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The amount of college debt is skyrocketing in the United States while job opportunities sought by graduates are dwindling. Costly undergrad and graduate degrees used to be the passport to a middle class lifestyle but are now leading to a growing number of indebted youth who are bitter about their time in higher ed. Have modern ideas of higher education been so deeply shaped by the logic of the financial sector that we won’t find an alternative? What methods of self-learning can we use to gain skills while avoiding the debt burden of a university education?

In Extraenvironmentalist #59 we speak with critical theorist Max Haiven about the financialization of higher education and how it has limited our imagination. Max discusses the Edufactory Collective and how we can’t separate the university from the transformations underway in global capitalism.

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In Quebec, a massive student strike defied the law and brought down the provincial government to prevent tuition fee increases. Across Canada, university campuses have been key incubators of the Idle No More movements, both for indigenous peoples and their settler allies. And around the world, from Egypt to New York to Greece to Chile to Nigeria, students have been leading the struggles against austerity in the name of a different future. Yet at the same time, universities have become more corporatized, commercialized and rationalized than ever, with skyrocketing tuition fees, staggering levels of student debt, massively inflated class sizes and deteriorating working conditions for teachers and support staff. This presentation advances the idea that there are two forces contesting the future of the university. On the one hand, there is “The University of Enclosure”: a tool by which society is brought into conformity with the ruling socio-economic paradigm of colonialist capitalism. On the other, there is “The University of the Common” where new ideas, new relationships and new forms of solidarity are being built. The struggle between the two is a struggle over the soul of education itself.

 

 

Benoît Peeters’ Derrida biography, just out in English and German translations, is a must-read for everyone interested in late 20th century philosophy. Over the years I must have read 4-5 books of Jacques Derrida–not much in comparison to his phenomenal output. As the cover already announces, Peeters has written a broad, human-interest biography in a Anglo-Saxon style. That may sound unusual for Paris–and maybe it is. A sign of times? Intellectual versions of Derridadology already exist and no doubt more will appear in this genre. The inevitable coming biography by Avital Ronell will no doubt be a unique mix between the two genres. I myself knew little or nothing about the Werdegang of the good man, so it is not up to me to complain about personal details. I do not feel like pointing at the bias of the biographer or complain about the lack of larger psycho-cultural and socio-political frameworks (which is no doubt true). The fact is, in a few decades, despite all the Derrida archives, a book like this can no longer be written because the contemporaries that Peeters interviewed (100 or so) will no longer be alive.

What tires you out as a reader are the sheer endless fights between Parisian (and European) writers and thinkers from the 1960s to the recent present. This personality got into trouble with that genius etc. etc. A concept was no good. A discussion got out of hand. With the distance in time growing this is a mystery that will need a proper explanation: Why all this fractionalism? What the hell was at stake here? Money? Media coverage? Research money? None of that seems to apply in the Parisian context. Power? Truth? Reputation? Honor? Maybe. Amongst orthodox Marxists and inside social movements there are and always have been strategic debates, but in this case? Why this enormous anxiety and polarization? Was it only about power position inside institutions? Or perhaps in general the position of the intellectual in society? (a joke from today’s perspective) A play of characters comparable to the dramas on the ape rock? (celebrities gossiping about each other). Or indirect political and ideological struggles? (preferred reading but most likely an overdetermination).

Peeters’ Derrida biography can be read as one of possibly many parallel stories that can be told about French Theory going Global. The historical contribution of the most widely travelled proponent of this diverse movement seems to be one of deconstruction. I prefer the German term Abbau (Heidegger writes about Destruktion). Working in the long shadow of Second World War, Cold War, economic restructuring, decolonization and new social movements (in particular feminism), Derrida has led the project to take apart the old European metaphysical concepts–albeit in a playful, positive manner. He comes over as a careful and modest person, neither a radical nor a fan of negative dialectics. Deconstruction as a cultural practices comes over a gentle project to take apart the Western supremacy, in a time when Europe was divided and defeated. Engaged and political in his own way, his main audience remained inside academia. His aim was to blow up the traditional discipline of philosophy (while remaining inside its walls). For today’s generation this would be a difficult task (Derrida’s failed attempts to get a respectable position inside French academia reads as a real tragedy). Anyone writing in the style of Derrida today wouldn’t even get a PhD and his or her contributions to journals would be straight out rejected because of incomprehensive language, lack of quotes and absent argument. We are not supposed to fool around with literature, theory and philosophy. What was, and still is so radical about Derrida is his poetic experimental style. That’s the real scandal. Just read the comments below Terry Eagleton’s review of the book in The Guardian.

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Benoît Peeters, Derrida, A Biography, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2013 (translated by Andrew Brown, org. published by Flammarion in 2010).

May 8, 50+ students, faculty, and staff are maintaining a ‘sit-in’ inside Jamshed Bharucha’s office on the 7th floor of the Foundation Building of the Cooper Union. As students we have reclaimed the President’s office in response to the Administration and the Board of Trustees announcing the implementation of tuition for the incoming class of 2014- desecrating a 154 year old tradition of meritocracy and free education. We stand together with the extended Cooper community in opposition to this decision; we reaffirm all of the previous and future actions of our fellow students and allies.

For updates see: http://cusos.org/

 

Re-posted from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/aug/23/toby-young-grammar-school-michael-goveOriginally published:  Sunday 23 August 2009 (The West London Free School opened in 2011) 

The West London Free School prospectus is also available here:  https://www.westlondonfreeschool.co.uk/overview/prospectus.html

Why I will set up a new school to give my children the best chance in life

 Toby Young, son of the visionary founder of the Open University, wants to break down Britain’s apartheid between the private and state sectors by creating a new type of ‘free’ school where access to a good education is not based on income

 

 

The news that a record-breaking number of pupils scored an A in their A-levels this year may sound like an educational success story, but it won’t mean much to many whose children are at comprehensives. As the Observer reported last week, 31% of privately educated pupils achieved three As in 2008, compared with 26% of selective grammar school pupils and 7.7% of those in comprehensives. This year the performance gap is even wider.

For the first time, more than 50% of A-level papers in private schools were graded A, compared with 20% in comprehensives. In relative terms, comps are being left ever further behind.

This is particularly worrying for me because I have four young children. I desperately want to educate them in the state sector, but I know just how easily comprehensives can let down some pupils. I attended two mediocre comps and ended up failing all my O-levels. I needed a disciplined, competitive environment in order to thrive and it wasn’t until I switched to a grammar that I managed to get three A-levels and win a place at Oxford.

The nearest comprehensive to me in west London is Acton High, which has a GCSE pass rate below the national average. Unfortunately, if my children do as badly as I did, there is no nearby grammar to pick up the pieces. Selective education is an option only for those who can afford to move into the catchment area of one of the country’s 164 remaining grammars or educate their children privately – and there are many who believe it shouldn’t even be available to them.

“It’s not surprising that, academically, selective schools get the best results,” says Fiona Millar, a former Downing Street aide and now a campaigner for state schools. “Someone needs to bite the bullet and get rid of grammar and fee-charging schools.”

But is there a less draconian way of boosting the performance of non-selective state schools? The Conservatives certainly think so. The details of their education policy have yet to be nailed down, but the centrepiece will be a commitment to Swedish-style “free schools”. Broadly speaking, a free school will be one that is owned and operated by a charitable body, but entirely funded by the Department for Children, Schools and Families. Free schools will have more autonomy than state schools, particularly when it comes to the curriculum, but they won’t be able to select pupils according to ability.

On the face of it, they sound identical to the academies that Tony Blair made the focus of his education policy, but they will differ in one crucial respect. In order to qualify for central government funding, academies have to satisfy a number of quite demanding criteria. For instance, they have to be set up in partnership with a sponsor willing to come up with £2m – or an existing educational institution – and they are supposed to have at least 900 students.

Free schools, by contrast, can be much more modest. There will be no minimum number of pupils, which means there could be as few as 20. Regardless of size, you won’t need the backing of a deep-pocketed sponsor.

Michael Gove, the shadow education secretary, says a Tory government would pick up the entire cost of setting up and running free schools. Unlike academies, free schools will compete directly with comprehensives. If a child opts to go to a free school rather than the local comp, the education department will transfer the cost of educating that child to the free school instead.

As the Tories are keen to point out, the policy has proved a success in Sweden. Free schools were introduced in 1992 and became an immediate hit. Today, they are an established part of the country’s education system, with 9% of primary pupils and 17% of upper secondary pupils educated at free schools.

At first, I was sceptical. Will the Tories really be willing to push through such a radical and costly reform of our education system, particularly given the public spending environment they will find themselves in? But having pressed Gove about it – and spoken to others in the party – I’m convinced they’re sincere. Consequently, I’m going to try to set up a free school in Acton.

My plan is to create a “comprehensive grammar”, that is, a school which is as close as possible to the grammar I went to – traditional curriculum, competitive atmosphere, zero tolerance of disruptive behaviour – but with a non-selective intake. It will be for 11–16s, with a total of 300 pupils. Assuming the Conservatives are in power by June 2010, I should be open for business in September 2011.

Naively optimistic? That remains to be seen. Everyone tells me that the biggest obstacle will be finding a suitable site and then converting it for school use, but, once I’ve done that, the mechanics of setting up my “comprehensive grammar” shouldn’t be too hard. Perhaps the most radical element of Gove’s proposal is tearing up the planning and building regulation system to enable these schools to be set up quickly and easily.

I already have a model, in the form of Marr College, a grant-aided Scottish comprehensive founded in the 1920s. In its heyday, when it was run by a combination of an independent trust and the Ayrshire education authority, Marr was among the best comps in the country, achieving exam results comparable with that of Scotland’s best selective schools. Its success was down to rigorous streaming and its philosophy of challenging all its pupils to push themselves to the limit of their ability.

The prospect of trying to start a new school single-handedly would be daunting, but I’ve been deluged with emails from local parents offering to help. It seems I’m not alone in wanting to send my children to a school with a comprehensive intake that isn’t burdened with a progressive educational agenda. Indeed, a significant percentage of comprehensives have already rejected this philosophy.

For instance, Burlington Danes in Shepherd’s Bush, west London, has recently been converted into an academy and the new headteacher, Sally Coates, uses the phrase “comprehensive grammar” to describe her school. There are 180 pupils in each year and they are individually ranked according to how they perform in two annual tests. The results are put up on a noticeboard and pupils are divided into seven streams.

“There is a huge amount of competition to stay in your set or move up,” Coates says.

She welcomes the idea of free schools because she believes they will allow parents to have more say about how their children are educated.

But not everyone is as sanguine. The main concern is that the only people who will take advantage of the new Conservative policy will be middle-class parents who don’t want to send their kids to the local comp – people like me. Struggling schools will end up with even fewer middle-class pupils than at present, thereby accelerating their decline. In effect, Britain will have a three-tier education system that exactly maps the class system.

As you’d expect, the Tories are anxious to rebut this charge. Gove recognises that the policy has to be embraced by Labour, too – one reason why free schools will be non-selective. In addition, Gove favours a sliding scale of pupil place funding, whereby the amount a free school receives to educate a particular child will be inversely proportional to parental income.

This is the most exciting aspect of the policy. One reason why social mobility has ground to a halt is because working-class children aren’t being pushed as hard as they should be. The great virtue of grammars is that they can help children from ordinary backgrounds get a foothold on the careers ladder, and I hope “comprehensive grammars” can do the same.

I have a personal reason for wanting to do this. My late father, Michael Young, was a visionary educationist who came up with the idea for the Open University. He was a passionate advocate of comprehensive education, being a close colleague of Anthony Crosland, the Labour education secretary responsible for the massive expansion of comprehensives in the 1960s. The downside of this policy was the decimation of the grammar schools that had done so much to help the children of the worst-off.

My father loathed the old system of educational apartheid, whereby children were divided into haves and have-nots at 11. But it didn’t occur to him that so many comprehensives would turn into secondary moderns in all but name. Today there are two types of comps: the good ones in middle-class suburbs and affluent rural areas, which are comparable to old-fashioned grammars, and the rest. In effect, the old division has been preserved, except access to the best state schools is now determined by income rather than ability. My hope is that “comprehensive grammars” can address this problem, honouring my father’s inclusive philosophy, but without the unhelpful egalitarian baggage.

Ultimately, the fate of free schools will turn on how many are started in the next few years. For the policy to succeed, enough new schools will have to be set up to make it politically impossible for Labour to oppose them. But will the British prove as enthusiastic as the Swedes? I hope so, if only because I want my school to thrive. I strongly suspect they will.

If you’re interested in helping Toby Young set up his new school, he can be contacted on howtolose@hotmail.com

Child of the Open University

Toby Young, 45, is the son of Michael Young, a Labour life peer and founder of the Open University.

A journalist and author, his most famous work is How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, which was made into a film last year, starring Simon Pegg and Gillian Anderson. The novel re-created his failed three-year attempt to succeed in the US as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair in the 1990s.

Young gained a first in PPE at Brasenose College, Oxford, and studied at Harvard and Trinity College, Cambridge. He is married to Caroline Bondy, with whom he has four children.

http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/inspection-reports/find-inspection-report/provider/ELS/124870

Re-posted from: http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/ModernSchool/modern_school.html

 

THE MODERN SCHOOL

On October 13, 1909, Francisco Ferrer y Guardia, a Spanish educator and freethinker, was shot in the trenches of Barcelona’s Montjuich fortress. Following a mock trial, at which no solid evidence against him was brought forward, a military court had found him guilty of fomenting a popular insurrection, which had raged for a week before being crushed by government forces. The execution of Ferrer, the founder of libertarian schools, provoked an international outcry. A little-known figure outside radical circles, he was catapulted into sudden prominence. On both sides of the Atlantic, there were meetings and demonstrations of protest. In a number of European cities streets were named after him and statues erected in his memory. Most important, however, a movement for libertarian education, spurred by his example, quickly spread throughout the world. In Brazil and Argentina, in Poland and Czechoslovakia, in China and Japan, not to mention England, France, and other Western European countries, schools were started on the Ferrer model. These schools, bearing Ferrer’s name and promoting his philosophy of education, emphasized the rights and dignity of the child, a give and take between pupil and teacher, and the cultivation of both manual and intellectual skills in a libertarian environment.

The most extensive Ferrer movement, however, arose in the United States, where it endured for more than fifty years. Between 1910 and 1960, an assortment of radicals from New York to Los Angeles carried on a venture in learning that was unique in American history. Inspired by Ferrer’s martyrdom, more than twenty schools were started in different parts of the country, where children might study in an atmosphere of freedom, in contrast to the formality and discipline of the traditional classroom. These Ferrer schools—or Modern Schools, as they were called—differed from other educational experiments of the same period in being schools for children of workers and directed by the workers themselves. Their founders, moreover, were mostly anarchists, who sought to abolish all forms of authority, political and economic as well as educational, and to usher in a new society based on the voluntary cooperation of free individuals. Their object, during an era of war, social ferment, and government oppression, was to create not only a new type of school but also a new culture, a new life, a new world.

In the wake of Ferrer’s execution, anarchist and free-thought groups marshaled their resources in a campaign to spread Ferrer’s teachings. By the spring of 1910, their efforts had crystallized into a national organization, the Francisco Ferrer Association (later the Modern School Association of North America), with Leonard Abbott as president and Harry Kelly and Emma Goldman among the charter members. Over the next few years the Ferrer Association prospered. Branches were started in all parts of the country, and membership grew with a rapidity that surpassed the most optimistic forecasts. By the out break of the First World War, moreover, Modern Schools had been opened in New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Salt Lake City, Seattle, and Port land, while additional schools were soon started in Boston, Paterson, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other locations. In addition to English, classes were conducted in German, Yiddish, Czech, Italian, and Spanish. Near the larger cities, including New York and Philadelphia, summer camps were established as retreats from the squalor of ghetto life.

Most of the Modern Schools in America were ephemeral ventures, lasting only two or three years, although the school at Stelton, New Jersey, continued• for four decades, and its counterpart at Mohegan, New York, for nearly two. Improvisation and experiment were the rule, and there was considerable variation from place to place, depending on resources and staff. Yet, for all the diversity, the schools shared a set of common practices and assumptions. Instruction was based on libertarian principles, with emphasis on learning by doing and on crafts as well as books. Rigid programs, curricula, and timetables were banished from the classroom.

Participants in the schools believed that traditional education restrained the spontaneous development of the child, stunted his growth, and brutalized his character Shunning memorization and rote, the staples of conventional learning, they argued that freedom must be the cornerstone of education, that education was a process of self-development, a drawing out rather than a driving in, a means by which the child’s unique spirit was nurtured rather than shaped or suppressed. As far as possible, they held, the pupils themselves must decide what to learn and how to learn it, that the function of the teacher was to allow them free scope, to encourage their self-reliance and independence. A favorite metaphor was that of a tree or a flower, growing, unfolding, blossoming, with nature alone to sustain it. In keeping with this philosophy, the students were treated with patience and understanding. Rewards and punishments were done away with, arbitrary rules abolished, and there were no marks or examinations which might engender hypocrisy or dissimulation or arouse feelings of envy among the pupils. Children, it was held, must be free to learn without fear and without the pressures of rivalry and competition.

In all the Modern Schools, education was conceived of as a never-ending process, extending from cradle to grave. Adults, accordingly, were encouraged not only to take part in the operation of the schools but also to attend evening and Sunday lectures by well-known speakers and writers, supplemented by courses on art, literature, and a range of historical and scientific subjects. In several schools, moreover, Esperanto was taught as an international language, promoting solidarity among the different nationalities, and nearly all the schools doubled as radical centers, involved not only with education but with a variety of social causes, from industrial unionism and freedom of speech to sexual liberation and antimilitarist propaganda. The prevailing ideology was a mixture of anarchism, socialism, and syndicalism, with Kropotkin as the most influential theorist. Apart from the Ferrer Association newsletter, a number of publications—notably Mother Earth and The Modem School magazine— carried news of the different schools, keeping them abreast of each other’s activities. Contacts between them were frequent, including exchanges of teachers and equipment, and they shared a sense of common mission in their quest for educational freedom.

No school better exemplified the dual pursuit of children’s and adult education than the Modern School of New York, familiarly known as the Ferrer Center. Established in 1911, it was a place where adults came to hear lectures by Clarence Darrow, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and other public figures, to see new plays staged by the Free Theatre, to listen to concerts of the Modern School Trio, and to debate the burning questions of the day. It was an outlet for men and women of talent, where Man Ray could experiment with camera and brush, Mike Gold read from Shelley and Blake, and Sadakichi Hartmann put on finger dances and perfume concerts.

Apart from a day school for children, supervised by Will Durant, the Ferrer Center offered evening classes for adults in literature, art, physiology, and psychology, as well as in Spanish, Esperanto, and French. The most successful of these was the art class, conducted by Robert Henri and George Bellows. An other popular course was the weekly forum on “Radical Literature and the Great Libertarians,” organized by Leonard Abbott, who lectured on Maeterlinck, Shaw, and other writers of advanced views. Jacques Rudome, the teacher’ of the French class, remembers the Ferrer Center as “bustling with life and activity,” and to Moritz Jagendorf, director of the Free Theatre, it was “a seething ocean of thought and activity, everybody working and creating.” “I liked it at once,” recalls the writer Manuel Komroff. “One felt unfettered, one felt free. Views were freely exchanged between the speaker and the audience, and the air seemed charged with excitement.”

The Ferrer Center was viewed by its enthusiasts as a model of what was desirable in human relations. In its structure and operations, in the behavior of its participants to one another, it provided a foretaste of the libertarian future, of what life could be like once the restraints imposed by authority had been removed. For some it was also a vehicle of rebellion, a means of altering social foundations by removing the fetters of ignorance, dogmatism, and convention. Its central aim, however, was to free the child. From this the rest would follow.

The progress of the school was interrupted, however, during its fourth year of existence. In April 1914, during a coal miners’ strike in Colorado, a detachment of militia attacked a tent colony at the town of Ludlow, killing five miners and a boy. The soldiers then poured oil on the tents and set them ablaze; eleven children and two women were smothered to death. Following this, three persons, including a leader of the strike, were savagely beaten, then murdered. The Ludlow massacre, as the episode became known, touched off protests throughout the nation, directed at John D. Rockefeller, Jr., principal owner of the Ludlow mines. In the ensuing weeks, moreover, a plot took shape to blow up Rockefeller’s mansion near Tarrytown, New York. Masterminded by Alexander Berkman, the conspiracy was hatched at the Ferrer Center On July 4, 1914, an explosion occurred in a tenement on Lexington Avenue, a few blocks from the Center, killing three anarchists, Arthur Caron, Carl Hanson, and Charles Berg. A bomb intended for Rockefeller had gone off prematurely.

The Lexington Avenue incident had immediate repercussions within the school. In the wake of the explosion, police agents infiltrated the adult classes in an effort to sniff out the conspirators. Overnight the school acquired the reputation as a bomb factory, a hotbed of incendiarism and subversion. The number of visitors dwindled, and financial contributions dried up. The straits in which the school now found itself, combined with the presence of spies and the general atmosphere of anxiety and suspense, led to a decision to move the school outside of New York. A quiet, rural location was found in the village of Stelton, New Jersey, where an anarchist colony sprang into being. In May 1915 the Modern School moved from New York to Stelton, where it maintained a continuous existence for nearly forty years, the longest such venture on record.

Education at Stelton continued along the lines laid down in New York. There was no segregation of the sexes. Attendance was voluntary; the children came and went as they pleased, pursuing what interested them, ignoring the rest. There was no discipline, no punishment, no formal curriculum. Pupils as well as parents took part in the administration of the school, which formed the centerpiece of the colony, the focus of its life and main reason for its existence. In conformity with the principles of libertarian education, due emphasis was laid on handicrafts as well as books. Instruction was given in carpentry, weaving, and basket-making; a Belgian anarchist, Jules Scarceriaux, came from Trenton to teach pottery and brick-making; and Joseph Ishill started a class in printing. Under the guidance of Hugo Gellert, moreover, the children produced strikingly original art work. As in New York, much effort was devoted to experiment and improvisation. Furthermore, given the school’s rural location, an outdoor education was more the rule than ever, featuring hiking, swimming, gardening, and a variety of games and sports.

Of the many teachers at Stelton during the school’s prolonged existence, the most notable, perhaps, were Alexis and Elizabeth Ferm, the objects of much attention in the interviews. “The school was run by saints,” Roger Baldwin remarks. “Alexis and Elizabeth Ferm were so dedicated, so self-sacrificing, that no setback or discouragement—and there were many—could stop them from carrying out their mission.” The Ferms—Uncle and Aunty, as they were called—were among the earliest pioneers of libertarian education in the United States. In 1901 they started a free school in New Rochelle, New York, moving to Brooklyn and then to the Lower East Side, before ending up at Stelton in 1920. Both—and especially Aunty—were strong personalities who left a deep impression on the Ferrer movement, in which they were active for nearly thirty years. The Ferms left Stelton in 1925, only to return eight years later Aunty died there in 1944, after which Uncle retired to a single-tax colony in Fairhope, Alabama, where he died in 1971.

Meanwhile, in 1923, a new colony had sprung up on Lake Mohegan, New York, with a Modern School of its own that lasted for two decades. The Mohegan school opened in 1924 under the direction of James and Nellie Dick, who were also in charge of the children’s boarding house. Both had been ardent proponents of libertarian education in England, where they had founded Modern Schools in Liverpool and London. Emigrating to the United States in 1917, they supervised the boarding house at Stelton until their move to Mohegan. In 1928 they returned to Stelton as coprincipals, before starting their own Modern School at Lakewood, New Jersey, which continued for twenty-five years, closing in 1958. For half a century, then, the Dicks had played a major role in the Ferrer movement on both sides of the Atlantic.

The closing of the Lakewood school marked the end of the Modern School movement in America. To preserve its legacy, however, a group of former teachers and pupils met in 1973 and established the Friends of the Modern School. In September of that year the new organization held its first annual reunion at Rutgers University, a stone’s throw from the defunct Stelton Colony. Since that time Rutgers has become the repository of the Ferrer movement archives, and hundreds of pupils and teachers, colonists and friends have attended the reunions, among them Nellie Dick, her son James Junior, and the children and grandchildren of Leonard Abbott, Harry Kelly, and Joseph Cohen, three of the principal founders of the movement. From all over the country the alumni of the New York, Stelton, Mohegan, and other Modern Schools have gathered each year to take part in lectures and symposiums and to deposit material in the Rutgers collection.

[By Paul Avrich]

Francisco Ferrer:The origin and ideals of The Modern SchoolChapter IX The reform of the school

There are two ways open to those who seek to reform the education of children. They may seek to transform the school by studying the child and proving scientifically that the actual scheme of instruction is defective, and must be modified; or they may found new schools in which principles may be directly applied in the service of that ideal which is formed by all who reject the conventions, the cruelty, the trickery, and the untruth which enter into the bases of modern society. The first method offers great advantages, and is in harmony with the evolutionary conception which men of science regard as the only effective way of attaining the end. They are right in theory, as we fully admit. It is evident that the progress of psychology and physiology must lead to important changes in educational methods; that the teachers, being now in a better position to understand the child, will make their teaching more in conformity with natural laws. I further grant that this evolution will proceed in the direction of greater liberty, as I am convinced that violence is the method of ignorance, and that the educator who is really worthy of the name will gain everything by spontaneity; he will know the child’s needs, and will be able to promote its development by giving it the greatest possible satisfaction.

In point of fact, however, I do not think that those who are working for the regeneration of humanity have much to hope from this side. Rulers have always taken care to control the education of the people; they know better than any that their power is based entirely on the school, and they therefore insist on retaining their monopoly of it. The time has gone by when rulers could oppose the spread of instruction and put limits to the education of the masses. Such a policy was possible formerly because economic life was consistent with general ignorance, and this ignorance facilitated despotism. The circumstances have changed, however. The progress of science and our repeated discoveries have revolutionised the conditions of labour and production. It is no longer possible for the people to remain ignorant; education is absolutely necessary for a nation to maintain itself and make headway against its economic competitors. Recognising this, the rulers have sought to give a more and more complete organisation to the school, not because they look to education to regenerate society, but because they need more competent workers to sustain industrial enterprises and enrich their cities. Even the most reactionary rulers have learned this lesson; they clearly understand that the old policy was dangerous to the economic life of nations, and that it was necessary to adapt popular education to the new conditions.

It would be a serious mistake to think that the ruling classes have not foreseen the danger to themselves of the intellectual development of the people, and have not understood that it was necessary to change their methods. In fact, their methods have been adapted to the new conditions of life; they have sought to gain control of the ideas which are in course of evolution. They have endeavoured to preserve the beliefs on which social discipline had been grounded, and to give to the results of scientific research and the ideas involved in them a meaning which will not be to the disadvantage of existing institutions; and it is this that has induced them to assume control of the school. In every country the governing classes, which formerly left the education of the people to the clergy, as these were quite willing to educate in a sense of obedience to authority, have now themselves undertaken the direction of the schools.

The danger to them consists in the stimulation of the human mind by the new spectacle of life and the possible rise of thoughts of emancipation in the depths of their hearts. It would have been folly to struggle against the evolving forces; the effect would be only to inflame them, and, instead of adhering to earlier methods of government, they would adopt new and more effective methods. It did not require any extraordinary genius to discover the solution. The course of events itself suggested to those who were in power the way in which they were to meet the difficulties which threatened; they built schools, they sought generously to extend the sphere of education, and if there were at one point a few who resisted this impulse–as certain tendencies favoured one or other of the political parties-all soon understood that it was better to yield, and that the best policy was to find some new way of defending their interests and principles. There were ‘then sharp struggles for the control of the schools, and these struggles continue to-day in every civilised country; sometimes the republican middle-class triumphs, sometimes the clergy. All parties appreciate the importance of the issue, and they shrink from no sacrifice to win the victory. ” The school” is the cry of every party. The public good must be recognised in this zeal. Everybody seeks to raise himself and improve his condition by education. In former times it might have been said: “Those people want to keep thee in ignorance in order the better to exploit thee: we want to see thee educated and free.” That is no longer possible; schools of all kinds rise on every side.

In regard to this general change of ideas among the governing classes as to the need of schools -I may state certain reasons for distrusting their intentions and doubting the efficacy of the means of reform which are advocated by certain writers. As a rule, these reformers care little about the social significance of education; they are men who eagerly embrace scientific truth, but eliminate all that is foreign to the object of their studies. they are patiently endeavouring to understand the child, and are eager to know-though their science is young, it must be remembered-what are the best methods to promote its intellectual development.

This kind of professional indifference is, in my opinion, very prejudicial to the cause they seek to serve. I do not in the least think them insensible of the realities of the social world, and I know that they believe that the public welfare will be greatly furthered by their labours. “Seeking to penetrate the secrets of the life of man,” they reflect, “and unravelling the normal process of his physical and psychic development, we shall direct education into a channel which will be favourable to the liberation of energy. We are not immediately concerned with the reform of the school, and indeed we are unable to say exactly what lines it should follow. We will proceed slowly, knowing that, from the very nature of things, the reform of the school will result from our research. If you ask us what are our hopes, we will grant that, like you, we foresee a revolution in the sense of a placing of the child and humanity under the direction of science; yet even in this case we are persuaded that our work makes for that object, and will be the speediest and surest means of promoting it.”

This reasoning is evidently logical. No one could deny this, yet there is a considerable degree of fallacy in it, and we must make this clear. If the ruling classes have the same ideas as the reformers, if they are really impelled by a zeal for the continuous reorganisation of society until poverty is at last eliminated, we might recognise that the power of science is enough to improve the lot of peoples. Instead of this however, we see clearly that the sole aim of those who strive to attain power is the defence of their own interests, their own advantage, and the satisfaction of their personal desires For some time now we have ceased to accept the phrases with which they disguise their ambitions. It is true that there are some in whom we may find a certain amount of sincerity, and who imagine at times that they are impelled by a zeal for the good of their fellows. But these become rarer and rarer, and the positivism of the age is very severe in raising doubts as to the real intentions of those who govern us.

And just as they contrived to adapt themselves when the necessity arose, and prevented education from becoming a danger, they also succeeded in organising the school in accord with the new scientific ideas in such a way that nothing should endanger their supremacy. These ideas are difficult to accept, and one needs to keep a sharp lookout for successful methods and see how things are arranged so as to avoid verbal traps. How much has been, and is, expected of education! Most progressive people expect everything of it, and, until recent years, many did not understand that instruction alone leads to illusions. Much of the knowledge actually imparted in schools is useless; and the hope of reformers has been void because the organisation of the school, instead of serving an ideal purpose, has become one of the most powerful instruments of servitude in the hands of the ruling class. The teachers are merely conscious or unconscious organs of their will, and have been trained on their principles from their tenderest years, and more drastically than anybody, they have endured the discipline of authority. Very few have escaped this despotic domination; they are generally powerless against it, because they are oppressed by the scholastic organisation to such an extent that they have nothing to do but obey. It is unnecessary here to describe that organisation. One word will suffice to characterise it–Violence. The school dominates the children physically, morally, and intellectually, in order to control the development of their faculties in the way desired, and deprives them of contact with nature in order to modify them as required. This is the explanation of the failure; the eagerness of the ruling class to control education and the bankruptcy of the hopes of reformers. “Education” means in practice domination or domestication. I do not imagine that these systems have been put together with the deliberate aim of securing the desired results. That would be a work of genius. But things have happened just as if the actual scheme of education corresponded to some vast and deliberate conception; it could not have been done better. To attain it teachers have inspired themselves solely with the principles of discipline and authority, which always appeal to social organisers; such men have only one clear idea and one will–the children must learn to obey, to believe, and to think according to the prevailing social dogmas. If this were the aim, education could not be other than we find it to-day. There is no question of promoting the spontaneous development of the child’s faculties, or encouraging it to seek freely the satisfaction of its physical, intellectual, and moral needs. There is question only of imposing ready-made ideas on it, of preventing it from ever thinking otherwise than is required for the ‘maintenance of existing social institutions-of making it, in a word, an individual rigorously adapted to the social mechanism.

It cannot be expected that this kind of education will have any influence on the progress of humanity. I repeat that it is merely an instrument of domination in the hands of the ruling classes, who have never sought to uplift the individual, and it is quite useless to expect any good from the schools of the present day. What they have done up to the present they will continue to do in the future. There is no reason whatever why they should adopt a different system; they have resolved to use education for their purposes, and they will take advantage of every improvement of it. If only they preserve the spirit of the school and the authoritative discipline which rules it, every innovation will tend to their advantage. For this they will keep a constant watch, and take care that their interests are secured.

I would fix the attention of my readers on this point: the whole value of education consists in respect for the physical, intellectual, and moral faculties of the child. As in science, the only possible demonstration is demonstration by facts; education is not worthy of the name unless it be stripped of all dogmatism, and unless it leaves to the child the direction of its powers and is content to support them in their manifestations. But nothing is easier than to alter this meaning of education, and nothing more difficult than to respect it. The teacher is always imposing, compelling and using violence; the true educator is the man who does not impose his own ideas and will on the child, but appeals to its own energies.

From this we can understand how easily education is conducted, and how light is the task of those who seek to dominate the individual. he best conceivable methods become in their hands so many new and more effective means of despotism. Our ideal is that of science; we appeal to it in demanding the power to educate the child by fostering its development and procuring a satisfaction of its needs as they manifest themselves.

We are convinced that the education of the future will be entirely spontaneous. It is plain that we cannot wholly realise this, but the evolution of methods in the direction of a broader comprehension of life and the fact that all improvement involves the suppression of violence indicate that we are on solid ground when we look to science for the liberation of the child.

Is this the ideal of those who actually control the scholastic system? Is this what they propose to bring about? Are they eager to abandon violence? Only in the sense that they employ new and more effective methods to attain the same end-that is to say, the formation of individuals who will accept all the conventions, all the prejudices, and all the untruths on which society is based.

We do not hesitate to say that we want men who will continue unceasingly to develop; men who are capable of constantly destroying and renewing their surroundings and renewing themselves; men whose intellectual independence is their supreme power, which they will yield to none; men always disposed for things that are better, eager for the triumph of new ideas, anxious to crowd many lives into the one life they have. Society fears such men; you cannot expect it to set up a system of education which will produce them.

What, then, is our mission? What is the policy we must adopt in order to contribute to the reform of the school?

Let us follow closely the work of the experts who are engaged in the study of the child, and let us endeavour to find a way of applying their principles to the education we seek to establish, aiming at an increasingly complete emancipation of the individual. But

how are we to do this? By putting our hand energetically to the work, by promoting the establishment of new schools in which, as far as possible, there shall rule this spirit of freedom which, we feel, will colour the whole education of the future.

We have already had proof that it leads to excellent results. We can destroy whatever there is in the actual school that savours of violence, all the artificial devices by which the children are estranged from nature and life, the intellectual and moral discipline which has been used to impose ready-made thoughts, all beliefs which deprave and enervate the will. Without fear of injury we may place the child in a proper and natural environment, in which it will find itself in contact with all that it loves, and where vital impressions will be substituted for the wearisome reading of books. If we do no more than this, we shall have done much towards the emancipation of the child.

In such an environment we may freely make use of the data of science and work with profit. It is true that we could not realise all our hopes; that often we shall find ourselves compelled, from lack of knowledge, to use the wrong means. But we shall be sustained by the confident feeling that, without having achieved our entire aim, we shall have done a great deal more than is being done by the actual school. I would rather have the free spontaneity of a child who knows nothing than the verbal knowledge and intellectual deformation of one that has experienced the existing system of education.

What we have sought to do in Barcelona is being done by others in various places. All of us saw that the work was possible. Dedicate yourself to it at once. We do not hope that the studies of children will be suspended that we may regenerate the school. Let us apply what we know, and go on learning and applying. A scheme of rational education is already possible, and, in such schools as we advocate, the children may develop freely according to their aspirations. Let us endeavour to improve and extend the work.

Those are our aims. We know well the difficulties we have to face; but we have made a beginning in the conviction that we shall be assisted in our task by those who work in their various spheres to deliver men from the dogmas and conventions which secure the prolongation of the present unjust arrangement of society.

Compiled by Romano Krauth

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This text has been re-posted from: http://stirtoaction.com/?p=544

 

An Education System: But What For? And When Will We Answer the Question?

| Michael Newman |

We are trapped in an ever-repeated education debate, whose very simplicity and facile nature allows everyone to contribute equally; meanwhile, our children are taught that learning is about exams, their futures, and what jobs they are to do. The majority struggle, the majority fail the five GCSE’s grade A-C, but once they are free from school they can ‘control’ their lives and will not have to study again, except maybe to improve their jobs. Our society continues to confuse human rights with consumerism — we have shopping riots, we have problems with community, with child poverty, with fear of youth, with ethnic differences. What kind of society do we want? How can our schools support this aim? And how can we escape the nausea of this ever-repeating debate that is more like sound bites from a popular TV show than an attempt to answer some of the most important questions we face.

Our new government has been challenging many apparently progressive moves that occurred under Labour. Whilst people on the web and in industries linked to ICT and creativity are holding debates around innovation and revolutionising our schools, there appears to be a regression back to the training of children to pass exams and gain qualifications that will allow them to take opportunities to further study and work. This is reflected in Toby Young’s ‘Free School’, based on his own experiences of schooling: the back to good old basics attitude that only requires that you have been a child in a school for you to talk about schooling and education, whilst the actual child has little voice in the debate.

“What we need to do to address the recycling of schooling debates is to include the children.”

The education secretary Michael Gove focuses schooling on exams as the conclusion to courses, and has recently announced a new Chief Inspector of Schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw, “who has told the BBC he is prepared to shake up England’s schools and that he will not tolerate any school being given an Ofsted rating of “outstanding “ unless it achieves outstanding academic results”. Gove is critically looking at the place of citizenship education and its contribution to academic achievement, and in his support of the baccalaureate measure of a school’s success seems to downplay the creative aspects of the curriculum. Teaching is about control, respect for authority, the efficient learning of academic subjects, and the measurement and celebration of outcomes as exams and qualifications. There is no need for education philosophy, or sociology, or psychology except for increasing the effectiveness of teaching.

What is at stake in the current education debate?  Why is its very nature part of the problem? How can we escape from the recurring nightmare of the repeated mantras of standards, basics and achievements: either from the right wing — training to be good producers and consumers — or the left wing —increasing equality through the opportunities of motivated training to pass exams — and, from both, the turning of our children into willing volunteers for the Big Society.

Let us start with some surprising establishment views about the direction education should have taken:

“What cannot be doubted is that a piece of fascinating and valuable educational research is going on here which it would do all educationalists good to see.” (HMI report 1949 on Summerhill)

“A vision of what the new form of secondary school can be.”  (HMI report 1948 on St Georges in the East)

These are the words of HMI, or Osfted, the very organisation that threatened Summerhill School with closure in 1999. We used the first quote to invite politicians, the Select Committee on Education, and educationalists to visit the school, or to meet us all when we held a democratic community meeting in the Jubilee Room at the House of Commons in 1999. They have yet to visit.  They prefer to meet with celebrities and hear about Jamie Oliver’s experiments in education made for a popular TV audience. Even so, they have discussed Summerhill’s fight with Ofsted and the consequences of its legal fight for survival.

Sadder still, no one seemed to respond to the opinions of HMI in 1948 and 1949. The 1948 comment is about an East London school that A. S. Neill, the founder of Summerhill School, thought was the furthest any state school could go with democracy, participation, and children controlling their learning. He visited the school a few times as guest of honour at their prize giving ceremony. You may have read about St Georges-in-the-East in the novel ‘To Sir, With Love’ by E.R. Braithwaite.

A. S. Neill was a teacher and writer who in 1921 founded Summerhill School in response to his experiences of teaching in state schools in Scotland. He wanted to create a school in which the children would be happy, would have no fear, would be able to choose how and what they learn, would be able to play as much as they wanted, would be able to express and share their emotions and creativity, and would be able to control their lives through democratic meetings.

A.S. Neill: The founder of Summerhill School

In 1915 he published his first book, A Dominie’s Log, which would become the Dominie Book series. This was a diary of his life as a teacher. He begins sitting on his school desk reflecting on the rules of writing an official school log. ‘You must not put your feelings, ideas or reflections into it.’ He goes on to think about why he is the head teacher of Gretna Green village school, and why the children of farm workers, who will never own a home or go to university, come to his school. The series ends with the book, A Dominie Abroad, in which he sets up his own school as a result of his thoughts and experiences of education and children. Summerhill School is the result of years of reflection on philosophy, different models of practise, experiences of teaching, discussions with other practitioners, psychologists, criminologists, educationalists.  Neill is now recognised by UNESCO as one of the world’s hundred most important educationalists.

This is a different world from that of Toby Young’s inspirational experiences of being a teenager in a strict, traditional, and successfully academic school. This difference in ‘heroes of change’ reflects the difference in their values. The arguments of the traditionalists are obvious — ones that we can all sympathise with as they relate to how we felt as children in our own schools. Give us soldiers or great communicators from television, and without any knowledge of education theory, practice or history, they will make good teachers and schools. If not, then we simply need to train them in classroom methods.

Neill reflects on the wider questions, necessarily ignored by the Toby Youngs and Goves of this world:

“Books are the least important apparatus in a school. All that any child needs is the three R’s; the rest should be tools and clay and sports and theatre and paint and freedom. Most of the schoolwork that adolescents do is simply a waste of time, of energy, of patience. It robs youth of its right to play and play and play; it puts old heads on young shoulders.

When I lecture to students at teacher training colleges and universities, I am often shocked at the ungrownupness of these lads and lasses stuffed with useless knowledge. They know a lot; they shine in dialectics; they can quote the classics – but in their outlook on life many of them are infants. For they have been taught to know, but have not been allowed to feel. These students are friendly, pleasant, eager, but something is lacking – the emotional factor, the power to subordinate thinking to feeling. I talk to these of a world they have missed and go on missing. Their textbooks do not deal with human character, or with love, or with freedom, or with self-determination. And so the system goes on, aiming only at standards of book learning – it goes on separating the head from the heart.”

Imagine if HMI’s comments on St Georges and Summerhill had been followed-up. If our schools were now based on the work and experiences of these and similar schools, imagine what our children would be like. Imagine what learning would be like if, as Sir Ken Robinson stated in his concluding speech to the TEDx London conference, our progressive schools should become the mainstream innovators. Indeed, imagine what our teachers would be like.

Strangely, there is a sense that this has happened with creative, self-directed, and individualised child-centred learning; the input of children’s voices into their learning and their schools; the right not to be physically punished; the importance of play and the role of emotions in learning; the previous government’s growing importance of citizenship education, participation and enterprise.  All this may be seen to be influenced by Summerhill — if nothing else but as the icon of progressive education. Again, quoting the ‘enemy’, the Conservative Leader of the House of Lords, Baroness Young, in 1999:

“My Lords, is it not a fact that in many respects Summerhill School has been the pioneer of many educational ideas which have subsequently been incorporated into mainstream school teaching and practice?”

Sadly, these changes have greatly affected our primary schools but not our secondary schools. I remember picking up a battered Penguin children’s book on my local doctor’s waiting room table called ‘The Primary School’. The class take a vote on where they want to go for their class trip!

How can schools based on children’s rights be created?  “By the children.” – Mary Robinson, UN Human Rights Commissioner

Our national curriculum subject descriptions and assessments, literacy and numeracy hours, and SATs all undermined these changes. Indeed they undermine the aims and values of the National Curriculum and state education, which are to develop successful learners who enjoy learning, make progress and achieve; confident individuals who are able to live safe, healthy and fulfilling lives; and responsible citizens who make a positive contribution to society.

These values are very close to those of the progressive education movement, and are hardly referenced by the traditionalists. In Summerhill’s most recent inspection in October 2011, on the school’s 90th birthday, Ofsted finally recognised that we fulfilled these aims:

“Pupils behaviour is outstanding…”     “Pupils develop clear views in how to live their lives and there is a tangible atmosphere of tolerance and harmony.”    “Pupils have an extremely deep understanding of work-related learning.”

At last, as a result of a legal battle in the Royal Courts of Justice in 2000, a team of modern inspectors examined the school according to its values and philosophy instead of those of academic classroom teaching. Summerhill is now seen to be a working school that shows excellence in its development of active citizens, ‘outstanding’ in eight aspects of its provision and practice, and ‘good’ in all others. Even so, we do not expect the government or the Select Committee of Education to come and learn from us.

So why should they? What issues about schools, learning and modern society does Summerhill address?

We are in a rapidly changing world: our technology, our knowledge, the nature and diversity of our communities are all being transformed. Religious people claim that we are in a moral malaise because people are deserting God and so they are fighting for religious schools and the influence of religion on values education in state schools; business people claim our children are not ready for work and that we need to compete with producers and businesses around the world; our universities are always criticising the young people they get as lacking in basic information and literacy and numeracy skills; our government argues that we must get back to basics to ensure that children become literate and numerate so that they can access opportunities in our society; our children need to learn parenting skills so that children in the future do not become ‘feral’…the list goes on and on.

The irony of this debate, and the sense of superficiality of it all, only hits you if you bother to look up a bit of history. The arguments have been repeated again and again and again. Darwin’s Bulldog, the scientist Prof T. H. Huxley, who coined the term ‘agnostic’, was on the first School Board of London and his words echo through time:

“In fact there is a chorus of voices, almost distressing in their harmony, raised in favour of the doctrine that education is the great panacea for human troubles, and that, if the country is not shortly to go to the dogs, everybody must be educated. The politicians tell us, ‘You must educate the masses because they are going to be masters’. The clergy join in the cry for education, for they affirm that people are drifting away from church and chapel into the broadest infidelity. The manufacturers and the capitalists swell the chorus lustily. They declare that ignorance makes bad workmen; that England will soon be unable to turn out cotton goods, or steam engines cheaper than other people; and then, Ichabod! Ichabod! the glory will be departed from us. And a few voices are lifted up in the favour of the doctrine that the masses should be educated because they are men and women with unlimited capacities of being, doing, and suffering, and that it is as true now, as ever it was, that the people perish for lack of knowledge.”

These issues hit the headlines during the debate around public education that led to the Foster Act (1870) that created a national schooling system. In the school boards around the country and in the House of Commons they had to discuss ‘What is a school? What is a teacher? How big should a classroom be?   What should be taught?’ They are in the writings, speeches and the workings of the school created by Robert Owen in response to the industrial revolution at New Lanark.

There are several problems here.  Firstly, the failure of our schooling system to respond to debates and to take account of the evidence and work in the fields of sociology, education research, psychology and child development.  Secondly, the failure of our school system to reflect the values to which it is framed and is supposed to legally express — the Education Act and the aims of the National Curriculum.  And lastly, the failure of the school system to tackle the problems projected onto it.

Michael on a panel with Summerhill students answering questions as part of celebrating the school’s 90th birthday at the Institute of Education’s students union. Courtesy of Michael Newman

What we need to do to address the recycling of schooling debates is to include the children. It is to allow our school students to find out about the evidence, the history, the working models of progressive schools and communities — from Robert Owen’s school at New Lanark, to Nellie Dick’s Whitechapel school that she founded in the early 1900s at age thirteen, to Janus Korczak’s Warsaw ghetto orphanage, to Bloom’s St Georges-in-the-East, to A. S. Neill’s Summerhill. Let these models of practice, of the history of the implementation of children’s rights, become a part of our children’s culture, and then let them see how they can adapt these successes to their own schools and communities.

The fight for good education is part of the fight for our children to have their rights expressed in their communities including their schools. After women, blacks, ethnic minorities, the working class, and groups of different sexuality, children are the last group prevented from struggling for their rights. Ironically, the image of the child was the powerful argument used to deny most of these groups their rights. We continue to do so by projecting onto our children the need for authority and control, experiences from our own childhoods, rather than the contrary examples of what children do when given those rights. We need the children to be able to respond to Toby Young and attack his view of childhood with a look at what’s happened, is happening and what has worked.

Without children’s rights all of our human rights are undermined. How can we have the values and culture of rights that protects groups from being bullied, imprisoned, disempowered, exploited, and killed if our childhoods are based on the opposite, paternalistic authority? When asked how schools based on children’s rights could be created, Mary Robinson, UN Human Rights Commissioner, said “by the children”. This can only happen if the children can see that rights are about justice, and that arguments about responsibilities and practicalities can be answered through models of extreme practice. They need to disarm those adults who hang onto unaccountable power by showing them that schools based on children’s rights can work, have worked and will work.

My mission is to help our children transform their schools as active citizens fighting for their rights. For children to be active global citizens they should learn about school councils and children’s voice through radical models of practice that create an alternative framework from orthodox, traditional schooling, allowing them to question the assumptions of the nature of childhood, learning and power. This will enable them to develop the underlying values of children’s rights and social justice.

_____

Michael Newman trained as a science teacher to deliver the then newly created national curriculum,attended the Speakers Conference on Citizenship in 1990, which was chaired by Francis Morrell, and included Shadow spokesperson Jack Straw with the Education Secretary John McGregor.  He has been active at conferences either as a delegate or speaker on citizenship, rights and educational innovations including social enterprise with the Executive Director of the Serco Institute, Gary Sturgess.   He has also worked at A. S. Neill’s Summerhill School for over 11 years as teacher and then houseparent, facilitating the children’s campaign to save the school in 1999, and organising events with them ever since to share Summerhill’s history and philosophy with other children and educationalists.  For the past six years he has been a school project worker for active global citizenship working with primary and secondary schools in Tower Hamlets and London, working on children’s and human rights, local democracy, sustainability, ICT, community cohesion, and co-operative enterprise.

 

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Since some weeks i see all the words tagged and I think in bigrams, trigrams, frequency distributions.

I’ve been playing with the nltk (natural language toolkit) and the really useful Jon Bosak xml annotated corpus these days, to give a try to the open knowledge foundation Open Shakespeare project, and this are some of the graphs I’ve been able to parse after analyzing the speech of the main characters of the play (characters that say more than 100 lines of code:

exclamations and interrogations

Here we can see that Macduff is screaming a lot, and that when everybody talks is never to question, but to assert… Poor Macbeth and Lady Macduff question everything, while Lady Macbeth just as much as asserting.

Regarding amount of words in the play, by far Macbeth is the one that talks more:

amount of words spoken by main characters

But what about lexical variety? In this next graph, we can see the variety of the words:

Macbeth - lexical variety

Here we can see the lexical variety of characters speech.

The brown-ish words are said just once per character. The light greens are word that will repeat on their speech, and the dark greens are repetitions of the light green words. I still need to take more measures to see if this is actually the way everybody speaks: by repeating a lot of small words with just some new words once in a while. (There are more words that appear just once, than the words you will repeat through most of your speech! Think about it!)