Launch of CERES lecture series

08 February 2010

Entitled, ‘Can Progressive Education make a comeback? The Case of Summerhill school in the audit culture,’ his lecture oultined the clash between the audit culture (in the form of OfSTED) and progressive notions of education that Summerhill exemplifies.

As an expert witness to the High Court Tribunal that adjudicated on the quality of the OfSTED inspection, Stronach indicated the numerous flaws and prejudices exhibited in the 1999-2000 clash, as well as the inadequacy of OfSTED’s appeal procedures. The second part of the talk concerned later inspections of Summerhill by OfSTED, where the same school, operating the same philosophy and essentially unchanged, received a very different report. Suddenly the School was deemed ‘outstanding’ in relation to personal, cultural, and social development. Such an about-turn no doubt reflected OfSTED’s desire to avoid further legal challenge, and also the fact that since the tribunal case, OfSTED inspections are ‘chaperoned’ by the school’s expert – who remains Ian Stronach.

Finally, Summerhill was explored as a ‘polysemous’ cultural object, variously painted in sexually scandalous terms (nude bathing!) or in terms of its allegedly extreme individualism and narcissicism or revered as the ‘epitome of liberal education.' Such a school could be given any number of contradictory readings, and the talk ended with a consideration of two of these possibilities. Was Summerhill still a genuinely radical project, whose very sameness was a guarantor of its enduring exemplarity, in a world of superficial innovations? Did it in that sense still have a revolutionary meaning in relation to conventional education? Or was its emphasis on soft skills and positive emotional dispositions, a rather more reactionary pointer in relation to what Boltansky & Chiapello have called the ‘new spirit’ of capitalism?  The talk concluded that, however you responded to the qualities of the school, it remained what in research terms might be called a ‘significant outlier.’ Indeed, it was in that very sense a ‘black swan’ (Taleb 2008), one which matched exactly the logo of the relaunched CERES.

The next lecture in the Educational Visions series will take place on February 22. Prof. Patrick Carmichael will present his lecture entitled 'Can New Web Technologies Support Radical Pedagogies?'

LJMU's Centre for Educational Research and Evaluation Services (CERES) is a fast-developing research outfit dedicated to ‘growing excellence in research.’ Recent and current funding includes Government Departments and Research Councils. CERES’s theoretical work is showcased in a forthcoming Special Issue of the International Review of Qualitative Research. The team is led by Professors Mark Brundrett, Patrick Carmichael, Dave Huddart, Marion Jones, Andrew Sparkes, Tim Stott, Ian Stronach and Phil Vickerman. CERES is linked with Illinois’s International Institute for Qualitative Inquiry via a Memorandum of Understanding. 

For further information about CERES please see http://www.ljmu.ac.uk/ECL/93614.htm or contact Emma Fitzgerald on 0151 231 5334 or by email at e.fitzgerald@ljmu.ac.uk