Can the Lib Dems get off the torture rack?

 business, education, government, politics, Psychology, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  5 Responses »
Dec 052010
 

Can the Liberal Democrats get off the torture rack they’ve put themselves on before next Thursday’s (9 December) vote on the university tuition fees proposal…?

One can only hope so. That this was a potential destroyer was recognised by the architects of May’s Coalition Agreement who gave Lib Dem MPs the right to abstain when this issue came up for the vote. Unfortunately, a number of Lib Dem MPs are threatening to vote against Government policy - including former Lib Dem leaders Charles Kennedy and Sir Menzies Campbell, both of whom still carry considerable influence amongst backbenchers.

Nick Clegg and Vince Cable; photo copyright © 2010 Getty

Understandably perhaps in the past week or so Nick Clegg and Vince Cable have tried to resolve the confusion and bitterness by getting the Lib Dems to block vote on the issue…for the proposal, of course. Clegg and Cable are, after all, senior ministers in the Coalition Government. But with the party now as low as something like 14% (Guardian/ICM, 22 November) in the opinion polls - though some pollsters believe that figure is artificially low – and with rioting students calling for Clegg and Cable to dare to meet them in person, it can hardly be surprising that Clegg and Cable are desperate for a show of party unity.

Now Cable has broken ranks and has said he will vote for his department’s policy regardless. In face of such a move, Clegg can hardly not support the Government if Cable is.

For sure, the Lib Dems have taken one hell of a battering in the past 6 months. Their first taste of peacetime government in 75+ years has come at a severe price. The Tories have used ‘those nice Lib Dems who wouldn’t hurt anybody unwillingly’ to front a series of policies that will (eventually) put around a million people out of work and slash public services to close on 1950s levels - all fronted publicly with an almost maniacal glee by Chancellor George Osborne! David Cameron has been close to explicit in saying that a partnership with the Lib Dems (trusted by most of the electorate as ‘honourable’) was preferable to depending on his own extreme right wing (thought of by many electors as moneyed fascist dogs).

The problem for the Coalition – and for the Lib Dems in particular - is that the economy is recovering just that little bit faster than predicted, lending some credibility to Labour’s claim that the cuts could be slightly less draconian -20% over a parliament, as against 25% over 2-3 years.

It must have seemed a wonderful wheeze back in March for every Lib Dem MP to sign to say they would vote against an increase in tuition fees. For a party that, if the pattern of the past 75 years had held true, would never actually have to live up to its promises….

But the opportunity came… Clegg’s ORANGE ambition rapidly overcame any BLUE/GREEN scruples he might have had…  A number of Lib Dem MPs suddenly found themselves to be members of the Government. That Clegg (amateur Blair-like who made one outstanding TV appearance), Cable (from ‘Woman’s Hour’ radio to prime-time ‘Strictly’ in less than a year - what a celeb!) and Treasury number 2 Danny Alexander (last-minute stand-in for ‘hard man’ David Laws) have convincingly passed themselves off as government ministers, with both a real understanding of their brief and a vision for driving change through their departments says one hell of a lot for the quality of the understudies who never ever thought they’d get a chance to actually play the part.

But playing the part in some pretty adverse circumstances is what they now find themselves doing.

Unfortunately some Lib Dem MPs seem determined to bring down the Coalition on the basis that what was promised in the election is not what is being delivered now. Well, of course, it isn’t!…because the Government is not a Lib Dem Government…it’s a Coalition Government! As David Cameron is only too ready to tell, he’s got far more backbenchers proportionate to Cabinet posts saying he’s sold out on Tory principles and giving him serious grief…!

The Coalition Government has reinforced the favourable public identities of Clegg and Cable and made somebodies out of nobodies Alexander and Laws. Many people will now have some idea who Alexander and Laws are and there’s a good chance Clegg and Cable might actually get recognised if they tried to walk down the street.

If somebody knows who the hell you are, there’s more chance they’ll vote for you next time!

So where does this leave the Lib Dems?
Potentially in a very difficult spot that they’re not going to get out of any time soon. They will have explicitly supported a series of policies that will (in the short term at least) widen the rich-poor divide in this country, make untold numbers of ‘middle class’ people less well off, been part of a complete dearth of ideas on how to make this country’s industries competitive again in a global market and appeared to be ‘Tory Toadies’ - doing what their political masters demand…virtually without question!

Yet they will have been in Government…and people all over the UK will know the Lib Dems are something more than hairy hippies with beards and sandals and papooses for the earthmothers with young babies.

How ever much some of the Lib Dem activists and MPs resent their Coalition with the Tories, the fact of the matter is that next election they will have had ministerial experience and thus can claim they actually do know how to run the country. And, for the next 4.5 years, they will have more opportunity to influence government policy - that influence being way beyond their arithmetical number (5 Cabinet ministers from 57 MPs). In some cases, those ministers will actually determine Government policy.

A substantial Lib Dem failure to support Government policy on tuition fees will, at best, undermine the value of the Coalition to many Tories and cause Cameron misery as he will have to fend off his right wing berating him that the Lib Dems can’t be relied upon. At worst, there is an outside possibility the Government could lose the vote…with all the consequences that might entail.

Of course, it galls the BLUE vMEME to betray principle and GREEN will be in sorrow for the very real hardships the Coalition policies are going to cause hundreds of thousands of people…but now is the time for YELLOW pragmatism. Most people acknowledge the need to cut Britain’s financial deficit - the main arguments are whether by tax rises, by cuts in the public sector or by both and how severe the measures need to be over how long a time period.

Although he can certainly talk tough enough to get the Tory right wing cheering him from time to time, David Cameron appears to be right of centre rather than hard right in most of his politics. His determination to find ways to measure ‘happiness’ - revealed in late November to more than a few jeers from the Tory right – would seem to indicate a genuine concern for people. The Lib Dems, coming from a sort or radical (non-socialist) left, give Cameron balance in the Coalition Government to justify not pursuing the hard right policies a number of Tories would pressurise the prime minister to push through.

Cameron, Clegg, Osborne and Alexander have all talked about the population sharing the pain of the cuts equally…and Cable has made it difficult for the Tories to let their rich donors escape the pain entirely by making it very public that he’s going after the big-time tax avoiders. So, when public sector workers are going to be losing their jobs in the hundreds of thousands…when probably an equal number of private sector workers will lose their jobs due to the knock-on effects of scaling back the public sector… how can the students justify not taking their share of the pain?

Having to pay 2 or even 3 times as much for your degree is relatively small beer compared to losing your job and your house. Some sense of proportion needs to be applied here.

The human tragedies
Look beyond the political posturing and the student riots and there will be real heartbreak stories in virtually every 6th Form in England.

As a part-time teacher, this term I’ve had Year 12s (16-17-year-olds) weeping inconsolably in front of me. They don’t think they’ll be going to university now due to the fees hike and they perceive their careers to be in ruins. Demotivated and with low self-efficacy - Albert Bandura’s term for the belief that they can make good use of their learning - the quality of their work is suffering. For some, even regular attendance at school is now becoming an issue. After all…what’s the point…? Bright kids, some of them undoubtedly university material, frittering away the chance to make the most of their opportunities.

In the bitter war of  words around the fees issue, the Coalition Government have only just started drawing attention to the £150M National Scholarship programme, under which students currently receiving free school meals will get substantial help with their fees - notably the first year paid for by the State. Universities minister David Willetts reckons this fund will assist around 18,000 students from poor backgrounds. Unfortunately, as with all such initiatives, those who just miss out on the eligibility criteria will be the hardest hit: low incomes but not low enough. Most of my inconsolable students would fit into that category.

Part of the problem, of course, comes from the way university has been pushed at 6th Formers as the only real option when they leave school. That, in turn, has been driven by the previous Labour Government’s target of sending 50% of school leavers to university. Ignoring the repeated allegations that A-Levels have been dumbed down to facilitate achieving this target, statistics showing around about a fifth of undergraduates drop out because they can’t hack it and reports of employers no longer valuing degrees because they are becoming too common, teachers in many 6th Forms will tell you that achieving 50% as a national average was always going to require some fudge because 50% of school leavers are not university material. Nonetheless, the pressure on schools to achieve the 50% target has been considerable and many students have been conditioned accordingly to think university is the only worthwhile option.

University as the only real option is, of course, a meme. When we get that meme into students’ heads, then that becomes a key operating schema. Which is why so many of them are now genuinely distressed by the  proposed rise in fees. The new harsh financial reality the Coalition Government intends to implement requires some considerable accommodation in face of the university-is-the-only-option schema running in the heads of many students.

2 things immediately come to mind in how to resolve these apparent contradictions for students: I get encouraged to aspire to university but, if I go, I’ll be saddled with debt for a large part of my adult life….

Firstly, we have to change the university-is-the-only-option meme. It needs to be seen as just one option. There are other options - and they should be promoted as valuable to 6th Formers.

To tell a personal story…I have 2 nephews by marriage. Both were expected - and, to some extent, pressured – (both by parents and teachers) to go to university. One did and didn’t like it, dropping out halfway through his first term. The other refused to go. Both are bright, clever and resilient but neither particularly enjoyed the discipline of academic study. They now work for a major corporation, have salaries equivalent to a first-year graduate, enjoy considerable responsibility and are considered potential middle-senior managers by their employer.

University and academic study were not for them but they found their niche and discovered other ways to develop their talents.

In a deliberate attempt to undermine the university-is-the-only-option meme, schools need to model such success stories and create the meme that there are good alternatives to university.

Secondly, for those who really want to go to university and for whom it will make a substantial difference, we need to work on the schemas they have about how much more difficult it will be from now on. For that, we need to amplify the perceptions of benefits for those prepared to pay the costs - and we need to make sure the increased costs are presented realistically. ‘Urban myths’ about a lifetime of crippling debt need to be offset by realistic projections of likely earnings against debt repayments.

And, yes, students and their parents do need to accept it’s a changed world and they will have to pay more if they go to university. That’s the way it is. It’s not fair. The new system will need refining to make sure it is more progressive - so that the low-but-not-low-enough incomes don’t miss out disproportionately on the opportunity to go. But the new system is just part of the pain we’re all going to be feeling in the coming months - and it’s only fair that students bear some  of the pain too.

Pragmatism over Principle?
The Lib Dems are known to be a principled lot. Let’s face it: if you want to be a career politician, then Labour or Conservatives have been the only options in England for the past 75+ years. Conviction politicians, for whom principle is more important than ambition, were the kind of people who ended up in the Lib Dems. No hope of ever being in government but the opportunity to stand up for what you believed. More often than not GREEN sensitivities of treating everyone fairly and equally, played out in BLUE’s do-the-right-thing motif.

So betraying your principles to achieve power is pretty hard for the Lib Dem BLUE to swallow, especially when it means some people really do get treated unfairly. It’s hard for the MPs, councillors and activists and it’s hard for the millions of voters who regarded them as honourable.

But what happens when the principles become outmoded and rendered impractical? The reality is that the past 2 years have taken the wind out of the Western economies’ sails. Just about every government in the Western world is undertaking some form of austerity measures and attempting to scale back their public sector. Clegg & Co’s wheeze of signing up to resist any attempt to increase tuition fees belonged in the previous era – the pre-recession, pre-financial crisis era.

Increased tuition fees are part of the new world. To be sure, this first attempt needs some refinement; but ‘refinement’ is a relatively minor term in the scale of adjustments. Sizeable tuition fees are here to stay.

The Lib Dem MPs have a decision to make. Do they want to go back to the ‘wilderness’, shouting a lot of principles but making very little real difference to people’s lives…? Or do they want to play a central role in government at a time of national and international crisis and succeed in getting some key Lib Dem policies onto the statute book…?

Wanted: Suitable Latvian Men for Latvian Women

 community, education, gender, mental health, Psychology, schemas & memes, sex & romance, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  1 Response »
Oct 162010
 

This article on the BBC News the other day (13 October) really caught my eye…about there being a shortage of suitable men for the women of Latvia.

Of course, there have been many shortages of men before. Usually after wars there are shortages of men since men do most of the fighting. Even in the one and only truly ‘total war’ of World War II, far more men were killed than women. Eg: the Germans lost over 5 million men and the Soviet Union an estimate of upto 10 million.

(If just some of the anecdotes I’ve heard are true, British and American soldiers in the ruins of Berlin in 1945 could have almost any German woman they wanted, especially if they had chocolate, cigarettes, nylons, etc, to give away.)

However, a significant shortage in peace time is unusual. Paradoxically statistics show that more male babies are born in Latvia than girls. However, a high early male mortality rate means there are 8% more women than men in the country. Among the under-30s, there are almost 9,000 more men than women. However, this is inverted between the ages of 30-39 so that there are almost 3,000 more women than men. This equates to men being 3 x as likely to die between the ages of 30 and 39. Overall women live 11 years longer than men, the highest disparity of life expectancy between the sexes in the EU.

Sociologist Baiba Bela explains the high male mortality rate: “Car driving, alcoholism and accidents in the workplace are mainly riskier for men than for women.” Statistics show that many Latvian men are also heavy smokers – so add that to the list of high risk behaviours.

This ‘express-self-now-and-to-hell-with-the-consequences’ nihilistic behaviour is clearly the output of the RED vMEME. The nihilistic element of these behaviours also illustrate what Sigmund Freud (1920) meant by Thanatos, the death instinct of the Id (peak RED) driving the individual to self-destruction. The gender difference in the numbers of people engaging in such risky behaviour can be explained by high levels of testosterone, the male sex hormone, which Hans J Eysenck attributed as the key factor in producing a Psychoticist temperament in many males. RED motivation and Psychoticism together make for a highly dangerous combination in males, leading to frequent behaviours dangerous both to themselves and others.

It would appear a substantial number of Latvian men have a RED/Psychoticist ‘lock’ or centre of gravity.

How did Latvian men get into this state?
Psychoanalyst Ansis Stabingis attributes high rates of Depression and suicide amongst Latvia men to the country’s rapid transition from Communism to Capitalism 20 years ago which suddenly put massive pressures on men to succeed financially. “There are demands about how [men] should live. And if they cannot meet those standards, they… fall into Depression…. And then they start to use some alcohol or some gambling because they cannot solve that problem.”

Capitalism and consumerism are driven by the ORANGE vMEME’s drive to create a better future for itself. As Zygmunt Bauman (1988) has noted, consumerism tends to divide people into those he calls the ‘seduced’ – those who have taken in the memes that life is about having designer goods and a luxury lifestyle and have the means to buy into it – and the ‘repressed’ – those who have taken in the same memes but do not have the means to buy into it.

When the world-wide economic crisis broke in 2008, unemployment in Latvia was pushed up by around 20%. Male suicide levels, already amongst the highest in the EU, rose correspondingly by 16%. Many of those who taken in consumerist memes and were only too willing to be seduced into the Western luxury life style now found they were actually slipping into the lifestyle of the repressed – wanting but no longer with the means to buy.

In Integrated SocioPsychology terms, the RED vMEME is motivated to establish self-esteem and esteem from others. When RED is confronted with failure – loss of job, drastic reduction in income, failure to achieve the lifestyle standards of the seduced – then RED simply cannot be shamed. It must either find someone else to blame for its misfortune or it will start to break the selfplex (an individual’s sense of self) down and/or become self-destructive (Freud’s death instinct). With a loss of self-esteem, RED is much more likely to engage in risky behaviour dangerous to itself. After all, if I’m no longer worth much, who cares if I risk everything for the little pleasure I might be able to get?

Latvia, like the other Baltic states and Russia, has long had a hard drinking culture. As software engineer Agris Rieksts told the BBC: “It is kind of perceived that it is manly, that the more alcohol you can handle, the more of a man you are. Everybody understands that it is kind of absurd. But it is still there.”

So there was a readymade alcohol culture for the newly repressed and depressed to drown their miseries in.

The undesirable male mate
In such circumstances, you might think that Latvian men between 30 and 39 could have their pick from so many available women. And the fact that Latvia has the highest rate of single mothers in the EU might well indicate that the men have indeed been ‘busy’. However, the fact that Latvia has the highest rate of single mothers in the EU can also be meta-stated to tell another story: that the Latvian women want babies but they don’t want serious ongoing relationships with the available men.

As Dace Ruskane. editor of women’s magazine Lilit, says: “The smartest girls are alone. The really beautiful girls are alone – if they are smart.”

There is an increasing stereotype of the Latvian male as a depressed drunk with little or no ambition. In his non-work time he either hangs out at sports bars or slobs out in front of the TV. Ruskane comments: “He just sits in front of the TV and knows he can get a woman. And if she doesn’t suit him, he will get another. Smart women simply don’t want to have such men as their partners.”  That, according to one woman who spoke to the BBC, is “why all my friends have gone abroad and found boyfriends there.”

The lack of male desire to better oneself is, according to Baiba Bela, encapsulated in the single statistic that there are 50% more women enrolled at the University of Latvia than men.

The existence of the ‘undesirable male mate’, while perhaps of particular concern to the men-starved women of Latvia, is by no means a Latvian-only phenomenon. 2 years ago then-Shadow Secretary for Innovation, Universities & Skills David Willetts drew attention in the UK to young women preferring to raise their children as single mothers rather than be partnered long-term with a man who had no means of support and no apparent prospects. Willetts was much influenced by the American sociologist William Julius Wilson (1987) who almost certainly was the first to identify the ‘unmarriageable male’, amongst the black underclass in inner city Chicago. (See ‘NEETS – are the Tories on the Right Path?’)

Wilson’s view is that the restructuring of the American economy (and the Western European economies) towards more knowledge-based industries (with much traditional heavy industry going to low wage economies, first Eastern Europe and then Asia) has led an underclass to develop of unskilled and unemployed American males (both black and white). The economic prospects of these males are so grim that effectively they are unmarriageable.

Norman Dennis & George Erdos (1992) confirmed the presence of the unmarriageable male in the UK, describing him as weakly socialised and lacking a sense of responsibility to be a functioning adult in the community, taking on the roles of husband and father.

Though their route to this state is a little different – Latvia was one of those Eastern European nations which most benefitted from being a low wage economy in the 1990s and early 2000s – Latvian men are now similarly undesirable as economic propositions…and drunk and depressed into the bargain!

Whither the Latvian man?
It will be interesting to find out just what kind of impact the BBC News article has on the collective psyche of Latvia. Certainly the article has been picked up a smattering of international news outlets, including the Herald de Paris, and several blogs; but, in the week of the Chilean miners, more Israeli rumblings about a possible strike on Iran and many in the Western world obsessing with just how savagely George Osborne is going to shred Britain’s public sector next week, it never did have much chance of making major news.

Since RED won’t be shamed, it’s more than likely that many Latvian males will simply shrug off the article – if they even register it! – with the selfplex defence mechanism of denial and reach for the next drink. It’s not hard to understand why so many Latvian women do turn to international dating agencies and web sites, with a few sadly ending up in the hands of the pornographers and human traffickers.

As for the Latvian Government and its policymakers…welcome to the late 20th/early 21st Century phenomenon of the undesirable male mate. He’s becoming a significant social problem throughout much of the Western world; but, in a country where there is a relative scarcity of men, he has the potential to become that much more a problem.

There again, as the Western countries struggle to reshape their economies in the wake of the global financial crisis and the unskilled and semi-skilled work continues to drift East, will the unmarriageable male, with his self-destructive behaviours, grow in numbers until he is a major problem throughout the Western world?

Cameron & Clegg: where’s the vision?

 Afghanistan, business, charity, community, crime, education, government, human rights, mental health, racism, religion, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics, substance abuse  48 Responses »
Jul 152010
 

2 months ago, in ‘”Liberal Conservatives”: new politics?’, I wrote about my hopes that the Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition might indeed be the start of the ‘new politics’ Nick Clegg says he’s always believed in. I talked about the need for 2nd Tier thinking in Government to take us beyond repeating the same old mistakes, ideological conflicts and embezzlement of the public purse.

A month on I’ve yet to see real signs of 2nd Tier thinking in anything the new Government does.

Yes, as Henry Porter wrote in last Sunday’s Observer (11 July), they’ve made a good start. “…the coalition has moved with degrees of fair mindedness and deliberation that are refreshing. To be sure, there have been blunders, like Michael Gove’s botched announcement on scrapping new schools, but it surely is right to suggest that doctors be put in charge of spending GPs’ £80bn budget, to remove the target culture from the health service and provide 24-hour cover. The withdrawal from Sangin and setting a deadline for ending combat in Afghanistan is welcome, as is the review of defence needs and spending. For once, our relations with the world appear to be conducted by grown-ups without displays of fawning or self-importance…..In two months, the coalition has announced the ending of the wasteful and, as it turns out, dangerously insecure children’s database, ContactPoint, as well as the ID card scheme. Immigration minister Damian Green put an end to the inhumane detention of thousands of children belonging to asylum seekers. Theresa May has agreed to examine the way the police are collecting and storing photographs and data about legitimate protesters, like 85-year-old peace campaigner John Catt who was classified as a “domestic extremist. She has also said that the automatic number plate recognition system that tracks and records 10 million vehicle journey per day will be placed under statutory regulation and scrutinised for the first time. CCTV cameras used to watch Muslims in Birmingham have been disabled. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act terror laws, used by councils to spy on members of the public, are to be reserved for counterterror operations. And in the last week the home secretary suspended section 44 of the Terrorism Act which allowed police to stop and search 250,000 innocent people last year alone, and [David] Cameron announced details of a full judicial inquiry into allegations that British intelligence officers were involved in the torture of terror suspects.”

 As Porter says, the “Coalition is popular” - and that may, in part at least, why there has been so little reaction against the massive cuts the Government is going to make – and is already making – in the public sector. (RMT leader Bob Crow’s call for a general strike is, at this stage at least, a very lone voice.) The Treasury’s demand, ‘leaked’ from the Cabinet meeting of 1 July, for most Cabinet ministers to prepare plans for cutting their budgets by 40% is, as some commentators have suggested, almost certainly scaremongering. That way, the real depth of the coming cuts – predicted to average out at 25% – will seem nothing like so bad.

While, as Henry Porter points out, the new government are already implementing a number of new policies, their ‘big idea’ undoubtedly is cutting the deficit; and it will certainly be the defining policy of the Coalition’s first few years in power.

Though I think the developing policy on Afghanistan is muddled and short-sighted – see ‘Why we must win in Afghanistan’ - much else the Coalition is doing seems headed in the right direction. Even the cuts.

We all knew there would be cuts. We’ve been told since before Christmas that there would have to be cuts; and Labour aren’t denying that they were edging towards the 20% figure for cuts in their own proposals. (Though Labour almost definitely weren’t planning to impose the cuts as hurriedly as Chancellor George Osborne intends.)

So why am I casting doubts on the quality of thinking in the new government?

Essentially, it’s because I’ve yet to see a vision being articulated.

Cameron & Clegg, in their co-written article for the Daily Telegraph (12 July) say they “…want to change our country for the better. We want to see the best schools open to the poorest children, a first-class NHS there for everyone, streets that are safe, families that are stable and communities that are strong.” That’s hardly a vision since it’s pretty much everything every politician tells the voters. Nor is a key strategy - that of slimming down and decentralising government – a vision.

When I say ‘vision’, I mean a view of how society should be.

The need for a vision
Margaret Thatcher, for example, had a clear vision based on the philosophy of meritocracy. It’s all too easy to see Thatcher as being about depriving unprofitable heavy industries of state subsidies or busting the unions or deregulating the money markets. Rather they were key strategies to free up individuals to create and enjoy wealth. ‘Thatcherism’ was such a success that Tony Blair carried many aspects of it over into the early years of his government, with the British being the second richest people on the planet (based on gross national income per head) by 2006 (World Bank, 2007).

However, it was far from being a 2nf Tier philosophy since it left substantial communities in Wales, the Midlands, the North of England and Scotland devastated, with a consequent raft of social problems – including large scale unemployment amongst the indigenous working classes, many house repossessions, spiraling divorce rates, substantial alcohol and drug abuse and an explosion in small-scale crime (drug dealing, prostitution, burglary, car theft and mugging, etc).

In the early days Blair talked from time to time of creating a ‘decent society’ but there was never any real elaboration of what he meant. So Britain drifted on, the majority reaping the rewards of Blair’s neo-Thatcherism while a substantial minority got lost in the sprawling urban sink estates typified so well in the Shameless TV programme.

Now a great many more of us are faced with ‘sinking’. The newly-created Office of Budget Responsibility anticipates 600,000 jobs will be lost in the public sector over the next 6 years. Meanwhile leaked Treasury figures anticipate more than 700,000 private sector jobs will go in the same time period. When confronted by Labour’s acting leader, Harriet Harman, about these figures at Prime Minister’s Questions on 30 June, Cameron stated that employment would rise during the life of the Coalition…but he didn’t say how.

The remarkable Coalition is enjoying a remarkable ‘honeymoon period’ with the voters (in spite of some venomous attempts in certain parts of the media to hurry them towards divorce). Partly that’s because people are ready for something different from the party-centric conflicts of the past. Partly it’s because Dave ‘n’ Nick actually do seem to enjoy a genuine rapport. Indeed much of the Government seems infused with bonhomie – even George Osborne and his Lib Dem Chief Secretary Danny Alexander seem capable of  singing from the proverbial ‘same hymn sheet’!

But bonhomie isn’t going to go very far when people are losing their jobs and their homes and seeing their standard of living plummet - and there seems little or no hope of things getting significantly better. The truly scary thing about Osborne’s ‘cuts budget’ is that there’s almost nothing in it to stimulate economic growth.

On 30 June Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development’s chief economist John Philpott told BBC News: “The government thinks that just by …tackling the deficit, there will be a vent for growth because the prospects for investments and exports will be greater. If you look at both demand in the UK economy and more globally, there is a question mark over that and if that doesn’t pay off then we’re going to have a much weaker employment outlook.”

If the economy fails to grow sufficiently in the short-to-medium term to offset the social sinking caused by the cuts in the immediate-to-short-term, we risk becoming a different kind of Britain.

Thatcher – love her or loathe her! – had a pretty clear vision of the kind of Britain she wanted us to become. So what kind of Britain do Cameron and Clegg want us to become? Do they know? And, if they do, when are they going to tell us?

25%…25%!!!!
You simply cannot take 25% out of the public economy in anything but the very shortest term and not create massive change.

So where do we start? (After all, Clegg has promised widespread consultation over how and where to apply the cuts….)

Maybe you’re OK with having to take your own recycling to the council tip; and having your domestic rubbish collected only every other week would be acceptable…?

Getting the potholes in your road filled in only every other Spring…?

Class sizes of 35-plus and out-of-date textbooks instead of broadband-connected PCs in schools…?

How many police officers are we prepared to lose…? (Former chief constable Tim Brain estimates, for Police Review, that between 11,500 and 60,000 police officer, civilian staff and community support officer posts will be lost by 2015.)

According to Justice Secretary Ken Clarke, speaking on Tuesday evening (13 July) to judges at their annual Mansion House Dinner, the fall in recorded crime during the 1990s may have been precipitated by economic growth, high employment levels and rising living standards rather than imprisoning criminals.

If Clarke is right, then will the reverse prove true when we add another 1.5 million to the unemployed tally, some of whom will be police officers?

Having still not cleaned up fully the ‘human waste’ from Thatcher’s era, are we now going to add massively to the ‘human rubbish tip’?

Just what do you do with 3 million people with no jobs and few prospects, slashed to the bare bones benefits, a still dwindling jobs market and many losing their homes…? Faced with similar crises, Margaret Thatcher, the most unpopular prime minister since the end of World War II, took us into another war – the Falklands – from which she emerged victorious and untouchable for another 8 years, the public behind her so much she was able to batter the miners almost with impunity.

What will Cameron and Clegg do to reverse their fortunes when, as is all but inevitable once people really start to suffer, their popularity dwindles? (Only yesterday a supermarket till assistant told me she wanted “that new prime minister shot because he took away my second baby’s child benefit!”)

What kind of Britain will we become?
The challenges Britain faces as the cuts bite are more than simply coping with lower standards of living, mass unemployment, schools troubled more than ever and a likely substantial rise in small-scale crime – as if they weren’t daunting enough! We actually face a major change at vMEMETIC level in societal values.

Since the late 1960s much of the political agenda in Britain (and in the rest of the Western world) has been driven by the GREEN vMEME. Anti-racism, feminism, health & safety, rights for disabled people, employment rights, anti-ageism, human rights…to some degree or other, they’re all the creation of the GREEN vMEME. In its drive for egalitarianism, GREEN will even use positive discrimination to equal the playing field for those who are disadvantaged.

The problem is that GREEN is expensive. Where now will come the money for ramps for wheelchair access in buildings that weren’t built with the disabled in mind? Community Care is more costly than institutional care – so how long before the old mental asylums are reopened and people with mental health problems requiring supervision are herded back into them? How will the Government be able to justify the Equality & Human Rights Commission when the jobless are marching through central London?

One of the things Tony Blair probably was grasping for in his inarticulation of the ‘decent society’ was that we treat each other as equals and with respect and that we care for the less fortunate.

Treating someone with respect might be hard when they got the only job available and you didn’t - especially if your PURPLE clocks that they’re not of your ethnicity and, therefore, not of your tribe. (Just watch the popularity of the BNP grow among the white working class jobless needing someone to blame! Just watch as more Muslims become more devout in the desire for God to right the wrongs white society does to them!)

Charities can be expected to take on some of the support for the disadvantaged but charities depend on donations and it’s hard to donate when your company can’t pay its suppliers (corporate donations) or you’ve not worked in a year (individual donations).

With little nurturing of ORANGE’s wealth creating tendencies, much of the culture of this country will go down the Spiral, settling in PURPLE and RED. Expect increases in racial tension, crime and religious observance (of all kinds).

To some extent, it’s unavoidable. Whether from Osborne’s head-on dive into austerity measures or Alistair Darling’s slightly more measured approach, the cuts have to happen. However, the transition to a different kind of Britain they will bring can be managed and some of the more severe effects ameliorated – especially if there is understanding and management of shifts in values from 2nd Tier perspectives.

But, for that to happen, Cameron and Clegg have got to develop and then share the vision.

It is, of course, a little unrealistic to expect 2 men who were political opponents 12 weeks ago to get into each other’s heads so much in such a short space of time that they can develop a vision they can sell both to the public at large and their 2 respective parties. But, if we are not to slide unthinkingly into the kind of Britain many of us won’t want, then Cameron and Clegg have to get to work pretty damn fast.

I wrote in ‘Liberal Conservatives’ about dissonance arising from the challenges in holding the Coalition together possibly being the factor to drive them into 2nd Tier thinking. Now, as we face the reality of the cuts, it’s clear that there’s going to be far greater dissonance from far more sources than most people realised. It’s also patently clear that the need for 2nd Tier thinking in our leadership is far more urgent than I realised 2 months ago.

I’m still intrigued and excited by the Cameron-Clegg Coalition and still think it presents potent opportunities for real change in the way we do politics…but, guys, we need real vision very quickly.

Designing our Future

 community, education, human rights, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  1 Response »
Dec 102009
 

Written by JON TWIGGE

 

I am thrilled to be able to publish another contribution by Jon Twigge, an ardent Spiral Dynamics Integral enthusiast and supporter of the Centre of Human Emergence – UK. Jon wrote the piece for his own blog and has graciously consented to it being published here as well.

If there is one thing that is certain, it is change.  And that is not about to change.  In fact, the rate of change in the world is increasing all of the time.  The rate of creation of new technology is increasing all of the time and this is leading to an ever more complex interrelated global society.

So how can we design our future when we don’t know what is coming?  Well, we can prepare for change.  What kind of change should we prepare for?  We don’t know, except that it will be big!

It does not sound like there is actually a lot of planning that we can do.  But, there is something very important that we can do. And that is being prepared for change when, inevitably, it does come.

We have recently seen large scale failures in the global banking system and we are threatened by global warming and terrorism to name just two current issues.  There are many other large scale issues facing us right now and these will change and their number will surely increase.

There is one vital ingredient for being prepared for change.  That ingredient is having enough people who cope well with change and complexity.  Of course we can’t just invent people who are good at coping with change out of thin air.  And that, I propose, is where we must design our future.

Strange Times
We are currently living in very strange times.  For many people in the West, we have an incredible standard of living. All of those global problems are mounting up around us and yet most people continue with their daily lives in blissful ignorance of the number and magnitude of the issues that are facing us here and now early in the 21st Century. Hopefully, most people may never need to see the full reality of just how complex and dangerous we have made our world; but therein lies a very real danger.

The difference between our global reality and the common man’s view of life is immense. Despite the current times of instant communication through the internet.  It is strange indeed.

Enough People
Going forward, if we do not have enough people who understand the issues and act to overcome them to take us forward into our next years of comfortable civilisation then the concerns of ordinary people, focused on the issues of their daily lives, will drive our society down a dead end.  A dead end from which there may well be no easy return. A dead end that may see our great civilisation stagger or even fall.

Perhaps that sounds too dramatic..and maybe it is; but I feel a real sense that, to get through the next few decades intact, humanity must start to take more conscious control of the direction in which we are heading.  And, as I said earlier, I believe that the best way to do that is to have enough people who can cope with large scale changes.

Preparing the Ground
So how exactly do we make sure we have enough people who can cope with change?

The question takes us straight back to Spiral Dynamics (SD) or, if you prefer, the human nature that SD models.  Clare Graves spoke of a great leap for mankind.  Those individuals who take that leap open up to the ever changing nature of human values.  By definition, to take this step you must be accepting of the complex nature of what it is to be human and to evolve.

It will not be an overnight process but; if we are to succeed as a race into the distant future, we must prepare the ground by building a society that allows as many people as possible to make this great leap that Clare Graves spoke of.

Dissonance
It turns out, according to Graves’ theory, that people grow through the Spiral of changing values when they are faced with increasing complexity.  New value systems emerge in individuals to help them cope with the problems that arise when an old value system starts to fail them.  In concrete terms, their behaviour, based on an old set of values, fails to maintain their life in society to their satisfaction.  The name used in Spiral Dynamics for this state is dissonance – the state where people start to become uncomfortable with themselves and/or their lives.

So, to grow through the stages of life that individuals need to achieve their full potential and ultimately take that great leap, people must grow through a series of steps, with dissonance at each step.

Dissonance Failure
One of the great values of modern civilisation is our equality and rights. We strive to make sure that everyone has somewhere to live, something to eat, is treated fairly and has equal opportunity.  Unfortunately this is having a rather unpleasant side effect.  When taken to it extremes it removes the natural dissonance that our societies have and creates a rather bland space that lacks complexity, at least in many people’s everyday lives, especially those of children going through an ever more safe and sterile early life.

Where have the rites of passage gone?

Of course, we have not taken all of the challenges out of life.  There are new challenges in life like getting famous and rich.  The trouble with these challenges is that most people fail to pass through them.  They never come out of the other side, having learnt the lessons of life.  Far too many people are unhappy and miserable nowadays.

The Answer?
The answer is, in fact. rather simple…at least on the surface.

The challenge facing us now is to provide our children, young people and those of us a little older with a deliberately designed set of challenges that will lead us all onwards and upwards through the complex Spiral of values to the great leap.

In practice that means massive investments in all kinds of education and social programmes designed to help us all help each other and our children to grow as effectively as possible.

It means education for educators: parents, teachers, managers, trainers, coaches and, in fact, all of us – so that we can produce an environment for learning values.  An environment that will provide security and challenge, at the appropriate times, for each and every individual.

It must be a programme designed to allow each and every one of us to reach our best potential so that as many people as possible will be ready to help humanity cope with the many changes that will surely come.

Children are the Future

Choice
We could of course choose to allow mankind to evolve unconsciously.  Either way we, and our children, have an interesting time ahead of us.

Behaviour in schools: more needed than Steer proposes

 Africa, community, education, government, Psychology, regeneration, society, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
Feb 212009
 

So the government’s ‘behaviour tsar’, Sir Alan Steer, has now published the fourth and final part of his review into behaviour in schools in England. And Secretary of State Ed Balls has signalled that he will support Steer’s recommendations. Among these are the ideas that schools should club together to provide social workers for disruptive students and support groups for the parents of such students.

The first response of National Association of Headteachers general secretary Mick Brookes was to point out that 3/10 of teachers leave the profession due to student behaviour problems while NASUWT general secretary Chris Keates has criticised behaviour management training as being ‘inadequate’.

Clearly student behaviour is a major issue that the government is not tackling successfully.

My own experience in the 9 years I’ve been back (part-time) in teaching is that there has been a general collapse in standards of discipline right across the secondary sector and reaching deep into Key Stage 2. In many schools, classes below the topmost sets in Key Stages 3 and 4 are often little more than battle zones.

There is, of course, in the popular imagination, a mythical Ealing Films-style ‘golden age’ when young teenagers were only mildly pranksterish in their misdemeanours and primary school children were uniformly well-behaved ‘little darlings’. In reality, that mythical golden age never existed and researchers from David Hargreaves (1967) on have been fairly consistent in painting classrooms – especially secondary – as places where there is a significant difference between what the teacher is charged with accomplishing (ie: a learning environment) and what the ‘students’ will accept as relevant to their existence.

Beyond the recent lurid headlines – even in the ‘serious papers’ – of primary students being expelled for bringing knives to school, is student behaviour actually getting worse? Are things more problematic than they were in Hargreaves’ day? If union statistics on teachers citing behaviour problems as their principal reason for leaving the profession can trusted, then the answer is Yes. Things are actually going from bad to worse.

It needs to be stated that there are schools where the majority of students are well-behaved and motivated to learn. Healing on the outskirts of Grimsby and Frederick Gough in a lower middle class/upper working class district of Scunthorpe are just two schools I’ve taught in and been impressed with the behaviour and attitudes of students. However, even in Harrogate, the affluent middle-class town I have called home for the past 4 years, all the schools experience some degree of behaviour problems and students being temporarily (and sometimes permanently) excluded is not exactly uncommon.

What’s going wrong?
8 years ago I created ‘A Downward Spiral…’ as an analysis of what was going wrong in Britain’s classrooms. As an overall view, it stands the test of time extremely well. Nothing it has to say about the roots of bad behaviour amongst children and the effect that has on classroom discipline and performance has dated at all. That I can say that with confidence is an indicator of how much the Government has failed to get to grips with problem behaviour amongst young people – in spite of all the money they have thrown at it.

Of course, ‘A Downward Spiral…’ deals with themes and makes generalisations. So individual circumstances and individual qualities such as temperament are not taken into account.. The big omission is the gender difference in behaviour – boys tending to have some degree or other of the impulsiveness and compulsiveness of Psychoticism (attributed by Hans J Eysenck & Sybil Eysenck (1976) to the effects of high levels of the male sex hormone testosterone.). Of course, girls do behave badly and some develop strongly habituated patterns of bad behaviour. However, it is boys who cause the bulk of disruptive behaviour in schools – it tends to be boys populating the school isolation units and boys who get excluded more often than not.

In children going through puberty and beyond, the RED vMEME, usually after playing second fiddle to PURPLE throughout early childhood, comes into its own as the driver to assert self and move the individual towards independence from their parents and old family as a prelude to establishing their own, new family as part of the next generation.

However, RED’s desire to assert self can be a real problem for others attempting to inhibit that person’s self-expressive behaviour. If, in a boy, RED settles into a Psychoticist temperament and forms a RED-Psychoticism centre of gravity or ‘lock’, then the self-expression will be impulsive and compulsive. 12 and 13-year-old boys are often at a loss to explain cognitively – in any way that makes any kind of rational sense – why they thumped the child next to them or persisted in shouting out the answer despite the teacher demanding the standard hands-up-in-silence routine for answering questions. What they’re experiencing is the unholy alliance in their psyches of RED and Psychoticism. They are truly, in that moment, effectively out of control.

It’s also worth noting here that, the more pre-puberty PURPLE fails to get its safety-in-belonging needs met, the more RED will emerge in an unhealthy way, perceiving the world as a ‘jungle’ where no one is safe and the only the strongest and toughest survive. Thus, it’s no surprise that the first ‘knifers’ in a school often come from one-parent homes suffering poverty and deprivation. The meme gets modelled and spread and more and more knifers appear as emergent RED in other kids fastens onto the knife as a means of asserting power.

And, as a final factor in our all too brief analysis of what’s going wrong, we need to consider the values parents give their children about school – the memes they infect them with. Since, pre-puberty, parents are the primary socialisers of their children, it is hardly surprising that, if parents don’t have positive values about school and education, their children don’t.

What to do?
Sir Alan Steers has recommended social workers for unruly students and support groups for their parents. On the face of it, this sounds expensive, bureaucratic and unlikely to be very effective. In fact, it seems like more of the GREEN vMEME’s failed policy of trying to create understanding and consideration – from which insights will presumably lead to respect and co-operation. It usually doesn’t. How many ‘problem children’ already have social workers attached to them, with little positive effect…?

Steers’ GREEN might just be blinding him to reality. In an interview in the Guardian last September, he said: “The vast majority of children don’t arrive at school in the morning thinking: oh, good, I’m going to get into trouble.” No, some actually do because of the kudos it brings them from other ‘bad boys’ – Nicolas Emler (1984) called this ‘reputation management’; if they can’t get esteem from academic success, their RED will lead them down other routes to get it. Plenty more drift into disruptive behaviour via that potent mix of RED and Psychoticism. All it needs is a few minutes of boredom and the child next to them gets kicked or otherwise provoked – a move made without thought of consequences other than to relieve the brief tedium. And bad behaviour easily becomes habituated if it is rewarded by other students. (Research – eg: P R Constanzo & M E Shaw (1966), A Palmonari, M I Pomberri & E Kirchner (1989), T O Harris (1997) – has shown consistently that teenagers are socialised more by their peers than anyone else.)

Steers rightly places great emphasis on improving the quality of teaching and learning and engaging students with interesting and relevant topics. However, making topics interesting and relevant can be an almighty challenge given what the ‘system’ says they should learn and what is actually really relevant to the lives of many children.

A personal anecdote…

Several years ago when teaching History at a secondary school in a highly deprived area of a town where the main industry, fishing, was mostly gone, I was tasked with teaching Year 8s (13-year-olds) about the Reformation. How was this relevant to teenagers whose fathers, uncles and grandfathers had worked the trawlers until the fishing industry had all but collapsed…teenagers, most of whom had never left that part of town and fewer even who had ever been in church??? (I polled one class and found that only one student had ever seen a Bible!) Even an attempt at turning the story of Henry VIII’s wives into an Eastenders-style soap met with only very limited success. My proposal that we should develop a local history module around the town’s fishing history – which would allow the Year 8s to collect personal anecdotes from family members – thus feeding PURPLE’s love of the oral tradition – along with the more standard ways of doing History was rejected on the grounds that we could only teach what the National Curriculum specified.

Most of the students at that school didn’t want to be there – saw no value in it because their parents saw no value in it (memetic infection) – and tried not to be there. Truancy rates were extremely high and the school’s Education Welfare Officer was forever cajoling and then threatening parents, to force them to send their teenage children to school.

To return to Steers’ recommendations, support groups for parents generally have a better track record than social workers attached to problem children – especially where there is an element of training in parenting skills involved. The biggest hurdle seems to be actually getting the parents of problem children committed to a support group and sticking with it. Such parents often have social, emotional and economic problems themselves and are already known to the police and social services in their own right.

Sir Alan Steers is one of the most successful headteachers of his generation and there is much of merit in his report. Undoubtedly there are major roles for social workers and support groups in improving behaviour; but, much, much more is needed. When we consider just the brief, partial analysis I have offered it is obvious that social workers and support groups are like trying to use high quality, expensive sticking plaster on a massive, gaping wound. If applied correctly as part of a raft of other measures, it might help make a difference. And so it is with Steers’ reported proposals. On their own, they are nothing like enough.

8 years ago I created ‘Potential Spiral Solutions’ as an action-oriented companion piece to ‘A Downward Spiral…’. Again there is nothing I would change…but there are a number of things I would add.

The strategies in ‘Potential Spiral Solutions’ need to form the core of a full-scale MeshWORK.

The MeshWORK concept was delineated retrospectively by Don Beck from his part in bringing Apartheid to an end in early-mid-1990s South Africa. By using what was shortly thereafter termed Spiral Dynamics, Beck helped turn the focus from colour of skin to who thought in what way. As was once put to me (perhaps over-optimistically?) by some white undergraduate students from the Boer-dominated Transvaal, Beck succeeded in taking racism out of South African politics…?!?!?

Put rather simplistically, Beck’s MeshWORKS concept involves bringing together all interested parties to look down the ‘spine of the Spiral’ at the relative health of each vMEME as a cultural operator – ie: at the relevant macro level – and then decide what to do about it in the interests of the Spiral as a whole.

The MeshWORK concept is at its most effective when designed through the 4Q/8L construct!

A MeshWORK will address the needs of each vMEME of all players in all contexts with regard to the health of the Spiral as a whole.

Making OFSTED useful
If Sir Alan Steers and his team really want to resolve the issue of disruptive students and the hellishly damaging impact they have on both teachers and other students, then they need to undertake a full MeshWORK process with all interested parties – teachers, police, social workers, parents and students, etc. They need to look at the health and well-being of each vMEME through the lens of each Quadrant and also how the vMEMES in each Quadrant relate to the vMEMES in the other Quadrants.

Strategies can then be developed to meet the needs of each vMEME in each Quadrant in a way that is conducive to the well-being of the Spiral as a whole.

And, because each school in each area will be unique, each school will need its own MeshWORK. Certainly, methodologies and strategies will be transferable between schools but the working assumption will need to be that every school requires a unique diagnosis and unique treatments.

Developing the mechanisms to put in place a MeshWORK for every school in the UK , obviously, would be very expensive. But, surely, the positive effect of learning how to inhibit the stimuli for negative behaviour and create positive classroom environments that will enable the vast majority of students to engage with the learning  process is a key part of the Government’s much vaunted Every Child Matters policy?

Plus, there are cost-savings to be gained in terms of reduded stress-induced absenteeism amongst teachers and reduced levels of crime and vandalism amongst children and teenagers.

Plus, the kind of network of MeshWORKS I’m proposing needn’t be that expensive. In OFSTED (Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services & Skills) there already exists a body and a framework for conducting a MeshWORK in every school in the country. After all, OSTED already have huge amounts of valuable data on every school and they are responsible (in terms of oversight) for ensuring that every educational institution and children’s service enables the children who use it to maximise their potential.

Of course, there would need to be some expansion of OFSTED’s remit beyind inspection and regulation to include support and guidance – but many OFSTED inspectors offer this informally anyway. The mindset of OFSTED would have to move way beyond BLUE to gain the holistic sense necessary to understand how learning really happens and what motivates people to learn. But the benefits to our young people – indeed, society as a whole – would far outweigh the costs of putting the mechanisms in place.

NEETs – are the Tories on the right path?

 community, education, Psychology, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  2 Responses »
Jul 222008
 

What a pleasure when, from a sociopsychological point of view, some of the politicians appear to be getting it right for once. Or at least partly right! Taking some tentative steps on the right path, maybe….

David Cameron and David Willets have declared they want to solve the ‘NEET problem’ as part of the Conservatives’ plans to sort out ‘Broken Britain’.

In case you’re not familiar with ‘NEET’, it’s the acronym for ‘Not in Education, Employment or Training’ – and the London School of Economics says that 18% of 16-17-year-olds are NEETs. (Department of Children, Familes & Schools (DCFS) data about a year ago had the figure at around 11%. Although we didn’t call them NEETs back then, the focus of the HemsMESH project 1999-2001 was how to make unemployed teenagers more employable. The national average then was said to be 14%.)

According to research by think tank Reform, NEETs are more likely than their peers to use drugs, be involved in crime, have poor health and have children young – nearly two-thirds of NEET females were mothers by the age of 21, 6 times the rate in the rest of the population.

Willets, Shadow Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities & Skills, has drawn increased attention to NEETs this week, with a particular emphasis on their negative impact on family life. It seems that many young women are preferring to raise their children as single mothers rather than be partnered long-term with a man who had no means of support and no apparent prospects.

According to Willets, “One of the things some lone parents say is, where are the reliable men with whom they can have a stable relationship?”

Willets has been influenced by William Julius Wilson (1987) who has been studying this problem in depth in American cities. Wilson is concerned that, via a combination of drugs, prison and being on welfare, the ‘marriageable pool’ of men in some US cities is now dangerously low.

So Cameron and Willets are proposing a £100M fund to allow social enterprises such as charities to provide vocational training. The latter says, “There is a particular problem about white, working class men and we are not providing them with the first steps to useful skills. When we do that, I believe we could make them much better bets as a partner. When these young men have got a useful skill and are then holding down a job, at that point they will also be able to hold down a relationship. They will be people who can then live up to family responsibilities.”

On the face of it, the Cameron-Willets proposal seems to add little to the bill introduced to Parliament in January by Ed Balls, DCFS Secretary of State, which will extend the school leaving age to 18 by 2015 and force schools to extend the range of vocational qualifications on offer to Sixth Formers. Balls’ proposals  would oblige all 16-18-year-olds either to stay on at school or undertake a full-time college course or enter employment which also provided accredited training. They even included a £100M ‘safety net’ for NEETs!

What does seem to be different about the Cameron-Willets proposal is allowing for social enterprises previously outside the education system to deliver vocational training.

And, of course, Willet’s highlighting of the effect the ‘NEETs problem’ is having on the formation – non-formation?  – of stable male-female relationships at the young and poor end of the social spectrum.

Do they really want to be there?

In 2004 the Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA) was introduced. This means-tested benefit gave poorer students up to £30 a week to encourage 16-year-olds either to stay on in the 6th Form or study full-time at a further education college.

At the same time a number of secondary schools began surreptitiously lowering the entry standards for Sixth Form. Generally speaking, most schools formally set the bar at five A*-C GCSEs (including Maths and English)  but they have the discretion to consider individual cases on their own merits – and when each individual case comes with funding….

For many young peopel EMA was a real lifeline from relative poverty to educational opportunity. For others, it was a ‘doss’ – the chance to not have to go out to work and have an extra two years at school not doing very much at all. For yet others, who lacked the wherewithal to find and impress a would-be employer, it was perhaps the only alternative to the dole.

As a part-time secondary school teacher, I saw the quality of 6th Form students plummet – in both attitude and aptitude –as the take-up of EMA increased. My classes now divided broadly into three groups:-

  1. Bright, highly capable students who wanted to be successful
  2. Fairly clever but uninterested students who would deal with their boredom by being disruptive – sometimes they would truant and then try to persuade the class teachers to sign their EMA forms to say they had attended!
  3. Fairly limited students who could be persuaded to work hard sometimes but who were too easily distracted by the second group

It was frustrating to find the opportunities of the bright and committed students reduced by the disruptive behaviour of the uninterested students. It was heartbreaking to see the limited students struggling with material beyond them and interesting to see how many teachers would find ways to cheat – particularly on coursework – in the interests of their students.

There has been for some years now a growing emphasis on vocational education – usually (but not always) targeted at the more academically-limited students and usually in the form of National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) or some variation thereof. However, there are serious doubts about the ‘economic value’ of NVQs. Alison Wolf of think tank Policy Exchange said in January this year: “Low-level vocational qualifications, notably NVQs, have, on average, absolutely no significant economic value to their holders. This is especially true if they were gained on a Government-financed scheme. These are also the qualifications which will be offered to most of the 16 and 17-year-olds forcibly obliged, under current proposals, to continue education and training.”

While much of the Cameron-Willets proposal seems merely to reflect well-advanced Government plans, David Willets does seem to favour a more hands-on form of vocational training – apprenticeships of some kind? – provided through means other than schools and colleges. He is of the view that many NEETS have already dropped out of school and do not want to study for anything remotely involving any form of exam.

The detail of the Cameron-Willets proposal is yet to come – but, going by the sketchy interviews and discussions so far, it might just be that, on this occasion, the Tories’ thinking is actually closer to the values of the people they are concerned with than is the Labour Government.

We don’t need no education!

The words of the Pink Floyd classic, ‘Another Brick in the Wall’, really do ring true for a small but significant minority of youngsters – the NEETs?

 

At least they don’t want the education being offered by the ‘system’. It’s one of the biggest fallacies in contemporary policy-making to think that truants are missing out on their education. Not true! They’re learning how to take drugs, have sex, steal from shops, find their position in gang hierarchies, etc, etc – and just generally survive, often on dangerous estates that really are ‘concrete jungles’. They’re getting an education alright – but not the one most of society wants them to have!

 

School often doesn’t work for these children because they enter it with their parents’ values – infected with their parents’ memes. Their parents don’t value education as such – so it’s no surprise they don’t. Failure to conform – in everything from dress to not doing homework to thumping that really annoying kid on the next desk (just like Dad told you to!) – results in punishment and the reinforcing of the schema that school isn’t where you want to be. Academic failure usually follows behavioural difficulties and then the only way then to gain the esteem of others for the emerging RED vMEME is via what Nicholas Emler (1984) calls negative reputation….How many times can you cause the teacher to stop the lesson? How many detentions can you rack up? How many times can you get dragged off to be shouted at by the headteacher. And, if you feel like a break, really push it and get yourself excluded for a day or two! What a hero you are to your fellow ‘bad lads’!

 

As Robert Dilts (1990) shows clearly with his Neurological Levels model, it is Identity and Values & Beliefs which drive Behaviour. You can try to pump all the Skills & Knowledge possible into them but it’s unlikely to be taken on board if it doesn’t fit with what’s really important – and it certainly won’t change Behaviour.

 

If either Ed Balls or David Willets really wants to deal with the ‘NEETs problem’, then, as 4Q/8L shows, they have to find a way of working with the values not just of individuals (Upper Left) but the entire culture (Lower Left) and social institutions (Lower Right) of the areas these children live in.

 

Willets at least recognises, however indirectly, that values are involved in tackling this issue. But a £100M and some social enterprise-run vocational schemes are only a drop in the ocean of what’s needed.

 

A MeshWORK Approach

What is required is a large-scale fully-coordinated/joined-up MeshWORK programme which works with the young people, the schools, the parents, the youth workers, local employers, the local NHS, etc, etc, etc, to examine and treat the health of each vMEME at both cultural and individual levels.

 

There are encouraging signs that the politicians are beginning to link things up. David Cameron has said the Conservatives will support the Government’s newly-announced welfare-to-work reforms. These will pressurise some of the NEETS into going on training schemes as a precursor to work. For some, the welfare reforms will actually bring them to a point of contemplating their own survival – and there’s no vMEME more powerful in motivating action than BEIGE! (After all, why else should NEETS go on Willets’ vocational training?) A few weeks back Gordon Brown announced financial incentives for poor parents who enrolled their children in schemes to improve their development.

 

But it all needs drawing together into a cohesive superordinate MeshWORK package that can, in a planned way, address a multiplicity of issues on several different levels at the same time. A whole-scale systemic solution, if you will.

 

A part of that MeshWORK package needs to take a Structural Functionalist (Lower Right) view of what type of work is and could be possible and what we want schools to do in relation to preparation for work. British industry once employed huge numbers of low ability, poorly-skilled manual labourers – the kind of work many young people who are now NEETs would have gone into when they left school at 14. While the work was sometimes dangerous and often poorly paid, it at least gave the men purpose and some kind of living, with the status of ‘wage-earner’ – a key to healthy PURPLE in a Western lower working class culture. Now those kinds of jobs are in short supply and we are told we need highly-skilled, flexible workers capable of at least semi-autonomous thinking ahead. In other words, we’re demanding the level of ORANGE in complexity of thinking for many ‘ordinary’ workers.

 

Only today’s ‘ordinary’ is very different from the ‘ordinary’ of 40 years ago. For many grandchildren of miners, seamen, farm labourers, conveyer belt workers, etc, it is just too far a jump in values without substantial assistance.

 

Brown and Balls are taking steps in the right direction. Cameron and Willets, the detail depending, may have even better steps to take. And, for these steps, the politicians should be acknowledged. But it’s still some considerable way from providing the systemic solutions that will really make the difference.

Time to turn against Cannabis!

 community, education, mental health, Psychology, society, Spiral Dynamics, substance abuse  13 Responses »
Jul 282007
 
The dangers of cannabis use are back on the front pages thanks to a report just published in The Lancet from a team led by Theresa Moore & Dr Stanley Zammit. From their meta-analysis of 35 studies from around the world, Moore & Zammit inferred that any use of cannabis – which means even taking the drug just once – was associated with a 41% greater risk of experiencing some form of psychosis – and possibly even developing full-blown Schizophrenia. People who smoked the most cannabis were the most likely to suffer a psychotic breakdown; for frequent users, the risk rose to between 50% and 200%.

Overall, cannabis could be to blame for one in seven cases of Schizophrenia and other life-shattering mental illness. With up to 40% of teenagers and young adults in the UK believed to have tried cannabis, the researchers estimated that the drug could be behind 14% of cases of Schizophrenia and other psychotic illnesses.

Perhaps fortuitiously Gordon Brown announced on 18 July that the status of cannabis was to be considered as part of a wide-ranging drugs review commissioned by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith.

The Brown-Smith move was initiated a week after former Tory Party leader Iain Duncan Smith called for reclassification of cannabis from ‘C’ back to ‘B’ in the ‘Breakthrough Britain’ report of his policy group on social breakdown. Duncan Smith’s call was trailed and endorsed several days before the report’s publication by current Tory leader David Cameron.

The basis of Duncan Smith’s call was the already-large body of evidence linking the development of various psychoses – especially the onset of Schizophrenia – to the use of cannabis. However, Cameron focussed more specifically on ‘Skunk’, the genetically-modified development of ‘the weed’ containing approximately 3 times the amount of the active ingredient THC as ‘standard’ cannabis.

To some extent, in differentiating between standard cannabis and Skunk, Cameron was following the lead of the Independent on Sunday (IoS) newspaper which campaigned right up to and beyond then-Home Secretary David Blunkett’s 2004 reclassification for the complete decriminilisation of the use, storage and selling of cannabis. (The IoS has been one of the most prominent pro-cannabis voices in recent years and the paper’s influence amongst leading thinkers and parliamentarians on the issue is thoght to have been significant.)

However, in ordering a review of the classification of cannabis per se, Gordon Brown is treating all varieties of the drug as potentially warranting a more ‘dangerous’ classification.

As evidence has grown dramatically in the past few years of just how dangerous cannabis can be, so the likes of the IoS have been caught on the backfoot, overtly supporting the legalisation of a truly dangerous drug. It, therefore, suits them to draw a huge distinction between ‘standard’ cannabis and Skunk; the IoS argument is that it only campaigned for the ‘more or less harmless’ standard cannabis and the paper is totally against the use and distribution of Skunk.

As regards David Cameron’s own record on cannabis, it may well suit his agenda to follow the IoS distinction between standard cannabis and Skunk. He has all but admitted that he has used the drug himself by refusing to deny reports this February that he had been punished for smoking cannabis during his schoolhood at Eton; his office have also allowed stories to circulate that he was an occasional user at university. Only the month before (January 2007), the Tory leader had said publicly he opposed making cannabis legal but would be “relaxed” about legalising it for medicinal use if there was evidence of health benefits.

Hopefully the rash of Government ministers who have admitted recently to indulging in mild cannabis use during their younger days - including Alistair Darling, Ruth Kelly, Hazel Blears, John Hutton, Yvette Cooper and Jacqui Smith herself – will lessen the potential impact on political careers of *owning up* and this will enable a more mature debate on the issue.

Unfortunately many, many people have been caught in the trap the IoS and Cameron have found themselves in. For decades users and research scientists have said that cannabis was less harmful than alcohol and tobacco and, therefore, the argument against legalisation on health grounds simply didn’t stand up. How now do the politicians who supported such propositions reconcile their ‘service for the public good’ with their support for a drug some increasingly consider as dangerous as heroin or cocaine…?

The Skunk-’Standard Cannabis’ Fallacy
While there is no doubt that Skunk is a much more potent drug than standard cannabis, to draw such a distinction between the two varieties is at best disingenuous. Moore & Dammit certainly do not let standard cannabis off the hook and the science appears not to support such a distinction – at least in terms of the serious long term psychological effects.

Zammit personally led an earlier study, published in 2002, which looked at 50,000 Swedish conscripts from 1970 through to 1996. Those who had tried cannabis by the time they were 18 were 2.4 times more likely to receive a diagnosis of Schizophrenia. Those who had used cannabis more than 50 times had 6 times the usual risk of developing Schizophrenia. Zammit and his colleagues then estimated that 13% of Schizophrenia cases could be averted if all cannabis use were prevented.

Another study of almost 5,000 subjects in the Netherlands replicated the findings, and also found that cannabis users were more likely to be diagnosed with Schizophrenia during the study’s 3-year follow-up period. Other studies suggested that participants who used cannabis in their early teens were more likely to be diagnosed with Schizophrenia by their mid-20s.
 
In 2005 Netherlands researchers reviewed 5 studies and concluded that the use of cannabis approximately doubles the risk of developing Schizophrenia. Because the studies excluded anyone with a history of psychosis and controlled for the use of other drugs, they were “able to show the specific effects of cannabis”.

Also in 2005 research by Robin Murray of the London Institute of Psychiatry – eg: Marta DiForti & Robin Murray – found that those who smoked cannabis regularly at 18 were 1.6 times more likely to suffer serious psychiatric problems, including Schizophrenia, by their mid-20s. For those who were regular users by 15, the risk of mental illness by the age of 26 was 4.5 times greater than normal.

Further Dutch, German and New Zealand studies have all found a relationship between regular cannabis use and psychosis, with heavy cannabis users doubling or tripling their risk of psychosis.

Critically a Department of Health spokesman summed up much of the emerging evidence in January 2005 thus: “There is medical clinical evidence now that there is an important causal factor between cannabis use and schizophrenia – not the only factor, but an important causal factor. That is the common consensus among the medical fraternity.”

Clearly, while there are minor variations in the percentages of risk, ‘standard’ cannabis is a very dangerous drug. Compared to Skunk, it isn’t at all harmless in the way pro-cannabis lobbyists like the IoS have suggested. It is simply that Skunk is a genetically-engineered more powerful version of a naturally-dangerous drug. Robin Murray, in commenting on the Moore-Zammit findings, possibly put it best: “My own experiences suggest to me that the risk with Skunk is higher. Therefore their estimate that 14% of cases of Schizophrenia in the UK are due to cannabis is now probably an understatement.”

Why does smoking cannabis cause Schizophrenia in some but not others?
Irving Gottesman’s 1991 large-scale study is generally taken as the ‘gold standard’ for evidence that a substantial number of people have a genetic predisposition to develop Schizophrenia. He found a concordance rate of 48% for monozygotic twins – in other words, if one identical twin develops the illness, there is a 48% likelihood the other will - reducing down through 17% for dizygotic (non-identical) twins), 6% for half-siblings  and 2% for the nephew/niece-aunt/uncle relationship, set against the 1% risk of developing the illness in the general population. So, basically the more genes you share with someone with Schizophrenia – ‘genetic relatedness’ - the more likely you are to develop the illness. Genetic predisposition to develop a very serious illness is a pretty scary proposition. However, it doesn’t mean that having a genetic predisosition automatically means you will develop the illness. It’s an example of the Diathesis-Stress model; in almost all such cases, it will need a damaging lifestyle or significant ’life event’ to trigger the onset of the illness.

For people with the genetic predisposition, smoking cannabis can be that trigger.

People without the genetic predisposition may get away with prolonged heavy use of cannabis without developing a psychosis.

So how do you know if you’ve got the genetic predisposition? Since the scientists have yet to isolate the gene(s) responsible, they can’t test for it. Clearly, if you’ve a close relative who has or has had pschotic episodes, you’re at risk. However, there being no apparent mental illness in the family is no guarantee that someone doesn’t have the genetic predisposition since the predisposition can be passed on through several generations via recessive genes without it being obvious.

If someone is high in the Psychoticism Dimension of Temperament, then it might be logical to assume that person (usually male) is more at risk. However, for all there being some similarities in the behaviour of psychotics and those very high in Psychoticism, Hans J Eysenck – Hans Eysenck & Sybil Eysenck, 1976 – went to great lengths to emphasise that Psychoticism and psychosis are not the same thing.

From the research we considered earlier, it seems that using cannabis during adolescence may be a significant influencing factor. (The shortest development history on record so far is of a boy who started smokin the drug at 14 and was a full-blown schizophrenic by 17.)

The results of a 2007 study by Xiaobo Li et al at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York may have found a degree of explanation for this. They found that heavy use of cannabis caused the same type of abnormalities in certain areas of the brain as were found in the brains of people with Schizophrenia, and these abnormalities were the most pronounced in schizophrenics subjects who regularly smoked cannabis.

The abnormalities occur in a brain pathway related to language and auditory functions which is still developing during adolescence.

Thus if a young person is genetically at risk for Schizophrenia, the research suggests the use of cannabis can cause the same kind of damage the Schizophrenia would cause, which could bring on the illness when it might otherwise have not have emerged, cause earlier onset, and/or worsen the condition.

The ‘Harm’ Fallacy
Although Gordon Brown is said to have “a personal instinct” that cannabis should be reclassified back to ‘C’, there is no guarantee that will happen. It certainly didn’t when then-Home Secretary Charles Clarke first reviewed predecesser David Blunkett’s 2004 decision in January 2006.

However, Clarke’s decision was influenced substantially by a report from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs which found alcohol (significantly so) and tobacco to be more harmful than cannabis. However, the Council’s findings related primarily to 3 classes of harm: physical harm, dependence and social harm. What they don’t appear to have considered (at least in sufficient depth) is the nature and depth of psychological harm.

There simply is no ‘cure’ for Schizophrenia. It is a serious and debilitating illness, with nearly a third of sufferers deteriorating progressively until they require full-time care and supervision. (The archetypal insane!) According to a 2004 study led by Delbert Robinson & Margaret Woerner, just 13.7% of diagnosed sufferers make an effective recovery. (However, since the illness is not well understood – there is a growing body of professional opinion that we should revert to Eugene Bleuler’s original 1908 proposition that the schizophrenias (plural) were a group of distinct psychiatric illnesses with some key similarities – it is difficult to be precise about what consitutes ‘recovery’.) The majority of sufferers will require a lifetime of managing the illness via medication and/or psychotherapy.

While the problems caused by alcohol misuse and tobacco use should never be under-estimated, it is surely a fallacy to say they are more harmful than cannabis. Even the argument about scale of use is becoming flawed. While the level of alcohol misuse is rising, tobacco use is continuing to fall while the rate of cannabis use, especially amongst teenagers, is on the rise.

In 2005 some 10,000 11-17-year-olds required medical treatment of some kind as a result of cannabis use. As researcher John Macleod told The Times in March this year: “…the number of cases of Schizophrenia will increase significantly in line with increased use of the drug.” No wonder that paper concluded we are sitting on a ‘cannabis timebomb’.

Should Cannabis be reclassified to ‘B’?
The Association of Chief Police Officers responded with some dismay to Gordon Brown’s 18 July announcement for all the reasons they lobbied for the original reclassification in 2004 – ie: large amonts of resources wasted on chasing smalltime perpetrators of what the general public largely percieved as a ‘non-crime’. (It is worth stating that there have been a notable minority of senior police officers who have consistenly disagreed with ACPO’s position.)

Which is where the views of Paul Corry, the public affairs director of Rethink,show us at least some of the way forward. (Rethink is a mental health charity which, amongst many other worthwhile activities, has campaigned vociferously for more research into establishing the causes of mental illnesses. In particular, it has campaigned for research into the effects of cannabis use on mental health.)

Corry wants education in schools about the dangers of cannabis use, directed from the Department of Education & Skills (DfES) so programmes are mandatory. Cleverly, he also wants young people who have suffered mental health problems as a result of cannabis use to be a key part of delivering the programmes on the grounds that teenagers are more likely to listen to other young people than teachers and police officers.

On an annecdotal note, I can certainly see Corry’s point. In teaching a class of disaffected Year 9s (the 14-year-olds) recently, I overheard 2 students discussing ‘blow’. When I asked them if they knew anything about Schizophrenia, one of them said he had an uncle with it. When I explained the link between cannabis use and Schizophrenia, they (and their mates!) wanted to know more.

In their kinds of communities (traditional working class/former mining), where the traditions and the superstitions associated with the PURPLE vMEME dominate culturally, mental illness still tends to attract real stigma. These young people viewed Schizophrenia with abhorrence; they don’t want to have anything to do with mental illness or anything that causes it. The kind of educational programmes Corry is proposing may well have a major impact with this kind of teenager.

(Incidentally, when asked what was a ‘safe’ level of cannabis use, I gave the Department of Health 2005 guideline of 50 joints (average cannabis content) per year.  One student went white at this while his mates laughed at him, one of them saying, “Fuck me, you must do 50 a week!”)

Importantly Paul Corry and Rethink are against reclassification on the grounds that it will criminalise what they believe should be perceived as a health issue.

Simon Heffer, in an otherwise-heavy handed piece in the Daily Telegraph, made the point that reclassification would give the courts a wider and more stringent range of penalties, particularly for use with traffickers.

If we aimed to implement both Corry’s and Heffer’s proposals but also looked to address Corry’s concerns…

# Firstly, the DfES would implement programmes in both primary and secondary schools to educate children and teenagers about the dangers of cannabis (and other drugs). Children will pass some of this on to their parents. (Perhaps, given the likely cost to the National Health Service of more people developing psychoses, perhaps the Department of Health could fund anti-cannabis educational campaigns in the media…?)

Secondly, reclassification would encourage and enable the police and the courts to tackle the dealers and traffickers. If the general public are being made more aware of the dangers of cannabis use, then the police should receive more support in directing their resources this way.

Thirdly, as Rethink is campaigning for, the NHS should put much more resources into identifying and helping people with mental health problems. At the same time the Ministry of Justice can issue regulations directing police to treat personal use levels of possession either as a cautionary offence (as under the current ‘C’ classification) or to seek a conviction requiring medical treatment, if appropriate.

While I was never much of a cannabis user – never a smoker, so very uncomfortable with that method of ingestion! – I freely admit I have ‘dabbled’ at times in the past. (Since I’ve yet to develop any form of psychosis – at least I don’t think I’m psychotic!! – I can only thank God I don’t seem to have the genetic predisposition which makes cannabis a near surefire route to Schizophrenia.). Until recently I approved of the Independent on Sunday’s legalisation campaign. I whole-heartedly approved of Blunkett’s 2004 decision. Today I have friends who are users. I have no wish for my friends to be criminalised. On the other hand, we need to recognise cannabis for the highly dangerous drug it is, deglamourise it and deal very harshly with those who deal and traffick in it.

I’ve had to deal with Schizophrenics. Believe me, if we can prevent some people from developing the illness, it’s most definitely worth it. 

Hooray for ‘Julie’!!

 education, Psychology, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
Jun 092007
 

‘Julie’ is one of my A-Level tutees. She’s a very bright 18-year-old and loves Psychology  so much she wants to study it at university.

But, in spite of this apparent dedication to her career – yet typical of so many teenagers! - she hasn’t been quite as disciplined in always attending class as she could have been or always kept up with her notes. However, with the A-Level exams now virtually upon her, Julie has been coming to me for private tution while also endeavouring to get her notes complete enough for effective revision.The great Psychodynamic theorist Erik Erickson (1964) called this phenomenon of realising the crticial importance of some future event yet not planning for it Diffusion of Time. The incredible energy Julie is now putting into exam preparation Erickson saw as an aspect of Diffusion of Industry (in which the individual can’t concentrate, then puts enormous effort into a single activity). These diffusions come from the RED vMEME’s live-for-the-moment/no-consequences motif.

To Julie’s credit, the energy she is putting into her last-minute preparations is driven to a considerable extent by ORANGE ambition. Julie knows what she wants and how to get there. Julie’s RED may have led her into potentially devastating diffusions; but, with her ORANGE now firmly in the driving seat, she is working hard and intelligently to get herself in a position to achieve the ‘A’ grade she is targeted for. (RED now seems to be in service to ORANGE in her selfplex.)

One example of this is her doing a full question paper under self-imposed ‘exam conditions’ and then giving it to me for marking  and feedback. That whole enterprise was Julie’s idea. If only more of my students and tutees were so motivated!

I graded Julie’s paper a very good ‘B’. With a little more push, she can get the ‘A’ she wants so much. I really hope she gets it. With the way she’s turning her situation around, I think she deserves an ‘A’. :-)

Healthy School Dinners – at last!

 community, education, mental health, Psychology, society, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
May 212006
 

I  have been teaching A-Level Psychology part-time in a depressed East Yorkshire town for nearly 3 years. The headteacher, has often said at the end of yet another week of classes being disrupted by appalling behaviour: “Our students don’t seem to do afternoons.”

The behaviour incident reports and the logs of unruly students being removed from classes by Senior Management show a definite increase in poor and bad behaviour after lunchtime almost every day. Many of the teachers attribute this surge in unacceptable behaviour, in part at least, to the kind of food the school canteen serves up – chips, baked beans, fried sausages and fish fingers and other so-called ‘junk food’ full of additives - not to mention the crisps, sugary snacks and fizzy drinks available from the school vending machine.

So it seems to me the measures Education Secretary Alan Johnson announced on Friday 19 May, regarding the implementation of national nutrition guidelines in schools from September this year, are a major step in the right direction. For which the Government is to be applauded.

Deep-fried food will be offered only twice a week under the new guidelines while fruit and vegetables must be made available a “minimum” of 2 days a week and sugary snack foods and fizzy drinks will be banned from vending machines. By September 2008 primary schools will have to demonstrate compliance to having a minimum content of vitamins and minerals in food offered to children. This requirement will apply to secondary schools from September 2009.

There are, of course, problems with the initiative. There are some doubts the £280M the Government promised when former Education Secretary Ruth Kelly first proposed the scheme at last year’s Labour Party Conference will be enough to pay for the extra canteen staff hours and training that will be required. National Association of Headteachers General Secretary Mick Brookes has pointed out that children, who dislike the new dietary regime, will simply circumvent it either by bringing food they do like into school (‘pack ups’) or leaving school at lunchtime to go to the ‘chippie’ or fast food servers like Macdonalds and KFC.

Brookes’ concerns hint at other critical issues. However, the relationship between diet and attitudes and behaviour – and the effect of poor diet in its contribution to bad behaviour – is just too important not to proceed with an initiative such as Alan Johnson’s guidelines.

Children’s futures are at stake!

Diet affects Thought
How what we eat affects our thought and behaviour processes, when set against the vast amount of biological and psychological research over the past 50 years, is relatively under-investigated. The consequent scarcity of hard evidence has enabled governments of all persuasions to simply ignore the issues in favour of taxing the substantial profits made by the junk food industries and the advertising industries which promote them.

However, there have been increased concerns in recent times about diet on the development of mental capacity and attitudes – and popular tv chef Jamie Oliver has done much via his ‘Jamie’s School Dinners’ Channel 4 programme to raise public awareness and put pressure for change on the Government. Significant resarch in the past few years has given the likes of Oliver the scientific clout to argue the case.

Arguably the most important is the work of Bernard Gesch of the University of Oxford, published in 2002. In a small-scale study of 231 inmates between the ages of 18 and 31, Gesch et al  found that supplementing the usual junk foodish prison meals with vitamins and minerals over 4 months contributed to a 26% decrease in minor breaches of prison rules and a huge 40% decrease in serious breaches, particularly involving the use of violence.  Reputedly, serious breaches by the prisoners returned to previous levels within a month of so of the supplementation being discontinued.

Although Gesch has been at pains to avoid the attribution of a simple cause-and-effect between nutrition and behaviour, his research demonstrates clearly that nutrition is a significant factor.

Unfortunately, when Gesch approached his funders at the Home Office to continue and extend his research, the money was not made available. However, in Holland Ap Zaalberg at the Ministry of Justice was sufficiently impressed with Gesch’s study to initiate a longer-term replication in 14 prisons across The Netherlands. Reportedly, the British Home Office is now considering plans for a large-scale study in British prisons, pending the Dutch results.

There’s a sense in which Gesch’s findings merely confirm those of Stephen Schoenthaler of California State University in Stanislaus whose work in schools and youth detention centres has shown that replacing junk food and snacks with fresh food alternatives contributes to better behaviour, higher IQ grades and better test scores. Schoenthaler’s work has not been taken as seriously as it should have been because flaws were found in his research procedures. However, no one has been able to find any fault with Gesch’s findings.

The research of Schoenthaler and Gesch gives ample weight to the concerns Don Beck, co-developer of Spiral Dynamics, has been expressing for several years now. Based on the 4 Quadrants framework of Ken Wilber (1995), Beck is concerned that pollutants and damaging foodstuffs we ingest inhibit the brain’s ability (Upper Right Quadrant) to develop and stimulate appropriate vMEME activity (Upper Left Quadrant) to deal appropriately with the circumstances (the Lower Quadrants) in which we find ourselves.

The underpinning issue
Mick Brookes’ reservations about the new initiative are valid. Students will bring their own food or go out at lunchtime if they don’t like what’s on offer in the school canteen. However, many students prefer to go out at lunchtime anyway – escaping the confines of school with its rules and procedures, so that they can do what they want. (RED freeing itself from BLUE structure, in Spiral Dynamics terms.)

At my school the Senior Mangement have instigated a policy of not allowing students out at lunchtime unless they have written parental approval. Enforcing this policy has meant Senior Management and volunteer class teachers manning gates and checking students’ passes. It has worked to a considerable degree. So students can be more or less contained, if the school management has the will.

The problems then lie with parents who either give their children permission to go out at lunchtime, knowing they will buy junk food, or else provide sugary and fatty items for pack-up. This makes it a cultural matter because parents either don’t understand or don’t value their children eating healthily.

Cathy Byrne, whose Parks Primary School in Hull is a case study in the Services section of this web site, introduced a healthy eating programme for her young students in 2004 (ahead of Jamie Oliver’s campaign). She met some notable parental opposition - “I was accused by several parents of ‘forcing’ their children to eat vegetables!”

Anecdotal evidence like this hints at the real problem which underpins Mick Brookes’ concerns: parental shortcomings. All too often inadequate parenting is the real issue behind behaviour problems – and allowing their children to have unhealthy foodstuffs or wander the streets at lunchtime is just one symptom of this. For example, staying on the food theme, it is not uncommon – especially in areas of deprivation such as Goole and other industrial towns in the Humber sub-region with which I am familiar - for children to go without a proper breakfast. Which may contribute to some bad behaviour at the start of the school day and which a number of schools are attempting to tackle through hosting ‘breakfast clubs’.

Poor parenting per se is by no means related purely to areas of deprivation. There are plenty of inadequate parents in the affluent middle class suburbs – but the ways in which they are inadequate tend to be different and the scale of inadequate parents as a percentage of the local population is usually much lower.

The worst areas are usually those where traditionally there has been a culture of low educational aspiration due to the dominant industries depending on unskilled/low-sklll male labour – eg: fishing (Hull, Grimsby), docks (Hull, Immingham, Goole), mining (Barnsley, Selby and the pit villages of South and West Yorkshire). Enough numeracy to count your wages and enough literacy to sign for them was as much as some of them needed. What was more important was having the grit to tackle what were dangerous and unpleasant jobs. These conditions suited  memes the PURPLE (mutual dependency) and RED (be powerful) vMEMES relate to. The memes favoured by BLUE (conform to the expectations of a higher authority) and ORANGE (achievement and goals orientation) propounded by the education system for the past 50+ years are largely foreign to them. As the traditional unskilled/low-skill male labour-dependent industries have gone into decline and unemployment has soared, so PURPLE’s demarcation of gender roles has been undermined by the loss of the traditional male ‘breadwinner’ role. That, in itself, has undermined self-esteem for many such men, resulting either in hopelessness or their RED finding new, often nihilistic ways, to assert self. Either way, their sons are not provided with healthy male role models. (And the statistics show unequivocally that most behaviour incidents involve boys – though testosterone-fuelled Psychoticism will be an additional factor to parenting issues in many of these instances.)

If indequate parenting is a major factor in the behaviour problems in so many British school classrooms – and OFSTED (the Office for Standards in Education) went public for the first time 2-3 years ago on its concerns about the effect of inadequate parenting on academic performance – then the question is: what to do about it?

Understanding the nature of the problem
There are far more factors involved in classroom behaviour problems than I can do possibly do justice to in the space of this short Blog. The quality of teaching, the school’s rewards and punishment systems, the innate temperaments of the children, etc, etc, will all have a part to play. However, the quality of parenting has much to do with the calibre of the ‘raw material’ that schools work with – the children and the values, attitudes and behaviour they bring into the classroom.

In the kinds of areas of deprivation I have described - the populations usually dominated by the PURPLE and RED vMEMES in their thinking - levels of literacy are low and awareness of global issues is often low too. Thus, parents from these areas frequently are, to put it bluntly, ignorant. They tend not to watch current affairs programmes on TV and, if they do read a newspaper, it’s more likely to be The Sun or the Daily Mirror than The Daily Telegraph or The Guardian. PURPLE, with its preference for oral communication over the written word, lends itself to the ‘village gossip mentality’ more than the formal presentation of information. Meanwhile, RED has little sense of consequences beyond what is immediate.

Thus, even taking into account relative and sometimes very real poverty, it is no surprise that the people in these areas tend to be more unhealthy, both physically and mentally, and they often have shorter life expectancies than the general population. More people per head of population tend to smoke in these areas; there is more alcoholism and use of dangerous drugs such as low grade heroin. And diet generally is more unhealthy, with higher consumption of fatty and sugary foods with lots of additives.

So, if the parents tend to eat like this, it’s no wonder they are not concerned about their children’s diets and may even oppose attempts to make them eat healthily. Then, working from the research of Bernard Gesch and Stephen Schoenthaler and considering the concerns of Don Beck, we can only guess at the effects of the parents’ diets and lifestyles on their mental ability to cope with their circumstances.

Thus, inadequately-functioning parents give inadequate care to their offspring who all too often fail at school and go on to become the next generation of inadequately-functioning parents. Cycles of failure and deprivation at the levels of PURPLE and RED are fostered, increasingly out of touch with the fast-changing bigger world driven by ORANGE technology and global capitalism.

In this context, the initiative announced by Alan Johnson is a critical intervention which will undoubtedly assist significantly in the healthy development of hundreds of thousands of children. However, in the grand scheme of things, it is no more than a key piece in the proverbial jigsaw and, on its own, will not deal with the worst classroom disruptors who will still be on the streets at lunchtime, eating chips & burgers and drinking fizzy pop.

A MeshWORK approach is needed
Don Beck developed the MeshWORK concept from his work in South Africa, leading up to and through the transition of the early-mid 1990s – see Don Beck & South Africa. The core of a MeshWORK is the bringing together of all pertient parties in a context and to seek to address all needs at all levels as far is possible.

This means accepting where people are at on the Spiral of vMEMES and enabling them to meet their needs at that level on their terms. It works from the basic principle enshrined in the work of Abraham Maslow (1956): that meeting needs at one level creates the capacity for upward progress to have needs met at a more complex level. This is a multi-dimensional approach that leaves both the ‘top down’ imposition and attempts to develop ‘bottom up’ initiatives looking decidedly limited. It means speaking to people in language and terminology they can deal with. Thus, it’s no use lamenting the fact that most people in areas of high deprivation, whose thinking is often dominated by PURPLE and RED, don’t watch reports on diet on ‘Horizon’ and ‘Panorama’ created by BLUE, ORANGE and GREEN thinking. Far better to sneak it into an ‘Eastenders’ or ‘Coronation Street’ storyline - or, indeed, get an expert celebrity with the ‘common touch’ such as Jamie Oliver to promote the idea in simple, basic terms.

What is needed is for Johnson’s nutrition guidelines to be just a part of a co-ordinated raft of regeneration measures, aimed at changing the way whole communities think about themselves and their worlds – but done through the natural processes of meeting needs at sequentially more complex levels and communicating to them in their languages and about their issues. 

This will require joined-up thinking across Government departments, an understanding of the way the thinking of individuals and communities develops and the will to set aside what should be done in favour of what needs to be done given where people are at. Polticians need to jettison rhetoric and ideals for understanding and pragmatism. Only then will they really be able to see what needs to be done.

So Alan Johnson gets a B+ for his school dinners initiative. Very good work but needs to see the bigger picture!

Are the Tories sitting on an Election Winner?

 education, Neurological Levels, regeneration, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
Jan 012005
 

The received wisdom of the political pundits is that 2005 will be an election year. It doesn’t need to be, of course. Constitutionally Tony Blair can go on to May 2006; but prime ministers often like to put themselves to the vote after 4 years – especially if they think they are ahead of the Opposition and/or they think things are likely to get worse.

The Labour Government looks tired and no longer so sure of itself – particularly in terms of  policies. (For example, House of Lords reform is bogged down and the fox hunting ban is a mess.) Blair is unpopular with much of his own party and much of the country – tainted by his unremitting support for the American war on/in Iraq. The media continue to speculate on just how sour relations are between Blair and Chancellor Gordon Brown. And the Prime Minister’s unequivocal public support for Home Secretary David Blunkett right upto the morning of his forced resignation has once again brought into question his judgement.

With the Government seeming to stumble from one poor/unpopular decision to another, you would think Blair would want to hang on as long as possible in the hope of things somehow improving. That to go to the polls sooner rather than later would invite sure defeat.

But, like Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party in the 1980s, the mess the Government is in is balanced off by there being no credible Opposition. For sure the Liberal Democrats are talking up a lot and behaving more like a serious political party than at any time since the end of the Second World War; but they still seem unfocussed and lacking policies that are both distinctive and populist. As for the Tories, Michael Howard may be a sharper debater in the House of Commons but he’s no more a leader who’s captured the popular imagination than his two predecessors, William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith.

So, bad as things may be for the Government, they could still be a lot worse. The pundits may be right and Blair might be tempted to go to the country a year early while there still is no sign of a credible opposition policy.

But, in fact, the Tories do have at least one credible policy and one that could do Labour a lot of damage were the Opposition to learn how to exploit it.

A Real Debate?
I realised this from listening to several broadcasts of BBC Radio 4′s ‘Today’ programme back in November.

You might recall then-Education Secretary Charles Clarke caused quite a kerfuffle one morning by lambasting Prince Charles for views expressed in a supposedly-private memo. Clarke called the Prince “very old-fashioned and out of time” for writing about a “system which admits no failure”.  

HRH had expressed concern at the education system encouraging young people to aim at careers beyond their natural capability. The memo had gone on to say, “This is the result of social utopianism which believes humanity can be genetically and socially engineered to contradict the lessons of history.”

The Minister’s unprecedented attack on the heir to the throne played on the Prince’s own theme by making an indirect reference to the desire to be king being an example of over-ambition.

The ensuing media furore culimated in HRH backing off and making conciliatory noises of an egalitarian nature and the Minister saying rather grandly he hoped that would end the matter.

Whether he had intended to create this furore in advance or he had merely seized opportunistically on the flow of the interview, Clarke’s comments and the media-fuelled public row they created benefitted him in 3 ways:-

a) They were so startling they actually distracted interviewer John Humphrys – a rare thing! – from the point he was pressing home;

b) They presented the Prince’s views in such a jaundiced way that the outcomes of any debate he was interested in generating were automatically prejudiced;

c) The media speculation about a potential consititutional mini-crisis effectively ensured the ‘new’ Tory education policies launched publicly the following week were given little in-depth coverage.

It was a piece of grand theatre on Clarke’s part that, to all intents and purposes, stifled real debate.

The Minister had gone on ‘Today’ to talk about the Government’s new policy of obliging schools to share out equally between them the unruly and disruptive students in their area – including those permanently excluded from one or more schools and those placed in secure units. An underpinning principle, it appeared from Clarke’s rhetoric, was that everyone should play a part in reintegrating these students into mainstream education.

The point John Hymphrys was pressing when the interview suddenly/miraculously/fortuitously diverted onto Prince Charles’ memo was that the ‘Middle England’ voters Labour needed to retain to win a third term would hardly be impressed with this policy. Competing with each other to buy houses – often at grossly-inflated prices - in the catchement areas of the best-performing schools, Humphrys contended that these voters would be hugely disappointed at Government policy dumping highly-disruptive pupils into these best-performing schools and causing mayhem.

Integrated SocioPsychcology Perspectives
In Spiral Dynamics terms, Clarke’s policy of everyone playing their part in giving equal/ mainstream opportunity to the highly-disruptive element is rooted in GREEN thinking – both in the desire to benefit the disadvantaged element and in the concept that everyone should take a share of the pain of doing that.

What Humphrys was identifying effectively was that this egalitarian dream would not sit well with the blue/ORANGE thinking of the aspirational meritocrats trying to get the best education money could buy for their offspring.

It was a classic major vMEMETIC clash Clarke ducked out of via his diversion.

The Conservative Party’s ‘new’  education policy launched the following week and largely lost in the Charles vs Charles furore was much closer to the values of Middle England.

According to Michael Howard and Shadow Education Secretary Tim Collins, a Tory Government would enhance a school’s ability to pluck unruly pupils out of classrooms and exclude them permanently, if necessary – with the independent appeals panels often blamed for overturning permanent exclusions being abolished.

Howard said: “How can the majority of pupils, who want to learn and get on, do so if they are disrupted by one or two unruly yobs their teachers are powerless to discipline or expel? School discipline is not some optional extra. It is the starting point. If our children are to get the decent education they deserve – and our country is to have the skilled workforce it so desperately needs – proper discipline in our schools is essential. Children learn best in a safe, secure and structured environment. They cannot learn in classes where loutish behaviour and disrespect for others are the norm.”

For once the Tories have a policy that addresses the needs of several vMEMES at once. Not only would it protect the achievement-oriented classroom environment  BLUE and ORANGE relish but, in its emphasis on removing the threatening and potentially dangerous, it would meet PURPLE safety needs and thus have an appeal to many in the traditional working classes.

Moreover, the Conservatives wouldn’t just abandon the delinquents. They say they would fund the 24,000 most disruptive students going into ’Turnaround Schools’ where discipline would be strict and they would face a curriculum based on reading, writing and arithmetic, as well as instruction in social behaviour and civic values. These students would be allowed back into mainstream education when they were certificated as having reached a minimum level of both skills and behaviour.

So it would appear their strategy would also facilitate GREEN’S need to help the disadvantaged.

(This element of the Tories’ education policy is not really ‘new’ but dates back to at least William Hague’s time when the Turnaround Schools were to be dubbed ‘Progress Centres’.)

Some people might consider the sheer scope of the Conservatives’ policy to be 2nd Tier. However, to be truly a 2nd Tier policy, it would need to link in with addressing the environmental factors which engender the development of such problematic youngsters – eg: parenting, neighbourhoods, employment prospects, etc. The Neurological Levels model shows us that Identity and Values & Beliefs – and, by implication, the vMEMES that shape them will adapt in relation to the Environment (Life Conditions).

There is also the question of financing the Turnaround Schools. They will be expensive. Indeed, it may well take some real 2nd Tier thinking to persuade BLUE and ORANGE to fund the re-socialisation of delinquents!

When I first entered the workplace in the early 1970s, a middle class boy from a fairly-protected environment, with my late-hippie-era GREEN values of equality and tolerance, what used to pass as the manual working class was a real shock to me. I found it hard to equate the racism and sexism I found to be pretty much the norm with the values preached by the Labour Party that claimed to represent them.

Years later, through my training in Spiral Dynamics, I came to see that traditionally there were two distinct strands running through Labour’s politics.

One was the GREEN of the intellectuals – students, lawyers, teachers, etc – who colonised much of the Labour leadership. The other was the PURPLE of the tribes – working class communities and shopfloor unions – and their leaders. These were often working class people whose self-expressive RED had driven them to become union stewards and local ward councillors.

These two strands wove together into an uneasy alliance, bound together by their mutual hatred of the class capitalism produced by BLUE and ORANGE thinking – and the Conservative Party which represented them.

However, as ORANGE technology and the spread of its globalist meme virus has changed the economic realities of the world we live in, including an 18-year reign of Tory governments and the end of the Communist fantasy, so the manufacturing base of this country has declined significantly, reducing the influence of the working class and their largely PURPLE values.

To end its isolation in the political wilderness, Labour had to acknowledge the new realities and, in the person of Tony Blair at least, adopt BLUE/ORANGE values. Thus, the vMEMETIC roots of the ‘Old vs New’ conflict which is yet a further twist in Labour’s multiple dichotomies.

That twist, however, stole much of the Tories’ natural constituency from them and left them to drift into an ever more narrow-minded extreme right direction.

Judging from the multiple vMEME education policy now on display, however,some Conservatives have been doing some pretty ‘big big-picture thinking’.

Meanwhile Charles Clarke’s education policy – at least on school discipline issues – looks decidedly Old Labour. Will that mistrustful alliance of GREEN with PURPLE and RED yet vanquish the BLUE-ORANGE interloper memes? (Many do suspect that the New Labour Project – at least as we know it – will indeed evaporate with Tony Blair’s eventual departure.)

If Labour does succumb to more Old Labour memes and the Tories can come up with more policies that are as multi-vMEMEd as the education one, then Labour may yet be denied its unprecedented third term in office.

But the Biggest Big Picture Issue is…
Prince Charles may indeed be where he is through birth and heritage. He may indeed, as many have suggested, not be the ‘brightest button’ on the planet. He is undoubtedly abysmal at managing his public image!

But for years this King-in-seemingly-endless-waiting has studied some of the world’s greatest thinkers and used his influence to ask questions that the standard-issue politicians, with their 5-year Parliamentary seat life and their buy-me-and-get-these-certainties soundbites, often don’t ask.

So, if the Tories have managed a Big Picture multi-vMEME education policy – and let’s hope there is more where that came from! – then Charles is asking the really Big Picture questions.

The questions he asks are often concerned with the paradoxes we face in trying to determine what kind of society we want to be and how we accommodate our ever-growing diversities.

There is nothing in what I have read of Charles’ speeches and/or writings that hints at any desire to inhibit opportunity in this country – and, as his defenders have pointed out, his Prince’s Trust operations represent some of the most potent work amongst the disadvantaged in this country.

Of course, we can’t pretend that Charles is an egalitarian – so real GREEN thinking will always have a problem with who he is – but he does seem to have a genuine passion for our country being a society which better serves the needs of its diverse citizenry.

So he doesn’t seek to inhibit ambition but rails against a one-size-fits-all education system and suggests we need a sytem – or systems? – which will equip as many as possible to make their way through life as best they can with what they have in terms of natural abilities.

Certainly not egalitarian. But hardly classist either.

I wouldn’t be so bold as to declare Charles a 2nd Tier thinker but I can understand why people like Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck are so keen to talk to him.

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