Henri Lefebvre and Education: Space, history, theory (New Directions in the Philosophy of Education) by Sue Middleton

Author:Sue Middleton [Middleton, Sue]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781135092276
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2013-11-06T23:00:00+00:00

The social unconscious

Lefebvre argued that, ‘There is a social unconscious as well as an imaginary’ (2005: 21). In this sense, Sylvia's ‘key words’ were symbols, emanating from the representational spaces of a culture. Lefebvre wrote:

Unlike psychoanalysis, bringing the social unconscious to light introduces not only the relations of production, but those of reproduction (domination and power), as well as representations (of a particular social class or stratum for itself, for other classes, for society as a whole).

(Lefebvre 1991c: 37)

In Native Schools, as in Sylvia's writing, residues of earlier colonial relations, tropes of civilisation and savagery (Olssen's [1992] ‘psychic and mental maps’, see Chapter 2 this volume) echoed through the more ‘modern’ discourses of racial equality.

As noted in Chapter 2, in nineteenth century human sciences, Māori were conceptualised as more ‘highly evolved’ than other ‘Native’ peoples. Native Schools were charged with a ‘civilising mission’ (Simon and Tuhiwai-Smith 1998) to assimilate Māori into Pākehā (British) culture. ‘Crossing’ into European culture was ‘progress’; failure to do so ‘regression’. By the 1930s, as Professor Fitt (of Auckland University's Education Department) explained, the success of assimilation was being questioned,

the main outcome of our attempts to educate the Maori has been failure. That this is so is substantiated by the reports from so many competent observers that the one longing of so many Maori boys and girls, once their schooling is over, is to ‘return to the mat’, that is, to the old paternal ways of living.

(Fitt 1931: 220)

Over twenty years later, Sylvia's teaching scheme used similar language:

This transition of Maori children is often unsuccessful. At this tender age a wrench occurs from one culture to another, from which, either manifestly or subconsciously, not all recover. And I think that this circumstance has some little bearing on the number of Maoris who, although well educated, seem neurotic, and on the number who retreat to the mat.

(Ashton-Warner 2009: 9)

As Cathryn McConaghy argued, ‘Sylvia constructed her notion of race usually within the tropes of the day’ (McConaghy 2006: 74).

High Māori mortality and susceptibility to European diseases led to a fear that Māori were a dying race. By the 1930s the assimilation policy was seen as partly responsible: ‘We do not educate the Maori but rather we unwittingly assist in killing him in the spiritual sense of the word. And, with this spiritual killing, the physical death is not far off’ (Fitt 1931: 225). A new policy of integration, known at the time as ‘fusion’, was envisaged:

To return to the Maori, we must consider for a moment the problem as to whether his ultimate end (if indeed he survive long enough) will be fusion with the white race or the maintenance of a separate existence alongside his countrymen. If the former case holds, and many high authorities on the Maori consider it will, then the education of the Maori must frankly face the problem of fusion. If the latter holds, it must be subject to certain limits, for much of the Maori's earlier life is quite inconsistent with our white civilisation.

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