Thinking about 'things'

Photo by Flickr user neil-san and made available under Creative Commons

Christmas day is almost upon us and the more sceptical part of me is brooding upon the vast mountains of plastic and electronics that will be awaiting many children throughout the land on Friday morning. I confess, I was one of those children who awoke to a rather large sack stuffed full of toys, most of which spent the remainder of their lives in the drawer under the bed, emerging into the light perhaps once a year. Now, it is not the purpose or aim of this blog to rant about and bemoan the age of rampant consumerism but rather to contribute, in some small way, to the wider debate that is taking place about ways we can re-envision and re-articulate our relationship to the Earth, and in particular to the places upon that Earth.

The absence of place

Photo by Flickr user stevec77 and made available under Creative Commons

In Alan Garner’s novel Thursbitch (Garner, 2004) the reader becomes acquainted with the life story of the valley of the same name and the powerful affects it has on those who dwell in it or visit it. The book evocatively interweaves the stories of two temporally distinct moments in the valley’s past and vividly captures the way that the narrative of an individual life, or of an entire community, is not only temporal but is also marked out in respect to particular places.

One of the novel’s two temporal strands is set in late 18th century rural England, and these parts of the narrative revolve around the life of Jack Turner, a ‘jagger’, or packman, who brings back to his family and community the foods, gifts and ideas that he has encountered upon his travels. After arriving back from one of these many jags, Jack is informed by his father that whilst he had been away the mysterious ‘land man’ had made an appearance. The land man, “one of the best of the worser kind of folk”, had been about with an eye for certain “improvements”, namely, the enclosure of the land, “walling right up Tors”, and using the sacred high stones as field lines and gates. What is worse, the ‘land man’ has an eye for improving the valley of Thursbitch itself, the very centre of Jack’s world, and to “make it a farm and build a house there.” Jack’s response to this threat is a blend of grief, fear and anger, and what he says is telling:

Learning as response

 Photo by Flickr user daveblume and made available under Creative Commons

"I must feed my body and arrange my house in order to receive the foreigner knocking at my door; if I posses a home, it is not for me alone." (Peperzak, 1993, pp.24-25)

There are many who would argue that in order to develop an ethical relationship, an empathy, for others, one must first acquire knowledge about them. The thinking goes something like this... "how can we expect children to care about people in such-and-such a country if they cannot even place it on a map?" There is something initially reasonable and compelling about such an argument, not least because such thinking (knowledge before ethics) is, as we shall see, entrenched deep in the Western tradition.

As our reading of Levinas in the last posting began to make clear, the history of Western thought has been long dominated by a tradition which sees consciousness as preceding, and having priority over, my encounter with the world. We might call this an 'egocentric' philosophy, one in which the Self comes first, and in which Others appear literally as an after-thought, that is, once they have been submitted to the integration, the 'violence', of thought. What Levinas proposes instead is a philosophy in which ethics, or our relationship with the Other, becomes fundamental. For Levinas, we have a primordial and unchosen responsibility for the Other, which comes before knowledge. Importantly, this is not to deny the Self. Rather, it is to say that the self comes into the world in relation to Others. As Peperzak writes,

What do we talk about when we talk about home?

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In previous posts I have been comparing education to a journey. One which begins in everyday and familiar places. One which turns us from this world of everyday experience precisely so that when we return home from our journey we will see that home in light of the larger place-world we have gained an insight into. This I called the educational odyssey. I cannot really claim any originality with regards to this line of reasoning. Although I shall not go into the details here, there is a strong, even dominant, tradition in Western thought that has seen philosophy and education as a homecoming, a coming-back-to-oneself, and we see this particularly clearly in Heidegger.

Why I am blogging

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There is a an outstanding moment in Proust's In Search of Lost Time where Marcel describes in detail the morning on which he opens the daily newspaper (I think it is Le Figaro) to find that his first article has, at long last, been published. I do not have the book to hand, so I cannot quote it directly. There subsequently follows one of Marcel's characteristically lengthy ruminations, in which he compares the arrival of this morning newspaper to the arrival of fresh bread, still warm from the press. He also describes the way in which, somewhat anxiously, he reads and re-reads the article numerous times, each time through the eyes of a different imagined observer. How favourably, or not, would he be judged by each of these scrutinising eyes? Hasn't every writer felt those piercing eyes?

The self in education

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The idea that to be educated is to come to know oneself and one's place in the world (and to be initiated into that privileged world of human being) has a long and distinguished history. From Bildung, through progressive and child-centred education, to the liberal, analytical tradition that flourished with the pioneering work of Peters and Hirst, it would appear that a conscious, rational and autonomous self is a sine qua non of educational philosophy. Even highly conservative theorists have been able to find common ground with progressives on this point.

The educational odyssey

Photo by Flickr user The Waterboy

Most of us have a view on the question of 'where is home?' We might well answer this question in the plural, maintaining that the house in which we presently live or the town, county or country in which we were born are all a sort of 'home' for us. Geography itself has often been described as the study of the earth as 'the home of humankind'.

Young people are also likely to come to school with a strong view on where and what home is for them. I sense that one of the most valuable contributions that geography can potentially bring to a young person's life is the broadening and diversifying of their idea of what a home can and might be. It has the power to take us beyond a provincial and exclusive identification with home or community that everyday experience might bestow to us, and refocuses our attention on that shared home in which we have to get along - Earth. It may also enable us to see our own literal home (our 'patch') from a new, expanded perspective.

Place as possibility

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Place has often been viewed as a sedentary, romantic and somewhat conservative concept and as such it is frequently regarded with great suspicion. The same goes for the notion of 'home'. In a recent thoughtful article on the matter, Guardian columnist Madeleine Bunting writes,

"The politics of home have had a fraught and vicious history on the continent, and perhaps this explains how they have been set aside, and so deliberately ignored. But belonging can be reinterpreted and that's where a host of seemingly unrelated cultural responses to our predicament seem to be forging a new understanding"

The article highlights a set of ideas that are currently refocusing attention on notions of home and the 'geography of our lives'. New localism and environmentalism are both identified as key to this recent re-engagement with place. Bunting goes on to reinterpret home and belonging as 'ongoing projects', the continuous result of a 'shared commitment' and not an allegiance to an unchanging common identity or homeland.

From landscapes of neglect to landscapes of hope

Photo by Flickr user Nicobobinus

In a recent interview for The Guardian, novelist Anthony Cartwright talks about ‘landscapes of neglect’, those mostly urban places which have seen dramatic decline in socio-economic fortune in recent decades and which thus become fertile breeding grounds for far-right extremism. Talking about the town in which he himself grew up, he explains,

"Even as a boy, I was aware of this landscape of decay as the physical fabric of the town was boarded up, and that fed into the psychology of the place… at times of economic collapse, people always look around for someone to blame."

It would seem that in the current climate, there are a lot of people looking around for someone to blame. This study funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 2006 found that as many as 18 to 25 per cent of the UK population would consider voting for the British National Party and it is unlikely that this statistic has since dropped.