Education - An 'Impossible Profession'?

Psychoanalytic Explorations of Learning and Classrooms

Tamara Bibby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136920226
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In classrooms and lectures we learn not only about academic topics but also about ourselves, our peers and how people and ideas interact. Education – An Impossible Profession extends the ways in which we might think about these processes by offering a refreshing reconsideration of key educational experiences including those of:

• being judged and assessed, both formally and informally
• adapting to different groups for different purposes
• struggling to think under pressure
• learning to recognise and adapt to the expectations of others.

This book brings psychoanalysis to new audiences, graphically illustrating its importance to understandings of teaching, learning and classrooms. Drawing on the author's original research, it considers the classroom context, including policy demands and professional pressures, and the complexity of peer and pedagogic relationships and interactions asking how these might be being experienced and what implications such experiences might have for learners and teachers.

The discussions will be of interest not only to teachers, leading-learners and teacher-educators, but also to individuals interested in education policy, professional practice and theories of education.

1
An introduction

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, ‘golden time’, 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 ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ children and childhood development (Burman, 1994, 1997; Walkerdine, 1984). Vygotsky’s and Bruner’s 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 child’s 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 ‘problems’ lay. Idealised and generalised classrooms seemed to offer me nothing but endless personal and professional failure – 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 – 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, didn’t push and test the boundaries, didn’t refuse to learn or find learning impossible? What would that mean? Would I want never to be asked a question I could-n’t 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 – 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 – 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 ‘work’ above an infantilised notion of ‘play’ and, despite protestations about lifelong learning, are quick to limit learning to something that happens in school – 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 ‘an avalanche of certainty’ (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:

Many accept the fact that we do not know what is going on or even how we feel about it, that students puzzle us or make us mad, and that however much we plan in advance, however clear our lesson plans feel to us, whatever beauty our syllabus design mirrors, however narcissistic we may feel in conveying knowledge or however much we attempt to convey our understanding to others or strain to receive the other’s inchoate views, the pedagogical encounter and what becomes of it are radically unstable, subject to the unconscious and the dream work.

(Britzman, 2009: xi)

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 ‘met their learning objectives’ 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 master’s 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 ‘more’ 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 …

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 ‘talking cure’ but we need to be careful how we understand her statement since psychoanalysis does not hold out ‘cures’ 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 life’s 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 – if we can bear it. And, maybe, sometimes we can’t, 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 ‘primer’ 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 ‘therapeutic education’ 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 ‘cognitive, behavioural therapy’ (CBT) and have generated long-running debates in the media (O’Hara, 2005; Shepherd, 2009) and drawn fierce criticism from academics who complain that attempts to ‘teach hap-piness’ 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 ‘ther-apy’ 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 government’s recent enthusiastic embrace of CBT² has the feel of a child’s 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 ‘happy’ are economically or socially unproductive; a wrong and deeply troubling assumption. Second, CBT does not always work and it does not work for everyone – 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 ‘report of research’, 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 – 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 don’t exist and don’t 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 – 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? – and invite others to engage with answering them, but that will not be the purpose of this book.

Key ideas

As I indicated earlier, psychoanalysis is a complex field with a specialist vocabulary. Words can mean different things in everyday and psychoanalytic usage and these differences can create problems for some readers. Many of these problems revolve around the way psychoanalysis moves between literal and metaphorical language. Reading about envy, denial, the phallus, a good breast, a child’s death-wish and so on can be uncomfortable if we assume they are being used with their everyday literal connotations; I will discuss these difficulties as they arise. Throughout the book, I will work to enable you to gain some understanding of the specialist meaning of the words and concepts I draw on. Like all definitions, though, there is always room for more nuanced and detailed understandings.

A first important idea is that psychoanalytic ideas are not monolithic. Given the length of his career it is perhaps to be expected that there are important differences within Freud’s own writings which came about as his ideas developed and changed. Unsurprisingly there are also significant differences between Freud and those who worked with his ideas in different ways and in different places. Those who interpret any theorist will find points of agreemen...

Table of contents

• Foundations and Futures of Education
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 An introduction
• 2 The primary task of the school?
• 3 Mirror, mirror on the wall
• 4 Accountability
• 5 Tall poppies and shrinking violets
• 6 Group processes
• 7 When does the lesson start?
• 8 But I think best with my friends
• 9 Being ‘good-enough’ and taking the risk to ‘fail better’
• Notes
• References
• Index