A Bad Romance: Hope and Heroism, not Heroes.

I want to respectfully disagree with my former colleague Dr. Maharaj-Sharma on the need for more ‘heroes’ in our school system. There are already sufficient numbers out there doing what heroes do – doing what needs doing with the resources and abilities that they have – generously, altruistically, silently and without recognition. I believe we need to shift the conversation to considering the qualities of heroism or expressions of heroic virtue. My personal position as a scholar is that the hero is an inappropriate archetype and metaphor upon which to found a renewed millennial project for Caribbean Education and Society. It is too close in my opinion to the religious call, one expressed by Fr. Harvey quite recently, on a need for martyrs. I prefer to found my philosophy of education on and in our history, art, and science; our models of resistance, hope and resilience which I find in our maroon heritage and an associated kumbla consciousness with its gesture towards intervulnerability. But I can appreciate the need, especially from those who experienced the tail end of British Colonialism, to begin with the Romantic mythologies of the hero.

Indeed this ground has been well trod by Professor Emeritus of the Institute of Education (London) David Halpin who has argued for the recovery of a Romantic conception of education (see Romanticism and Education: Love, Heroism and Imagination in Pedagogy and Heroism and Pedagogy). By ‘Romantic’ he refers specifically to some of the central elements (as he sees it) of the British literary-historical tradition known as Romanticism. He suggests that recognizing and supporting these conceptions in education might play a role in helping us to recover a sense of hope as educators. While acknowledging the diverse interests of the Romantic period and the ongoing debates within literary criticism he defines the Romantic Vision as “a tradition said to embody a recognizable aesthetic sensibility that centrally attaches great importance to the power of the imagination and the need for spontaneity in thought and action” (p.2). It is to these aesthetic sensibilities: an ideal of love, the heroic, the power of the imagination, and commitment to a rebellious and critical stance that I now turn.

Love for Halpin in the works of the Romantic poets is an overarching and unifying theme. He distinguishes between the different forms of love in their works, namely Eros, “denoting a form of passionate desire of a possessive and sexual nature…that seeks to consume sexually what it passionately desires, in other contexts, like for instance in Plato’s dialogue the Symposium, it provides the initial impetus for an erotically mediated pursuit of the truth – one in which selfish desires are ‘educated’ and ultimately won over in favour of the Good,” and Agape, the self-transcendent form “of caring for the Other that entails a selfless and public-spirited unsparing generosity”. It is this latter form, Agape, that Halpin suggests needs to (re)permeate/reanimate educational discourses and which I believe is the focus of Dr. Maharaj-Sharma’s article though she does not use the term.
Halpin makes a strong case that teachers must be able to find ways to love like this, both for their own well-being and that of their students. He also draws attention to the real difficulty of sustaining such a pedagogical practice and thus the need for “commitment, intimacy and passion” of which passion is seen as the innervating medium that supports others. He cautions against an excess and unalloyed passion (eros). Instead he argues for a passionate teaching that, “places the greatest emphasis, not on charisma, but on a form of earnestness about teaching …[associated with] “enthusiasm, caring commitment and hope . . .; with fairness and understanding . . .; with being close rather than distant; with having a good sense of playfulness; with encouraging students to learn in different ways; with relating learning to experience; with encouraging students to take responsibility for their own learning; . . .; [and] with being knowledgeable about their subject; with creating learning environments that engage students and stimulate in them an excitement to learn”. Such teachers have “a genuine concern for the Truth” [ . . . .] ”which they know is “a passionate business.”
In his description and rationale for a ‘heroic conception’ of teaching he focuses on the element of “daring to struggle for some form of inner authenticity as the basis for personal imaginative freedom” that he sees as another common theme in Romanticism. He draws extensively on the work of Curriculum theorist Kieran Egan who recommends identifying with the transcendent and admirable qualities of the hero. The rationale for this is given as “by associating with whomever or whatever in the world seems to best transcend (the threats posed by external reality and personal circumstances), we too feel some security against them as well, some confidence that we might transcend them also”. This heroizing is meant to be of benefit to teachers as well and leads Halpin to equate heroic teaching of the nature he describes as a vocation. He writes, “such vocationalism requires courage, entailing a willingness by teachers to take risks, sometimes at some cost to themselves… it remains the virtue of heroes. It is also a necessary virtue in teaching. The courageous teacher-hero, on this interpretation, is someone who seeks bravely and disinterestedly to serve the needs of others; who takes moral duty and personal authenticity seriously; and who eschews cowardice in the pursuit of the common good.”

After love and heroism Halpin next focuses on the role and power of imagination in Romanticism and for education. Here he draws extensively on Romantic critic, journalist and essayist William Hazlitt. He draws on Hazlitt’s thesis that, “the human mind is simultaneously ‘sympathetically disinterested’ and ‘autonomously creative’. It is ‘sympathetically disinterested’ in the controversial sense that people, according to Hazlitt, are not inherently selfishly motivated, but rather are as sympathetically interested in the welfare of others as in their own happiness; it is ‘autonomously creative’ in the sense that it is the imaginative master and not - as the empiricists would have us believe - the mechanistic slave of sense impressions”. Indeed, much of the work in positive psychology, the science of human goodness, is lending strong empirical support to Hazlitt’s thesis. For Hazlittit it is the imagination that empowers us to imagine and work towards creating a better future. As I and others have argued repeatedly, the real crisis in education in T&T, aside from incompetency and fixed-mindsetedness, is both a lack of imaginative vision of how it could be otherwise and the socio-cultural inertia that often prevents us from following through on what we know should be done.

Finally Halpin looks to rebellion as a virtue of the Romantic which compels him to a critical stance as a ‘public’ or ‘professional’ intellectual. Here he draws on postcolonial and cultural theorist Edward Said as one embodying the Romantic virtues of rebellion, social critic and public intellectual. Said describes the intellectual as, “…a person who is “set apart, someone who is able to speak the truth to power, a crusty, eloquent, fantastically courageous and angry individual for whom no worldly power is too big and imposing to be criticized and pointedly taken to task…an opponent of consensus and orthodoxy”, acting as “a kind of public memory; to recall what is forgotten or ignored; to connect and contextualise and to generalize from what appear to be the fixed truths…”. Prof. Kenny, smelter activists Vine and Kublalsingh, educator Raymond Hackett and journalist Kevin Baldeosingh meet these criteria as has Lloyd Best and others in the past. Indeed we have a rich tradition of this in the Caribbean but unfortunately we work very hard to discipline our rebellious and unorthodox teachers in primary, secondary and tertiary schools. Let me also be clear that this particular enactment of heroic virtue is difficult and dangerous resulting in exile, ostracism, loneliness, impoverishment and despair – it is not something to be entered into lightly. Heroism is a risky business.

While preparing this response I had occasion to chat with a friend associated with the now grieving and guilt-racked Naparima Girls’ High School community. We discussed the general lack of courage among students, teachers, staff and parents in failing to say what needed to be said to each other and indeed in not being able to listen to one another. As she said to me, “many people don’t speak up because they are afraid, afraid of subtle victimization.” I wonder whether some will manage to find their heroic voices in the new academic year as they work through this trauma?

A Romantic conception of education (teaching and learning) which acknowledges rebellion and criticism as virtues is perhaps a more open and desirable one than that which currently prevails. Such a view helps teachers to appropriate and value the agency that they always already have though which may be at times diminished by forms of pedagogical and institutional control. It is a perspective that adds to the discourses on teacher empowerment and critical pedagogy.

Halpin’s arguments and examples elaborate Maharaj-Sharma’s musings and calls us then to consider what we have lost and to consider what is likely to be gained by adopting a Romantic conception of education in which love, imagination, heroism, rebellion and criticism are all valued. He offers that “Romance is a necessary condition for being hopeful in education” (p.15) and that we may need “…somewhat against the grain of events, and maybe in order to challenge them - to restore to critical consciousness some of the ideals, values and beliefs of the Romantic Period, many of which in any event interpenetrate unconsciously our thinking today about education, but not in ways that sufficiently influence for the better our actions within it.” As educator Ivan Illich has argued, organizations, systems and institutions have futures, but only people hope. Hope, it appears, is a scarce resource in education at present, scarce but not yet exhausted.

While I have taken pains to be sensitive to the Romantic values and palpable despair that underlies Maharaj-Sharma’s and other teachers’ desires for heroes, the desire to be saved, note how it fits right in with an patriarchal infantilizing damsel-in-distress trope – the damsel being the feminized profession of school teaching – I want to re-iterate that for me the British and European hero motif and narrative perhaps is not the most appropriate one for our situation as it continues to limit and locate the locus of action in a mercenary individual (who does not necessarily live happily-ever-after) independent of the actions of a community that is itself transformed and self-transforming. Indeed, the hero brand today is too easily co-opted into a marketable fetishizable commodity and transformed by the cult of celebrity and narcissism. It is quite likely that we will never come to know of most heroic actions – those that result from the multitude of everyday people doing what they know to be good and right with love, imagination and courage. We do need heroic actions, the virtues associated with heroism (love, imagination, care, courage) available to all of us. As I said earlier, I find my models among the maroons.

Earl McKenzie, in Philosophy in the West Indian novel has recently thrown out a challenge for Caribbean philosophers to articulate our own aims for education. I too want to end with a focused challenge to Dr. Maharaj-Sharma and the staff at UWI and UTT – will you provide the necessary emotional, legal, and financial supports for the type of heroic teachers and teaching you are advocating? If not, then why should anyone choose the path of the hero which comes too closely to resemble that of the martyr? Have you chosen it and followed through on it for yourselves?