Leadership As Lunacy by Lumby Jacky;English Fenwick W.; & Fenwick W. English

Author:Lumby, Jacky;English, Fenwick W.; & Fenwick W. English
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1051679
Publisher: Corwin Press
Published: 2010-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE SCHOOL AS RITUAL PERFORMANCE

The relationship between the play and the audience has been of central interest throughout history. For the Greeks, plays were performed for the gods with the earthly spectator merely taking advantage of the spectacle. Drama was a way of sustaining a relationship with the immortals through enacting the fundamental and mythic dilemmas of being human. Issues of fidelity, revenge, trust, and fateful circumstance reverberate through Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. Arguably, drama migrated to the quasitheater of sacred events in the Middle Ages. In Christian societies, the liturgy enacted a spectacle with a similar aim to that of Greek tragedy; to cement a relationship with God and to stimulate reflection on what it means to be a frail and erring human. Schools of today may seem to be a long way from such dramatic and quasidramatic performances. However, much school activity has a ritual element that connects it to external forces, though in this case to a different kind of godlike power.

Ritual is characterized by Burns (1972) as “a system of communication” (p. 208) and ceremonial as customary rituals performed at moments, often quasireligious, of change. For many children, schooling is a performance of ritual where habitual enactment communicates relationships and values. Consider, for example, the young adults in the study of high school students in the UK in 2008, for whom lessons were a mysterious enactment of copying notes that were then discarded (Gorard et al., 2009), or the high school students in Harris, Wallace, and Ruddock’s (1995) study, for whom school was a question of keeping up with listening, taking or making notes, and regurgitation that had little to do with understanding or learning. Such a process is designed not for the young person, but for an external audience. The quasireligious element of performance has disappeared, but the demands of utilitarianism, the economy, and international league table competition as exerted by the capitalist state may be as demanding and incomprehensible to the student actors as were the actions of the gods in ancient Greek civilization.

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