'Philistinism and Cultural Renewal':
Essays on Education
by Tony McManus
Philistinism and Cultural Renewal (2000)
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'Philistinism and Cultural Renewal':
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[A shortened version of this essay appeared in Scottish Book Collector, autumn 2000, pp. 19-21, and the essay is included here with the permission of the editor, Jennie Renton, of that journal's successor, Textualities. The title is taken from the published version. The footnotes in this essay have been added.] At a meeting in Edinburgh's West End Hotel in October 1997, the teachers of English from the Lothians who had gathered there to discuss the recently issued Higher Still Arrangements document for their subject, asked me to articulate their concerns at the in-service seminar organised by the Higher Still Development Unit the following week. This seminar became something of a cause célèbre when some participants (not me) were so concerned at its conduct and content, that they contacted the press and a report of the anger which boiled over that day appeared on the front page of the Times Educational Supplement Scotland. I, along with other teachers of English, have continued since then to represent the views of classroom teachers on the unworkable and educationally undesirable aspects of Higher Still. Attempts were made initially to intimidate me, then to sideline, to ignore or to misrepresent. It has been a frustrating, occasionally infuriating, sometimes lonely battle, but I have never been anything other than totally convinced of the correctness of our analysis of Higher Still and of our critical analysis of the Scottish education system in general which we have published in various papers, the booklet Sense and Worth and in regular correspondence in the press particularly The Scotsman, the Herald and the Times Educational Supplement, averaging, I estimate, about one letter a fortnight over the past three years. What, apart from cussedness, pride and a congenitally endowed psychology of the rebel, sustains such a battle? For me, Higher Still was not just one initiative too many, a focus for decades of pent-up teacher frustration, it was an attack on the very nature of education itself and, more than that and consequent upon that, it was an attack on all that is best in Scottish culture just at the moment when, with the restoration of the Scottish Parliament, the Scottish people had won the opportunity to revive that culture and restore it to its former position of universal influence. This will seem to many to be an inflated claim, but I believe that those of us who have been campaigning against Higher Still have been campaigning for a vision grounded in the best areas of our tradition and aspiring to a new sense of global culture. To explain this will require a survey of the cultural-intellectual sources which inform my involvement, a quick trip through my meagre library with pointers to the vaster library of ideas which impel one towards cultural action. My main source of inspiration has been the work of the Scottish poet and essayist, Kenneth White and the ideas for cultural renewal which he encapsulates in his 'Geopoetics'. I first came across the work of this prodigious and prestigious writer some fifteen years ago in France where he lives and where, at the time, his work was available, the poetry in bilingual editions, the essays and prose writing in French editions. The fact that his work was not available in Scotland revealed to me, as soon as I had begun to read it, that the cultural-intellectual renaissance that many believed was underway here at that time, was, to say the least, a diminished affair if it existed at all. It would take greater space than is available here to justify that opinion fully, but I shall attempt to indicate the broad lines of White's thinking and the writers and ideas to which it points as they are relevant to the issue at hand here. White starts from a negativist perspective on modern (i.e. post sixteenth century) western society. He explores the two main antidotes to western alienation - the mainly Marxist political line and the psycho-analytical line from Freud through Jung - and finds them wanting. The former, by engaging in struggle with the society it criticises, becomes subsumed into it, the latter devotes itself too often to forcing the alienated individual back into the alienating context through coping or medical strategies. For White, modern obsession with the personal-social context is part of the problem, not the solution. What we are faced with is not a political-economic or family psychology problematic, but a deep and general cultural malaise. From many possible references here I will raise the dark, aphoristic definitions of the extreme negativist E. M. Cioran in his A Short History of Decay,[1] who refers to the modern human being as 'a convalescent aspiring to disease' (the temptation to mention SQA[2] and, indeed, Scottish education in this context is, I am afraid, irresistible). Cioran makes the resonating claim that modern humanity 'lives in order to unlearn ecstasy', an idea with infinite applications which suggests that we not only lack aspiration, but we are meant, we are conditioned, to lack aspiration, and our education system - a phenomenon of modern societies - is the means for imposing that conditioning. This critical journey along the 'motorway of western civilisation' culminates in a withering account of where it is headed at the moment in its alternation between catastrophe (the Somme, Hiroshima ...) and platitudinous banality (the abuse of mass 'communication' systems). It is a degraded and degenerate culture, 'a bit if this and a bit of that ... scraps of Christianity, bits of Greek Humanism, a little science, a drop of the exotic (Zen) ...'. But White does not stay in the negativist compound, as does, say, Beckett - 'I feel myself beyond endgame' he says. He draws upon his intimate childhood experiences exploring the shore, islands, woods, moors and hills around his native village of Fairlie on the west coast of Scotland, to go beyond modern alienated urban civilisation in a process he calls 'intellectual nomadism' - a physical and intellectual exploration of the world. This involves a critical analysis and ultimate rejection of the philosophical stances which underpin modern society: Plato's idealism which leads to the fundamental western belief that reality is to be found elsewhere other than the here and now, and Aristotle's categorisation which divides the world and our experience of it into analytical categories which are then never unified into a whole in our psychology. Their modern derivatives - dualism which is the cultural fount of modernism with Descartes's separation of human and 'nature' (res cogitans, res extensa), mind and body etc. etc., rationalism which derives from this separation of subject from object, and humanism with its Hegelian notion of ultimate historical progress and exploitative approach to 'nature' - are similarly rejected. But there are pointers away from this indicated by Nietzsche - 'remain true to the earth' - and Rimbaud - 'if I have any taste it is only for earth and for stones' - towards the thing that has gone missing in western civilisation - a 'sense of world'. For White the cultural problem faced by the west is solvable if, instead of idealism in its religious aspiration towards an afterlife or its political utopian aspiration, we seek a sense of reality in the earth, make a penetrating perception of the earth the grounding of a renewed cultural vision which will renew our moribund societies. It is in the examples of this sort of world-perception which White's intellectual nomadism throws up that I have found the greatest inspiration. Edmund Husserl's remarkable essay 'Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy'[3], which criticises science's objectivism as 'naivety', seeks to reinstate the philosophical mind as the one which can, when disencumbered of its conditioning, perceive reality in the world of experience. His pupil Martin Heidegger in an equally remarkable lecture 'An Introduction to Metaphysics',[4] undertakes some etymological archaeology among the basic concepts of western civilisation before they were codified by Plato and Aristotle. He excavates a sense of 'being' in which the phenomena of the world 'emerge', 'stand' and 'endure in the light' and are 'apprehended' by the human being. These mobile ideas are a far cry from the static interpretations and opinions which characterise mainstream western culture. But Heidegger goes further - when the human being expresses that perception of being which opens up to this philosophical mind, he is not scientist, he is not even philosopher, he is poet: poetry, says Heidegger, brings being into the light. The French philosopher of the imagination, Gaston Bachelard, in his The Poetics of Space [5] places the human ability to perceive reality in the imagination and brings all disciplines and experiences together in his memorable description of human expression, poetry, as 'the flare up of being in the imagination'. Scientists at the thinking end of their discipline have been coming to similar conclusions. Mathematicians had to fracture the language of mathematics to account for the fact that in the real world there is an element of chaos in the shaping of things which conventional, euclidian mathematics ignores. The quantum physicist, Heisenberg, announced that 'a sharp division of the world into object and subject has ceased to be possible' and his colleague Bohr talked of 'the deep-seated failure of our spatio-temporal images which till now have been used in the description of natural phenomena'. The Nobel Prize winning Belgian scientists Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers in La Nouvelle Alliance [6] (translated as Order out of Chaos) describe the history of science in terms of a gradual and complete break from philosophical enquiry - a break which has led and continues to lead to catastrophe. They insist upon an element of molecular 'communication' at work in the evolution of life-forms (a subtler, more complex and more thrilling 'communication' than that envisaged by those 'educationalists' who would like to see that word replace 'language' and 'literature' in the vocabulary of education). But they go beyond the need to re-unite science and philosophy and look for ' a poetic listening in to nature'. This is the sort of poetics developed in America by Pound, Williams and Olson who fracture given language structures. They take their cue from the orientalist Ernest Fenollosa who, in his study of Chinese ideograms, reached the conclusion that 'a true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature ... neither can a pure verb, an abstract notion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one: things in motion, motion in things.' [7] Having moved from Europe across to America, we can now move on to the orient where the seventeenth century Japanese poet, Matsuo Basho, offers us these particularly apposite words: 'Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the thing have become one. If your feeling is not natural if the thing and yourself are separate - then your poetry is not true poetry but merely a counterfeit.' Let me insist that the word 'poetry' in this context does not refer to the mass of more or less formulaic statements of petty personal-social angst which weighs on the nation's literature shelves today. Nor does 'imagination' refer to the simple products of fantasy and fiction. Poetry, here, is the expression of the human mind which has, disencumbered of all its petty angst and thick layers of its conditioning, reached a perception of the world which it must express. In other words, it is natural and, potentially, universal. This quick trip round the world through the west to the east, brings us back to Scotland, not the Scotland of the cringe, of pessimistic defeatism and cultural shallowness, but another Scotland which has always been in communion with such ideas and, even in its politically and economically impoverished modern condition, has attempted to stay in communion with them. In many essays, poems and travelogues Kenneth White refers to the pelagian basis of the peculiar Christianity which flourished, not least in the form of a natural poetry like the type of poetry referred to above, in these islands until the tenth century and which continued to offer an underground commentary on western civilisation for long after that. The pelagian belief is that there is no original sin, consequently that redemption is a matter of reason and the will as much as it is a matter of divine grace. Pelagianism is at the root of the thinking of John Scot Erigena whose patron, Charles the Bald, the King of France in the ninth century, offered him the resources and sanctuary to write his remarkable treatise on God and nature, Peryphyseon, which Patrick Beresford Ellis has referred to as 'a Zen of the Druids'. In the twelfth century John Duns Scotus continued this work on the relationship of the human, the divine and nature with ideas which, through their influence on Gerard Manley Hopkins, are at the foundations and aspirational heights of the best of modernism. In the sixteenth century, George Buchanan, known in Europe as 'prince of poets', laid the foundations of what we now know as the social sciences, insisted, like his pelagian forebears, upon the pre-eminence of reason over authority and wrote, in Latin, a five volume poem on the subject of the cosmos - 'De Spher'. In the twentieth century Patrick Geddes, before Prigogine and Stengers, indicated that communication and cooperation are as much part of the evolutionary process as the mainstream culture's obsessive theory of the 'survival of the fittest' or competition. He united the particular and the general approaches to social science, referred to the biologist as a 'necrologist' and declared that 'the age of mechanical dualism is ending'. A generalist well grounded in the particulars of the specialisms, Geddes came to the significant conclusion that the true function of human life (not just for the privileged) was not maintenance or production but aesthetics - art. Geddes's thinking had a profound influence on Macdiarmid whose use of Scots and cosmic perspective in his early lyrics shifted his nation's perspective in order to renew its perception of the world, while his later poetry sought to bring together all the vast areas of human knowledge and experience. What has all this to do with education? What this quick and selective run through areas of the geopoetical landscape throws up is the basis for a renewal of culture. It indicates that all those sciences, doxies and technics which have been dominant in modern culture have now run to ground and it is now necessary to bring together all the separated disciplines to lay the foundations of a new cultural perspective which is necessary in order to avert catastrophe and to banish mediocracy. It holds out not just the possibility of, but the necessity for the fully human being as one who strives towards perceptive awareness of the world through experience and contemplation and action and who strives also to express that 'sense of world' in his/her life and thought. If culture is the problem, then education is at least part of the answer, lifelong education in all its forms, formal and informal, individual and collective, personal and social. And if education is of such fundamental importance, then Scotland is a particularly privileged place in this movement towards global renewal because nothing better defines Scotland as a recognisable cultural entity in the world than its educational philosophy and practice. Here we must turn to the ground-breaking work of Dr. George Elder Davie in his books, The Democratic Intellect and The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect which establish the identifying features of this Scottish educational tradition and offer a historical account of the struggle of the cogent features of that tradition to maintain its position in the post-1707 Union, a struggle against concerted efforts by Westminster to align the Scottish system with the English. He articulates the key question thus: 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. (Crisis of the Democratic Intellect p.v) Metaphysical Scotland, in contrast to utilitarian England, always favoured the former generalist, philosophical approach not least because it was felt that education, rather than specialist training, would have a more beneficial effect on the specialisms when the broadly educated mind was turned to them. The plumber with a knowledge of Plato would not only be a more rounded person, he would be a better plumber. The correctness of this position is evident in some of its products such as those mentioned above or others such as the biologist D'Arcy Wentworth Thomson whose On Growth and Form[8] inspired Prigogine and Stengers' work with its interdisciplinary approach and its often lyrical expression of its search for 'a community of principles' in our understanding of the shape of our world. Similarly James Clark Maxwell's work reveals a generalist inter-disciplinary approach which led to discoveries well in advance of his time which have inspired the search for a mathematical understanding of all aspects of human life including language and emotion in the work of the French mathematician René Thom. For Davie, then, the key feature of Scottish education is its insistence upon philosophy as both source and aim of all educational activity. It is because of this philosophical insistence that Scottish education is characterised by a generalism quite opposite to the highly specialist tradition of English education. It is also because of this intellectual insistence that Davie can lay claim to democracy in the tradition. Class, caste, colour and creed are irrelevant in a philosophically-based education. And it is the philosophical source and aim which leads to the famed breadth of education which we have come to expect in the Scottish system. Students were expected to enquire into the connections between subjects, their intellectual and ethical grounding and relationships as well as their functional application and usefulness to the community. Again, the application of knowledge in the economy was not thought to be a separate issue from the philosophical drive of education. Far from it - the high point of Scotland's functional contribution world-wide in engineering, industry, science and architecture, coincided with the high point of her philosophical and literary influence. From this generalist grounding, specialism could then be pursued, although this would be put off for as long as possible, safe in the knowledge that specialising students would have been so well educated in the philosophical perspective that they would always refer that specialism back to its relation and significance within the generalist context. Some dismiss the democratic intellect as a 'myth'. I have no problem with the notion of 'myth' - it reveals the community's aspirations and desires and I believe those aspirations and desires not only to be still relevant today but necessary if we are to solve the global problems which threaten us with catastrophe or if we are to deal with the 'mediocratic' culture which is reducing our societies to the state envisaged by Auden wherein 'intellectual disgrace stares from every human face'. [9] So where does Higher Still fit into all this? Higher Still is not an educational programme, it is merely a modular framework for internal assessment with an external examination tagged on to the end of it. It seeks to 'merge' Further Education and schools, the vocational and the academic, internal and external assessment. Institutionally this meant the creation of the Scottish Qualifications Authority through the 'merger' of the internationally renowned Scottish Examination Board (SEB) and SCOTVEC[10] which had administered, with famous and risible incompetence, further education and senior school modular certificates. However, no such 'merger' really took place. It was more a SCOTVEC takeover which led to the sidelining and disaffection of many SEB people within SQA and to the Higher Still Arrangements which, to the utter disbelief of teachers who had experienced SCOTVEC, offered SCOTVEC modules by another name. This was an attempt to replace education with mere training. Higher Still talks of 'skills' which is what you train people in whereas education, as I understand it is, about the development of 'abilities' - more complex, more subtle more valuable, more real. Higher Still favours the modular approach to courses again stressing training as opposed to education because, rather than offering a generalist, inter-connected approach to educational content, it limits it to a set of prescribed aspects which in turn are divided into a prescribed selection of bits of knowledge or practice which can be uniformly and mechanistically assessed to suit a universal bureaucratic framework. (Readers are referred to Hugh Noble's excellent critique of modularisation on his website: http://www.tartanhen.co.uk/essays/module.htm). It is all about presentation, the appearance of competence in the image of a tick-box grid, rather than the substance of genuine ideas and expression. This is a mistaken view of education as product rather than process, a set of specific 'skills' rather than a complex of interconnecting abilities, the servant of a limited and short-term perspective on employers' interests rather than the generator of critical and creative minds able to apply themselves to complex and long-term problems and experiences. In other words Higher Still is the educational expression of rank philistinism, the educational provision for the 'mediocratic' society which all those writers and thinkers have identified as the great threat to the future. And it is fundamentally anti-democratic. By reducing education to a network of arbitrarily prescribed assessment mechanisms it deprives all but the already privileged of access to their birthright as human beings, to the world of knowledge and ideas and the development of the ability to express critical and imaginative perceptions and developments of that world. It is the educational system for the 'global knowledge economy' which is only superficially global and which demeans 'knowledge' by restricting it to that which aids the generation of business and money. Indeed, Higher Still and its consequent fiasco are what happens when business is given undue influence in social policy - the leading figures in the SQA have business backgrounds and little educational experience. I have published many letters in Scotland's newspapers over the past three years and my experience has been that when I have attempted to raise the wider political issues the sub-editor reaches for his scissors. Genuine ideas-based education is, on the other hand, a necessary element in a truly democratic society (which as Kenneth White points out is not what we have at present). In Scotland the restoration of our Parliament with responsibility over education and the power to raise money to finance it ought to be the opportunity for people of genuine educational vision to turn back the advance of philistinism and to once again create a model of educational provision for the world. Clearly, the dominant party in the Parliament doe not see it that way but has gone about the implementation of Higher Still with foolish and destructive thoughtlessness. The opposition parties, especially the SNP, have yet to show a genuine sense of vision as opposed to mere politically astute reaction to Labour's lack of thought and daring.
Footnotes[1, return to reference in text] Précis de Décomposition, 1949 [2] Scottish Qualifications Authority – responsible for examinations in Scottish schools and (in most respects) colleges, although not universities. [3] Lecture given in Vienna in 1935. [4] Lecture course at University of Freiburg 1935, published 1953. [5] 1958 [6] 1977 [7] 1967, published in the book Instigations by Ezra Pound. [8] 1917 [9] ‘In memory of W. B. Yeats’, 1939. [10] The Scottish Vocational Education Council.
(Published Online: 28 June 2006) Other essays available
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