Hope and Education

The Role of the Utopian Imagination

David Halpin, Professor David Halpin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134568994
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book is a rallying cry to teachers at a time when many in the profession feel profoundly pessimistic about their work and the future of education. In this uplifting book, David Halpin suggests ways of putting the hope back into education, exploring the value of and need for utopian thinking in discussions of the purpose of education and school policy. David Halpin does not attempt to predict the future of schooling. Rather, he discusses the attitude educators should adopt about its reform and the prospect of educational change. He suggests that educators need to adopt a militant optimism of the will, applying aspects of the utopian imagination through which hopefulness can be brought to bear on educational situations. This important book will stimulate fresh thinking about school reform. It will be interesting reading for those studying for Masters and Doctoral degrees in education, and academics, researchers and policy makers working in the same field.

1 Hope and its significance for education

Teaching…is in every respect a profession of hope.

(Vito Perrone)

A story from the field

If some of the stories emanating from the field are to be believed, teaching is presently a beleaguered occupation, particularly in schools serving areas of cumulative social and economic disadvantage. Many teachers working in such settings are reported to have low morale, coupled, in some cases, with feelings of professional inadequacy. Indeed, a recent study conducted by a group of economists at the University of Warwick UK (Gardner and Oswald, 1999) suggests that teachers in England are less content at work than any other professional group.

The factors contributing to this state of affairs are not difficult to identify. Teaching in urban environments, while it has its obvious rewards, can often be grindingly hard. Certainly teachers in many of our inner-city state comprehensive schools are required to work with the most challenging of students, in situations that are often less than ideal, and in circumstances in which they feel their efforts are insufficiently acknowledged and inadequately rewarded.

Here is how one of them—a 46-year old male—described his work in an article that appeared in the Times Educational Supplement a few years ago:

I work with 14-year old children who have 39-year old grandparents, whose families are fourth or fifth generation unemployed and whom the police deem ‘out of control’. Many started their sex lives at 12 and already smoke and drink heavily. We manage and they pass some exams, but they won’t get jobs because there aren’t any. I don’t have carpet in any room I work in and the furniture is broken. I don’t even work in the same room all the time. My office is a chair in the staff room and I don’t have a personal phone or computer terminal. The windows and roof leak. Bright displays cover holes in the walls. It is cold in winter and too hot in summer. The building is unhealthy, badly designed and, until recently, full of asbestos. Some of my classes have more than 30 children, all of which have a right to individual attention and some of which have special needs. I haven’t had a full set of textbooks in years and produce photocopies and worksheets in my own time. If children misbehave, it is apparently my fault for inadequate childmanagement skills. I have been hectored by the press, badgered by parents, pressured by management, and insulted by politicians, just for being a teacher…. I’ve worked through innumerable Secretaries of State for Education, and I feel that I can wear my despair and cynicism as the professional equivalent of a long service and good conduct medal. I have earned a privileged insight into my job the hard way and—unlike some politicians—I know exactly what I am talking about. I am a good teacher because I appreciate and like children. I enjoy my subject, and I admire learning, but I am going to need a lot of help to trust a politician again. The Government and my management will have to support me in order to get back some of the loyalty and sense of vocation that has been squandered need-lessly. The years to retirement are going to be a long, hard haul and if I could leave teaching, I’d go tomorrow…. I’m not sure I have much hope or faith left.

(TES, 6 November 1998, p. 13, emphasis added)

This almost entirely negative assessment by one teacher of his work circumstances, of course, needs to be read critically alongside others that portray things altogether differently and more positively. On the other hand, if the comments the article elicited in the letter columns of subsequent editions of the Times Educational Supplement are any guide, its description of the experience of what it is like today to be a secondary schoolteacher is one shared by many others in similar positions. Thus, while it reports a single case, parts of the account are shockingly recognizable.

The large amount of discontent said to permeate teaching is one reason, I suspect, why today fewer of its practitioners than in previous times think of it as a job for life. Indeed, a high number do not even start out. Figures issued by the UK’s Teacher Training Agency three years ago, for example, point up the disappointing extent to which graduates who are completing programmes of teacher training increasingly do not seek teaching posts (Smithers, 1999). For those who do, a high ‘drop-out’ rate after five years is evident. It appears too that more and more experienced teachers, including many occupying senior posts, are actively seeking ways to retire early, often because of stress in the workplace. (In this connection, figures recently issued by the UK government indicate that nearly half of all teachers working in state schools in England in 2001 were compelled to take four or more weeks off work because of workrelated illness. In addition, there are other data which suggest that currently up to 5,000 UK teachers retire each year on grounds of illhealth compared with about 2,000 in 1990.) So, although cynicism and pessimism are probably not as widespread among teachers in England as some might think, it remains the case that neither optimism nor hopefulness is present in super-abundance either.

But what is meant by hope in general and how does it connect with the educational process in particular? Neither question is easy to answer, for while it is clear that vocabularies of hope crucially affect people’s thinking, emotions and achievements, and perhaps teachers’ more than most, hope itself has rarely been at the centre of detailed theoretical attention or intensive empirical investigation. My own search for relevant literature in the course of writing this book, for instance, brought to light only a handful of comprehensive accounts of its nature and significance (namely, Dauenhauer, 1986; Godfrey, 1987; Kast, 1991; Ludema, 2000; Ludema et al., 1997; Lynch, 1965). As Godfrey observes, ‘as a topic for study, hope has largely been left to psychologists and theologians. For the most part, philosophers treat [it] en passant’ (1987, p. xi). It is also a neglected concept in the academic study of education.

Hope as a theological virtue

One of the historic roots of hopefulness is Christian theology—specifically, Pauline ethics. Saint Paul, in one of his letters to the Christian Church in Corinth, identified hope, along with faith and love, as one of the three ‘theological virtues’. Drawing on the ethical philosophy of Aristotle, Saint Thomas Aquinas (1952, II, I: 62), developing this insight, articulated Saint Paul’s taxonomy with one of his own—the four ‘cardinal or moral virtues’ of temperance, justice, prudence and fortitude, the latter of which he conceived as the necessary means for bringing about the former.

Aquinas’ ancient cardinal virtues have much to teach us about the modern practice of education. Take ‘prudence’, for example. In Aquinas’ scheme, this is not so much to do with being cautious in reaching judgements, but more with working hard to identify the right means to particular ends in specific circumstances. However, before anyone imagines that here we have an ancient theological endorsement of teaching by objectives, Aquinas makes clear that ‘prudence’ is centrally about ethical deliberation—that is, about thinking through and taking counsel about what ought to be done to achieve one’s purposes. Thus ‘prudence’, while it is most assuredly about the business of choosing ends, is chiefly about identifying through reflection the most morally justifiable means to achieving them. Its status as a ‘cardinal’ virtue then lies in the fact that it instructs us to find those means which can be defended ethically.

‘Fortitude’ is relevant at this point. According to Aquinas, it teaches us the importance of not being distracted from pursuing our proper and noble ends by the attraction of immediate pleasures or short-term advantage. Translated into the education context, ‘fortitude’ offers a warning about the consequences of pursuing ‘quick-fix’ policies that appear to fit well with an immediate problem, but which may have no enduring merit. It also impresses on teachers the importance of persevering professionally in situations that might to any other person seem impossible or extremely difficult—of showing courage in adversity, in other words, particularly when this involves motivating and teaching ‘difficult’ pupils about whom it is tempting to have low expectations.

‘Justice’, of course, leavens the whole process. While ‘temperance’ orders us in ourselves, the cardinal virtue of ‘justice’ requires those who follow it to consider the common good of society. Specifically, for Aquinas, it is about rendering what is due or owed to another. As such, it invites educators to think of the wider implications of the decisions they reach and pursue in the course of their work. For school managers, in particular, it may constrain them to take more into account the needs of other schools alongside the ones they lead. This has particular relevance in settings where competition between schools is being exacerbated by local market conditions that disable the capacity of some of them to succeed.

Aquinas’ cardinal virtues are human virtues. ‘Faith’, ‘hope’ and ‘charity’, on the other hand, are ‘supernatural’ ones insofar as they raise our minds to things that are above nature. ‘Hope’ is a special case here. In Aquinas’ writings its object is twofold: first, the future good that one desires and, second, the help by which one expects to attain it. As one would expect, God is the object of hope in Aquinas’ philosophy. Moreover, because hope is ultimately only realizable through divine means, it requires a modicum of humility on the part of those who practise it. As Aquinas remarks, ‘hope goes wrong and is mistaken when you rely on your own strengths’.

Hope, mutuality and experimentation

Aspects of Aquinas’ theistic interpretations of hope are capable of secular, including educational, interpretation, in the sense that hopefulness, as experienced by those who have it, entails both anticipating future happiness and trusting in present help to come to it. This is something any good teacher would quickly be able to identify with, in the sense that being such a person entails having both high expectations of students’ potential as well as faith that the educational process will realize them.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant appeared to recognize this as well, remarking in his magnum opus, The Critique of Pure Reason, first published in 1781, that ‘all the interests of [his] reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the following three questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? And for what may I hope?’ (1978, para. 805). Kant emphasizes what is at stake in this last question by claiming, in terms reminiscent of Aquinas’ earlier, that ‘all hoping is directed to happiness’. However, having declared that the concept of hope is central both to his thinking and living happily, Kant nowhere explicitly develops a full-blown analysis of its character. Some of his twentieth-century successors, on the other hand, have given it a fuller treatment, and in roughly similar ways.

For example, central to the thesis developed by Martin Heidegger in his monumental study Being and Time (1962) is the proposition that human existence is temporality. The is here is fundamental. For Heidegger is not suggesting that human beings simply exist in time; rather that being human entails, in terms reminiscent of the kind of craft knowledge good teachers are said to possess, the capacity simultaneously to be at once ahead, behind and alongside oneself. In fact, in Heidegger’s schema, ‘Being’ is literally ‘ecstatic’—or, as he graphically puts it, a form of ‘self-projective throwness’ in the course of which past, present and future are articulated.

Thus conceived, hope is interpreted not so much as a matter of positively ‘looking forward’—though that is a significant part of it—but a way of living prospectively in and engaging purposefully with the past and present. Gabriel Marcel says much the same, defining hope as the ‘memory of the future’ (1951, p. 53) which Ludema and his colleagues translate as the process whereby people ‘make a kind of triangulation between the past, present and future, which frees them from the limits of momentary time and space and allows them to make certain global judgements about life and existence’ (1997, p. 1039). Something very similar may be said about the process of education to the degree that it entails working positively with what is initially given in order to realize something that is immanent and wished for. There is a clear sense too in which teaching itself is an activity both within and without time, undertaken in one place, but not delimited by it.

The state of being hopeful, however, is not a passive or empty one. On the contrary, it implicitly involves adopting a critical reflective attitude towards prevailing circumstances. Indeed, hope often creates discontent, inasmuch as a person’s hopes for the future may make them very dissatisfied with things as they are presently, especially if they get in the way of making progress. Consequently, discontent of this kind often draws attention to a significant absence or gap in how certain matters are currently experienced, allied to a wish to change them for the better. Ludema and his colleagues make the same point, stressing the way in which hoping is a ‘continuous movement toward the superlative, the sublime’ (1977, p. 1037). Much the same, of course, may be said of the proper practice of education which is premised upon the hope that teaching and learning will lead to improvement, a form of the sublime, even. This premise explains the frustrations that frequently occasion classroom teaching that all too often entail working against the grain of conditions that are antithetical to effective learning.

To say that someone is hopeful is thus to refer to a disposition they possess which results in them being positive about experience or particular aspects of that experience. Being hopeful also involves the belief that something good, which does not presently apply to one’s own life, or the life of others, could still materialize, and so it is yearned for as a result. Being hopeful consequently encourages outgoingness as well as a fundamental openness towards one’s environment, including, crucially, the people in it. This last element of the equation cannot be stressed enough. For hope, as Ludema (2000) reminds us, is ‘fundamentally a relational construct’, rather than an emotional or a cognitive possession of individuals. Lionel Tiger argues in similar vein, stating that hope is an ‘essential vitamin for social processes. If everybody awoke each day to announce “It’s hopeless”, there would soon be no plausible tomorrow and no continuous social arrangements’ (1999, p. 622). Marcel concurs, arguing that hope ‘is only possible at the level of the us…and does not exist on the level of the solitary ego’ (1951, p. 10). In fact, Marcel inscribes the us here with a form of love (specifically, agape, which literally means ‘self-giving love’), a theme to which I will return towards the end of this chapter where I commend a particular way of bringing the hope back into the practice of teaching in those contexts where it is otherwise difficult to feel anything but pessimism.

Mutuality is then both a source for and a potential outcome of hope, the latter of which is closely bound up with the willingness to experiment, to make choices, to be adventurous. Accordingly, hope has a creative role in encouraging the development of imaginative solutions to seemingly intractable difficulties. To that extent, hope ‘is in love with success rather than failure’ (Bloch, 1986, p. 1). Specifically, it can visualize a state of affairs not yet existing and, more than this, can both anticipate as well as prepare the ground for something new. Jürgen Moltmann makes this same point, observing that ‘unless hope has been aroused and is alive, there can be no planning’ (1971, p. 178). The resonance here with the education project hardly requires elaboration, other than to remark that the wish to succeed as a teacher is likely to be accompanied by a yearning hope to do well, allied to a propensity to innovate in order to achieve one’s ends.

Absolute and ultimate hope

Godfrey’s (1987) own analysis of hope helps us to make further sense of what I have said about it so far. Like me, he draws on Marcel’s ‘metaphysics of hope’ (1951, 1962, 1965), distinguishing two kinds of hope: absolute hope and ultimate hope. Absolute hope connects with a particular kind of positive orientation to the world—one that entails an openness or readiness of spirit towards the future. According to Godfrey, a person who has absolute hope is someone who, in hoping, sets no condition or limits—is not ready ultimately to despair in the face of disappointment.

While hope needs despair as its opposite (Marcel, 1965, p. 82), despair itself is the enemy of progress because it lacks a faith in the future. Indeed, despair frequently leads to a form of abject pessimism resulting in the grudging acceptance of the status quo (Nesse, 1999). As a result, despair almost always compromises radically people’s capacity to act to improve things on behalf of others. Centrally, it can also undermine confidence generally. Looked at from this perspective, absolute hope may be thought of as a vital coping resource in the struggle against despair. Certainly, it can help to galvanize and re-double all our efforts, and not only those of teachers, to overcome negative circumstances that otherwise appear to be beyond reparation. As Marcel says, ‘hope is a spring; it is the leaping of a gulf (1965, p. 86).

Absolute hope entails a basic, even naïve, kind of faith in the future and of the prospects for reform and renewal. This is what Jonathan Sacks, Britain’s Chief Rabbi, seems to be inferring in his remark that being hopeful is about ‘retaining our sense of the underlying goodness of the world’ (1997, p. 267). Christopher Lasch, echoing this sentiment, states that hope of this kind implies ‘a deep-seated trust in life that appears absurd to those who lack it’ (1991, p. 81). Marcel concurs, remarking that ‘to hope is to put one’s faith in reality, to assert that it contains the means of triumphing over all dangers’ (1965, p. 82). Thus understood, it is, in Vaclav Havel’s words, ‘an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart…. It is not the conviction that something will [by definition] turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out’ (1990, p. 181). For Havel, hope is a ‘dimension of the soul…[that]…transcends the world that is immediately experienced’ (ibid.). Similarly, Marcel sees it as ‘the prolongation into the unknown of an activity which is central— that is to say, rooted in being’ (1962, p. 33).

Although Havel and Marcel are not speaking specifically about the experience of being a teacher, their sentiments connect with it none the less. For most teachers are able to appreciate the unpredictable nature of their work, while at the same time acknowledging that, when it is undertaken seriously, it adds up to more than appearances might otherwise suggest. Although few teachers would probably say as much, many would be able to identify with the suggestion that the educational process always transcends what can be directly observed in it to the degree that it adds up to far more than the sum of its parts. This aspect of teaching is probably what people are referring to when they call it an ‘art’, which is partly why, I suppose, when it ‘works’ it can both inspire and uplift all concerned. Confidence of course is crucial to the process. But being hopefully confident does not mean that teachers are therefore excused from ever being sceptical of their abilities. On the contrary, the very ambiguity of the teacher-learner transaction can have the effect of fostering serious self-doubt among those more sensitive practitioners who have particularly reflective approaches towards their work.

While ultimate hope complements its absolute variant, it differs from it in being an aimed hope; that is to say, unlike absolute hope it has an object or, more accurately, a better specific state of affairs in mind. As Godfrey remarks, ‘its simple objectives [may be] one’s own benefit, another’s benefit, or a shared life’ (1987, p. 152). Either way, ultimate hope refracts back on the present, holding up to it the prospect of a better way of life—for oneself, for others and for society generally—while recognizing that there are likely to be obstacles on the way that will need to be challenged and overcome. Walter Benjamin’s idea of ‘Messianic time’, which he tantalizingly and briefly outlines in his essay ‘Thesis on the philosophy of history’, reinforces some of these themes. Benjamin writes of the importance of ‘establishing a conception of the future as the “time of the now” which is shot through with chips of Messianic time’ (1973, p. 266)—in other words, anticipations in the here and now of a better future.

More recently, another Benjamin has integrated these analyses into a compelling and fascinating exploration of how we may think philosophically about the present through the leitmotiv of hope. Andrew Benjamin’s Present Hope (1997) concludes that hope is best understood as a vital part of living to the full in the present—a form of realized eschatology without which it is not possible to engage either meaningfully or authentically with one’s immediate life or the contemporary world. These religious emphases—which in Andrew Benjamin’s case are inflected by a personal commitment to Judaism—are also manifest in Jürgen Moltmann’s highly influential Theology of Hope (1967) which seeks to show how Protestant Christian theology can set out from hope and begin to consider its themes in an eschatological light. A similar approach, informed interestingly by Heideggerian categories, is found in John Macquarrie’s Principles of Christian Theology which concludes that ‘hope belongs to the eschatological dimension of the Christian life and, from the ethical point of view, provides a dynamic for action’ for where we are now (1966, p. 451).

Enemies of hope 1: Cynicism

Both ultimate and absolute hope articulate awkwardly with modernday cynicism. A cynic today is not the same person the Ancient Greeks meant by the term. For them the cynic was a critic of contemporary culture on the basis of reason and natural law—a revolutionary rationalist, a follower of Socrates. My impression is that many contemporary cynics seem unwilling to follow anybody in particular and appear to have no obvious criterion of truth or set of fixed values, other than to be cryptically critical of most things.

Of course, there is a role for this, inasmuc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Hope and its significance for education
• 2 Utopianism as a vocabulary of hope
• 3 Utopianism and education
• 4 Utopian realism and a Third Way for education
• 5 Utopian educational management and leadership
• 6 Deliberative democracy and utopian school governance
• 7 A utopian cultural core curriculum
• 8 Putting Hope back into education
• References and other sources