‘Egos come and egos go
And that's all right you see
Experience has made me rich
And now they're after me
'Cause everybody's living in a Remedial world
And I am a Remedial child
You know that we’re living in a Remedial world
And I am a Remedial child’
We all know the story. The kid who was no good at education –
aspergers, dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, the wrong side of the tracks, whatever
– who ends up conquering the world. Rags
and thickness to riches and brains. The
story of Remedial Child.
Only it’s not true. ‘They’
don’t become one of ‘us’. This isn’t
Pygmalion. The truth is far more
interesting: the normative ‘us’ in the story is a lie, a distortion created
through our obsession with a rational logic that defines a set human identity we believe
everyone should conform to. What William Whyte, in a business context, defined
as ‘organisation man’ (1956). The beauty of the truth is that Remedial Child
never learns to be normal; they learn how to use who they are within the limits
of our world view, harnessing what they were deemed to be no good at – what they
were mocked for - and turning it into their talent for life.
Look at some of the absurdly prescribed indicators of ‘gifted
children’ – as if we have learnt nothing from R D Laign about defining the
human norm from ticklists – and you will find some of the indicators of Remedial
Children. For example,
•doesn't accept authoritarian pronouncements
•asks provocative
questions, challenges parents, teachers, and other authorities
•is bored with
memorisation and recitation
•displays energy,
sometimes disruptively
•produces unexpected,
sometimes "silly" responses
•is considered, and
perhaps resented, by some peers as "crazy"
Remedial children turn their problems into talents either by
immense resilience; or by being spotted by someone to invest in their quirks as gifts;
or through the luck of a life experience that alters their chances of growing the confidence to believe in what they can do. Whatever, the important thing is that 'they'
change 'us' as the norm, rather than become part of the same norm. Some organisations talent spot for ‘remedial’
these days – they want a more balanced staff team than just ‘organisation man or
woman’. Things have changed since I was growing up in the 70s or William Whyte's 50s .
I write this because I was a Remedial Child. And I still am.
I’ve been living in a remedial world for a long long time. And always will.
I was sent to remedial classes as soon as I entered into primary
education. I was also banished from art classes, deemed too disruptive an
influence. I can’t remember what I was meant to have done
to be disruptive, but I think it involved completing my artwork at speed and then
getting in everyone else’s way by throwing paint over them or tearing up their work. On the one hand, it appeared I couldn’t do
anything normal, like speak and write properly; but on the other hand, while I
was dreaming of much more important things in my head and heart like castles and wombles and clangers, I couldn’t understand
why life had been reduced to such a boring set of things that seemed
to make no sense to me. And so every week I went to the classes for
the ‘thickheads’ as they called us, where we had to colour in picture books and
work out if the words ‘flash and flush’ were for ‘the toilet or the torch’ (a
question I thought was so stupid I remember deliberately getting it wrong). You got gold stars for going to remedial
class, and you could take them back to your main class to put them on the achievement
chart, so everyone could see what a thickhead you were. I hid mine in the desk when no one was looking.
I knew how to make untidy desks from an
early age.
Then one day it dawned on me. I must have been about 5 or 6,
and I suddenly realised in an Orwellian kind of way: it’s not me, it’s the
system. The education system was as
silly as a plate of wobbling jelly. My suspicions
reached their zenith when our young teacher of the time, let’s call her Miss
Brodie, lost her rag with us one day and cancelled our games class. Everyone
put their ties back on and grimly filed out the building to watch the other kids
play instead, standing where they would probably be castigated by the head teacher.
Being Remedial Child, I had to wait behind everyone else so Miss could put my
tie back because I couldn’t do it myself. And there we were, just the two of us,
Remedial Child and Miss Brodie. As she
took my tie in her hands she looked at me and said: ‘Colin, do you think I did
the right thing?’ The me of now would
have said – how the xxxx should I know?’. But the me of then understood, deep
down, intuitively, that ‘they’ the adults didn’t know what they were doing, no one
knew what they were doing, and they certainly didn’t know who I was or have any
right to call or define me as Remedial. Let alone ask me to advise them about
their wobbling jelly.
I was lucky. My parents took my out of that crazy education
system to a ‘Cider with Rosie’ world in South Wales, where I was nurtured in a
small school that encouraged imagination and play. Remedial child started to
show signs that he could out-read and think his age group, but still at the same
time be educationally vulnerable within the assessment system - I only scraped
through my 11 plus, on the borderline as ever, with no confidence in my real ability.
By the time I entered University at 18, all the disruptive
energy and wayward dreams that got me classified as remedial were now being
admired as signs of ‘a brilliant mind’. I didn’t just get a First, I won every prize they were giving out the
year of my Graduation. Yet sitting at the Graduation meal next to the Archbishop
of York and the Duchess of Kent, it was abundantly clear that I lacked the graces
and charms and normality of the other students at the top table. I wasn't like the real 'gifted' children. They had tried
to throw me out of University in my first term for being ‘too odd’. Nothing had
changed since: I just learnt to harness my oddness as an art form and turn it
against the persecutors.
At the top table I could ask them to
go and get me another bottle of wine instead.
Fast forward to where I am now. What I have learnt most over my time at the
Foyer Federation is that I am not only driven by the feelings and insights I
carry with me from my time as Remedial Child; I am the same person living
inside a rational adult. It’s where everything I do comes from. I had a stammer at an early age, and it’s something
you never lose; you just stammer the words inside your head instead as you speak. So
Remedial Child thinks away at a 1000 disruptive images a minute inside, while
the rest of me copes with the logical systems that I have to function through.
Those same logical processes and contexts and assessments that
classified me as Remedial - and continue
to fail others by the same discriminations - are the logic I see reflected back in the systems and
processes that most organisations (dis)function by.
Sometimes people think I am being difficult or rude or detached – well,
he is an innovative type with Einstein hair - but truth is I’m simply trying to
contain my disruptive energy to fit in an outside world I don't really feel part of. It's not always easy, I don't always get the better of myself, I hurt people without meaning to, I care too much about everything because the experience is alive for me. And some days, Remedial Child gets a gold star,
when the piece of innovation ‘they’ have been allowed to disclose – healthy
transitions, working assets, open talent, whatever – is shown at the front of the class. Other
times I’m left in the corner, with the crumpled stars hidden in a little desk in my
head, the ideas no one sees again.
Disruption is now a cool word. I go to meetings where people
talk about their organisation being ‘disruptive’, about the power of ‘disruptive
innovation’. The last person who asked
me for advice on this I told to go drink a bottle of pepper vodka on a full moon and see what happens
the next morning. Which is what my tutor Lorna Sage would have said, tongue in cheek. She had the gift too, in a very different way.
Her 'Bad Blood'. Maybe I’m in style at last. Only of course there is a logical system already
being devised somewhere to classify disruption, and it certainly won’t include
me in it.
It’s strange that someone as disorganised as Remedial Child
could grow up to devise the organised purity of the Foyer Accreditation Scheme.
But that’s another part of the lie: Remedial Child can do pretty much anything,
IF they are allowed to do it in their own way, or can convince others to play along with their rules. (I wrote the accreditation scheme of 2005 called ‘FISH’ listening to ‘Michael Caine’ by Madness, played repeatedly over 72 hours while living on tea, toast and jam
in a basement with the original SP QAF drafts for company, without any help other than no one asking where I had vanished
to at the time - few organisations would have allowed me to do that, which is why the Foyer Federation is always a special place to be remedial in).
The logical systems we live our life by are mostly flawed
proxies that serve a majority, but fail the rest of us. Intelligence systems
test what intelligence is deemed to be, not what it really is. I am a Remedial
child with a First Class degree and an MA. And yet nothing has changed in my intelligence. I still can't do the same things - but I can do others.
As I think back to that childhood incident with Miss Brodie,
there is something else I remember. She chose to ask me because she trusted that
I wouldn’t tell on her. And I allowed that trust, because I could feel that she
was genuine. She was a nice person, she cared, and she was worried about what
she had done. She was vulnerable, and in
that vulnerability she was as open as I was. It was an early lesson in authenticity. I knew
the education system was false, was a lie, and that the truth was different. But
here was someone who was being honest with me for once. No more flash and flush.
I have spent the last 18 years fighting for that truth with and for others. I care
passionately about it. There is nothing that makes me more 'disruptive' than
working with an organisation that is not authentic, that thinks it is
invulnerable, lost in the ego of its false logic, in pursuit of itself, dismissive
of everyone else. And there is nothing that makes me more innovative than
working with someone who trusts me enough to open up the bag of tricks in my
head, playing together to find real solutions that are honest to the people we are meant to be working for.
I wanted to be an enfant terrible like Foucault or Lou Reed, but I was
just a dumb kid who found he wasn’t stupid after all. There are lots of us,
very successful, very talented, very remedial, shaking the status quo at the
top table. And there are lots of us not
here, lost in transition, struggling in life, crushed by a policy-driven
system, the other remedial kids falling into the cracks we walk over in our
rush to another morning meeting about the unshifting paradigm shift.
I used to tell myself, when being Remedial Child really hurt,
that the 7th cavalry would
come to save me one day, like it did in the stories in my cartoon book. While
the adults droned on about how useless I was, I’d be listening to a bugle
horn playing in my head. I still hear it in meetings, whenever the
adults are droning on about rational things I can’t understand.
Had I read my
Foucault early enough, I would have realised that I had chosen the wrong expression
of power to save me. What I should have been asking for was the other ‘re’ word
– revolution. A revolution in education to find the talent
in everyone, without a logic model to discriminate and punish people by. That’s an idea worth being disruptive for, 'in
a remedial - in a remedial - in a remedial world'. Go sing the words ...
'Egos come and egos go
And that's all right you see
Experience has made me rich
And now they're after me
'Cause everybody's living in a Remedial world
And I am a Remedial child
You know that we’re living in a Remedial world
And I am a Remedial child’
