Rehumanizing Education - From Authoritarian to Arthurian
An illustrated talk by Alan Rayner
SUMMARY
Very different perceptions of reality arise from immersed and detached perspectives, epitomized by the naive outlook of a child and the rational down look of an adult. These differences can produce fundamental incongruities in patterns of relationship with one another and our living space that bring rule-based objective judgement of ‘right and wrong’ behaviour into sharp conflict with natural subjective exploration and response. In turn, this conflict severely limits our human creative potential and sets the scene for abuse and long-lasting social, psychological and environmental damage. Such abuse and damage can, however, be avoided, and our creative potential released, through an ‘inclusional’ way of seeing, which brings the immersed contextual view from inside-out into holographic rapport with informed discernment from outside-in. This way of seeing leads naturally away from authoritarian styles of instruction based purely on precise transmission of expert knowledge, to ‘Arthurian’ styles of facilitated dialogue within ‘Round Tables’ or ‘Sharing Circles’ structured so as bring together, respect and learn from diverse contextual perspectives.
Detached and Immersed Viewpoints
The Child’s Eye View
What do we see when we look out on the natural world with a child’s eyes? Try to imagine yourself back at a time of innocence, with no pre-conceptions, unknowing, clueless.
We see a dynamic, non-Euclidean geometry with no straight lines, save those that emerge like a tree trunk from a primarily curved space. We see a dome of sky that cycles between light and dark, with sun or moon and stars, joined with a horizon at which a vanishingly small space encompasses within its reach all that occupies our foreground. Trees that are specks in the distance become giants close-to-hand. When we spin ourselves around, the world spins around us in the opposite direction, all the faster the nearer it is to us. When we travel forwards, the world unravels and re-ravels before and behind us, all the faster the nearer it is to us. We see spaces as gaps that make our movements possible as we tunnel our way through endless explorations, following and creating paths of least resistance. The world is full of holes. We make vacuums in our mouth-holes that induce inward flows of nourishment, making us sure in the knowledge that space sucks. We generate pressure in our mouths to blow bubbles, revealing how space can fill as well as be filled. Playing with sand or mud and water, we realize we can’t change the shape or flow of one without simultaneously and reciprocally changing the other.
When others in our view appear kind, we joyfully gravitate to share their space. When others appear threatening or to block our way, we take flight from fear or fight to displace them with anger. Pain diverts us from confrontations that damage. We live attuned with an ever-present, ever-surprising now that folds around and within our view, protecting, exposing, soothing, thrilling.
For myself, I grew up in East Africa, and a few years ago I tried to paint some of my childhood memories of the Place.
Slide: "PLAIN BROTHERHOOD"
Silver and gold strands of rain and sunlight are strung, harp-wise, from the sinewy, strong legs to bass clef wing plumes of a male ostrich with negligee of black belly feathers. Black-backed, pink-palmed, male hands, modelled on my hands, emerge like primary feathers from white coverts and fiery secondary feathers in the wings of crowned cranes, mutually supporting each other’s one-legged stance. The hands stretch out to pluck the harp strings. Wet season gives way to dry, across a sinuous path on which two warriors stand one-legged, spear-supported to left or right, vigilant yet content and open-handed in the generosity of their unconditional love. Swallowtail butterflies link darkness and light from giraffes to zebras. Acacias transform stems to leaves. An egg cracks open, perpendicular to the hatching plane to reveal – what?
Magic!
But a magic fraught with danger! For we are vulnerable, oh so vulnerable! And our vulnerability resides not only in our lack of physical prowess, but in the blissful unawareness of our immersed view. Whilst this view from inside-out may take in others as inseparable inclusions of our self-world, it does not reveal ourselves as others might see us from outside-in, precariously perched on the brink of disaster, always prone to over-reach. We can’t step outside of ourselves and see ourselves detached from what we see – unless we catch sight of our reflection in some mirrored surface, that most stunning of revelations! We can’t self-differentiate. So we need others to do this for us. We need to be cared for, looked after. But our carers, looking, as they must, discerningly from outside-in, may not see the world as we do, from inside-out. So, the question is, does their view – a view that we may increasingly come to see for ourselves – negate or complement the one we began with, our aboriginal view?
It seems that, all too commonly, as our discernment grows with our knowledge of the world, so, paradoxically, we are prone to some narrowing of perception, some loss of innate wisdom, that brings conflict with our innocence – a veritable ‘Paradise Lost’. We enter a far from magical world of victims and bullies, consumed in a ‘struggle for existence’.
Yet, we need not enter this world, nor remain in it, if we can only become aware of what brings about this narrowing of perception and its self-perpetuating consequences. And just as this narrowing accompanies ‘growing up’, from child to adult, so it has been the hallmark of the journey of western philosophies from aboriginal cultures through classical to modern and post-modern. It is the product of a detached viewpoint that separates ‘subject’ from ‘object’, ‘self’ from ‘other’ and ‘better’ from ‘worse’, regardless of context.
Detachment
The detachment that, needs must, comes to empower and protect us, swings our focus round from subjective to objective, from inside-out to outside-in. All of a sudden, things begin to resolve into a sharp, clear focus – sorted! Now, seemingly ‘Enlightened’, like Bacon and Descartes, we no longer see through a glass darkly, and may be tempted, indeed proud, to banish our child’s eye view for good.
Now, at last, we have a sense of certainty and control, aided and abetted by our predator’s binocular vision and our hugely developed left brain hemispheres. Now we can take possession of objects of our desire. We can build mathematical, technological, philosophical, governmental, economic and scientific edifices out of these objects, seeing them metaphorically as ‘building blocks’ in our ever more sophisticated constructions.
Carried away with our success, we may go so far as to regard our outside-in, objective view as the one and only ‘correct’ one. We then hasten to instruct our ‘children’, learners of all kinds, young and old, to accept and learn it, whilst abandoning their naïve, inside-out view as ‘wrong’.
And that is when the trouble starts, because the detached, objective view inescapably deprives us of vital contextual information, and so limits our understanding. Like spectators watching a football match, our grandstand view may empower us to witness the movements of all the players within a fixed arena, but can we know what it means, from a player’s eye view, to be involved in the thick of the game? Listen to any post-match interview between a commentator and a goal-scorer, and their difference of view will be palpable. Aided by instant replay, the commentator will have seen all manner of kinetic events, plotting an extraordinarily intricate and improbable calculational path to goal that the goal-scorer will, likely as not, be completely unaware of, let alone capable of computing. The scorer, likely as not, will only be aware of one thing – a space opening up, both mediating and mediated by his/her own movements.
What objectivity does, essentially, is de-contextualize, because it loses sight of the immersed view, from inside-out. All movement, all behaviour correspondingly becomes interpreted within a super-imposed, fixed reference frame, which isolates objects as discrete, independent bodies – centres of attention – in neutral, non-participative space. A Newtonian, clockwork universe view develops with space, time, energy and matter all unrealistically abstracted out of their natural co-creative relationship.
Almost 30 years ago I represented my feelings about this abstracted view in a painting entitled ‘Arid Confrontation’
Slide: "ARID CONFRONTATION"
At the end of a long pilgrimage, access to life is barred from the objective stare by the rigidity of artificial boundaries. A sun composed of semicircle and triangles is caught between straight lines and weeps sundrops into a canalized watercourse. Moonlight, transformed into penetrating shafts of fear encroaches across the night sky above a plain of desolation. Life is withdrawn behind closed doors.
In this abstracted view, nothing can truly relate to anything else because every thing’s inside is spatially isolated from its outside, disconnected. The view is like a flat-field photograph, with all the relief, and all the space included within and around that relief, squeezed out of it, rendering it lifeless, breathless. And since this view excludes any natural coherence, implicit in the receptivity of included and including space, it implies that we must invent something else to keep order.
And so, taking objectivity as the only correct view and mistrusting if not outrightly denying the relevance of subjectivity, we have recourse to Higher Authority and prescriptive Rules as our only means of governance. Then we set this Authority and these Rules in opposition to our real nature, making judgements without regard to context. Hood-winked, and hood-winking, we set the scene for inevitable abuse.
This abusive objectivity permeates our educational systems, stifling imagination and creativity, killing joy, dumbing down. We generate a divided, divisive culture of knowledgeable ‘experts’, placed in positions of executive authority, and clueless ‘public’ obliged to defer responsibility to others, along with any tendency to think for themselves. We become subjected to the tyranny of our own authoritative structures and experts at the expense of our humanity. Great, therefore, is the gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands when those structures’ and experts’ deficiencies inevitably make their absence felt, our controlling grip loosens, and both nature and human nature fight back in such malignant forms as disease, climate change and terrorism.
This abusive objectivity finds expression in many forms.
It finds expression in the way we confuse ‘training’ – instruction in the application of expert knowledge – with ‘education’ – leading out into greater awareness.
It finds expression in the way we confuse expert knowledge of many things with wisdom – the understanding of how, as the ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus remarked, all is steered through all.
It finds expression in the way we treat ‘information’ as ‘data’, solid immutable facts independent of their context.
It finds expression in the way, in accordance with the classical information theory of Shannon, we regard communication and teaching as the transmission of data from source to receiver, to the detriment of dialogue, creative engagement between the views of one and other.
It finds expression in the way we endlessly examine learners’ reception of transmitted information in terms of their ability to reproduce it in uncorrupted form, regardless of the learners’ well-being, state of mind, background and learning styles.
It finds expression in the way we select, as ‘successful’ learners, only those with a particular kind of ability commensurate with the objective approach, and so maintain a vicious cycle of exclusion.
It finds expression in the way we treat those who do not or cannot reproduce transmitted information, or abide by prescriptive codes of conduct, as failures and criminals that humanity would be better off without.
It finds expression in the way we seek to eradicate rather than transform problems.
It finds expression in the way we discriminate between ‘work’ and ‘play’, and exclude the latter from ‘serious’ inquiry or consideration.
It finds expression in the way we nonetheless treat life and career as ‘a Game’, with prescriptive rules.
It finds expression in the way we equate ‘success’ with ‘being competitive’ in the ‘Game of Life’ and ‘Law of the Jungle’, rather than with ‘being capable’ in our own sweet, uniquely valuable and special way, of contributing to a common wealth of understanding and sense of ‘belonging’.
It finds expression in the way we divide our studies up into discrete disciplines and specialisms that don’t communicate with one another.
It finds expression in a host of other ways.
Re-connection – Encouraging Participation in Education
But it doesn’t have to be like that. If we allow ourselves out of the vortical trap of unremitting objectivity – complete with associated Rules, Regulations and Policing – for a moments reflection, isn’t it obvious that the immersed and detached inside-out and outside-in views are complementary rather than contradictory? Can’t we see that each informs the other and neither can be realistic in themselves? Don’t we appreciate that the banks that shape the river are co-produced by the reciprocal coupling of stream and catchment? Do we not understand the significance of the fact that the interference pattern produced by bringing an object’s reflection from its inner space into relation with light from its outer space produces a hologram, with all relief and space retained, rather than a flat-field view?
So, indeed, let’s find ways of bringing the child’s eye view from its inner space, centre of attraction, back – if it really ever left us – to enrich our lives and creativity. Imagine being able to step into your outside and view yourself detached as others see you from without. Imagine being able to step into another’s inside and see their unique immersed view from within. It’s easy, as John Lennon sang, if you try.
I believe that we can help ourselves to bring our immersed, unique view into rich, holographic rapport with our detached view, with each respecting and empowering the other, by developing what I and some of my colleagues call an ‘inclusional’ approach to education.
Fundamentally, ‘inclusionality’ is a ‘way of seeing’ from which a participative, deeply holistic world view naturally emerges of the dynamic inseparability of content and context – ‘informational lining’ and inner and outer ‘possibility space’ – across all nested scales from subatomic to universal. All things, our Selves included, are dynamic contextual inclusions. ‘One’ cannot change without changing ‘other’. Space unites rather than separates and is inseparable from matter, energy and time. And it is in the gravitational, inductive, transformative receptivity of informationally lined spaces, ‘informed holes’, that the coherence necessary to sustain all evolutionary co-dynamics may be found.
This way of seeing radically affects the way we interpret all kinds of creative, evolutionary processes. Boundaries that from a rationalistic perspective are regarded as discrete, fixed limits – places of ‘severance’ of ‘one’ from ‘other’, are seen inclusionally as ‘dynamic fulcra’, dynamic, non-Euclidean turning points, lines or planes (i.e. ‘folds’). Here, mutual transformation and correspondence are possible, as at the banks of a river where catchment and stream are brought into co-creative dialogue.
Studying inclusionality therefore means working at boundaries – dynamic relational fulcra within and between social, biological and universal systems, and within and between Science, Arts and the Humanities.
In appreciating the reciprocal, dynamic inseparability of ‘content’ and ‘context’, inclusionality may provide valuable insights into the origins and obviation of many kinds of conflicts and paradoxes arising from detached, rationalistic thought. These conflicts and paradoxes, if allowed to remain in place, are capable of giving rise to serious misunderstanding of complex system dynamics and, consequently, to severe social, psychological and environmental abuse and damage. Their obviation will be a source of great relief, literally a ‘breathing space’, for Humankind.
How, then, can we develop a more inclusional approach to education?
I believe an answer to this question lies in the new perspectives of space and information that inclusionality provides. Inclusionality calls for a radical re-orientation in our perspectives of space and boundaries. It challenges the abstraction, implicit in the ‘Enlightenment’ rationalism of Bacon and Descartes and enshrined in the ‘clockwork universe’ of Newtonian mechanics, of ‘things’ as discrete ‘bodies’ whose kinetic movements are isolated from and independent of the transforming shape of their containing space. Instead, it envisages all universal features to be ‘embodiments’ of the space that they both include and are included within. It treats space not as a passive ‘absence’, a ‘disembodied space’ split apart from time and incapable of interacting with explicit matter and energy, but rather as an inductive, receptive, super-conductive (non-resistive), inseparable presence, forever transforming and drawing in upon itself as a powerful ‘attractor’. Correspondingly, it treats boundaries not as fixed presences that render things discrete, or complete non-presences that wholly unify ‘one’ and ‘other’, but as dynamic, necessarily incomplete, transcendent surfaces, ‘dynamic fulcra’, that simultaneously both differentiate and integrate and so mediate the reciprocal relationship between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ space.
Boundaries, then, are viewed as co-creative, co-products of inner and outer space, that render these spaces ‘distinct’ (‘identifiable’) but not discrete (because the spaces are continuous through their boundaries, without which they could not communicate). Boundaries both mediate the balance (the zero condition) and summation (totality) of inner and outer space whilst being neither one nor the other. In the ancient, but overlooked Chinese philosophy of the Tai Hsüan, they are equivalent to the Jen third agency that both integrates and is the product of integration of Tien (outer infinity space) and Ti (inner infinity space), across all scales from sub-atomic to universal. They explicitly inform the implicit space they both shape and are shaped by. Information is found therefore not in solid particulate bodies surrounded by space, but rather in communicative surfaces that mediate dialogue between inner and outer over multiple, nested scales.
This inclusional view of informational boundaries or surfaces therefore brings immersed views from inside-out into correspondence with detached views from outside in to create an image of reality that retains all its complex topological form of relief and space. All views of this image are unique. It is a hologram. And, remarkably Gabor, the inventor of holography and winner of the Nobel Prize for that invention, based his invention on an information theory far more general than Shannon’s purely transmissive theory. In short, Gabor’s theory encompassed not just monologue, not just dialogue, but multilogue, the bringing of many, diverse, uniquely positioned perspectives to focus on a common space.
Here then, we see the basis for a natural departure from authoritarian styles of instruction based purely on precise transmission of expert knowledge, to ‘Arthurian’ styles of facilitated dialogue within ‘Round Tables’ or ‘Sharing Circles’ structured so as bring together, respect and learn from diverse contextual perspectives.
The differences between these styles has been illustrated by my colleague, Ted Lumley, as follows, using graphics by Jacques Rainville, a Montréal artist of mixed Abenaki-Québecois ancestry:
Rationalistic and Inclusional Systems Inquiry
The Sharing Circle --- acceptance of the multi-reality aspect of Nature which comes from each constituent of space being uniquely positioned within the containing opportunity landscape.
The search and debate for the mythical 'true reality'
"Am I too busy to listen to others when they have something valid to say? If the answer is yes, look at your ideas of self-importance and see yourself as one part of the whole of Great Mystery. Seek humility. . . . The Talking Stick clearly points to every direction on the Medicine Wheel as being good and worthy of experiencing. . . . [It] also teaches us how to use communication skills from the Native American viewpoint, which is to share feelings, wisdom, teachings, customs and Traditions without seeing others as wrong because they hold different Points of View." . . .
Jamie Sams (The Sacred Path)
Supportive Narrative: The little circular forms in the viewgraphs are intended as the heads of people as seen from above as indicated by their eyelashes. In the image on the left, the assumption is that there is 'one true reality', an assumption in which one excludes information relating to 'the shape of space (the opportunity landscape)' which forms out of the actions of the constituents. This view leads to debates on 'what is the true reality', with each representative taking into account their own unique positioning within the opportunity landscape, but the single-reality model having no way to account for these uniquenesses in perspective. The jigsaw puzzle geometry on the left is the result, wherein those who are most vocal (have best access to 'the microphone') and those most powerful get the lion's share of the describing of the reality upon which actional responses will be based.
By contrast, in the 'sharing circle' tradition of the indigenous tradition, it is accepted that people are uniquely situated within 'the opportunity landscape' and that reality is something which is 'implicitly understood' and which forms out of the relational view of the collective.
So in calling for us to ‘Re-humanize Education’, this is the approach whereby I think we can develop a truly participative learning style. As will be evident from its use in aboriginal cultures, it is clearly not a new concept, and the basic principles of facilitated discussion are well known in management practice. What I hope to have shown you, rather explicitly, is why this approach is so badly needed, especially when trying to understand complex system dynamics that no authoritative figure or body can comprehend on its own.
I might say that I have personal experience of this approach in a final year degree course I teach on ‘Life, Environment and People’at the University of Bath; as External Examiner for the MSc in Holistic Science at Schumacher College, Devon, England; and in the establishment of a new Master of Arts and Science degree course at the Matran School for Cross-Disciplinary Creativity based in Berlin. And I can tell you that the relief I find in not having to be an omniscient authority with Atlas-like responsibility, and the joy I perceive in the students as they are freed to develop and express their own views, is immeasurable.
I’d like to end with another painting, called ‘View from Anchorage’
Slide: VIEW FROM ANCHORAGE
The clear perspective of explicit landscape features grounded within a fixed reference frame, is dwarfed by the implicit view taken in from encircling flights of Snow Goose imagination, where cloud-dappled sky becomes summitless, snow-patched mountainside, far beyond the peaks and troughs, light and shadow, of rational consciousness.