Rumination 2# - A radical ghost from the past

Professor Stephen Dobson Dean of the Faculty of Education

Who remembers a Swedish radical called Ellen Key? Early childhood educators remember her for sure as a voice from the distant past and known for her book The Century of the Child (1900)1. It is always useful to periodically revisit such ghosts, and not merely those “male” ghosts like Aristotle, Dewey, Rousseau or Vygotsky. I was reminded myself of Ellen Key by my friend Professor Kjetil Steinsholt2. He re-quoted her in Norwegian, `Dannelse er det som er igjen etter at vi har glemt alt vi har lært’ (the formation of one’s identity is based upon what remains after we have forgotten everything we have learnt).

This quote seems at first glance somewhat paradoxical and even wrong. Surely learning (and learning of set curriculum) in schools, communities and other institutions of learning is what makes us mature and prepares us for different professions and life – trade, scientific, caring, academic and so on? Yet, if we remove and forget for a moment the content of the knowledge, we have also learnt a vast array of skills, such as learning how to learn, social skills, problem solving and inquiry-based learning that leads to more learning. We have also learnt most importantly about belonging and hopefully not the opposite, the painful experience of not belonging.

1 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/572832 A well-known Norwegian philosopher of education who has written about Bildung (identity formation) and been inspired by Rousseau, Wittgenstein and Gadamer.

Ellen Key

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Key was a strong advocate of the importance of play, creativity and letting children remain children as long as possible. In current rhetoric about 21st century skills and future oriented/future proofed education this is considered in terms such as the need to prepare the ground to be enterprising, entrepreneurial and an inquiry-based problem solver. From Key we learn that children are the true source of these skills. However, while she regarded this as a right of all, she noted how class (and cultural – my addition) divides meant some always have more advantages, privileges and opportunities to learn and advance than others.

Epochs of childhoodAt the height of her influence in the early 20th century, Europe was seeking to pass laws limiting child labour. The rights of the child were paramount in the minds of society and many political activists.

A small digression in order to contextualise: the understanding of the child and childhood has changed and it is possible to identify five dominant epochs (Thuen’s framework; detailed in the footnotes3): the subservient child4, typical of the Middle Ages, the malleable child marking the breakthrough of modernity from 17005, the child under protection (1870–1940)6, the vulnerable child (1945–1975)7 and lastly, the participatory child (1975–2010).

Where are we now? The participatory child who negotiates in the family, school and society has become commonplace and taken-for-granted; and we seem to have returned once again to a concern with the rights of the child. This time clothed not in terms of protection from too much labour or capital punishment. It is protection from males or child pornography or the power of the internet, where cyberbullying amongst adolescent peers and children has become problematic.

Ellen Key is a welcome voice in these contemporary debates. Even though concerns with child protection seem hegemonic over most if not all other concerns, she is a ghost emphasising the importance of the child’s need and right to be creative; and so too by association the adolescent’s need and right to be creative. How can we in the spirit of Key and as educators, parents and concerned citizens seek to ensure creative opportunities without (over-) grasping towards protective strategies?

3 Om Barnet. Oppdragelse, opplæring og omsorg gjennom historien (About the Child. Upbringing, Education and Care Through History). Oslo: Abstrakt forlag, 20084 To be disciplined and theories of the child in accordance with this. 5 Locke as the father of behaviourist theories of learning and Rousseau as the father of humanistic and constructivist theories of learning.6 The beginning of developmental psychology and the science of the child alongside protecting the child from excessive labour and capital punishment, clothed in the child-centred Reform movement. 7 The mother at home who gradually begins to take waged work, the increased rise of professionals diagnosing children with difficulties and lastly a deeply felt skepticism to the insitutionalisation and separation of children in different institutions.

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A story Earlier in 2018, I visited a high school one morning. Several principals were discussing how the big challenge on Monday mornings was finding time for 30 minutes to sort out and sort through all the social media experiences of the children in the weekend that had just passed. The main topic and challenge was cyberbullying. They expressed the common view that until these immediate weekend issues had been resolved, the school day for the children could not begin. It was as if the world of leisure had invaded the classroom in the manner of the War of the Worlds, the Fringe or Counterpart (if you are up to date on your boxed sets and Netflix)8. The classroom was no longer a place of asylum from the social media world. Of course, such a separation of worlds is by most accounts impossible to maintain and a project doomed to fail.

What can an educator do in such a situation? Is it their role to be social worker, psychologist, life-coach, mediator and educator? I prefer to pose this question differently: we have challenges and opportunities and co-investigating the space, clearly shared between the worlds inside and outside schools and between professions, is vital to the Life (Worlds) of learning. It is the space experienced between question and answer or between problem and solution. It is an ocean of opportunities and time, in which these matters can be (co-) deliberated and actions sought and delivered with parents and communities and the children themselves. One of my own favourite unpublished poems9 evokes the space and time of decisions in the time of children/childhood.

“Having counsel”Walter Benjamin was a literary critic, essayist, translator, a collector of fine books and rare toys. His interests spanned Surrealism, Communism, theology. He grew up in Berlin at the turn of the 20th century, with Jewish parents. As an adult he visited and published travel accounts of Naples, Marseilles, Moscow and he came to know Paris intimately in the 1930s. He committed suicide in 1940, while attempting to escape from France as the Germans increased the reach and depth of their occupation. Of his

8 The Fringe is a classic sci-fi about parallel worlds, so too Counterpart.9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merry_Maidens

The Merry Maidens Stone Circle Stamp your feetStamp your feetTwo pipers from afar.

Hold firmWax your earsLook away look away Away

Twist and turnTwist and turn

Follow the traveling beatHum a sunset By the stonesThe pipers call

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acquaintances, Brecht is probably the most famous. He wrote essays on Kafka, Baudelaire, Brecht, Karl Kraus, technologies of mass reproduction, language, violence, photography, the storyteller and Surrealism. He wrote two academic dissertations, one on Goethe and one on allegory and its role in German tragedy. The latter was never accepted as his habilitationsschrift and resulted in his never qualifying as a university lecturer. He turned his attentions elsewhere: made a series of radio programmes for children, retreated to libraries to research his never completed Arcades Project and wrote pieces for a number of popular journals and monthlies.

‘Benjamin the outsider’ lived before the time of the internet and yet he posed the question of teaching as the question of the communication of experience. Not just any kind of experience, but experience communicated in story form and experience for which, the hearer would find a future use. To put it differently, it was a question of the teacher being able to offer counsel to the pupil in an individual manner; at once sensitive to culture and context and use. It had to strike a chord with the pupil’s own particular life, viewed as an ongoing story for them and for those around them.

Benjamin added, however, that in 20th century information-saturated society it was less easy to offer counsel:

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In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel…but if today “having counsel” is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring, this is because the communicability of experience is decreasing. After all, counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding.10

Benjamin, writing in the 1930s, viewed the rise of the newspaper as typical of information society, `every morning it brings us news of the globe, yet we struggle to integrate it so that it is relevant for our daily lives´11. That is, we don’t readily, or easily, make it into part of our experience and life story, so that we can in turn make use of it and communicate it as counsel at a later date.

For Benjamin, there was little point sitting in a lecture hall, or undertaking different projects, if the knowledge had the character of information and wasn’t integrated into the individual’s reservoir of experience. This was the problem for soldiers returning from the ravages of the First World War – poorer, not richer in experiences considered worth telling12. Furthermore, for Benjamin a student being in a position to search freely on the internet and select the knowledge considered suitable for their own experiences - this would not in itself have been enough: would the student in the course of their search or on acquiring the required knowledge - would they receive the counsel they desire, and then in turn be in a position to offer counsel? (For the observant reader – in `offering counsel’ I might fall into the trap of transmission pedagogy and omit consideration of constructivist pedagogy. Please allow me to acknowledge this distinction and yet side-step it - it would take me to a different track in a Norwegian forest of knowledge and experience.)

For Benjamin, this desire and skill required to offer and receive counsel, to share counsel was the connecting link between the knowledge taught by the teacher and the motivated student. This largely explains why he expressed sorrow at the demise of the storyteller who could give counsel. To search for knowledge on your own on the internet, to complete a set project or learn a skill; this is not then the same as receiving counsel from a teacher. There are of course those who offer counseling services on the internet, but are they willing to listen to the whole of a person’s story, of the particular context in which the person finds they live?

In the fragmented times in which we live, the school teacher or early childhood educator offer counsel on a daily basis. They listen to the story of children not as 10 Benjamin, W: Illuminations. Contains essays: The Task of the Translator, The Storyteller, Theses on History. London: Fontana, 1992:83.11 Benjamin, W: Charles Baudelaire. A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. London: Verso Books, 1983: 112-113.12 Op.cit., 1992: 84.

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sound bites, but as `the continuation of a story which is just unfolding’. In offering/sharing counsel about cyberbullying and the importance of lived experience, the teacher is perfectly positioned to dig deep into these issues and offer timely counsel.

What is your opinion? What qualities are identifiable in lived experience in a digital world? Have educators lived enough of this experience, more so than children and adolescents? Can they share counsel?

MortalityIn Benjamin’s mother tongue:

Rat ist ja minder Antwort auf eine Frage als ein Vorschlag, die Fortsetzung einer (eben sich abrollenden) Geschichte angehend13.

In the English this has been translated as:

After all, counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding.

In the Norwegian, the German source has been translated as:

Et råd er jo ikke så mye svar på et spørsmål som et forslag som har å gjøre med fortsettelsen av en historie, som i alle fall går sin gang14.

Note how the English translation has the phrase, `which is just unfolding´, which appears in the source German sentence as, `eben sich abrollenden´, meaning to `at any rate roll on´, or, `at any rate occur´. It is present in the Norwegian, som i alle fall går sin gang, which can refer to how the recipient’s own story, their life as experience, will continue on a course to an end, even if the counsel is not heeded. In other words, what Benjamin seems to say, according to the Norwegian version, and which the English translation glosses as unfolding, is the manner in which counsel can be heeded or ignored, but irrespective, a person’s life story will reach and move onwards to an end. So, even if the life story is unfolding, and the counsel ignored, it will reach an endpoint. This carries the wider implication that humans must acknowledge their fundamental mortality. And, talking of death and mortality - providing counsel upon it - is one of the things Benjamin explores in later sections of his essay on the phenomenology of the storyteller.

13 Benjamin, W.: Illuminationen. Ausgewählte Schriften. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1961: 413.14 Benjamin, W.: Kunstverket i Reproduskjonsalderen og andre essays. (Art in the Age of Reproduction and Other Essays) Oslo: Pax Forlag, 1991: 182.

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