Father Christmas: an apology

In Private Eye there is a running gag in which news media retract a statement about a celebrity and change it to the opposite: David Cameron is not a rich idiot but the saviour of the nation; David Beckham is not a great sports star but an over-paid underwear salesman – &c. You get the idea. In doing so they expose the volte-face of a shallow reporting. Here comes one of my own.

I have long been seen as a Scrooge-like figure in my own family, and this…erm.. ambiguity around late December festivities has extended to Father Christmas. I have often cast doubt on the usefulness of Fr C in proposing an authentic Christmas narrative. I am sure that, however I dress this up, part of it is the upset of ten-year-old me discovering, probably a couple of years after his peers, what the adult world made of Father Christmas.

But the difficulties of current Santa culture seem particularly sharp this year, and not because of typhoons, or food banks, or the Middle East, or anything grand. It’s just that two examples from this Christmas seem especially naff: the illogical stance of this campaign in which a child writes to Santa saying she is “too old for fairy tales” (or is this simply ironic?); the bizarre “Catholics Come Home” video which has Santa at the stable. Even if I wielded an autocratic power to ban such things, I have no objection to people who do not believe in the Incarnation having a December festival, even if its name is nicked (let’s face it, Christianity probably stole the feast off the Romans), and I am not seeking to ban Santa from the celebration of Christmas. There is, however, a blind spot here. It is as if we can have a Christmas without Christ, but that the festival must have “Santa.” Not St Nicholas, of course, not the fiery , Orthodox bishop who stands as a symbol for children, for travellers, against exploitation; we must have Clement Moore’s jolliness, a penchant for overeating and comedy, and gift-giving. We must have that by-now-ingrained picture of a red suit and a white beard. He must receive the petitions of children not to have to go to Church; he must be corralled into Church-going himself. It is as if the myth has to trump both the religious belief and the negation of that belief. Santa, the jolly Winter King, rules. To my mind the glutinous “Santa at the Stable” advert is just as empty-headed as the “Dear Santa” letter.

Calm. Calm. Calm. Here comes the retraction.

With my white beard, and a (provided) red suit, I will be in a local Nursery in a fortnight’s time, ho-ho-ho-ing about and eating pies – both the mince and humble varieties. The prancing and pawing on the roof will be my feebly held values, anxious to fly away like the down of a thistle.

Where does that put me as cynic and hard-line Santa-doubter? I’m really not sure. But I will throw myself into Santadom with abandon and I fully expect to love it.

Safer to stay at home

The Teddy Bears’ Picnic is an odd mix of cuteness – bears gaily gadding about &c – and danger. From a sweet picture of playing and shouting, the text and the key move (2 mins 13 sec) to a more sombre tone:

“You’d better not go alone.”

“Lovely – but safer to stay at home.”

It’s as if the Teddy Bears are involved in the scene from the Bacchae that King Pentheus is lured into watching. A pastoral scene: a little valley, shaded by pines, a very rural scene where Pentheus watches the ritual abandon of the Bacchae who are “unawares” – until Dionysos reveals the watching king and the terrible tragedy unfolds.

What would the Teddy Bears have done if we, the watchers hadn’t stayed at home? They would have torn us, as Agave does her son, limb from limb – because they are not Teddies; they are bears.

The Teddy Bears’ Picnic is perhaps the last gasp of this understanding, arising from the event in 1902 when “Teddy” Roosevelt encountered a bear – a real bear – on a hunting trip. Bears (until the Teddy) sat alongside wolves as dangerous; the tension of wild and dangerous versus tame and cuddly is evident in the change of tone in the song.

And with this tension comes the greater dilemma: how safe it is Out There?

Zombies

My main idea – there aren’t many – for tomorrow (Thurs 30th, School of Education Hallowe’en Seminar) is to look at the notion of the oath suggested by practice in Singapore and by Tristram Hunt on his return from his visit there. There is plenty to look at in the history and folklore of transgression and retribution, and I hope I have the balance of fun and reflection right.

I will also note that Hunt seems to have “rowed back” from his original, rather bullish statements about an oath and a compass (see my previous post) and is now quoted as saying:

“Taking such an oath would be voluntary and would reinforce the teacher’s commitment to professional development, a symbol of their continued willingness to seek out learning opportunities to make them a better teacher for their students.”

It is, of course, possible that the original reportage was a misrepresentation of his views*.

What I would now have liked to add in (and since the presentation is already written and would require a lot of work today in time I don’t have), would be to reflect on quite what, in this largely unobjectionable vow from Singapore, exercised us all so much – and to do so by looking at what is, in effect, a plea from James Mannion in his blog that we should look at the big questions. We do tend to look at the smaller stuff, the changeable and annoying bits that politicians present as panaeceas, when what James asks us to do is explore question such as:

Where lie the boundaries of current discourses around education?
How does this differ from educational discourses throughout history?
What paths in the current discourse are well-worn – and are there areas where we no longer dare tread?

He is quite right. The notion of moaning at Tristram Hunt’s proposed oath instead of asking (as James does) “If you could design an education system from the ground up – to what extent would it resemble the one we have?” maybe just reduces us to the role I am saying we dread: moaning zombies.

*NB: this quotation has been edited by me for grammar and clarity.

Hold the Front Page – reflection on yesterday’s Sun

Pages like this are not new. They are part of the Heavy Artillery of the Red T ops in the battle for readers. The small storm (which now seems to have passed over the Sun to cloud the skies of Richard Dawkins) around yesterday’s front page is illustrative of the ways in which people – I ‘d include myself – find a sudden burst of righteous anger when faced with insensitive idiocy.

And it was idiotic, wasn’t it? I’m not imagining it when I see the picture of a young boy with mark on his chest being described as having a “mark of Satan” and think “This is cruel on so many levels”? If we discount at the first filtering of idiocy the notion that this is mark of Satan – I must dust off my copy of Keith Thomas’ Religion and the Decline of Magic before I go down that route too far – we are left with a child accidentally or on purpose marked (possibly a burn, possibly a pressure mark – and speculation is with the end of a hairdryer) and the picture found by or sent to a newspaper. The Independent has a good line in its discussion:

“…the silly season ceased to exist a long time ago. In the information age there is never a shortage of news. Least of all now, as the world is transfixed by the horrific events in Gaza.”

The next line of idiocy – it feels like mounds of rubbish in some intellectual rubbish dump – is the defence that the parents thought it funny. Parents have a right to find their children funny, from child A (yes, a real person, now an adult) getting dressed entirely in Thomas the Tank Engine stickers to child B (another real person, still quite small) arguing about bed time by pointing out that her partner in crime, the cat, is allowed to stay up. Parents are also allowed to be delighted or exasperated by their children, to be worried by them, entertained and challenged. Go into Twitter and find adoptive dad Nick King to hear the stories, or find his blog.

What parents can’t do is mark or hurt their children, find it funny and publicise it. It may be, of course, that this isn’t what happened – there are all sorts of explanations possible and You’ve Been Framed type publicity at least provides a precedent – but we should be wary of such images for a number of reasons, and here are two:

Children’s rights are sometime seen as a left-wing or woolly liberal excuse for getting children off the hook when they have done something wrong. Given the context of this particular picture, in which a demonic mark and abduction by aliens are mooted as possible, the Sun commodifies the child to an extent where the rational has gone out of the window. It’s exploitative. This is what children’s rights are about: protection children from mindless exploitation.

Images of children are themselves highly emotive. This can be positive – fond memories, key moments, assessment opportunities – but it could also be traumatic (as in the images from Syria and Gaza, which may or may not stir the viewer into action or at least sympathy) for the child or for others. We are bombarded with images of children suffering; in what way does this image lighten that load or seek to do good?

Early Years Post Doc

If we assume – I am not sure we can assume – that the advert for a nanny in New York at a sum that no post-Doc and no Early Years practitioner would dream of (current link here: not sure it’s stable) is not a spoof, then what would it say about Early Years?
It might tell readers that these are people with more money than sense, certainly without a sense of what the market could offer (a similar person for half the salary for example). It might also indicate a willingness on the part of the family to prize academic qualification over professional qualification or experience.
It just might, however, suggest that parents who have the money to do so could think seriously about much they value the education and care of the youngest people in their family. What, really, is the price for bringing up baby? It is as if this advert, genuine or not, points back to George Monbiot’s argument about forests: how can we reduce some things to unit costs?

And yet, of course, we do. How much can I afford in childcare? What help will the Government give me? How much does a childminder earn?

Until someone shows me otherwise, however, I think I will stick to the position I have reached: that this is not genuine, but a satirical way of criticising either the poor financing of postdoctoral study, or the even poorer salaries of EY workers – or both.

The question remains, however: is cost really reducible to a unit-by-unit cost benefit analysis, or do we have to acknowledge this is a threadbare way of “un-valuing” some things?

Pedagogy

This posting from me is just a jumped-up tweet, but what’s behind it is worth sharing, I feel. Steve Wheeler (whose blog is always a good read) has an insightful view of pedagogy here in his latest post.

Good pedagogy is about guiding students to learning. It’s about posing challenges, asking the right questions, and presenting relevant problems for learners to explore, answer and solve. True pedagogy is where educators transport their students to a place where they will be amazed by the wonders of the world they live within.

Yes, well worth a look.

The Guardian Letter, Fri 21st Feb 2014

Local politicians must take action to protect provision of quality for young children. We are profoundly concerned about the widespread loss of local early years provision of quality and the resulting harm to children and their families. We understand that the resources available to local government are being reduced, and therefore difficult decisions must be taken. But we urge local politicians to protect early years provision, which can have a lifelong, positive impact on young children and their families. Otherwise, we will all pay in the long-term for cuts being made in the short-term.

Since 2010, the number of children’s centres in England has reduced from 3,631 to 3,116; and some of these centres are information hubs open in name only – “half a person and a bunch of leaflets” as Naomi Eisenstadt, the first national director of the Sure Start Unit, has summarised the situation. The House of Commons select committee also reports that “many maintained nursery schools have closed in the last decade” (over a hundred in England) despite robust evidence to show that they offer the best outcomes to disadvantaged young children. The benefits of attending a maintained nursery school last right the way through the school system: their closure represents the worst sort of short-term thinking. The youngest and most vulnerable children are being harmed by these irresponsible actions.

Where is the quality for two-year-olds? Local government has a vital role to play in the successful delivery of the national programme to provide free nursery places for disadvantaged two-year-olds. We know children will only benefit if they attend a good-quality early years setting with appropriately qualified staff. So we are dismayed that some councils fund settings without a good Ofsted rating, and further dismayed by the cutbacks to training courses and to teams of early years advisers. Without training and ongoing support, how will quality be sustained and the poorest settings improve?

A recent report on summer-born children has highlighted the pressure being put on children and parents by local authorities and schools to enter reception class before the age of five.

All these short-term actions which damage children in their early years will have an upward impact as they go through their schooling. This in turn damages communities. Local authorities must do more than blame national government and the economic recession. We therefore call on candidates in the forthcoming local elections in England and Northern Ireland to stop cutting early years provision and pledge their support for the high-quality provision that will benefit young children and their families now, and for years to come.

Helen Moylett President of the British Association for Early Childhood Education, Prof Tina Bruce Marion Dowling, Retired Her Majesty’s Inspector, Bernadette Duffy Head of Thomas Coram Centre for Children and Families, Prof Aline-Wendy Dunlop, Jean Ensing Retired HMI, Professor Chris Pascal, Rosemary Peacocke Retired HMI Prof Iram Siraj, Lesley Staggs Retired national strategies director of early years, Prof Kathy Sylva, Prof Colwyn Trevarthen, Denise Hevey Emeritus professor in education, University of Northampton, Anne Nelson National Association for Primary Education, Wendy Ellyat Save Childhood Movement, Jo White Headteacher/head of centre, Portman Early Childhood Centre, Dr Margy Whalley Director, Pen Green Centre for Children and Families and Pen Green Research Base, Ben Hasan Chair, National Campaign for Real Nursery Education, Jane Payler Chair, Association for the Professional Development of Early Years Educators, Pamela Calder On behalf of The Early Childhood Studies Degrees Network, Melian Mansfield On behalf of Early Childhood Forum, Nancy Stewart Early Learning Consultancy Emeritus professor Tricia David, Nick Swarbrick Oxford Brookes University, Dr David Whitebread University of Cambridge, Beverley Nightingale University Campus Suffolk, Rosalind Godson Unite/Community Practitioners’ and Health Visitors’ Association, Penny Webb Proprietor of Penny’s Place Childminding, Kathryn Solly, Edwina Mitchell On behalf of OMEP, Michelle Melson, Chris Palmer Chair of trustees of Centre for Research in Early Childhood, Birmingham (CREC), Maureen Saunders Trustee of CREC, Sheila Thorpe Trustee of CREC, Professor emeritus Philip Gammage Trustee of CREC, Professor emerita Janet Moyles

Open Air Schools

A now lost phenomenon, largely built on how people understood tuberculosis – but does the Open Air School movement have something to teach 21st Century Britain?
Check this out: http://municipaldreams.wordpress.com/2014/01/21/aspen-house-open-air-school-lambeth-doing-the-world-of-good/

As the blog post states:

This was an education rooted squarely – though without the rhetoric – in the principles of the Swiss pedagogue, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi: a focus on the equilibrium between head, hands and heart, a belief in the free development of each child’s potential through observation and discovery of nature and the material world.

Whereof one cannot speak…

What to talk about today?
Goodness: from PISA to Tom Daley, there are lots of stories to look at, from (on a different tack) the HE action to odd but delightful metareporting (Twitter – Guardian-Academic Journal) on academic blogging.

I’d like to make

some witty mash-up line about at least two of these (“Tom Daley came out yesterday, PISA came out today; I know one piece of news gladdens the heart,” doesn’t do it, really) or
some deep and meaningful connection between workload and blogging

or at least use the Wittgenstein line as an excuse to remain silent on all these subjects, since they are beyond my ken and I will only talk drivel. But even using that as a line has been trumped by this from poetry rapgenius:

You probably need to read the whole book to get the punchline.

Yes, you probably do.

So here are the Guardian on PISA, the Indie on Tom Daley and the really interesting (and free access) article on academic blogging from Mewburn and Thomson. They can speak for themselves and I should be silent.

Hallows? Thoughts about Hallowe’en

Three aspects of Hallowe’en and a reflection.

This is going to go on a bit, I’m afraid, as I want to look at

Hallowe’en and its modern popular expression.
Hallowe’en and Christianity (the longest section)
Hallowe’en and UK schools

“When I were a nipper” – the argument from memory comes first, here – Hallowe’en was overshadowed by the much more exciting Bonfire Night, which had a run-up in collecting for a guy, &c., carving a lantern from a swede (a labour of love) and somehwere, for a Catholic child, the Holyday of All Saints followed by the day of prayer for the faithful departed, All Souls (a reasoned, modern Catholic view of this day is to be found here, in the Dominican student pages, Godzdogz). For for my mother, as a war widow, the day of remembrance and the military solemnities around it, were especially important, too – something Dave Aldridge has written about thoughtfully. This was all about the dead, but not all in sorrow: fireworks, and mischief were mixed up with sadness and silence, with black vestments and red poppies.

This is not the modern landscape, where the American Halloween (note the spelling) occasions fancy dress, trick or treat, pumpkins, and a much greater sense of gleefully enacted horror. I won’t bother with many links here, despite the fact that the bounds of taste do get overstepped in an effort to maintain the frisson. Yuk.

So Hallowe’en has become a feast of horror in some eyes, where the dead, the uncanny and the downright nasty are mocked and celebrated by small children and adults alike.

But what about Christianity? Where does Hallowe’en sit?

One of the key books in the history of the Reformation has got to be Keith Thomas’ Religion and the Decline of Magic, one of those books that, when I first read it, changed my opinion about so much I had been brought up with. After all, I had lived in the shadow of Pendle Hill, the stories of the witches and the story of my family’s struggles with Protestant Christianity part and parcel of the culture. The overall premise – this is a gross over-simplification – is that the Christianity of the Word that comes in heightens a growing mistrust of popular practices from beliefs in fairies and spirits to dealing with “cunning men and women.” This is not to put Hallowe’en (yet) into a Merrie England which includes a pretty and rational Roman Christianity (I am choosing my words here) – but to suggest that opposition to it has a connection to a (very seventeenth century?) vision that any divergence from a particular view of Christian practice is wrong, evil, Satanic. A very broad brush-stroke account of this argument is to be found here, although the details are a bit dodgy.

Its roots with regards Christian practice, are in some ways about the celebration of a major feast, All Saints. Hallowe’en, as a name, is after all, shorthand for the Vigil of the Feast of All Hallows, or All Saints. It might be that we should see the week or so of Church and popular festivals that occur here as having very different roots but all coming to express something similar: a celebration of the oncoming of Autumn, of shorter days and longer nights, of the dying of the light, and therefore the remembrance of the dead. Christians celebrate the same things as non-Christians at this time, maybe always have done. By this argument, this All-the-Dead celebration is just one more Christianisation of a different tradition; Christianity’s magpie proclivities are seen as stemming from the appropriation of the synagogue service and Passover, through Roman cults and the imperial court. Any purging of Christian practice has been a pick-and-mix approach which chooses one lump of tradition to keep and another to discard.

And yet, partly because of its opposition to (or distraction from) All Saints and All Souls, or because it looks at the dead as menacing, some thinkers from Pope Francis to US Evangelicals have seen this is something to be viewed with a deep mistrust. As one writer puts it,

“…the underlying essence of our celebrations of Halloween is based upon modern Wiccan interpretations of pre-Christian paganism and involve occultic rites and practices that Christians should have no dealings with.”

Once upon a time, the missionary elements of Christianity might have been tempted to view the unchristian as anti-Christian. Matthew 12:30 (perhaps contra Luke 9:50) suggests that Jesus’ teaching backs this up; certainly “He who is not with me is against me,” and other similar sentiments, suggest an uncompromising attitude. Modern opposition to any kind of syncretism uses these texts, and lines from Paul about “having no dealings with darkness.” There is another strand to this, however: when Gregory the Great writes concerning the mission to the Angles he exhorts Mellitus to baptise, rather than destroy the pagan temples, so that “seeing that their places of worship are not destroyed, the people will banish error from their hearts and come to places familiar and dear to them in acknowledgement and worship of the true God.” It might be that this leads to a syncretism that Christians (or maybe some Christians) would find theologically unsound. I can’t make the time to rehearse this argument, from Basil on the use of pagan “classical” authors through to musings on Christian/Jewish or Christian/Islamic relations in Vatican II (and beyond), but there has been at least some uneasy dialogue with culture outside orthodox Christianity throughout its history, maybe from the moment Luke quotes Euripides in his account of Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus.

So what of schools and Hallowe’en?

There seem to be two different practices developing here: one is to ban it as a modern invention, as American and/or anti-Christian (I’ve heard a teacher say she wouldn’t have it in her class “because it’s contrary to my belief”), as in the arguments glanced at above. The other is to allow, or encourage some forms of celebration, whether with the whole pumpkin and fancy dress thing, or with a more muted event, with maybe a ghost story and witchy songs.

The first has an odd lack of logic, at least in a state school (not controlled or aided by a religious group): if Hallowe’en is the pagan festival of Samhain, then surely the school’s equal opportunities comes into play. The pro viso – as with any celebration – is that there should be some sense of respect and real knowledge, and that it should fit with the long-term planning for a school, or a class. And this is the caveat for the second: it’s got to be a learning opportunity. But then again, so has Christmas.

This has hardly been a proper sic et non, so my final reflection only hangs to the above by the fingertips, but here it is.

Winter is on us, or just around the corner. Our food is changing, too, and tomatoes give way to squashes. The days are shorter, darker. And when you are four, or five, or six, these are big changes. In particular, the child that is afraid of the dark, or who now has to come to terms with coming home in the dark after After School Club, needs time to explore it. They also might need a way of celebrating their control of it – through lanterns, through the sanitised parade in fancy dress, through seeing this potential occasion for fear minimised and mocked. Look it in the face and see it as something to play with.

There is certainly unthinking excess, a possibility for going over the top with children, and adults have a role to play here, but I would end with a plea: take Gregory’s injunction to baptise the nefas, to take the secular and use it. We live with this at so many levels; why not counter fear of the dark, the gloom of winter, with saying “I am bigger than this”? It’s not a bad message for children, after all.