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'Philistinism and Cultural Renewal':
Essays on Education
by Tony McManus

Inaugural Lecture to
the Scottish Association of Teachers
of Language and Literature (1999)

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[Remarks delivered to the inaugural meeting of the Scottish Association of Teachers of Language and Literature (SATOLL) on 6 February 1999 in order to provide a background to the meeting and ideas as to what such an association of teachers may represent. The footnotes in this essay have been added.]

Can I repeat the chairperson's welcome to all of you who have turned out from all over Scotland for this meeting today as well as to the representatives of the media who have responded to our invitation to cover this inaugural meeting. This magnificent turn-out is enough in itself to send a clear signal to the authorities, HMI[1], the politicians and the media that we have a case to present, that we feel strongly about the current situation in education in Scotland and that we are prepared to come together to work out our ideas and put them into action.

I would like to spend some time sketching in the background, what has led to this meeting, and to present some ideas about education in general and the current state of education in Scotland, before going on to suggest the broad aims which we should seek to further as an organisation in the future.

Ours will not have been the only English Department in Scotland which, on sitting down to read the Higher Still Arrangements for English and Communication a couple of years ago, came very quickly to the conclusion that this was the proverbial last straw. It was clear that those who had drawn up these arrangements were woefully, unbelievably, ignorant of the workload burden already carried by teachers of English (I understand there were 2 actual teachers of English on a working party of 22), especially since the advent of individual Folio work at Revised Higher and Standard Grade levels. There was simply no room for what was being suggested.

But it was worse than that. It was not just a matter of practicalities, there were elements in the Arrangements which were downright unprofessional, elements which were unacceptable on professional and ethical grounds. I am referring here, of course, especially, to the proposals for internal summative assessment which, as we know, is open to misuse and abuse.

Mind you, you had to go no further than the front page of the Arrangements to know they would be undesirable, for the very title gave the game away - 'English and Communication'. Whenever I hear that word 'communication' used in respect of our subject I always remember the remark of Henry David Thoreau, a remark which I think all teachers of English should have at the nearside of their memories when the bogus purveyors of systems management-speak are on the loose. Thoreau was a figure of great significance for Scots - his essay on Civil Disobedience inspired Gandhi and, hence, Martin Luther King, and he has the great distinction for us of having been imprisoned by the American Government for having refused to pay a Poll Tax. When the telegraph system was spreading across the States, a friend came to see Thoreau in his cabin at Walden Pond and told him what was happening and that 'soon, Maine will be able to communicate with Kentucky!' 'Very good,' replied Thoreau, 'but what if Maine has nothing intelligent to communicate to Kentucky?' And, of course, it is that word 'communication', whose function we have all come to know in the education system, which gave away right from the start that what Higher Still was all about was a further step, and a big one, in the attempts to move education away towards mere training, the final move which we had to resist. Remember always that the people who drew up the Higher Still Arrangements for English and Communication wanted, in their first attempt, to remove Literature altogether from the syllabus. [2]

Our reaction then was to set up the loose grouping based in Edinburgh, called Teach! which produced three papers critically analysing the Arrangements from, and this has been consistently the case, an educational point of view. The Authorities have failed to answer our criticisms in these papers and other communications because, of course, they have no answers to them. Our campaign reached a high point recently when a petition was sent to every single English Department in Scotland with the following strong and unambiguous wording:

We, the undersigned teachers of English, agree that the proposals for internal assessment in the Higher Still programme do not meet the standards required by the national qualification at senior level in Scottish schools. The system as proposed is clearly open to misuse and even abuse and will expose the class teacher to unwholesome pressures from various sources, pressures incompatible with the conditions required by teachers to properly carry out their professional, educational responsibilities. None of us wishes to be both teacher and examiner of our pupils at senior level. Accordingly we call on those responsible to remove the internal assessment procedures from the programme.

Despite the fact that many teachers have yet to see this petition, as it has been, apparently, withheld from them, it has so far attracted a formidable response with 1254 signatures from over 170 schools.

It became clear, however, especially in light of the failure of the teaching unions to represent our educational case properly, indeed their apparent support for what we consider to be the unprofessional and anti-educational nature of Higher Still, that we had to get our movement on a more formalised footing and organise ourselves nationwide to present the case for education, for genuine educational values and for the teachers who struggle to retain educational values in a society which appears to be heading in the opposite direction, teachers who are subject to vilification, misinformation and on occasion downright lies from various sources in certain sections of the media.

Hence today's meeting, the setting up of the Scottish Association of Teachers of Language and Literature, if you are in agreement, whose name is deliberately chosen to affirm our vision of what we teach, against the 'communications' industry.

And it is necessary for us to stand up for the education system and seek its restoration, especially in Scotland. For, it is true to say, for many historical reasons, that Scotland is, to a great extent, identifiable with a vision of education. This is not to be anti-English of course, it is just to recognise that the Scottish system and the vision which has informed it has always been utterly different from that which has pertained in the South. Yet, especially over the past thirty years, the education system in Scotland has been subject to changes which have been not driven by its own sense of vision and purpose, but by the agenda operating in the English system. We have been fed watered down, ameliorated, adapted versions of English policies reflecting English needs. The Millennium review[3] and the recent White Paper [4] are recent examples of this process. We must re-establish the locally driven agenda, the traditional educational values, and the reopening of the Scottish Parliament gives us the opportunity to do so.

The aforementioned tendency in policy, along with other political, economical and cultural changes has brought Scottish education to a sorry pass. Before we can look to our vision and aims we must first of all undertake a negativist exercise and face up to what is wrong with things as they are now. There is no creativity without an initial negativity. It is necessary. I would like now to read you a section of a draft paper which attempts to jot down some of the main failings in our present schools. Before doing so I reiterate that we must face up to these failings. But let us be quite clear from the start that our position on this is quite different from that being peddled by Government and media. These failings in the education system are there not because of teachers but despite the best efforts of teachers. In fact, the only criticism that teachers must accept is that we have been willing to accept a whole raft of changes to the system, we have welcomed many of them, without insisting upon the necessary administrative time and resources necessary to implement them. One of the reasons why Higher Still cannot work in our subject is, quite simply, that there is no room for any more.

Here then are some criticisms which we must accept and seek to change for ourselves because it is quite clear that nobody else will and that is all the more true the louder others shout about them. These remarks are taken from a paper in progress, working title 'Manifesto' [5] which will eventually lead on to positive proposals after this initial negativist critique.

The debacle surrounding Higher Still, and the documentation regarding S1/2 [6], 5-14 [7], the management of schools etc. etc., has made it plain for all to see that those charged with the development and administration of our education service are not up to the task. The failure to think clearly, widely and deeply, the failure to see things whole as well as in their parts, the apparent lack of knowledge of the particular perspectives on the intellect, the community and ethics which have informed the education system in Scotland, and all the many other failures of which we are only too aware and whose deleterious effects we and the children we teach are the ones to bear, derive from a narrow managerial attitude towards the education service which replaces the energy of intellectual dynamism with the paltry mechanistics of systems management.

It is time, therefore, for genuine educators to seize the agenda on education from the functionaries of the systems-management society, the ill-informed and ill-motivated media commentators, the short-term perspectives of politicians, and the narrow needs of employers.

Education is not a 'product' and the thinking and the vocabulary of the modern market do not apply. Accepting this means accepting that practically every initiative, comment, policy etc. to do with education is bogus no matter how much attention has been devoted to presenting it as educationally desirable.

Nor is education a service provided for employers. While all education systems change and adapt to suit their times, education also has a meaning and function which exists in a much larger time-scale than that colonised by the vagaries of political/economic systems of whatever hue and of whatever moment.

The current situation fails to respond to the changing situation in Scotland, Europe and the world as a whole which encourages the renewal of familiarity with European ideas and expression and which recognises that the principal cause for concern in the world is rooted in the critical problem of the human relationship with 'nature'.

Scotland is peculiarly well-placed to found and foster the intellectual/cultural movement which the current situation necessitates. Here, education has always been grounded in intellectual enquiry, or philosophy. It has always been the view that specialism and socially useful knowledge is more effectively and efficiently produced, in the long term, from an initial basis in a generalist education arising from philosophy and aspiring to a philosophical spirit. Despite attempts to eradicate this educational particularity, as documented in George Elder Davie's The Democratic Intellect and The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect and in Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull's The Eclipse of Scottish Culture, enough of that philosophical spirit has remained for us to be able to revive it, as we must, not only in our own interests but in the interests of the world as a whole. This possibility has been explored in Andrew Lockhart Walker's Revival of the Democratic Intellect. The major example of where such intellectual/cultural renewal may lead us is to be found in the Geopoetics of Kenneth White whose book of essays on Scottish culture, On Scottish Ground, takes the previously mentioned work forward and, in the educational context, indicates the coordinates and perspectives of the educational systems we must look to develop.

Our first task, however, must initially be a negativist one. In the following ways the current situation fails to meet the standards of the traditional Scottish approach to education or the needs of the current situation as outlined above.

  • the curriculum is intellectually weak

  • workload is a real and serious concern for teachers of English and as such is a serious concern for the curriculum and the education system as a whole, for 'English' ('Language and Literature' would be a more accurate title) is the key core area

  • S6 [8] is not working

  • the responsibility of the Scottish education system to produce young adults who can, and see it as natural to, think about the world they live in and approach all specialist areas of knowledge from a generalist, philosophical perspective is not being fulfilled

  • this is because children are no longer taught to think independently, logically, analytically and imaginatively - one publicised result for which teachers are unjustifiable criticised: an inability to write independently in essay form

  • historical cultural awareness and general knowledge are absent from our pupils' minds

  • sense of inquiry and the right and duty to question is going, if not gone, except at the most banal and petty levels

  • the literacy level of many of our pupils is shameful and failure to deal with this problem has a deleterious effect on the whole educational provision as well as, obviously, on the children concerned

  • able children are often isolated, silent, left to cultivate their intellectual growth outside the school in case their ability upsets the social priorities which have come to dominate educational provision

  • expectation of, or aspiration towards, intellectual achievement for all has been replaced by a patronising, sentimental attitude towards youngsters from 'deprived' areas which, contrary to Scottish tradition, does not expect them to do well intellectually

  • SCOTVEC [9] has not provided a satisfactory model for senior school provision

  • authenticity and integrity of materials internally assessed or internally gathered for assessment, is not being guaranteed, to the extent which it may be possible to do so, in the present system

  • resourcing is a key concern and failure to satisfy it means the failure of Higher Still and other initiatives

  • resourcing does not mean centrally generated materials; it means increased staffing in order to reduce class sizes, increased admin and preparation time and finance for the development of syllabuses and courses

  • discipline, in the correct sense of the word, is a major problem deriving from a society which is increasingly non-, if not anti-, intellectual

  • children are no longer considered by those in 'authority' to have responsibility for their education: the minimum commitment they must bring, the minimum expectations teachers may reasonably require of them are not part of official thinking any longer. This is because children are seen as customers, education as a 'product'

  • the sense of the relationship of the local to the universal and the essential educational-cultural dynamic (from known to unknown, familiar to unfamiliar, particular to general, part to whole and vice versa) which it embodies, is absent from our children's upbringing.

  • the diminishing provision of educationally essential subjects such as outdoor education , drama, art and music, in contrast to the expansion and extraordinary resourcing of numerous variants of 'social education', business and computer education which are more training orientated, is rooted in this absence.

  • the hierarchical system is detrimental to the educational process because it encourages prioritisation of personal presentation and conformity rather than single minded concentration on educational needs and research.

The education we must try to revive and renew is the ideas-based and ideas-aiming education which George Davie in particular has outlined in his books The Democratic Intellect and The Crisis in the Democratic Intellect. Here is an extract from the Prologue of the latter book :

It used to be noted that visitors to Scotland without a taste for metaphysics were liable to be nonplussed by the questions publicly debated, because of the tendency for arguments about mundane matters to develop into arguments about first principles and for ordinary problems about material things to turn into rarefied problems of the relation of matter to mind. Commenting caustically on this situation, Dr. Johnson remarked that Scotland was the only country in the civilised world in which the advance of learning and the diffusion of culture had not been accompanied by a corresponding advance in the material quality of life, while William Cobbett, putting the same thing from a rather different point of view, spoke of the Scots of his time as having the absurd idea that the way to improve the condition of the workingman was not to give him 'bacon' with a small 'b', but 'Bacon' with a big 'b'.

In fact the Scottish tradition was that this type of education starting from and leading to philosophical speculation was not only desirable in itself but would, in the long-term, lead to genuine progress in the economic and social fields. The great example of the Scottish Enlightenment suggests they were right. It suggests also that the current policy of making the social policy and the economy, the needs of industry, dominate educational policy is not only wrong from an educational point of view, but self-defeating as well. For Davie, the great question is:

whether the aim of education is to produce people who, in Arnold's words, see life steadily and see it whole, or people who are trained to look at things in detail and who are expert in isolating problems and propounding observationally testable hypotheses in regard to them and thereby producing obviously socially useful results in the short term.

In Scotland, then, the former, metaphysical, view held sway, while in England, philosophy, when it has not been denied altogether, has been of the utilitarian sort. Again, what is important for us is that there is a difference, a difference so marked that our situation requires its own analyses and remedies , not watered down versions of England's needs.

The Scottish tradition produced remarkable results such as those exploding into life in the Enlightenment and also in individual thinkers of a unique nature whose influence, worldwide, has been quite peculiar and remarkably enduring. Let's mention D'Arcy Wentworth Thomson whose work now inspires the Mathematician René Thom:

Physical science and philosophy stand side by side, and one upholds the other. Without something of the strength of physics philosophy would be weak; and without something of philosophy's wealth, physical science would be poor.

…

The search for differences or essential contrasts between the phenomena of organic and inorganic, of animate and inanimate things, has occupied many men's minds, while the search for community of principles, or essential similitudes, has been followed by few; and the contrasts are apt to loom too large, great as they may be.

(On Growth and Form, CUP, 1917, p.7)

Or Patrick Geddes who challenged Huxley's version of Darwinism - the 'survival of the fittest' - with evidence of cooperation and communication in the development of forms, and who recognised a fundamental but rather awkward fact about human society which exposes the callous philistinism of our world:

When we add up the aesthetic subfunctions of all 'necessary' ultimate products, and add to this the vast quantity of purely aesthetic products, we see how small the fundamental element of production has become in relation to the superior, and reach the paradoxical generalisation that production - though fundamentally for maintenance - is mainly for 'art'. [10]

And, presently, the poet-thinker and cultural analyst, whose work informs much of what I have been saying this afternoon, Kenneth White:

I loathe pedagogues. Their narrow-mindedness, their intellectual comfort, their routines, their paternalism. The university is dying underneath its pedagogical structures. The real master-thinkers, life-masters, are never pedagogues. And real students do not subordinate themselves to a pedagogy (the methodological murder of the mind), they follow their desire, right to the end - an over-riding desire for knowledge. And if they don't have this desire - it's up to the teacher to waken it in them. [11]

Now, you might be thinking of some of your pupils and thinking 'this is all very well but ...' and I know exactly what you mean! Yet, the underlying principle, or ground of education does apply in varying forms to all, and the opportunities for everyone to aspire to education are, by the very nature of this view of education, open to all.

I believe that we, teachers of language and literature, are the last bastion of that old system, we inhabit the last sizeable space in the system where ideas remain at the root of what we do and at the height of our aspirations for our pupils. But, as the philistine society seeks to stifle these educational values with the values of training and the structures of systems management and the language of the technocrat, it is incumbent upon us to fight back, to insist upon our subject as being about the development of critical and imaginative thinking, the development of cultural awareness and the development of clear and strong expression of these things.

That is why we must come together as a national body. A heavy responsibility is devolved upon us - together it might be possible for us to re-establish educational values in our schools, nobody else is going to do it. A national Association of Teachers of Language and Literature is necessary to inform the public and all interested bodies of the realities of the education system at the moment and to lobby for our vision of restoring it. It is necessary also to communicate between ourselves, to share and promote ideas and practical help about texts and methods.

So, I would like to recommend to you the draft constitution which we may now go on to discuss and amend so that we may approve a final version and thereby establish the Scottish Association of Teachers of Language and Literature.

Thank you.

 

Footnotes

[2] For reports of the controversies which this provoked, and the response of the working group to them, see, for example, Times Education Supplement Scotland, November 1995 and May 1996.

[3] The controversial review of teachers' pay and conditions, the precursor of the McCrone review, the outcome of which (A Teaching Profession for the 21st Century) resulted in agreement between teachers' unions and the employers. See Pickard, W. and Dobie, J. (2003), The Political Context of Education after Devolution, Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press, especially Chapter 5.

[4] Probably the White Paper Targeting Excellence: Modernising Scotland's Schools, issued by the Scottish Office in January 1999, effectively as part of Labour's campaign for the first elections to the Scottish parliament.

[5] Much of this material, and of other parts of this lecture, appeared in SATOLL's publication Sense and Worth: Scottish Education, the Teaching of English, and the Higher Still Programme. November 1999.

[6] The first two years of secondary school in Scotland.

[7] The curricular guidelines covering the age range 5 to 14 in Scottish schools (primary and the first two years of secondary).

[8] The sixth year of Scottish secondary schooling.

[9] The Scottish Vocational Education Council, merged in 1998 with the Scottish Examination Board to form the Scottish Qualifications Authority.

[10] See Boardman, P. (1944), Patrick Geddes: Maker of the Future, University of North Carolina Press.

[11] The source of this quotation has not been located. The editor, Lindsay Paterson (lindsay.paterson@ed.ac.uk), would be grateful for information about it.

 

(Published Online: 28 June 2006)

Other essays available

Introduction by Lindsay Paterson

Paths of Perception (1997): an essay on the Celtic and European basis of Scottish thought.

Philistinism and Cultural Renewal (2000): a general cultural critique, with particular attention to the state of education.

New Labour and the Poverty of Ideas (2001): a political polemic, arguing that the UK Labour government and its predecessors have come close to destroying the intellectual basis for social renewal.

Higher Still and Lower Yet (1997): critique of the reform to the examination system in the senior years of Scottish secondary schools that was put in place between 1994 and 1999.

[This essay] Inaugural Lecture to the Scottish Association of Teachers of Language and Literature (1999): political activism set in the intellectual context explained in the other essays.

Background paper by Lindsay Paterson

 

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