“Individualism, Community and Learning”
“Since individualism misrepresents our nature, it follows that communal life is the
normal state for human beings. But human life is not organic; a shared existence is a
matter of intention, not of fact. Community has to be created and sustained by
conscious purpose, and the more successfully this is done the more we fulfil our
personal nature”.1
John MacMurray
We are each who we are because of the interaction between our inherited, individual
natures, and the world as we experience it. The possible permutations of all this are
incalculable, hence the diversity of human experiences. Take the case of Thomas
Paine.
Thomas Paine probably became the world’s most famous political polemicist when, in
1776, he published his pamphlet “Common Sense” which did so much to unite the
American colonists in their opposition to the government of George III. Yet Paine
had only arrived in America two years earlier, a failed corset-maker of 37 years of
age, looking for a new start in life. Boston then was a thriving port, the focus of
political unrest, and the bridgehead for Englishmen into the great American
enterprise.
Paine had been born, and grew up, within a typical 18th Century English market town
– Thetford in Norfolk. He had only a few years of schooling as a Quaker, and then
learnt his trade. With a population of less than two thousand people, Thetford had an
abnormally high number of tradesmen – 350. These were thoughtful men, who
through knowledge of their craft could sell their wares and their expertise to other
people. Separated by a good day’s walk from any other towns, such men quickly
learnt that, whilst standing on their own feet, their well-being was ultimately
connected to the fortune, or misfortune, of the entire community. Thetford in the
1770s was notorious as one of the most “indolent, venal and undemocratic” of all the
so called Rotten Boroughs of England and “its behaviour a source of scandal and
notoriety, its affairs a synonym for dishonesty even in an age well accustomed to such
conduct.”2 Political controversy was the stuff of endless debate amongst tradesmen,
and Paine, it seems, became an uncomfortable man of restless energy, fired with a
hatred for monarchy and vested interest, and incensed by his own inability to make
progress.
In Boston he found a city ten times the size of Thetford, straining at the leash to trade
with whomever it wanted, in whatever way it chose, unfettered by the restrictions of a
monarchy three thousand miles away. What might have seemed like the quick mind
but rough tactics of a barrack-room lawyer in Thetford became, in the Boston of 1776,
the first blast of the council for the revolution. Eventually six hundred thousand
copies of “Common Sense” were sold in a country whose population numbered only
two and a half million people.
History would have known nothing of Thomas Paine had he not experienced these
two communities; ‘Common Sense’ was the conjunction of these two experiences.
2
Three thousand miles away, and some twenty years later, the MacCleans of Duart
finally evicted the last of the MacQuarrie clan from their tiny Hebridean Islands of
Ulva and Gometra, and replaced them with sheep. Amongst those evicted was the
twelve year-old Lachlan MacQuarrie, youngest son of the impoverished chieftain,
who had now to make his own way in the world. The young Lachlan joined the army
and somehow survived the vicissitudes of the Napoleonic Wars to be sent eventually
to New South Wales where, in 1809 he became governor of the struggling colony. I
once saw, amongst his papers in Scotland,3 a letter he had written as an older man to a
questioner who had asked how he had achieved such eminence from such humble
beginnings. The letter went like this; “When you are born on a tiny speck of an
island in the midst of the ocean, you very quickly learn what things influence
everything else. With such a lesson, well learnt when young, you quickly become ‘a
citizen of the world’, and nothing is henceforth impossible to you”.
Irish farmers have known the value of bringing young cattle reared on the exposed
coasts of the West, whose heavy bones and tough constitutions very quickly put on
flesh when introduced to the lush grasslands of Co. Dublin and Co. Meath. Tom
Paine and Lachlan MacQuarrie learnt the skills that proved to be of such value to
them later in life, whilst growing up in small, self-contained communities where they,
perforce, had to learn just what it is that makes humans ‘tick’.
I well remember an incident with two of our own sons a dozen years ago. We had
had a computer in the home for a couple of years and Peter, my eldest son who was
then eleven, had largely taught himself everything about its programming that anyone
might wish to know. Our second son, David, some three years younger, became
greatly interested in also using the computer. He asked endless questions of Peter,
whose patience – and he had much of that commodity normally – finally gave out.
“Find it out for yourself”, he snapped back at David eventually. Then, turning to me,
he said, “If I always give David the answers he’ll never learn to solve a problem for
himself. That’s what I had to do. Work it out for myself. That’s how I learnt”.
David took the advice to heart. He is now extremely competent and understands all
aspects of programming, which he finds fascinating. Not sufficiently fascinating,
however, that it is overtaking his first love of art, but fascinating enough so that now
he is able to charge other people, in his spare time when he is not painting, for sorting
out their problems.
We humans ‘tick’ best when we are faced with challenges always slightly in advance
of what we had earlier thought we could do, providing we are within a supportive
community that gives us our sense of identity. Here I must raise a reservation.
Whilst being enthusiastic for the many benefits community can provide, there is often
a flip side. Communities can often be stultifying to young minds. To migrate
between communities is often the stimulus that produces outstanding performance –
as it undoubtedly was to both Thomas Paine and Lachlan MacQuarrie.
In biological terms, human are a ‘small group’ species. Left to our own devices we
self-organise in groups with a core of often no more than a dozen people. Not for us
the army mentality of the ant, or the herd mentality of the buffalo, or the flocking of
the swallows. Nor do we seek the isolation of the sea eagle. In physical terms we
are, pound for pound, puny in comparison to the ant. It is only in our brains, and in
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our ability to communicate with one another, that the human species is pre-eminent.
We know how to create community; this is what makes us special. This is, if you
like, ‘our unique selling point’.
Other creatures know how to do this, but not as well as us. Some two years ago a
game warden rejoicing in the name of Jumbo Jones Junior was escorting me through a
game reserve in Southern Africa. Like his father before him he spent his lifetime
tracking wild animals. He told me how, the previous week, he had come upon a
pride of five lionesses, just after they had killed and devoured a gazelle. They were
well-fed, contented and cleaning the blood from their paws.
They would, he
suspected, not need to feed again for two days. Midway through the following day,
however, a large herd of gazelle moved down to the grasslands below them. The four
older lionesses looked up, but realised they didn’t need to hunt. The fifth lioness, the
youngest of the five, became restless but could not excite the attention of her
colleagues.
Suddenly the young lioness leapt to her feet and rushed off in the direction of the
herd. The herd instantly scattered. The young lioness became confused. First she
tried to follow one, then another, and then changed her mind yet again and set off in a
third direction. After half an hour, crestfallen and with no meat to show for her
labours, the young lioness returned. Jumbo Jones watched with bated breath. The
other four lionesses formed a circle, heads facing inwards, with a space for the errant
lioness to enter. Slowly, head down, she crept into the circle. The four older
lionesses slowly, but with no force or malice, head-butted their errant colleague for a
couple of minutes. Then all five lay down.
The gazelle had been frightened off, and next day did not return. All that day the five
lionesses lay fretting, obviously increasingly hungry. On the third day Jumbo Jones
saw the gazelle returning. For hours he had his glass trained on the young lioness.
She lay intently watching the gazelle, but absolutely still. Then, at a signal from one
of the older lionesses, the five leapt to their feet and acting as an extraordinarily welldisciplined team, identified, surrounded and brought down a gazelle within a couple
of minutes.
I heard another story that day. This concerned a new Game Park that was being
stocked with a variety of wild animals. Five young bull elephants were introduced,
but quickly ran wild. Their adolescent hormones got the better of them. One tried to
mate with a water buffalo, and broke its back. Another had the audacity to try and
mate with a mini-bus full of Japanese tourists! Something had to be done, and
quickly, or they would have to shoot the young elephants. “There is a simple
solution”, said an experienced old game warden, “Introduce an old bull elephant to
the Park”. They did. The old bull elephant quickly sized up the situation and he
started to roar. The more disobedient the young were, the more the old bull elephant
roared and roared. Until, quite suddenly, the young calmed down and quickly fell in
line behind the older elephant. Peace returned, and the Japanese smiled. The young
bulls were now having their instincts shaped by the older animal’s understanding.
It seems as if the human species learnt its social skills long before we developed the
ability to speak and use language. There continues to be dispute as to exactly when
this happened, but a date of about one hundred and twenty five to one hundred and
4
fifty thousand years ago is becoming generally accepted. That, in terms of the
existence of recognised humans, in the genealogical time-scale, is relatively recent.
Our ancestors broke company with the great apes between five and seven million
years ago, and Homo erectus appeared about two million years ago. Neanderthal
man, it seems, disappeared only about thirty-five thousand years ago and in all
probability even at that stage was unable to talk.
Our ‘inarticulate’ ancestors, however, must have had splendid powers of social
organisation; half a million years ago they started to migrate out of Africa so that
within three hundred thousand years each generation had apparently split into those
who occupied the latest bit of newly colonised land, and those who went on a few
miles further. In their turn they too split, and some went still further. They took
with them the ability to self-organise, to make arrow-heads and to hunt down
sufficient animals larger and quicker than themselves before those same animals
hunted down our ancestors. Small, vulnerable and puny humans populated the earth
because they could, increasingly, use their brains in an intentional way.
They
understood the significance of collaboration.
A very interesting perspective on all this is given by the work of two psychologists,
Alan Fiske4 (“Structure of Social Life; the four elementary forms of human relations)
and Jordan Peterson.5 Peterson’s work (“Maps of Meaning; the architecture of
belief”) has focused on the evidence that seems to suggest that all humans have a skill
set that helps them to respond to novelty with a mixture of anxiety and curiosity.
This ‘novelty detector’ serves to alert the body from moment to moment as to how to
examine a new situation in terms of threat or opportunity. “In this process”, say
Lawrence and Nohria, “The brain tries out different forms of representations of the
unknown object, searching for any pre-existing representation (model action)… and
noting possible matches and mismatches”.6
Peterson goes on to theorise that humans are predisposed through these mental
processes to respond to novelty with a range of instinctive reactions. As soon as we
‘find’ pre-existing ‘manoeuvres’ that actually work, we adopt them. It’s a basic
survival technique.
In this way we don’t have to experiment with too many
alternative procedures.
Fiske has developed an overview of the skill sets that humans use as they relate to
each other. He calls these skill sets ‘Universal Forms of Sociability’. His research
has shown that all human behaviour falls into four distinct skills sets; Communal
Sharing (CS), Authority Ranking (AR), Equality Matching (EM) and Market Pricing
(MP).
Communal Sharing (CS) seems to be the most basic form of human transaction;
“From each according to their ability, and to each according to their needs”. It is a
system most applicable to small family, or extended family groups, where everyone
knows each other, and all are affected by the sum of all such transactions. Authority
Ranking (AR) is a very different set of relations. Essentially it is a relationship of
inequality in which humans negotiate over time a rank order amongst themselves – a
kind of ‘pecking order’. While this carries mutual benefits for everyone, other than
those at the very bottom, such relationships tend to disintegrate during periods of
turmoil and social change.
5
6
Equality Matching (EM) is a form of long-term relationship based on a ‘you scratch
my back, and I’ll scratch yours’ principle. Market Pricing (MP) is best understood
as a form of bartering, often on a single transaction basis, as when buying a secondhand car, or a house. Each side knows the other is out to get the best deal they can,
and therefore each party plays the deal very carefully, surreptitiously, and to their own
advantage.
Fiske suggests that these four modes of behaviour are universal. They are part of our
inheritance, and have been shaped over long periods by the ancestral environment.
Communal Sharing is the most deep seated, and would appear to be a skill set
inherited from the hunter-gatherer society of very small communities that have
dominated so much of human history. Equality Matching would certainly have
applied in the (by modern terms) small urban centres that have characterised much of
human society over the last 5000 years, while Market Pricing is a skill most likely to
have been developed between craftsmen in more recent times.
Fiske suspects that every child, as they mature, demonstrates a growing appreciation
of the rules applicable to each set. Three-year-olds already appear to know how to
operate Community Sharing, while an eight-year-old will have graduated through
Authority Ranking, Equality Matching, into Market Pricing.
It’s an interesting
concept.
It might help to explain why, if youngsters have not had plenty of
opportunity to socialise when they are young, they are not quick to appreciate which
set of rules someone else is playing by in any new situation. At its most basic a
socially inexperienced girl, feeling her innate sexual urges, may feel she is acting on a
Community Sharing set of rules, while the more experienced man is definitely in a
Market Pricing (and re-cycling!) mode.
Fisk concludes, “This relational-model theory construes human beings as being
inherently sociable. People seek to relate to others in each of the four basic modes…
and attempt to impose these relational structures on their social world. People want
others to conform to the model (‘let’s play on a level field’) they understand.
Consequently, conceptions of social relations, moral judgements, norms and relational
motives often coincide. We are social by nature and by culture”.
This, it seems, we have been for a very, very long time. The achievement of the lions
is only partly to do with their superb bodies; in every generation the young have to be
– indeed they expect to be – introduced to the culture of their species. Jane Goodall,
of chimpanzee fame, often tells how she could find no case of a young orphan
chimpanzee, even though its physical needs had been provided by a surrogate parent,
ever forming a secure enough relationship as an adult to reach the stage of successful
breeding. Without proper parenting, Goodall surmises, chimpanzees never develop
the social skills a possible partner requires.
Young humans, growing up, are impelled by their deepest instincts to search for the
appropriate culture. When they can’t find this they are unable to release those
sophisticated predispositions that have accounted for, what can best be described as,
the ‘Ascent of Man”. Occasionally we see whole generations of children emerging
from totally broken societies, such as the street children of Buenos Aries, or Cape
Town. Horace Mann, observing the influx into Boston of the Irish fleeing the
devastating effects of the potato famine of the mid-1840s, was terrified, “No-one at all
7
familiar with the deficient household arrangements or the deranged machinery of
domestic life of the extreme poor, and ignorant, to say nothing of the intemperate – or
the examples of rude manners, impure and profane language, and all the vicious
habits of low bred idleness which are bound in certain sectors of all populous districts
– can doubt that it is better for children to be removed as early and as long as possible
from parental influence”.7
So, and this seemed a highly obvious thing to do, education in Boston in the mid1840s, and increasingly in England in the years leading up to the Education Act of
1870, was seen by governments as a benign act to assign more and more of the
responsibility for learning to the schools. Steadily education and schooling became
seen as synonymous, and the child’s informal experiences – their own ‘scene-making”
– was largely ignored. Community and family were down-rated.
That is why The 21st Century Learning Initiative now places such a strong emphasis
on community in all its thinking about education. One simple statistic tells all…
children in the Western world spend no more than 20% of their waking hours in a
classroom between the ages of five and eighteen. More than three quarters of a
young person’s time is not under the supervision of a teacher, or organised by a
school. Thus, the greater proportion of children’s time is spent in many places other
than classrooms – with their peer group, in shops, sports facilities, libraries, or just
‘hanging out’ in their own home or the homes of their friends. It is facile to think
that children ‘turn their brains on’ as they go into a classroom, and then ‘turn them
off’ when they leave. The reverse may well be the case! Given the nature of human
inquisitiveness, learning occurs whenever someone is in a position to benefit by
finding yet another way of ‘making sense’ of fascinating ideas and situations. There
is only one word to describe this vast array of learning opportunity, and that has to be
the over-used word ‘community’.
As the needs of young learners change ever more rapidly, and as ‘just in time’
learning becomes increasingly necessary for adaptability, it will be on people’s ability
to draw on all the resources, skills and experiences available around them, that so
much learning will depend. Community is set to become more important, not less.
For a hundred years and more we have come to think of learning as something
essentially done in institutions, and separate from the rest of life. That is a very
limited way of thinking. In Rorabaugh’s study of American Apprenticeship made in
1986 he stated, “It was a system of education and job training by which important
practical information was passed from one generation to the next; it was a mechanism
by which youths could model themselves on socially approved adults; it was an
institution devised to provide proper moral development through the master’s fatherly
responsibility for the behaviour of his apprentice; and it was a means of social control
imposed upon potentially disruptive male adolescents”.8 In a brilliant analysis of the
impact of new technologies on working practices, Shoshana Zuboff wrote in “The
Age of the Smart Machine” in 1988, “Learning is not something that requires time out
from productive activity; learning is at the very heart of productive activity”. 9 Social
groups provide the resources for their members to learn. Learning is essentially a
community activity; powerful learning has to be both social and active – hence the
Initiative’s focus on community.
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So What is Community?
“We have not inherited this world from our parents;
we have been loaned it by our children”
Native North American Proverb
“Community” is a nebulous, slippery concept – as indeed are many other terms
beloved of sociologists and philosophers.
Robert Putnam in “Bowling Alone”
(2000), acknowledges that while the term lacks precision it is intuitively plausible.
“Civil society”, argues Putnam, “teachers its members how to make a community
function”.10
“Social capital allows individuals, groups and communities to resolve collective
problems more easily. Norms of reciprocity and network help ensure compliance
with collectively desirable behaviour”, states the recent OECD report on “The Wellbeing of Nations”.11
Just as the word “learning” seems automatically to conjure up visions of schooling, so
in the minds of the public at large (including politicians) community seems to be a
‘catch all’ type of expression that is so imprecise that it is either ignored or spoken
about in the abstract. Indeed the concept to many people is so hazy that politicians
concerned about the learning needs of young people see solutions almost exclusively
in terms of institutional provision. Others go further and argue that, “Communitybuilders condemn themselves to failure if they do not realise that for good historical
and psychological reasons many people perceive efforts to establish community as an
inherently undemocratic notion, a thrust that is necessarily homogenising and often
hierarchical”.12
Such people see community as the root of oppression and
domination, and put their trust in the influence of formal state sponsored structures.
Schools are what these people understand. Responsibility is vested in the hand of
professionals such as appointed administrators and bureaucrats or elected politicians.
Schools, it is argued, are more responsive to the interests and concerns of various
groups who traditionally do not have a strong voice in the larger community. The
work of schools can be more precisely defined and measured. No-one, it seems, is
responsible for community – such matters are best left out of the equation. They are
simply too complex. Unfortunately for young people this is a disaster as it places
emphasis on one part of children’s lives while leaving the greater proportion of their
experience to chance.
Undoubtedly it is convenient to the general public at large, as well as to politicians
and community leaders, to focus on schools. To require more of teachers can be seen
as getting ‘a good deal’ between what is paid, and what brings results. It becomes an
appropriate balance between acceptable legislation and rates of pay. It becomes an
input–output system. You get what you expect to pay for. To require more of the
community, however, means winning a change of heart right across all kinds and
conditions of people. It means developing a community that is genuinely ‘childfriendly’; a community where every adult accepts that they have a responsibility for
children… to encourage children to debate and discuss important issues with them. It
requires adults to practice what they preach. It means accepting that children’s
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horizons are far further out than adults, and that policies that bring immediate rewards
to the current generation may in fact be bad news for the younger generation. John
Taylor-Gatto writes forcibly about the need for children to understand community
better, and for community to understand children better, in his 2001 book “A
Different Kind of Teacher”.13
This is, in reality, more a moral issue than a political issue. Governments can’t set
moral codes, but they do react to such codes. Another reason why the Initiative puts
the community at the top of its argument is that, after years of studying the evidence,
we have come to the sober conclusion that much of the world is dealing, not so much
with a crisis in schooling, as it is with a crisis of childhood, and even more a crisis of
community. Learning and community naturally go together, and this fact needs to
lead us to a better understanding of what each means, and how they relate. In other
words, I believe we are dealing with a crisis of education, not in education.
Ernest Boyer, the one time President of the Carnegie Foundation in the United States,
responded to the “Excellency Report” of 1984 issued by the United States government
on education, by noting “To blame schools for the rising tide of mediocrity is to
confuse symptoms with the disease; schools can rise no higher than the expectations
of the communities that surround them”.14 Whilst some would dispute this in detail it
really put the issues we are addressing into perspective. Schools act on behalf of
parents; ‘in loco parentis’. If parents do not understand what children need, then
schools do not have a clear mandate within which to operate.
So, again, what is community?
Peter Drucker argues in “The Post Capitalist
Society”, “People need roots… something they can get their arms around”. He went
on to sound like Alexis de Tocqueville when he argued “To foster autonomous
community organisations is an important step in turning around government… such
communities would create a new centre of meaningful citizenship. This would
require a social sector as well as the two normally recognised Public and Private
sectors”.15 If Drucker is correct then the American social critic William A Galstone
argues, “It is a mistake to believe that civil society (and communities) can remain
strong if citizens withdraw from active engagement in political associations. Over
time, the devitalisation of the public’s fear is likely to yield a privatised hyper
individualism that elevates the civil sphere as well”.16 Such disengagement from the
affairs of the community has a dramatic effect on children, and in particular on their
ability to make sense of a world that seems increasingly fragmented.
This is a useful distinction. Too often, in England at any rate, when government
looks beyond itself for partners it sees clearly leaders from the Private sector, and
indeed actively seeks the support of business and commerce. In practice, it fails to
identify the other nine-tenths of the population as being the social sector. Money and
politics, of course, go hand in hand, but in so many ways we have failed to realise the
significance of human dynamics at the micro scale.
This has encouraged the
destruction of strong communities. No wonder so many people have decided to optout of the democratic process, and everywhere we see single-issue politics in the
ascendant. Community is where traditionally all the conflicting expectations of
individuals were resolved, but community is increasingly seen as being under threat
from economic forces.
10
Libby Purves, of The Times, warned, “Unfettered, me-first capitalism and the loss of
community are a strain on the family. So is an ever more hopeless sense that ‘they’
are in control and make a new rule every week. If you create an edgy, uneasy, tired
and hypochondriacal society, its members get more prone to give up the struggle and
fall for irresponsible moonshine about nothing being anybody’s fault!”17 Bob Reich,
the former US Secretary of Labour in “The Future of Success” (2001) wrote “The
deepest anxieties of this prosperous age concern the erosion of our families, the
fragmenting of our communities, and the challenge of keeping our integrity intact.
These anxieties are no less part and parcel of the emerging economy than are its
enormous benefits; the wealth, the innovations, the new chances and choices”.18
The Evolved Nature of Community
To try and understand community we have to further explore the origins of our
species. Humans are, as has been noted, social creatures and it is through learning
that we become socialised. Learning involves becoming a member of ‘a community
of practice’ and thereby understanding its work and its talk from the inside. Learning
from this perspective is far more than simply acquiring information; it requires
developing the language, disposition, demeanour and outlook of the other community
members.19 “The key to understanding our evolutionary success, as well as our
unique combination of every-day behaviour that sets us apart from any other living
thing to date, is our unique talent as human beings”,20 writes William Orman.
Human survival is almost totally dependent on relationships with other people, and
these relationships are dependent on learning; learning and community are
intertwined.
Faced with a hostile environment, our ancestors banded together to achieve as a group
what they could not do alone. We have evolved over millions of years to need each
other – most of the time. But remember also that Cain killed his brother Abel.
There is a dark side to human nature as well that has to be understood. Orman goes
on to say, “The most complex, dangerous challenges facing our ancient ancestors
were indeed each other”. It seems that, some five thousand years ago, as man
became ever less nomadic and more a sedentary urban dweller facing increased
population pressures, we ‘became more vulnerable to exploitation by our rulers and
from group aggression’. It’s probable that it was at this stage that the skill set of
Market Pricing first entered the human psyche. (See work of Fiske above). This
seems to be where we are now. Under too many circumstances our ability to hold
together fractures incredibly easily. Our inability to control such aggression fuels
daily the news stories in every newspaper in the world.
The voice of the evolutionary psychologists really began to be heard in the early
1990s. Driving their enquiry is the thirst to find a balance to the simple question, “If
culture creates the individual, what then creates culture?” In synthesising the work of
these leading evolutionary psychologists Robert Wright wrote in “The Evolution to
Despair” for Time in 1995, “Perhaps the biggest surprise from evolutionary
psychology is its depiction of the animal in all of us. Freud and various thinkers
since, saw civilisation as an oppressive force that thwarts man’s basic animal urges
such as lust and aggression, transmuting these into psychopathology.
But
evolutionary psychology suggests that a larger threat to mental health may be the way
civilisation thwarts civility. There is a kinder, gentler side to human nature and it
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seems increasingly to be a victim of repression”.21 Wright went on to say, “The
problem with modern life, increasingly, is less that we are over-socialised than that
we are ‘under-socialised’ – or that too little of our social contact is social in the
natural intimate sense of the word”. In other words much of our current lifestyle
works against our innate ways of developing community, and helping children to take
control of their own learning. Too often it is easier for teachers and parents to give
students the answers than it is to show them how to find it out for themselves.
There is strong evidence to support the human species’ predisposition to live within
relatively small groups – maybe as small as the extended family (fifteen or so) or as
large as sixty or seventy when only twelve or fifteen of them are the dominant figures.
Writing in “The Land We Have Left Behind” the Cambridge historian Peter Laslett
suggests that for most of the past thousand years most people in England lived in units
of only thirteen to fifteen people, and it was only when they came together in units
larger than that – in the church or in the army – that they became potentially
dysfunctional.22 It seems, some psychologists point out, that in a single lifetime no
one grieves deeply for more than a dozen people. The wells of human sympathy it
seems are much conditioned by the social environment from which we have evolved.
Research would suggest that we have a predisposition towards moral behaviour
amongst our closest relatives, but this rapidly disappears as the relationship becomes
weaker.
On a spectrum of social organisation, society is at the opposite extreme to the
individual, with community and the family above the individual. Yet people are very
unclear as to what these terms really mean.
“Society is a given”, writes the
philosopher Elliott Deutch, “something that everyone is born into and is nurtured
through education and culture, whereas a community is essentially a voluntary
venture”.23
“A voluntary venture?” Margaret Thatcher with her unlimited faith in the free,
untroubled individual set out as she interpreted this by Adam Smith and John StewartMills, claimed, “There’s no such thing as society. There are only individual men and
women, and there are families”. Families we know are in great disarray, so much so
that many people even feel that it is politically incorrect even to mention them. So,
on Margaret Thatcher’s score, that really leaves our social arrangements in tatters.
That’s not good for the creation of learning environments.
Indeed such policies have had the unintended consequence of disconnecting children
from the adult community. It is sometimes useful to point out the obvious, especially
when it collides with short-term political and/or economic interests. Babies are born
helpless, and depend on someone who loves them to care for their many
developmental needs. This is a fact. The preparation for lifelong learning and
effective community participation starts at the every beginning of life. Ideally,
children’s learning should be supported by a loving and committed nuclear family,
reinforced by the extended family, neighbours and the immediate community. It is
well understood, by any measure, that this traditional arrangement is under threat (or
has disappeared) for many. Nevertheless if the goal is to raise children as successful
lifelong learners and productive members of communities, then the youngest children
need an environment that offers them the stability, challenge, values and cohesiveness
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that we attribute to functional, loving families.
belong.
Children need to know where they
John Taylor-Gatto in his earlier book “Dumbing us down, the hidden curriculum of
compulsory schooling” defines communities as “Collections of friends and families
who find major meaning in extending the family association to a band of honorary
brothers and sisters. They are complex relations of commonality and obligation that
generalised others beyond the perimeter of the homestead. When the integration of
life that comes from being part of the family in a community is unattainable, the only
alternative, apart from accepting a life in isolation, is to search for an artificial
integration into one of the many expressions and networks currently available. It’s a
bad trade”.24
In Jane Jacob’s book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” (1961) she noted
that regular contact with the local grocer, the families on the front doorstep, and the
priest walking the blocks of his parish, as well as the presence of street fairs and
conveniently traversed parks, developed a sense of continuity and responsibility in
local residents”. She continued, “The sum of such casual, public contact at a local
level – most of it fortuitous, most of it associated with errands, all of it metered by the
person concerned and not thrust upon him by anyone – is appealing for the public
identify of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of
personal and neighbourhood needs”.25
Robert Putnam in “Bowling Alone” sights O. J. Hanifan, the State Supervisor of Rural
Schools in West Virginia, as being the first to develop the concept of social capital.
This he described as being “Those tangible substances (that) count for most in the
daily lives of people: namely goodwill, fellowship, sympathy, and social intercourse
among the individuals and families who make up a social unit… The individual is
helpless socially, if left to himself… If he comes into contact with his neighbour, and
they with other neighbours, there will be an accumulation of social capital which may
immediately satisfy his social needs and which may bear a social potentiality
sufficient to the substantial improvement of living conditions in the whole
community. The community as a whole will benefit by the co-operation of all its
parts, while the individual will find it has associations, the advantages of the help, the
sympathy, and the fellowship of his neighbours”.26
Going back to John Taylor-Gatto he also makes the point that, “unlike communities,
networks have a very narrow way of allowing people to associate, and that way is
always across a short spectrum of one, or at most a few, specific uniformities. When
people in networks suffer, they suffer alone, unless they have a family or community
to suffer with them”.
For Gatto, networks are closely associated with formal
government institutions or businesses, while communities are self-organising and
informal. Gatto concludes that increasingly children spend time in networks (schools
and formalised activities) and this comes at the expense of adults who lose out on the
energy and curiosity of children. Laureen Resnick shows that there is evidence that
this segregation of children from the real life of the community comes at the expense
of their ability to make valid connections between their in-school learning and real
life.27
13
Bob Rae, the former Premier of Ontario, argues for a balance between economic
change and the needs of communities when he writes, “A politics that ignores selfinterest deserves to fail. An economics that ignores our common interests as citizens
in the well-being of the broader community will eventually face a wall of public
hostility.
The poet Oliver Goldsmith wrote at the beginning of the Industrial
Revolution of a world where ‘wealth accumulates and men decay’.”28 This effort at
balance sounds a bit like the English sociologist Anthony Giddens writing about “The
Third Way” in politics. Giddens writes, “The corner-stones of the new progressivism
are said to be equal opportunity, personal responsibility and the mobilisation of
citizens and communities”.29
This seems to suggest that community, especially when expressed as a place, is where
the inter-connectiveness of all aspects of life are the most apparent. George Rupp,
President of Rice University, pushes this thesis when he says, “Without shared
commitments or common task there can be no community”. Very simply, people
who work together hold together so that, “In the modern world community is an
achievement not a given”.30
MacMurray, in the quote given at the beginning of this essay, talks about a shared
existence as being a matter of intention, not of fact. What MacMurray means by
fulfilling our personal nature is that it is through personal relationships that we
discover ourselves. Aristotle put it nicely, “Without a fully active role in community
life one could not hope to become a healthy human being”. Within a responsible
relationship in a community, “Genuine freedom leads to a personality which is quietly
confident; fully sensitive to others but not egocentric in petty and aggressive ways”.31
It is community that brings together autonomous individuals who have freely chosen a
conscious set of values and goals. They have not been coerced but have come
together naturally, and largely stay together. The key would seem to be common
values, and a task to do. Jűrgen Moltman from the University of Tubingen argues,
“Knowing and community are mutually related to one another: in order to come
together in community we must know each other: and in order to know each other we
must come into contact with each other and enter into a relationship with each
other”.32
In other words a community that talks together, understands the
connections between the various aspects of life. A truly functional community
knows it can’t have its cake and eat it at the same time.
A community that thinks about the interests of all its members understands the
importance of deferred gratification in a free society. Alexis de Tocqueville, and
other 18th and early 19th Century social philosophers, held that religion was the
ultimate support for deferred gratification in a free society, and that ultimately this
was the glue that held communities together. Tocqueville understood the paradox
that a work ethic based on deferred gratification produces material prosperity – which
in turn gradually undermines the religious beliefs that justified deferred gratification
in the first place. In studying Tocqueville’s classic “Democracy in America”, João
Carlos Espanda, a Portuguese social researcher, argues that Tocqueville knew that in
an age of scepticism, religious belief was eroding. Despite this fact, Espanda says,
“He strongly opposed any sort of state enforcement of religion”. Instead, he urged
government to instil ‘a love of the future’ by showing citizens that their long-term
prosperity and that of their children depended on deferred gratification. In this way
14
Tocqueville hoped, citizens would be gradually and unconsciously brought nearer to
religious convictions”. 33
The challenge, to a large degree, for those interested in preserving and strengthening
community in the early 21st Century is to find a ‘glue’ that would unify people of
diverse interests and backgrounds around common agendas and dreams. Nowhere is
this more important than in providing young people with a clear and acceptable
answer to the question “Education for What?”. If education and learning is seen only
as an economic issue preparing future workers and consumers, then increasing
numbers of children will see education as really being rather pointless, and indeed
they would be right to think so.
A Sense of Possibility
The 21st Century Learning Initiative argued forcefully in “The Unfinished
Revolution”,34 that it was the institutionalisation of learning during the latter stage of
the Industrial Revolution that removed from the community the very task that had
earlier given reason for its existence. The induction of young people into shared
values, goals and indeed shared future was now seen to be a job for professionals.
The vacuum this created within the community was never filled by other
arrangements for young people, and this was the disaster that precipitated what was
earlier defined as “the crisis of childhood”. This focus on the economic, and its
impact on the learning of children, is an important issue for those concerned about
children and the development of community.
It is within communities, which by their very nature include people with differing
views and opinions, that young people first start to appreciate the essential
interconnectedness of people and events.
It was to help build a sense of
interconnectedness with these powerful influences on children’s learning – the home,
the needs of employment, school, the new technologies – that the English education
foundation, Education 2000, was founded in 1986. It sought to explore how the
community at large could be an active participant in young people’s learning.
Without the full support of the community, Education 2000 argued, it would never be
possible to reform educational practice, “What people don’t understand they resist
with all their strength” it was argued.35
Before unpacking the story of Education 2000, it is instructive to note the work of the
Kettering Foundation in the United States, whose prime interest is in the development
of community. The Kettering Foundation believes, “The promise of community
politics is that communities can learn to work better, to increase the capacity of their
citizens to join together to face common problems. It starts with citizens – and the
way they think, act, and relate to each other and to the problems in their particular
communities. At the heart of community politics is an integrated set of idea, that,
when put into practice, create opportunities for citizens to make choices and to act on
problems that affect their common well-being”.36 It is the acceptance of mutual
responsibility that is at the heart of community – “Here everyone matters”.
The Kettering Foundation Report continues, “As the idea of community politics
becomes imbedded in the life of the community, people develop habits of connecting
with each other and issues in new ways. A public – a diverse array of citizens who
15
are joined in ways that allow them to make decisions and to act on common problems
– can emerge out of a collection of busy, pre-occupied, heterogeneous individuals.
Forming a public is thus not so much about an identifiable body of people as it is
about creating connections between people in relation to issues. Through the practice
of community politics, a committed and democratic public will form and continually
evolve. Without an engaged public, lasting community improvement is unlikely.
The practice of deliberation is the cornerstone of community politics; deliberation
connects people, even people with conflicting interest in ways that allow them to
make decisions and act in regard to problems in challenging circumstances”.
Deliberation. Talking together. Understanding each other. Not feeling left out.
Let’s stress that earlier statement; “Without an engaged public, lasting community
improvement is unlikely”. As the Kettering Foundation concludes, “The goal of
deliberation is not a clear cut agreement or a compromise, but rather a general sense
of direction and purpose based on limits… Deliberation can stimulate citizens and
community organisations to take action by triggering a sense of possibility”.
A sense of possibility. It was to trigger a sense of possibility that Education 2000
spent much time on its first community-wide project in Letchworth, encouraging a
community of thirty-five thousand people to deliberate. Although a relatively small
urban area, it was not sure of its own identity, and at the time many of the decisions
that related to its life were made within a County Council that was more preoccupied
with balancing the needs of its million citizens, within the political dogma of the
dominant set of politicians, than it was in experimenting with how to release the
creative possibilities of one community.
A sort of model that guided the Letchworth Education 2000 Project was what had
been seen in the schools of Princeton, New Jersey. A medium size city of some fiftythousand people with a highly varied population – including a world-famous
university, numerous science research laboratories, and a large ethnic minority living
on the borders of the old industrial area to the south. For years it had been a
community torn asunder by an apparently unachievable range of objectives for its
schools, ranging from university elitism to racial confusion and prejudice. Then, as
the whole community, they decided to take a long, cool look at the changing nature of
learning in the early 1980s, and challenged the entire community to spend two years
establishing a community-wide mission statement for their children’s education.
This involved large numbers of the community. The resulting statement is powerful,
but its real strength lay in the process through which the community passed in order
for this to be made. The statement read:
“This community believes in Functional Literacy for all; that is the ability
to feel comfortable amidst all the change and confusion of the fastgrowing, technological society. That comfort comes with knowing that
you have learned-how-to-learn and feel confident in your ability to face
the future. This depends on developing to the full the ability to think, to
communicate, to collaborate, and to make decisions”.
After several days in that community it was obvious to see how powerful that mission
statement was. Enormous potential had been released; home and school understood
each other; teachers had developed a new confidence in what they were doing;
16
technology became a means to an end and was heavily invested in; adults regained
their enthusiasm for learning, and sharing their learning with young people; young
people were encouraged to take ownership of their own learning.
17
We realised that we had to work together.
Building on this valuable experiment from the United States, a three-fold strategy was
developed in Letchworth that took as its base the whole of the town, not the sub
components of a single school and their separate catchment areas. The first goal was
to get people to deliberate. Twelve Community Study Groups, each comprising ten
or twelve people drawn from discreet interest groups such as employers, parents,
voluntary organisations, statutory organisations, students and others, were set up. To
each group a comparable number of teachers were assigned. Over a twelve month
period, meeting at least once a month for two or three hours, each group deliberated
over three issues;
1. From the particular perspective of your organisation, what should the schools
be aiming to achieve?
2. What can you do to help the schools with the resources to do this?
3. What can you do from your own resources to support these objectives, but
outside of school time?
These questions prompted lively debate. Some people got very angry. There was
much confusion about what schools might properly address, and what had to be the
preserve of the home. Some people wished to be highly prescriptive and many –
unwittingly – challenged the role of government in legislating over-specifically for
the curriculum. One group in particular was very interested, the Council of Churches
and Faith organisations. They asked for extra time for their deliberations. “The
more we study this”, they said, “the more we realise that the most – and it’s a very big
most – that schools can do is to awaken in young people’s minds the questions that
need to be answered.
Schools can’t give the answers – they are not faith
communities. The better, therefore, that schools help children to frame the right
questions, the more important it is that we have our doors – metaphorically and
literally – open with people who are really able to answer just these questions”. They
then followed with the real clinch to the argument; “We realise that we have to work
together – with school and community – no one group can do this on its own”.
A second group supported this integrated agenda. Every two weeks for nearly three
years, ten or fifteen members of the community sat down to breakfast with some of
the teachers. The make up of the groups varied every two weeks, so as to expose
everyone to different ideas, views and possibilities. For an hour the teachers would
speak with non-teachers about what they hoped to achieve in the school. There was
just one condition. Every member of the community agreed in advance to spend half
a day later shadowing that teacher in their own school. More and more people started
to talk – thoughtfully and knowledgeably – about the needs of children.
The concept of shadowing was expressed in the third strand – but this was shadowing
for teachers, not pupils. For three years funds were found to enable fifteen percent of
the teachers to spend three weeks shadowing a member of the community at their
place of work. They were asked to investigate three topics.
1. What skills and aptitudes does this organisation expect of young employees?
18
2. How does this organisation seek to develop the professional skills of its
employees over the years?
3. What is this organisation doing to exploit technological change for its own
benefit?
There was much deliberation, and it occurred at many different levels. Barriers were
being broken down. It had its moments of near collapse. At one breakfast meeting,
held in a factory canteen, where most of the participants came from small engineering
plants, one man became totally incensed by what he saw as misdirected priorities.
“I don’t want any of my young employees to be distracted by all this ‘highfaluting’
technological stuff. I just want youngsters who are good at following instructions
and doing as they are told”.
There was a stunned silence, broken eventually by one of the other sheet metal
workers who said, “You’re wrong, Jock, quite wrong. The schools have got it right.
If we don’t change the foreigners will simply come in and take your place”.
It was particularly pleasing to find the members of the community delivering our
message for us. A particularly valuable group was that made up of twelve students
and a similar number of teachers. One of their conclusions, when asked what would
improve the quality of their own learning, was a surprise. They argued, “What we
need is contact with adults other than parents and teachers. We know what our
parents think (they’ve been telling us that for a long time!), whereas teachers are
actually paid to say what they think; what we want to know is what real adults think?”
That was the statement, made by someone little more than a child, that really started
the community to think seriously about its responsibility for its young people.
It’s interesting to return to the Kettering Foundations guidelines.
They say,
“Community politics arises out of a vision of politics in which the public takes control
on a central role, with greater control over, and greater responsibility for, issues
important to them. Its goal is to supplement and reinforce, not replace, the activity of
government officials”. Here people disagree profoundly. Several do not believe that
we should automatically assume that the old system can still work effectively in this
new environment, and that too much of an effort to hold these in place may well
thwart the full impact of the new ideas.
This is where it becomes very difficult.
It is where the work of Letchworth
eventually came apart.
The relevant authorities simply did not wish to see a
subsidiary part of what they saw as ‘the system’ start to do things in a different way.
Despite the rhetoric, this is a very tricky issue and the more involved becomes the
public, the more aware they are that the ideas of community challenge many of the
boundaries that politics normally establishes. The issue goes even deeper than that.
Across much of the Western world (and certainly in the Anglo-American context) the
nature of the involvement that can be released by truly meaningful deliberations
across an entire community will often release an energy and a thoughtfulness not
normally found within the confrontational style of much conventional politics. This
ought to lead to new ways of doing business..
19
David Matthews, the President of the Kettering Foundation, concludes his summary
by saying, “When citizens engage together in the practice of community politics they
are redefining politics by the way they practice it. Community politics is about more
than holding a forum, or community event, or even solving a particular community
problem. Ultimately it is about developing ways to allow deeper, deliberative forms
of public engagement to take root in the habits, traditions, and cultures of their
community on an ongoing basis.”
There is a further aspect of this. It concerns the young people themselves. For far
too long they have been regarded, often subconsciously, as being too young to be
involved. That is fundamentally wrong. Basing these ideas on a Swedish Work
Orientation Scheme, several communities in England sought to emulate the Swedish
town’s arrangement for all seven-year-old students to spend a day shadowing their
father at his place of work; a day shadowing their mother and two days shadowing
their best friend’s parents – always one-on-one. So successful was this that they had
expanded the scheme to five days a year at the age of ten; ten days a year at the age of
thirteen, and fifteen days a year at the age of sixteen. By the age of eighteen
youngsters in that Swedish town would have had the equivalent of eighteen weeks of
such work orientation.
“That must have been very good for the pupils”, I concluded rather lamely after being
shown the scheme. “Of course”, was the reply, “but think of the effect that it has on
the community. Not only do we clean our shoes twelve times more frequently (we
tend to be shadowed one day in twenty), but we have got used to being asked
apparently naive questions about our work for which we can’t find any rational
answer…. So we’ve started to change the way we work. But the third reason is the
most significant; there is hardly an adult now, within the community, who does not
accept at first hand that each of us has to accept the personal responsibility for helping
to educate young people. The task is just too important to be left simply to teachers
to do in isolation”.
We make grave mistakes in underestimating young people’s interest in, and ability
for, becoming daily involved in these issues. Of all the audiences that I have spoken
to in recent years it has been audiences of sixteen, seventeen and eighteen-year-olds
who have been by far the most interested. “It’s our world you’re talking about”, they
say, “Of course we want to get to grips with these issues”.
Conclusion: Learning communities are intra-dependent, inter-dependent and
independent.
Community and family are inseparable. Both are under great strain. Robert Wright,
in “The Evolution of Despair” quoted earlier, said, “people often talk about
urbanisation as the process that ushered in modern ills (yet) many urban
neighbourhoods at mid-century were in fact far more communal… It was suburbanisation that brought the combination of transience and residential isolation that
leaves many feeling a bit alone in their neighbourhoods”.
Wright went on, “The suburbs have been particular hard on women with young
children. In the typical Hunter-Gatherer village, mothers could reconcile a home life
20
with a work life fairly gracefully, and in a richly social context. When they gather
food, their children stay either with them or with aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins
or lifelong friends. When they’re back at the village, child care is a mostly public
task – extensively social, even communal”. The anthropologist Marjorie Shostak
wrote of life in an African Hunter-Gatherer village, “The isolated mother, burdened
with bored, small children is not a scene that has parallels in !Kung daily life”.
It’s simply because, as we explore the nature of human learning, we are continuously
reminded that learning is driven by the need to make sense. To make sense of
everything the young mind experiences, to fit all these experiences together and to
continuously try and fit these into theories of how things work. Howard Gardner
explained this well when he talked about “the unschooled mind” of a five-year-old.
To the inquisitive young mind, no question is ‘off limits’. Everything has to be
investigated.
Yet personal investigation is becoming ever more difficult and
dangerous for young people growing up in urban areas that do not consider the scale
of young people. When communities disappear and there is nothing, as it were,
between society and the needs of the individual, then we are in danger of creating a
population that sees nothing of value but their own individual interests. Without that
sense of community in their greater lives, young people can’t relate their theoretical
school-based knowledge to every-day reality.
“You can’t bring children up to be intelligent in a world that is not intelligible to
them”, is a statement the Initiative adopted in its earliest months. Communities that
really understand themselves are more able to understand other communities. To live
in functional communities is to accept responsibility for other people. Learning
Communities are intra-dependent, inter-dependent, and independent. These are good
places for children to grow up in. To not grow within a community makes it
relatively easy to simply be in denial of what are other people’s realities. “Streets
that are unsafe for children to play in are as much a measure of failed educational
policy as are burnt-out teachers and decaying classrooms,” states the Initiative several
years ago. But not too many people yet see this connection.
It is a connection that is essential to make. In so many subtle, and not so subtle,
ways, we are each encouraged by public policy to become ever ‘better’ consumers.
Greed, as the mediaeval moralists well understood, feeds on itself – “got more, want
more”. Research in 1996 by Bell and Freeman into people’s willingness to surrender
their own free time to earn more money, shows that the greater the income differential
between the richest and the poorest within the country, the greater was the
individual’s willingness to surrender their own time for more money.38 In the United
States, where the differential is greatest, more than sixty percent said they would
surrender such time; in Germany, where the differential is much smaller, it was thirty
percent. Shortage of ‘discretionary’ time damages community, for whatever reason.
In 1999 The Saguarro Foundation calculated that people cut their commitment to
community involvement by ten percent for every ten minutes of commuting time.
John Gatto concluded his argument in “Dumbing Us Down” with words that made
him an anathema to the officials of the New York school authority. He argued, “It
appears to me as a school teacher that schools are already a major cause of weak
families and weak communities. They separate parents and children from vital
interaction with each other and from true curiosity about each other’s lives. Schools
21
stifle family originality by appropriating the critical time needed for any sound idea of
family to develop – then they blame family for its failure to be a family. Whatever
an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist. It should
furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should
allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you
spiritually rich, a person who loves what you are doing, wherever you are, whoever
you are with. It should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.
We think Gatto would approve of the question asked at every presentation made by
the Initiative; “What kind of education for what kind of world? Do we want our
children to grow up as battery hens or free-range chickens?” Battery hens are
‘efficient’ to produce. They occupy little space, and because they have to expend so
little energy they fatten quickly. But if their cages are ever removed they can’t even
stand up by themselves. Free-range chickens need space and challenge. They keep
their options open. If a predatory fox appears they simply fly up into the roof. They
are survivors. Quality education is dependent not so much on instruction as on interactivity. The community is our ultimate resource. Cherish it and replenish it, or lose
it; for remember … “a shared existence is a matter of intention, not of fact”.
John Abbott
President
The 21st Century Learning Initiative (UK)
Business Centre West
Avenue One
LETCHWORTH
Hertfordshire SG6 2HB
UK
Tel: +44 (0) 1462 481107
Fax: +44 (0) 1462 481108
Email: jabbott@rmplc.co.uk
Website: www.21learn.org
May 2002
22
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