Groups
During these years I also had my first experience in unstructured groups,
and experienced at first hand the power of such group interactions to produce
major changes in social behaviour in the participants; within the microcosmic
society of such groups, as they developed, there was opportunity to take
risks, revisit social experience, and re-construct social meanings. I learnt
how powerful such groups could be in raising awareness, loosening counterproductive
behaviours, and reframing experiential meanings (Slater, 1966).
Research
When at age forty I was appointed to head the newly established Research
and Planning Branch in the SA Education Department, a position I held (with
planning dropped half way through), for the next thirteen years, my major
claim to expertise was in the area of testing and assessment. The Directors
never allowed this to influence their decisions about committee membership,
and during my sojourn with them I was never appointed by them to any departmental
committee concerned with assessment. Nor, for that matter, am I aware of
any decision made by the Department that was informed by research that
the Branch carried out. When research knowledge was consistent with Departmental
policy assertions it was utilised; when it didn't or wouldn't serve those
interests it was ignored. I was learning that research knowledge was an
instrument of power, a weapon for rationalising decisions, rather than
a springboard for rational decision making (Cohen & Grant, 1975).
It was partly this insight, as well as a belief that my clients were
students and teachers rather than administrators, that determined that
most of my own research would be concerned with classroom practice. I also
noticed that most educational research dealt with special groups and special
problems, leaving the "normal" educational assumptions and practices unsullied
by any critical research probes. So I directed most of my action research
to the "average" classroom; that is, I sought out the commonalities of
educational experience rather than the differences.
In the first few years I spent considerable time with teachers looking
at improving assessment practices in schools. One thing in particular became
apparent during these discussions--that most of what I had learnt as a
professional test constructor was irrelevant to the assessment issues that
concerned teachers in classrooms; these were not the sort of descriptions
that helped children learn better, or helped teachers teach better. When
I wrote Assessment in the primary school in 1972 the then Director
of Primary Education wrote a foreward in which the final paragraph stated
"some people would question his suggested limitation on testing. Whatever
one's views, teachers will find the report thought provoking and valuable".
In other words, I disagree with him, but respect his different viewpoint.
As Directors became more managers and less educators in the 1980s, this
sort of clarity and openness, this up front honesty, was to become increasingly
rare.
Politics
In 1974 a thirteen year old schoolgirl was suspended from her high school
and refused to accept the suspension on the grounds that it was unfair.
She returned to the school and was subsequently removed forcibly by police.
The incident resulted in a Royal Commission, and the Royal Commissioner
found that the girl and her parents were a "trinity of trouble makers".
(Royal Commission, 1974). It was never suggested that the setting up of
the Commission had anything to do with the fact that the girl's father
was an endorsed labour candidate and a personal friend of the Minister
of Education, and that the Principal of the school was the brother of the
shadow Minister of Education. Nor was it ever suggested that the united
front of the Education Department officers and secondary principals had
anything to do with the highly conflictual situation then existing between
the Minister and the high school principals.
I thought that most of the overt conflict at the school was due to communication
problems between the girl and certain members of staff, and certainly not
due to the severity of the crime, which was trivial. In such cases it seemed
to me to be the job of the professional staff, not the student, to resolve
the conflict. So I gave evidence on behalf of the student. I was the only
member of the Department to do so. What I learnt from this episode was
that the structural violence embedded in institutions is evidenced not
by the severity of the punishment when rules are breached, but by the severity
of the punishment when the sanction, whatever it is, is not accepted. I
could see that accepting any sanction reinstates the power structure; in
fact, breaking the rule enables such re-establishment to become visible,
enhancing the power relations. But not accepting the sanction is extraordinarily
threatening because it destabilises the power structure, challenging its
very existence. It also became clear to me that none of the Departmental
officers, or the Royal Commissioner, could see this.
Social development research
As the development of social skills was a major objective in the stated
curriculum of almost all school subjects, I initiated a major project on
social development. It lasted four years, attracted two major grants, and
at one stage involved six full time and six part time researchers (The
Social Development Group, 1979). As a starter to this I took six months
long service leave and a round the world trip. I spent some time visiting
people and relevant projects in the United States, Canada, and England.
I talked to teachers at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels about the
social development of their students, and how they were able to facilitate
that development. They all described the social development of their students
during a year, whether six or twenty six years old, in the same terms;
tentative, inarticulate, immature to confident, articulate, sensitive.
It was obvious that what they were talking about had little to do with
developmental skills.
My experience in unstructured groups suggested to me that it had everything
to do with developing groups, with the way that power, affect and trust
relations change if they are allowed to. I had already spent six months
reading the literature on social skill development. It was often interesting,
but utterly uninformative in regard to classroom practice. And we had asked
teachers to describe mature social skills; they responded with good descriptions
of conforming behaviour. I could see that shifting the focus to the social
group, to the context of social action, produced an array of possible teacher
interventions, informed by group development theory. We started with a
project about developing social skills. We ended with a project on developing
the classroom group; for only in a developed group would the demonstration
of mature social skills be appropriate.
Rebelliousness
One incident that occurred on this journey deserves a mention, as it
relates to the question of what constitutes experience. In London I went
into a coma for two weeks, during which time I convulsed and hallucinated
and was fed by a drip and lost 12 kilograms in weight. I was diagnosed
as having viral encephalitis.
My hallucinations had a clear story line. They all involved adventures
with semi humanoid monsters who were trying to kill me. The final scene
had me lying on an operating table with ten humanoid gun barrels at my
head. The odds were stacked against me, and death was immanent. I had time
only for one statement. "You will only kill me," I said, "to prove that
I cannot control you. Yet if you kill me for that, then I have completely
determined your actions." They left, I came out of coma, and requested
some food. With some trauma, I had learnt that the rebel is as tied to
the system as the conformist. If I wanted to change the system, I would
have to take a different stance; one of autonomous action, rather than
rebellious reaction. I would need to tap the ambivalence of those in power,
not their antagonism.
Back in Adelaide, the social development project got under way. I read
the literature on (small) group development theory, and realised that most
of the models could be reframed in terms of distributions of power and
affect relations; and because of my physics background, I conceptualised
these in terms of fields; properties of the space between rather than of
the agents mediated by the fields. My personal ontology was developing,
and ten years later more complex notions of power relations (eg Foucault)
would find nourishment in my conceptual space.
Politics again
Part of the condition of the research grant was that separate reports
be written for the major participants in the study; researchers, administrators
and curriculum writers, teachers, students. I wrote the booklet for students.
It was entitled How to make your classroom a better place to live in
(The Social Development Group, 1980). It described the four stages of development
of the classroom group, how students might experience these stages, and
how they might respond to that experience. Four different responses to
each situation were constructed, and were overtly categorised as positive
and negative; the negative responses, with which students would identify
and be familiar, were likely to be not constructive in moving the group
onward; the other two responses, one involving individual action and one
group action, were ones which might help the group develop. The booklet
was designed for classroom discussion.
Before the book was distributed a question was asked in the South Australian
parliament about the book. Was it not encouraging students to respond negatively?
The Director General responded by ordering that the book be shredded. Flattered
if furious with this treatment, I pointed out the conditions of the grant,
and requested specific information about exactly what was objectionable
in the book, so that it could be amended and reprinted. After some months
the answer came back; two words, "fascist" and "fairy," had to be removed;
the positive responses must come first; and there must be an overt statement
that the positive responses were "better". In addition, only teachers involved
in developing their class groups could distribute this book to their students.
I interpreted this to mean that there was nothing specifically at fault
with the book. It was the ideology of the book, with its implicit aim of
empowering students, that had caused the over-reaction. Yet the rhetoric
about schools applauded the empowerment (autonomy) of students. Unwilling
to confront the contradiction, the Department had to settle for limitation
rather than complete suppression. For of course developing the classroom
group meant that the power relations between teachers and students changed.
If this happened in enough classrooms not only classroom structures, but
school structures, would have to change. The implications of the research
were radical rather than progressive.
Inservice training was essential if the findings of the research were
to be propagated, if practice were to follow theory. So four researchers,
now highly skilled in working with teachers, were retained for a year to
produce inservice materials and work in schools with teachers. A year later,
despite protestations, all had been returned to classrooms. An invaluable
human resource for the dissemination of ways of developing the classroom
group was annihilated. Fifteen years later teachers still struggle with
rebellious classrooms and search for answers in individual psychology,
curriculum statements still highlight the development of social skills
rather than the social context for mature social behaviour, and teachers
still say "groups don't work" because they don't understand group development
theory. In 1980, I was beginning to learn what I knew by 1990; that nothing
really changes unless the power structure changes, and hierarchical power
structures are immensely stable and resistant to change (Wilson, 1991).
Consciousness
One further event in 1979 is pertinent to this story. At Findhorn, an
intentional community in Scotland, I experienced some shifts in consciousness
(without drugs or intention, with detachment and interest), that seemed
very similar to those experiences described by mystics, and generally described
under the rubric of the perennial philosophy. (Bucke, 1901; Huxley, 1946;
Wilbur, 1977,1982,1991; Wilson, 1992). These experiences, and subsequent
ones, make it impossible for me to take Freud's easy way out (Freud, 1963),
and discount such events because I have not experienced them. Such experiences
have been immensely significant in the history of the past three thousand
years, for they have provided the bases for the world's great religions.
The mythologies and structures that are the social manifestations of these
initiating mystical events have taken very different cultural forms, but
all have retained, within their core practices, considerable congruency
with their source as a particular state of consciousness. This is important
because it points to one exit from the maze of confusion created by the
acceptance of the relativity and cultural determination of all human values
(Wilbur, 1995).
Peace and violence
By 1982, Ronald Reagan's unique combination of monstrous stupidity and
apocalyptic hardware had stirred the coals of fear still glimmering under
the weight of twenty years of psychic numbing and denial, of human refusal
to seriously consider the high probability of a nuclear holocaust that
could destroy all life on the planet. Everywhere the peace movement flourished.
Learned journals of all sorts from medicine to engineering, from physics
to art, began to feature articles about nuclear war and its effects. Most
unlikely bedfellows, Marxists and churchmen, pacifists and retired admirals,
feminists and builders labourers, would all shout out their protests.
Where were the children in all this? I decided to find out. There was
some American data from surveys. I decided to tap a richer source; children's
fantasies of the future. The data was devastating (Wilson 1985). For many
it was a post-nuclear war world, barren landscapes and destruction everywhere.
For nearly all it was dehumanised, people existing either as passive recipients
of technology, at the best comfortably mindless in a plastic world, at
the worst slaves of the machines or robots that grind mercilessly along
their efficient and pre-programmed paths. An unstoppable high-tech, high-destruct
world.
Like many who start with a naive view of peace as the absence of war,
my reading and reflection soon led to more sophisticated understandings;
towards peace as the absence of fear at a psychological level, and as incompatible
with injustice and repression at the social level. And I began to understand
how injustice was often not so much a matter of human intention, as a product
of historical man-made structures, continually reproduced through the human
facility of role-taking, and the moralities and ideologies that are able
to transform efficient violations into noble virtues. At fifty I was beginning
to articulate a world-view.
During the international year of peace, schools were all expected to
get involved. Believing that in dealing with violence we should begin in
our own back yards, I prepared a kit for schools entitled Programs to
reduce violence in schools (1986). It included ideas for involving
students, teachers and parents, for collecting information, and for taking
action at a school level. It also included a paper on understanding violence,
in which I tried to make overt the links between violence, school structures,
social control, and justice. Complete with words of encouragement from
the Director General of Education, the kit went off to one hundred high
schools in South Australia. One school got the project off the ground and
collected data from students and staff. Then they stopped. During the year,
many schools planted trees for peace. I was developing a feel for the absurd.
Writing again
Two years before, buttressed by a report by the head of another educational
research organisation, the Department disbanded ours. I was sent out to
graze in the country at Murray Bridge for two years as an Assistant Director
Curriculum, where I managed to get two of the social development advisers
back into business, before I retired gracefully. There was nothing further
I could do within the system. I was ready to write, and had two young daughters
at home that I wanted to spend more time with. I was learning the difference
between jousting with windmills and hitting my head against a brick wall;
one is a noble quest, the other just plain masochism.
The writing and the daughters got together into a book called With
the best of intentions (Wilson, 1991). The book deals with the structural
violence embedded in the hallowed institutions of family and school. I
had decided to self-publish the book before I began, and as a result was
able to give clear reign to my personal voice(s) and style. The book is
egalitarian in that it treats children as fully human persons; it is iconoclastic
in that it challenges many of the sacred myths and structures of child-rearing;
it is written with passion and humour. It is informed by empirical data
and overt in its philosophical world-view. The arguments are dense, but
the presentation is, I hope, sufficiently varied and light to make its
message accessible. With modifications that are essential to the context,
I hoped to use a similar approach in this thesis.
The current study
A large number of significant learnings have emerged for me from the
current study. I want to refer to the two that I have found the most significant.
The first relates to my extensive reading of Michael Foucault, the second
to my grapplings with ontology.
There were two major insights from Foucault; the first was his analysis
of how culture produces and expresses rather than reduces and represses;
that if the person is one dimensional, this is not because society has
taken away the other dimensions, but that society, through its relations
with the person, has produced a one dimensional person. The second insight
was the centrality given to the examination, in all its forms, to the construction
of the individual in the modern world. It was from this springboard that
I could leap to observe the standard as the bullet in the examination gun.
An equally important learning from Foucault relates not to insight,
but to style; not to his immense data base and sometimes lugubrious argumentation,
but to the soaring rhetorical passion that marks his insightful conclusions;
his demonstration that "scientific" writing does not need to be dull and
portentous, but can legitimately use the full creative resources of the
language, helped me to feel much more comfortable in using my own voice
for this work.
My own philosophical gropings into what is knowable, what is describable,
led to some surprising conclusions. Such delving was necessary, because
any assessment is a description. In practice it is a description of a performance
of some kind in context, even if in theory it purports to be a description
of some attribute or quality of a person; this I had known for a long time.
To move from here to the insight that all knowledge is a description of
events involving a relationship between at least two elements, and thus
to appreciate the slide made when the description is pinned to one particular
element, represented a major reframing of much of my earlier thinking.
Summing up
There are at least five levels in all this: The events that I was a
part of; the manifest behaviour that constituted my part of those events;
my particular recall of that experience; the meanings I verbally constructed
from that recalled experience; and the meanings and reactions that you,
the reader, construct from all that.
Truth is not an issue here. Awareness and truthfulness are. I can only
assert my truthful intentions. Regardless, the reader will make his or
her own judgment about the value of the position from which they interpret
me as coming.
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