Two Poems

We've been working on poetry in my Grade 8 class. The process is to find a poet we admire, explore how they write and adopt an element of their technique in our own poems. As I worked to model for students I wrote two poems. The one I shared for students to work on with me is called "Medusa". Gwen Harwood's cycle of poems called "1927" gave me inspiration.

The other poem I didn't share because I'm a little unsettled by it. The inspiration came from a poem I stumbled across by Stephane Mallarme. Every now and then a poem or a piece of prose will reach off the page and punch you: not just because it's a great poem; also, I think, because it is saying something you are just then ripe to hear. My poem responds to the idea of cutting into the future but the metaphor seemed too raw to use as a model for students. Still, I think it's a poem worth sharing. Here's Mallarme's poem and then my own. And below that is the my poem "Medusa" which I shared with students.

Stéphane Mallarmé

A Toast

Stephane Mallarme
By Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841–1919)
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Nothing, this foam, virgin verse

Depicting the chalice alone:

Far off a band of Sirens drown

Many of them head first.

We sail, O my various

Friends, I already at the stern,

You at the lavish prow that churns

The lightning’s and the winters’ flood:

A sweet intoxication urges me

Despite pitching, tossing, fearlessly

To offer this toast while standing

Solitude, reef, and starry veil

To whatever’s worthy of knowing

The white anxiety of our sail.

Undefined

cogdogblog - https://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/5702592254/

Purity, a knife, cutting

Into the virgin white 

Of the blank space.

My cursor doing

Violence to the 

Peaceful undefined. 

With good intent,

I break forward

Seeking to shape

A new understanding.

But the chaos

Of my voice

Cuts and cuts 

And cuts 

Again.

Searching for this

Elusive meaning

I am   

Most alive.        

Medusa. 

By Powerhouse Museum from Sydney, Australia
Girl (Cook family) on front doorstep carrying a
toy 'Life Savers' truck, Public Domain,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51424376

My Brother thought up the name

For the girl next door.

We played with her sister

And ran and explored

And did what young kids do.

When the younger sister appeared,

We’d scream “medusa”

Invoking the Greek monster who,

We had read, was so ugly 

That mortals were turned 

To stone 

Just by looking at her. 

We’d run and hide

Leaving her standing alone 

On her doorstep. 

Only now do I look back. 

Remembering our cruelty 

And hoping her heart 

Was not too much hardened

By the ugliness she saw. 

Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals by Owain Service
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book has an interesting genealogy: Owain Service and Rory Gallagher are two key members of the Behavioural Insights Team or “Nudge Unit” grown out of the Prime Minister’s office in London and now with offices in Manchester, New York, Singapore and Sydney. According to their website, the BIT has been working since 2010 with the objective of:

• making public services more cost-effective and easier for citizens to use;
• improving outcomes by introducing a more realistic model of human behaviour to policy; and wherever possible,
• enabling people to make ‘better choices for themselves’.


Think Small is Service and Gallagher’s attempt to build on the last of these objectives. Drawing together all of their learning about how people think and what helps them succeed, Think Small is a manual for how to effectively set and achieve goals.

What I found particularly useful about the book is the way it filled in the small details between the more familiar building blocks of decision making and project planning. To use an example from my work as a teacher, research in education makes it clear that “feedback” is at the fulcrum of learning but we are sometimes unclear what we mean by feedback or how best to use it. Service and Gallagher offer a clear articulation of some underlying behavioural principles and a plethora of examples to help illustrate these principles. There is a lot in this book which is immediately transferrable to my classroom.

Whilst I really enjoyed and appreciated the book, I have one major reservation - to be fair it is a reservation about behavioural science in general as much as this book in particular. I was reminded as I read of a comment by Professor Frank Knopfelmacher who lectured at Melbourne University when I was an undergraduate. Knopfelmacher had some fame for his work in Social Psychology and perhaps even greater infamy for his political views and his lecturing style. He began his introductory lecture by asking students to raise their hands if they had studied the history of religion. There were a couple of half-hearted hands raised, but the vast majority of us remained still.

“Well,” he said, “there’s really no point in any of you being here. You can’t learn anything about social psychology if you don't know something about the history of religion.”

His point was that human actions always happen in contexts and that whilst the behavioural sciences are important and useful for describing human action, we risk significant blunders if we don’t also have an eye to the historical and cultural narratives in which those actions are embedded.

At times Service and Gallagher seemed to me to be uncritically entangled within a protestant work ethic that assumed a set of values which might warrant exploration. Their version of “the good life” seemed based on what made the people in their studies “feel good” and that alone seemed to justify their views of how we should plan to act.

I think Service and Gallagher might reasonably respond to my criticism by saying that they are behavioural scientists, not ethicists, and that their role in a democracy is to empower others to achieve their goals - whatever those goals may be. My response is that we all have a responsibility to see the world more widely and to inform ourselves as best we can with a broad understanding of what is right and wrong. There is a wide range of ethical assumptions embedded in Service and Gallagher's advice and we and they are unconsciously encumbered by what is not articulated.

As a Czech Jew who fought alongside the British against the Nazis and lost all his family to the Holocaust, Knopfelmacher knew better than most how important it is to be asking not just how to act efficiently, but also what do my actions mean within a wider understanding of the world.

I think the observation I am making is particularly salient at the present time as leaders such as Trump are dismantling the bureaucracies that have provided a stabilising cultural continuity to many western democracies. In the foreword to Think Small, David Halpern, Chief Executive of the Behavioural Insights Team, tells us that the soft motto of the team is: “Shunning the bureaucratic levers of the past and finding intelligent ways to encourage, support and enable people to make better choices for themselves.”

We should encourage, support and enable people to make better choices for themselves by all means, but let’s also work to understand our cultural history and improve our bureaucratic levers rather than simply shunning them.

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KURT HAHN AND THE HUMANIST TRADITION

As relevant today as 50 years ago

Published in the UWCSEA magazine Dunia 8th June 2017







Something interesting happens each year when my Grade 6 class are studying the history of Kurt Hahn and the United World College movement. Part of the learning intention is for the students to have a broad understanding of the key events that shaped this history: WWI, The Holocaust, WWII and the dropping of the two atomic bombs. And each year, somewhere in the middle of this learning, some version of this conversation happens:

First student: “I think Japan needed more materials to make their army strong.”
Second student: “But they shouldn’t have been invading other countries to get what they needed.”
First student: “Well it’s kind of the same as what the European countries were doing through colonisation.”
Second student: “True, and maybe that’s one of the things we need to know about war—that one group shouldn’t be taking things from another.”

The conversation is interesting and relevant, but there is another detail that makes it even more so: one of the students has relatives who were in Japan during the war and another has relatives who were in China. In other versions of the conversation the relatives might have been in Germany and England or Indonesia and Holland or the US and Japan or Italy or Poland or Singapore or Malaysia or any number of combinations that reflect the conflicts between nations in the past 100 years.

Often the students know little about these histories and are exploring them for the first time and there is a moment of realisation—usually prompted by me—that their grandparents or great-grandparents were on opposite sides of this history.

The response from the students is, in my view, one of the greatest possible endorsements of Hahn’s vision. They are fascinated and engaged, but their cultural differences, without exception, come second to their shared humanity. Their differing histories become a resource to tap as they explore and understand more about who they are and where they come from. I have never seen this realisation create animosity—in fact quite the opposite—and there is something profoundly hopeful about watching two students talk through the conflicts of their great-grandparents and then head out to eat lunch together.

Kurt Hahn and Humanism

Whilst this humanist educational tradition is very evident in Kurt Hahn’s actions, it isn’t so clearly articulated in his writing. As Stuart MacAlpine, Director of Teaching and Learning at UWCSEA's East Campus pointed out to me recently, the writings of John Dewey have been very influential in education and yet the one school Dewey founded folded in a few short years. Hahn, by contrast, wrote little and is comparatively little known, but he founded three highly influential schools in Salem, Gordonstoun and Atlantic College, the first UWC. Additionally, he built the Outward Bound organisation, the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, and supported the foundation of the Round Square movement, as well as encouraging or actively supporting the establishment of dozens of other schools and organisations based on his humanist principles.

Hahn’s influence can now be found in hundreds of schools and organisations: 17 United World Colleges with national committees in 155 countries (1), Outward Bound Schools operating in 33 countries and 250 locations (2), 180 Round Square schools located in 50 countries (3) and, over the last 60 years, millions of participants in the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award delivered across 140 countries(4). And this is to name only the most salient of the organisations Hahn has influenced.

What all these organisations have in common is a set of values based on challenge, the environment and a humanist concern for respecting others. Apart from a number of useful aphorisms, anecdotes and speeches, however, there is little that Hahn wrote that clearly articulates his wider educational vision. It’s instructive instead to look to Hahn’s life (5) for a clearer understanding of his vision. Whilst this article is far too short for anything but the most cursory summary, here’s an attempt to describe the broad facts.

As a German Jew born in 1889 into a wealthy and influential family, Hahn’s access to power was guaranteed. He attended Oxford University and several universities in Germany and gained a firm grounding in Classics as well as literature of the Romantic period in both English and German. When WWI broke out, he was conscripted into the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs where, being fluent in English, his role was to read the British press and ‘provide summaries and interpretations (6). By the end of WWI, Hahn had been appointed Personal Secretary to the German Imperial Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden. Hahn was a skilled negotiator and he had a key role in behind-the-scenes negotiations for peace both before and during the Treaty of Versailles.

After the war, and with Prince Max’s active patronage, Hahn built his first school, Salem, in Germany. Hahn’s approach to educational philosophy was that of the magpie (7), taking the best ideas from those educators he most admired. Salem, like all his schools, was designed very much within the liberal-humanist tradition. In the following years Hitler rose to power and Hahn spoke publicly on several occasions against the actions of Nazi thugs. In 1933 he was imprisoned. Many of Hahn’s friends agitated for his release and the British Prime Minister, Ramsey MacDonald sent a letter to the German authorities pleading Hahn’s case.

Hahn spent five days in jail for speaking out against Hitler. After his release he moved to Scotland where he set up his next school, Gordonstoun, in 1934. Once WWII had been declared, Outward Bound was Hahn’s next venture designed to train young people for the mental as well as physical hardships of life in the Merchant Navy.

And after WWII, with the horrors of war and Hiroshima and Nagasaki as backdrops, Hahn built Atlantic College, the first UWC. His intention was to create a two-year pre-university education which would bring together students from many of the countries that had previously been at war and do exactly what I describe as happening in my Grade 6 classroom.

In this brief summary of some of Hahn’s public achievements can be seen the signs of a man who was principled and determined. A skilled and connected negotiator who was pragmatic and driven. But this is only one side of the coin.
Failure

In July 1904, at age 18, Hahn rowed across the Havel river on the hottest day in 100 years and suffered an injury that was to shape the rest of his life. David Sutcliffe argues that “no appreciation of Hahn’s personality, life or work is complete without an awareness of the implications of these early experiences.”(8) Hahn suffered a sunstroke that would cause him to require intermittent bed-rest and dark rooms for the rest of his life. His parents sent him to a long list of experts trying to get to the bottom of the illness but nothing seemed to work and they questioned whether his condition may have been psychosomatic (9). Hahn wrote: “I owe the stronger part of my nature not only to the compelling circumstances of illness and misfortune, but to the misunderstandings I encountered from people I loved.” (10)

Humanism is as much about accepting human failings as it is about understanding human strengths. Hahn began and ended every term at Salem and Gordonstoun with a reading of the parable of the Good Samaritan—the New Testament story in which a man demonstrates compassion for his fellow man despite the barriers of culture and belief that separate them. Understanding Hahn, his legacy and the strengths of a UWC education, requires more than just assembling a list of Hahn’s achievements, it also requires an understanding of something essential about compassion and humanism; about the way adversity and failure can be a foundation for finding inner strength to do good. Hahn had a profound faith in the goodness of the young and in the ability of us all to find reserves of strength to allow us to build a better world.

Legacy

In the classrooms of UWCSEA, students are far more likely to see each other through the lens of a common humanity than through the filter of cultural difference. Cultural identity is very important and it is celebrated through events like CultuRama and our Uniting Nations days—it remains a rich resource to tap when looking to understand the world—but one of Hahn’s enduring legacies is a desire to see our common humanity as foundational and the key to making education a force to unite people, nations and cultures for peace and a sustainable future.

1 https://www.uwc.org/

2 https://www.outwardbound.net

3 https://www.roundsquare.org

4 http://www.intaward.org

5 In describing this history, I’m particularly indebted to David Sutcliffe’s superb book Kurt Hahn and the United World Colleges with Other Founding Figures. 2013, published by David Sutcliff.
6 Sutcliffe p. 59

7 Sutcliffe p. 120

8 Sutcliffe. p. 52

9 Sutcliffe, p. 52

10 Sutcliffe, p. 52

Wolf by Wolf by Ryan Graudin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Think "Hunger Games" meets "The Book Thief" with a touch of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" for good measure. This is a remarkable book that manages to be both compelling and engaging; exciting and thoughtful.

Set in 1956 in a world in which WWII was won by Hitler and Japan, the protagonist is a holocaust survivor who, as a result of experiments by a Mengele-like Nazi doctor, can shape-shift into different forms. Her task is to win a round the world motorbike race so that she can dance with Hitler and assassinate him. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it really works and Graudin's treatment of the history is sensitive and inquisitive. I particularly liked his postscript discussion of how and why we might usefully rethink history.

If this book doesn't end up as a blockbuster film, I'll eat an article of clothing.

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Dark Emu: Black seeds agriculture or accident? by Bruce Pascoe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This Christmas I visited a friend who gave me two precious things: a copy of Bruce Pascoe’s book Dark Emu and an envelope of seeds from the daisy yam, Microsceris Lanceolata, known as “murnong" in the Boonwurrung language.

Dark Emu begins by challenging the received historical wisdom about Australian Aboriginal peoples which says that they were hunter-gatherers who lived opportunistically in a kind of harsh subsistence at the hands of nature. Pascoe argues that this description suited early settlers who wanted to see indigenous people as passive and childlike; unable to take responsibility for the land on which they wandered and undeserving of its possession.

By contrast, Pascoe shows a very different indigenous relationship to land and nature. Working systematically through early white accounts of contact with Aboriginal people and their land, Pascoe shows how accomplished Aboriginals were as farmers.

CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/

w/index.php?curid=5603763

The daisy yam is a case in point. This highly nutritious tuber grew prolifically across much of southern Australia and was common in the areas south of Melbourne where I grew up. It is now rare. Within a few short years of white settlement in the mid 19th century, sheep had almost completely wiped it out.

It’s easy to take this history at face value and conclude that it was an unfortunate but relatively inconsequential side effect of agricultural development which caused the demise of the daisy yam. What this surface analysis hides is a much more complex understanding of the farming practices of Aboriginal people. When white settlers arrived, they saw an environment which they often described as “park-like”. Early descriptions I have read of the Mornington Peninsula talk about its open grasslands reminiscent of an English park. As a kid on weekend hikes battling my way through the thick scrub of the Otway Ranges, I remember being amazed to recall the stories of an elderly neighbour who had grown up in the area. He talked about the descriptions of the early bushmen who described the area as open and grassed, shaded by the enormous eucalypts that now were just stumps amid a younger generation of regrowth.

Pascoe shows that it wasn’t just sheep and logging that changed the environment but a loss of indigenous farming practices. Aboriginal people systematically burned and managed the environment to produce food sources when and where they needed them. The daisy yam requires a loose, friable soil and the harvesting practices supported regrowth and soil conservation in a form of sustainable agriculture which modern Australian farmers are only beginning to understand. Sheep ate the yams, but what was far more destructive was their trampling of the earth which prevented regrowth. Within a few years, parklands were replaced with compacted soils which encouraged erosion and supported far fewer animals - including sheep. Indigenous populations collapsed and their complex management of the land ended.

This story alone would make Dark Emu a compelling and important book to read but Pascoe’s analysis goes further:

Some say the idea that the world trajectory is driven by conquest followed by innovation and intensification is satisfying to the Western mind because of our psychological dependence on our imperialist history. But if we give consideration to the idea that change can be generated by the spirit and through that to political action, then the stability of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture might be more readily explained. (p.136)

In the later part of the book, Pascoe explores visions and versions of what it means to live well. Against the history of Western imperialism, Pascoe contrasts at least 40,000 years of carefully evolved environmental understandings deeply embedded in the cultural practices of Aboriginal Australians. As the world looks forward to a more sustainable future through aspirations like the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals,  Dark Emu is a timely contribution to alternative views of history and a reminder that much of the knowledge we need may already exist.

I have passed my murnong seeds on to a colleague who will grow them with students at UWCSEA as part of a project to support natural diversity. I’m not hopeful that these temperate climate seeds will grow in the tropics of Singapore, but I hope to do my best to nurture the story they represent.

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