'Thinking cities'

I came across this thought-provoking video, called 'Thinking Cities', on ReadWriteWeb - it provides a completely different but connected take on the last post about life in the East End of London in the first decades of the National Health Service.  It is the second in a series funded by Ericsson.  Here is the first:

http://www.youtube.com/embed/R7cuatm_bqw

The point made about City Mayors being the most important politicians, for better or worse, in terms of addressing most of the world's problems, echoes similar arguments made, from quite different perspectives, by commentators such as Ken Worpole and Umberto Eco: cities are likely to be the most important political entities of the future;  it seems clear that the 20th century trend towards ever-larger trans-national governmental entities, such as the UN or the EU, is slowing or even halting, not least as a result of the global banking crisis.  This situation creates both dangers and opportunities

The Stockholm 'connected' and energy-efficient housing project is interesting to me not because it embodies a particularly advanced set of technical specifications but because it is a project clearly led by the city council.  It's hard to see how a wholly or very largely privatised system of local governance would be likely to lead such a project, certainly not if it was aimed at anybody except the very rich.  You can't imagine Bovis making such a development in Mexico City or Nairobi, for example - it would be too risky for a company which after all, has no essential commitment to any particular local area.  Or am I being too cynical?

Interesting too that the 'thinking' projects that have produced these videos are sponsored by Ericsson.  Or perhaps not....

The East End of London in the post-war period

Flower-seller, E1, 1959 (John Claridge)

From another wonderful post by the 'Gentle Author' of the Spitalfields Life blog, here are some of the photographs of John Claridge, whose work obviously deserves to be better known.  There are more pictures on Spitalfields Life at http://spitalfieldslife.com/2012/02/19/john-claridges-east-end/

Crane and seagull, E16, 1960 (John Claridge)

Mass X Ray, E14, 1966 (John Claridge)

At the window, E1, 1963 (John Claridge)



The great danger with photographs is that they have a tendency to romanticize the past (though strictly speaking this tendency is in our reading of them rather than inherent in the photographs themselves).  Claridge's pictures, especially those of East End people, of which he was one, resist this danger. 

Because of a coincidence of timing, it is interesting to compare them to the visual values of the recent television series about midwives working in Poplar just after the war, which I very much enjoyed and was at times moved by.  The series was set in 1957, and was based on Call the Midwife (London: Merton Books 2002), the diaries of Jennifer Worth.  The TV series, written by Heidi Thomas, probably does romanticize the East End in visual terms: the main characters in it are the nurses themselves, the nuns they live with, and the local doctor and policeman.  Other local people only really appear as extras, or as those whose experiences of childbirth provide the focus, usually just for one episode, of the midwives' work.  Poplar looks a little too neat and tidy, there is no fog, and buildings are only falling down as a  result of bomb damage.  This isn't to criticize the series too much: some of these incidental characters' stories were very harrowing.  But its overall mood, as I read it at least, was one of hope and positive social change: one of the most important jobs for midwives and other care-sector workers (they would never have referred to themselves in this way!) at this time was to convince many people that the National Health Service really was for them.  One of the most touching stories was about a woman who had a slight deformity in her hips and had had 3 stillborn children as a result: with the help of a relatively straightforward procedure for the first time available to her at the London Hospital she was finally able to have a healthy child.

Claridge's wonderful pictures are different: they appear, they do not speak.  If they have a message, it is anything but clear.  The past is just the past, it is indeed 'another country': we have both gained and lost in leaving it behind.

Time for Outrage! and Stephane Hessel

Stephane Hessel is 94.  He has recently published a short pamphlet supporting the Occupy movement, linking its energy and values to those of the Free French resistance movement towards the end of World War 2.  He argues that those French people who refused to join with the Vichy France government in collaborating with the Nazis after the occupation of France, had to create a new set of values to inspire and energise the rebuilding of French civil society after the war.  He argues that these values are still relevant today, and are similar to those espoused by the Occupy movement.  This pamphlet has sold over 3.5 million copies worldwide since it was published last year.  It is called in English Time for Outrage, in French Indignez-vous! and in Spanish Indignaos!

The story of Stephane Hessel's life is so extraordinary that there is a danger that it may detract from the importance of his message in this pamphlet, so I won't say any more about this right now.  On the other hand, his story provides this message with unusual moral authority.  His integrity, authenticity and personal modesty are evident in a recent interview with Democracy Now! which can be viewed in full at: http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/10/10/stphane_hessel_on_occupy_wall_street_find_the_time_for_outrage_when_your_values_are_not_respected

Hessel S (2010): Time for Outrage! London: Quartet books

To create is to resist

To resist is to create

How many Nuclear Explosions have their been since 1945?

The answer is 2053, or possibly 2055.  The league table of countries responsible is as follows:

USA 1032
USSR 715
France 210
UK 45
China 45
India 4
Pakistan 2
North Korea 2 (unconfirmed)

A much more powerful way to understand these data has been created by Isao Hashimoto, which consists of a time-lapse map of the world recording the time and location of each individual explosion and tallying the totals for each country cumulatively as the months pass, accompanied by oddly sad and emotive bleeps for each one, in different tones for each country.   Did you know that the last British nuclear test took place as recently as 1991?  Or that the only continents not to have experienced nuclear explosions are Greenland, Antarctica, and South America?

I came across this in an article by Dan Rowinski on the ReadWriteWeb site, 10th February 2011, at http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/video_artists_time-lapse_map_of_the_worlds_2053_nu.php?utm_source=ReadWriteWeb+Newsletters&utm_campaign=1714b79d29-RWWDailyNewsletter&utm_medium=email

Rowinski wites:

Hashimoto is a curator at the Lalique Museum in Hakone, Japan. The video was created in 2003 as a series expressing Hashimoto's view of, "the fear and the folly of nuclear weapons." The video represents nuclear tests with a colored dot and a beep on a map. It starts slow in 1945, showing a world view of a couple flashes in the southwestern United States before zooming in on the two bombs dropped in Japan. The video then pans out and continues for the duration from a birds-eye view of the world. The climax comes between 1955 and 1970 as the Soviet Union joined the U.S. as a nuclear power and England, France, India and Pakistan eventually joined the arms race. The U.S. had the most nuclear tests, by a large margin, with most occurring in the southwest. The Soviet Union performed most of its tests in and around what is now Kazakhstan and the Lake Balkhash region with many also coming in northern Siberia and Nordic border with Finland. When the British entered the nuclear race, their first tests were in the desolate regions of west Australia. The French were several years behind but made up for coming late by being very active with nuclear tests in the South Pacific, the most vast and uninhabited region on Earth. India and Pakistan tested nuclear bombs mostly in the northern section of the Indian subcontinent. China tested many of its nuclear weapons at Lop Nur in the northwestern part of the country. Hashimoto's data is based on research from the Swedish Defense Research Establishment and Stockholm International Peace Institute. It does not include two supposed nuclear tests by North Korea in 1998 that may or may not have actually happened. Pakistan was the last to test nuclear bombs in 1998.

"This piece of work is a bird's eye view of the history by scaling down a month length of time into one second. No letter is used for equal messaging to all viewers without language barrier. The blinking light, sound and the numbers on the world map show when, where and how many experiments each country have conducted. I created this work for the means of an interface to the people who are yet to know of the extremely grave, but present problem of the world" Isao Hashimoto, quoted by Rowinski.

The video is hypnotic, chilling, and thought-provoking.  You can see it here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LLCF7vPanrY

Found object (on the web that is)

I suspect that the ordinariness of the elements that make up this beautiful construction, and their obvious association with childhood, as well as the complete absence of any utilitarian content, might appeal to Grayson Perry.  Not sure what Clarkson would make of it.

See http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2011/12/rainbow-toy-car-installation-made-from-2500-cars/?src=footer

Nothing is original

I'll let this speak for itself.  It means a little more to me because someone in a shop in Hackney once asked me if I was Jim Jarmusch! 

Thanks to Catherine Mary Hayes for this!

What's your philosophy type?

Found this on the Big Ideas site (http://bigi.org.uk/):

Do a simple test and find out which of the six major schools of Greek philosophy which emerged in the 4th century BCE you would belong to.  The result is presented as the name of the leader of your school, who is described as your 'ancient Athenian guru'!  Watch a short video about your 'guru'!  They should make it a TV programme.....

My guru, according to Mark Vernon's site, is Zeno of Citium, usually accredited as the founder of Stoicism. 

I think I'm happy with this: I think Montaigne would have described himself as a Stoic.  I'm certainly glad to find that my guru isn't Plato.  I was observing a trainee teacher this afternoon, teaching the ideas of conservatism as part of an Access Course, and as one of the students pointed out, Plato was certainly some sort of conservative!  I found out from Mark Vernon's video that the name Stoicism comes from the ancient Greek word for 'shop'.  This is either because Zeno's gang met in a shop, and/or because they were a down-to-earth bunch and thought that philosophers should discuss down to earth subjects.  This relates well to the Big Ideas site's commitment to 'pub philosophy': see

http://bigi.org.uk/2007/02/28/a-pub-philosophy-manifesto/

Here, according to wikipaedia, is something of Zeno's epistemology.  He suggests that there are four stages of the apprehension of knowledge: perception (symbolised by an open hand), assent (an open hand with the fingers closed a little), comprehension (the hand closed like a fist) and finally knowledge, possessed only by wise people (the second hand closed tightly round the fist of the first hand).  This sounds suspiciously similar to the image of knowledge as birds in a cage that need to be caught, and wisdom consisting of having caught many of them, demolished comprehensively by Socrates in one of Plato's dialogues.  Presumably Zeno's ethics are more sophisticated, as Stoicism was among the most important Greek influences on the Romans and through them, on Western European culture after the Renaissance.

Two interesting and neglected writers on education

Karl Popper 1902-94

Who were the mystery philosophers whose quotations I listed in two recent posts?  The first was Karl Popper, known mostly as a philosopher of science, who died in 1994, and the second was Tyrrell Burgess, a teacher, activist, and writer on the British education system, who died in 2009.  Until recently I had no idea that Popper had written about education - indeed, that he formulated a distinct and very interesting 'Evolutionary' theory of learning, some idea of which can be seen from the quotations I used.  Burgess was influenced powerfully by Popper while teaching at the London School of Economics, and he tried to put Popper's theories into practice when developing a teacher training programme based on Popper's ideas, at North East London Polytechnic (NELP), in the 1970s and 80s.  Burgess, of whom I have been unable to find a picture, became Professor of the Philosophy of Social Institutions at the University of East London, which NELP was transformd into in 1987.  He was a strong advocate of comprehensive schools, and a lifelong opponent of selection.

I came across them both recently in a terrific new book aiming to spread their ideas about the organisation of education, and in particulr about approaches to curriculum.  This is Learning, Teaching and Education Research in the 21st Century: an evolutionary analysis of the role of teachers, by Joanna Swann (Continuum 2012).  It is a very clearly-written account of Popper's evolutionary theory of knowledge and education, and of its implications for practice.  Popper argues that although the objective world exists, we can only ever have imperfect knowledge of it, and learning (indeed the practice of living) consists of a continuous process of identifying problems, creating hypotheses for addressing or solving these problems, and then testing the hypotheses to find out whether or not they are correct.  Our hypotheses can be found to be false (if our results contradict them), but they can never be proved to be true, as it is always possible that contradictory evidence will be found in the future.  Learning is therefore a process of identifying as many false theories as possible, and coming up with as many hypotheses that have not yet been proved false, as possible.

The implications of this are radical, as quotations like these demonstrate:

The process of learning, of the growth of subjective knowledge, is always fundamentally the same. It is imaginative criticism.

There are no subject matters, no branches of learning - or rather, of inquiry: there are only problems, and the urge to solve them.

Education should be organised wholly around, not the notional 'transmission' of a fixed and agreed body of knowledge (which Popper argues hardly exists anyway), but around the skills of perceiving the world as a series of problems, creating sensible theories and hypotheses for solving these problems, and then testing these theories and hypotheses.  In a word, there should be no pre-conceived curricula, and education should be organised around collaborative research projects, on subjects and topics chosen by students.  The teachers' role is to facilitate the selection of suitable projects and problems, and to guide students in their researches.

I really like these ideas, which align nicely with my thoughts about craft and professional learning, and also with the best research findings on effective learning, which emphasise the importance of students' motivation and engagement with the content of learning, and of being active rather than passive in the learning process.  In particular, Joanna Swann has a chapter using this theoretical framework to argue against prescribed curricula in schools and colleges, the paradigm of this being the English National Curriculum for schools.  It so happens that I am  in the middle of teaching a module on curriculum theory and design at this very moment, and I am going to give this chapter to my students: it is directly relevant to their assignment.

I am embarrassed that I didn't know about this significant body of theory before, though I have an idea that Popper, judging by his style of writing, may have made himself pretty unpopular with his academic colleagues - he seems in the couple of chapters I have recently read to be trying to pick fights with people perceived as critics rather than colleagues, in almost every line!

I want to think some more about Joanna Swann's book before posting some more on it.  In particular I want to compare the ideas in it with those of Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, fast and slow (Allen Lane 2011), which I have read about half of so far.  This is a book about the psychology of decision-making, how we learn to make better decisions, and it also takes an evolutionary perspective.  So I mean to write some more about this sometime soon.

One of those strange coincidences, when something strikes you, and then more or less at the same time gets echoed from a completely different angle, making you think that maybe it wasn't a coincidence (thought this is very likely indeed to be a false conclusion).  I was checking out books written by Tyrrell Burgess, and found that, inspired like me by Ambrose Bierce, he published a book called The Devil's Dictionary of Education!  (See my post of 21st October last year, not that I've done much about it since!)  Though this is only a coincidence, it suggests to me that Tyrrell Burgess was my kind of person!  Here is a brilliant joke from it:

Art History: n. numbing by painters (credited to M.Burgess)

It would be tempting but lazy to give up the idea of collecting my own collection of 'Devil's definitions' about education and just cite examples from Burgess's book.  What I will do is think about my own and then see if (a) he has included the same word or phrase at all and (b) whether his take on it is different in ny way.  It occurs to me that some such words might also appear in Keywords by Raymond Williams (OUP 1985), and if they do I will compare Williams's definition also.

Public Art in Hackney: some examples

Another mystery philosopher of education

Here are some more provocative quotations from yet another mystery thinker about education, another whose work should be better known in my view:

All knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is provisional, and always will be. We cannot prove that what we know is true, and it may turn out to be false.  The best we can do is justify our preference for one theory rather than another.....of course, we assume the 'truth' of our existing knowledge for practical purposes and are quite ready to do so; but we must be ready for it to be superseded....we cannot be sure that we have the truth: we can, however, systematically eliminate error.  the way we eliminate error is by testing.

Of course there have been many people with a sense of unease about the practice of education.  most important, there have been many teachers who have either instinctively or after worrying thought tried to organise learning rather than teaching.  They have encouraged 'discovery methods', project work and independent learning.  But they have been under attack, partly because these methods still sit uneasily in the rest of the system (how, for example, does one examine such work?) and partly because they have been unable to give as coherent an intellectual account of themselves as is claimed by traditional academics. This insecurity is no longer justified.  It is the traditional academic practice which needs to be defended.

What we have, in fact, is a continuum of learning, whose logic is the same, from the new-born babe (indeed, from the amoeba) to the research worker on the frontiers of knowledge.  Each is engaged in the formulation of problems, in solving them and in testing the solutions.  Most people will formulate problems that have been formulated many times before.  Their proposed solutions will be familiar; their tests commonplace.  But they will learn by this activity.  They will not learn better or faster if we parcel up received solutions to problems formulated by others: indeed this is an anti-learning process.  Moreover it inhibits the possibility of progress, because it is always possible that someone will formulate a common problem differently, will propose a different solution or a more effective test.

What is important is not a particular fact or even a particular ordered collection of facts, but method.  It is method rather than information which gives mastery, and it is method which must be the chief business of education.

The presentation of knowledge as bodies of organised facts is a way of ensuring its unhelpfulness to most people.

Since criticism is of the essence of the method, education must offer opportunities for students to be critical and to use criticism. 

Clue: All these quotations come from the same book, published in 1977.  They still appear to me to represent a radical critique of the basic assumptions of our entire education system, perhaps even more so now than when they were written.  Any ideas?  Answers in a day or two.

Mystery educational philosopher

All these quotes are from the same thinker, someone I didn't realise had written about education.  I will shortly be posting a review of the book I discovered them in.  Can you recognise the author?

I may be wrong, and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth.

We do not discover new facts or new effects by copying them, or by inferring them inductively from observation, or by any other method of instruction by the environment.

(Picture by Chris Bradey)

We learn only through trial and error.  Our trials....are always our hypotheses.  They stem from us, not from the external world.  All we learn from the external world is that some of our efforts are mistaken.

The process of learning, of the growth of subjective knowledge, is always fundamentally the same.  It is imaginative criticism.

Institutions for the selection of the outstanding can hardly be devised.  Institutional selection may work quite well for such purposes as Plato had in mind, namely for arresting change.  But it will never work well if we demand more than that, for it will always tend to eliminate initiative and originality, and, more generally, qualities which are unusual and unexpected.  It has been said, only too truly, that Plato was the inventor of both our secondary schools and our universities.  I do not know a better argument for an optimistic view of mankind, no better proof of their indestructible love for truth and decency, of their originality and stubbornness and health, than the fact that this devastating system of education has not utterly ruined them.

There are no subject matters, no branches of learning - or rather, of inquiry: there are only problems, and the urge to solve them.

If I thought of a future, I dreamt of one day founding a school in which young people could learn without boredom, and would be stimulated to pose problems and discuss them; a school in which no unwanted answers to unasked questions would have to be listened to; in which one did not study for the sake of passing examinations.

[If] we produce many competing ideas, and criticise them severely, we may, if we are lucky, get nearer to the truth.  This method is the method of conjectures and refutations: it is the method of taking many risks, by producing many (competing) hypotheses; of making many mistakes; and of trying to correct or eliminate some of these mistakes by a critical discussion of the competing hypotheses.

Does this last one give it away?

The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman 2

I was with two friends from outside London, who were looking for an interesting exhibition to go to, so I ended up going to see the Grayson Perry again!  This was a great thing to do - it's the sort of show where you notice different things if you go more than once.  Once again I took rather random notes about anything that struck me, and here they are (quotes from GP in italics):

Do not look too hard for meaning here, I am not a historian, I am an artist, that's all you need to know.

Deep in the mountains of my mind there is a sacred place where there is a monument to skill

Journeys as pilgrimages

Early English motorcycle helmet: title of a GP piece that looks like something vaguely Viking from 1200 years ago that's just been excavated, displayed next to the helmet GP made for his trip round Europe with Alan Measles.

If Alan measles had been around in ancient Egypt he would have hung out with Bes.

A walk in Bloomsbury, an encounter with the world: 'the journey has become a tired metaphor of reality television, describing a transformative experience.'

Ritual can become stultified if not kept relevant to its time and context

Shrines - in your pocket, in a corner of your house, or by a roadside, portable.

I can make art with hardly any money and on the kitchen table
A forge for turning old people into young, Russian print 1800

Fallen giant - cf Jerusalem, I wanted to make something that was about England

The Rosetta vase, yellow, covered with incantations (see picture in my earlier post)

Boli or power figure, from Mali, raw potency, pared down, apparently modern

Everything in the BM was contemporary once. The frivolous now, companion to Rosetta. I wanted it to have the look of a mystical diagram whilst the content consisted of banalities and buzzwords of Feb 2011.

Hello kitty hand towel pilgrimage souvenir

We trust maps. I like maps of feelings, beliefs and the irrational, they use our trust of maps to persuade us that there might be some truth in their beauty.

The wheel of life Tibet 1900. A map and self-help chart combined

Map of truths and beliefs. The entire landscape is a graveyard

Pilgrims travel light so the souvenir may be only a badge, a photo or a signature.



Map based on Bunyan's Pilgrims Progress. 1800.

Confucius

Votive stupas

Our father and mother - pilgrims made of iron

Tate Modern is the cathedral of the cult of modern art.

Relics

The chevalier d'Eon de Beaumont, 1728 - 1810.  French diplomat, spy, soldier and Freemason whose first 49 years were spent as a man, and whose last 33 years were spent as a woman. Died in England, buried in St Pancras churchyard.

Journeyman cabinet maker carrying the tools of his trade

Sheela-na-gig. PJ Harvey album of the same name

 
Do go and see this exhibition, whatever your craft, it's been extended for another month until February 26th.

This is the link to the British Museum teaser about the show: http://bri.mu/r0v6jH

Here's a link to the notes I took on my first visit to the exhibition: http://jayoptimistic.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/grayson-perry-exhibition-tomb-of.html

Standardisation in the work of Teaching and Learning

Forcing everyone to teach by the rules does not improve the “bad teachers”– it only hobbles the good ones (Papert 1990)

I came across this quote from Seymour Papert in Joe Bower's post at http://coopcatalyst.wordpress.com/2011/03/13/the-illusion-of-standardization/. He sees standardisation in education as one of the ways in which mass production techniques are being applied to the work of teachers. The justification for this is 'fairness': the argument is that everyone should have an equal experience of their education, otherwise something isn't fair. The fact that the quality of an experience - how it is felt by two different people - is completely immeasurable, and actually is a completely meaningless idea, is forgotten because of our fear of being unfair. Sadly, the price for alleviating this fear is 'dumbing down' to the minimum level set by the standards, exactly as Papert pointed out more than 20 years ago. Supporters of standards argue that because there are so many bad teachers, we have to have standards to ensure that teaching quality is consistent. This is another concept, along with standardisation, that needs looking at carefully by every teacher.

Joe also includes a link to an article by Maja Wilson, who tells the story of her son choosing a book to read and taking it to school, but being told off because he hadn't chosen the book from the 'levelled book tubs'.

'Standardisation' in education is a paradigm indicator of what Donald Schon, nearly 30 years ago, described as 'technical-rationality':

In the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground where practitioners can make effective use of research-based theory and technique, and there is the swampy lowland where situations are confusing ‘messes’ incapable of technical solution. The difficulty is that problems of high ground, however great their technical interest, are often relatively unimportant to clients or the larger society, while in the swamp are the problems of the greatest human concern (Schön 1983 (1991), p42).
Schön uses the term ‘technical rationality’ for what he describes as


the dominant epistemology of practice...which has most powerfully shaped both our thinking about the professions and the institutional relations of research, education and practice – professional activity consists in instrumental problem solving made rigorous by the application of scientific theory and technique (Schön 1983, p21).

He presents a compelling, almost overwhelming argument that the dominance of this version of epistemology in the theories of learning, research and professional practice has obscured the real importance of alternative, more expansive and provisional knowledges, resulting in the diminution of professional expertise and creativity in the design of a wide range of projects, and in addressing major social and educational problems. Unfortunately, his work appeared in the period just before two momentous shifts in Western politics and culture: the advent of computers on every workdesk, and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. These shifts gave a renewed and powerful impetus first to neo-liberal economic policies and secondly to a new wave of technical-rational social policy fuelled by the new capacity of organisations both public and private, to collect and crunch data. Arguments such as Schön’s for a more nuanced and complex appreciation of the work of professionals of all kinds were swept aside in the rush towards the ‘Audit Society’ – a paradigm of technical rationality, ‘audit’ being seen in strictly well-defined, contractual and numerical terms (Power 1999). This mode of thought is still dominant, probably to a greater degree than when Schön’s work was published nearly 30 years ago, and professional practice is even more clearly subject, though not unresisting, to its sway, not just in the structure, organisation and curricula of universities, as Schön demonstrated in 1983, but nowadays also in social, educational and economic policy, at least in the UK and the USA, where it has become an explicit element of the philosophies of every major political party.

As a result of this continuing dominance, the situation of professionals in every field has become much more problematic than when Schön was writing. They are far less trusted, they are less autonomous in practice, early ideals have been watered down, they are subject to various versions of ‘performativity’, the ethical issues they face are far more complex.  But the most important consequence of this situation is that the work of dedicated, thoughtful and hard-working teachers is undermined, with obvious consequences for learners of all kinds.

Papert. S. (1990, July). Perestroika and Epistemological Politics. Speech presented at the World Conference on Computers in Education. Sydney, Australia

Power, M. (1999). The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Schön, D. (1983, 1991 edition). The reflective Practitioner: how professionals think in action. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd

Professionalism as profound involvement with material rather than detachment

Source: Hubblesite.org

I just read the latest post on Solid Gold Creativity, entitled Possibility 3, which includes a story about a singer who, in order to achieve a great interpretation of a Schubert song, discovered - with help from a coach - that he needed to 'stop taking himself so Goddam seriously'. He needed to lose himself in the material, to give himself up to it, to submit to its demands. This language is not too strong: on the contrary, it is precise. The craftworker aims for a moment to become one with his/her material. This is exactly what I mean in my analysis of craft when I argue that the craftworker's identity is completely bound up with their work, and that consequently their work truly and uniquely reflects the person they are. We talk of a singer 'interpreting' the song, with the connotation that every interpretation is unique (for better or worse!). But even to say this plays down the active role of the material in shaping the identity of the craftworker too - every piece of work they produce changes them, makes them the person they are, becomes part of their lived experience and their identity.

In the same way, we can say that teachers are formed by their students, provided they allow themselves to be so formed, provided they don't take themselves too seriously.

For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry

The wonderful Spitalfields Life blog does it again! I know of this poem, written around 1760 by Christopher Smart, but I had no idea that he probably wrote it while confined inside the St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics, where he was first described as 'curable' and later as 'incurable'. This institution, according to 'the gentle author' of the blog, stood where the CoOp and Argos are today, on Old St.

The post tells the sad story of Smart's life, and publishes the whole heart-warming poem.  The gentle author wonders whether Smart, known to many as 'Kit', might have seen an image of himself in Jeoffry which may have helped him rise above the 'tyranny of his circumstances'.  Certainly we can all relate immediately to the poem.  The blog post is at: http://spitalfieldslife.com/jeoffry-2/

Paul Bommer, a friend of 'the gentle author' of Spitalfields Life, has produced a beautiful and witty poster, parts of which are shown here, illustrating every line of the poem (see http://spitalfieldslife.bigcartel.com/product/for-i-will-consider-my-cat-jeoffry/).  If anyone very generous wants to give me the perfect Christmas present, this is it!

Note that Bommer has put the cat into a frame alongside a bust of Montaigne (the main inspiration for Optimistic but Sceptical).  This is a coincidence, but absolutely appropriate, for one of Montaigne's most famous quotations is:  'When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her.'   He was clearly also a close observer of cats, and would I'm sure have been very amused by Smart's poem.  There's an interesting book to be written on humanists and cats: or perhaps a bigger one on the different animal companions preferred by different kinds of philosopher.  Did Diderot have a cat?  We know Nietzsche was moved, possibly to madness, by the sight of a horse being whipped.  Did Kant take a dog with him when he went on his walks in Konigsberg at exactly the same time every day?

Any more information on this vital question will be very gratefully received, and published here.  In the meantime, look up Spitalfields Life, read For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry, and glow inside....while shedding a sad tear for Kit Smart.