6. Can One Learn Without Teachers?

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم وصلى الله على سيدنا محمد وعلى ءاله وصحبه أجمعين وسلّم

Title: Can One Learn Without Teachers?

Author: Richard AbdarRazzak Goodall

Publication date: 5th October 2013

Assalamu alaykum. Welcome to the Civilisation & Society Programme of the Muslim Faculty of Advanced Studies. This is the sixth of 12 sessions which make up the Society Through Literature module. The lecture will last approximately 40 minutes during which time you should make a written note of any questions that may occur to you for clarification after the lecture. 

I heard this story, I can’t remember where from; a ‘teaching story’. It goes something like this. A young man arrives at the university of his own choice and is surprised to find that there are no teachers, nor lessons for that matter. So, he carries on regardless, doing what young people do. At the end of the first year he is surprised when a teacher appears and confronts him with a question: 

“We know that 1 plus 1 is 2, but where does the 1 come from?”

The young man is more surprised than anything and cannot begin to think of an answer and thus receives a big cuff around his head. The teacher leaves.

The second year. Same thing. No lessons and it passes in much the same way except with a creeping anxiety towards its end when sure enough the teacher again appears in front of him; “We know that 1 times 1 is 1, but where does the 1 come from?”

The young man still has no clue and receives a second slap with a strange sense of fatalism.

The third year, no change, only a growing sense of alarm as the year passes. He racks his brains and awaits the question on the teacher’s return;

“We know that 1 divided by 1 is 1, but where does the 1 come from? 

Silence. 

The teacher raises his arm and… 

What do you think happens next? I’ll leave it for you to think on and meanwhile set the scene for the answer.

 

The story evokes a number of issues around the question of learning, from Old School to Free School, from the nature of learning to that of teaching. I’d like to take you on a small journey and hopefully we might learn something. In case you haven’t read the bumf, I am a teacher myself. The person who pulled me in told me clearly at the beginning; ‘The day you stop learning you stop being a teacher’. I’m asking the question whether there can be learning without teachers.

Let’s start with a trip back to the old school. I’ve been reading Winston Churchill (My Early Life 1874-1908), a classic example of a successful product of the British Public School system you might think, with all its mixed results. A cavalryman who led a charge against the Mahdi’s armies at Omdurman and who bitterly carpet-bombed cities in Europe, his life spanned the end of the age of chivalry and the triumph of technology. He “was first menaced by education”, he says, when confronted with a book produced by “the Governess” called ‘Reading without Tears’. “It certainly did not justify its title in my case” Churchill recalled. At seven he was packed off to school, “I was no more consulted about leaving home than I had been about coming into this world.” He recalls his first Latin lesson: 

On a gloomy evening, with an aching heart, seated in front of the First Declension:

Mensa a table

Mensa O table

Mensam a table

Mensae of a table

Mensae to or for a table

Mensa by, with or from a table

What on earth did it mean? Where was the sense in it? It seemed absolute rigmarole to me. However there was one thing I could always do: I could learn it by heart. In due course the Master arrived.

“Have you learnt it?” he asked.

“I think I can say it sir,” I replied; and I gabbled it off.

He seemed so satisfied with this that I was emboldened to ask a question.

“What does it mean sir?”

“Mensa means a table,” he answered.

“Then why does mensa also mean O table,” I enquired, “and what does O table mean?”

“Mensa, O table, is the vocative case,” he replied.

“But why O table?” I persisted in genuine curiosity.

“O table – you would use that in addressing a table, in invoking a table.” And seeing he was not carrying me with him, “You would use it in speaking to a table.”

“But I never do,” I blurted out in honest amazement.

“If you are impertinent, you will be punished, and punished, let me tell you, very severely.” [op. cit. pp. 18-19]

(Had Churchill lived a century later he would have assumed that mensa also meant tablet or iPad, much invoked and talked to these days. ((In fact tabula/ae F.)))

So to punishment… a key aspect of the Old School, “that exceeded [again Churchill] in severity anything that would be tolerated today.” Flogging, meted out on the decks of Nelson’s ships (‘no place to swing a cat’) was commonly used in schools before the 60s.

George Orwell, in Such, Such Were the Joys recalls his experience of prep school.  He opens the essay by recounting a reversion to bed-wetting after arriving at the school at the age of seven. After a sinister warning from the matron and another bad night he is told to report to the head who beats him once and then again much harder as after he had left the room the first time, he was seen to be smirking and overheard saying to another boy that it hadn’t hurt very much. After the second beating he comments:

 

“I was crying partly because I felt that this was expected of me, partly from genuine repentance, but partly also because of a deeper grief which is peculiar to childhood and not easy to convey: a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them. 

I knew that bed-wetting was (a) wicked and (b) outside my control. The second fact I was personally aware of, and the first I did not question. It was possible, therefore, to commit a sin without knowing that you committed it, without wanting to commit it, and without being able to avoid it. Sin was not necessarily something that you did: it might be something that happened to you. 

At any rate this was the great, abiding lesson of my boyhood: that I was in a world where it was not possible for me to be good. And the double beating was a turning point, for it brought home to me for the first time the harshness of the environment into which I had been flung. Life was more terrible, and I was more wicked, than I had imagined.” 

Ironically he suggests that the continued beatings probably did cure his infirmity: 

“I did not wet my bed again—at least, I did wet it once again, and received another beating, after which the trouble stopped. So perhaps this barbarous remedy does work, though at a heavy price.”

I was also beaten fairly regularly. Years later I wrote about my school, that I too entered at seven, and in the process wrote the bullying headmaster, L E Davies, out of my life:

“His presence filled the place. More powerful than God, prayers didn’t work except for sentimental value, setting off hot, gushing tears and sending you down to the woods for some comfort amongst the trees. Nothing was separate from the dread we felt and like troops on constant alert, we had to learn to live with fear and use it. Dare games would see bursts of individual courage and floggings for failure were marks of rank; the welts on the bottoms displayed nightly in the dormitories as they changed from purple to red through to brown then yellow…

We had Davies for Maths, Geometry, Algebra and Latin – everyone did as they moved up the school into his form. Once I’d worked out that his method was more or less invariable, I was able to cheat, using the exercise books from some previous year boy… I learned to make deliberate mistakes to take my fair share of the punishment… 

Davies didn’t bring us up as dumb infantry though. He had his method as I said. We were his little dogs, which to give him his due, he liked. He just had a proclivity for punishing them.”

I learned little in the conventional sense of course; some Latin and lots of Shakespeare - lines given as punishment to memorise. If you’ve never seen them, watch the two films Tom Brown’s Schooldays and Lindsay Anderson’s If.

The film If begins with a typical flogging of the protagonist by prefects, and depicts a violent insurrection staged by the public school pupils on the annual Speech Day. The film was released in 1968, concurrent with the riots in Paris, ‘black power’, the My Lai massacre and the growing anti-Vietnam war campaign. As the American project stalled, the status quo in the West seemed to reel for a time in the face of new social and cultural movements with radical theories starting to find their way into every field, including education. RD Laing’s ‘anti-psychiatry’ challenged conceptions of what was normal, and brain research, in particular that of LH/RH brain thinking modes. RW Sperry’s article in the American Psychologist, Hemispheric deconnection and unity in conscious awareness also published in 1968, led to a flowering of holistic and lateral thinking. For a while, ‘borders were lost’; it was a period when non-European spiritual movements sprang up. (It was the first year in Islam for Shaykh Abdalqadir.) 

It coincided with a great shift in learning theories. One example of these new learning theorists was John Holt, who wrote the classic How Children Fail, a swingeing attack on the old prescriptive, carrot and stick pedagogy. He writes: 

“I was an ingenious and resourceful teacher, clever about thinking up lesson plans, demonstrations and motivating devices … but it dawned on me slowly and painfully, that when I started teaching less, the children started learning more.” 

“ We can help our children learn, not by deciding what we think they should learn … but by making the world as far as we can, accessible to them, paying serious attention to what they do, answering their questions – if they have any – and helping them explore the things they are most interested in.”

  

Holt’s entire career, comments a friend, was “the making sense of experience.” His starting point was that learning begins when you accept what you don’t know – something children naturally do – and is led by curiosity:

“It seems to me a fact” Holt says, “ that, in our struggle to make sense of life, the things we most need to learn are the things we most want to learn.” [How Children Learn p. 291]

“The human mind is a mystery. To a very large extent it will probably always be so. We will never get very far in education until we realise this and give up the delusion that we can know, measure and control what goes on in children’s minds.” [ibid. p. 293]

Ironically though, the brain research that influenced a generation of ‘radiant thinkers’ (Buzan), marvelling at the billions of brain cells and the incalculable synaptic connections, that spawned the personal development movement, and that for a while carried the pedagogical initiative, was born out of research into brainwashing by the Chinese during the Korean war. Psychologists had become fascinated by the power of propaganda and of influencing the mind; William Sargant’s Battle for the Mind (1957) and JAC Brown’s  Techniques of Persuasion (1963) indicated a fascination with measurement of brain patterns which influenced a new Behaviourist School and likely resulted in ECT etc. Remember One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? 

Education, which stemmed from this type of research, can, as Holt says, justifiably be deemed ‘a product’. Indeed, the state over the years took a greater and greater interest in the administration of educational process, instituting management-style, measurable, target outcomes, and in the Education Reform Act of 1988, introduced the National Curriculum with the aim of standardising assessment which in turn enabled the compilation of league tables detailing the assessment statistics for each school. The difficulties and the sheer scale of managing universal education mean that it is rarely out of the news. It is beyond the scope of this paper to cover educational policy. But to bring it up to date, after academies sprang up all over England, we now have ‘Free Schools’. I went along to an Open Evening of one of them recently, which had as its exciting selling point that no homework will be set, but, one senses with an eye on the parents’ working hours and child minding bills, there is to be an extended day from 8.30 to 5.00 o’clock. The brochure reads:

“ Excellent teaching and learning, combined with a high quality academic curriculum and the highest levels of support for all students will ensure the highest standards are met. We will help our students build independence, character resilience, leadership skills and a love of learning. We will create a culture that is focused on promoting excellence and supporting our students in achieving their academic potential and aspiring to go to university and into successful, fulfilling careers…the best teachers… guaranteed results etc…etc.” 

The place was packed. Parents are dying for a solution. I’m not sure that a string of superlatives in the face of current economic and social realities will bite though. There was no denying their well meaning. But almost every phrase had a sense of measurement, or fear of it, the legacy of the league table years. Uniforms are back in vogue and the catchphrase ‘traditional yet modern’ expressing the dualistic dilemmas educationalists face in presenting an updated version of the mass package and seeks to get the best of both worlds. It is what Ernst Jünger would probably call the striving for ‘technical perfection’. [Glass Bees 1960 p. 112]

The other way, preserved by teachers/masters of old, but not necessarily from schools, has been the search for ‘human perfection’. As Abdalhamid Evans reminded us in his lecture on Psychology in Literature recently, Heidegger, for example, tells us that the teacher is the one who is best at learning, that his job is to bring the student to the ‘place of learning’, and he is not talking about a building. Here, in the place of learning, in that illuminated clearing of shared awareness, the teacher makes an offering, and the student accepts it. But this, he tells us, is not yet learning. If the student just takes the offering, he has not learned anything. If, in taking the offering, the student finds something new within himself, that he did not know before, but that he recognises belongs to him…then he has learned something. In my own field, language teaching responded to the learner-centred approach and as I said, led the field in creative pedagogical development for many years. Jim Scrivener in his book Learning Teaching (1994) reiterates Holt in stating: 

“‘Teaching’ does not equal ‘learning’. Learning – of anything, anywhere – demands energy and attention from the learner. One person cannot learn anything for anyone else. It has to be done by your own personal effort. Nobody can transmit understanding or skills into your head.” [Learning Teaching]

So what does a teacher do? Scrivener argues: 

“It is our attitude and intentions rather than our methodology that we may need to work on,” and quotes the three core teacher characteristics  suggested by Carl Rogers’ that help to create an effective learning environment. These are respect, empathy and authenticity. Of these three Rogers considered authenticity the most important. “To be yourself. Not to play the role of teacher, but to take the risk of being vulnerable and human and honest.” [ibid. p. 24]

So, let’s go back to the initial story… How does the learner approach the teacher? It is the Buddha who is reputed to have said, “When the student is ready the teacher (or master) will appear.” And here he comes for the third time:

 

“We know that 1 over 1 is 1, but where does the 1 come from?” The student knows for sure that he is going to get another clout. But as his eyes fall, he notices that a button on the jacket of the teacher is hanging by a thread. As quick as a flash he says with newfound clarity and purpose, “Can I mend that for you?”

End of story… or rather; the beginning. Got it?

The beginning of adab is in the approach to the source of knowledge. It was in that wild dare game we played in our desperate schooldays, long before ‘health and safety’; Follow my Leader. Now, it is in the recognition that you do not know, with the journey on the path ahead lying, for a large part, in courtesy to one who knows more, as Hajj Uthman Morrison said in the opening lecture to this series. Literature is one expression of this courtesy. Thus the lessons come, and came. Here are a couple of extracts from a letter from the Earl of Essex written in 1595 to a young protégé on the point of travelling (of course, passed to me through the hand of my teacher):

“…when the little I had learned had taught me to find out my own emptiness, I profited more by some expert man in half a day’s conference than by myself in a month’s study.” [Dallas, I. The Interim is Mine p. 85]

And,

 

“ I do conclude […] with this advice, that you shall rather go a hundred miles to speak with a wise man than five to see a fair town.” [ibid. p. 86]

Here’s another expression of such an encounter, in his poem called The Master where Seamus Heaney, as apprentice, deals explicitly with the influence of Yeats (the teacher in me prompts me to say that the word coign in it means position of vantage or observation):

He dwelt in himself

like a rook in an unroofed tower.

To get close I had to maintain

A climb up deserted ramparts

and not flinch, not raise an eye

to search for an eye on the watch

from his coign of seclusion.

Deliberately he would unclasp

his book of withholding

a page at a time and it was nothing

arcane, just the old rules

we all had inscribed on our slates.

Each character blocked on the parchment secure

in its volume and measure.

Each maxim given its space.

Like quarrymen's hammers and wedges proofed

by intransigent service.

Like coping stones where you rest

in the balm of the wellspring.

How flimsy I felt climbing down

the unrailed stairs on the wall,

hearing the purpose and venture

in a wingflap above me.

[Station Island, 1984]

My Arab students readily recall the respect due to the teacher, but when asked to account for the disastrous situation in the Middle East have no answer. It must be very hard to find authenticity in autocratic regimes, with nationalized universities as constricting for the soul of a teacher as schools are for students. Most settle for the technical option. There are those who call themselves teachers in this age of celebrities and many charlatans no doubt. I can only attest to the veracity of my own experience and that meeting mine, in the words of a song written by Abdalhamid [Evans]: 

“…he told me things that I already knew, but had just forgotten that the truth was really true.” 

And how did he do this?

By spreading amongst his students the wealth of European thinking and composition, as well as at the same time bringing us in his turn to the most authentic of teachers, the prophet Muhammed, (SAW) who famously said, “I only came to perfect good character”. 

I will quote just one passage from Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi’s The Way of Muhammad, from the chapter entitled ‘Bewilderment’ because it pertains to the initial story. After making the case for the dismantlement of the “dualist machine ideas of existence which we were taught” (perhaps those that fill the three years of the university of one’s own circumscribed choice), he argues their needing to be replaced with a ‘living and moving picture of reality’. He says, making free with the English language: 

“You have to ‘one’ reality, and when it is ‘one-d’ experientially, the goal is achieved. Unification is our business on the Path; the knower, the knowledge and the known.” [p. 167] 

If somehow a goal has been indicated what I have just said, there remains yet the ‘how’. In what way a teacher can help steer the youth towards a ‘place of learning’ or inward confirmation, perhaps we can call it, so that it is characterized by a natural acceptance of the unknown, or with what DH Lawrence calls “that sense of awe and wonder natural in a child.” 

Lawrence had pronounced views on upbringing; “The instinctive way of the mother” was the way to educate children he thought: 

“There should be no effort to teach children to think, to have ideas. Only to lift them and urge them into dynamic activity. The voice of dynamic sound, not the words of understanding. Damn understanding. Gestures and touch, expression of the face, not theory. Never have ideas about children and never have ideas for them. [First Steps in Education Fantasia of the Unconscious p. 78]

You can understand why Lawrence is not so popular with the modern educators. He too placed child learning squarely at the feet of the mother. 

The word ‘mentor’ on the other hand, from mentos "intent, purpose, spirit, passion," is a word with growing implications as support and advising extend beyond the school years and yard. From Sanskrit, man-tar - ‘one who thinks’ – it brings us closer to the nub, the  parental responsibility for our own and other children –as it has always been – but particularly now in confronting the cyberspace.

 

This is a whole new environment – the new ‘jungle’ through and in which our young have to traverse. Last month, a film called In Real Life opened around England in which the director Beeban Kidron explores the addictive relationships that are developing around computers and the unregulated use of the internet as the young use programmes with innocuous, (baby-) sounding names like skype, ‘google’, tweet, twitter; ‘be my friend.’ Kidron’s purpose is not to judge or provide solutions, but aims to make people think about the situation. She is at pains to show that ‘cyberspace’ is in fact a load of sheds networked around the world that in actual fact favour governments and corporations. Julian Assange makes the cameo comment that “There is only one thing going on.”

 

She wanted to see how the devices that teenagers always seem to be attached to mediate their behaviour, “We know the young can adapt, we just want to see what they are adapting to.” 

Kidron’s greatest concern is with the pervasiveness of reward technology, “the grasping of data from under 18s who SHOULD be experimental and transgressive but are leaving a really public footprint. I worry about a culture of anonymity that allows unbridled cruelty and power abuse.” She points to an absolute failure of responsibility and aside from issues of regulation and verification, the lack of which will leave a legacy “ as serious as debt or global warming,” she cites a strange statistic concerning a greater incidence of playground accidents because, ironically, parents are on the phone.

 

After the screening of the film, Kidron commented further on this point, suggesting that it is the risk-averse parents who are likely to shout, “ Get off the phone!” Far better, she suggests, to say, “Invite your friends round.” “Acts of bravery are needed,” she said and she certainly advocated outdoor activities and sport if for the only reason that you can’t use your phone at the same time. ‘Online bullying’, ‘acts of bravery’; the world doesn’t change that much. We have almost come full circle. I want to relate two more encounters. One definitely ‘old school’, the other from a rather free one. 

The first took place in South Africa. Winston Churchill met Baden Powell, 17 years his senior but both Hussars, to interview him for the Morning Post just after the relief of the siege of Mafeking where B.-P. and his troops, hugely outnumbered, had brilliantly defended the town for 217 days. Part of his strategy during the siege was to use a corps of boys, the Mafeking Cadets; boys below fighting age but able to stand guard, carry messages, assist in hospitals and so on, freeing grown men to fight. Earlier reconnaissance missions during the Matabele wars had sown the seeds of his later Boy Scout ideas and in 1908 he published his book Scouting for Boys. (This copy here given to me by the contributor to the previous lecture, one of the best outdoor travelling companions you could have). This is Winston Churchill on it:

“It appealed to all the sense of adventure and love of open-air life which is so strong in youth. But beyond this it stirred those sentiments of knightly chivalry, of playing the game - any game - earnest or fun - hard and fairly, which constitute the most important part of the British system of education.”

Ideas that are largely lampooned these days. But if you read the book, you see the thoughtfulness and kindness imbued in it. It is full of  “intent, purpose, spirit, passion,"

with all the right ingredients to catch normal children’s interest, like; “what to do if you find a dead body, dealing with ‘panics’, climbing trees, feeding and serving others and long sections on self discipline with reading suggestions like “Bee-keeping for beginners”; random life elements… being prepared for all eventualities. This is something very close to futuwwa, something which has been translated as chivalry. It implies ‘youth’, which any one of us can subscribe to at any age inasmuch that we go beyond the sayings that describe access to the truth to those who embody it.

Matsuo Basho puts it well when he said:

kojin no ato wo motomezu,
kojin no motometaru  tokoro wo motome yo

Seek not the paths of the ancients; 

Seek that which the ancients sought.

[‘Words by a Brushwood Gate’ 17th Century]

Clearly scouting, pathfinding, is the first step. The second is for us to find ourselves (in both senses). And it is the duty of those who have found something of that secret to pass it on to others (as Hajj Abdassamad reminded us in the khutba yesterday).

How does one finish something that has barely been started on? 

(This has merely been an exercise in reminding myself of the work still to do.)

B.-P. was keen on exercises and I will share one for the chest that will certainly increase your speed on the path. This is word for word as it is written in Scouting for Boys:

“From upright position bend to the front, arms stretched downwards, with the back of the hands together in front of the knees. 

Breathe out; “One”

Raise the hands gradually over the head and lean back as far as possible, drawing a deep breath through the nose as you do so – that is drinking God’s air into your lungs and blood. Lower the arms gradually to the sides breathing out the word “Thanks” (to God) through the mouth.”

The other encounter. I began with an old story – a learning story that I hope will now have struck some chords. I finish with a new-ish one. Some years ago a good companion and I started a cycling club of sorts for some children of our mutual friends. We called it ‘Rain or Shine’ and the idea was to give the young (boys mostly) skills on and around their bikes with some adventure thrown in. We made wider and wider sorties around Norwich in all weathers and a first camping experience in Thetford Forest. We had plans for a bigger trip and did our best to get the boys and bikes up to scratch. It was decided to cross England by bike, West to East, along the line of Hadrian’s Wall. Inevitably, there was a lot of planning involved. 

We all went up by train to Newcastle where we had arranged a carrier to take the bikes across to the Solway Firth on the west coast as they could not fit in the cross country Sprinter the boys took. I went with the carrier to look for a good camping site near Hadrian Wall’s westernmost end. Hajj Rashid [Luqman] and the boys were to catch a local bus from Carlisle and join me at the spot around dark. I wanted to get the tents up before they all arrived. We must have had mobile phones but I can’t remember using them. 

It had been a lovely day but rain had been forecast and was now visible in the west as we approached Bowness-on-Solway in the van, but search as we might, we could not find a suitable spot; too many rocks, brambles, bushes or animals in the fields. It was getting dark too and the driver wanted to get back to Newcastle and, as it had just started to rain, I had to make a decision. I plumped for putting them up on the side of the estuary itself, on little islands of clean green grass rutted with deep channels formed by water at high tide but which I reckoned would remain clear once the tide did come in. We hurriedly unloaded the van of bikes and I immediately set to. Putting up tents in the rain is never easy, and it had now become a downpour. Worse still, the tents had knots in the strings from the last time they had been put away badly. 

It was now almost dark. I was cursing the boys when the lights of their bus came round the corner. The van driver who had actually stayed to try and help me, flagged it down, and the boys, muffled in their jackets, unwillingly tipped out and stood bewildered by the side of the road, watching me wrestling with the tents, lit up in the occasional lightning flash. I was now soaked to the skin but had no option but to continue. I wondered how we were going to make them a hot drink.  The situation was looking hopeless.  But then, out of the darkness a man appeared wearing a full length Barbour coat and a leather cowboy hat. I can remember the water pouring off its brim as he lent close to talk to me: “You can’t stay here, you’ll get flooded when the tide comes up.” I had calculated differently but held back my protestations, deferring to his local knowledge. “You’d better come back with me.”

So, picking up the damp tents and kit, we wheeled our dripping bicycles up to a sizeable house just nearby. These we safely stored in the sheds, after which he invited us in and gave us all hot cocoa. All our damp clothes were taken away and dried and while the adults were offered their own rooms, the boys tucked into their sleeping bags - in the front room - all ten of them. You can imagine how delighted they were, and, how surprised our host’s wife was when she came back from orchestra practice around midnight to find the house full of people. 

In the morning after a hearty breakfast and, now with the sun shining, we bade farewell and waved our thanks to this generous saviour. It was the initiation and thereafter we had a spectacular journey back to Newcastle in brilliant sunshine and two more rainless nights. The boys have obviously never forgotten this trip and the kindness of a complete stranger who took us all in. 

What a lesson. 

Who could have planned it?

An inkling of where the 1 came from.

Thanks indeed.

All praise is to Allah

That brings us to the end of today’s lecture. The subject of our next lecture is Film and Reality which will be presented in two weeks time by Imruh Bakari. Thank you for your attention. Assalamu alaykum.

References

As-Sufi, (Shaykh) A. The Way of Muhammad. Diwan Press London, 1975

Baden-Powell, R. Scouting for Boys: Original 1908 Edition. OUP Oxford, 2005

Brown, J.A.C. Techniques of Persuasion. Penguin Books Ltd., 1969

Churchill, W. My Early Life 1874-1908. (first pub. 1930) Fontana, 1958

Dallas, I. The Interim is Mine. Budgate Press Cape Town, 2010

Heaney, S. The Master. Faber & Faber London, 1984

Holt, J. How Children Fail. Penguin (revised ed.), 1995

How Children Learn. Penguin, 1991

Jünger, E. The Glass Bees. Noonday Press New York, 1991

Lawrence, D.H. Fantasia of the Unconscious. Penguin, 1981

Orwell, G. Such, Such Were the Joys. Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1953

Sargant, W. Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brain-Washing. ISHK, 1997

Scrivener, J. Learning Teaching. Macmillan Education (3rd ed.), 2011

Sperry, R. W. Hemisphere deconnection and unity in conscious awareness. American

  Psychologist 23, 723-733 (1968)