In a great posting today, "The good news ... and the same old dreary mixture", Andrew Sutton has come up with the truly wonderful phrase "pedagogic nihilism". It's just got to be an invention of Andrew's. It might be the first time the phrase has ever been seen in print. A search on Google produces zero results. In the whole world of the internet, the only occurrence of the phrase is today, on Andrew's blog.
And what a wonderful, illuminating, phrase. Intellectually satisfying. Amusing even. A phrase to roll around the mind and along the corridors of power. A phrase that sums up in just two words, everything that I see conductive education as being opposed to: that nothing much is to be done because nothing is much better than anything that is being done and anyway nothing is much better than anything else. And then I remembered as a parent the first time I was told that I should not get my hopes up too much.
I thought I'd check out "
nihilism" on Wikipedia and it went something like this:
Nihilism (from the Latin nihil, nothing) is the philosophical position that values do not exist but rather are falsely invented. Existential nihilists argue that Life itself is without meaning, purpose or value. Moral nihilists assert that morality does not exist and so there are no moral values by which we can live our lives.
Then I found mereological nihilism. (No, don't stop reading. Bear with me a minute). That's one I hadn't even heard before so I took a look. Mereological nihilists argue that "objects with proper parts do not exist" so that "world we see and experience as full of objects with parts is a product of human misperception (i.e., if we could see clearly, we would not perceive compositive objects)."
Perhaps we're getting in a bit deep here. Let's get back to "the real world" and Andrew quoting The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which in turn quotes Dori Ortman, Program Coordinator for UCP Kids:
It's important to key on what's best for the child, rather than trying to determine whether one therapy or approach might be better than another.
'"What we [at UCP Kids] try to focus on is what we believe: That the best outcomes come from kids' involvement in the community. How can we change the community to accept that child for who they are?"
Put aside the confusion between 'education', 'therapy' and 'approaches'. The "best outcomes", assert the pedagogic nihilists come not from preferring this system of education over that system of education but from rejecting education altogether in favour of "involvement in the community" and getting the community "to accept the child for who they are". The trained and experienced medical professional who told me not to get my hopes up too high for my daughter would have understood perfectly. Accept her as she is and get everyone else to do the same. Don't get your hopes up. False hopes. (Didn't Andrew once say or write that the opposite of "false hope" was not "true hope" but despair? But let's not get too far diverted from nihilism, else we might lose track of what's real and what is not :-)
So the mereological nihilists gang up with the pedagogic nihilists against me and it's not that my daughter has any problems, it's that the others have problems of perception; if the others could only see clearly, my daughter wouldn't have a disability! Just sort out the others and everything is fine.
As my late dear friend, Michael Gray, used to say when asked how he was: "I'm fine. It's the others."
Instead, I chose the transformational power of education. And began my journey into conductive education. What else was there? Nothing. Nihil ex nihilo fit. Nothing will come of nothing.
"Nothing", by the way, along with the metaphor of blindness, are two of the great themes of Shakespeare's "King Lear". I read "King Lear" in the Sixth Form. About the same time I first saw "West Side Story". "Gee Officer Krupke", sings Riff, "I got a social disease. I'm depraved on account I'm deprived". It's nothing to do with Riff. In Michael Gray's words: "It's the others", the community. Nihilism, like Love, is all around. (I was a Troggs fan, sorry.)
"Pedagogic nihilism". Wonderful, Andrew. Thanks for amusing me for most of the evening.