All We Need is Love

Well, we’re pretty puffed out after their pretty long run of entrepreneur-ing, and things don’t seem a whole lot better.

One of my major interests is education. In the schools of the sixties we fought to make schools more caring places; we strove to “humanise” schools, to break out of the traditional competitive structures that had seen schooling as a process of separating academic goats from the non-academic sheep. Schools had served as great sifting machines. To modify the metaphor: education dealt in apples. Some apples were “windfalls” – they dropped off the tree before picking time, and disappeared into unskilled, low status jobs – road sweeping, garbage collection. “Low grade” apples – the drop-outs and early leavers, who disappeared as soon as they could – at 15 – went into unskilled jobs. The more able took up apprenticeships, or went to work in the huge typing pools that existed in those pre-computer days. A little higher up the tree were the apples destined for work in banks, or nursing or primary school teaching. And from the top of the tree came the elite few – roughly 9% of all kids – the ones who went on to universities to enter the more lucrative professions.

Then larger numbers of kids began to stay longer in secondary schools. We tried to make schools more hospitable to the wider range of abilities. Pastoral care programs began to emerge. We recognised that schools needed to care for more than just the mind and the intellect. Schools needed to be caring places, supporting young people through the tough years of adolescence. For a time – a short, short time – the destructive philosophy of competitive learning was replaced with a philosophy of growth. Schooling ought not be about the “survival of the fittest”, but about the growth of each apple to its fullest potential.

The Progressive movement in education placed the individual child at the centre of the education project. Traditional education had framed its task as separating the high quality apples from those of lesser quality, and “rewarding” the very best; progressive education framed its purpose as nurturing each apple, giving each apple the attention it deserved. At its heart, the philosophy was based – at least in part – on the faith that “all you need is love”.

Maybe it’s time to revisit the idealism of the sixties. Can it do any harm to ask the question: “Is love ALL we need?”