David Cameron’s right about Multiculturalism BUT…

 Afghanistan, American Foreign Policy, community, cross-cultural, government, international conflict, Neurological Levels, politics, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, racism, religion, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  3 Responses »
Feb 082011
 

This past weekend David Cameron pushed forward considerably ideas his predecessors Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had been moving progressively towards …. In essence, this is to say pretty explicitly that, if you want to be British, you need to buy into the British identity and British values. (Ironically, freed from the collective responsibility of Cabinet, Blair on these issues is almost certainly well to the right of Cameron these days – see: ‘”Radical Islam” and the Return of Tony Blair’)

Cameron criticised ‘state multiculturalism’ and argued the UK needs a stronger national identity to stop people turning to extremism. With MI6 warning last week that Britain faces an “‘unstoppable wave of home-grown suicide bombers”, Cameron could hardly have ignored the threat from radicalised young Muslims; and it seems logical to ascribe their lack of identification with ‘British values’ as one cause of their radicalisation.

In his speech on Saturday (5 February) Cameron accused multiculturalism of leading to a Britain of ‘divided tribes’. The prime minister posited that the multi-culturalist dogma, which increasingly dominated political and social thinking from the early 1970s on, had meant the majority had to accord each minority ethnic group respect and the freedom to pursue its own cultural practices and traditions. Anti-discrimination legislation had protected the minorities – though arguably not so much the majority - leading to a failure to integrate into ‘mainstream British culture’.  Then the very existence of multiple cultures - multiculturalism - with each one given equal due meant no one culture could dominate, leading to a diminishing of mainstream British culture - with a sense of loss of ‘Britishness’ and even confusion as to what ‘British identity’ might actually mean.

Cameron’s attack is certainly not new or isolated. The formal identification of multiculturalism as a source of racial, ethnic and cultural divisions began with Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, commenting on the reports on race riots in Oldham, Bradford, Leeds and Burnley during 2001. He told The Times (Tom Baldwin & Gabriel Rozenberg, 2004) that multiculturalism was out of date and no longer useful – not least because it encouraged ‘separateness’ between communities. He said that multiculturalism – one of the founding principles of his own organisation - “means the wrong things…. We are now in a different world from the Sixties and Seventies.”

Lord Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, said in a speech last year that the concept of multiculturalism had been developed to create a more tolerant society – one in which everyone, regardless of colour, creed or culture, felt at home. However, multiculturalism’s message ended up becoming: “There is no need to integrate.” Further, Sacks saw multiculturalism as dissolving national identity, shared values and collective identity which “makes it impossible for groups to integrate because there is nothing to integrate into”.

I’ve touched upon the undermining of national identity via multiculturalism in Blog posts such as ‘Is restricting Immigration discriminatory?’…while Jon Twigge has taken the issue fully head-on in the Blog ‘The Curious Case of Being British’. There is little doubt that Cameron is describing, not theorising or speculating. Inevitably, though, for a politician trying to play the ‘populist card’, Cameron has oversimplified the issues.

Then there is the conundrum: if we accept that multiculturalism has led us to become a Britain of ‘divided tribes’ and the majority have lost much of their unique sense of Britishness, then what do we do about it?

What is the ‘British Identity’ and what are ‘British values’?
If we want to embody or become something, it’s a good idea to spell out just what that something is. So what is ‘British identity’ and what are ‘British values’?

On Saturday Cameron said: “Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism [which] believes in certain values and actively promotes them…. Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Democracy. The rule of law. Equal rights, regardless of race, sex or sexuality. This is what defines us as a society. To belong here is to believe those things.”

That’s helpful. But the values the prime minister espoused are pretty much those formally held by any modern western democratic state. It hardly informs us what ‘Britishness’ is.

To expect people to adopt values unrelated to their identity is a fallacy. As Robert Dilts’ Neurological Levels model shows clearly, truly-held values come from the identity you hold in relation (contextually) to the environment you are in.

So, for people to cherish ‘British values’, they must have a ‘British identity’. When people wholeheartedly see themselves as ‘British’, then they are much more likely to hold British values.

Just over 18 months ago the inaugural Centre of Human Emergence - UK event featured Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck leading us through an exploration of the British character - see: ‘”Britishness” at the Regent’s College Summit’. What we came up with was:-

  • Leaders in many, many ways
  • Great innovators
  • Quirky and eccentric - often precursors to innovation
  • Resilient and supportive of each other in face of external threats
  • Humour-full -– we can usually see the humour and irony in most things and we don’t usually take ourselves too seriously
  • At the centre of the world, a bridge between Europe, America and the Commonwealth

In large part our assessment was based on the past - our recent history from the days of Empire, through the Blitz to the ‘Swinging Sixites’ - though an echo of the ‘Blitz Spirit’ was acknowledged in the carry-on attitude displayed by many Londoners in the wake of the 7/7 bombings.

Of course, in identifying Britishness, we can’t simply go back to the 1960s before multiculturalism really began to take hold. That was then; this is now. As noted children’s author Rosemary Wilkie said at Regent’s College: “We have had a great story. Now we need a new great story.”  So we need a new sense of Britishness, one that does indeed draw on Britain’s illustrious past but one which also takes stock of the peoples we are right now and one which can inspire us as a nation into our future.

Britain is not the land of white anglo culture it was 40 years ago. A walk along the high street of most towns will reveal a plethora of Asian, Chinese and Thai restaurants and takeaways – with the occasional West Indian or North African nestled in between them. These establishments couldn’t stay in business without substantial patronage from amongst the white majority.

This fact alone should tell anyone with the ability to view these things objectively that you can’t just turn the clock back 40 years - just imagine: no Chinese or Indian eating houses or takeaways! So the British National Party (BNP) pipedream of shipping 2nd and 3rd generation Asians and blacks off to some place their grandfather came from is just that: a fantasy pipedream. Short of the BNP being able to impose a totalitarian state in Britain and pursuing the kind of 10-year blame and dehumanisation strategies the Nazis employed against the Jews which eventually enabled them to pursue the ‘Final Solution’, black and Asian Britons are here to stay.

Even with the will to integrate, it is inevitable that many of them will be bi-cultural: they have the culture of the land they live in and belong to now and the heritage of the land their grandparents came from. On the one hand, it is essential to developing Britishness that they do assimilate into the mainstream; on the other hand, from their heritages, many ethnic groups have much to offer beyond eating houses.

So we need a ‘British identity’ that not only draws inspiration from the past but also incorporates, to some degree at least, the amount of diversity found these days in Britain’s streets.

Another factor to take into consideration in developing a new British identity is that Britain is, in fact, composed of 3 nations in a United Kingdom with Northern Ireland. While the Welsh and especially the Scottish contributed much to the explorations and innovations that developed Empire, ‘Britain’ all too often meant England and ‘England’ meant Britain. That code was particularly prevalent in foreign portrayals of the ‘British’ or the ‘English’ - the terms being effectively interchangeable. Just look at the way Hollywood movies portrayed us in the 1930s through to the 1960s. The Welsh hardly got a look-in and Scots were only usually included if it was to caricature the ‘wild highlander’! 

That simply won’t do now. With Welsh nationalism an ever-strong presence in the Welsh Assembly and a minority Scots Nationalist Government in Hollyrood, any new sense of British identity must incorporate sufficient elements of ‘Welshness’ and ‘Scottishness’ to appeal to those more assertive and confident peoples no longer prepared to acquiesce compliantly to the Englishness.

Creating the new ‘Britishness’
Back in 2004, Trevor Phillips said: “We need to assert there is a core of Britishness…. What we should be talking about is how we reach an integrated society, one in which people are equal under the law, where there are some common values.”

The question then becomes: how do you create that integrated society Phillips talked about?

A strategy Tony Blair’s Government introduced in 2005 in an attempt to inculcate knowledge about Britain into immigrants applying for British citizenship (or long-term residency) was the mandatory ‘Life in the UK’ test. It covers issues such as Britain’s constitution, the originating countries of previous UK immigrants, family life in the UK and where dialects like Geordie, Scouse or Cockney come from. Knowledge of practical matters such as the minimum age to buy alcohol and tobacco and what services are provided by local authorities are also covered. Finally, the test requires a certain level of fluency in English, Welsh or Scottish Gaelic.

Last May the Home Office revealed that a third of applicants fail the test.

Out of interest, I gave my GCSE Sociology classes the following mini-version of the test:-

  • What is the Queen’s official role and what ceremonial duties does she have?
  • What is the role of the Prime Minister? Who advises them and what are the main roles in the  Cabinet?
  • What is the Opposition and what is the role of the Leader of the Opposition?
  • What are MPs? How often are elections held and who forms the government?
  • Do women have equal rights in voting, education and work - and has this always been the case?
  • How is political debate reported? Are newspapers free to publish opinions or do they have to
      remain impartial?

Close to a half failed the test. But, as several students - all of them white anglo – protested, their parents would probably have failed too and they were undoubtedly British!

As Dilts’ Neurological Levels model demonstrates only too clearly, it’s much more likely that identity leads to the values which make you want to acquire relevant knowledge than being fed knowledge shapes identity. The high level of failure in the Life in the UK test would indicate many applicants don’t value the knowledge…and the reason for that is almost certainly because they don’t really see themselves as British. Forcing knowledge at people in the hope they will ingest it does not mean they will. Ask any teacher!

By all means, from Phillips through Blair to Cameron, there needs to be pressure to integrate on the basis of the old proverb: ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’. But that pressure alone - which comes from BLUE’s do-what’s-right thinking – will not produce integration. Indeed, in immigrant communities where the acculturation strategy - as identified by John Berry (1997) – is to marginalise (have only minimal contact with the majority culture) or, even worse, separate (avoid contact altogether) to preserve the purity of the immigrants’ cultural identity, such pressure may even lead to extreme separation,  a sense of persecution and deep-felt alienation from the mainstream culture. And that can only fuel the radicalisation of young Muslims in such immigrant communities.

What Government strategies life ‘Life in the UK’ miss is the need to target the PURPLE vMEME as well as the BLUE vMEME. What also needs to be understood by the strategists is that PUPRLE naturally differentiates between ‘my tribe’ and ‘your tribe’ - with race/colour, religion and ‘ethnic dress’ being the more obvious markers of difference – see: ‘Is Racism Natural?’ in the Society section of the main site.

If tribalism is natural and the markers of difference are needed to distinguish the tribes, how then can integration ever be possible?

The answer is that complete integration is likely to take generations as people grow beyond the boundaries of their tribal areas – and there are signs this is starting to happen naturally, led by one of the most powerful instincts of all: sexual love. While at the above-mentioned Regent’s College Summit in June 2009, I was impressed with how many white/black and white/Asian couples I saw in the pubs around cosmopolitan Finchley where I was staying. Around the same time last year, I attended the wedding of a white friend’s daughter to a Muslim man.

Using techniques adapted from sociopsychology, this process can be manipulated and accelerated. Muzafir Sherif et al ‘s famous Robber’s Cave Experiment (1954) demonstrated that you can create super identities with shared values if you create challenges which are so daunting, it is only by working together that they can be overcome. In 1984 G Andreeva, to all intents and purposes, repeated Sherif et al’s study but in a different culture - Russia – and this concept of uniting the tribes via common challenge (or threat) is at the heart of  Samuel Gerners’ Common In-Group Identity Model (1993). However, while Gerner expressed concern that there could be a reversion to tribal identities once the challenge was accomplished, an interesting study by Andrew Tyerman & Christopher Spencer (1983) found it effectively impossible to turn the lesser identities against each other provided there was a potential for the super identity to endure and there was a moral element to the identity. In this case, the super identity was boy scouts, the study was carried out on different scout groups brought together and the moral element was the Boy Scouts Code of Honour.

Of course, it is difficult - if not impossible (short of genocide) - to eradicate tribal identities entirely and those tribal identities will always require managing. Just think how PURPLE tribalism tore apart Yugoslavia and  the Soviet Union’s successor Russian Federation once the repressive BLUE controls of the Communist state were removed! But, if the memetic focus is on shared/common values, desires and needs, then the tribes can be brought together to work on achieving shared/common aims. After all, most people, whatever their tribe, want a decent income, good schooling for their children, freedom from crime and the fear of crime, value for money local services and amenities, etc, etc. David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ concept, if presented correctly, could actually stimulate inter-tribal co-operation. After all, if government does less, then the people need to come together to do more.

Last Summer, working with Councillor Darren Reynolds of Burnley Council, he and I tentatively mapped out how gatherings of seemingly-disparate tribes might work together in that ‘race relations hotspot’ to achieve things the Council could not.

Who do you belong to: God or the State?
This, for the devout – Christian, Jew or Muslim- is always going to be an issue if the state’s laws and/or requirements conflict with religious duty. For the devout, at the end of the day, it is usually God who wins. Eg: for the Christian, Acts 5:29 says simply: “…obey God rather than men…”

Thus, national identity needs to be constructed in such a way that it is not at odds with mainstream religious teaching.

David Cameron’s linking of a failure to become ‘British’ with extremist Islam is only valid if other causes of radicalisation are acknowledged and strategies put into place to deal with them.

For Muslims, there is a duty to fight with other Muslims against oppressors – viz:-

“And slay them wherever ye catch them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out; for tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter; but fight them not at the Sacred Mosque, unless they (first) fight you there; but if they fight you, slay them. Such is the reward of those who suppress faith….
And fight them on until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah; but if they cease, Let there be no hostility except to those who practise oppression.” (Sura 2: 191, 193)

All too easily radical imams have been able to turn the Anglo-American blunders in Afghanistan and, especially, Iraq and insensitivity to untold numbers of civilian lives lost or ruined into tales of the West oppressing Islam.

Thus, it’s difficult for a Muslim to be ‘British’ if the British are perceived to be carelessly slaughtering Muslims. The PURPLE/BLUE vMEME harmonic of loyalty and duty tells them they should be standing alongside their brothers and sisters fighting the oppressor.

In terms of whether young Muslims can be reconciled to a British identity, the Government has been losing the propaganda war since 2002 and first talk of invading Iraq. And there’s no sign yet that the new Government has any better idea than the previous one of how to win the war of hearts and minds. No wonder MI6 is predicting ‘an unstoppable wave of home-grown suicide bombers’!

For young Muslims appalled at Anglo-American actions in Afghanistan and Iraq to be reconciled to being British, their BLUE need to be told by those with high authority as Islamic scholars that violence is not the way to express disquiet and disgust. Rather, that their voices can be heard through the British political systems.

I’m still baffled why so much more was not made of Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri’s fatwa last year denouncing terrorism and stating suicide bombers could not go to Heaven - see: ‘Why is the West ignoring a leading moderate Muslim?’ As one of the most scholarly texts based on Islamic scriptures in recent years from one of the religion’s leading thinkers, it was literally an instruction to Muslims not to commit violence against civilians whatever the cause.

Yet it was largely ignored by western leaders.

The works of ul-Qadri –  an appropriate teacher for the BLUE of many Muslims – and similar scholars should be being promoted through the mosques as the correct interpretation of Islamic scripture. With such memes forming their schemas, it is then possible for young Muslims to be British and use our democratic systems to articulate their needs, desires and dissatisfactions.

Should the BNP appear on the Beeb?

 community, cross-cultural, Neurological Levels, Psychology, racism, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  13 Responses »
Sep 062009
 

There are few things guaranteed to get the knickers of the British ‘chattering classes’ in a twist more than the British National Party (BNP). It’s bad enough that they exist at all – that they are gaining significantly in electoral support in 21st Century Britain is simply unbelievable!

And now the BBC are considering having them on ‘Question Time’…how utterly disgraceful!!

People who vote BNP are clearly small-minded, uneducated, unthinking and immoral racists.

It’s a harmonic of the BLUE and GREEN vMEMES which condemns the BNP and which condemns those who vote for them. It’s a variant harmonic of these vMEMES which has led the Equality & Human Rights Commission (EHRC) to take the BNP to court on the charge that the latter’s constitution is discriminatory as it does not allow membership to those of a non-white ethnicity. And it’s another variant harmonic of these vMEMES which has drawn up the forthcoming Equality Bill 2009.

The problem with these approaches is that, rather than understand what it is about the BNP that gains support from substantial numbers of people, they attempt to suppress the BNP. However, Nick Griffin and the top echelon of the BNP are smart characters. They have got a 7-week adjournment on the EHRC case; and Griffin is making it clear the BNP has to adapt, to find ways of complying with the inevitable tighter legal restrictions. In how ever the BNP changes, though, Griffin has made it clear they are not going to compromise their “core principles”.

We can legislate to make it more difficult for the BNP to do what they do; but that is not going to undermine their support. It may even increase it, as what they portray as ‘persecution of true Britons’ may well strengthen their sense of solidarity as a persecuted minority. By making out that they are being persecuted unjustly, the BNP are likely to draw in those who may be only slightly sympathetic to their stance on race and repatriation but will rally to their cause because of the perceived injustices. (From Griffin’s statement on the EHRC case, it would appear this is at least one route the BNP are going to go down.)

The problem is you can legislate against discrimination – speech and behaviour based on prejudice – but you can’t legislate against prejudice (biases) because people’s thoughts are their own private experience.

Is racism natural?
That’s the question one of my A-Level Psychology students asked me when the class was discussing Henri Tajfel & John Turner’s Social Identity Theory (1979) in relation to Prejudice & Discrimination.

Tajfel (1970) showed that, as soon as you categorise people, they invest themselves in the identity and well-being of the group of people with whom they have been categorised, aborbing its values and norms. Because their selfplex – their sense of who they are – is tied up with that group, they need their group to be at least safe and preferably superior. The In-Group/Out-Group Effect. What drives this investment in the group is the PURPLE vMEME’s need to find safety in belonging.

PURPLE needs to know how to identify which tribe it belongs to and who “is not of our tribe” – using markers such as nationality (English vs Scots), names (Singh vs Kahn), football scarves (Millwall vs West Ham), religion (Protestant vs Catholic) and, of course, colour of skin (black vs white).

So it’s not racism per se which is the problem, it’s PURPLE’s need to discriminate between members of the tribe and those who are not members of its tribe. And this is why ‘education’ is only partly successful in persuading people to turn away from the BNP. It’s not so much a ‘skills & knowledge thing’; it’s a ‘values & beliefs thing’. As Robert Dilts (1990) showed with his Neurological Levels model, Identity and Values & Beliefs influence behaviour far more than Skills & Knowledge. You can tell me all you want about how unfair and evil racism is [knowledge]; but, when I hear about the ‘other tribe’ getting the few jobs going or getting better handouts, then what’s important to me is the survival of my tribe [values].

As Marilynn Brewer & Donald Campbell (1976) demonstrated, competition for essential resources will significantly increase hostility towards out-groups – effectively the formation of a BEIGE/PURPLE survival-of-the-tribe harmonic. Last year the more forward-thinking commentators did predict a rise in racial tension and support for the BNP as the recession bit. Where are the BNP at their strongest? In the towns and cities of the Midlands and the North of England where there are large immigrant communities and the decline of the traditional manufacturing industries has already resulted in high unemployment amongst unskilled and semi-skilled young males all full of testosterone and only too ready to defend their ‘turf’ against the out-group. All it needs is a RED-driven leader (Griffin) with a slight sheen of BLUE patriotism, telling people they are doing the right thing in defending ‘our turf’ to exploit that frustrated in-group angst and we have the kind of problem the BNP are facilitating.

A superordinate identity and common values are needed
Way back in 1954, in their famous Robbers Cave study, Muzafer Sherif, O J Harvey, Jack White, William Hood & Carolyn Wood Sherif (1961) showed that groups conflicted by identity and competition could be brought together if they needed each other to address common goals. Andrew Tyerman & Christopher Spencer (1983) found that shared goals and values actually made inter-group conflict more difficult to create in the first place.

Samuel Gerner et al propose, in their Common In-Group Identity Model (1993), that it is possible to bring together conflicted groups by creating a common identity to fight a common out-group. Eg: English and Scots become Britons to fight Germans. Eg: Sunnis and Shi’ites become Muslims to defend Islam against Christians. PURPLE can expand to include all within a super tribe to defend shared values. However, learning from Sherif et al and Tyerman & Spencer, it needn’t always be explicit threats that lead us to unite; but aspirations and opportunities can also lead us to a sense of common identity in a super tribe. Eg: Britons and Germans become Europeans in the pursuit of greater wealth for all their peoples.

GREEN’s fallacy is to assume that we can all be the same. We can’t. We have different traditions, norms and values. And even within each tribe, there are vastly different temperaments and intelligences.

What’s needed is not a top-down BLUE/GREEN suppression of organisations like the BNP and their riotous close cousins, the English Defence League – though carefully-considered legislation can place useful restrictions on the out-and-out extremists and education has a role too – eg: unrestrained Fascism led to the Holocaust.

What’s really needed is a bottom-up building of confidence and respect between the tribes, based on common needs, goals and aspirations, whilst acknowledging difference.

If it serves my purpose, I may even come to gain value from the difference. 50 years on from the first waves of immigration, millions of Britons, whose grandparents would have considered Asians and West Indians inferior species, eat in Indian and Jamaican restaurants because they enjoy the food so much. Racism died in part at least on the football terraces because so many good black footballers came through from the 80s on – after all, what white football fan is going to throw racial abuse at the black footballer who scores goals for his team? (Of course, as Spiral Dynamics clearly demonstrates, values are all too often contextual. The white football fan who praises his team’s black goal scorer, may still vote BNP when he’s made redundant and the BNP tell him the government is forcing employers to take on more black workers.)

When it comes down to it, most members of most tribes want decent jobs with reasonable wages, good schooling for their children, freedom from the fear of crime, effective healthcare, etc, etc. So there are a large number of self-evident shared needs, goals and aspirations. What is needed is the belief that it is by working together, rather than fighting each other, that those needs, goals and aspirations can be achieved. Eg: unite to put pressure on the local health authority to improve maternity facilities. Eg: unite to set up neighbourhood watch schemes. Etc.

Ideally this bringing together of the tribes should be structured as a MeshWORK, using 4Q/8L, to ensure that all the issues relevant to a locality are tackled together in a concerted way. This should enable all relevant points to be covered in a transparent manner, thus catching those half-hidden things that are often overlooked but emerge later to cause immense amounts of trouble.

Of course, there may not be enough dissonance in such a process to bring the out-and-out extremists to the point of change – especially if they are high in Psychoticism (as some of them do indeed appear to be); but, if the more moderately-minded come to trust the process, then it leaves only the true hardcore, still dangerous possibly but isolated and without any real powerbase any longer.

So should be BNP appear on ‘Question Time’?
The arguments will run from Margaret Thatcher’s ‘starve them of the oxygen of publicity’ stance – which led, in the 1980s, to the ridiculous situation of silhouetted actors reading out paraphrases of IRA statements – to the let-them-appear-in-all-their-full-nastiness-so-people-will-realise position.

In fact, it’s a tough one to call. When even China and Iran can’t keep news they would rather suppress from appearing all over the Internet, the ‘starve them of the oxygen of publicity’ stance clearly isn’t going to work. On the other hand, some people watching Nick Griffin on ‘Question Time’ will say to themselves: That guy makes a lot of sense – I’m going to vote BNP – because he’s appealed to their values.

In fact, it’s also a red herring. Think of when Tony Blair (1998) said: “Labour will be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime.” We can be tough on the BNP but we also need to be tough on the causes of BNP – and that means understanding the very real needs, goals and aspirations that BNP voters have and finding ways of meeting those legitimately through cross-cultural, common identity means.

‘Britishness’ at the Regent’s College Summit

 community, government, international conflict, Neurological Levels, regeneration, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  27 Responses »
Jun 302009
 

Down in a basement meeting room of the Holiday Inn Oxford Circus…that’s where the Centre for Human Emergence – UK (CHE-UK) was born on the afternoon of Friday 26 July 2009. Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck, Jon Freeman (author of ‘God’s Ecology and the Dawkins Challenge’), Rachel Castagne, Lynne Sedgemore CBE,  Ian MacDonald of the Integral Centre,  the veteran activist and author Rosemary Wilkie and myself harmonising an intent – creating a spirit, if you will.  That intent is to build MeshWORK alliances to design natural solutions to local problems in the context of a globalised world.

The next 2 days, Saturday 27th – Sunday 28th, saw CHE-UK host its first event, ‘A Regent’s Summit on the Future of the UK’ at Regent’s College. Don, Rachel and Jon led the event and old HemsMESH colleague Christopher ‘Cookie’ Cooke flew in from Switzerland to lend his talents to a task-and-feedback session on the Sunday.  About 50 people joined us to get a feel for what the real issues are confronting the UK and what we might do about them.

The general consensus was that in the UK a lot of the positive influence of the BLUE vMEME has been diminished by the emergence of GREEN (a not-uncommon pattern in much of North America and Western Europe).  This weakening of BLUE has had a number of negative effects – ones especially noted were:-

  • the lack of discipline in our culture, particularly amongst young people – resulting in RED excesses such as binge drinking and violent rowdiness on our city centre streets at weekends
  • the collapse of effective regulation in our financial markets, resulting in toxic ORANGE taking the kind of foolish gambles on debt and investment which have brought the banking systems to their knees
  • the RED, thoughtless greed of many politicians milking the expenses system to and beyond its limits – with some clearly having committed fraud

The ‘expenses scandal’, it was generally agreed, served as the tipping point for so much anger amongst the general population that has been building up, suppressed and simmering, for so long.  The occupants of the ‘Mother of Parliaments’, the cradle of modern Democracy, are now perceived far and wide to be ‘on the take’ just like the officials of those corrupt regimes our government used to be so fond of criticising.  That only about a third of MPs have been exposed in this way and the actual sums involved are piddling in the grand scheme of things –  eg: National Debt estimated at £1.3 trillion!! – are beside the point.  As a kingdom, we are humiliated and in one hell of a mess.

As Lynne commented, people are now genuinely outraged.

A deeper malaise?
There was a recognition that there was a lot of variation in just how far the recession was affecting people in different parts of the country. Ali Gibson made the point that in leafy Buckinghamshire £200-£300 on a new handbag was still a ‘normal’ purchase while in a neighbouring health authority hospital waiting times were way below national targets due in part at least to lack of funding.

As a northerner I was keen to stress the ‘disappearance’ of much the traditional male working classes in the north of England, South Wales and the Scottish Lowlands and the effect on the health of PURPLE and RED that was having in their communities. For many in those classes, the recession began in the 1980s and has continued more or less since. (See my previous Blog, ‘The Thatcherite Era is ended. Whither Britain?’, for more on that.)

But, interestingly, in our discussion groups the sense of an even deeper malaise began to emerge as we talked about what it mean to be British…the nature of the British identity. The source of that malaise, it was felt, was the loss of Empire. Britain through the16th-19th Centuries was an invader and a conqueror. With our Empire eventually stretching over a third of the habitable globe, much of the world’s story in that time was our story. There was belief in ourselves and the religions we espoused – all those Christian missionaries! – which fed a stream of great innovations, from the road building of Thomas Telford to George Stephenson’s ‘Rocket’ to the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin to the medical breakthroughs of Joseph Lister and Edward Jenner to the astounding engineering feats of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. A sense of: “We are British. We can do.”

As a trained historian very aware of the horrors of colonialism – knowing that many of the conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa are rooted in the European boundaries which cut right through tribal territories and made artificial nations of unwilling tribal slices mixed with unwilling tribal slices – I found the thought that there could be any good in ‘Empire’ initially quite a challenge to my GREEN.

However, as Don pointed out, the rights and wrongs of what the colonialists did, in the context of our current discussion, were only relevant in that GREEN was still castigating us for the evils done. The question, then, is: does this castigation actually obscure the damage to our RED pride and BLUE nationalism by the loss of Empire…?

Add to that the fact that the once-mighty conquerors are increasingly looked upon as a liability by our military allies. Our army, having relied on American air support in Helmund province and still being unable to suppress the Taliban, American troops are now flooding in to do the job we can’t.

Discussion then raised the issue that, as an island nation, not invaded since 1066, do the recent waves of immigration constitute an invasion of sorts? Thus, the mighty invaders and creators of ‘Empire’ are now themselves diminished and invaded. For me, this was all a series of challenges that became ‘ah-ha moments’. I had previously tended to see racism and ethnic hatred as simply PURPLE’s rejection of those ‘not our tribe’ – especially when security (jobs) are threatened. But, for the British at least, is there also an element of invasion and loss of national pride involved?

What made these discussions particularly astonishing were that there were people in the room from the former Empire – Asians, West Indians, etc – whose grandparents and great-grandparents would have been subjects of British rule and its many indignities. But nobody got upset. Nobody got overly-emotional. Nobody wanted to decry the Empire and rake over the ‘evil coals’. Everybody was completely focussed on the collective character of the British psyche, where it was now and why and what needed to be done to lead that British character to a new place.

These were truly 2nd Tier discussions that transcended personality and history. Truly, truly astonishing!

Of course, not everyone there was well-versed in Spiral Dynamics. But a couple of brief-but-potent presentations from Don gave everyone enough of a flavour to contribute to the discussions. Another pleasure of the weekend for me was seeing so many people get turned on to the power of the Spiral Dynamics model to explain human motivation.

Hope from the mess
In discussing the nature of the British character, we also identified many positives. We are and remain:-

  • Leaders in many, many ways
  • Great innovators
  • Quirky and eccentric – often precursors to innovation
  • Resilient and supportive of each other in face of external threat – eg: the ‘Blitz Spirit’ being rediscovered in the aftermath of the 2005 terrorist bombs in London. (See Dave Lowe’s comment on the Blog ‘Inside the Mind of a Suicide Bomber’) Under pressure, the identity of the tribe expands to include all on our side.
  •  Humour-full – we can usually see the humour and irony in most things and we don’t usually take ourselves too seriously
  • At the centre of the world, a bridge between Europe, America and the Commonwealth

These exercises  gave us the sense that there is still much Britain has to give the world; but, to do that, we have to sort out our current problems and believe in ourselves again. As Rosemary put it: “We have had a great story. Now we need a new great story.”

We need strong RED proud in the BLUE frame of responsibly  ’doing your duty’ as just the start of creating that new story.

But our new story has no place for the prejudices, discriminations and abuses that have sometimes sullied our past. One of the most interesting tales of the weekend was one with which Rachel effectively closed the summit. She had been to a folk festival recently. One of the performers, the traditional singing legend June Tabor, had asked the audience what it meant to be English. After some repartee and banter, Tabor answered her own question: “If you love this land, then you’re English.”

Of course, there is no single homogenous English identity. And there certainly isn’t a British one – just ask the Scots, Welsh and Irish! But there is a sense of being English…and there is a sense of being British, whichever of our 4 constituent countries you come from. And, using Tabor’s definition, if you’ve just arrived in this kingdom for the first time but you love this land, then you’re one of us.

At the end of the 2 days, we hadn’t come up with magic solutions. We didn’t have an agenda to present to Government. Those things will come in time; but we had made a start on serious work.

And there were a lot more of us at 5 PM Sunday than there were at 5 PM Friday. Welcome. Juliana. Welcome, Denise. Welcome, James. Welcome, Jon (Twigge). Welcome, Willa. Welcome, Ali. Welcome, Faheed. Welcome, Richard. Welcome, Sherrif. Welcome, Carragh. Welcome, Dave. Welcome, Julian. Welcome, Laura. Welcome, Eileen. Welcome, Shaun. And so on…and so on…and so on…and so on…..

There will be 4 more summits to follow on from this weekend and then there is the EuroConfab at Gatwick 23-25 October – the first time the Confab has been held in the UK. If you’ve a mind to understand and a heart that loves this land, then please join us!

[For a more formal description of the founding of CHE-UK, see: ‘From Rule Britannia to Cool Britannia to Integral Britannia’.]

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.

Formation more than Education

 education, Neurological Levels, NLP, Spiral Dynamics  3 Responses »
Jan 242004
 

I find that one of the more interesting aspects of my part-time return to secondary school teaching is that of being a form tutor.

The role has a pastoral element built into it not obviously present in classroom teaching or general schooIl management.

For someone interested in the development of children and young people and how their psychology affects their performance at school (and beyond), the role of form tutor offers possibilities of making the kind of difference that most other roles in school life don’t.

What’s more, a good form tutor can create a climate of trust that enables members of his or her tutor group to open up and confide some of the turbulence going on inside their teenage heads.

Recent examples I’ve had to deal with include a 14-year old girl distraught because her mother had started calling her “fat” and “ugly” over the past few months – having previously tended to tell her daughter how beautiful she was. Investigation revealed that the catalyst for the change in Mum’s behaviour was the arrival on the scene of a new serious boyfriend. It looked pretty much to me like Mum was belittling her daughter because the daughter (who was quite well-developed for her age!) could be seen as competition for the attentions of the new male on the scene. If that may sound far-fetched to some, evolutionary psychologists have found much evidence for this kind of behaviour. The mother’s intent was almost certainly subconscious but the flattening of her budding sexuality caused a lot of damage to the girl’s RED self-esteem.

Discussions around the intense feelings aroused by first falling in-love and telling the daughter that Mum’s emotions were likely to balance out a little more after the first phase gave her some reassurance. What really made the difference though was telling her how I had overheard some Year 10 boys saying how much they fancied her. That put a smile back on her face!

On another occasion one of the girls in my tutor group approached me somewhat hesitantly to say how she felt one of the other teachers was victimising her in class. For a student to initiate a serious complaint about one teacher to another is no easy thing. Students – particulary Years 8-10 (when RED is pretty much to the fore) – tend to perceive teachers in ‘us-and-them’ terms and, indeed, the ethic encouraged among teachers is to close ranks and defend colleagues. (Given how vulnerable teachers are to accusations of impropriety and/or unprofessional conduct, this is hardly suprising.) Assuring the girl that her complaint would be taken seriously and offering advice on how to handle her relationship with the teacher in question in the short term enabled the girl to at least function after a fashion in that class while the matter was investigated.

And then there are relationships with parents which develop in ways they often don’t from the classroom teacher perspective.

Unfortunately BLUE’s Procedures meta-programme means that much of tutor time is spent on administrative tasks – chasing up absences and checking whether planners have been signed and homework recorded. Important as these tasks are, they can take away from relationship building.

The Bigger Picture…?
Since the mid-1980s successive secretaries of state (of whatever political persuasion) at the Department of Education have been – not altogether incorrectly! – obsessed with academic performance.

Undoubtedly some of the strategies – most notably the introduction of numeracy and literacy hours in primary schools – have produced impressive results. However, many of the initiatives have failed to have the desired effect. There is serious concern whether the Education Action Zones have provided value for money and criticism is starting to build over the successor Excellence in Cities schemes. (There is now even some evidence that improvements in literacy in primary schools may have peaked and there may even be something of a backwards slide.)

There is perhaps more debate than ever over what to do to improve academic attainment. There has been some relaxation of the National Curriculum in England and Wales. In Scotland it has been dumped as a statutory requirement. Wales has axed Standard Assessment Tests (SATs) at Key Stage 1 and is considering the same for Key Stages 2 and 3. And the January 2003 publication of ‘14-19: Opportunity & Excellence’, along with the establishment of the Pathfinder concept, is starting a process of massive change in the way education and training for that age group is delivered.

Yet there is still relatively little on the pastoral side. Connexions is the Government’s big idea and the fact that the service is oversubscribed in many schools is indicative of just how needed action is on this front.

Children in the early years tend to carry their parents’ memes. Memes – a concept developed by Richard Dawkins (1976) – are transmittable values, beliefs, attitudes and even memories. Parents’ memes will be reflected in children’s behaviours. As an example, one of the teachers at my school recently rang home to dicuss a Year 7 boy who was consistenly underperforming and misbehaving and who displayed a couldn’t-care-less attitude. His mother’s response was: “Well, I didn’t do well at school either and it hasn’t done me any harm.” Hardly surprising then that achieving in the classroom is not on this boy’s list of priorities!

It’s also no coincidence that the majority of parents who attend parents’ evenings – ie: they are concerned enough about their children’s progress at school to make the time and effort – are those whose children tend to work hard and do at least reasonably well in class.

Evidence shows that, in the teenage years, young people tend to be socialised more by their peers – often going through a partial rejection of their parents’ values. This is a normal and in some respects quite healthy part of the RED vMEME’s journey to establish personal identity beyond the PURPLE belonging of the family. This was termed ‘Negative Identity’ by psychologist Erik Erikson (1964), an element of ‘Identity Diffusion’ which the adolescent must overcome to achieve his/her own ‘Identity’.

Even when undergoing a partial (and usually temporary) rejection of the family, the young person’s PURPLE vMEME still has belonging needs. So now the young person tends to find a new degree of belonging in a peer group. But with RED predominant in the mix, the task is to build self-esteem often through recognition within the group.

How that building of self-esteem takes place will depend to a great extent on whether the dominant memes held by the group are those compatible with and including academic success or more centred on delinquency and anti-social behaviour. In his famous study of 14-15 year olds back in 1967 David Hargreaves established that it tends to go one way or the other. The RED vMEME’s drive for recognition and self-esteem does not stop because of the failure to achieve academic success. Rather, it finds ways to ways to achieve its goals through less ‘socially-acceptable’ means. Most teachers in most secondary schools are familiar with this model: the poor performers academically who score kudos with other poor performers by the trouble they cause in class and around the school building. Detentions then replace merits as badges of this kind of success. Nicholas Emler (1984) calls this ‘Reputation Management’.

Thus, the parents’ memes brought into primary school will often be predictors for the kind of memes displayed in secondary school. The child entering infant school, whose parents place no value in formal education, will most likely be an academic failure by the time of leaving junior school and a truant/disruptive student by mid-secondary school.

This isn’t, of course, a route set in stone. All kinds of things can bring about a change in values and, therefore, a change in attitude. For example, Frederick Gough Comprehensive, a school I know in Scunthorpe, is located in a fairly ‘rough’ part of the town. Its school population is not the type one would readily associate normally with good behaviour and academic success. Yet Frederick Gough has been doing substantially better than another, neighbouring secondary which draws upon largely the same catchement area but has had severe behavioural problems and low academic attainment. (A litmus test of a school’s ability to manage behaviour is the willingness of supply teachers to service it! In fairness, it should be pointed out that the other secondary has recently acquired a new headteacher and the description here of the school hopefully will soon be obsolete.)

So what is the secret of Frederick Gough’s relative success? One factor may be that there is a significant emphasis on pastoral care: every student receives a number of one-to-one sessions with his/her form tutor. These function with varying degrees of success, with some form tutors clearly more effective than others and some students memetically more ‘damaged’ than others. Nonetheless, considering its natural population, Frederick Gough does rather well and the emphasis on pastoral care is almost certainly a significant factor.

Where, for all its reforms and intended reforms, the Government is still largely missing the point is that they are targeting ‘education’ at the levels of ‘Skills & Knowledge’. The Neurological Levels model of Robert Dilts (1990) allows for change at any level to impact upon the other levels but makes the case clearly that, for change to be really effective, it has to be at the upper levels of ‘Values & Beliefs’ and Identity. That means dealing with memes – preferably the earlier in childhood the better.

Understanding ‘Formation’…?
Giving pastoral care takes a teacher beyond education and into ‘formation’ – the forming of the character and the personality.

We often hear or read terms like ‘formative influences’ or ‘formative years’ – but how often do we really think through what they mean?

I personally didn’t have a clue what formation meant until I was involved on a quality systems project with the Hospitaller Order of St John of God in the mid-1990s.

A worldwide Roman Catholic lay order dedicated to health care – especially of the ‘disadvantaged’ – the English Province had been pioneering new ways of helping people with severe learning disabilities maximise their quality of life. As the number of ‘brothers’ in the English Province was in marked decline, most of the management and delivery of services was carried out by ‘civilians’ – some of whom were not even Christians, let alone Catholics!

In this situation I found myself fascinated with the few new recruits the brothers did have and how they inducted them into lifelong formation which meant for them celibacy, service both to God and to mankind, no personal possessions, religious study, etc, etc – essentially a life of ‘active monasticism’. But note: this was not ‘lifelong learning’; this was ‘lifelong formation’.

Formal education and training, important as they were, were just part of the formation. The brothers were concerned with the development of the whole person. The character and nature of the inner person, if you will, was the centre of this. The brothers were operating at the levels of Identity and Values & Beliefs. How successful they were was reflected in how rare it was for a brother to leave the Order. Not unknown but very, very rare.

As my knowledge and understanding of Spiral Dynamics and related Psychology has grown over the intervening years – and particularly since my part-time return to teaching in 2001 – this concept of formation has seemed more and more relevant.

If we are to be successful in dealing with people, then we have to deal with the whole man or woman. Not just their training and education.

If we take the example of back-to-work schemes for the unemployed in places like Hull’s Bransholme estate, it’s no wonder they are relatively unsuccessful because the training provided is aimed at the Skills & Knowledge level. If the values of the intended recipient are not in accord with the values embedded in the scheme, then there is a memetic discrepancy. While employable skills are obviously important, bringing about change so that people actually value having a job is the key to take-up of these schemes.

The earlier one can make memetic interventions in a person’s life the better. Cathy Byrne, Headteacher of The Parks Primary School (on Hull’s Orchard Park Estate) – featured as a Services case study – has stated that she believes interventions should begin (where necessary) at nursery school age and possibly even younger.

If we are to transform our schools and enable them to actually hit all those targets the Department of Education burdens them with – if, indeed, we are to transform our society (greater prosperity, less crime, less drug and alcohol abuse, happier and more sustainable families, etc, etc) – then we have to go beyond education and training. We have to deal with lifelong formation.

To do that, we have to go beyond single institutions or sectors. A cross-boundary approach is needed which can address all relevant aspects which impinge upon the people and issues in question..

Back in 1999 Richard Dunn, then Headteacher of Hemsworth High, near Pontefract, agreed to let a team, in which I was involved, work with the school on what became known as the HemsMESH  project. This was the first attempt to use Spiral Dynamics on a macro level in the UK. Dunn’s rationale for this was that he and his staff had improved the school’s score of 5 A*-C GCSEs as much as they could via internal actions at the school. He recognised now the need to engage parents and the wider community – which the MeshWORK approach offered. Though the term wasn’t used at the time, Dunn knew that further improvement in student performance was a formation issue.

As the pace of change in Western societies grows ever quicker – often stimulated by ORANGE’s development and manipulation of new technologies – frequently bringing with it both huge benefits and immense social dislocation, creating what seem to be ever-widening ‘values gaps’, the need to address formation gets overlooked all too often in the drive to train skills and implant knowledge.

Yet formation is clearly the key to what kind of people we are, both as individuals and as societies.

Hull OFSTED hits the mark – but misses the point!

 education, Neurological Levels, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
Jan 192003
 

After months of speculation in the media and undoubtedly trepidation at the Guildhall (seat of Kingston Upon Hull City Council) and in Essex House (the headquarters of Hull’s Local Education Authority), the results of the inspection last September by the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) have been made public.

2002 was a bad year for Hull Education. The city returned to the bottom of Britain’s GCSE league tables after managing one place above bottom the previous year and slumped 11 places down the primary league tables.

Director of Learning Peter Fletcher, in post only a year or so, held Hull’s headteachers accountable for the GCSE league table performances last Summer while the Hull Daily Mail screamed out its headline, ‘Do you care?’  at parents who allowed and even facilitated truanting by their children.

The OFSTED report has largely upheld these two positions. Fletcher and Essex House get off pretty lightly while headteachers are criticised for not being focussed enough. However, it is parents and the truancy issue which seems to have most vexed the inspectors. Since the LEA is considered to be pursuing a robust anti-truancy policy – truancy sweeps in conjunction with Humberside Police have made local headlines several times – the inescapable conclusion is that it is parents who are the problem.

Since, in most children’s lives. the parents are the single biggest influence until well into the teenage years, OFSTED have undoubtedly got the right people in their sights. If you can’t get the kids into school, then you can’t teach them. they can’t take exams and the Government targets can’t be met. So doing something about the parents who can’t or won’t ensure regular attendance by their children is clearly a major issue.

Unfortunately, while OFSTED have hit the mark, the inspectors appear to have missed the point.

Truancy, like attendance, is a Behaviour. As the Neurological Levels model clearly shows, Behaviours are driven by Values & Beliefs – and Values in turn are underpinned by a sense of Identity.

If the formal school education of the child is not a foremost Value for the parent, then other priorities – taking the day off to buy the child a new pair of trainers, going on an out-of-season holday, keeping the child at home to do chores and errands while the parent is ill, etc, etc – can easily take precedence. And, since people are driven by Values, the parent who condones and even facilitates truancy in such circumstances, sees nothing wrong with what he or she has done.

Of course, having police officers bringing truanting children home or having an Education Welfare Officer knocking on the door to enquire about unacceptable absences can change the priorities of the parent somewhat.

When such a parent, under such pressure, changes behaviour and now insists the child goes to school, is it because the parent now recognises that conforming to expectations and sending the child to school is the right thing to do – in Spiral Dynamics terms, BLUE – in which case the parent may now be on the way to recognising the Value of formal school education? Or is it a fear-driven RED response to a greater power (‘The Law’) he or she cannot fight? – in which case, there will be little or no Value in the child receiving a formal education – the Value lies instead in avoiding a real threat (fines, possibly even a custodial sentence)?

If the motivation comes from RED fear of a greater power, rather than BLUE conformity to expectation, then, since RED thinking has little sense of consequences, once the threat has been removed, the parent will be vulnerable to other priorities overtaking sending the child to school.

What the OFSTED inspectors missed – as do many in the management of Education – is that, to bring about real sustainable changes in behaviour, there have to be changes in Values.

And in the Classroom…?
Here’s an unpalatable truth for many education strategists: many, many teachers breathe a sigh of relief when a problem child truants – some even rejoice! It means they have more chance of teaching the class than wasting large amounts of the lesson in ineffective behaviour management.

Of course, it’s ‘politically incorrect’ for teachers to think this way – they should be obsessed with (GREEN-derived) ‘inclusion’ the same way as the strategists and the ‘gurus’ are! But, if the strategists and gurus could be flys-on-the-wall in school staffrooms, they would pick up conversation after conversation about how relieved teachers are when a problem child is absent or how they wish such a child when present could be somehow spirited away!

Most classroom teachers recognise when a child has Value in his or her school education – and, since most children reflect their parents’ Values, they can soon discern whether the parents have Value in their child’s school education.

The child who doesn’t have enough Value in his or her formal education to actually bother to come to school is unlikely to become a model student once forced into class. Since he sees little or no relevance in what is being taught, winding up other students or even the teacher becomes an entertaining way of passing what is effectively a jail sentence – and RED, which is where the thinking of most of the seriously-disruptive children is at, bores very easily indeed. (I once asked an abusive Year 11 what such behaviour accomplished. Her reply was: “It’s got me thorugh five years of this hell hole. Now, fuck off!”)

Getting the truants into school is only a part of the solution – as Malet Lambert School found out when they improved attendance in 2001-2002 but actually expereinced slippage down the GCSE league tables.

So truancy and bad behaviour are symptoms of the formal school system having a lack of relevance to the Values of those children and their parents.

And it is a complete misapprehension to suggest that truanting children are not learning. They are learning to improve their skills at Playstation games and improvised sports, they are learning gang leadership and relationship skills, they are learning to shoplift, steal cars and break into houses, to take drugs and drink alchohol, etc, etc – often to live on their wits independently, without proper support from adults. What they are not doing by absenting themselves from school is learning what the system says they should and which they consider irrelevant.

A couple of years ago, I was teaching History in a secondary school in a deprived area of a port which had largely lost its fishing industry. The area was largely populated by the former fisherfolk. (Hull gets all the brickbats because its demographics give it such a strong concentration of ‘problem schools’, but there are schools throughout the rest of Humberside – for that matter, thoughtout Britain! – equally as problematic as any in Hull.)

As part of the curriculum, I was obliged to teach the Protestant Reformation of the Middle Ages to a class of low ability Year 8s. About half of them had never been out of the town, nearly 90% had never been in a church and only one had ever opened a Bible. What relevance did the Reformation have in the eyes of such children?

If we were going to interest such children in History, I suggested we develop a local history module around the port’s fishing fleet, thus enabling those children to explore their PURPLE heritage in a positive way, through talking to grandparents and other relatives, etc, to find out what part they had played in the port’s glory days of the fishing boats. I was told that the pressures to conform to the National Curriculum would not give us time or scope to do this.

Has Education lost its Way?
Numerous Key Stage 2 teachers have told me that Year 6 is not about Education; it is about getting high Standard Assessment Test (SAT) scores. Anything that will not actively contribute towards the children doing well in the SATs is likely to get jettisoned.

The desire to measure progress towards goals and targets comes from ORANGE thinking and is laudible in itself. The problem comes when BLUE thinking institutionalises the targets as standards and the targets then become ends in themselves.

That not all of Hull’s headteachers share the same obsession with targets as the Department of Education & Skills and OFSTED may be a recognition that Education is about a lot more than just meeting the targets – and that is no bad thing!

While the school systems perpetuate BLUE values of conformity, discipline and linear thinking and ORANGE goals of  future achievement, our society has changed dramatically in the last half-century in ways which the systems are not addressing adequately. The advent of large-scale GREEN permissiveness (in everything from dress and language to sexual mores), channelled through ORANGE consumerism, has fed RED self-indulgence and destabilised PURPLE family units. (The early 1990s campaigns of John Major around ‘family values’ and ‘back to basics’ were hopelessly naive but at least he recognised some of the damage done.)

It is a basic principle established by Abraham Maslow and reinforced by the work of Clare Graves, Don Beck & Chris Cowan, etc, that, when the lower levels of thinking are compromised, people leave the higher levels to sort out their problems at the lower levels. (Indeed the higher levels may collapse completely – ie: the individual ceases to think at the higher levels until the problems at the lower levels are solved.)

Thus, if a child’s PURPLE safety-in-belonging is compromised because the parents split up or the young person is unable to find him/herself as a unique human being – RED self-expression – then the higher disciplines of BLUE and the strategic forward-thinking of ORANGE mean little or nothing.

The school system, in demanding that everyone should conform to its BLUE-ORANGE ethos, is not serving the needs of many parents and children whose thinking is in PURPLE or RED. No wonder they don’t find it relevant!

The school system needs to become part of a broader system that addresses all the needs of all people in all their ways of thinking. This will require a seismic shift in thinking amongst politicians and education and social strategists. However, there are some encouraging signs that some forward thinkers are starting to move in that kind of direction.

Last year’s Parliamentary green paper on 14-19 Education, helmed by then-Education Secretary Estelle Morris, was a brave admission that vocational education – usually (though not always) more suited to people whose thinking is in PURPLE, RED or BLUE – needs to be developed on a par with academic education – usually (though not always) suited to BLUE., ORANGE and beyond.

More locally, in this past week Simone Butterworth, Leader of Hull City Council, stated in a letter to the Hull Daily Mail that the thinking of the Cabinet in deciding on a management restructure, which would appoint new Directors with a cross-Council remit, was a recognition that issues such as Education performance were beyond the Directorate of Learning as a stand-alone department. Social Services, Housing, Regeneration and whole raft of other services would need to link up to provide a broad based approach to developing the young people of the city – with Education performance as a key consideration.

This is radical stuff – and exciting! It would appear that Ms Butterworth is inching her way towards developing the breadth axis necessary for a large-scale MeshWORK. What must follow, though, is the developing of the understanding to provide the depth axis. so that all ways of thinking can be taken into consideration. Without the depth axis and the common understanding it provides, the breadth axis will fail to gel as conflicting personalities and departmental agendas fight for domination.

Making Education relevant to the needs of the people it is meant to serve is the key to educational performance. If that can be accomplished, then truancy – while it is unlikely ever to be entirely eliminated – will become largely a thing of the past.

The more the needs of the people are different from the ‘solutions’ Education offers,the more truancy there will be. Close that gap and truancy will diminish accordingly.

OFSTED may have identified the behaviours inhibiting progress in Hull Education, but it will require much more sophisticated thinking to understand and deal with the causes of such behaviours.

Needed: new ideas for Hull Education

 education, Neurological Levels, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
Aug 262002
 

So Hull, the city where I live, is back at the bottom of the UK’s GCSE league tables, Education Director Peter Fletcher is arranging for the headteachers of the city’s 15 secondary schools to appear before the leaders of the City Council and the Hull Daily Mail is once again devoting acres of space to what it terms a “devastating blow” and hinting darkly at retribution.

After four consecutive years of being the worst-performing local education authority in the country, Hull climbed up one place in 2001 to leave Knowsley in Merseyside languishing at the bottom. This year Knowsley “leapfrogged” (according to the Mail) over Hull, to put the city back at the bottom.

The furore, though, masks an important point. Hull schools and their Year 11 students actually improved over 2001′s performance. Only by 1.1% – but an improvement nonetheless!

Knowsley simply improved more than Hull and thus managed to lift itself off the bottom. This, however, should not take away from the fact that Hull did improve.

An undoubted contribution to this improvement has been the performance of Kingswood High School. Located on the sprawling and troubled Bransholme Estate, two years ago Kingswood was Britain’s single worst-performing school. Now the school is out of OFSTED Special Measures and this year improved its GCSE results significantly. Headteacher Kevin Beaton went out on something of a limb, trying radical new ideas such as Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1983) to make teaching more effective and learning more fun. That, combined with a vigorous anti-truancy policy, has paid off – and Kevin is to be congratulated.

The league tables, of course, do have their detractors.

In Spiral Dynamics terms, they were born out of ORANGE’s desire to measure progress: but BLUE thinking uses them to identify and punish the ‘failures’. (Just read the comments in the Mail about accountability and failure to meet targets!)

So doing well in the exams, meeting the targets and scoring well on the tables easily become ends in themselves. I’ve met several primary school teachers in the past couple of years who have complained that Year 6 is not about educating children but simply about getting good results in the Key Stage 2 Standard Assessment Tests (SATs).

As a part-time supply teacher, I’ve had Year 9s complaining to me about the pressures other teachers put them under to do well in the Key Stage 3 SATs.

And it’s less than a couple of months ago since the national media were carrying stories about children facing too many exams, illustrated by stories of students walking out of GCSE, AS and A-level exams because they were simply overloaded!

In the overall scheme of things, then, if some of the value of the league tables is in doubt, does it really matter if Hull is bottom of the league?

Well, to quote David Burnby, from last year’s ‘Of Cogs & Spirals…’  guest blog, “People will not feel positive about their city when they live in sub-standard housing, when they feel unsafe in their own homes, when they are constantly reminded about how their children are failing in school and when traditional jobs and livelihoods have vanished.”

Something New?
As they work out what to do next, Peter Fletcher and Hull City Council leader Simone Butterworth have the luxury of being new to their respective jobs, with the blame for the mess passing implicity (or otherwise!) to their predecessors. The long-running Labour administration which preceded the present Liberal Democrat-led coalition at Hull’s Guildhall, has been effectively disgraced by the Audit Commission while Fletcher’s predecessor, Joan Taylor, was hounded out of office 15 months ago via a campaign led by the Hull Daily Mail.

Butterworth and Fletcher are new…so they are expected to try something new. But what will that ‘something new’ be?

If they follow the usual Flatland thinking favoured by most politicians and local government officers – ‘Flatland’ is a derisory term coined by Ken Wilber (1995) to describe one-dimensional viewpoints – then Hull will get more of the one-size-fits-all piecemeal solutions which only partly work.

A great emphasis – rightly! – has been placed on reducing truancy rates in Hull, and that has resulted on schools like Kingswood doing better. However, Malet Lambert School had good attendance rates but still saw a drop in grades achieved. Clearly the problems are multi-dimensional.

What is needed is a systemic approach which can take into account all needs in all dimensions – which is what the MeshWORK approach of applying the Spiral Dynamics ‘map’ offers.

A MeshWORK analysis of what is going wrong in many classrooms in Hull – and, for that matter, in Bridlington, Withernsea, Grimsby, Scunthorpe and other parts of Humberside – is given in the schematic, A Downward Spiral…, in the Learning section of this site. (Interestingly enough, when Malet Lambert Deputy Head John Cornelius attended one of my Spiral Dynamics & Related Models of NLP workshop programmes recently, he said he recognised much of what this schematic showed as applying to his school.)

‘A Downward Spiral…’ shows that the problems in schools are to do with far more than simply what is going on in the schools themselves – critical though that is.

Richard Dunn, the Headteacher at Hemsworth High School (Pontefract) at the time of HemsMESH (the first Spiral Dynamics-based Education project in the UK), said in 2000, after several years of improving against GCSE targets: “It is unlikely that we can improve academic standards without engaging the broader community.”

Cultural Values
From his 24 August Hull Daily Mail interview, it appears that Peter Fletcher clearly recognises some of the cultural barriers he is facing:-

“We need a culture where the whole community is helping learning.

“It is a long, long process that will not be completed in my working life.

“In some cases you are working against perhaps three generations of unemployment.

“It is hard to make people see education is important if they don’t believe they will get a job anyway.

“Schools have to reach out into the community. A lot of the work going into adult learning will  play a role too.

“Hull has very low skills levels among many adults, with high levels of illiteracy.

“But if we can get those people doing courses and qualifications, it raises aspirations and shows them the value of education, which they will pass onto their children.”

With these statements, Mr Fletcher is close to the heart of the problem.

Using the Neurological Levels model, we can see that, if adults or youngsters don’t place Value in Education, then they are not going to Behave appropriately in relation to the Environment of schools or other ‘places of learning’.

Put simply, this is the root cause of truancy and bad behaviour in classrooms.

We need the Spiral Dynamics map to understand why some people don’t place Value in Education – or, to be more specific, Education as delivered by the ‘education system’ – because those adults with “very low skills levels” and the truanting kids who don’t get their GCSE passes are still learning. They just learn different thigns than the ‘education system’ wants them to!

How to get people to place Value in the kind of learning the ‘education system’ delivers is the problem Peter Fletcher faces and appears to understand. Whether that kind of Education is relevant to the Environment/Life Conditions of those people, as they perceive them, is a moot point. The fact that those people reject (or, at best, ignore!) the ‘education system’ but do learn how to survive and even prosper on the tough streets of Orchard Park or Bransholme suggests that they don’t think it is.

It is a basic principle of the work of Abraham Maslow that people cannot move onto higher ‘Levels of Existence’ until problems at the current level are resolved.

So, in Spiral Dynamics terms, if a youngster’s issues, for example, are concerned with a broken home (PURPLE level) and making his/her mark amongst the street gangs of an estate (purple/RED levels), then the BLUE/orange structure of the ‘education system’ is unlikely to have much immediate relevance.

What is needed is a MeshWORK approach, working not just in the schools but throughout the client communities, which addresses the needs of all levels in all ways – and can align the Neurological Levels of Identity and Values with that of the Environment to produce appropriate Behaviour.

The schematic, Potential Spiral Strategies – based partly on a Spiral modelling of how Paul Edwards turned around Knottingley High School (Pontefract) in the mid-90s – offers some ideas on how a school-based MeshWORK might be developed. It must be stressed, however, that the strategies for a MeshWORK must be developed uniquely in response to a Spiral analysis such as that which 4Q/8L offers and not from some pre-determined templates.

If Hull Local Education Authority really doesn’t want to waste more years playing leapfrog with Knowsley at the bottom of the league, then it needs to develop whole system MeshWORKS.