Do we trust our educational leaders?

If you're a teacher, you'll be saying internally "of course not, you moron" and move on. No, don't go away; this was the title of an article by Professor Walter Humes in January's edition of the GTC's "Teaching Scotland" - and it was actually worth reading. No, really. Take this, for example:

"I am (intolerant) of the efforts of leadership "gurus" - those who claim to be able to transform the lives of individuals and the culture of organisations by a few days intensive course...they do not begin to address the underlying systematic problems facing many parts of the educational system".

We've all been to that in-service, eh? Think it'll be good to get a track-suit free day or two, until you get about an hour into it and you feel the life-force ebbing from you as you listen to repeated crimes against the English language being committed by someone who has clearly had the inside of a school described to them. Professor Hume then goes on to argue that this is essentially a "diversionary tactic":

"It involves passing on responsibility but not power...Attention is thus shifted from the people whose leadership underpins the whole edifice and determines the environment in which teachers work: politicians, inspectors, directors of education, chief officers in educational quangos".

You know - them that talketh copious pants, yet get paid more than us, and lord it over us. Why doth the Lord not hear our cries and smite the pants-talkers?

"Teachers are not unaware of this but feel too powerless to do much about it, often because they are too busy getting on with the job of promoting learning".

Or in my case, farting about with this blog when I should really get on with my prelim marking...

"If an independent survey of teachers was carried out, asking them what they really think of the leadership offered by (educational leaders), the result would reveal a profound cynicism".

He's not wrong - and, if any such survey had a wee box for any comments, they'd all say things like, "You're only a leader if someone's following you, shit-for-brains". But it's a couple of lines in the last section that are so true, it makes me wanna cry:

"The leaders of teachers' organisations like to think of themselves as radical but are generally deeply conservative in their professional attitudes".

The frequently used oxymoron "trendy teacher" always makes me laugh; delete "in their professional attitudes" from that last sentence. One Heedie that spoke to a group of us when we were students actually used this sentence: "Just to put you in the picture guys - I'm a socialist; I'm a member of the Labour Party". No irony intended, I can assure you. Now, the really painfully sad thing was that I think he said this so that we would think he was cool (I swear I'm cringing with the memory of it as I write). For non-teacher readers of this blog, the international pecking order in the "most conservative force on the face of the planet" competition goes something like this:

1) House of Saud
2) Catholic Church
3) Scottish Teachers

I hope you don't think I'm making a sectarian point if I point out that 2 and 3 are in many places virtually indistinguishable. I've been accused of this before but my position's FTP and FTQ, know what I mean? (Don't make me spell it out).

Not sure about the next bit about Scottish teachers recapturing their "reforming zeal" if that means a return to innovations like the open-plan school (on a par with the chocolate frying-pan in the good ideas department) but if that means confronting these leaders and saying, "get thee behind me, semi-literate ruiner of education - after the revolution ye shall be tried for crimes against the English language and for being too stupid to live", then I'm up for it. Professor Humes advocates teachers asking "searching questions at school and at local authority level":

"That will require courage because the techniques of marginalising dissent are well developed in Scottish education"

That bit is so cool, I need to repeat the phrase:"the techniques of marginalising dissent are well developed in Scottish education". Is that elegant understatement or what? And it's so true, I'm wincing right now; non-teachers will have to re-read Kafka's The Trial or something to get a flavour of it, I'm not kidding. But courage? Nah - just a ready acceptance that you'll never be promoted, that's all.

Blair and Brown: neighbours from hell

Simon Jenkins - an Oakeshottian Tory - had a quite interesting piece in the Times yesterday on the increasingly dysfunctional relationship between Blair and Brown. Jenkins often writes quite sharp stuff on the British constitution; his Accountable to None: The Tory Nationalization of Britain, published in 1996, was a trenchant critique of Thatcher and Major governments tendency to centralize power in Whitehall - and considerably more penetrating than anything I can recall coming out of the centre-left in those days. Here, he highlights the reason why this aspect of decision-making in central government is so difficult to teach these days: there simply is no effective check on executive power from HM Opposition in Parliament - any that does exist comes from within the Labour Party and specifically from No. 11:

"We can clearly forget those fuddy-duddy textbook checks on the executive: Her Majesty's Opposition, the Conservative Party and House of Commons Question Time. With Whitehall inhabited by neighbours from hell, there is no need of a balancing power. 'Friends' will do the job. The first rough draft of history lies with such blood-spattered gentlemen-at-arms as Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell on one side and Ed Balls and Sue Nye on the other. "

Jenkins thinks that part of the reason for the "personal immaturity" of these two men lies in the fact that neither of them has ever run anything. Now, this could be dismissed as the usual Tory prejudice in favour of "natural rulers" drawn from business - and Jenkins has a touch of this about him without a doubt - but he does have a broader point: the British ruling class, whether Tory or Labour, traditionally would be drawn from landed interests, business, and the trade union movement. The representation of trade unionists - as anyone who has studied the make-up of the New Labour creature will tell you - is today dismally low, with a career in law probably the most common precursor to entry into politics. This can make for able debaters who can think on their feet, avoiding the toe-curling embarrassment of someone like Bush, or before him Reagan - but Jenkins makes the point that this is of little use when things go awry - as they clearly have here:

"Political leadership in Britain now expects of its claimants the talents of a president without any relevant qualification. To lead America, or Germany, or France requires one to have been a minister, a governor or a mayor. Mr Blair and Mr Brown were none of these. They were lucky in taking power when economic and electoral good fortune masked what memoirs now reveal as a divided and shambolic administration. The past week's fiascos over tsunami relief and a leaky book reveal deplorable management by both men, poor delegation, rotten discipline and a failure to suppress personal ambition for the wider good. Nobody has a clue how to keep a secret."

The key problem, as Jenkins points out, is that - in the absence of any proper functioning administration - the absolute nature of the disagreement between these two men remains unresolved. (The disagreement is over, of course, who should have the top job).

However, his solution isn't very convincing: "If I were Mr Blair, I would do what I suggested he do after Mr Brown's challenge at the 2003 Labour Party conference. He should sack him and damn the consequences". Unconvincing because the likely consequences would be a complete meltdown in the Labour regime and I think both Blair and Brown, in their better moments, understand this perfectly well. Jenkins cites examples of other premiers who were at loggerheads with their Chancellors - but he skates over the Thatcher example: "Margaret Thatcher had an aversion to half her Cabinet". Certainly true but lacking detail; the reality was that Thatcher was ultimately destroyed because of her aversion to "half her cabinet" and more specifically, she did not survive falling out with two Chancellors, Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe. Rather than following Jenkins' advice, Blair would do well to remember that it was the latter of these two former Chancellors that wielded the assassin's blade.

Tsunami redux

I used to read the Independent before Simon Kellner turned it into a comic. Usually, I would go for the liberals' default position, which is to read the Teacher's Bible - but I'm a busy man these days and there's only so much middle class liberal self-loathing that one can manage in any given week, so today I read the Times and came across this.

Contra my previous post: come back Richard Dawkins - all is forgiven. I'd rather neither but if forced to choose, I'd prefer a secular jihadi any day!

Tsunami, Richard Dawkins and the theodicy problem

In the wake of Tsunami, much has been written about the parsimonious response of various governments, including our own, to this humanitarian crisis. Corporations too have come in for criticism for their stinginess, as in this piece by Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian. (The Scottish Daily Mail, in response, cheekily pointed out that the Guardian has contributed precisely nothing as yet.)

I don't have anything much to add to this; rather, I found my thoughts at the time and now turning to the subject of religion. Richard Dawkins uses the disaster to question the validity of religious thinking in this context:

"The Bishop of Lincoln (Letters, December 29) asks to be preserved from religious people who try to explain the tsunami disaster. As well he might. Religious explanations for such tragedies range from loopy (it's payback for original sin) through vicious (disasters are sent to try our faith) to violent (after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, heretics were hanged for provoking God's wrath). But I'd rather be preserved from religious people who give up on trying to explain, yet remain religious.

In the same batch of letters, Dan Rickman says "science provides an explanation of the mechanism of the tsunami but it cannot say why this occurred any more than religion can". There, in one sentence, we have the religious mind displayed before us in all its absurdity. In what sense of the word "why", does plate tectonics not provide the answer?

Not only does science know why the tsunami happened, it can give precious hours of warning. If a small fraction of the tax breaks handed out to churches, mosques and synagogues had been diverted into an early warning system, tens of thousands of people, now dead, would have been moved to safety.

Let's get up off our knees, stop cringing before bogeymen and virtual fathers, face reality, and help science to do something constructive about human suffering."

Dawkins isn't exactly subtle (am I alone in thinking that, while I'm sure he's a good scientist, his forays into the subjects of religion and politics haven't been entirely successful?) but he gives voice to what undoubtedly many people have been thinking: how does Tsunami square with a supposedly omnipotent, omnibenevolent deity?

Theologians and philosophers of religion have attempted to overcome this theodicy problem in a number of ways. Mainstream Christianity, having largely wimped out of the divine retribution explanation alluded to in Dawkins' first paragraph, have tended to rely on a free-will theodicy. Whether this is a philosophically satisfactory explanation for the existence of evil is questionable and it is precisely this type of catastrophe that highlights its weakness, given that the movement of tectonic plates doesn't originate in any human's will.

Those who, unlike the Bishop of Lincoln, do attempt to reach some sort of religious understanding would, I presume, reach for some kind of soul-making theodicy. (This is what Dawkins alludes to with his testing of faith remark). Now, I can't say I've ever come to a successful resolution to the theodicy problem - which is why I'm agnostic but Dawkins and others like him, I think, fail to understand the paradox of religion, which can be found right in the heart of this question: what is considered an insurmountable philosophical weakness (the existence of suffering and evil) is precisely where the religious often find their faith gives them the most strength - in giving meaning to suffering.

I can't say I find any explanation - the world as a vale of tears, or a vale of soul-making - any more philosophically satisfying than Dawkins but I'm disinclined to sneer, given that I haven't suffered anything like the hardship of many who retain their faith - and I doubt whether Mr. Dawkins has either. I am, in short, wholeheartedly in favour of what some conservatives dismissively call the "privitisation of religion"...

Happy New Year

Like many of you, no doubt, I enter 2005 several pounds heavier and several hundred pounds lighter: the latter due largely to reckless breeding by myself and other family members; the former due to the normal seasonal excess. My mind still agrees with JS Mill in saying that "pagan self-assertion is as good as Christian self-denial" - but my body, as it groans in anticipation of the coming track-suited onslaught, says he's talking mince. Anyway, Happy New Year to one and all - normal service will be resumed as soon as possible...