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- Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Serie: The Philosophy Foundation Series
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
This book is ideal for teachers, whether they are P4C trained or just experimenting with philosophy. It will help teachers to present ideas and stimulate discussions which both accommodate and engage adolescent appetites. Are human beings flawed? Is murder an act of insanity or just plain thoughtlessness? Do we need a soul? From the fall of Icarus to the rise of Caesar this practical book draws upon history, philosophy and literature to provoke students to think, question and wonder. Divided into chapters on The World, Self, Society and Others, this resource for secondary school is written to give teachers the means to listen rather than teach and to allow the ideas and thoughts of students to form the centre of the lesson. It raises questions on the nature of evil, belief in God, slavery, consumerism, utopia, the limits of freedom, and a whole lot more. With a clear introductory outline on its use both in and out of the classroom, Provocations also contains tips and advice to help guide teachers to span the curriculum. Applicable to History, Geography, RS, Science, Art, English and Citizenship it offers teachers of all subjects the opportunity to introduce a student-centred approach to their lessons. There is also an extensive bibliography for those who wish to explore the topics in greater depth. Provocations is a set of philosophy sessions designed for secondary school and predicated on the pedagogical methods of The Philosophy Foundation. These sessions are mature, challenging and provocative, using history, literature, myth and the world today as their basis. Each session contains particular pedagogical tips and advice and suggestions as to how they can be effectively delivered
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Peter Worley, not only for starting the The Philosophy Foundation, but also for his continuing openness and desire to experiment. I am very grateful to Emma Worley for doing such a wonderful job of keeping the show on the road and making it all possible. Thank you to Caroline Lenton for the time and belief she has invested in this growing series of books, and thank you to Tamar Levi for beautifying the book with her illustrations.
Simply by talking about what they think, my pupils at Evelyn Grace Academy in Brixton have helped me to write this book and I am thankful to them. Thank you also to Olivia, Richa and Bhavesh for our weekly conversations. And thank you to Sarah for her encouragement and her loveliness.
Foreword
In philosophy, as David Birch aptly states in his introduction to this book, no one is an expert and no one is smarter than anyone else. Philosophy is conversation, exploration, experiment (with ideas) and, in general, an effort to achieve greater understanding of whatever topic is under discussion. Everyone has a right to express a view, and the only rules are: do one’s best to think clearly and honestly, listen to other points of view and bravely follow where the best arguments lead.
The exercises in this book – again with great aptness called provocations by their author – are designed to invite reflection and generate debate. They do both these things wonderfully well. The principles that lie behind them, set out by David Birch in his preface and introduction, are excellent. He notes that teaching should not be about handing down knowledge from on high, as a professional such as a lawyer or doctor might do for a client or patient, but instead should be a response to the student’s curiosity, interest and desire to learn – and should provoke these things by being inspirational and by listening; especially by listening to students as they work out their own answers to the questions prompted in them by the world around them and their experience of it.
It is a common view, and one much acted on, that education consists in the transfer of knowledge and skills from teachers to pupils. This is indeed the case for at least part of what is involved in schooling, given that basic information and ways of handling it have to be imparted before students can become more independent as thinkers. But it is also important that students should understand how partial, incomplete and open-ended almost all enquiry is; and that in many areas of enquiry, there are no right and wrong answers, only better and worse reasons for taking this view or that, subject always to scrutiny and challenge.
Philosophy is par excellence the enterprise of being open and exploratory, of accepting that certainties are hard to come by and that complexities often remain after much debate. It also parexcellence teaches the important lesson that this openness, uncertainty and incompleteness can nevertheless be highly productive, for as Paul Valery says, ‘a difficulty is a light; an insurmountable difficulty is the sun’.
This book is a superb provocation to philosophy itself. The exercises challenge us to do philosophy, to think philosophically, to generate and test ideas, to try to make sense of what is at stake and to gain deeper insights. It should be in every schoolroom, and every teacher’s hands, as an instrument that will transform students’ interest and capacity across the whole range not just of their studies but their lives.
A. C. Grayling
Preface
During teacher training I was told by the director of the course that the relationship between a teacher and their pupil should be like that of a lawyer and their client. The idea, generously read – it is hard to shake off just how mad and dystopian it sounds – seems to be that teachers are experts and teaching is a profession, an idea which I think gets it exactly wrong, more or less. Expertise demands recognition and deference, yet adolescents are the least likely of all people to offer either. A professional teacher is a naked emperor to an incredulous audience. It is impossible to maintain the poise of expertise while spending your day with people who could care less. Composure quickly ebbs away.
The expert is the one in the white coat, unstained and uninvolved. They are never in the thick of it, never in a muddle. I doubt the course director could so easily have spoken of the relationship between a primary school or nursery teacher and a child as being like that of a lawyer and client, which makes one wonder what it is about adolescence that requires this redefinition of status. What compels us to play these parts, when teachers call for order by telling their class to ‘act like professionals’? We feel it necessary to assign adolescents roles, but they are provocatively ill-defined; the thing we least want them to be is themselves (which, of course, is often the thing they least want to be; we become complicit in their self-evasion; there is perhaps something worryingly contagious about adolescence).
An expert is a coincidence of fear and need. Teachers should not think of themselves as needed (nor should they need themselves to be feared). You can only counteract the evidence to the contrary by telling yourself that you are doing what is best for your pupils, whether they know it or not. But it’s very difficult to talk about knowing what’s best for someone without implying that you know what’s worst about them. It’s very difficult to say, ‘This is for your own good,’ without sounding like a sadist. Necessity and punishment are cut from the same cloth.
What would education be like if we dropped the idea that it was necessary, if we didn’t think of it as something we had to get right, if we weren’t so worried about getting it wrong? What would we do with it if we didn’t think there was any way it should be, if we thought of it as spare time?
We think of lawyers or doctors as experts because they more or less have control over their respective remits. The doctor pretty much knows the effects of administering a particular treatment; the lawyer can pretty much tell the best line of defence and the odds of success.
What is it teachers are thought to have control over? The idea, apparently, is that teachers are experts of impartation – they know how to give skills and knowledge. In other words, a teacher can control the outcomes of their teaching. So whereas the lawyer has a level of control over a bureaucratic system of justice and a doctor has a level of control over the body, the teacher has a level of control over the minds of adolescents. This, of course, just sounds silly. What we all know, but rarely acknowledge, is that you cannot teach a pupil something they don’t want to learn; the managerial need for ‘evidence’ is the denial of this.
Learning is a matter of desire, not a question of cognition; of magnetism rather than machinery. How would teaching change if we worked on the basis that we didn’t know what we were doing, if we worked not for targets but curiosity, if we thought of the classroom not as a proto-office but as the bit outside the office, the so-called real world? I suggest it may be something like philosophy.
There is nothing essentially good about doing philosophy in schools – pupils may just as well learn to surf or garden – just as there is nothing essential to, say, English or chemistry. I do not teach philosophy to impart skills, nor do I read it to acquire them (I’d rather talk of developing affinities, not abilities). I don’t teach philosophy for knowledge as there is none (I’d rather give provocation than information). Without knowledge or skills what remains are the pupils themselves. The approach to education advocated in this book is one not based on teaching but listening; listening neither to console nor redeem but to crack things wide open.
Listening endows speech with reality while endowing reality with speech. Encouraging pupils to question the world helps them to see that it is something to be customised rather than complied with. By offering conversation rather than instruction, philosophy shows that the world is up for negotiation. It seeks to enlarge the inner-light, that source of shifting conviction, which moves beyond the inertia of rebellion and conformist submission into a realm of appetite, uncertain and changing.
Philosophy says it is okay to be incomplete, it is sustained by incompleteness. (‘A philosophical problem’, Wittgenstein wrote, ‘has the form: “I don’t know my way about.”’) It is a great leveller. The teacher may have a sense of how to get a conversation going, an idea of where the catalytic questions lie, but they don’t know where the conversation might lead or how they can end it. Questions take on a life of their own. The teacher is in no position to be conclusive, the subject is predicated on mutual wonder, confusion is its currency of exchange. Philosophy is a way of relearning language.
The expert is fluent. They have little to learn. For them nothing is new. They have seen it all before, they are through with surprise. They know so much they are barely present. This cannot be the teacher’s condition, for the teacher does not only teach what to learn but how to learn. The teacher is showing their pupils how to be receptive to the world, how to be open and vulnerable to its pleasures.
If learning needs incompleteness, then the one thing the know-it-all cannot teach is how to learn, for not knowing it all is something they know nothing about. That is to say, the more you know the less you can teach. If we approached education thinking less about what we should give and more what we can take, if we saw a lesson as our opportunity just as much as our pupils’, schools I think would be better for it.
Contents
There are more idols in the world than there are realities.
Friedrich Nietzsche
All that philosophy can do is to destroy idols.
And that means not creating a new one –
for instance as in ‘absence of an idol’.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Introduction
It is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The lessons in this book are based on talking. It’s a simple yet peculiarly radical approach. Children spend little class time speaking and listening to one another, yet the best (and worst) thing about school is the opportunity to make friends and discover new people. It is this aspect which is obviously the most important to the pupils.
PE and drama are the only subjects that cannot be done solo, where the class itself is internal to the lesson, where the pupils become a group rather than a random assembly of separate individuals. Philosophy is asking to join these subjects. As well as playing and performing together, it suggests we talk together. This book is made up of questions; a question is an invitation; the best questions are the questions that multiply. In philosophy the class does not take, but rather becomes, the subject. That is to say, if these lessons have a topic, it’s not so much philosophy as other people.
Listening is odd. It is porous and strange. Other people’s words, like their smells, are emanations we cannot remain indifferent to. To listen is to be involved, and it’s to be involved without ever quite knowing what we are involved in. Though we can suppress our own thinking, it is rather more difficult to defend against the thoughts of others, to shore ourselves up against their influence; ‘shut up’ is never said politely. Listening opens us up to ourselves. It permits the mind to be moved in ways we cannot will. The solipsist, in other words, is a creature of habit.
Schools harp on about respect and the necessity of boundaries without also promoting the pleasures of togetherness. The emphasis is on how it can go wrong when we are with other people, not on the available goods. We need to respect in order not to hate. Other people are the enemies we mustn’t make. But if that’s all they are, what is the point of them? An education that isn’t concerned with this question is an education palpably unconcerned with the good life.
The focus on listening dissolves the dichotomy of child-centred or teacher-led learning. It dissolves the idea of a source, an originator. Speaking and listening mixes and merges. Conversation makes a farce of supply and demand (a question is a demand that doesn’t know what it wants, an answer is the supply that doesn’t know what it is giving). To put the cards on the table, this book believes in liberalism without the individual and collectivism without the cult; the individual may not be sovereign, but neither should they be pressured to participate, which brings Oscar Wilde to mind. His line about the weather seems just as applicable to education: whenever people talk about it, one feels quite certain that they mean something else.
Education can serve as a distraction from social injustice – it is, among other things, the state’s attempt to drum the family out of the child – and it is always at risk of utopianism, always in danger of converting our dissatisfaction with adults into a wish to create new ones (a wish that never works; the utopian teacher inevitably ends up more like Prospero to Caliban than Pygmalion to his statue).
Education, in other words, is plagued by its desired ends, which is perhaps why there are many more books on philosophy for primary school than there are for secondary. Children are believed to be more pliant than adolescents, they are pre-lapsarian, easier to bewitch; their eventual nature is still up for grabs. The effort to produce tolerant citizens, rational individuals or sceptical atheists is a race against time.
The adolescent is a lost cause; they are a kind of underclass. Though we can imagine a situation in which a child might protest that they should be treated more like a child, or an adult like an adult, it is rather more difficult to imagine an adolescent asking to be treated like an adolescent. Whatever it is about adolescents that makes adults envy them, it is not the trust and understanding they receive (these are, of course, things which the adolescent seeks to sabotage; it might be worth acknowledging that adolescents present us with impossibilities, such as the need to maintain our understanding while not forestalling their resourceful attempts to shatter it).
If we dropped that other dichotomy, the one of knowledge or skills, and approached education with an old-fashioned belief in virtue – our dispositional paths to self-actualising pleasure – we might think of the project as being to encourage, or bring out, the virtues of the pupil. When teaching children we would encourage their childhood virtues and when teaching adolescents we would seek out and inspire their adolescent virtues.
What, then, are the virtues of adolescence? Unless we are interested in this question, I would suggest, provocatively rather than prescriptively, we should not be teaching. The idea is simply that we cannot live well unless we are living as ourselves.
Of course, for us to see these adolescent dispositions as virtues we must be free to consider them as options, and aspirations, for ourselves.
Set-Up
The classroom should be arranged in whatever way will be conducive to conversation. These are three options: horseshoe, circle and desks.
Having pupils seated in a horseshoe creates the sense of a shared space where everyone can see everyone. The opening also gives you access to the board. But if you don’t wish to use the board, sitting in a closed circle is often better.
The horseshoe has a leak in it. I have taught classes where their sessions were much improved simply because we sealed the leak and sat in a circle. Sitting with the class in a circle offers a greater sense of your presence. It is no good asking pupils to speak if you are not going to help them feel they are being listened to. The board can be an unhelpful distraction, even a barrier. The allure is that its filled emptiness at the end of a session will prove that something has been achieved, something has been produced. But the board will only give the teacher’s version of what has been achieved or produced, and this risks becoming the party line.
If teaching philosophy were to have its sins, pre-emption and foreclosure – forms of interruption – would be cardinal. Philosophy is incorrigibly curious. To teach philosophy you need to adapt to the idea that you might not be able to identify what, if anything, was achieved. When we read a poem or eat an eclair we don’t sit and wonder afterwards what we’ve accomplished. Profit is not the point (no philosopher ever went into it for the money). Philosophy requires you to lead with passivity.
The circle and horseshoe may not do. A class may find it too difficult to sit in a shared space. What feels communal to some will feel exposed to others. I have found that some classes are more able to enter into a session when they remain at their desks. Every class is different. There is no single way. When arranging the classroom, the question is simply: what will best enable discussion?
Find yourself a large (easy to catch), soft (obviously), colourful (exuberance is beauty) ball. This will be passed round the group, held by the speaker. The ball is like the baton in a relay. It connects speakers, it hints at a common thread. It also serves as a signal to help follow the action. And it gives the pupils a sense of security; when holding the ball they know they will have the space and time to think and talk without being interrupted or overridden. Again, some classes get along fine without a ball, and this becomes truer the smaller the class is. But, beside the point, the ball also makes the time more enjoyable. It knocks things over and hits people in the head. Pupils become rather attached to it.
If you do use the board, you should emphasise to the class that in philosophy it undergoes a metamorphosis. It’s no longer an instrument of information but a medium of experimentation. I have found that if pupils are not aware of this change, they become outraged when an idea they disagree with is converted into pixels; it is seen as a kind of sanctification. In philosophy what’s written on the board is not what the class is being taught, but what they are being asked to consider; the board is not performing its usual function. This also applies to the teacher’s voice.
You are not using your voice to direct or dictate. When you speak in philosophy you are not telling but suggesting. So you need to suspend your certainties. The voice becomes a catalyst, a solvent. It may take the class a while to get used to this. Their voices are also being used differently. They are not reciting or speaking to please. They are speaking to find out what they believe. Speech is not a medium of consensus or conformity, of falling into line, nor is it a declaration of individuality. It’s something else.
Material
The sessions feature three types of questions: Starter Questions, Hermeneutic Questions and Task Questions. Starter Questions are the prelude, they get things started; Hermeneutic Questions are the digestion, they give the class time to ponder a text; and Task Questions are the eye of the storm, the central philosophical focus. That’s the idea. But, in fact, you may find that a Task Question falls flat and that a Starter or Hermeneutic Question carries more energy. Don’t let the book’s way of carving things up distract you. Don’t feel you must reach the Task Questions, or spend more time on them. The sessions are made up of several different sections and you should also feel free to skip sections or reverse their order. The book is written to be customised rather than followed.
Each session is potentially enormous. They have not been written to fit into an hour, though they have been written to fill at least an hour. One of my classes spent three hours on a Starter Question (What is nature?). We took nearly half a term on a single session. Do not feel that you must fit it all in. Somewhat absurdly, you must be prepared to change direction and improvise. Lesson plans are only for the omniscient.
The various questions mostly have bullet-pointed questions beneath them. These constitute a map of the possible terrain, a suggestion of where the discussion may go or where you might like to take it. They are there as an additional resource. You may find that one is more interesting than its corresponding Task Question, in which case you should nudge the Task Question aside. In the discussion new and interesting questions will often emerge. If, say, you’re discussing torture and a pupil asks, ‘Does prison count as torture?’, you might feel it’d be good to shift course and give this question to the class as their main focus. You will find yourself discussing things you hadn’t anticipated. You cannot step into the same session twice.
Most of the Task Questions are closed questions, meaning they can be answered with a straight yes or no. The best reason for this is that closed questions are more inclusive. All that a closed question is asking of the pupil is whether they accept or reject something, whether they swallow or spit; it is appealing to taste rather than reason. As such, it is easier to become involved in the discussion. When a pupil has given their yes/no answer, you would then ask them why they think that, but to take a first step into the discussion they don’t need to be Rodin’s Thinker. Thinking is not an entry requirement. Once in, then you can encourage their thinking via the questions you ask.
To give the questions a different spin, you can turn them into assertions. An assertion isn’t asking us what we think, it’s telling us what to think, and so it can work better at provoking a response. It gives the pupils something to resist or it articulates something they believe. Rather than asking, ‘Is it more pleasurable to be bad than good?’, you would say, ‘It is more pleasurable to be bad than good.’ Rather than asking, ‘Are people basically selfish?’, you would say, ‘Everyone is selfish.’ Then you would ask, ‘Does anyone believe this?’
A further option is to ask no questions at all. You may simply want to present the story, or whatever it is, ask the class if anyone has any thoughts about it, then let the discussion loose. Alternatively, once you’ve got the hang of philosophy, you might discard the book and present nothing.
I sometimes go in with no prepared material and begin by asking the class what they have been thinking about during the past week. Sessions that open like this tend to be more free-flowing. You might start with a thought about fortune telling and end with a discussion on make-up. A free-flowing session isn’t necessarily better, it’s just another option. But before you feel comfortable turning miscellaneous thoughts into evocative questions and shaping a discussion from thin air, using prepared sessions is good practice.
Every session in the book has an epigraph. I included these for my own pleasure but they can be fruitful. Writing one up on the board at the outset, you can say, for example, ‘This is a line from an ancient Persian writer called Rumi. I’ve written it up because the questions we discuss may connect to this quote, and maybe by talking about these questions, we will get an idea of what the quote means.’ Then, at opportune moments in the discussion, you can return to it: ‘Does what you’re saying have any connection to the Rumi quote?’ or ‘Does anyone now think they understand the quote?’ Of course, there are no right or wrong answers to these questions. There is little design to the choice of quotes, which can make them an interesting addition to a session.
A final point about age appropriateness. Some of the sessions are quite graphic or touch on disturbing topics. I haven’t recommended any lower age limits because every class is different and you are in a better position to decide what is and is not appropriate for your class. But, of course, the best way to establish their maturity is to test it – just let the class know that if anyone is finding a discussion too much, you will, without hesitation, move the lesson on to a different topic.
Discussion
The pupils need to feel free to speak. Explain to them that in philosophy no one is more intelligent than anyone else. There is no one whose thoughts are worth any more than your own. There is no one to lower our heads to, no voices that can cancel yours out. (To this end it’s worth emphasising that you should not evaluate or appraise answers; before moving on to the next pupil, you can simply end with a thank you.)
Philosophy occupies a tantalising position – otherwise known as democracy – between or beyond the poles of expert knowledge and personal opinion (the task being to claim rather than explain the world). The philosopher is neither a scientist nor a shopper. It seems to me that from primary to secondary, the space beyond authoritative judgement and personal opinion starts to disappear – or rather, the ideas of authoritative judgement and personal opinion start to emerge and encircle – and requires relearning. Primary school children are less self-conscious of their ideas.
Philosophy is against self-consciousness; it is for absorption and intrigue. It won’t allow us to be the centre of attention or just another face in the crowd. The meagre and the special are no good at conversation. (However, what may appear to be self-conscious inhibition could actually be a promiscuously adolescent wish to keep one’s options open.)
When you first pose a question, give the class a couple of minutes to discuss it with the people round them. It would be silly to snap your fingers and expect immediate answers to the world’s mysteries. Talk time gives the class the space in which their ideas can emerge. It also serves as a relief from the group discussion. Philosophy requires patience, but the risk is that a pupil will wait so long that they lose their desire to speak. Talk time gives everyone the opportunity to use their voice. As such it can also revitalise a discussion. If you notice the energy starting to flag, but you feel the present question has more to offer, you can recycle the question with another talk time.
Another important feature of talk time is that it gives you the opportunity to involve quieter pupils. By directly listening and talking to these pupils during talk time, you can then encourage them to share their ideas in the group discussion. You can reassure them that what they’ve said is interesting and would be a brilliant contribution. It may be that some pupils really do not want to speak and no one should feel pressured to participate. If you throw someone the ball in order to prompt a contribution, ensure you’ve emphasised to the class that they are free to decline. Having said that, it is, of course, very difficult to tell whether someone is resisting their desire to speak or if they’d actually rather not, so it’s important to be encouraging without being forceful and to be laissez-faire without being negligent.
Do not rush pupils. If they lose their train of thought or fall into confused silence, give them a minute to think it through. Simply repeating the question is often helpful, but you do need to be patient and allow for silence. A philosophy session is neither a game show nor a Quaker meeting, but it’s closer to a Quaker meeting. When the pupil with the ball is sitting in silence trying to figure out what they want to say, others can grow impatient and frustrated, but you need to be patient on their behalf. The concern with keeping pupils ‘engaged’ risks becoming a fear of their frustration. And philosophy is frustrating, just like everything else. Though we probably shouldn’t intend to frustrate or bore our classes, nor should we be preoccupied with not doing so (who are we trying to convince?).
As I’ve said, philosophy is conversational. When pupils start philosophy they don’t tend to naturally fall into a dialogue. They will give you their answer to the question but they won’t connect it to other answers, as if they were all doing philosophy separately, together. So a large part of what you’ll be doing is trying to engender the conversation. This can be done by asking questions like, ‘Is what you’re saying similar to X’s idea?’, ‘Oh right, so would you say your thoughts are quite different to X’s?’, ‘And what did you think about X’s idea? Do you think that too?’, ‘Okay, let’s all focus on X’s question. What do we think about it?’ and so on. The wish is for the class to listen to each other, to see their thoughts as part of a context, a conversation.
It can take a few weeks, it can take longer, but eventually you’ll stop needing to ask these questions so often. The class will start responding to each other far more; they will start to do your job for you. It is therefore possible to be too strict about letting only the person with the ball speak. You want the class to be able to respond to each other spontaneously. You don’t want them to feel that they can’t address the speaker – with a question, objection or something else – without first putting up their hands. Rules are a means to an end. The best moments are when you can step back and let the conversation happen. If the conversation stops happening, if people are talking over each other and not letting others finish, then, of course, it’s time to intervene. Not interrupting others is important; it’s a matter of not cramping their style.
On a similar note, a common rule in philosophy is that pupils should give the reasons behind what they think. This may be a matter of temperament, but I would suggest that what you are not asking the pupils to do is to justify their thoughts, but rather to see where their thoughts come from and where they might lead. Justification only comes in demands. ‘How would you justify that?’ is tantamount to, ‘You must legitimate that.’ The implication is that only justified thoughts are legitimate thoughts. And we don’t want exclusivity. So let’s play it like this: when you ask the pupil why they think what they think, you are not asking them to reason, but to riff; you are not asking them to be justified, but curious; to see where the thought takes them and what else they might make of it.
World
‘It’
The proofs of deaths are statistics and everyone runs the risk of being the first immortal.
Jorge Luis Borges
Imperialism and Magic
We can be competent but we are always helpless.
Adam Phillips
Until the 15th century the Americas did not exist as far as Europeans were concerned. These continents could not be found on their world maps. There was no knowledge of them.
This changed, however, when, starting with Portugal and Spain, Europeans started to explore the oceans. They discovered the Americas, Australia, and ventured further into Africa and Asia. Europe wanted to colonise the world.
It was through this imperialism that Europeans began encountering people belonging to cultures and societies seemingly very different from their own. They called these people ‘savages’ and their societies ‘primitive’. One recurrent practice they found was magic.
In the 1920s, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, an English anthropologist, went to live with the Azande people in Central Africa to observe and document their use of magic. He found that the Azande believed that magic could be used, among other things, to make them invisible while hunting, guide the aim of a spearman, protect against witches, obtain wives, prevent rain from falling and delay the sunset.
One of their main tools in magic was a whistle, of which they had several different types. One whistle was believed to give the wearer invisibility. Another was used to seek revenge against witches or enemies. The wearer would recite a spell: ‘You came to steal my spear. I am going to blow my whistle. May thunder strike you. May a leopard seize you; or a lion also. May you cut yourself with an axe. Whistle, whistle, whistle, I send you after a thief.’ Then they would blow the whistle and continue, ‘O whistle! O whistle! O whistle! May he cut his food on a large stump of wood.’
The Azande didn’t only use whistles. If they were travelling home late in the day and did not want to be caught in darkness, they would place a stone in a tree in order to delay the sunset, saying, ‘You, stone, may the sun not be quick to fall today.’ Stones would also be used to stop the rain during the construction of buildings or huts, or on the day of a feast. The stone would be hung in the air accompanied with these words, ‘May rain not fall, when rain appears as though it is about to fall may it remain firm like the stone.’
Starter Question Do you think their magic worked?
Questions to take you further
Is it appropriate to speak of magic as working?
Is magic practical? Is performing rain magic an alternative to buying an umbrella?
Why would the Azande practice magic if it weren’t successful?
Having observed such practices, many Europeans believed that these societies were not as progressed as their own. They believed that these peoples used magic because they didn’t yet know how nature really worked. These Europeans were certain that magic was false and that its practice revealed the undeveloped minds of primitive people. They saw magic as a kind of science, but a science based on a wildly incorrect understanding of nature and the forces that govern it.
Task Question 1 Is magic primitive?
Questions to take you further
Is magic bad science?
Is it possible for us to understand the Azande’s practices?
Does science show us how nature really works?
Do those who practice magic have undeveloped minds? Are they less advanced than us?
Could science and magic coexist within a single culture?
Is there anything wrong with being primitive?
Do we have our own forms of magic?
Can we live without myth, religion or superstition?
What is magic? Is it an acknowledgement or a denial of human helplessness?
Imagine that Evans-Pritchard felt he ought to help the Azande. Though he respected their customs and their way of life, he believed their lives could be improved. For example, if he replaced their magic with medicine, their lives would be longer and healthier. He could establish a school in order to teach the children and adults about the discoveries of science, build a hospital and introduce technology into their society.
Task Question 2 Should he do this?
Questions to take you further
Do they need educating?
Do their lives need improving?
What things make a life better?
Can we know what’s best for other people?
Are some cultures superior to others?
Should he also build a church in order to save their souls?
Is introducing them to his religion like introducing them to science?
Madness
Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.
George Santayana
Starter Question 1 Which, if any, of these three people are mad?
Questions to take you further
Which is in need of help?
What sort of help is required?
Take each of the cases in turn. As the pupils are expressing their thoughts on which is mad, board their reasons for thinking so. This way you’ll build up a map of answers addressing the implicit question:
Starter Question 2 What is madness?
A thing is delineated by what it is not, so with ‘What is …’ questions it is useful to look for opposites, to ask what the opposite of madness is – what sanity is – and how close we can come to madness without actually being mad. Things are also delineated by the values we place on them, by the tenor of our fears and desires towards them. So you might additionally ask, ‘Is it good to be mad? Is madness something we should be striving for?’
Shakespeare’s play Macbeth is a story of murder and guilt. Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth, plot to murder the king and take his throne. Macbeth has his doubts but Lady Macbeth is insistent. While the king is in bed, Macbeth kills him with a dagger. Lady Macbeth places the bloody weapon beside the king’s sleeping servants in order to implicate them. She commands Macbeth to wash his hands: ‘A little water clears us of this deed.’ Macbeth is crowned the new king.
The Macbeths, however, are not comfortable in their new lives, with their new power. Macbeth, fearing that he will himself be dethroned, orders a wave of deaths. Late in the play Lady Macbeth is seen shuffling through the night talking to herself. Her maid fetches the doctor. Lady Macbeth is not aware of them, she sees no one else. She washes her hands to cleanse them of blood, but neither her maid nor her doctor can see any blood there.
Doct. What is it she does now? Look how she rubs her hands.
Gent. It is an accustom’d action with her. I have known her continue in this a quarter of an hour.
Lady M. Yet here’s a spot.
Doct. Hark! she speaks.
Lady M.
