Raymond Williams through Sri Lankan eyes

[Part 8]

In today’s column I wish to focus on Raymond Williams’ approach to education in general and how it could help us to think through some important issues that are relevant to our own pedagogical interests and concerns. The educative element has always figured prominently Williams’ writings. For him criticism, commentary, has a deep educational function.

He entered the world of learning as an instructor in adult education and later moved to Cambridge as a don. His entire life, he has grappled with the complex and thorny issues of education. How he approached the idea of education, what he proposed by way of policy and concrete action can in many ways illuminate our own problems in this field.

For example, his attitude to literary education and cultural education has much to offer us by way of guidance. He was not a fly-by-night showman; he was a resolute and unostentatious enlarger of the mind.

Education

Raymond Williams approached education in the same way that he approached other pursuits, fiction, drama, poetry, cinema, culture in general- as both a reflector and shaper of the larger society. Hence his understanding of education was closely interwoven with his progressive social vision. He saw that poverty and inequality were endemic to the educational process. This poverty and inequality manifested themselves in two ways – the inexcusably inadequate resources available to fulfill the education function and the orienting of the system of education towards a narrow and counter-productive notion of human intelligence; this notion had the unfortunate consequence of perpetuating the class structure of British society.

As he observed, ‘the separation of an elitist education for the leaders from a rigidly vocational training for the lower ranks; the offering of false alternatives between education as liberal self-development for those not immediately vulnerable to the pressures of the economic system, and as the transmission of values and skills for a subordinate place within that system; these remain characteristic.’

Creative participation

This critical perspective on education characterised Williams’ thinking throughout his life. He had higher goals for education; he wanted it to be a preparation for healthy democratic practice and creative participation in a common and equal culture. He was keen to abolish private educational provisions which extended social conflict and division.

As he observed, ‘we need to shift emphasis, within what is actually taught, from the transmission of isolated academic disciplines, with marginal creative activities, to the centrality of creative self-expression and an organic inter-relation between subjects, between theory and practice.’ It was his conviction that the current curriculum was reflection of the underlying class structure and it needed radical revision.

Raymond Williams was deeply interested in the problems of education in general. However, he was also a teacher of literature. As a teacher of literature he paid close attention to the issues of pedagogy. He wanted education to be dialogical, an informed and open-ended conversation between teachers and pupil. In teaching literary texts he placed great emphasis to close readings, the kind of strategy that was put into play by I.A. Richards and followers of practical criticism.

What Williams did was to extend this practice of close reading to other texts such as popular fiction, newspapers, journals as well as films. Secondly, whatever texts he had selected for close reading, he wanted to locate them in the historical and social contexts from which they emerged and on which they aimed to have an impact.

Endeavour

In his adult education classes, Williams was in the habit of showing films and discussing them with students. In this endeavour, he made use of creatively the tenets of practical criticism; practical criticism that was employed for the elucidation and evaluation of literary texts was used by Williams to assess film texts. In other words, he sought to press into service methods associated with literary criticism for film criticism.

There is, to be sure, a danger in this move in that it can serve to ignore what is distinctive about the art of cinema. At the same time, there is a positive aspect as well. Williams claimed that, ‘the normal written work, in this part of the course, consisted of full and detailed description of a brief sequence, and it was very noticeable how quickly most students were able to improve their capacity for observing and recording a total rather than a select content.’ In his hands, practical criticism became an instrument ideal for training in reading of passages of film sensitively and intelligently.

Raymond Williams’ approach to education was a part of his larger vision of society and participatory democracy. In all his writings, the sharply-etched boundaries between cultural and political activities are erased. One way of deepening the political awareness of citizens, according to Williams, is through the participation in cultural activities.

Another way of phrasing this idea is to state that education needs to be seen as a part of the political discourse. This line of thinking can be traced to his two seminal works culture and society and the long revolution that I had discussed in my earlier columns. It was his declared intention in these works to demonstrate the importance of examining the concept of culture in terms of the larger social and political discourses. His general attitude to education grows out of this objective.

Democracy

Towards the end of Culture and Society, for example, Williams underlines the fact that a good education system is vital to the effective functioning of democracy, and conversely, the consequential functioning of an education system depends on a vigorous education system. Raymond Williams, in this book, advanced the bold suggestion that in order for the students participate actively in a democratic polity, critical reading of newspapers and advertising should be a part of the education.

What we see here is his desire to shape the educational goals in relation to political objectives. Similarly, in his book The Long Revolution, Williams asserted that education can play a crucial role in ushering in the political maturity of students, and consequently would be able to emerge as able and informed actors in the political process.

Another important feature of Raymond Williams’ attitude to education is to foster a spirit of questioning, independent thinking. Rather than passively absorb a certified body of knowledge, which is what students are standardly expected to do, they are encouraged to challenge and interrogate – to examine the very social basis of the process of education. Williams is opposed to the widespread transmittal model of education. Education is more than transporting a body of knowledge to students; it is a way of shaping a critical and participatory outlook. In order for education to be a force for the democratisation of society, Williams believed that ‘education itself has to be democratised.’

In this regard, Williams made the following pertinent observation.’ the failure is due to an arrogant preoccupation with transmission, which rests on the assumption that the common answers have been found and need only be applied. But people will….learn only by experience, and this, normally is uneven and slow. A governing body, in its impatience, will often be able to enforce, by any of a number of kinds of pressure, an apparent conformity.’ Williams, throughout his writings, shunned this much esteemed conformity.

Ideas and attitudes

The idea that education be regarded as a common pursuit of knowledge, exchange of ideas and viewpoints among equal partners was central to his thinking. Admittedly, teachers are more knowledgeable than their potential students. However, the important point is that this relationship should not be one of authoritarian transmission of knowledge but a common quest for understanding. His preferred model of education was one that emphasised common investigation and mutual interchange of ideas and attitudes.

This is indeed very different from the standard and dominant model of education which stresses the role of an all-knowing teachers handing down knowledge and values to a group of inert students. Raymond Williams promoted a discussion-centered educational model that was open-ended, flexible ad responsible to the needs and the living realities of students.

The kind of education system that he had in mind was one dedicated to ‘changing the educational system from its dominant pattern of sorting people, from so early an age, into educated people and others, or in other words, transmitters and receivers, to a view of the interlocking processes of determining meanings and values as involving contribution and reception by everyone.’ Williams was clearly opposed to the transmitter-receiver paradigm of education.

He not only stressed the importance of education as a facilitator of mutual interchange of ideas but also the fact that the education needs to fashion itself as a site for challenging and undermining various forms of insidious cultural colonisation. Clearly, Williams wanted education to be a pathway to democratic participation, and his agenda for education is guided by this admirable desire.

An aspect of Williams’ agenda for education that needs to be studied more carefully is his shift of emphasis from psychological factors to social ones. He was able to call attention to such vital concepts as hegemony, dominant culture, ideology, equality, justice and selective tradition. These are cornerstones of his education policy. As one commentator accurately pointed out, ‘Williams; influence on critical educational studies has not only been strongly felt in the growth of analyses employing this rich stock of concepts.

By providing some of the most important foundational components that led to a strengthening of the broader cultural Marxist tradition, his work has had an impact in a more indirect way as well. Thus, knowingly or not, the development of educational scholarship that rests within this tradition owes a major debt to Williams.’ His tireless effort to illustrate the interplay between education and social formation had met with some success.

Common culture

Raymond William frequently in his discussions of the problematic of culture talked about the importance of a common culture – I have alluded to this topic in some of my earlier columns. His paradigm of education s designed to further the intensification of this common culture. His education program has to be understood in terms of the promotion of a common culture. As he rightly observed, ‘the culture of a people can only be what its members are engaged in creating in the act of living.

He goes on to say that it involves the creation of contexts and conditions in which the people as a whole participate in the expression of meanings and values. Hence, as Williams sees it, a common culture is never finally materialised; it is never finds completion and finality.

Williams does not conceive of common culture as being uniform and settled. In the words of Raymond Williams, what a common culture should strive ‘precisely for that free, contributive, and common process of participation in the creation of meaning and values.’ He sees education as a ladder that enables us to reach these objectives. His participatory concept of education s inextricably intertwined with meaning and significance.

Raymond Williams’ notion of education is one that promotes self-reflection and self-interrogation. He wants us to question not only the education system but more importantly the social system that supports it.

We cannot meaningfully discuss such important concepts as hegemony, justice, cultural domination, equality of opportunity as they relate to the education system if we are unable or unwilling to address inequities and dominations and subjugations that mark the functioning of the larger social system.

The continuing struggle for democracy should galvanise the reformers bent on bringing about changes in the education system a well as the social activists and policymakers desirous of ushering in progressive transformations of the social system.

Raymond Williams’ critique of the educational system paid great attention to the concept of hegemony. He once defined hegemony as…as many commentators have pointed out, he broke new theoretical ground in his project of linking education ti hegemony. He highlighted the power of what he called the selective tradition that was taught in schools and universities and how this selective tradition was shaped by various vested interests including class interest. It was indeed his considered judgment that the educational system in tandem with other social forces ‘is involved in a continual making and remaking of an effective dominant culture.’

Williams always liked to speak from the margins and one of his recurring targets of criticism was this dominant culture. He saw the insidious role played by hegemony in moulding our consciousness in conformity to the dominant culture, and he stressed the fact that in order to reverse this trend, one must engage in ‘the most sustained kinds of intellectual and educational work.’

Social structures

In order to promote his challenges to the dominant social structures, Raymond Williams wanted the class room to become a site of resistance, a counter-hegemonic space. For this to happen, a critique of the hegemonic processes, which are often unobtrusive needs to become a central part of education. Raymond Williams was of the opinion that institutes of formal education should become spaces of resistance and contestation of meaning.

They must be able to encourage and facilitate bonds between different scattered groups that are subject to incessant domination. This involves not only paying attention to cognitive understanding and analytical skills but also to affective and emotional dimensions. It was his belief that educational transformation entailed changes in both cognitive and affective spheres. He highlighted the need for both cognitive unlearning and affective unlearning as a way of upending the dominant social and cultural structures.

One of the cardinal tenets of Williams’ philosophy of education is self-management. He was extremely weary of bureaucratic management and authoritarian modes of problem-solving; he believed that citizens should be allowed the opportunity and the resources to manage their own affairs. He saw self-management as a vital mechanism for unleashing ‘a tremendous reservoir if social energy, now locked in resentments of bureaucratic and hierarchical organisations.’

His desire was to produce a participant community dedicated to the pursuit of democracy in which the people, for the most part, have the power to make decisions themselves. The highly privileged concept of self-management that he promoted was not something that can be delivered by the state or bureaucratic organisation; instead, he saw it as social process that has to be out in place through struggle and hard work in all spheres of social life. In his words, self-management underscores the growth of ‘new kinds of communal, cooperative, and collective institutions.’

Self-management

Raymond Williams made self-management a centerpiece of his educational program because he saw is value in promotion equality, justice, participatory democracy and human dignity.

Raymond Williams always believed that education needs to be regarded as a supremely important cultural activity. His writings on education make this abundantly clear. For example, in his early book The Long Revolution he claims that it is unhelpful and counter-productive to discuss education in terms of the transmission of a settled body of knowledge and opinion. It is not a product but a process in which larger contours of culture are given expression.

Education is a site in which cultural meanings are made and unmade. According to Williams’ view of education, has to be understood as a dynamic process which is both the cause and consequence of social change. Indeed, it is a transformative experience. As a consequence, it has the potential for making citizens more active and productive members of society.

Raymond Williams expresses the view that we cannot ‘call an educated system adequate if it leaves any large number of people at a level of general knowledge and culture below that required by a participating democracy and arts dependent on popular support.’ It is important to recognize the fact, he argues, the interaction between education and democracy is not instrumental; education should not be seen as a means to an end, it is not a service designed to satisfy the imperatives of the market.

Williams fervently believes that education implies choice and that it is inseparably linked to questions of values and significances. The choice that he speaks of is not individual but communal and that choices are culturally constructed. In his view, democratic educational institutions have a significant role to play in nurturing the abilities of people to choose intelligently and responsibly.

It is through this means that they would be able to exercise some degree of control over their lives and decision-making processes. So what we see is that for Raymond Williams, education carries a heavy burden of social responsibility.

As I stated earlier, Williams aim was to make education into a facilitator of participatory democracy. He wanted the curriculum to be shaped accordingly. He wished to put down the following as the minimum to aim for every educationally normal child.

Extensive practice in the fundamental languages of English and mathematics.

Environment

General knowledge of ourselves and our environment, taught at the secondary stage not as separate academic discipline but as a general knowledge drawn from the disciplines which clarify at a higher stage

History and criticism of literature, the visual arts, music, dramatic performance, landscape and architecture Extensive practice in democratic procedures, including meetings, negotiations, and the selection of conduct of leaders in democratic organisations.

Introduction to at least one other culture, including its language, history, geography, institutions and arts, to be given in part by visiting and exchange.

In designing the curriculum, Raymond Williams had the following important question in mind. It is a question of whether we can grasp the real nature of our society or whether we persist in social and industrial patterns based on a limited ruling class, a middle professional class, a large operative class, cemented by forces that cannot be challenged and will not be changed.

It is only a question of whether we replace them by a free play of the market or by a public education designed to express and create the values of an educated democracy and a common culture.’ Raymond Williams’ proposals for educational reform in England, when judged in terms of our own special needs and requirements in Sri Lanka, tend to focus on a number of key areas. In the interests of space, let me highlight two of them. And these areas are, to be sure, interconnected. First, his orientation towards general education as a gateway to social justice and participatory democracy is one that we could pursue productively.

Second, his approach to literary education is one that should inspire us greatly. His concept of literary criticism was exegetical and evaluative, textual and contextual. While focusing closely on the words on the page, the intricate verbal weave of a given text, he was also keen to locate texts in their proper historical, social, political contexts.

Contemporary arts

Let us, for example, consider his attitude to the teaching of contemporary arts. In this regard, he makes the following comment. ‘The proper extension of creative practice is direct experience and discussion of al the contemporary arts at their best. The difficulty here is the goldsmith assumption; the idea that education has done its work when it has introduced us to a few classic authors.’ He is not denying that we should acquaint ourselves with as many classical authors as possible. What he is saying is that ‘if we get to know it as a body of classics, we may sometimes confirm what is being taught elsewhere; that the arts are separate, in this case separate in time.’

Raymond Williams stressed the importance of including contemporary texts in the curriculum. He believed that to include contemporary literary texts would have the salutary effect of unmaking the classics and remaking them as novels, poems and plays. He sais that this was especially the case if living writers were invited into the educational process, at all possible stages, to read and discuss their writings.

Similarly, in view of the fact that modern communication technologies have begun to exert such a powerful influence in society, we need to study them carefully. Williams always insisted that communication media have to be studied in terms of the social organisations that give rise to them. Hence, the study of communication in the classroom needs to pay particular attention to this topic

Raymond Williams was promoting a form of critical pedagogy. Hence the idea of criticism, how it should be taught within the walls of educational institutions, was of paramount importance to him. He believed that educational work should be critical of all cultural work. Williams once acutely observed that,’ criticism is certainly essential, but fir a number of reasons we have often done it so badly that there has been real damage.

It is wholly wrong, for example, if education is associated with criticism while the non-educational world is associated with practice, personal experience, direct experience of the arts, understanding of the institutions, should come first.’ What Williams was seeking to establish was that criticism should grow out of each of these kinds of teaching; it would be detrimental to the students if a separation between the two was enforced.

For example, in discussing the standard approaches to the teaching if classics, he says that,’ in teaching the classics we are usually not critical enough. We often substitute a dull and inert appreciation which nobody can go on believing for long. But then in teaching or commenting on all other work, we are usually so confident and so fierce that is difficult to believe that we are the same people.’

He goes on to say that nearly all of us need assistance in interpreting and judging the vast amount of work which comes our way. In education, it is important that we focus on the bad work as well as the good. Traditionally, the assumption has been if one knows the good, one can distinguish the bad. However, that all depends, according to him, ob how well one knows the good.

I have discussed, so far, the features that stand out in Raymond Williams’ approach to education. In the concluding part of this column I wish to discuss what Raymond Williams as an educator should mean to us in Sri Lanka as educators, writers, literary critics and avid readers of literature. In this regard, I would like to make ten quick points.

First, he pointed out that education is not a transparent process and it is deeply embedded in history, social formations, institutional settings and power. In other words he worked towards a critical pedagogy. Second, he saw education as a means of empowering students and urging them to play an active role in the formation of participatory democracies. For this to happen students need t intervene in the education process and their distinctive self-formations. Third, Williams believed that the life experiences of students should be an integral part o the education process and the logical starting point. What this means s that the aims of teaching and the designed curricula should conform to their life experiences.

Fourth, education should pave the way to a democratic public sphere. And this democratic public sphere should promote free, independent, discussion and debate on matters of common interest. In order for education to become an enabler of forging a democratic public sphere teaching should be geared towards the emergence of a common critical vocabulary of analysis. Fifth, education should have as its objectives the promotion of self-reflexivity, critical thinking, promotion of equality and social justice.

This imperative is indeed closely related to the formation of a democratic public sphere that I referenced earlier. Sixth, the interrelationships among education, culture and politics have to be carefully scrutinised and the complexities of these relationships have to be recognised in formulating educational programs.

Education, as traditionally understood, should not be confined to teaching practices alone; it is important to discover the cultural politics involved with such practices. Seventh, education is open-ended, evolving, and no sense of finality marks it. What this means is that both teachers and students need to appreciate its importance as a self-transforming process.

Eighth, critical self-reflexivity should characterise any education system worthy of serious consideration. However, this critical-reflexivity should not end in pessimism or negativity; on the contrary, it should lead to hope. As Raymond William said, education should be a resource of hope. Ninth, education should address the issue of active citizenship.

Social consciousness

The end product of education should be the creation of citizen-subjects who are endowed with a social consciousness and moral imagination. Tenth, it is the function of education to promote modes of knowledge and social practices that encourage critical thinking in students and to invest them with a sense of power and agency that would enable them to play an active role in the transformation of their respective societies.

These ten desiderata are vitally interconnected, and in many cases, shade off into each other in unobtrusive ways. Beneath the busy textures of Williams’ writings one discerns a supremely inquisitive mind and a powerful theoretical imagination. The complex geometry of his thought is an outcome of these endowments. He was always practical and realistic and was not given to hyperbolic amplifications. His writings seem all of a piece as he was able to integrate cogently his early views to his later writings. Raymond Williams continues to be a bright guiding light in British cultural studies and educational endeavors, and we surely can borrow some light from him.

To be continued