Would you like to receive publication updates from HLT? You can by joining the free mailing list today. |
Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 4; July 02
Sometimes against the grain
Seth Lindstromberg
Erratum
In the previous issue I gave, in my piece on sailing expressions, a mistaken history of the to coast (as in coast through life). Coast seems, rather, to be a sledding expression. Various dictionaries indicate that to coast means, literally, to slide down a slope. Cf côte, French for 'slope, hillside'. I speculate that this comes into English from French Canadian. But speculating is what got me to make a mistake in the first place. I was put right, incidentally, by the editor of this magazine who sometimes leaves his comments till after a piece is in print. In fairness to him though, I had sent him 'Sailing expressions' rather near the deadline.
Utopianism in education
There is an aphorism, perhaps a modern one, that runs something like this:
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
It applies cases of counter-productive utopianism.
I offer, just to clarify, the following distinction between utopianism and perfectionism. The latter seems to be used in connection with fairly discrete tasks such as cleaning a window. Utopianism is about the quest for the pure or the ideal in some much broader and more complex aspect of life. If the imagined pure or ideal situation or social order is placed in the next world, what you have is religious utopianism (e.g., messianic Christianity and Islam). If in this, you have ideology (e.g., Communism), which may or not be tinged with religion (e.g., utopian expectations of societies subject to Koranic law).
Utopianism is something to which beguiles a great many people. Extreme forms crop up now and again and have been exceedingly lethal. The past 90 years have provided us with particularly lamentable instances. The Leninist-Stalinist, Maoist, Pol Pot and Taliban versions of utopianism can all be boiled down to this credo--"We're going to create an ideal state a.s.a.p. and too bad for anyone who gets in the way." There was also an element of utopianism in Nazi ideology—the ideal of a racial purity achievable through eugenics and wholesale bloody murder.
There have been many other, less virulent cases of utopianism at work. One is the British National Health System and the expectations people have had of it. (The NHS was spoken of as a part of "The New Jerusalem"). Another case is the movement which produced the human rights legislation of the late 1940's and early 1950's and which is with us still. (But you will disagree that it is utopian if you think it really is or ever will be possible for any and all refugees in their hundreds of millions, even billions over time, to go wherever they want, be welcomed and succoured with open arms and settle permanently happily ever after.)
However, the case that concerns me here is the utopianism which has taken root in some Western educational systems, or at least in government and university departments of education. In Britain, a drive for perfection in more and more aspects of teaching, learning and pastoral care has led to the promulgation of ever more standards and regulation and a demand for more and more evaluation of everything. At the same time, teachers have been quitting the state system in droves. One reads of replacements being recruited in desperation not just from former colonies such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa and the USA but from Holland and even Russia and Bulgaria. And yet teachers keep quitting, appalled by a system that in many parts (particularly in inner city areas) is showing big cracks. No doubt schools confront a range of problems. But the introduction of myriad standards and regulations for the promotion of ideal teaching and learning is mainly counter-productive. For instance, the use of a thick matrix of regulations and standards to force out bad teachers and to form ideal teachers of the rest is one of the things that makes it increasingly difficult for any of them to be good.
