Taproots for Transformation: Nurturing Intergenerational Discernment and Leadership in an Irrational World

By Bruce Gilberd and Richard Whitfield

Set against a background of hugely irrational social dysfunction and restlessness, the essence of the book concerns the ideal of people growing into a sufficient wholeness, integration and contentment in their identity. This requires all of us to take due account of each component of our personality (body, intellect, soul-spirit, emotion, and creativity) and intentionally nurturing these. Then, at each life-stage, we may function better as healthy citizens in family and community settings, being effective as role models, mentors and leaders in varied levels and contexts.

The book therefore challenges us to take our whole nature seriously as individuals, within the reality of our social, physical and emotional inter-dependence. It calls for new vision, in particular amongst educators, parents and others in the caring professions, including politicians, warning that without new enlightenment upon our relationships, with self, other, society and the environment, our highly unstable social ecologies will remain grossly inefficient, and swiftly become unsustainable.

After noting that 'future shock' has arrived, the first part of the book is devoted to outlines of 'the natural nature of persons', the 'givens' of the human situation. The second part focuses upon practical aspects of policy renewal that can offer grounded hope for more people attaining 'a good life', living and loving authentically in community.

Two helpful summarizing appendices are provided on 'mentoring' and on 'human attachment', themes which feature throughout the main text.

In their relaxed, uncomplicated, wise and spiritually illuminating conversations, the authors lead readers through implicit underlying questions of meaning and purpose in human life with sensitivity. Helpfully, they refer engagingly to their own problematic experiences of 'getting a life'. Matters of spirituality and faith are discussed with compassion and without dogma, noting that, without some understanding of our selves, including matters of brain and emotional development, 'religious beliefs' that lose sight of our basic need to receive, give and propagate 'reliable love' can be more of a problem than a solution within contemporary human living.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Feb 6, 2007
• ISBN: 9781412204316

Bruce Gilberd

Both authors are spirited grandfathers, originally schooled in the 'hard' sciences, but having contrasting professional experience. Sharing a deep respect for evidence, relationship and spirituality, dialogue has shaped their unexpected friendship. Richard is an Emeritus Professor of Education, having served as a Dean of Social Sciences and Humanities, as UK Director of Child Care with Save the Children Fund, and as Warden of St George's House, Windsor Castle.

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© Copyright 2006 Bruce Gilberd (NZ) and Richard Whitfield (UK)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

Cover design by Lucy Everitt (www.lucyeveritt.me.uk

)

Note for Librarians: A cataloguing record for this book is available from Library and Archives Canada at www.collectionscanada.ca/amicus/index-e.html

ISBN 1-4120-8895-X

ISBN 978-1-4122-0431-6 (ebook)

Published on 1st May 2006

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Bruce Gilberd, 81, Manaia Road, Tairua 2853, New Zealand

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Richard Whitfield, Bracken Bank, Timber Hill, Lyme Regis, DT7 3HQ, UK

Tel. [phone] [e-mail]

*****

Other recent books by Richard Whitfield

Mastering E-Motions: Feeling our Way Intelligently in Relationship, O-Books, 2005,

ISBN 1 905047 26 6

Also [from Bracken Bank Books]:

Mindscapes of Meaning: Paging the Soul

(Paintings by Eva Maria Barry with complementing poems)

ISBN 0-9538624-3-7 64 pages, 2003, with 30 full colour plates

Twin pocketbooks (each 64 pages, A6 size):

Lifelines: Poems for Pocket or Pillow, 2004, ISBN 0 9538624 4 5

Resonant Reflections: Prayer-poems for Pocket or Pillow, 2006, ISBN 0 9538624 5 3

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Preface

Diagrams and Tables

Prologue: Future shock has arrived!

Part 1:

Chapter 1: Forming trust

Chapter 2: Reliable love and nurture

Chapter 3: Values drive virtues

Chapter 4: Human wholeness

Chapter 5: Emotional realities

Chapter 6: Dreams and choices:

Chapter 11. But the little girl’s question was fun as well as challenge; so memorable too to be asked something like that, so fresh and authentic!

Chapter 7: Prizing Partnering and Parenting

Chapter 8: Working purposefully

Chapter 9: Fruits from Roots

Chapter10: Mentoring, human formation, and organisational health

Chapter 11: Focusing a learning revolution

Chapter12: Growing hope from inside out

Epilogue: Delving deep, aiming high, living authentically

Appendix A:

Appendix B:

Bibliography

Preface

We are two men originally trained as scientists, and thus respectful of evidence. Of practical inclination, we seek to live by and to explore mature faith for today’s context. Bruce, experienced in industrial and school chaplaincy, is a former Anglican Bishop of Auckland, New Zealand. Richard, an Emeritus Professor of Education is a research-informed child, youth and family advocate, more recently influenced by the poetic muse. We have worked in a diverse array of educational, social work and policy-shaping settings, both of us being long-married with 7 grown-up children and, so far, 8 grandchildren.

Now still energised grandfathers, long committed to well-sculpted educational processes, and free of institutional employment by others, our life experience has prompted much reflection upon our social, cultural and intellectual world that we believe now markedly lacks discernment, with many incipient yet avoidable dangers. Here we invite readers to share in a conversation motivated by that assessment, but also offering hope if we are prepared to change our outlook and priorities. Our research-informed text combines the social and personal, with practical implications for political, institutional, community, individual and family life. Hopefully some of our vision and acquired insights might help others on their journeys as individuals and as active citizens.

We first met in November 1997, shortly after Richard had relinquished his last position as Warden of St George’s House in Windsor Castle, an independent residential study center working at the interface of the professions, business, public policy, churches and society. On that occasion, we were both keynote speakers at a values education conference held in Wellington NZ for head-teachers, senior school staff and School Board members. The event, part-sponsored by the New Zealand Herald newspaper, focused upon the school-based needs of young people in the arenas of values, mental health, personal behaviour and formation for life.

Although living on opposite sides of the world, we later became friends. The idea of this book was first aired over an evening meal in April 1998 at a restaurant in Auckland close by the 5 to 13 age-range school of 650 boys in which Bruce was then working as full-time chaplain after serving the Anglican church in various ministries, and lastly as Bishop of the vast Diocese of Auckland for 9 years.

Our text is intended for a wide readership, including those particularly troubled by the dominant and unsustainable directions in westernised societies, and not least who seek to offer leadership, guidance and mentoring for upcoming generations. We have endeavoured first to lay out aspects of what we see as crucial to human well being, including faith and spirituality, but not religious doctrine. Secondly, we discuss some consequences for the review of personal, social and political priorities. This accounts for the two-part structure contained between a prologue and an epilogue.

Initial conversations from which the book has grown took place during two weeklong periods at our respective seaside homes; first in Lyme Regis, Dorset, southwest England, and then in Tairua, on the east coast of New Zealand’s Coromandel Peninsula. Mindful of the ancient root of the word ‘dialogue’ (dia-logos), translating as ‘the flow of meaning’, we have set the text largely in dialogue form. Through this conversational technique we hope that readers will be able to identify with the key issues more easily than through what would otherwise be more formal prose.

The process of dialogue and text compilation, hugely facilitated by e-mail, included the tape-recording of our free-flowing, relatively unplanned, open discussions. Then followed a slow crystallisation of key themes, the rearrangement of parts of the dialogue, editorial pruning and the plugging of gaps through later and much shorter recording and editing sessions. We hope that we have thereby improved the flow and accuracy of our discourse, enabling readers to gain some sense of participation with our dialogue, hopefully more akin to ‘bees’ feeding on nectar rather than proverbial ‘flies on the wall’.

Acknowledgments

We thank our wives Pat and Shirley for their many years of support, and for their forbearance with this surprisingly stretching project, in which our face-to-face and distant ‘listening’ had to become acute.

We are grateful to the Venerable Frank Johnson, a former Chaplain General of the British Army, who with Shirley, read and commented upon the text at a relatively late stage of manuscript preparation.

We also thank Lucy Everitt for her complementing cover design, and staff at Trafford Publishing for their helpfulness and professionalism.

Bruce Gilberd, Tairua, Coromandel, New Zealand

[e-mail]

Richard Whitfield, Lyme Regis, Dorset, England

[e-mail]

March 2006

Diagrams and Tables

Diagram 1: Cycles of emotional affirmation and deprivation

Diagram 2: Representation of the human soul

Diagram 3: Simplified model of the ‘three systems’ human brain

Diagram 4: A path model towards marital satisfaction

Diagram 5: Dynamic pattern of conserving life-cycle learning

Diagram 6: School in community with secure foundations

Diagram 7: Key factors in and flowing from secure attachment

Table 1: Illustrative matrix for values education

Table 2: Innate and learned emotions

Table 3: Personal traits of good leaders

Table 4: Basic components for balanced school curricula

Table 5: Arenas of multiple intelligence

Table 6: Features of secure and insecure attachment

Prologue: Future shock has arrived!

As stated in the Preface, we invite readers to share in our conversation that examines human nature, our place in the contemporary world, and some consequences for leadership, living, and the formation of young people. Our prologue starts with a shared statement, followed by individual biographical comments, before the dialogue proper begins.

Bruce and Richard

In much of our working lives we have been involved in promoting sound education, delivered sensitively and reflectively. We assess much within the preoccupations and organisation of our contemporary world as an irrational madness, lacking in wisdom, and often unresponsive to the bequests of the best scholarship and reflective experience. Furthermore, we believe that a true education can and should make us wise, really ‘smart’, faster than many of our forebears, by enabling us to stand upon the best of their endeavours and the shoulders of the wisest among them. Against that criterion, and the goal of a sufficient contentment in life, the outputs of education are we believe woefully inadequate; much instructional endeavour is misplaced. We have allowed the politics of education, and the diminishment of home life as prime teacher, to circumvent much good, and practicalities of moving towards wholeness and sound judgment. We now collude in systems of accounting that subtly peddle compulsory mis-education, and inadequate personal formation in home and community for living safely and well in the contemporary world.

Yet there is hope, for we could do much better in these fields. Furthermore, we have the resources to do so, if only we dare take our full human nature seriously so as to transform the values that we presently allow to dominate most collective endeavour. Thankfully there are a few outstanding examples of this in our own and other countries, but also much human pain and tragedy that arises from inadequate formation and which is certainly avoidable.

Similar individual, family, community, national and global problems, beset Anglophone countries. Newspaper headlines, and many social and economic trends tend to be the same against a background of new global threats. Change the names and places, and the ethnic mix, and the stories are often identical. For example, in recent times our countries have variously agonised, short-term, about: global warming, the ozone layer, environmental disfigurement, air safety, terrorism, religious conflict, the threadbare infra-structures of public transport, the price of fuel, motorway traffic, youth suicide, child abuse, community policing, access to prompt health treatment, eating disorders, depression, marriage and divorce rates, educational standards, social exclusion, racial conflict, bureaucratic obscurity, integrity in public life, teacher shortages, growing drug abuse, violence, absent and solo parents, adoption, genetic modification, human embryology, euthanasia, workplace stress, and the price of housing in relation to what used to suffice as a ‘family wage’ that, arguably more than any other feature, has dislocated domestic security, lifestyle and life prospects.

Now too much data from the natural and social sciences raises doubts about both our social and ecological sustainability unless we change our personal and social outlook and habits. That would seem to demand a change in the dominant post- industrial revolution values and ethics of the last half of the last century to something very different and more obviously respectful of environment and life, not least human life and its potentials.

Our social and environmental futures now trouble the hearts of huge numbers of citizens. Yet we seem, so far at least, relatively powerless to motivate our democracies to make the quantum leaps that seem on present knowledge to be essential, and, from an evolutionary perspective, require very rapid implementation. Amongst other things, we seem far too hooked upon mere materialism and the false doctrine of insufficiency that disrespects the fullness of environment, and of self and other.

This signifies the general character of our contemporary madness. Current failures to safeguard even our own short and long-term interests of human survival reflect our collective irrationality, despite recorded history, and the many scientific findings that prompt respect for our place in Creation.

Before starting our dialogue proper, we each make an introductory opening statement so as to give readers a little more background about our respective journeys of personal formation. These suggest elements lying behind and shaping our core concerns, and provide some hints concerning why we felt enough synergy and respectful resonance to imagine that this conversational venture might be worth completing for wider sharing.

Richard:

I was born in West Yorkshire, Northern England, amid heavy ‘dark satanic mill’ industry, particularly of engineering and textiles, the elder of two brothers. My parents were some 200 miles from rarely seen next of kin. The bumpy unsealed road on which we lived had little traffic, yet a fine sense of community. I called several neighbours, often parents of my peers, ‘aunts’ and ‘uncles’, and felt safe there, and at primary school, opposite the church, despite its very shabby medieval toilets! Dad fortunately was spared absence from us over the years of World War II. He was involved in making parachute silk, and served in the Home Guard. At primary school we all owned gas masks as a preventative wartime measure.

After primary school, and two secondary schools (the second from age 13 when we moved to North London), and an undergraduate course mainly in chemistry, but including history and philosophy of science, I started my professional life as an organic chemist. After a few early conceptual hiccups (that were to drive the form through which I later helped to change the teaching of that subject), I took like a duck to water to this branch of chemistry. I specialised in large molecule natural products just as biochemistry began to emerge as a distinctive area. My first significant dissertation was on human sex hormones, while my 1963 doctorate concerned the structure of a delicate antibiotic of which only a few grams had at the time been produced by natural organism fermentation. My experiments, each on a few milligrams of material, required manipulative dexterity and patience, and I had the occasional thrill of albeit minor new discovery.

The historic literature of scientific accumulation concerning the material world, and the discipline and integrity that are required by it, helped to shape my attitude towards many things, including education, religion, spirituality, and my rather later contact with political ‘science’, psychology and sociology. For, after periods of school science teaching, and training science and other teachers as a University Lecturer at Cambridge, I was able to branch out more formally into the social sciences, becoming Faculty Dean in that arena at Birmingham’s city centre ‘technological’ University of Aston.

The preference for ideology and theory over evidence of human nature amongst all too many sociologists in the UK disturbed me. They seemed unaware that the history of science is littered with careful recording of observations prior to any grand theory. Yet aside from the ‘observations’ recorded in great literature and art, we were then but in the foothills of serious recording of human behaviour as a prerequisite to speculation and testing of cause and effect that might inform social policy. So I had in the mid 1970’s, for example, to look to California in order to recruit an empirically oriented sociologist of education as a lecturer for our department that, after consultation, I had re-christened ‘Educational Enquiry’. That now redundant title still encapsulates the flavour of adventure that I believe remains the acid test for significant learning.

My concern about various relativist and neo-Marxist influences were not unconnected to practical issues about children and their safe development that had become my prime focus, both professionally and personally. Such ideologies were having all too rapid impacts upon the formation and training of teachers and social workers, and had little or no passion of concern for even small-scale improvements to the human lot. Once, in frustration over some nit-picking point of syllabus approval, I hectored our Faculty Board from the Chair. I remember saying that we had no business in a city centre university, with social decay all around us, if we could not in some ways become committed to alleviating the plight of many local children and families, in their structural and ethnic variety, through whatever means, including the use of technology. I also observed how many evidence-shy ideologues disdained serious consultation when given responsibility for a piece of collective work, suggesting a dangerous and unexamined appetite for power that I suspect lay as much in the biography of their inner pain as in their reading of largely leftist gurus’ outpourings.

My passion for children and their development goes back to the months after I married Shirley in 1961. A family friend since childhood, Shirley had become a gifted primary teacher. While completing my PhD, and teaching organic chemistry to somewhat reluctant medical students, I became enchanted by three lovely pre-school children; Peter, Elizabeth and Gillian who lived next door to our first home as newly- weds. They lit up my life with their open friendship, questions and desire to help me with any do-it-yourself activity that I engaged upon as a new young householder, facilitated by the fact that we had no fence between our adjacent properties, so were enabled as good neighbours. These lovely children had a clearly committed mother who had also been a primary teacher. I watched her tend her little flock with all their usual ups and downs. I now know that their secure bonding to her enabled them to be such trusting fun for me. So I knew from that stage that I had both to become a father, and to teach and be concerned for the young.

Several years later that took me away from being a serious chemist. By then our three sons had arrived by surprise channels, followed seven years later by our only daughter. An overseeing responsibility for pioneering courses in human communication, and training for counseling in educational settings, enlarged my sense of personhood, particularly through new attention to the emotions. This was an arena that I had, on the surface, unwittingly escaped from when I went on a prematurely specialised intellectual diet of pure and applied maths, physics and chemistry from the age of 16. Such brain-crimping learning was, I now realise, relieved by a lunch hour informal art class for rebels gathered together by an art teacher who graced our company in preference to that of a somewhat dysfunctional secondary school staff room. Other sustaining extra-curricular experiences included cricket (for which I had the wrong ‘un-gentlemanly’ attitude of a Yorkshire-man exiled in North London!), tennis, attempts (even then!) at school reform, and organising a then school-frowned-upon jazz-band.

Almost 20 years later I was brought up with a jolt when a concerned critic suggested that my then formative book on the philosophy and structure of the whole school curriculum (Disciplines of the Curriculum, McGraw Hill, 1971) gave only about two- thirds of the needed story. I was excessively hooked on the development of the rational mind, and, unwittingly, had made marginal both emotion and imagination. A few years later, an all too predicable but totally unanticipated mid-life crisis finally pressured my better rounding out, and I became fully aware of details of this conceptual omission. The idea of ‘emotional’ and other non-IQ ‘intelligences’ was then far from being articulated, though a better insight into the psychological interior of my Christian commitment that had crystallised, with far too sharp edges, during my undergraduate phase would have helped. Sadly, no less than secondary schools, churches tend all too frequently to be propelled by brain-unfriendly learning. Church life still embodies a surfeit of intellectual propositioning through doctrines too often destined to divide rather than heal. Optimistically, my own writing in the area of human emotions, and surprise flows of poetic commentary on life (see bibliography) now reflect a better balance in my being.

In 1983 I left university service, largely on grounds of conscience, for I could foresee that the then politically inflicted, and locally unjustified funding pains of my own institution would be likely to sweep the whole tertiary system. Educational values had become daily infected by accountancy, as if money alone could drive meaning or serious values-based housekeeping.

I know that I am far from alone in grieving for the implicit loss of commitment in the tertiary education sector to truth ‘in the round’, and to its balanced dissemination to students, for managerial ‘political correctness’ is generally an anathema to holistic enquiry. When truth is sidelined or dismissed in Senates, departments and courses freely decimated, gifted teachers dispossessed of students, and even books burned, trust evaporates, and cultural peril awaits, with unmonitored backwash effects for schools and family ambitions. The extent to which educational agendas have been invasively and narrowly politicised over the past 25 years is far too little appreciated.

Then, as UK Child Care Director with the Save the Children Fund, I became responsible for 700 staff working in some 160 often pioneering projects scattered over the most disadvantaged areas of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. In this demanding, secularised role I was to have most of my hunches about child welfare and formation confirmed. Simply, the unwelcome message is that we cannot ‘save’ children unless we also ‘save’ their parents or other carers from the debilitating impacts of social and emotional deprivation, this being far from only a matter of economic resources. A reliable cuddle cannot be purchased, whether by minion or millionaire, pauper or princess, a reality millions sensed upon the tragic death of Princess Diana. Collective grief for her, marked by so many flower displays is etched upon many memories, for we sensed that her tragedy was avoidable if only Diana had felt and known of reliable love, and so shown discernment about who to trust with her life.

The child is the father-mother of both man and woman (adapting a line of William Wordsworth). Both emotional and spiritual deprivation and affirmation are culturally transmitted. We do not live in normal evolutionary times in this new millennium. This lack of normality is reflected in the pace of socio-economic change that stretches our adaptive psychology and biology, and much else. Alvin Toffler’s prophetic Future Shock, some of whose categories are noted later (pages 11 and 159) is with us, right now! Humanity is reeling with inadequate world-views, and fragmented sensing of who we really are, or are to be within a fabric of sustainable relationships.

Unsurprisingly, both individuals and societies have hidden bereavements and loss of a sufficient centeredness, not least as we engage in a dangerous secularism that is an experiment seemingly unprecedented in human history. This raises the urgent question as to whether unbelieving peoples can be civilised without a sense of the numinous. Materialism wars with meaning, as does truth with trauma, and individualism with isolation and integrity. We moderns, or post-moderns, need to contemplate the possibility that the human brain has evolved to be hard-wired for numinous and transcendent belief.

When I met Bruce, his open attitude, sense of humour and lack of pomposity, or what my Yorkshire roots term ‘side’, were clearly apparent. In addition, as the serving schoolteacher he had then become, having resigned his bishopric at the age of 56, I felt he had a deep sense of what contemporary youngsters most need if they are to form a life of both safety and inner contentment. Bruce’s long experience as an Anglican priest in varied youth and adult settings, set alongside my own sometimes bumpy journey within and beyond church life, sparked our friendship. Now that’s quite enough of me, and so over to him!

Bruce:

Thank you Richard. Those reflections in your story are suggestive, as our later discussion will no doubt reveal. I note passions driven by a sense of unfulfilled visions in that sample of your story. Everyone’s story, or ‘gospel’, holy or unholy, is a precious tool for reflective learning. For pastoral ministries, whether in education, health, social work or church, listening to personal story is essential.

I grew up in a medical family in Epsom, Auckland, with three older sisters. People and people-care were at the heart of our hospitable home, though tensions had their inevitable place. My 13 years at two Auckland Anglican church schools were particularly formative, giving me lifelong friends and a broad education, as well as growing my faith.

As with yourself Richard, a chemistry degree focused my lineal thinking, but did not feed the intuitive side of my nature. I do however find it interesting that many particle physicists now recognise that scientific method lies within the crucible of mystery. But theological college teaching and community living did fire my intuition. In particular, my New Testament theology lecturer inspired me. He brought me much more than just another batch of intellectual cleverness. He respected me, inarticulate theological student as I was, and he embodied the profound theology and spirituality he had offered us. He believed what he was talking about, always a mark of teaching excellence.

Parish and industrial ministries in New Zealand and England over 20 years helped me to understand even more deeply the complex questions that these societies face concerning social sustainability at all levels. For example, over the risks to family life of long working hours, as a young energetic priest with a young family I found it a real challenge to balance work and rest, activity and recreation. In addition, there was the challenge of where I might place myself in regard to gender and racial justice, and how I could nurture the deep heart of my nature, learning to be actively reflective.

Over this period I participated in group-dynamics education, including encounter groups, and endeavoured to apply those principles to both secular and church situations. This experience prompted further questions; such as what kind of leader did I want to be? Why is it so hard to express my feelings and communicate in a straight and kind way? What do I value most? These questions remain for persons, families, organisations, and communities as they struggle for health and wholeness. Over this time I learned to set work and life aims. That discipline has served me well over the years.

Most of the second 20 years of my ministry has been spent as a theological educator, Bishop and school chaplain. These tasks in church and community have evolved further questions, awareness and learning as I worked amongst peers and children, and provided oversight to many faith communities in the geographically scattered and varied diocese of Auckland and across New Zealand and Polynesia. I name some of these issues and associated learning, for they condition my approach to this dialogue:

*   the need to have clear aims;

*   how our lives are enhanced by truthful, loving and wise mentors-guides who give us enabling feedback;

*   how faith-sourced values education gives shape to young lives; organisations achieving tasks well always contain good people and group processes;

*   the sacred, secret center of every child and person needs recognition, respect and nurture by themselves and others;

*   we all have pain; the key is not to waste it; furthermore, we are members one of another in all areas of life, so we need to be there for others offering sustained, perceptive support;

*   mature leaders - emotionally, spiritually, professionally - are essential to any nation’s well-being;

*   leaders need a good balance between work, family and solitude;

*   awareness of context is vital, be it cultural, geographical, political or whatever, if we are to make an effective contribution from our essence;

*   a theology, that is both God and life-centered, needs constant refocus and communication;

*   the churches need to be courageous and hospitable communities of the spirit, holding in trust that which gives new life to all.

My marriage to Pat, now over forty years ago, has been a loving, growing and nurturing anchorage. Three creative searching children, all in their thirties, and grand-parenting, have challenged and enriched me.

As I reflect upon my life journey so far, I am delighted to work with you Richard on these themes, believing that our public life is the visible expression of the quality of our private, intimate and inner life. Our countries certainly need leaders of all kinds of depth and quality, who can evoke hope and vision, especially amongst the young.

So let us now move to a first brief foray in our real-time conversations to round off this Prologue.

Richard:

We met through our mutual interest in and professional concern for the education of the young. On the surface, governments, businesses and most of society now make assumptions that education is a good thing. We devote a large proportion of gross national product to activities presumed to be ‘educational’, even though we are far less sure than we should be about the core aims and content that must be reviewed and freshly justified for each generation. We have had universal education in our countries for over a century, extending its scope age-wise, yet now communities’ contentment rather than material benefit from the investment is hard to see.

Since I first started teaching in the early 1960’s and at that time engaged in important curricular innovations in science, I have become profoundly dissatisfied with the direction and emphasis of educational systems’ endeavours, not least at the post- primary phases in both the state and independent sectors. Actions are governed by excessive competition, league tables, and the measurement of too much that is insignificant, rather than long term issues concerning whether education succeeds in helping most of its clientele to construct a life, being conscious of a sufficient contentment. Put simply, our reflective imagination is cramped by the politics and practice of individualism and materialism, amid doubts about criteria for truth, and these are shaping far too much of the flow.

Bruce:

That political flow has some subtle undertones from parents, university staff and employers. Parents hope that their offspring will find a niche in the segmented and fragmented society as it is, without perhaps probing how they can become whole people in the process. True education is a lifelong process requiring us to identify early-on the factors that generate wholeness, formation and adequate integration within individuals, so that youngsters might contribute to the society in a broader and more imaginative way over their adult lives.

Richard:

From the start of our friendship I knew that we were both bothered about the idea of and transmission of human wholeness. I have not found that industrialists or parents, social workers or clergy, or fellow teachers disagree with that goal, though many in politics, leading complex lifestyles, smile and pass on swiftly at the thought. But when it comes to running a school, college or a university department, or even a playgroup, we still seem to make some very traditional assumptions about how we go about matters. The wholeness issue is presumed to float in miraculously on the ether rather than be treated as something that must be planned for, and directly and subtly provided.

Bruce:

I think we’ve lost touch with how to do that effectively. Much inner and outer life feels, and is, dis-integrated (a matter covered in