The problem with these linked campaigns is not that they’re wrong.  You’d be a dinosaur if you argued that digital education shouldn’t be updated, deepened with more science and giving learners more creativity. The problem is that it worked by pressure from employers rather than teachers and in a highly fluid context where educational change is too controlled by Gove. There are at least three factors that diminish the potency of Gove’s decision, despite it heading in the right direction:

- Cuts to education in general and in particular to tech support by local authorities (e.g. by the closures of City Learning Centres), will decelerate a decade-long push to integrate technology across schools.

- The shiny reviewed National Curriculum will be toothless because it won’t be required in academies and free schools, yet the Government is luring and forcing both secondaries and primaries to become academies or free schools.

- Vocational learning, including engineering, has just been massively downgraded and discouraged by the exclusion of the majority of such qualifications from League Tables.

Let’s assume, though, that a National Curriculum still has some validity. The problem is that it makes no sense to overhaul specific subjects, or for Gove to agree to major changes to particular subjects outside a holistic and systematic review of the whole curriculum. Such a review should include interrogating the whole notion of ‘subject’. When Gove conceded to the digital skills campaigns he also said the ICT curriculum should be crowdsourced. I’m aware of numerous platforms where educationalists share and generate strategies and resources, and also the subject associations have contributed to curriculum design. So, let’s assume Gove wasn’t suggesting reinventing those wheels. I’d like to think the best of his intentions, that he was inviting us to  recode the whole curriculum.

The success of the coding campaign can be seen as an opening, positive but only of chink size, that can pave the way for an open recreation of the curriculum. Coding can be seen not just as a narrow branch of computer science but more metaphorically as working with data, identifying patterns and crafting solutions, with a whole range of languages and materials. A curriculum based on ‘delivery’ of skills and knowledge that really is relevant for the future is almost impossible to craft, as we can’t predict how the future will unfold. What we can do is focus our efforts on supporting children to be creative, resilient, co-operative and driven to make a better world, with ‘bigger than self’ values. We’re unlikely to achieve these outcomes if computer science is added to a delivery-based Govean mix alongside Dryden, the King James Bible, the English kings and the periodic table. The curriculum needs to be restructured predominantly around creative enquiries whereby students are interpreting and manipulating code, numbers, materials, images, forms, ideas, emotions, actions, words and perhaps most importantly, the elements of the biosphere, in ways that generate meaning and value. Coding with data needs to interact with all these other languages or systems to explore their generative potential.

Ken Robinson has written inspiringly about the importance for learners of ‘finding their element’. I think we need to deconstruct this more. I wonder if there are three dimensions to it:

- The self (identity with others and distinctiveness from others, fear and desire, motivation, talent etc)

- The context (a locality, a diaspora, an ecosystem etc)

- A syntax or system of practice (maths, aesthetics, manufacture/craft, ecology, social wellbeing, literature etc)

We need to deconstruct this more comprehensively and more responsively to the world’s future problems. At present, the argument swings between whether education should be driven by the needs of industry or by the interests of the child. The question we may soon be asking is how education can be driven by the needs of the future generations and the planet.

Tony Butler has just written a great post reflecting on the event, and listed some fascinating questions that he wants to pursue. Although each one is worth a thesis and I’m foolishly starting this at midnight, I’m paraphrasing each one and responding with some half-formed thoughts.

1) Why are museums good at ‘high well-being’ but less good at addressing good stewardship of our environment? Some tentative thoughts:

Maybe, because good environmental stewardship is not integrated into our ways of thinking or talking, not just in museums but in the wider culture? We don’t have an ecological epistemology. You might see campaigns about litter or tree-planting or counting birds. But these campaigns don’t reinforce how human wellbeing depends on the wellbeing of ecosystems and biodiversity. Museums endorse and reflect a traditional taxonomy, whereby Natural History and Earth Science are always in different museums or departments from Art, Design, Anthropology etc. Even the question which holds ‘high wellbeing’ and ‘environmental stewardship’ as distinct activities or concerns, reflects this separation (which isn’t to criticise the question or questioner).

2) Why has the dominant radical social justice paradigm in museums been so poor in linking social justice with resource equity and climate change? Some very tentative thoughts indeed:

Funding sources setting the agenda have required museums to focus closely on social agendas. 13+ years of Blairism: Museums & schools have been expected to overcome social inequality, while the Government’s policies on taxation and the liberalisation of capital worsened inequality. The more we saw inequality worsen the harder some of us in the sector tried to tackle it.

Wider society, including the elites of politicians and media commentators, are almost entirely blind to the connections between social injustice and the resource iniquities resulting from agribusiness, food shortages due to climate change, conflict fuelled by fighting over resources and so on. They are, however, starting to wake up to the connections between resource inequity and corporate greed.

Because reports like this (review of 2011 from an environmental perspective) don’t get extrapolated and mapped onto other projections or interpretations of what is happening in the world.

3) Why is it we have to revisit examining the relationship between culture and wellbeing when we have years of experience and analysis? Some rather simplistic thoughts:

From a positive perspective, because we do now need a radical fresh understanding of culture and wellbeing. Cultural research hitherto has been carried out in a vacuum, in which an understanding of wellbeing has a limited frame of reference, one which is not informed by an ecological epistemology. Conventional discourses skew the public debate because culture is generally represented as a decoration above brutish life, a form of escape rather than a return. When culture is not recognised as the fundamental means by which we spread and grow knowledge and thereby develop the means to thrive (not just between our own species but with others) we can only measure its value in ways that devalue it.

To be more critical, it is because we now have a Government which is blundering through a radical reform agenda with a questioning naivety, asking for simple restatements to inform their policies but without maintaining contracts of enough experts (e.g. DCMS civil servants) who have prior experience.

4) It is possible for small amounts of investment to make effective change. Why does larger scale funding often miss the mark?

I’m not sure about this one. I’d need to see a bit more evidence to prove this assertion. Not that I’m sceptical, just that it doesn’t fully accord with my experience. If there is an answer, it’s because large scale funding is usually for buildings and infrastructure, which gets spent up on project managers and concrete. Smaller education, or staff training or community projects which might have more impact on how museums deliver wellbeing are too often tied up by predetermined outcomes, often servicing those big infrastructure projects. These small projects often have conflicting outcomes, by both serving the corporate goals of growing visitors or income and serving social or learning outcomes. So, I’m not sure how common it is for small amounts of investment to make effective change, though I do concede it’s possible.

5) Is risk-taking more likely through funding of ideas and individuals or organisations and projects? Good question, one which I’ve not thought about much:

I guess this question arises from a comparison of funding of museums, where the only individuals funded are a few PhDs or researchers, compared to the arts, which is a more individualistic domain. I’d like to see more funding in the museums and heritage sector for creative enquiry, for individuals or loosely constituted teams. I’d very much like to benefit from such funding myself. However, I don’t know how much impact such individual enquiry would have on museum organisations (if that’s the way to make effective change). How much would museums have to change to allow an individual or a radical action research project to make a real difference? As I write this I’m remembering that there have been a number of individual creative research projects in museums in the field of cultural diversity, which have been exciting and have maybe helped to radicalise the profession if not the organisations themselves.

Ultimately I think this isn’t so much about individuals vs organisations, but open-ended outcomes for research vs closed outcomes that serve the most corporate aspects of an organisation’s agenda.

6) Could the ancient notion of the Commons provide a framework to deliver this change, gathering virtual and real-time communities around a desire to share and steward heritage?

Yes! And yes again. For me the Commons isn’t just an ancient notion but a current and highly relevant notion. Fundamentally, the commons are goods that are all shared (universally) and are all gifts (so, impossible to measure economically, or commodified, but important to value).  The idea of the commons sits well with taking a long view: they exist to be preserved and passed down the generations. Just right for the museum sector. The beneficiaries or owners of the commons are not just humans but all species. The commons is a principle that should be applied to both our biosphere and our digitally-powered knowledge sphere, and both need preserving as heritage and nurturing as new growth. Our knowledge sphere should be applied to preserving the biosphere as commons. Museums must start seeing their digital strategy as much more than marketing through a web presence but exposing their collections to the hive mind for this purpose. It’s much more than just a technical or legal challenge of digitisation. It’s a philosophical and educational challenge too.

7. This change can only happen if embedded within highly participatory organisations, right?

Well, yes. Participation and the commons go hand in hand. But I’ve run out of steam now. Let someone else have a go.

Axis one: One end of the spectrum: The myth of Babel = Imperialist, Man will Overcome, We Just Have to Come Together, Technology Will Fix It

Axis one: Other end of the spectrum: The myth of Eden = Arcadian, We Must Return to Nature and Live in Harmony with it, Man Shall Have No Dominion

Axis two: One end of the spectrum: The myth of Apocalypse = Crisis, Massive Change, Urgency, Despair/Preparation/Acceptance

Axis two: Other end of the spectrum: The myth of Jubilee = Celebration, Reassurance, Opportunism, Imagine a Bright Future

Any story or initiative that is really interesting or worthwhile will be impossible to neatly plot on this axis. There will be individuals or dimensions within them who change or differ. Stories or initiatives about crisis shouldn’t be doctrinal but flexible structures to help us think and make decisions. For example, see how Tania Kovats describes the Svalbard Seed Bank as ‘both Eden and Apocalypse’.

I’ve been talking with some friends who are fellow supporters of the Dark Mountain Project (a cultural movement for an age of global disruption) about how we can draw and contribute more meaning and action from it. There has been criticism that Dark Mountain is too Apocalyptic and, variously, either too Babel or too Eden. I welcome the emphasis of Dark Mountain on facing the reality of crisis, even, let’s use the word, Apocalypse. (Incidentally, see this piece on why the term Apocalypse should not be used with such fear, as it means the revelation of what is hidden not the end of the world.) I’m dismayed and sometimes shocked by most mainstream thinking which, even if not meaning to deny or befog, still does so by overusing the Jubilee myth so as not to frighten people. However, I think that Dark Mountain would gain strength both by embracing more myths of crisis and by making more attempt to rehabilitate Apocalypticism (is that a word?). Also, it could benefit by developing communications and methods that come across as more ‘Jubilee’, to attract and reassure people in the difficult tasks of exposing and facing revelations.

Actually, I think this is already happening with a flowering of Dark Mountain groups and the theme of Coming Home in its 2012 publication. Other ways to achieve this could include developing more activities and voice for children and young people, and more programming for the visual arts. I’m hoping to be able to give time to both strands of activity this year. To acknowledge that these elements have been lacking is not intended to criticise Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine for their leadership so far, which has been inspiring.

Dark Mountain has been a fantastic network for me, leading me to some wonderful, like-minded and also provocative people. One person I met at the 2011 festival was Keri Facer. She has just invited me to a seminar and study group on Education and the Crisis in March. To help with this (and for my research), I’m trying to think more deeply to understand how people react to news of crisis as opposed to experience of crisis, and how the reality of crisis can be dealt with in education.

Daniel Gilbert, the evolutionary pyschologist (author of Stumbling on Happiness) explained how the human brain evolved to respond to threats, helping us decide to run away or fight, or stay and nurture. He says our brains have evolved to respond to threats with four features, none of which is shared by climate change (a shortcut to describe wider environmental crisis): 1) Threats of social intention or plotting 2) Threats that violate our moral intuitions  3) Threats that are coming right at us now  and 4) Threats that are sensorily evident.

Much of the task of a cultural movement like Dark Mountain is to help us reveal what is hidden, to make people notice, understand and respond to these threats. Perhaps we can do this by understanding how myths are constructed (as above), and by understanding how we deal with threats.

Thinking about threat one, Social Intention and plotting. Most denialists interpret the problem of environmental crisis as a problem of conspiracy or intention to hurt other people, so it has to be revealed as a geophysical problem.

Thinking about threat two, Moral Affront, the more I learn about ecocide and inaction on climate change, the more my sense of morality feels affronted. So, the moral dimensions of the geophysical problem must be revealed as fully as possible.

Thinking about threats three and four, that Environmental crisis is too distant in time and not sensorily available to us, cultural forms must reveal that it is here now and happening, that it is the root cause of many other problems that can be felt more readily.

Before Christmas, on Radio 4, I heard a spokesperson for property developers promoting the Government’s planning reforms that would give local authorities the power to say ‘yes’ to any proposed development by default. The context is a lack of houses in particular areas where more people are employed or seeking work, and the Government’s view that the economy must be stimulated by building more workplaces and homes. The property developer was arguing that there has been too much care for environmental sustainability and not enough attention paid to the ‘other side of the equation’, economic sustainability. In this oppositional model, social sustainability is invisible, but the implication is that good jobs and nice homes matter more to people than does the planet that sustains the possibility of those jobs and homes. The battleground is clearly drawn between the economy as good for people and the environment as an overvalued abstraction, difficult to measure its value, too much preserved in misguided old-fashioned conservatism. Behind these fine principles he means ‘there isn’t enough ecocide for the good of my industry’.

I was also bugged when I inarticulately explained to Maurice Davies that I thought the sustainability triad model was entirely wrong. He replied that the sustainability triad is best understood as all about relationships. I see this as meaning that it’s OK to define three key areas of sustainability if connectedness is a guiding principle: That all the pillars are much more overlapping than we think, that solutions to imbalances can be overcome by better relationships and so on. In this view, social sustainability is not invisible but is seen as the glue between economy and environment, perhaps.

Hmmm. Much head-scratching. Then I saw the UN Draft Declaration on Planetary Boundaries:

“What is new about the concept [of planetary boundaries] is that, rather than understanding environment, economy and society as three pillars of sustainable development, it makes clear that sustainable development can only take place within the safe operating space identified by the biophysical realities of critical natural thresholds.” Draft UN Declaration on Planetary Boundaries.

It strikes me that we need to start replacing talk of the sustainability pillars with these terms: Planetary Boundaries, which are breached directly by Ecocidal acts and indirectly by delay in Mitigation. Sustaining human society and economy also depends on Adaptation to inevitable change, as the most critical Planetary Boundaries (notably Climate Change) have been breached.

In this North Devon orchard, there are rose-orange apples and pale green apples and many more kinds.

The more you look at an apple tree, the odder it looks, like when you roll the same word around your mouth and it becomes nonsense. Apple. Apple. Apple.

‘Bapple’ was my brother’s first word and ‘App’ was my husband’s. But apple isn’t baby nonsense. It’s a first word, first fruit, first knowing of the pleasure of food. Its sherbet-ness, what my daughter calls ‘ting tang’, once tasted, feels somehow essential for the tongue. As a weaning baby her eyes stretched in curious shock as she tried it for the first time but she knew it was her food, for good.

Apples are good for tongues and also good for songs. Actually, people round here used to believe that songs were good for apples. Wassail songs were laid around apple trees on January nights as a kind of fertiliser. Wassail means ‘be hael’, be healthy or whole. To be fertile is to be whole.

This is an old and fertile orchard. If you dip down so your chin is in line with the high grasses, you see that the sunlight is laced with flying creatures. The apples here cluster at the end of branches like siblings around a table, the bigger ones elbowing out the runts, hungrier for the soil juices, weighing down the branches until they have to fall. Each apple has a navel, and all the navels look outwards. The hidden fibres from stalk to navel form a rope, for holding on to the mother tree while the hungry flesh bulges out around it.

Four decades ago. I remember being crowded around a table. We would have stewed apples for pudding. It was always cooking apples in those days, crazily sour and rough, never sweet enough but back then you would never think to cook sweet eating apples. The cookers were given to us by old men in the village and we’d return the favour when we had gluts on, giving them strawberries or tomatoes. Sometimes their gifts would be horse shit or peelings for compost. My mum was a keen member of the Soil Association and she liked to experiment with different recipes.

We were not encouraged to take our pudding bowls through to the TV. We’d stay at the narrow dining table squeezed in beside the pantry, to converse about Democracy, Evolution or Expressionism. Chewing on food and ideas. There was no elbow room or echo room but there was room for thought. Mouths around our old spoons, tasting of acid biting into metal, we’d test big words for approval, try out questions to see if they would grow into trees of talk.

Maybe I asked then, does every kind of fruit have a perfect mouth? What animals in nature are apples designed for? They seem too big for so many mouths but perfect for apes and boars. I heard that human flesh is more like pig flesh than any other animal because we are both omnivorous woodland creatures. Have apples been designed by humans and boar over the years, through a three way symbiosis? Is it that we pick from the branches, the boar snout from the ground, while the tree evolves to suit us both?

As a child I’d invent systems like this, draw flow diagrams in my head, linking the seeds, roots, birds and soil, making wholes out of parts. I never arrived at any kind of system that felt whole because another question would always disturb the soil bed of my thinking.

I’m still thinking like this, still more questions than answers. One question is perennial. Are we evolving to be more ecocentric? Or, are we not evolving yet because we’re manipulating everything else in nature to suit us and so we haven’t suffered enough yet? We’ve manipulated apple trees to suit us, first of all designing in great variety but now designing out the variety in a plague of monoculture. Maybe we’ve come to be against diversity and so we’re working against evolution.

Sometimes, as a child, I didn’t think. I was just there leaning out of my window in the unlit night, out in the massive black sky, with the stars. At other times, lying under a tree but up there in the sky with the house martins. I could do this mental trick of leaving my body. It felt like a scattering, a distribution of myself into many stars, snowflakes, insects, birds. But simultaneously I was also whole. Once I had discovered this trick, the sensation of it entered my dreams. I began to dream lucidly and then to paint these dreams. But these youthful feelings of mastery over my dreams and dissemination through space was illusory. It didn’t translate into control over the things that made my life and the world so problematic.

Over the cattle grid out of the orchard, I cross gingerly to one side of the bars. At that place, every time I cross here, there is this threshold smell. From behind comes the orchard’s grass and from the hill ahead comes manure. The cattle grid is a little like a cow’s digestion, transforming grass to manure. The two smells combine into one, fresh, rotten, fresh.

I walk up the hill and divert leftwards to the corrugated iron barn. It has no gates or locked doors. So, there innocuously and with no security, sit twenty one bags of Nitron fertiliser, each holding 600kg. They look like supermarket carrier bags for a giant. I feel as if someone is watching, despite the silence. I start to see the bags as fat women with narrow heads swathed in long veils, peering mournfully at me. Then they are bags again.

Who is it that comes and picks them up, stirs up the poison stuff with a giant spoon and scatters it on the fields? I don’t have the internet here in Devon but I’ve spent enough years absorbing the internet to recall some salient facts: Nearly half the people on Earth are fed as a result of synthetic Nitrogen fertiliser. Nitrous oxide is the third most important greenhouse gas. It poisons rivers and causes dead oceans. It is the biggest environmental disaster nobody has ever heard of. It causes Blue Baby Syndrome, which kills children.

It feeds children and it kills them.

We used to hang round the farm in our village, though I knew we weren’t supposed to. Helen Harvey took me there because her dad and grandad worked there, so she felt at home in the farm. Two relatives of my village school friends died of leukaemia. They had spent winter months spreading artificial fertiliser on the fields around our houses.

There, just six feet away in front of the giant’s bags, is a squirrel static on its haunches. We startle each other. He scampers away, more frightened than I am. To him I’m the giant.

I am nervous in farm buildings because I expect a foreman warning me about the dangers of falling onto blades or into silage tanks. There never is, though. There are rarely warnings about the really dangerous things. Beneath the squirrel startle, there is something else, a deeper sense of unquiet. I’ve been cut off from news for a week but last Friday the news was terrible enough to stay with me. Anders B. Brievik had taken delivery of six tonnes of fertiliser to a barn, perhaps just like this. He used it to bomb the offices of Norway’s prime minister before heading to the island of Utoya to shoot young people on a Labour Party camp. He killed ninety three and injured almost as many. He did it because he was against diversity.

Oddly, in the weeks that followed, despite demonstrations of sympathy across Norway, the membership of the country’s right wing parties and extremist groups increased while support for the victimised Labour party decreased. Oddly. Or maybe this contrariness is typical? Maybe violence against diversity fertilises more violence. The beast stirs things up.

I’m startled again. A little crowd of sparrows rushes across the barn opening. They are like children out on a school trip, keen and small, looking always for their lunch. I’ve missed sparrows lately. They were many when I was young but their numbers have declined hugely due to increased farmland yields because of fertiliser.

We fertilise life and yet we kill it. We feed children and we kill them. Those children (who live), grow to feed children and also to kill them.

I’m disturbed again and my thoughts won’t be whole. So, comfort me with apples grown fat with songs.

Written at Totleigh Barton on a creative non-fiction course with Sukhdev Sandhu and Rachel Lichtenstein

This is Bosci. He’s the main feature of an installation made by my partner, Brian McKenzie, in the chapel of Nunhead Cemetery. He is supposed to be living in the chapel for 3 months. Visitors could look through a closed gate to see him sitting innocuously on a bench, a nest and pile of bones behind him, forming an artwork called Animal Within. He’s not intended to be frightening but to disturb you mildly by being ambiguous, to raise questions about the nature of animality and humanity. His face and pose are intended to be slightly amusing and urbane, perhaps making you feel empathetic for a human-like creature, rather than horrified by a beast. The setting of a ruined roofless chapel, with a stone angel looking on, and beneath a crypt containing coffins, and the woodland all around, are all part of the experience. It was installed for one day, and caused a bit of a reaction. Loads of people loved it and spread the word, so today lots of people are arriving on word of mouth to see it. However, two people complained that it was too scary, especially for children. One of the complainers says that Bosci is satanic, although that wasn’t at all Brian’s intention.

Iona Hine, a Bible scholar, provided a well informed opinion on whether Bosci could be deemed or defined as Satanic, if not intended as such. She concludes that, although she can understand why reasonable people may make allusions to Satan on first impressions (as it’s black and its ears seem like horns), it can’t be judged as Satanic. Read more here. Zoe Young pointed out that most of what is deemed Satanic is not intended to be, citing false accusations of witchcraft. Because Brian modelled the figure on himself, and because the image came out of himself, he feels accused of being Satanic himself. Zoe said: Imagine if Brian actually looked like Bosci (e.g. suffered from hypertrichosis) – would he be banished as being too evil and fearful if he was a living human?

Brian named the figure Bosci because of a vague sense that this was a suitable name for a wood-dweller. It turns out that the Bosci were a Mediaeval monastic sect of Grazers. (Thanks to photographer Andrew Hewson, who we met wandering the Cemetery with an ancient camera, for pointing this out.) These men and women were so dedicated to an ascetic life that they lived as grazing beasts, wearing fur or growing their own hair sometimes to cover their nakedness. They believed that because animals had not been cast out of Eden they were closer to God, so wanted to emulate them as a spiritual practice. On discovering this, Brian felt that this is very close to his intentions for Bosci.

Anyway, without any consultation with the artist, the Cemeteries Manager for Southwark Council ordered Bosci to be removed from sight, and is unmoved despite hearing how many people want to see the work. Since her initial decision, she has expressed regret but the Cemetery friends are adamant that the work is unsuitable because it is insensitive for Cemetery visitors.

Now, I don’t like children to be exposed to violent imagery or stories, for too long, without support to engage  critically. However, I do believe that children need to face and discuss things they find frightening, with the help of adults. Children might find many things in the cemetery scary, such as dogs barking, crows, open graves or dark woodland paths. It’s the role of adults to help children differentiate between things which are genuinely threatening and things which are only unsettling. If adults respond to children’s fears by demanding that the source of their fear is removed, they are reinforcing the fearfulness of the scary thing. If authorities support adults’ demands to remove the source of fears (except those which are genuinely threatening), they are dismantling the foundations of good parenting. We must have open debate about where to draw the line between what is genuinely threatening and what is unsettling, so that we can make decisions to protect children from harm. However, this decision was made without debate or consultation.

What do you think?

• They learn fast and adapt to change in a timely way
• They learn together and co-operatively
• They learn with a turn towards ecology and sustainability

I’m interested in organisations that learn well through a good mixture of play (experiment, creativity, fun etc) and praxis (serious challenges, real experiences, thinking about context), that are open to diversity of cultures and views, and that encourage co-learning between peers.

I am writing chapters on the following kinds of community or organisation, and would love to hear your suggestions for the best case studies for each category:

1. Indigenous communities, especially ones that draw together emerging technologies with traditional knowledge (my inclination is to focus on the Sami)
2. Intentional communities, especially ones that are restoring ecosystems and developing eco-innovations
3. Cities, for which I need an example where large-scale change is happening from the ground up or by non-Governmental agencies
4. Businesses, especially ones which are radically changing to adapt, rather than start-ups
5. Schools and colleges, especially ones that give maximum freedom to learners  (my inclination is to focus on Hellerup School in Denmark)
6. Research institutes, especially ones that have a strong emphasis on world-changing and praxis
7. Activist groups or campaigns, especially ones that have an emphasis on co-learning
8. Artist and designer communities, especially ones that are ecologically focused
9. Online communities, and I need advise on how to narrow this category down

So, I want to know, do you have any inspiring case studies to share? What communities would you like to know more about?

Please feel free to spread this call for help widely, and contact me to discuss on bridget.mckenzie@flowassociates.com

It seems odd to look back over the year because it seems impossible that it can already be over. I could swear we’ve only come as far as March. If I really have experienced enough of it to be able to box and name it, its name is Transition. On a personal level, it has felt like a year of transition to the second half of a life because of the need to grow up and deal with some difficult, although partly positive, situations. My work as director of Flow has taken a new direction as we have set up Flow India. (Deficit cuts have hit the UK’s cultural sector but growing demand for international-style cultural experiences in India is keeping us busy.) My mother sunk deeper into dementia and my parent’s marriage collapsed. My daughter rejected her transition to secondary school and so I had to become a home educator with my partner.

This last has brought a transition into a deeper kind of parenting, and with it a fuller awareness that learning in general is much more about home than generally assumed. I had always seen a division between home as a place of comfort and school as a necessary ‘outing’, a place that prepares you to go out into the world. This year I’ve realised that learning defined as ‘learning to work out there in the world’ is an unhelpful and untrue construct. The dichotomy of home and work that is embedded in our culture is unhealthy because it increases isolation in communities, reduces the confidence of those with home-based lives, increases our perceived needs to travel for work and so on. At root, the trouble is that when most of us push off into the world of work, we enter an industrial system that is other than the living world, somewhere abstract from our planet home. With this enforced dichotomy, conventional schooling becomes a process of hardening your heart so that you can hurt the living world and so that you can cope being untied from home.

After two decades within schools and then two decades working with schools, home schooling has been an eye opener. I’ve become more keenly aware that good learning is a process of intergenerational exchange. Often forgotten is the value of exchange from younger people to adults. (Also, it’s about interdisciplinary exchange but I’m focusing on age exchange for now.) Adults nurture by expressing willingness to grow through the insights offered by children and young people. Younger children open us up to grow because they feel as if they have all the time in the world to be mindful and playful. Conversely, teens and young adults touch us with their urgency because in coming into world awareness they notice how short the time is before their youth and the stability of their world may come to an end.

It’s clear to me now that we learn best in and thrive most from home and with a goal of making your home a place to thrive in. By home, I don’t mean only the place that shelters us nightly but the wider world that can be explored freely. The typical judgement is that we must put children in schools because, by a great majority, their homes are not fit for the kind of thriving or learning that will make our nation competitive. So, we build schools because we are also building workplaces that are not-home. More workplaces are disconnected from reality in the sense of human intimacies within a local ecosystem. More schools now resemble these alienating and disconnected workplaces. In turn, our alienation through the normalisation of industrial workplaces has led to a situation whereby many homes are not optimal for thriving. Parents are working outside of the home or growing inequality means that homes of the long term unemployed or the most deprived can sometimes tip into places of abuse for children. Families have become too isolated from one another so the idea of co-parenting is now almost unheard of in the mainstream.

I’ve discovered that home schooling is a good deal more possible even for working parents than most imagine, if you can set up co-operative co-parenting networks and very small schools. Still, home-based education will remain a minority choice and schools will continue to be built in their thousands across the world. So, if schools must exist, they need to ‘come home’. To do that, they need to give more attention to nurturing more intergenerational learning. They need to enable much more exploration of our planetary home, the wider world. Rather than banning displays of affection, and increasing discipline, they need to structure spaces, groups and tasks to breed intimacy. School could become a resource for making both your private home and common home a place for thriving.

I’ve not said much yet about the extraordinary events of the year, but they have been a stimulating backdrop for my thoughts about home, thriving and learning. The question I wake up to every morning is ‘what about our children? How will they live with this?’ The fear that threatens to keep me awake each night comes from the ever-harsher biting of climate change impacts with more  severe droughts, forest fires, forest diseases, storms, floods and in turn rising food prices which are a major but unacknowledged cause of current discontent. The unexpected speed of these impacts has led many scientists to believe that 2C is no longer to be considered a safe limit for rising temperatures. Although 2011 has seen the first full agreement on the Kyoto Protocol in 20 years, this supposed good news is bad news because climate action is largely deferred to 2020. No actions can now prevent a 2C increase, so the climate realists’ question is now: How can we act urgently to prevent rapid feedback effects, a temperature rise of 4-7C and the annihilation of most vertebrate species? In fact, very few people with any influence are asking this question, so it feels unlikely at this moment that there will be enough urgent action. I don’t want to say that it IS unlikely, but to express that it feels unlikely.

I’m not suggesting that we need to turn our attention to our families and our parochial lives in order to solve the big global problems. Transition actions towards sustainable living that are focused only on the domestic and the local might have been relatively impactful on a global scale if it had been mainstreamed thirty years ago. It is too late for this alone to give us hope. It is too late for any one kind of action to give us the necessary hope. However, it is essential for us to live in hope and to take action.

One strand of thought I will pursue in 2012 is about what we can take from long cultural histories of homeliness, horticulture and parenting, and how can we best scale up what works. How can we rethink all our institutions of state and industry as homes, or safe places for intergenerational and interdisciplinary exchange with the goal of a thriving home world?

Appropriately on the day that the Localism Bill became law, I was asked to speak about localism, Big Society and community ownership of cultural and heritage organisations. I promised that I would post my notes, so here they are:

I want to draw out some of what I think are the most salient points about Big Society, Localism, and the ownership of cultural organisations, referring to two case studies in my own neighbourhood, Southwark and Lewisham.

A salient thing to explore is the background to how local cultural services are being affected. From my experience with these councils:

-          most of the closure stories in my area are rooted in councils seeing assets as disposable, playing the game of property development, looking to sell or lease land and heritage buildings either to private or community-run groups.

-          when they review their opportunities, Councils place a low value on cultural services as deliverers of social goods, but on the other hand, they hope that others will value their social goods enough to want to take them over.

David Cameron’s vision for the Big Society and Localism is all about enabling: “We are breaking down the barriers that stop councils..[and]..groups getting things done for themselves.” But, what actually are the barriers that stop us getting things done in our sector? Are the Government’s changes lifting the barriers we actually experience, or only the barriers that prevent private companies making profits?

Certainly I think there are some positive things about the Localism Bill but there are reasons to be cautious and critical. A key change in the Bill is that any service currently provided by a supplier can be challenged by any other organisation, and a procurement exercise carried out and if the challenger can offer a better value service it must be awarded to them. Polly Toynbee pointed out this means your school can be taken over by an education company, and that the Localism Bill has no provision for local people to contribute to the procurement decision. It’s good to see the move to allow community groups more time to fundraise to take over a service if they are in competition with private buyers. On the other hand, however, this provision is really of use because it’s less likely now that Councils will be able to let communities run public amenities at peppercorn rents, and that if they want to keep them, they will have to buy them or prove that they can raise money to revamp them just as a property developer would.

I’ll describe two examples I’ve been involved in.

First, the Livesey Museum for Children
The Big Society isn’t new. The first employer to implement co-ownership and workers’ self-education, 120 years ago, was George Livesey. He was benefactor of the Camberwell library, later to become the Livesey Museum for Children, on the Old Kent Road. This was closed in 2008 because Southwark Council felt the costs of employing creative learning managers were less worthwhile than the ongoing costs of keeping the building secure against vandals. Actually, they wanted to sell off the building until we (the Friends group formed from the campaign) pointed out Livesey’s bequest meant it wasn’t theirs to sell. There was quite a bit of interest, for example from the MLA, because this could be an experiment to see if community transfer of assets could provide a model for other museums threatened by local authority cuts. This could have been nice except that to date there isn’t a model to demonstrate, as the Council chose not to accept the community’s proposal to run the museum, which was underwritten by a housing and social care trust, and the Charity Commission rejected the Council’s proposal that it be converted into theatre rehearsal space, and so the building remains locked after nearly 4 years. It’s important that the Bequest stated that it must be a free learning resource, open to all in perpetuity. This openness to all is, in my view, a crucial element in generating cultural value. Even if we had been given the chance, we may have struggled alone as, inevitably, anger at its closure may not easily convert into drive and imagination from local supporters. Now there’s a Labour council, open to proposals but as far as I know, none is strong enough and the Livesey friends members are now focused on other causes.

New Cross People’s Library
Lewisham cut funding to 5 libraries and allowed other companies or groups to bid to run them. New Cross got left behind. But, now it’s temporarily being run as the People’s Library by a group of campaigners. Underpinning it is a charity called Bold Vision, set up to incubate local projects that combine culture, learning, food and social capacity.  Actually, NXP Library is a working title because it can’t call itself a library in its new independent form, because funders expect that libraries should be funded by local authorities as statutory provision. There aren’t ready streams of funding available. So, we have to reinvent it as a creative learning centre, or a literacy shop. It’s in a shop on a main street, which is good for passing trade. However, Lewisham council sees it as an opportunity, no longer as a library, now that they’ve withdrawn funding: It’s on a high street in a shop premises so they are going to charge a going commercial rent of £25k a year, which may be impossible to raise on top of other running costs. So, at a time when the Empty Shops movement is turning shops into cultural spaces, it’s ironic that we’re having to turn a publicly-funded cultural space into more of a self-sustaining shop.

So, back to Cameron’s barriers to getting things done. There are two levels of barrier. One is the superstructures of power and wealth generation, which I don’t have time to go into. The other is to do with people’s energy. I’ve found in my experience that main barrier to getting things done is when a group doesn’t have enough drive or capacity, mainly because it doesn’t have enough common cause. A lack of common cause happens when:

- people disagree about an emphasis on either rescuing the assets or sustaining the cultural programme which could possibly be independent of the space (and just to note, possibly now also more digitally delivered)

- some people can’t gain kudos – the more modest or generic the cause, the more difficult it is to gain kudos.

- fundamental disagreements about whether we’re serving people or culture, about who we are serving. It’s not always straightforward: Those favouring working class interests can sometimes be culturally conservative, and might conceive middle class cultural radicals as elitists, even if they’re committed to social justice. It can be hard to explain why participation in difficult or experimental culture can be accessible and empowering for all.

- a project emerges out of a conflict situation like a campaign to save a museum with different proposals for its use. You are going to end up with winners and losers, and most people will lose energy.

- disagreements about money: people who say it is impossible without a cushion and long-term projections, and people who say a great idea will enthuse and attract money

This last also relates to a key practical problem: That you can’t easily get funding & permissions unless you are solid & constituted and have a reputation. A campaign group hastily constituted to save a museum won’t have that, even if its individuals have decades of experience between them. That often means partnering with or allowing an organisation to run the show, but, they may not have the right kinds of local or specialist knowledge or affiliation.

There’s little wrong with the Big Society principles of agency, resilience and democracy. The problem is that the persisting system in Britain, underpinned by global superstructures, cannot allow these things to flourish. What kind of Big Society, if it becomes less regulated by law and more led by corporations or ideological interest groups, can be trusted to do good when the unsustainable exploitation of people and resources for profit is held to be the ultimate good? To challenge this, we need to see a more participatory democracy enacted at every level, and in every institution, not just at the most local.

So cultural organisations, if they are increasingly to be run by people, need people to have agency, urgency, enthusiasm & innovation. These are exactly the qualities that cultural orgs actually bring about, so there’s need for a circular growth, a new kind of supply chain, where bigger fish fund orgs to develop those capacities in people who in turn can help run the orgs.  I want us to override that fight between whether we serve either people or culture. We should unite around our common cause, with similar missions to focus on transforming ways we make decisions about how to live well together, helping us take a long view, to learn from the past and helping us operate on registers that are to do with beauty, complexity, mystery, empathy and invention.