Article
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Education
6 min read

Shouldn’t you be in school?

Beyond headlines about school refusers and ghost children, lies a challenge to adult notions of schooling. Henna Cundill unpacks the issue, inspired, in part, by fish.
A school of tropical fish swims to the right, while one swims to the left.
A school of tropical fish off the Maldives.

The squeaky black shoes are back in the hall, and by now all the white polo-shirts in the land (except aged 4-5, slim-fit) have been snaffled by harassed mums and dads. Yes, it is that time of year again – the time for newspaper editors to dredge up some statistics about the rising number of “school refusers” – anxious young people whose squeaky shoes and white polo shirts are looking set to never leave the house.  

The numbers are “spiralling” frets the Guardian, and the Daily Mail asks “Are you raising a ‘ghost child’?” Forth come the stock images of a sulky teenage girl pulling the duvet over her face, or a young boy with an oversized backpack and hands clamped firmly over his ears. A parent, frowning, is quoted as saying that the school isn’t doing enough. A headteacher, eyebrows knitted, says how difficult it is without the support and cooperation of the parents. Then everybody shakes their heads and blames the pandemic. 

In my time as a School Chaplain, before the pandemic, I saw how truly awful school refusal is – for everyone involved. Beneath the covers, underneath the backpack, there is actually no “refusal” of anything – in fact, there is a campaign to get rid of this term, which I heartily support. Refusal implies there is a choice, but when a young person feels so overwhelmingly anxious and afraid, there is no choice for them, other than fight, flight, or freeze. Parents and caregivers feel judged, teachers are largely helpless. Social workers, when they get involved, quickly feel like they are the enemy of absolutely everyone involved. Surrounding any long-term school refuser there is often a hot mess of frustrated adults, and underneath the frustration, sadness.  

No Scouts, no community choir, not even traipsing down to the park to hang out informally with their peers. Instead, anxiety traps them into the perceived safety of home. 

Why sadness? Because we know that, regardless of our views on the importance of cookie-cutter educational attainments, no young person should be isolated. Even families who are committed and evangelistic about home-schooling will also schedule social activities for their children, be it membership of various clubs and organisations or group sessions of learning with other home-schooled kids. But the school refusers I have known have typically also refused anything like that. No Scouts, no community choir, not even traipsing down to the park to hang out informally with their peers. Instead, anxiety traps them into the perceived safety of home, that one tiny corner of the world where they have a sure sense of belonging and some modicum of control.  

With the idea of “belonging” in mind, perhaps it is helpful to think about what a school actually is. The word school is multi-faceted in meaning. In nature, it denotes a group of fish, all swimming together. Such behaviour would seem counter-intuitive, since it means that all the fish are then competing for the same food or other resources. But ask any fish and it will tell you that being part of the group is itself a resource, enhancing their ability to find food and to protect themselves from predators. We could put this a more familiar way: a school is where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  

There’s also another meaning to the word school – groups of creatives or philosophical thinkers whose styles and methods influence and complement each other, e.g., “His paintings are those of the Impressionist school.” We can see how, in these schools, people spark off one another, constantly developing and refining their own work in response to the work of others. Those with greater skill and experience mentor those who are just beginning. In this respect, we could say that a school is where people can push the boundaries of human creativity and knowledge.   

Since the ancient days, when learners gathered around the Greek philosophers, first to listen, then to discuss, and then to refine ideas, we have gathered our young people into schools for the purpose of educating them. We have long acknowledged that the best learning is a group activity which takes place over time. This is why home schoolers also schedule the clubs and activities – not just because children need friends (although that is important) but because there is a particular “other” kind of human progress that happens when we have to rub along with other people. When learners are placed in groups, ideas can be tested, boundaries can be overcome, creativity meets with critique - the whole quickly becomes greater than the sum of its parts.  

You may notice that many schools promote themselves as being a “learning community” or a “family.” It’s not just about being twee – research shows that promoting a sense of belonging reduces the amount of school refusal and non-attendance. We know that belonging matters, as Belle Tindall has recently discussed, and that a sense of belonging can impact our health and even our mortality. (“Well, I told you so!” says the fish.)  

This was something the early Christians knew too. In the first few decades after Jesus’s life and ministry they gathered in groups to pray and to discuss, just like those earlier followers of Plato and Aristotle had done. There was an eagerness to learn from those who had heard Jesus’ teaching first hand, and to develop and refine their understanding of what that teaching could mean in practice. It was a school, although they called it a church – or strictly speaking an ecclesia in the Greek, which just means a gathering of people.  

In the ecclesia there was good natured debate, but also some spicy disputes and arguments, along with a lot of discussion about who was “in” and who was “out” - something which is also a hot topic in the school playgrounds of today. Into that context, Paul (one of the first leaders of the ecclesia) wrote that the church was a bit like a human body, in which:  

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” 

His point was that belonging is about knowing not just that you belong but that you are needed. In a human body, different parts have different roles, and Paul also asks his readers to consider this point:  

“If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be?”  

I have seen that schools do often try very, very hard to communicate to young people that they belong. But, shackled to the syllabi and never more than a few short months away from the next round of exams or individualised assessments, it’s much harder for schools to show young people that they are needed. With our present system, how can we show young people that, even if they are not predicted to be the student in the class who gets straight A’s, their presence there in the group and their role in the learning process is vital, and contributes to the learning of others? 

When it comes to the presence of absence among our young people, schools have often gone as far as they can practicably go, as have parents, as have social workers. And the young people themselves? Well, they are stuck – biologically their only options are fight, flight, or freeze.  

So that leaves us, the society that over-emphasises individualised achievement, that glorifies celebrity and individual success. In adulthood we so quickly forget how to “do” school, how to model it to our young people, swimming all together in a way designed to promote human knowledge, protect each other from danger or even just to ensure that everyone gets fed. No wonder our young people absorb a sense that their presence isn’t needed, when in so many areas of life it’s every fish for themselves. 

As adults, perhaps we should be asking ourselves the question: why aren’t we in school?          

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Comment
Digital
Football
Sport
6 min read

Fed up with today’s football? Blame this passion killer

How the beautiful game became boring

Sam Tomlin is a Salvation Army officer, leading a local church in Liverpool where he lives with his wife and children.

An AI image of apathetic football players being watched by dis-spirited fans.
Nick Jones/Midjourney AI.

The football season has begun. And with it, the usual rigmarole of adverts, fantasy football and over-priced shirts. But this season has a slightly different feel to it. Perhaps it is the obscene - and record - amount of money that was spent in the transfer window (benefitting the biggest clubs), or the sour taste of the Isak saga between Newcastle and Liverpool.

Or maybe there is just a malaise with the game that has been growing for years and is now perceptible just below the surface. Friends and family tell me they have lost interest in football, echoing the words of former Chelsea and England player John Terry who recently made headlines by lambasting the state of the modern game as ‘boring’ . The tendency for one team to defend while a more technically gifted and drilled team tries to break them down means ‘You don't see many shots,’ according to Terry. 

His thoughts reminded me of comments made by pundit Gary Neville a couple of months ago after a dull 0-0 draw between Manchester United and Manchester City: 

‘This robotic nature of not leaving our positions, being micro-managed within an inch of our lives, not having any freedom to take a risk to go and try and win a football match is becoming an illness in the game'. 

Neville and Terry are referring to the style of play inaugurated by Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola who has undoubtedly revolutionized how football is played in the last decade. The style is geared towards complete control and domination, ironing out any potential errors and minimising risk. It is statistics and data driven, with managers and coaching staff constantly looking at iPads during matches and clubs employing data analysts. 

This strategy has of course been wildly successful for Man City in recent years. I don’t think these former players are contesting these remarkable achievements or that this style of football can’t be inspiring and entertaining when executed by players at the top of their game. But because it has become such a dominant way of playing, worse players and teams feel that they have no option but to mimic it. The result is often a boring game with neither team willing to take risks as they are desperate to keep possession. Just look at popular memes comparing wingers from 20 years ago putting crosses in the box compared to simply passing backwards.

Liam Manning, the former manager of my team, Bristol City, very much models himself on this data-driven Guardiola style. Tellingly, one of his catchphrases in interviews refers to ‘taking the passion out of the game’. By this he means ensuring that players keep cool heads and stick to the game plan - but I wonder if he inadvertently betrays the philosophy Neville and Tarry rail against: it is passionless, soulless and mechanical, less open to moments of surprise and unexpected brilliance. 

To put my cards on the table, I agree wholeheartedly with Neville. Modern football in my estimation has changed beyond recognition even from the 90s when I grew up. While I cannot deny that some of this has been for the better – stadia safety and decrease in hooliganism for instance – I lament the introduction of VAR and its flawed search for objectivity, the replacement of stadia rooted in the heart of the communities which gave rise to them with soulless bowls located outside of town and the expense that often prices poorer fans out of the game. 

Are Neville, Terry and I just hopeless Luddites longing for a past that would inevitably pass away, or is there a deeper philosophical point to all of this? Perhaps. The French Christian thinker Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) critiqued modernity’s propensity to seek ever more efficiency no matter the cost. The French word he gave to this was ‘technique.’ While this is often translated simply as ‘technology,’ it is wider and deeper than this. He describes it as ‘the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of activity.’ 

In a ‘technological society,’ efficiency rather than creativity, beauty or freedom becomes the norm. It is not hard to see this all around us as we scan our shopping on machines to minimise time-consuming personal interaction, use our pocket computers to organise our lives and dominate our attention all the while we do not know our neighbours’ names. Most Western institutions, the systems of business, politics and morality (and perhaps now football?) have been consumed by this system. 

Technique, according to Ellul, is not any one person or group’s fault, but develops its own internal and de-humanising logic which will never reach its goal as it searches forever greater efficiency:  

‘proceeding at its own tempo, technique analyses its objects so that it can reconstitute them; in the case of man, it has analyzed him and synthesized a hitherto unknown being.’  

But the spiritual consequence of technique is a flattened and banal account of human life, desacralizing the world. ‘Technique denies mystery a priori. The mysterious is merely that which has not yet been technicized… Nothing belongs any longer to the realm of god or the supernatural. The individual who lives in the technical milieu knows very well that there is nothing sacred anywhere… He therefore transfers his sense of the sacred to the very thing which has destroyed its former object: to technique itself.’  

There is a clear parallel here with the principalities and powers the Apostle Paul warns against in the Bible: ‘For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.’ 

What is the antidote to technique in football and elsewhere in life? It is tempting to collapse into a fatalism assuming the march of technical and de-humanising efficiency is unstoppable. Ellul acknowledges the potency of technique but suggests that the greatest weapons against its totalising control are both an awareness and consciousness of its methods and consequently a certain conception of freedom which will willingly not conform to its pattern. ‘Freedom is completely without meaning unless it is related to necessity, unless it represents a victory over necessity… We must not think of the problem in terms of a choice between being determined and being free. We must look at it dialectally, and say that man is indeed determined, but that it is open to him to overcome necessity, and that this act is freedom.’ 

In footballing terms this might be seen in an enigmatic figure like Khvicha Kvaratskhelia who seems to belong to another era and whose national team Georgia lit up Euro 2024 with their fearless and free flowing play, or by supporters applauding players who take greater risks even if they do not come off. In life in general this might be expressed through consciously avoiding the ‘necessity’ of efficiency: like choosing to do things more slowly like queueing at a supermarket checkout rather than using the automated machine, or walking to rather than driving where possible.  

For Ellul and Christians, however, the ultimate liberation from enslaving systems comes in the form of a God revealed in Jesus Christ, who lives a life wholly free from such slavery and takes upon himself the debt and weight enslaved humans hope to escape on their own. As Paul puts in another one of his letters: ‘It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by the yoke of slavery.’ 

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