Orwell's Roses. Rebecca Solnit

 

Orwell's Roses by Rebecca Solnit
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is many things, but what I think is at its centre is a thesis about beauty. Solnit uses the cultural legacy of Orwell to explore how we find dignity and purpose in our political selves. Her idea is that we can find in Orwell's writing more than just dystopia; there are also moments of beauty and compassion. To avoid the tendency to fascism, we need a richer reading of the world. A reading that looks one way to stare fascism in the face, and then the other, to find beauty and truth.

Near the middle of the book, Solnit quotes Hannah Arendt: "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist." Whilst Solnit quite deliberately has little specific to say about the present state of the political world, her writing is a perfect foundation for addressing so much of it. What I took most from the book was the need to do the hard work necessary to build better worlds. There's an urgent need to resist the laziness of leaders and the media who say what is easy and expedient. Instead, we need to take the time to explore complexity, reach compromises, and add beauty to the world.

View all my reviews

Banksia

When I trace my hand it’s 

Naturally the right that 

Picks up the pencil and marks

The page with tracing lines.

Dominance ironically results 

In the right being erased

And the image on the 

Page emerges as a

Mirror to that

Determination to define.

The wordless left:

An empty space

Inside the boundaries 

That seek to contain 

And frame and

Control.

The spirit of the Law,

A Terra Nullius,

Which we try to contain 

Within the legal letters that write

Who belongs where.

The vast openness 

That Banks and Cook 

Traced as they sailed

North labelling the

Flora and Fauna.

…

An educational mentor

Reminded me regularly that

“Values are Caught

Not Taught.”

“Create the right space” 

He said, 

“Model respect,”

Which he did,

Walking gently through 

The world. 

…

We wear paths 

In the landscape.

Tracings 

That define

Us

And circle 

The soils

Too beautiful, 

Too soft,

For words.

“Whereof one cannot speak

Thereof one must be silent.”*

Tracing our words

We map the edges 

Of the known world.

*Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. 

Banksia

This poem is my attempt to grapple with ideas in two remarkable books: Sand Talk: how indigenous thinking can change the world by Tyson Yunkaporta and The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist.

The book that began it all was McGilchrist’s and I came across his writing after hearing an interesting story. A couple of years ago, the judges of the High Court of Australia (that’s the court that interprets the constitution) were grappling with the problem of how they interpret the “spirit” of the law in contrast to the “letter” of the law. On the one hand, they have the documents that lay down understandings with a semblance of clarity through the reified language of the law; on the other hand, they have their understandings of the context in which laws are created by humans who make sense of the world in more than just words. The role of judges is to interpret the law but the words on the page don’t necessarily represent the entirety of the intent of the law makers who wrote them - particularly if you consider that much of our thinking and understanding is non-verbal. 

So the High Court judges looked around for someone to help them think through this problem and found McGilchrist. They invited him to Australia to join them for a study retreat. McGilchrist is a psychiatrist: at various times he has been Clinical Director at Bethlehem Royal and Maudsley Hospital in London, a researcher in neuroimaging at John Hopkins University, and a lecturer in English at Oxford University. The core argument in his book is that individuals have two basic modes for engaging with the world which correspond in loose neurological terms with functions in the two hemispheres of the brain. The one is when we put the world into words; the other is when we look for patterns and relationships. Describing the latter function he writes:

Another way of thinking of this would be more generally in terms of the ultimate importance of context. Context is that ‘something’ (in reality nothing less than a world) in which whatever is seen inheres, and in which its being lies, and in reference to which alone it can be understood, lying both beyond and around it. The problem with the ‘attentional spotlight’, as conventional psychological literature calls it, is that this isolates the object of attention from its context - not just its surroundings, but the depth in which it lives. It opacifies it. Our vision stops at ‘the thing itself’. The price is that this sheering away of the context produces something lifeless and mechanical. In a famous passage in the Meditations, Descartes speaks of looking form a window and seeing men pass on the street. ‘Yet’, he reflects, ‘do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons? I judge that they are men.’ It is not surprising that, shorn by the philosophical stare of all context that might give them meaning, the coats and hats that Descartes sees from his window walking about in the street could be animated by a machine. They have become fully opaque; the observer no longer passes through them to see the living person beneath. He no longer sees what is implied. However, the attention of the right hemisphere, concerned as it is with the being in context, permits us to see through them to the reality that lies around and beyond them. It could not make the mistake of seeing the clothes and hats in isolation. (p.181)

Words show us what is, context show us what it means. Through an exhaustive review of neuropsychological research and a detailed journey through the history of philosophy and art and literature, McGilchrist shows how an increasing separation between words and context is a hallmark of Western civilisation. He argues that this has made societies increasingly bureaucratic and structured and decreasingly adaptive and engaged. The letter of the law is engulfing the spirit of democracy.

Which is pretty much what Tyson Yunkaporta argues too, but in a very different way. 

Yunkaporta is an Alpalech man from Western Cape York in the north of Australia and a lecturer in Indigenous Knowledge at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia. In Sand Talk, he explores the contrast between western thought and indigenous thought; how each frames the world and responds to its problems. He writes about “haptic” or embodied knowledge and argues that:

The only sustainable way to store data long-term is within relationships - deep connections between generations of people in custodial relationship to a sentient landscape, all grounded in a vibrant oral tradition. This doesn’t need to replace print, but it can supplement it magnificently. (p.167)

I don’t know if McGilchrist and Yunkaporta have ever met, but if they did, I would sure like to sit by and listen to that yarn. 

Yunkaporta writes often about hands - as mnemonic devices, as the physical conduits of thought - and I think it is from him that I picked up the metaphor of hands in my poem. He doesn’t write in his book about James Cook or Joseph Banks, the Captain and gentleman botanist of The Endeavour which sailed up the east coast of Australia in 1770. Both characters fascinate me. I’ve read Cook’s log in the remarkable book H.M. Bark the Endeavour by Ray Parkin and Patrick O’Brien’s insightful Joseph Banks, a Life and neither Cook nor Banks strike me as the kinds of people who would have wished for the environmental and cultural destruction their mapping unleashed. 

I see myself as part of that unleashing. Particularly my work as a teacher. In a literal sense because so little of the education systems I have been a part of even begins to show respect for indigenous knowledge, but in a more subtle sense because the needs of our world to engage respectfully with one another and the environment are not well-served by education. 

The right hand of knowledge is constantly telling us how to live, without a counterbalancing respect for an alternative sense of embedded being. 

In education this tension is particularly represented by the predominance of exams. One potential countervailing mechanism is what is known as “Capabilities” in some curricula and “Approaches to Learning” in others. Capabilities or ATLs are attempts to value student's attitudes and approaches to knowledge but the challenge is that we don’t seem to know what to do with them. When we try assessing them, it feels wrong; intuitively, I think, we realise we’re making them subservient to the exam culture again. They end up remaining token elements at the fringe of education. 

I think McGilchrist and Yunkaporta nudge me towards a different way of thinking about education in general and Capabilities/ATLs in particular. I need to find ways to better honour process, engagement, connection and enjoyment without resort to numbers and definitions. In education, we need to build a culture where the sharing of a child’s story has a greater value than the grade it is given. 

Brian Henderson, the Headmaster I worked for at Woodleigh, showed us that “values are taught, not caught”. When the beautiful natural environment of the school had too much rubbish, he would wander around at recess chatting to the kids and picking up papers. I found it impossible to watch him do this without picking up a few myself. Students would see, and a culture develop. In education I think we need to spend a little less time working out what to teach and a little more time working out who to be.

When Brian retired, the school gave him a gift: the naming of a new cultivar of the indigenous Banksia. I didn’t remember this fact when I wrote the first draft of this poem and it was only after looking back through the poem and remembering that Joseph Banks gave the bush its European name that I remembered Brian and found a name for the poem. The thing about a poem is that it can embody a kind of haptic knowledge greater than prose. It’s a space for meaning inviting the reader to open potentials and trace their own paths as they look sideways for meaning. As a teacher, I've never been able to work out how to give a grade to poetry.

Istanbul

A baklava city
With its traditional
Forty layers of paper
Thin pastry, honey, pistachios.

Our guide told me it's
Best turned upside down
So that the crisp
Foundation sticks

To the top of your
Mouth - like words
Struggling for articulation.
All that history:

One religion built
On another and
Another. Pagan temples,
Under Cristian churches,

Beneath Mosques,
Shadowed by office
Buildings with
Telecom-tower minarets.

And through it all,
1700 years of tourists
Wearing away at the stone,
Crawling through the layers,

In the honey-sweet
Sickliness of history.



Link to my photos - a week in Istanbul April 2018

On reading Shostakovich's pronouncements concerning "meaning in music".

In Soviet Russia

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24727079-symphony-for-the-city-of-the-dead

Under Stalin
When everything
Had meaning
But nothing
Made sense
Shostakovich was denounced
As "anti-people".

Stalin sat
At the Bolshoi,
Listened
To the music,
Stood
Half way through
And left.

An orchestrated
Moment perfectly timed
To set vibrations
Through the audience.

Shostakovich asks:
"What was the
Composer trying
To say?"
And answers:
"Questions are naive"

He asks:
"Can music
Be evil?"
"Can it make man
Stop and think?"

...

Each of us
Sits in the pits
Bowing our parts,
Playing to a wider
Score.

When the
End comes,
There is
A brief moment
Of silence;
We hold
Our breath
And wait
For a reaction.

Kurt Hahn and Experiential Education

Admin building, Gordonstoun School, Scotland

This July I had the great pleasure of spending several hours in the Archive Library at Gordonstoun in Scotland. Gordonstoun was Kurt Hahn’s second school, dating back to the time of his exile to Britain from Germany in the 1930s.

The challenge of a library is how to find one’s way in. In the case of Gordonstoun, the literal path is through the front arch of the Round Square building then up some stairs to the main library - quaintly monastic with it’s raw wooden beams and thick stone walls - and through a rear door to a room which feels every bit like a chapel. 

The intellectual path is the more challenging. The archive is a forest of documents and memorabilia and the fear is that hours can be spent exploring one small region while other, more dramatic spaces, will be missed. Without a plan, you might walk in circles or find that you visit only the most well-trod routes and fail to discover something unique. So I began my navigation with a quote from Hahn, ‘The Moray Firth is my best school master,” and  the hope that I might learn more about his vision for experiential education by navigating a path through his writings about the sailing program.

The Moray Firth is the body of water closest to Gordonstoun; it’s where the school has always kept it’s sailing boats. Today they’re sleek fibreglass ocean-cruising yachts; in the 1930s they were a series of wooden boats traditionally rigged and every bit as capable as their modern counterparts. Hahn’s assertion that the Moray Firth is his most capable teacher is a statement about experiential education. It’s a statement about the power of challenge and a well-crafted learning environment and, for me, it’s a reminder that “the teacher” can be much more than just a person. 

I know from my time working in a number of Kurt Hahn organisations how central experiential education is to his vision. I have been an Outward Bound instructor in Australia, a teacher at Woodleigh School (a Round Square school in Australia) and my present teaching role is at the United World College of South East Asia in Singapore. In each of these organisations outdoor education is more than just an extra-curricular activity, it is central to the curriculum and intentionally designed to shape young minds in specific ways. Where classrooms teach knowledge, skills and understandings, experiential education focusses more on dispositions and attitudes that allow an individual to make something of themselves. 

One discovery in the archive that highlights Hahn’s focus on learning beyond academics is this 1950’s report template.

Notice the relatively small space allocated to English, Maths and other academic subjects. Achievement in each of these areas is represented by only a grade. More considerable space and teacher effort is devoted to describing dispositions like “public spirit” and “ability to plan”. In the Australian curriculum these dispositions are known as Capabilities, in the IB they’re the Approaches to Learning and in the UWCSEA curriculum we call them Skills and Qualities. The desire to teach and report on dispositions is still important in contemporary education, but it certainly isn’t front and centre in the way that it was for Kurt Hahn. 

In contemporary education we have elevated grades to give them a declarative authority beyond other professional teacher judgements. The apparatus of academic assessment - particularly Grade 12 exams - creates a social authority (in sociology this mechanism is called allocation) that often gives grades precedence over other forms of judgement. What Kurt Hahn’s 1950s report format does is balances the weight of judgements differently. It says, as much by its format as by its words, that how we act is more significant than what we know.

In the 1950s when WWII was in near memory, the need to find balance between knowledge and actions must have been pressing. Gordonstoun, like all schools at the time, was a very changed place with many of its teachers having seen active service and some of its staff not having returned from the war. Academic achievement must have seemed less impressive and less pressing when it was personal actions like planning and ability to manage hardship which were keeping people alive and winning battles a few years before. 

This is simplistic, of course. Not far away on the coast of Scotland are the remains of the early RADAR installations which were critical to defence in the the Battle of Britain. WWII was a technological war as much as it was a war of human values and technical knowledge was as much a weapon as determination. But in the 1950s, agency and human dispositions must have seemed very much at the fore of educational thought at Gordonstoun as this report format shows.

Which brings me back to sailing. The story of the Gordonstoun boys sailing the Prince Louis down to Wales during WWII has an important place in the mythology of Outward Bound and we have used this story in our Grade 6 curriculum at UWCSEA East. In summary, when Gordonstoun’s location on the coast of Scotland became too dangerous during the war, the decision was taken to relocate to a safer location in Wales. Most of the school population travelled down by train but a small group of boys sailed down as crew of the school boat, Prince Louis. Over several weeks they sailed down the Caledonian Canal to the West coast of Scotland and through the Irish sea to Wales. They spent several days disoriented in the Irish sea and eventually fell in with a Merchant Navy convoy coming in from the Atlantic. The seamanship and personal qualities of the boys who crewed for this voyage played a part in convincing benefactors of the value of the Outward Bound movement which Kurt Hahn founded soon after.

As I discovered in the Gordonstoun Archives, sailing was a central part of the learning program at all of the Schools that Kurt Hahn built - Salem, Gordonstoun, and UWC Atlantic. I think it was the challenge and camaraderie of sailing that Hahn valued. He wrote that:

an eminent man challenged me to explain what sailing in a schooner could do for international education. In reply, I said we had at that moment the application before us for a future king of an Arab country to enter Gordonstoun. I happened to have at the school some Jews...If the Arab and one of these Jews were to go out sailing on our schooner. . .perhaps in a Northeasterly gale, and if they were become thoroughly seasick together, I would have done something for international education.

It’s hard to quantify the value of experiential education. In the world where I live and teach, it often feels as if money is the best security - that economic prosperity is what will make the world safe - and that is perhaps partly true. Grades on academic subjects are a way that we allocate positions at universities which lead to higher paying jobs and a greater possibility of financial security. 

I think, however, that security meant something different to Hahn and the post-war generation. For Hahn, security was paradoxically a product of testing ourselves in challenging experiential environments and learning the personal dispositions that would build a better world. 

Our challenge as we shape learning in the present time, is to think about what kinds of security we need and how best to prepare our students for the challenges ahead. 

Thank you Louise Avery, Gordonstoun Archivist, and Claire MacGillivray, Director of the Gordonstoun Summer School program, for welcoming Sharon and me into your school.

Seeing things

Half my lifetime ago, and a quarter of the world away, I started my first job in a tiny rural town on the edge of the Australian desert. At night I could jog 10 minutes over the crest of a hill and see no artificial lights, only stars. There were no public busses, no parks, no traffic lights, no supermarkets, one policeman, one doctor, one store, two pubs and a school of 100 students where I taught.

Every other weekend I drove 10 hours round-trip to visit the girlfriend I had left still studying in the city. The first hour of the drive was along a single-lane bitumen road that, in line with popular practice, I would travel at 120 kilometres an hour slowing to 100 to put my left wheels in the gravel if I met a car coming the other way. I might pass 4 or 5 cars before I hit the T intersection with the main highway and could relax onto the two-lane road that would carry me down to the city.

Half way along this first stretch of road was a small shop with a section of concreted footpath and a wooden bench. I assume the building was a shop because it sat so close to the road but it no longer served any commercial function. A section of wire fence on one side enclosed the dry weeds of what once was a garden.

As I whizzed by I would see two old men sitting on the bench. All I’d get was a snapshot glimpse of two hat-clad men sitting in the shade looking out across the road. I never stopped. They sat watching and I drove by.

What strikes me most, in retrospect, is the speed of it all. In a place of such stark beauty and timelessness, I passed, regularly, meters from these two men and knew nothing of them. Perhaps they knew that I was the young teacher - one of a regular cycle of young teachers who would stay a few years before moving on. Perhaps they didn’t notice me at all and just waited for the dust to clear and their view of the wheat paddocks to re-emerge.

 Some rights reserved by Valley_Guy

In Singapore where cars are so expensive, I ride a bike. In the park each morning I pass dozens of old men and women out for their morning exercise. One man always waves and says “good morning” as I ride by. No dust here. The sky is much closer and regularly washes everything clean. Strange, though, that in such a fast-paced city I find myself travelling so much more slowly.

The younger me never took the time to wonder at what those two old men might be seeing as they looked into their memories. 

Singapore

The bus

Singapore Ian Tymms

On a school excursion
to "The Cement Works"
Drove down the
Sides of an open-cut
Mine to the
Bottom
Where we found ancient
Shark's teeth.

Now I live in a
Concrete tower looking
Down on the trees and
Earth below.
Cranes on every horizon
Are emblems
Of a desire to rise
Above the complex
History of this
Place.

But there are still
Shark's teeth in the walls.