Editorial

for Concept Volume 12, Number 3

by Mae Shaw, Executive Editor

This issue of Concept appears to deal with big ideas. Yet perhaps big ideas are precisely what we need in order to lift our heads from the grindstone of busyness, to contemplate the nature of our engagement with people at this time. Historical understandings are inevitably necessary to such a process. Richard Holloway, the former Bishop of Edinburgh, provides a timely reminder that we need ‘a vision of what the education system is meant for’ and warns of the tendency for process to pose as purpose to such an extent that we no longer recognise the difference between the two. The managerialism which currently drives much of our work is a prime example of this tendency. For example, participation too often becomes an end in itself rather than a means of enabling those most removed from power to challenge and change their position. Process and purpose are clearly not the same thing, but they are symbiotically connected. It is for this reason that Jo McFarlane advocates ‘pay[ing] attention to process’ by enabling people to identify why change is needed, rather than driving [change] for its own sake’.

Power relations work their way into our understandings of ourselves and the world around us. In other words, what is regarded as ‘natural’ often has more to do with socially constructed categories than any kind of objective reality. This has implications for educational practice which is framed around the notion of ‘community’ - itself a normative concept. Community-based education can all too easily function in a way which remoralises people into what is deemed to be ‘natural’ or ‘normal’. For example, ‘social inclusion’, if it is based on conformity to alien (and alienating) norms, can become a means of enslavement rather than empowerment. Jo McFarlane’s article helps us to think about inclusion in another way. She describes her own transformation from passive recipient of expert ‘care’ to active agent in the mental health user movement. It is significant that the impetus for change, which led to a ‘re-assertion of personal autonomy’, came out of a politicised understanding of her own personal experience and that of others like her.

The relationship between ‘the personal’ and ‘the political’ is by no means static. What is, at one time, experienced as an individual personal trouble can be translated into a collective political issue. Conversely, political issues can be personalised. Iyaah Warren highlights both of these possibilities in her article. On the one hand, she describes how personal experience of poverty is systematically related, through educational programmes, to economic and political processes. On the other hand, the political process of ‘renewing democracy’ is re-defined in terms of ‘develop[ing] voice’ of those who are not usually heard, and who may even think (or been taught) that they have nothing to say. The act of ‘teaching one another’ is a powerful corrective to the ‘deficit’ discourse which is implicit in much policy.

Open and informed debate is both a precondition for and a purpose of democratic renewal. This includes debate about what exists now as well as what should exist in the future. Modernist and postmodernist accounts of social reality address these questions rather differently. The dialogue which has gone on between Mike Gonzales and Rod Purcell over the past few issues has enabled us to engage with the ‘politics of position’ and the ‘politics of identity’ in ways which extend our understandings of the world we live in. Perhaps, in the end, we need both ways of thinking: modernism helps to explain the causes of poverty and exclusion, and post-modernism helps to explain why the effects are differentially.

If we think of ‘community’ as a political space in which both neighbours and strangers meet and deliberate on their differences as well as their commonalities, then educational engagement can make a contribution towards, in Richard Holloway’s words ‘bringing the exiles home’.