in turn, but the point to bear in mind throughout is that these are irresolvable. Grant and Murray are not saying that these are choices teachers have to make once and for all; they are tensions that can never be avoided permanently without self-deception. They are the reasons why teaching is so rich and rewarding, but also why it is such a source of frustration and even despair.
Expertise or nurture?
We live in a supremely student-centered age. Gradually from the 1920s, insistently from the 1960s, and overwhelmingly in a time when students are thought of as consumers, teachers are expected to teach in a student-centered way. It is true that the jargon changes, even to the extent that the slogan of ‘child-centredness’ that was popular among theorists and eventually policymakers from the 1920s to the 1960s has now acquired an aura of the quaintly na•ve or of the lunatically progressive. But, in this debate, there is really not a great deal that separates it from such modish ideas as that each student’s unique learning style ought to be respected, and that each learner has a unique combination of multiple intelligences (such as the mathematical, the linguistic, the aesthetic, the emotional, and so on). The aim of teaching, we are told by policymakers and inspectors now, is to cultivate autonomous learners, and – in Scotland especially – this often goes along with a belief that children lack self-confidence and need to be inspired to take control of their own lives. This kind of student-centredness is then both a means and an end: by instilling confidence, it can inspire the motivation for learning without which we cannot create a more confident, entrepreneurial nation.
Now, in one sense, this is simply what effective teaching has always had to do. No teaching worth anything at all can afford to ignore where its students start from, what their preferred learning styles are, what their several personal aspirations are and might, with encouragement, be. But notice that even the most enthusiastic of nurturers in this sense expect the teacher to do the nurturing, to have the wisdom – the expertise – to know what lies beyond the horizon of the learner. If we are to believe the recommendations of the currently very fashionable thinker Vygotsky, the key skill in teaching is to know about the learner’s ‘zone of proximal development’ – what is just visible on their horizon, so that, with imagination and hard work, they can feasibly reach it. By the very definition of this, the learner does not yet know (although may instinctively be on the point of grasping) what is to be reached for: only a teacher can see that.
People can learn how to think only if they have something worthwhile to think about, and knowing what that might require the teacher’s wisdom. The same might be said of the skills of citizenship. Without knowledge, they are useless, even meaningless in a truly citizenship-like way: there is little point in having the capacity to engage with the structures of power in a society if you don’t know what these are and what they signify.
More generally, we also have philosophers’ well-developed – and ancient, in the sense of Aristotelian – view that teachers are a source of authority, that teaching is an intrinsically ethical activity because it models the good life, the educated existence, as well as enunciating it. This is sometimes expressed colloquially as ‘Do what I do, not what I tell you to do’. It is something that was a common expectation of teachers by people contributing to Scotland’s national debate on education in 2002-3. In the focus groups run as part of the parallel inquiry into the purposes of education by the Scottish Parliament’s education committee, lone parents in one part of Glasgow put this rather well. Their children were faced with all sorts of invidious pressures – pressures to take drugs, pressures from violent threats, commercial pressures to put pressure on their parents to buy things for them that they could not afford. In that ethical jungle, one of the few sources of moral authority was the children’s teacher.
So we simply cannot escape the importance of teachers, however, nurturing they aspire to be. To be able to nurture effectively, the teacher has to have expertise; not to have that role of leading students is to abdicate responsibility, to subvert education by anarchy in the worst sense, and – in the actual world in which we teach – to do a disservice to those students who cannot draw on the examples and guidance of other people, of parents, of peers. In that obligation to be wise in the service of liberation lies the essence of this first dilemma.
Transmitting culture or challenging it?
Debating any cultural questions in education can sound rather odd these days when all non-economic purposes are officially ignored by politicians, policy documents, the media, senior managers, and so on. Yet cultural selection is actually unavoidable because even an economistic rationale is a form of it. And any debate in this area inevitably gets us back, at some point, to Matthew Arnold’s view that the purpose of education is to pass on ‘the best that has been thought and said. In our context here, it ought always to be remembered, as a preliminary, what it was that provoked him into writing that. It was his experience as a school inspector in England in the middle of the nineteenth century, and his conclusion that, unless the schools of England paid attention to questions of culture, then the nation was condemned to spiritual decay and, because of that, to economic disaster as well. As a tentative democrat, he distrusted the philistinism of the middle class. If he had doubts about the democracy that he perceptively saw as inevitable, it was that he feared that such a bourgeoisie would never provide the working class with the cultural understandings that are needed to rule wisely; but he never doubted that such wide diffusion of culture ought to happen, and could do so. He did not share Thomas Carlyle’s pessimism in this regard, and hence – despite his doubts – did not share his antipathy to democratic rule. In that respect, the ethical English liberalism of Arnold survives better into the communitarianism of post-Calvinist Scotland than does Carlyle’s rather more historically Scottish skepticism. I suspect also that Arnold’s anticipation of communitarian democracy resonates rather better with the values that tend to pervade Scottish public debate today than they do with the more aggressive liberalism of Blairite debate in England.
So a curriculum is always a cultural selection, whether we have done it ourselves or not; the interesting question is then what criteria are used to do the selecting – to determine what counts as ‘the best for us, now. This is perhaps most obvious in universities or in the senior years of secondary education, and so some examples from the primary stages might illustrate the point more pertinently. On the whole, in Scotland, to children aged about 10 upwards, we choose to teach French or German rather than, say, Gaelic, Spanish, or Urdu. That is a selection that is not a mere technicality. It says something about the kind of people we are, and what are our internal and external understandings of ourselves. To roughly the same age group we teach about Mary Queen of Scots or about Victorian cities nowadays, rather than about the Covenanters or the Clearances. Either of these latter choices would shape our self-understanding in different ways from our current practice. Slightly later, around age 12, we are unanimous in teaching algebraic manipulation rather than Euclidean geometry as the starting point of mathematics proper. Again, that is a cultural not merely a technical choice, not only in the sense that it relates us in different ways to a certain idea of the origins of European civilization (although rather obscuring the Arabic foundation of algebra), but also in the kinds of ways in which we understand mathematics itself, for example as a computational activity rather than as a practice that relates intimately to social spaces and to the aesthetic of those which we create ourselves through our architecture. And – a final example – we teach now that the natural world is something to be respected, conserved, and held in trust, an unprecedented sentiment in the history of education, where it has mostly been seen as a resource or even as a threat to human survival.
So education selects. But there are two meanings of tradition at work here, consideration of which indicates the inescapability of the second dilemma – a tradition as what is received (‘what has been thought and said’) and tradition as a refinement of that (‘the best É’). The process of creating a curriculum inevitably involves us in judging what we have received, even if we do that only implicitly, or merely follow tacitly the judgments that others have made. And so a proper engagement with the curriculum by students must include an engagement with these judgments. Can a child really understand the significance of Mary Queen of Scots or of the Covenanters without understanding the other (or, more strictly, the strand in tradition represented by the other)? Can a proper education then really avoid an engagement with the task of selecting, which must always also be a task of evaluating and hence of critically engaging with received ideas at any one moment? It remains true, as Raymond Williams reminds us, that the second part of Arnold’s dictum is often ignored. The purpose of becoming acquainted with ‘the best that has been thought and said’ is action: ‘through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly and mechanically’.
In educational circles – which tend these days, as they probably always have done, to the romantically radical – this point about critical engagement might be rather more congenial than the earlier point about the importance of what is engaged with, the importance of ‘what has been thought and said before deciding what is ‘the best in our judgment, now. So to avoid this point about critical judgment becoming too congenial, let me mention an example that is rather more awkward to a liberal understanding. What should our orientation be, as teachers, to the legacy of European culture? If multiculturalism means developing a proper appreciation of all (or at least a feasible assortment) of cultures, then ought not that to include the Christian legacies of a continent that is rather too easily caricatured as merely the source of imperialism, xenophobia, and a sort of mechanical rationalism? Can a student really be said even to have appreciated, say, the significance of Islam in the last 500 years without understanding its interaction with Christianity? Is that not even more true of Judaism? And are not the values which lead us to espouse multiculturalism not also in part a legacy of ideas of democracy and equal rights, which, whatever other debts they owe, undoubtedly in part depend on Christianity?
The point, again, is that the dilemma is inescapable. The necessity of culture – both logically, in the sense that it is ubiquitous, and ethically, in Arnold’s sense – has to be asserted when education seems dominated by philistinism to an even more thorough extent than Arnold feared when he wrote. But then the equal necessity of critical engagement with culture is of the very essence of education, not to overthrow it but to understand truly what the best is.
Inspiration or collegiality?
This last dilemma is perhaps rather more evident to anyone involved in teaching, or at least school teaching because we have been living recently through an important change in official attitudes to it. The process symbolized by the McCrone agreement on teachers’ conditions represents an assertion of collegiality, and so a sharp departure from the move away from it that had been growing since the 1980s. To some extent, this movie is based on good evidence that dispersed leadership is more effective than more concentrated styles, summarised, for example, by John MacBeath. Effective leaders learn, from their colleagues but also, in an educational institution, from their students. Effective leaders, therefore, encourage all the members of an institution to lead, because all are potential teachers of lessons about what the institution should be doing. And schools, where leadership is collective, are more likely to engage in genuine self-evaluation, and self-evaluation is more effective at bringing about sustained change than imposed evaluation. These principles are embodied in the important Scottish Executive discussion paper on leadership, a document that is rather more eloquently argued than most.
Yet, despite all the reservations about charismatic, individual leadership which this recent shift embodies, is that any more the final word than child-centredness was the end of the debate about student motivation? Is it not true that some people can command loyalty, trust, and respect, and can make people do things; and that other people cannot? It may be that different people in an organization can do this at different times, and in relation to different activities and purposes; but if the headteacher is fallible, then so is everyone else, and it is not obvious that the only way around this is to share our fallibility rather than temporarily efface it in deference to someone who does things better.
Moreover, even if that argument for some role for charisma is not accepted, is there not a contradiction between student-centredness and collegiality (even though these tend to be ideological soul-mates, as do their opposites)? If good teaching requires teachers to respond personally to each pupils’ abilities and problems, then an organization that is student-centered when looked at from below, as it were, needs to be teacher-centered when seen from above: collegiality can be suffocating to that inspiration which allows a teacher genuinely to respond to a child’s needs and capacities.
Collectives can be suffocating, but isolation is lonely and demoralizing. In this, as in the other two of Grant and Murray’s dilemmas, it is the unavoidability of each pole that is the point.
Three Democratic Dilemmas
I’ve been drawing some implications for the nature of democracy throughout, but let us look now at this more explicitly, again in terms of the three dilemmas.
Expertise or nurture?
You could argue that democracy is a radical experiment in learner-centredness, not only in the sense that Arnold might have agreed with – that democracy requires its voters to be educated – but also in the sense that taking part in the exercise of power is itself educative. Historically, the link between democracy and child-centered education tended to be the other way round – the belief that the only form of school organization that was consistent with democracy was one in which the rights and individualities of its students were respected. There has probably, in fact, been more agreement over that than over the precise organizational means by which it may be achieved, for example over whether various kinds of selection based on prior attainment do or do not better contribute to that end; both sides in these debates tend to share an over-riding focus on the needs of the learner.
Since democracy as a system of social organization (as opposed to the particular institutional forms that claim to embody it in any particular era) is even less in question than the principles of learner-centredness as I outlined them earlier, the difficult question then is how democracy copes with the need for expertise. We had a good instance of this in Scottish educational debates a few years ago, following the crisis that accompanied the first year of the Higher Still program of reform to the curriculum and assessment arrangements for the senior years of secondary school. The initial response as the crisis erupted in early autumn 2000 was sometimes to blame the very fact that the examination system was overseen by a quango, only indirectly responsible to the democratic process. But the debate which was subsequently sponsored by the Parliament’s Education Committee reached a more subtle conclusion – that expertise is needed, not only because we would not want direct political involvement in decisions about examinations, but also because assessment is an intrinsically complex matter that has to be overseen by people with appropriate expertise. The Committee thus performed a valuable service to Scottish democracy, and this was one of the earliest instances of the new Parliament thinking through in practice what the principles of democracy that are embodied in its founding ideals actually meant. Accountability does not mean popular control; transparency is actually better achieved if consultation is about principles rather than technical details that are properly preserved by specialists.
The role of professionals and therefore of expertise in a democracy can be asserted more generally. The campaign for a Scottish parliament was often cast as a populist skepticism about the professional rule, and many other political movements across the world have expressed similar sentiments in the last four or five decades, ever since the welfare state has seemed to be growing so big that it subverts the democratic impulses that led to its set up. These movements have been as often of the political right (Margaret Thatcher’s suspicion of public-sector professionals in their conspiracies against the laity) as of the left (the 1960s New Left, or the more recent New Labour). But, looking back now on the development of the state and of democracy over the past century, we can more reasonably say that professionals have been amongst the most powerful founders, defenders, and ethical models of the very idea of public welfare. Professionals, by the very fact of their professional commitment to their students, patients, and clients, have had a suspicion of the unfettered power of the market, but also a suspicion of the overweening power of bureaucracies. They have defended the rights of minorities even against populist threats: it was, for example, a committee of teachers and other educational interests that maintained the relative liberality of Scotland’s guidance on sex education at the time of the public acrimony over ‘Section 28’. Teachers and schools are where refugee children have found a haven in recent years, their languages and religions relatively more respected than in the wider society, their experience of racism understood and, on the whole, acted upon fairly.
So professionals have been sometimes the guardians of democracy, their expertise necessary not only to its efficient functioning but also to the survival of its principles. Having found Matthew Arnold more congenial than Thomas Carlyle, we might nevertheless now find ourselves wanting to qualify that: the people, despite Thomas Jefferson’s enlightenment faith, are not always the best guardians of their own liberty, and properly ethical professionalism sometimes is more democratic than the popular rule.
Transmitting culture or challenging it?
The question of cultural transmission and renewal is as important for the nation as a whole – or indeed for the whole global polity – as it is for education. How does a nation deal with its own cultural legacy, and with the issues embodied in the multiplicity of cultures within its borders? It might even be argued that this is the biggest issue facing democracy following the international political events in recent decades, too neatly referred to as the legacy of the bombings in New York and Washington in September 2001 but actually gaining force for much longer. What degree of homogeneity is needed for democracy to function? How can the liberal freedom of critical dissent be encompassed within a common culture?
As with the question of selecting elements of a culture into a curriculum, that is a genuine dilemma. Neither pole is attractive ethically, because they entail offending minorities or offending the majority, and reconciling these is impossibly difficult. The dilemma cannot be solved merely by the superficially democratic assertion of the importance of the tradition that the majority embodies, because that, in practice, is too often actually demagogic. Nor can it be solved by the easy assertion of radical multiculturalism that leaves little room for more than superficial dialogue. The poles of the dilemma are also untenable logically: you can’t question a culture without having an intimate acquaintance with it, and so some cultural maintenance is essential even for encouraging dissent; but a culture atrophies if not renewed by questioning, and so some dissent is needed, from within and outside, if the transmission is to be of anything lastingly worthwhile.
Scottish democracy has rather too easily assumed that the nation does have a shared set of values, and it may be that our homogeneity is greater than in some places, including England and the USA. But that does not absolve Scottish democracy from responsibility for thinking about the wider question, for example as it affects the UK or Europe as a whole. The example sketched earlier about what we mean by Europe and the European cultural legacy is enjoined on anyone who asserts the value of any one part of European culture, such as the homogeneously Scottish instance.
It is then not surprising that these democratic dilemmas about what to do about culture have often appeared most controversially in schooling, precisely because this general cultural dilemma for a democratic society as a whole is indeed so closely analogous to the curricular dilemma in which teachers face all the time. It is also, though, a dilemma that affects later stages of education too. When universities were small places giving a grounding in general education to a small elite who would become professionals of various specialized kinds in due course, there was a fair amount of tacit agreement as to what the dominant values of our society were. Universities now educate far more people at a time when that agreement has withered. So what is the social purpose of all this massive new amount of education? What role should universities be preparing their students to take in society? Is it really enough to say that higher education is primarily, and in an undifferentiated way, about supplying the advanced skills needed by the economy? These are first of all educational questions, but – as in the dominant Scottish university tradition that the new mass system has superseded – they raise profoundly social and political ones too. Have the graduates of our universities and colleges for the most part acquired any advanced understanding of such questions, as opposed to carrying into adulthood the more introductory knowledge of the culture they acquired at school?
Inspiration or collegiality?
The final dilemma also has close analogs with the educational one: what is the nature of democratic leadership? Over many centuries, Scotland has had a somewhat ambivalent attitude to charismatic leadership. For every John Knox, John MacLean, Wendy Alexander, or Tommy Sheridan there are far more boring but worthy clerks, getting things done by unspectacular, cautious, incremental but certain change. Scottish charisma tends to be a minority cult except sometimes in nostalgic retrospect. The media at the moment has a tendency to worship charisma and transformation, and its alleged weakness in the Parliament is sometimes felt to be a national failing. But democracy itself is essentially based on low-key, consensual, cautious change, and that is certainly the aspiration embodied in the principles that the Scottish Parliament chose to govern its working. How do we resolve this? How do we hold in balance the tension between the wisdom of the desire for dialogue and caution but also the need, sometimes, for charismatic leadership?
There might be a direct lesson for democracy here from the educational dilemmas. If a proper capacity for student-centered education needs a teacher who has the autonomy and capacity to lead students to the knowledge they did not know they didn’t have, then the same might be true of democracy. What we need in our politicians is a capacity for educational dialogue. That is certainly leadership, in the way that good teaching is actually crucial to student-centredness. But it is also about a pedagogic relationship between political leaders and citizens. When a difficult political issue arises – say, the question of refugees – then the politically wise course is neither to impose a course of action, however liberal nor to surrender to popular prejudice. It is, rather, to see the problems raised as opportunities for educating citizens into change. This kind of political leadership does not abdicate responsibility or surrender principles expediently. But neither does it see the opposition of the majority as inevitable; it teaches, and so changes. It is true leadership, but it is as slow and consultative as the Scottish Parliament’s founding principles require.
Conclusion
This short essay has done no more than sketch some analogies, starting by working through in a current Scottish context the implications of the three dilemmas identified by Grant and Murray as characterizing any kind of teaching, and then suggesting that there are some surprisingly close analogs in the dilemmas facing democracy itself. So close is the connection that we might be inclined not to describe it as one of analogy at all: perhaps the dilemmas of education simply are the dilemmas of democracy, translated into the institutions which we have chosen to use for the very maintenance of the principles by which we organize our life together.
If that is the case, then the significance of the educational debates is all the greater. None of the solutions commonly put forward for the problems of education seem adequate to the task posed by coping with such dilemmas. Even to put the problems like that is to be too optimistic because little of our public discussion of education recognizes such deep dilemmas at all. For teachers, the question of what they do, as citizens or as educators, is no easier. They should insist that the problems of education are at least as complex and at least as deep as I have indicated here, and they should also insist that the problems are inescapable, and are not the pathological condition of Scotland alone.
Teachers should also, however, accept their claim to democratic leadership itself. Educational leadership in a democracy cannot any longer fall back on the old belief that professionals know best, a tradition that is particularly potent in Scotland. But neither can it simply abdicate responsibility to the majority vote, or to the market. The real challenge for teachers is to find a form of professionalism that is at the service of democracy while also not betraying its own necessary cultural authority and legitimate expertise.
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