Why we need Informality in Education

For 34 of my 43 years in teaching I have been referred to as ‘Andrew’ by students and fellow teachers. Andrew is my name – others called me ‘Andy’ when I was at college, but that has never stuck. I have always had difficulty seeing myself as an ‘Andy’, the name holds connotations of one who likes to go out with his mates, have a good time, and be the life and soul of the party – I’m afraid that is not and never has been part of my character, believe me I have tried!

‘How can the children possibly respect you if they call you by your first name?’, my mother was aghast when she heard that I had found a job at a school in which informality of relationship was deemed as integral to its ethos.

‘How can there be discipline when the children can wear what they like?’ She added, as all the formality of her own background and way of life came rushing to the surface like a flood of disbelief. My mother thus encapsulated the authoritarian outlook that has dominated schools for many, many years.

Recently, I read about a mainstream state secondary school that on the first day of the school year made nearly 200 students sit in silence in the school hall for about 2 hours for ‘uniform infringement’.

The school’s stated uniform policy is this –

‘We believe that correct uniform is very important in encouraging self-respect, pride in the school and a sense of community. It’s also an excellent indicator of a student’s attitude, state of mind and readiness for work.’

Bohunt School, Liphook, Hants

An informal ethos in educational establishments questions assumptions about regimenting children, systems of punishment and reward, and allows for relationships to blossom. Undoubtedly, teaching in an informal situation is very challenging – there is no hiding place, no status to cling to, little in the way of a formally designed sense of hierarchy, and there is an obligation to respond to questioning of authority by giving attention to the question itself, and listening to the student.

I have had the very good fortune of teaching in 3 schools* in which informality forms the ground upon which learning takes place. The level of informality has differed in each place, but the school in which I am now working, and have had significant involvement in over the last 40 years or so is probably the most informal.

It is a residential international education centre for around 75 students aged from 14 to 19. Staff and students live together, sharing many of the day to day tasks of taking care of the place and each other. The community exists to learn about what living is – not what someone’s idea of what life is, but to find out what it means to inquire into life with an open mind. This cannot effectively take place in an authoritarian atmosphere; it cannot exist in the systems that exist in most schools. However, this sense of informality does require consideration of others, a willingness to withhold judgement and an acknowledgement that mistakes are made. For learning to be effective there must be affection, which implies a lack of coercion and a willingness to listen.

Formality implies control; the formal gardens that became fashionable in stately homes of the 18^th Century are testament to the obsession in taming the wild. And that obsession was also translated to the treatment of children. Formality is mechanical, requiring pre-determined responses and ensuring outcomes that have also been prescribed. Consequently, formality limits freedom, limits spontaneity and denies humanity. Formality forms the basis in the language of fear.

The current approach to education is all about a faceless, standardised production line from which some children will emerge as successful achievers and many others will be spat out as failures, losers. This lugubrious machine hoovers up money as the segregated masses are processed, but the residual fallout of individuals through this system is requiring even more funding.

Learning is the lifeblood of being human; there is no price; there are no limits and learning cannot be formalised.

My mother did change her attitude to the schools in which I taught, even supporting our youngest son in his final year at the school at which I now work. Sadly, the formality of her own upbringing could not leave her. She died after 2 years at a care home where she was seen as a cantankerous, self-important, superior nuisance; until she succumbed to dementia and softened slowly into a self-imposed death – no longer eating or drinking.

*St. Christopher School, Letchworth; Bedales School, Hants; Brockwood Park School, Hants.

Young Children: A Generation at Risk? (Embryonic Memoir)

Below is a piece that I had written in February 1997 which was included in The Link magazine produced by Krishnamurti Link International. I am using it in the writing I am doing and publishing at as a blog to ask - how far have we come in those 21 years? And - what have I done in that time?

What is this process called growing up? Do we begin as empty shells and then evolve through a series of changes, growing physically and psychologically? I think not. The unborn baby is heir to all humanity, subject to its conditioning throughout history. My observation has been that the notion of psychological growth is misleading; the personality traits of the young child often continue through adolescence to adulthood, experiencing only superficial modification. So much of the character of the individual becomes apparent in the early years of life. In fact, if you look carefully you will observe that a great deal of so-called adult behaviour is not far removed from much of what you might see on a typical primary school playground, only more subtle.

 If you watch a young child closely you can often quite quickly get a feeling for what that child is like. From the way he or she moves, talks and interacts with the surroundings you can get some essence of the character of the child; particularly if you are impersonal in your observation, you can begin to understand the child. Generally a young child is open, friendly and interested in the world that surrounds her or him. However, we are rapidly approaching a point where these aspects of early childhood are seen as irrelevancies in a world which is quickly degenerating into a place where only the measurable has significance.

 I am reminded of something that Dorothy Rowe has written in her book ‘Guide to Life’:

‘As small children we are interested in everything and are infinitely talented. However, our education destroys our curiosity and we are taught that we are not the artists, musicians, writers, singers, scientists and inventors we had once thought.’

In much of the teachings of Krishnamurti it is put forward that inner freedom is essential for humanity. With young children you see the expression of this in their urge to explore, to find out, a kind of free play with their environment. Surely it is the task of education to ensure that this exploration does not result in a domination of the individual by his or her surroundings, nor by those people with whom contact is made, although neither should it result in the individual being dominant. It is of the utmost importance that education maintains the integrity of the individual, whilst seeking to avoid the setting up of one individual against another.

Children are losing their physical freedom for a variety of reasons. The predominance of car usage is having far reaching effects. Roads are becoming increasingly more dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists. Fewer children walk reasonable distances, thus they become less physically fit and view life through an isolated, sound-proofed bubble, having no contact with the sights, sounds and smells of those things they pass. Open areas are being closed off; a poignant personal illustration of this is the place where I used to play as a boy, walking through woods and over fields to the sea, is now a theme park providing expensive entertainment ‘for all the family’.

A further element in the loss of physical freedom has been an insidious fear that has entered the minds of many parents, fuelled by the immense media coverage that inevitably surrounds the violation of children. Thus, thoughtful protection is replaced by constricting supervision, sometimes resulting almost in a form of imprisonment of children for their own safety. Watching young children play outside you are convinced of their need for space to run, jump and explore. Similarly children need inner space to play with ideas, to understand their own thinking and to go beyond their own demands.

As we are destroying their physical freedom, so we are also threatening the inner freedom of the young. In their anxiety over their own security parents transfer their hopes and aspirations onto their children. These parents want to ensure that their children come out on top of the heap by passing all their exams and getting good, well-paid jobs. Unfortunately, this thinking is becoming more and more ascendant as the politicians take increasingly greater control of education and see that these attitudes might win them votes. Under the guise of ‘improving standards’ children as young as five are being tested and these results are being converted into league tables for schools, thereby investing these tests with value considerably more than their worth, that is if they have any worth anyway. This enhances the spirit of competition, pitting school against school, pupil against pupil, creating the feeling that educating the young is a team game complete with winners and losers.

Krishnamurti’s words from Education and the Significance of Life have a particular resonance as we move into a world of education where the watchwords are inspection, monitoring and assessment, where teachers and administrators are forced to defend their livelihoods:

 ‘When there is love of the child, all things are possible. As long as the institution is the most important consideration, the child is not.’

The corruption of the politicians is complete as they mass behind the rallying cries of parental choice and parent power, steadily destroying the integrity of educators. We watch silently as the effects of parental expectations blight yet another generation. Anyone who is a parent and is able to view the experience with some sense of detachment is aware of all the possibilities in the process of bringing up children, and the immense dangers involved.

So what are we to do? Do we continue to send our young children to creches, child-minders, nursery schools, where they often move from having individual attention to being lost in the mass? Do we continue to work long hours so that the only time we spend with our children we call ‘quality time’? And finally, are we ultimately concerned to make all children the same, conforming to arbitrary norms? The beauty of the majority of young children is in their integrity and unselfconscious differences. This beauty can be seen to fade as they become more aware of themselves and begin to compare themselves to those around them, so their differences are hidden, and they seek to be the same as those they admire or fear.

We want to control our young children far beyond pointing out the dangers and delights that life has to offer; we want to clothe them in our own well-meaning, so that they, like us, live second-hand lives. Krishnamurti used the expression ‘flowering’ as a description of the process of growing up. If we strip away the cloying sentimentality that so often stifles young children and watch them as they are, seeking to understand them as individuals, then this ‘flowering’ process is sustained by a dynamic new relationship with the child, and all are enriched by the unfolding of this new life.

Embryonic Memoir

I began this blog six years ago. Since then it would appear that the disintegration of the world has accelerated and we have come to a global situation of considerable danger to humanity. Nevertheless, there are many good people around and many encouraging projects being undertaken. It is just that we seem to be drowning in a sea of greed, hatred, self-gratification and stupidity. And yet wherever we go we continue to experience everyday kindness – there is an underlying compassion in humanity.

I am currently writing a memoir through which I am exploring a life, my life. It is not a life that is particularly exceptional. However, it is a life that has been lived in education, in learning. The way we bring up our children dictates the future of human society. The basis of our child-rearing in the modern world is to herd them together at a young age, dress them all the same, tell them how to behave, tell them what they should know, tell them what is good and what is bad, and what they should be aiming for in life. We do not ask them to inquire into life itself.

Therefore, I am using this writing to attempt to engage the reader in an exploration into their own thinking; and to move beyond my own petty life to touch on something more universal.

Below is an extract from near the beginning:

I was embarking on, or to put it more accurately, was being placed on a pathway designed for the ruling classes, at whatever level of ruling that might be. This pathway might well be called the destiny of deprived privilege. The Great British Public School System was created in the 1860s to supply the British Empire with manpower, the sons of officers and senior administrators educated as successors to take their rightful places in distant lands. To bestow their superiority in the name of civilisation; and to be distinct from the lesser mortals, whose bodies populated the killing machines in the colonies – disposable bodies. A way of educating was evolved that ensured a mindset of superiority combined with an unwavering belief in the power of the Empire, and the ability to put up with extraordinary discomfort, physical, mental and emotional. Now, after two world wars, the British Empire was in its final death throes, fatally wounded and dangerous, but it would live on in the cold climate of my schooling.

And here is a piece that illustrates a significant aspect of my attempt to break with the effect of my schooling:

At nineteen I found myself sitting on a bench on a cloudy September day waiting for a bus to India.

It was fashionable at that time for young people to take the overland trail from West to East to find themselves. The perceived spirituality of India had been exported wholesale to the West since the early 1960s; the Beatles with their exotically long-haired, bearded, robed guru, filmed at the colourful ashram on the edge of the milky blue holy Ganges against the backdrop of the mystic Himalayan mountains had fairy-tale qualities. I had no doubt been influenced myself. Influenced by the assimilation of the sounds of the music of the East that had emerged in the 1960s and the words that had been culled from the ancient Hindu texts. Recently I had made a foray into Buddhism and through that had come across the words of Jiddu Krishnamurti, who constantly reiterated that he was not a guru. Through friends I had also come across one or two poems written by Rabindranath Tagore, half-remembered for their simplicity of observation moving effortlessly from the particular to the universal. Through both their work I had been touched by the expression of harmony with nature through which lens the world of humanity could be seen and understood. Nevertheless, however much I enjoyed and admired the stories of the wise and enlightened people of the East, I had no wish or desire to seek enlightenment for myself.

Neither of these extracts are fully finished. I am currently under the mentorship of the writer Paul Kingsnorth, and am working towards a first draft.

My intention is that the writing will progress from here through to my teaching experience, which is woven in with my continuing and changing relationship with India and the many influences in my life. How it will end? I am not quite sure. Maybe it will be with that which calls a stop to all that we do!

This is one way I feel I can respond to the state of the world. Although I continue to look for further possibilities. However, it seems to me that despite all the technological connections, the vast mounds of ideas, words and opinions, it is how we relate in our daily lives that still has the deepest significance.