Dancing Bears, Compliant Children

Polish journalist Witold Szabłowski  writes about the long Bulgarian tradition of travelling folk breeding bears and training them to dance.  The bears were not just a means of income, but were actually welcomed into the travelling communities and even into individual families.  The tradition largely ended in the early 2000s, when with the fall of Communism the bears were taken into wildlife refuges.  That's probably a good thing - but even today, whenever these bears see a human, they still get up on their hind legs to dance.

Szabłowski's marvellous book - Dancing Bears - is a mosaic of stories of people in post-dictator worlds.  Like Bulgaria’s dancing bears they are now free but seem nostalgic for the time when they were not.

His on-the-ground reporting of those who long for the return of USSR or pre-Castro Cuba - or even Stalin or Castro themselves - is a remarkable insight into the challenges of freedom and the seductions of authoritarian rule.  The changes of recent decades have not been popular, even with increased freedoms and opportunities.  I was reminded of the old one-liner no-one likes change but a baby in a nappy but actually, I have never really understood that.  It seems to me that there are plenty of changes that we might like - better health, happy developments for loved ones, a better job, a pay rise, improved leisure opportunities, better holidays, more travel.... and so on.  

In other words, perhaps it's simply a case of good changes and bad changes; we all want the former not the latter, and like beauty, good and bad are in the eye of the beholder.  But what Szabłowski shows most compellingly is that the habits we can form in one system can persist in different systems long after they are necessary, and prevent other, better behaviours from developing.  The bears would be better off foraging than dancing; the people he mentions would be better off adapting to the new than arguing for the old. 

Szabłowski writes that fear of a changing world, and longing for... life [to] be the same as it was in the past, are not confined to Regime-Change Land and it's interesting to consider parallels in education.  If I compare modern progressive education with what I experienced as child in a much more rigid traditional system, it seems to me that we offer far more freedom, far more individualised care, far more opportunities, far more growth.  There's far less lecturing, far less explicit emphasis on rules, uniform, competition.  There's more discussion, more independence.  You might argue we have, in recent decades, moved away from a more authoritarian approach.    This new approach does, of course, bring its own issues - when we offer freedom we have to accept that some will use freedom in sub-optimal ways; when we ask for independent thought we have to accept that many will debate and disagree (and we no longer use the compliance-based tools to deal with these issues). And in this newer system it's not hard to find educators, parents, even students who call for the return to the good old days, when things were clearer, when we simply told students what they needed to do, know and think.  I think these calls are, generally, to be resisted.  It does not seem to me that the things that have changed were worth keeping, and overall, we serve our students better now than we ever did.

Perhaps the analogy is far too harsh - schools were never authoritarian states and headteachers were hardly Stalin.  But it is true, I think, that some proposals for improving schools in some systems - more testing, tighter discipline, more drill, more emphasis on tradition and 'rigour' (of one particular sort) - have their roots in a yearning for the certainties of the past.  In January 2022, after two years of a pandemic, it's hard not to sympathise, and there is, for sure, the pressing need for further reform; but the reform has to accelerate us in the direction in which we are moving, not reverse us to the imagined and largely illusory glories of a wonderful past.  We need more creative opportunities, more chances to learn to collaborate, more chances to grapple with open ended projects, more ambiguity, more agency for students.  It's messy and unforgettable, and difficult.  I don't know exactly how it will play out over coming decades - but reaching for the past is not the answer.  In his review of Dancing Bears, Historian Orlando Figes suggests that in yearning for the old certainties.... perhaps... human beings are more like bears than we imagine.  So let's start 2022 looking forward, not backwards.