Teachers
Je texte, donc je suis Geran Jones.
Geran Jones argues that the ‘liquid life’ is eroding the cultural security of teenagers
The world of education is under threat, not just from political interference, but it now finds itself at the mercy of the market, media, modernity and millenials. A pervasive safety culture has curtailed children’s discovery of the new, prevents them from playing independently, from learning to control their own emotions and behaviour, and from developing a sense of responsibility. Its influence extends to education, where a paternalistic control of reading material limits discovery of the world of fiction. What once passed as the accepted cultural canon is now off-limits; trigger warnings are becoming more widespread; books which might offend sensibilities are being removed from the syllabus. This, together with politicisation of language and political correctness, has given rise to fears of microagression, the perceived offence that someone’s words cause to individuals and cultural groups. Examples of readily bruised sensitivities are widespread: student protests to remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from a Princeton faculty or Rhodes’ statue from Oriel; some US colleges have compiled lists of forbidden phrases. University campuses establish ‘safe spaces’ and ban certain national dailies from sale as they might cause offence. Once a place of refuge for people exposed to racial prejudice or sexism, these are now used by illiberal students to ban words and ideas that oppose their own, to stifle freedom of expression. This is a far cry from the Higher Education of the recent past, where university was a place where students could be challenged and intellectually taken out of their ‘safe space’. The twin prongs of identity politics and the denigration of knowledge exercise a pernicious influence. Academic culture today, it has been noted, has a greater tendency to combine relativism with an absolute conviction in the validity of subjective truths. The Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University expressed concern about the disappearance of moral and epistemological modesty which enables the interchange of ideas, and she wondered whether it would ever return. She is not alone in this. Educational institutions are at the mercy of these and other corrosive influences. The deculturation of education and politics, where policy is dominated by the balance sheet, is omnipresent. It is devoid of any humanist setting or historical vision and has become an end in itself. This is in a context of postmodernism, which seems bent on constant motion and perpetual change – be it in mentality, lifestyle or values. There is no specific goal, just the need to survive, communicate and consume. Our obsession with media and communication has led to a blurring of boundaries between work and leisure, between the formal and the informal. We are all living a ‘liquid life’, which Zygmund Bauman sums up as ‘a precarious life, lived under conditions of constant uncertainty, in which the
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consumerist syndrome has devalued values of duration and instead elevated transience’. These currents are reflected in language use. Words dissolve in the continual flux that is communication: they no longer play the role of symbolic markers. The discourse of advertising and instant messaging renders content irrelevant. We live in the eternal present, reflected in tense usage: we are ‘going forward together’; ‘change is now’; ‘Yes, we can’. Liquid life is well illustrated by the contemporary pupils’ obsessive-compulsive tendencies in mobile telephone usage. Initially provided as a means to keep in touch with parents, the device comes to symbolise freedom and security, the two contradictory needs which millennials yearn for most. But it is not just a link with the outside world; it becomes the affirmation of identity: texts, calls and photos corroborate the existence and popularity of the owner; messages are sought round the clock, even interrupting sleep cycles. The validity of modern teenagers’ existence can only be confirmed by the receipt of a communication, however banal. Je texte, donc je suis. The social consequences of growing up in liquid life and the protective environment of a safety culture have bred a greater sense of vulnerability in young adults and fostered a disinclination to trust their own judgement and take responsibility. They fear the sound of silence and shrink from engaging with uncomfortable ideas and the complexity of language. The Zeitgeist of the globalised landscape makes the task of educating bright young minds all the more challenging. How can school pilot the young learner between the Scylla of consumerism and the Charybdis of social media? It must set store by traditional values which develop the whole person and confront emotional fragility; cultivating a sense of community, team spirit; a moral compass, a sense of curiosity. It is essential that it fulfil its role to educate in the broadest sense; that it impart, maintain and renew those elements which form the cultural legacy of society. Contemporary currents contrive to remove culture and history as a landscape for constructing personal identity. This is a dangerous development. Without a personal connection with history and culture, we risk simply building a shallow profile in an illusory world. To have roots and an awareness of a common past is all the more vital in today’s liquid world. This is a key reason why, in today’s educational environment, an understanding of knowledge of science and technology alone is insufficient: the teaching of the humanities remains of the utmost importance. As Kolakowski observed: ‘We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.’ Geran Jones teaches French and Russian at Westminster School.
Autumn 2016
*CCR Vol53 no3 Autumn 2016.indd 22
19/08/2016 12:29
