Where this book comes from
For many years, first as a teacher and later as a researcher and teacher educator, the psychology I engaged with was dominated by the work of Skinner, Piaget and Vygotsky, and later that of Jerome Bruner. The work of these cognitive psychologists was undoubtedly useful in that it provided me with models and metaphors to think about aspects of learning and development, processes central to education (Moore, 2000). For example, school and classroom behaviour management: rules and sanctions, âgolden timeâ, reward charts, stickers and assemblies that praise good work are all educational applications (and misapplications) of Skinnerian operant conditioning. Yet somehow, despite the attractive promise of sticker charts and table points, in the hustle and bustle of the classroom and in schools that must perform to succeed, it seems easier to pounce on and punish the negative than it is to recognise and reward the positive (Parsons, 2005). Skinner would be spinning in his grave.
Piaget thought of himself as a genetic epistemologist, interested in the development of knowledge. His ages and stages of development were never intended for educational purposes yet they influence the structure and content of schooling including the National Curriculum. This despite the fact that his work has been consistently criticised for experimental and interpretive inaccuracies (Donaldson, 1978; Hughes, 1986; Tizard and Hughes, 1984), and for the unintended and unfortunate side effects of their application in creating and perpetuating notions of ânormalâ and ânaturalâ children and childhood development (Burman, 1994, 1997; Walkerdine, 1984). Vygotskyâs and Brunerâs introduction to psychology of sociocultural stories is to be welcomed. These theories broadened the basis of our decisions about children and their learning although they still rely on tales of rational, linear development (Bibby, 2008), of normal and smoothly developing children and rational, logical teachers knowing and acting in the childâs best interests.
For me, the tension between the utter difficulty of being in the classroom and the calm, rational responses of those writing about learning and teaching grew and became increasingly difficult to live with. But I did not want to be told how to fix my perceived problems; I was not necessarily sure I agreed about where the âproblemsâ lay. Idealised and generalised classrooms seemed to offer me nothing but endless personal and professional failure â why could I not make it all work like I was (apparently) supposed to? Still, the muddle and chaos, the delight of the triumphs and the despair of the difficulties all seemed important â in them lay the vital heart of classroom life. Would I really want to teach, work or live in classrooms where children never fell out, never got furious with each other and me, didnât push and test the boundaries, didnât refuse to learn or find learning impossible? What would that mean? Would I want never to be asked a question I could-nât answer? A fix seemed to threaten to remove the passion and creativity, the inquisitive questioning and the excitement from the children and also from me, from the relationships that drive learning in classrooms. And so I turned to a different body of literature and a different form of psychological understanding â to psychoanalytic theories and the struggle to hold together both the love and the hate, the desire and the fear.
But why psychoanalysis? I gradually became frustrated with the increasingly narrow understanding of education that I was expected to work with. Schools, col-leges and universities are all guilty of this reduction â if only because we demand it of them. An open, broad understanding of education, of learning from paintings, novels and films, of learning from our friendships and enmities and from the labours of life seems to be a far cry from what happens in formal places of learning, or at least what is called learning in those places. We elevate the serious business of âworkâ above an infantilised notion of âplayâ and, despite protestations about lifelong learning, are quick to limit learning to something that happens in school â what a relief we do not have to do that again, all that painful growing up and passing all those useless exams!
Deborah Britzman has characterised formal education as an encounter with âan avalanche of certaintyâ (2009: 2), an encounter with certain knowledge, with tests and measures of success and failure. It is worth considering her evocative description of the strange disappointments and frustrations of being a teacher:
This honest highlighting of the fact that so much of what happens in the formal classroom is beyond our control is tantamount to heresy in the current context of learning and teaching in England. The need to control, ensure, demonstrate that our students have âmet their learning objectivesâ and (in a strange piece of mathe matical unthink) are all achieving at or above the expected average is the rhetorical force shaping our endeavours. The complete denial of the reality of classroom life and of learning makes it impossible to think about broader, more enduring notions of education and learning. Or, as Britzman points out, perhaps it is the pull of our own experiences of formal learning that drags our minds back to memories of our schooling, that shrinks and limits what education can be. Perhaps the wild possibilities of what education might be are just too threatening?
In this respect, it is notable that the qualification to become a head teacher in England (the National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH)) is now a competency-based qualification and that this replaces past requirements for classroom experience and later a masterâs degree in education: the control has ratcheted up; the possibilities for what counts as valuable learning for a teacher to become a leader or manager of teachers have reduced as the requirements have been listed and quantified. We circle the drain: we want education and learning to be âmoreâ but then how do we know it will be useful or appropriate? What is useful and appropriate? Better list it, then we can check if the important stuff has been learned. And the rest? Well, it would be nice but we do not have time, and it does not appear on the list of what is important and useful. And even so the curriculum is overcrowded, better trim it down. Perhaps this bit is a little less vital than that bit, perhaps we can do without it âŚ
To begin to make sense of this and other education-based contractions, of these reductions and minimisings, we will need to think differently. To not get sucked into the naming and measuring, the acting and blaming, the swapping of this constraint for that restriction, to step aside and think about why, at some level, we feel compelled to collude and perpetuate these normalised contractions, requires a different set of tools and a different language. That is why psychoanalysis seems attractive. It can provide different sets of metaphors and give attention to the difficult bits: the fears and anxieties, the fantasies and desires, the loves and hates, the less than rational and the strange logics of our passions and our unconsciouses. It enables, indeed it requires, us to say the unsayable, to experience what it feels like to utter the forbidden words, and to know that the unbearable feelings are in us as they are in others. Because, I suggest, that is where we need to go to try to make some sense of why education is, as Freud suggested, an impossible profession.
Anna O1 famously characterised her experience of psychoanalysis as a âtalking cureâ but we need to be careful how we understand her statement since psychoanalysis does not hold out âcuresâ in the medical sense of that word. When life is difficult and painful the thought that someone can smooth over the bumps or forever erase the pain is very attractive. And indeed pain can be modified, yet some trace, some memory of it will remain and continue to affect our lives. There is no route map for an easy walk through lifeâs vicissitudes, but I will suggest that there may be some ideas that can help us to think about the difficulties and why they might feel so hard, or downright impossible, to deal with. And that in turn can help us to develop some ideas for other ways of thinking and acting â if we can bear it. And, maybe, sometimes we canât, and that too will need to be borne. So this book aims to explore such paradoxical difficulties and will draw on ideas from a variety of psychoanalytic theorists to do so.
What it is and what it is not
In the course of the chapters in this book I explore aspects of education and classroom life with a range of psychoanalytic lenses. While the book does not assume any prior knowledge of psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic theory it is not a âprimerâ and does not explain the basics of all theories nor their historical genesis and interrelations. If that is your interest, or if it becomes your interest, then Elliott (2002), Elliott and Frosh (1995) and Frosh (1999) are useful places to start. Nor is it a guide to âtherapeutic educationâ or the claims of Richard Layard (2006, 2007) and others that we can and should teach children to be happy. These claims and suggestions rely on the use of âcognitive, behavioural therapyâ (CBT) and have generated long-running debates in the media (OâHara, 2005; Shepherd, 2009) and drawn fierce criticism from academics who complain that attempts to âteach hap-pinessâ distort the purposes of education and create a culture of vulnerability (Ecclestone and Hayes, 2009; Furedi, 2004).
But we need to be careful here. CBT and psychotherapy or psychoanalysis are widely different projects. That they can all sit under the broad umbrella of âther-apyâ is misleading and unhelpful. CBT can enable people to learn to rationalise and so try to find ways beyond aspects of their lives that are creating difficulties for them. Typically CBT has been used to support people with issues such as stopping smoking, coming to terms with drug or alcohol abuse, mild depression, or bereavement. It sets identifiable goals in an explicit and conscious way and tends to be conducted in a time-limited context (for example six sessions provided by the National Health Service (NHS)). Its short time-span, identifiable targets and measurable outcomes make it seem ideal in the current culture of targets and cost-effectiveness. Yet the governmentâs recent enthusiastic embrace of CBT2 has the feel of a childâs desire for someone with a wand to magic the difficulties away, a pied-piper to remove all the nasty rats. When we are happy, the policy story goes, we can be economically useful rather than a drain on the public purse. This is a problematic fantasy for at least two reasons. First, it assumes that people who are not âhappyâ are economically or socially unproductive; a wrong and deeply troubling assumption. Second, CBT does not always work and it does not work for everyone â an underlying problem can re-emerge elsewhere and CBT has no way of managing this apart from treating the re-emergence as a new problem.
Psychoanalysis, in contrast to CBT, works with the unconscious and may continue for years. It is a long and unpredictable journey that requires patience, commitment and courage. As such it is not for everyone and certainly the NHS would struggle to fund it. It is also a practice that requires long training for its practitioners and it cannot be undertaken quickly. There are books (Bollas, 1999) and TV series such as In Treatment (Garcia, 2008) that describe the journey of psychoanalytic psychotherapies if that is of interest to you. However, this book is not about a personal analytic journey in that sense. Rather, following a tradition of work in cultural studies, art, anthropology and education, it uses the tools developed for clinical work to explore social processes. We need to heed the words of Sigmund and Anna Freud, Susan Isaacs and others: psychoanalysis and education are different projects, they work differently. Psychoanalysis cannot provide a prophylactic for education although it can provide tools and metaphors for thinking about education. That is a fine distinction, but it is an important one.
Psychoanalytic theory can sometimes be dense and difficult to understand. Typically it is written in terms of clinical practice, often the intense one-to-one relationship of the analyst and the client or patient. For some readers such language may not sit easily in a book about learning in the classroom, teachers and students, adults and children. So while this book is not a straight âreport of researchâ, I will draw on classroom-based research I have been involved in to contextualise, reframe and develop ideas from psychoanalytic theory.
The aspects of learning and classroom life chosen for consideration reflect my own interests and concerns. They are not the only difficulties that could have been chosen, and similarly, the theories or aspects of theories that I draw on are not the only ones. Those that I have selected have been shaped by my history as a primary school teacher and my research which has largely taken place in primary school classrooms and has often focussed on mathematics lessons. Despite this apparently narrow focus, I suspect the issues will be familiar to people who work in other kinds of classrooms â they continue to resonate for me in seminars at all levels in higher education, from foundation degree to doctoral work. The work of education is not time-limited or age-specific, whatever our fantasies about schooling might suggest and however they may return us to forgetfulness.
Throughout this book I will resist any suggestion that there is a cure or a simple fix to the difficulties of learning in formal contexts. I will view magic wands and fairy-dust with suspicion and wonder why they still seem attractive when we know they donât exist and donât work. I do not restrict myself to one school of psychoanalytic thought, but draw widely and without apology. An aim of this book is to raise more questions â what would happen if I applied those ideas to this other issue? Why are those ideas useful here, what would that other theorist have said? â and invite others to engage with answering them, but that will not be the purpose of this book.