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John Macmurray, Spirituality,Community and Real SchoolsJulian SternPublished online: 21 Jul 2010.

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International Journal of Children’s Spirituality, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2001

John Macmurray, Spirituality, Communityand Real SchoolsJULIAN STERNBFSS National RE Centre, Department of Education, Brunel University,Osterley Campus, Borough Road, Isleworth, Middlesex TW7 5DU, UK. E-mail:julian.stern@brunel.ac.uk

ABSTRACT This paper suggests that the work of the Scottish philosopher John Macmur-ray provides a valuable contribution to debates on spirituality, education, and schools ascommunities. In particular by recognizing the nature of the spiritual in everyday activitiesof people in communities, by focusing on the overall aims of schooling, and by rejectingdualism, idealism and materialism, Macmurray was able to describe how schools mightproperly be organized. The paper aims to investigate some of Macmurray’s insights, to seehow they might help transform one’s vision of schooling.

Contemporary debates on spiritual development in schools have attempted to takeus to the heart of what it means to be human and relationships of people to othersor ‘the Other’. Such issues have been addressed over many years by, amongst others,the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray, who said that:

We are not individuals in our own right; and in ourselves we have no valueat all, since we are meaningless. Our human Being is our relations to otherhuman beings and our value lies in the quality of these relations. (Macmur-ray, 1995a, p. 72)

Macmurray had a distinctive approach to spiritual issues, and connected these toissues of community, education, and ‘reality’. This paper therefore explores hiswork, and presents this as contributing to a possible foundation for, and explanationof, some current work in schools.

John Macmurray lived from 1891 to 1976. Brought up in the Scottish Calvinisttradition, as a youth he became an evangelical Christian preacher, but withdrewfrom all institutional religion during World War I in response to the receptionchurchgoers gave his views on war. His reasons for withdrawal are interesting, andilluminate his views on human nature and the making of community, which he laterillustrates by use of Jesus’ answer to the question ‘who is my neighbour?’. Life in thetrenches, facing death all the time, appeared to him to allow people to make more‘real’ connections, and therefore be more ‘real’ in a spiritual sense. He describeshow, on a brief period of leave from the war, during which time he was preaching,

ISSN 1364-436X (print)/ISSN 1469-8455 (online)/01/010025-15 Ó 2001 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/13644360120047423

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26 J. Stern

[b]efore twenty-four hours had passed I wanted to get back to the trenches,where for all the misery and destruction, the spiritual atmosphere wasrelatively clean. It was, I think, the ignorant and superstitious hatred of theGermans, and the equally ignorant and unreal glori� cation of us, in thetrenches, as heroes that had this effect. (Macmurray, 1995a, p. 20)

He joined the Society of Friends late in his life, but despite an entire working lifeoutside organized religion, he always considered himself a Christian, and wroteextensively about religion in his work as a professional philosopher. His work oneducation is less well known than that on religion. Indeed, Macmurray’s papers oneducation were rejected for publication by two publishers, and remain unpublished(Costello, 1998b; one of the rejection letters is included in Macmurray, 1968). [1]However, his views on ‘community’ have recently gained fame through the high-pro� le admiration shown by UK prime minister Tony Blair, who wrote the forewordto a new edition of Macmurray’s works (Macmurray, 1996b). Blair praised thephilosopher for his views on the relationship of people to society and on the placeof spirituality in this world. [2]

This short paper [3] suggests that, by his attempt to go beyond materialism andidealism, Macmurray provides a sound foundation for aspects of spiritual develop-ment and, more indirectly, of religious education in our schools. Further, bydescribing communities as being personally rather than functionally or mechanicallyconnected, Macmurray provides a sound foundation for understanding the wider,whole-school, context in which spiritual development and religious education maybe placed. The aim of this paper is therefore to see why Macmurray’s insights mighthelp transform one’s vision of schooling.

Macmurray on the Spiritual and Communities

The spiritual, and spiritual development in schools, is sometimes stereotyped as aform of ‘escapism’, or a form of idealism. Macmurray was certainly not of thatopinion.

Idealism seeks to escape from action into meditation; and from the tensionsof life in common into the solitariness of one’s own spirit. The purelyspiritual which it seeks is the purely imaginary, a ghost world withoutsubstance or shadow. (Macmurray, 1995a, p. 59)

Spiritual issues in education are currently the subject of many debates and disagree-ments, and Macmurray’s views may help illuminate some of them. An author cansay that ‘[s]piritual development lies at the heart of our school system’ (John Hall,quoted in the Times Educational Supplement, 1998), yet the nature of what is called‘spiritual’ is, inevitably, hotly contested. In recent years UK government agencies(e.g. DES, 1977; NCC, 1993; OFSTED, 1993, 1994; SCAA, 1995; and, from UKlocal government, Hartland, 1999) have contributed to the debates just as havethose based in universities and elsewhere (e.g. Thatcher, 1996; Copley, 1997; Hull,1998; Hay, 1998; Cohn-Sherbok, 1998; Wright, 1999). Teachers in schools may

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John Macmurray and Schools 27

have even more diverse views, as described by Geraint Davies (Davies, 1998). ForMacmurray, the debate was set in the context of the entire history of Christianity—indeed, the history of the world.

Macmurray’s starting point is that:

Religion is about action because it is concerned with the whole man [sic].A religion which is concerned only with the ‘spiritual life’ is a religionwhich leaves action out, and in which spiritual activity has no practicalreference. (Macmurray, 1995a, p. 65)

‘Action’, in this sense, is what distinguished the Good Samaritan, and when peopleact in certain ways, as whole people, they may be making community—they maybecome ‘my neighbours’. But action is not merely physical movement. It includesthought as one of its aspects:

Whereas in re� ection we are engaged quite literally in changing our minds,in action we are engaged in changing the world. Action includes thought;it is not something which can be distinguished from thought. The life ofre� ection is not a different life from the life of action. It is a limitation ofthe life of action to one of its aspects. This is why we contrast ideas and realthings. (Macmurray, 1996b, p. 75)

Macmurray therefore rejects ‘dualism’, ancient and modern, and it is his rejection ofdualism that perhaps best illustrates what religion, education and spiritual develop-ment is and is not:

The contrast between the Greek and Roman social achievements is acontrast of opposites at the same level. Both are dualist societies, subject tothe opposition of spiritual and material ideals. The Greek sacri� ces thematerial to the spiritual; the Roman sacri� ces the spiritual to the material.(Macmurray, 1996b, p. 175)

and:

in his [Macmurray’s] view Descartes’ starting-point led inevitably to athe-ism. But since he considered atheism false, it followed that the Cartesianmode of thought must be mistaken. If the individual is no more than adetached consciousness, action becomes inexplicable and the existence ofother people problematic: that of God, even more so. Here is the genesisof idealism, or dualism, to which Macmurray was implacably opposed: thesplitting of experience into mind and matter, the spiritual and the secular,ideal freedom and material subservience to law … Religion, if not rejectedoutright as illusory, becomes a question of pure subjectivity, while theorganization of everyday life is surrendered to scientists, managers andtechnocrats. In short, idealism breeds materialism. (Cornford in Macmur-ray, 1996b, p. 21)

Philosophical systems based on dualism, and approaches to education based onthese systems, inevitably fall into an atheistical materialism or an idealism based on

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28 J. Stern

false views of the ‘spiritual’. Descartes’ systematic doubt, therefore, is directlyconnected to approaches to education (and to religious education in particular) thatmaintain a sceptical view of all matters of truth, or avoid issues of truth altogether.Long before Wright identi� ed the problems caused by Descartes’ ‘rationalist her-meneutic of suspicion’ (Wright, 1999), Macmurray was writing that:

The method of doubt rests upon an assumption, which should be madeexplicit, that a reason is required for believing but none for doubting. Thenegative, however, must always be grounded in the positive; doubt is onlypossible through belief … It cannot be true that I ought to doubt what infact I believe, by a deliberate act of will. (Macmurray, 1996b, p. 50ff.)

If a pupil asks a teacher ‘why do Christians say they know that there is a God?’, ateacher might, following Macmurray’s lead, refer the pupil to Christian argumentsfor, and purported evidence for, the existence of God. What Macmurray seems tobe rejecting is an answer of the form ‘nobody really knows; those who believe in theexistence of God simply make a leap of faith’. Hence, the rejection of Cartesiandualism, and Cartesian doubt, is also a rejection of some common forms of dialoguein lessons on religious topics.

Macmurray co-opts Jesus to his anti-dualist argument, as Jesus ‘is not an ideal-ist—for the same reason that he is not a materialist—because the distinction betweenthe ideal and the material does not arise for him’ (Macmurray, 1996b, p. 209), [4]yet he is prepared to dismiss a considerable amount of Christianity (especially sinceits adoption by the Roman Empire [5]), as ‘a great deal of what passes forChristianity is undoubtedly idealist, and must either be cured of its idealism orrejected’ (Macmurray, 1995a, p. 26).

It is worth considering how Macmurray, as an anti-dualist, positively describes the‘spiritual’. The surprise with which authors may encounter Macmurray’s views isperhaps best described by David Hay. Talking of the work he and Rebecca Nye hadbeen doing on children’s spirituality, he sees a similarity between his and Macmur-ray’s views on spirituality and religion, which current debates (in an ‘individualist ’culture) had managed to hide. Hay says that:

It was only during the � nal stages of our analysis last year that I cameacross Macmurray for the � rst time. As I read his Gifford lectures [i.e.Macmurray, 1991a and 1991b] I realised that our � ndings were convergingon an understanding of the nature of spirituality and hence religion thatseemed remarkably close to his vision. I felt some relief that our analysishad not simply re� ected back to us the conscious preconceptions we hadbrought to the practical side of the research. At the same time I wassurprised and somewhat alarmed that such an important element of spiritu-ality could be central to our theoretical dialogue, yet had escaped ournotice over several months of planning. Our obliviousness seems to havebeen a function of the presuppositions we share with the individualisticsociety which John Macmurray criticises so trenchantly. Children’s spiritu-ality and its religious expression appears to point overwhelmingly in the

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John Macmurray and Schools 29

communal direction expounded by Macmurray. This theme emerged inspite of our blindness, when we paid close attention to the children’slanguage. (Hay, 1998, p. 10ff.)

It is only a dualist, then, who would see ‘spirituality’ or ‘spiritual development’ as aseparate and rather idealist aspect of education, and only an individualist who couldsee relations between people (or between a person and ‘the Other’), as, similarly, apossible addition to an otherwise individual-centred curriculum. Having dismissed adualist idea of spirituality, Macmurray, like Hay, builds a case for a ‘communal’ or‘relational’ view of what makes a person. ‘God’ is seen by Macmurray as the‘universal other’ and religion as the ‘expression of consciousness of community’. Itis only in communities that people have ‘personal lives’: it is in communities thatpeople exist as people. ‘It is the life of the individual that is the common life’(Macmurray, 1993, p. 9), ‘it is the sharing of a common life which constitutesindividual personality’ (Macmurray, 1993, p. 37), human life has an ‘inherentsociality’ (Macmurray, 1993, p. 31), ‘the personal is inherently mutual’ (Macmur-ray, 1968, p. 27), and, in summary ‘a person is always one term in a relation ofpersons’ (Macmurray, 1968, p. 149). (Macmurray’s biographer suggests an evenstronger version of this view, that, when Macmurray considered himself alone, hejust ‘crumbled away to dust’, Costello, 1998a.) And, on God, ‘[i]n its full develop-ment, the idea of a universal personal Other is the idea of God’ (Macmurray, 1991b,p. 164). There are lessons to be learnt, for example for current work on citizenshipin the UK, and on ‘social’ education and ‘political’ education, making, it seems tome, the spiritual (indeed the human), inevitably social and political.

There are, nevertheless, two possible ways of interpreting Macmurray’s views onspirituality described here. One would be to say that, in rejecting dualism, herejected any recognizable idea of ‘spirituality’, or interpreted it in a way that wouldnot be recognized within a wide range of religious or philosophical traditions.Christopher Clouder, from the Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship, might be saidto have such a view, in saying that the spiritual dimension in education starts ‘fromthe premise that teachers are essentially idealists’ (Clouder, 1998, p. 43), and that,when it comes to the aims of education in ‘making the world better’, ‘there wouldbe general agreement in all cultures that such goals as ‘peaceful’, ‘happy’ and‘ful� lled’ should be encompassed within it [i.e. the word ‘better’]’ (Clouder, 1998,p. 43). [6] These views contrast with the views of Macmurray, not an idealist, whoinsisted that the ‘ancient and widespread belief that the supreme good of human lifeis happiness—for all its persuasiveness—is false’ (Macmurray, 1993, p. 2).

However, a second and more plausible interpretation of Macmurray would be tosee in his work on persons-in-relation, and God as the ‘universal other’, an approachthat might be acceptable within many religious traditions, and many of the ‘of� cial’descriptions of the nature of the spiritual in education. In particular, in de� ning theindividual in terms of relations—that is, in making transcendence an essentialelement of the ‘self’ (as ‘the capacity for self-transcendence … is the de� ningcharacter of the personal’, Macmurray, 1993, p. 58)—it chimes with the UK’sSchool Curriculum and Assessment Authority (‘SCAA’, now the Quali� cations and

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30 J. Stern

Curriculum Authority or QCA) description of spiritual development, which refersto:

Experiencing feelings of transcendence—Feelings which may give rise tobelief in the existence of a divine being … Relationships—Recognising andvaluing the worth of each individual; developing a sense of community; theability to build up relationships with others … [S]teps to spiritual develop-ment might include: recognising the existence of others as independentfrom oneself. (SCAA, 1995, p. 3ff.)

More recently, but suggesting a similar approach, a report by the English schoolinspection service said that spiritual development in schools was good in schoolswhich ‘provide opportunities across the curriculum for pupils to consider, forexample … the importance of relationships and the worth of each individual’ (OF-STED, 2000, p. 32). Adrian Thatcher says of the approach of some of� cial ac-counts, that it ‘excludes the Transcendent and perpetuates its exclusion’ (Thatcher,1996, p. 117), yet ‘[t]he emphasis on “relationships with other people and, forbelievers, with God” is welcome’ (Thatcher, 1996, p. 123). Macmurray’s approachcertainly includes the transcendent, and makes persons-in-relation so central as toavoid the perception that a child is an ‘individual, autonomous self for whom even“recognising the existence of others” is a problem’ (Thatcher, 1996, p. 123).

Macmurray on Education

The ‘spiritual’ in Macmurray, then, embedded as it is in his account of persons-in-relation, is recognizable as addressing issues raised in current debates on spiritualityin education. How this ‘spirit’ is linked to educational issues, for Macmurray, is inturn embedded in his views on community. Whereas religion ‘is the business of thefamily, to hand on the customary way of life from one generation to the next’,education ‘is the means of extending the spirit of the family beyond its boundariesto the society as a whole’ (Macmurray, 1991b, p. 192), and schools can—must—beviewed as communities and not merely social groups with external purposes. Schoolsare therefore centrally concerned with ‘spirituality’—with ‘real people’ working in‘communities’. Reality, for Macmurray, was an emergent property:

For reality is essentially the concrete wholeness which characterizes im-mediate experience. Whatever is abstract, whatever is isolated and sepa-rated out from the in� nite in which it has its being, becomes to that extentunreal. This, I think, is what Spinoza means when he talks of the unrealityof the � nite in so far as it is � nite. (Macmurray, 1996a, p. 16)

I suggest that one might therefore call schools ‘real schools’, in so far as they helppupils become more ‘real’. (Striving for more ‘real’ schools might then be seen as analternative to, or a clari� cation of, striving for more ‘effective’ schools or for ‘schoolimprovement’).

If schools are communities, in Macmurray’s sense, their way of working is likely

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John Macmurray and Schools 31

to be given structure by this nature. In a phrase that is striking, amidst current UKdebates on citizenship education, he says, for example, that:

To be educated today means to have learned to be human—not Scottish,not British, not even West-European—but human. (Macmurray, 1968,p. 145)

Schools are best seen, then, as examples of ‘communities’, a form of organizationthat is positive and personal, in contrast to ‘societies’ that are negative and imper-sonal. The ‘unity’ characteristic of ‘community’ is different to the unity character-istic of ‘societies’. Hence:

we should use the term ‘society’ to refer to those forms of human associ-ation in which the bond of unity is negative or impersonal; and to reservefor the contrasted forms of association which have a positive personalrelation as their bond, the term ‘community’. A community then restsupon a positive apperception by its members of the relation which unitesthem as a group. It is a personal, not an impersonal unity of persons.(Macmurray, 1991b, p. 147)

and:

Like a society, a community is a group which acts together; but unlike amere society its members are in communion with one another; theyconstitute a fellowship. A society whose members act together withoutforming a fellowship can only be constituted by a common purpose. Theyco-operate to achieve a purpose which each of them, in his own interest,desires to achieve, and which can only be achieved by co-operation. Therelations of its members are functional; each plays his allotted part in theachievement of the common end. The society then has an organic form: itis an organization of functions; and each member is a function of thegroup. A community, however, is a unity of persons as persons. (Macmur-ray, 1996, p. 166)

Macmurray’s views on schools as speci� c examples of ‘communities’ (in his sense),generated by his philosophical work as well as work with schools, are expressed inMacmurray, 1968. Costello points out that:

The almost complete victories of technology and capitalism in the Westand the reduction of education from learning as full personal formation incultural life to the mere acquisition of discrete ‘skills’ and ‘tools’ for a worklife affect him deeply. In 1968, he notes in his correspondence that he isattempting to write an essay entitled ‘Education for a Stupid Society’.(Costello, 1998b, p. 24)

For Macmurray himself, ‘the school is a community; and we learn to live incommunity only by living in a community’ (Macmurray, 1968, p. 149ff.), and aschool’s:

… � rst principle is that it must be a real community. Not because

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32 J. Stern

community is a good thing—I would underline this—but because this is thecondition of success in its educational function. Only in a community cana living culture be developed. (Macmurray, 1968, p. 35)

The possibility of schools being communities is not an ‘ideal’ for Macmurray. As:

… when we try to teach, we must deal with living human beings. We, theteachers, are persons. Those whom we would teach are persons. We mustmeet them face to face, in a personal intercourse. This is the primary factabout education. It is one of the forms of personal relationship. It is acontinuing personal exchange between two generations. To assert this is byno means to de� ne an ideal, but to state a fact. It declares not whateducation ought to be, but what it is—and is inescapably. We may ignorethis fact; we may imagine that our task is of a different order; but this willmake no difference to what is actually taking place. We may act as thoughwe were teaching arithmetic or history. In fact we are teaching people. Thearithmetic or the history is merely a medium through which a personalintercourse is established and maintained. (Macmurray, 1968, p. 5)

It is not, then, that schools simply ‘might’ be communities, but rather that they‘must’ be communities. That is, they are ‘required’ to be communities, as schools:this is central to their educational role, with education broadening the spirit offamilies (which themselves are small communities). Hence:

[t]his school community stands between family and the wider communityand looks back to the � rst and forward to the second. For long periods ithas to take the place of the family for its pupils: and also it has to mediatebetween the family and the larger world of adult life. It is able to do this,and to combine in miniature the conditions of each of these, because unlikeeither of them it has one concern to which everything else is directed—theeducation of young persons who are entrusted to it. (Macmurray, 1968,p. 35ff.)

It could be noted, too, that the legal position of teachers as being in loco parentisstrengthens the idea of the school being a ‘broadened’ family. Some commentatorshave pointed out, too, the importance of ‘belonging’ to a school. People may belongto a school, as a community, and this might compensate, to some degree, for theapparent disintegration of extended families in modern society. Such a developmentof a sense of belonging is similar to some religious communities (for example, themodern Iona Community) (Somerville, 1999). Hence, people may become more‘real’ people, educated in ‘real’ school communities, just as they may attempt suchpersonal development in explicitly religious communities.

The personal ‘unity’ that describes a school community, must for Macmurrayinvolve equality. The nature of equality in schools touches on many issues ofconcern, then and now, including the nature of school hierarchies and authority, thepossibility of democracy in school, and more generally the legitimacy of the powerrelations that dominate the everyday activities in schools. Macmurray was not acampaigner for ‘democratic’ schools in the crude sense of spreading power equally

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John Macmurray and Schools 33

amongst staff and pupils or even amongst staff alone. It is unlikely that he wouldhave seen the approach of A. S. Neill at Summerhill as a way forward in making aschool community of ‘equals’. Macmurray was keen to stress the potential for allschools to be equal in the way he described. He did not expect radical formalchanges, but changes (if needed) in the intentions of members of the community.Instead of formal democratic structures, the unity of a school is such that membersare:

… related as equals. This does not mean that they have, as a matter of fact,equal abilities, equal rights, equal functions or any other kind of de factoequality. The equality is intentional: it is an aspect of the mutuality of therelation. If it were not an equal relation, the motivation would be negative;a relation in which one was using the other as a means to his own end.(Macmurray, 1991b, p. 158)

Macmurray avoids suggesting that ‘unity’ in a school implies the absence ofdisagreement, or that any disagreement (or ‘disobedience’) is pathological. For ‘weat once assert ourselves as constituent members of the society while opposing it toourselves as the ‘other-than-I.’ So the child discovers himself as an individual bycontrasting himself, and indeed by wilfully opposing himself to the family to whichhe belongs’ (Macmurray, 1996a, p. 129). In common with many of Macmurray’sviews, these views on equality in schools have implications for the nature ofcitizenship and more general social education, as well as for the organization of theschool as a whole.

It is worth considering in some more detail what schools exactly do. Teachers ‘arenot training children to be mathematicians or accountants or teachers or lin-guists … [they] are training them to be men and women, to live human livesproperly’ (Macmurray, 1968, p. 112). And ‘a good education is one which succeedsin training a child to live well, to live his whole life as life should be lived’(Macmurray, 1968, p. 111), so that ‘[t]he golden aim of education [is] to teach thechildren how to live’ (Macmurray, 1968, p. 114), and this should not be ‘crowdedout by a multiplicity of little aims’ (Macmurray, 1968, p. 114):

We are becoming more and more technically minded: gradually we arefalling victims to the illusion that all problems can be solved by properorganisation … [But] [t]o think thus in education is to pervert education. Itis not an engineering job. It is personal and human. (Macmurray, 1968,p. 154ff.)

For Macmurray, this view of schools excludes the possibility that education shouldhave examination results, for example, as its prime aim. In fact, he suggests that if‘the examination system frustrates your efforts to educate your pupils … [t]hen let’sget rid of it’ (Macmurray, 1979, p. 13), and even that ‘the major alteration requiredto make our method of education truly effective … [is] the abolition of the examin-ation system’ (Macmurray, 1968, p. 2). However, that is not to say he did not careabout examinations. The apparent view expressed in the last quotation (probablywritten in 1941) was not borne out in his subsequent management of courses at

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34 J. Stern

Edinburgh University as Professor then Dean of the Faculty of Arts. Biographer JackCostello talked (in a conference address) of the meticulous care with which Mac-murray would mark and monitor examination scripts whilst at Edinburgh, and thisis con� rmed by a former colleague in the department (Somerville, 1999). In otherwords, examinations may be important, but they should not be the main aim ofeducation.

On the issue of ‘discipline’ in school, too, Macmurray has interesting views, seeingdiscipline, freedom and friendship as complementary. We should not contrast‘freedom’ and ‘discipline’, as:

[d]iscipline is the condition of all freedom in human life, and all training isdiscipline. The discipline which a school exists to provide may be willinglyand gratefully welcomed by its pupils or it may be imposed and enforced.If it is not willingly accepted it will have to be enforced. But this means thatthe motive for accepting it is fear, and to enforce discipline is to use fear asan educational motive: I will not say that this is never justi� able, but I willsay that it can only be justi� ed as a last resort; and that it implies aconfession of failure. (Macmurray, 1968, p. 33) [7]

Hence:

Freedom in Community is the � rst condition as well as the � nal goal oftrue education. Friendship then is the condition of freedom in community.(Macmurray, 1968, p. 34)

And ‘[f]riendship is a spiritual relationship’ (Macmurray, 1995a, p. 37). So schools,in their attitude to discipline as to everything else, make or should make eachindividual pupil matter, and this is a form of spiritual development. Althoughreligious education is not a central concern of this article, it is worth pointing outthat Macmurray’s community of ‘whole’ individuals surely provides a useful contextfor religious education, when compared to, for example, an attempted functionalobjectivity, bracketing out aspects of oneself, implied by some phenomenologicalapproaches (as described in Cox, 1983, pp. 25–27).

Seven Implications of the Work of Macmurray

How have Macmurray’s views held up over the years? There were some changes inMacmurray’s lifetime that seemed to him already to be going in the wrong direction,and some of these changes might be thought to be even more signi� cant today. Forexample, he complained that:

The golden aim of education—to teach the children how to live, hasvanished over the horizon—crowded out by a multiplicity of little aims.(Macmurray, 1968, p. 14)

If we take a Macmurrian view of people, communities, and schooling, then there areimplications for many areas of education research and practice. In the � rst place, itis helpful to � nd and discuss an individual, Christian, view on people, communities

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John Macmurray and Schools 35

and school, of a professional philosopher who spent a great deal of time working inschools as well as universities. Macmurray wrote, and wrote clearly, [8] on a numberof issues that have become, or remain, central educational concerns. Secondly, ananti-dualist (and anti-idealist and anti-materialist), anti-sceptic, view from a pro-fessional philosopher is all too rare in academic philosophy (though more common,I suspect, in theology departments, less dominated by the legacy of Descartes), andsuch a view has a great deal of signi� cance for the place of spiritual development andreligious education in schools. In particular, making transcendence (the ‘other’implied by the ‘self’), rather than some separate ‘spirit world’, central to hisphilosophy, may help debates on spiritual development in schools, and may helpavoid trivializing debates on transcendence into the mere recognition that otherpeople exist.

In the third place, the philosophy of Macmurray helps us describe what schoolsare, and how they are different to other organizations. It also therefore helpsilluminate the aims of schooling—and how to avoid the ‘multiplicity of little aims’.The narrowing functional agenda of schooling, for Macmurray, is inappropriate, andso is any widening agenda. That is, the use of schooling to promote ‘national’ (or‘international’) aims above those of individuals—what he refers to as treating agroup of people as if they were a single organism—would be wrong. He explicitlydraws out implications for citizenship as a school subject. There is a:

… tendency to conceive education as a training for citizenship. Suchtraining has its place in a good system of education. But it is a subordinateplace. To use citizenship as a co-ordinating conception for education as awhole is merely one way of identifying the personal with its organic aspect.(Macmurray, 1968, p. 12ff.)

In describing equality as important in schools, without requiring a radically demo-cratic ‘political system’ in schools, Macmurray’s work also has implications forschool leadership. And, as a fourth general area of in� uence, it is worth pointing outthat treating all members of the school community (including non-teaching adultssuch as the domestic staff mentioned in Macmurray, 1968, p. 37) as equals, aspersons, of course also has implications for relationships throughout schools, and forthe nature of ‘discipline’ (or ‘behaviour’) in school. The most damaging possibleresult of failing to recognize a school as a community, is what Macmurray might callthe defensive school, with managers or teachers acting as authority � gures. This islikely to happen as a result of fear (for Macmurray, the opposite of faith [9]), as:

… when people grow afraid, when there is a secret hidden fear at the centreof their consciousness, they have lost faith in themselves, and they begin toclutch at anything to save them. And they turn always to power, especiallyto organized power. They want an authority to take the burden of responsi-bility off their shoulders. They become formalists in religion and morality.They get excited about money and position because they want to be safeand secure. They want everybody to agree with them, because then theyfeel safe in their beliefs. That is when the false morality of obedience to law

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36 J. Stern

becomes rampant. People want an authority to tell them what to do, tomake them feel safe. (Macmurray, 1996b, p. 145)

Macmurray, then, describes some of the problems arising from teachers’ ideas oftheir schools, and alternative views, based on the school-as-community, and thiscould be said to be the � fth area of importance, as it may impact on teachers’professional development. ‘The teacher who does not understand and respect—evenif only intuitively—the peculiar wholeness, the integrity of the personal is not merelyinef� cient, but dangerous’ (Macmurray, 1968, p. 12). Sixthly, it is worth bringingout the current political implications of his work, through the possible in� uence ofhis philosophy on the current UK Prime Minister. Macmurray’s work might be usedto illuminate (or provide a critique of) several key ‘Blairite’ policies, not least thoserelated to education, but also including policies relating to community, stakeholders,and social exclusion.

In the seventh place, on professional issues relating to spirituality and religiouseducation, Macmurray’s work can clearly be used alongside the in� uential work ofDavid Hay and colleagues on spirituality (e.g. Hay & Nye, 1998), John Hull andcolleagues on the work of SACREs (as ‘religious education is rooted in localcommunities’, Hull, 1998, p. 1), Andrew Wright and colleagues on philosophicalscepticism, and so on. The role of the teacher is therefore clari� ed by his views onhuman nature and the nature of communities.

Conclusion

For Macmurray, education is about making people, people are made real incommunities, and schools are communities. Talking of everyone, but with a specialresonance for educators, he says:

We are all more or less unreal. Our business is to make ourselves a littlemore real than we are. (Macmurray, 1992, p. 143)

Macmurray was a Christian and a philosopher. It is not the intention of this articleto promote his views—on people, communities, and God—as universally acceptable,even if I were to regard them as true. He certainly appeared to have a limitedunderstanding of or sympathy for religions other than Christianity, dismissingBuddhism, for example, as simply ‘idealist’ (Macmurray, 1993, p. 67), and seeingChristianity as ‘the only instrument for the achievement of a community of theworld which we possess’ (Macmurray, 1993, p. 73). He also saw religious educationas explicitly ‘religionist’, to use Hull’s terminology (e.g. Hull, 1998, p. 55), as‘religious education [aims] at making them [i.e. pupils] religious’ (Macmurray,1968, p. 103), and ‘religion is not a subject in the curriculum; it cannot be learnedfrom a text-book or taught by anyone who has got it up properly. It can only betaught by example, by showing it in action’ (Macmurray, 1968, p. 106). [10]

Yet he provides us with valuable arguments against individualism, scepticism, andnarrowly functional approaches to education, challenging many aspects of currentpolicies on the curriculum and education in general. More positively, he provides us,

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John Macmurray and Schools 37

I believe, with valuable arguments for transcendence as essential to human being,thus underpinning the statutory requirement for ‘spiritual development’ in UKschools, and for understanding how and why schools work as communities. Hisarguments were set in a Christian context, yet his beliefs about transcendence couldbe explored from several religious and non-religious perspectives. [Macmurray’sviews on God were described by his biographer as ‘essentially Buddhist’ (Costello,1998a): a remarkable suggestion.] His work helps illuminate many educationalissues, and further discussion of his views would surely help move many debates on.

Acknowledgements

The author would particularly like to thank Lynne Broadbent, Howard Horsburgh,and especially Catherine Somerville, for their comments on drafts of this paper.

Notes

[1] The reasons for not publishing this collection of papers are likely to remain obscure.However, the papers are on a wide range of educational topics, were written over manyyears, and have not been edited into a coherent whole. A book may remain to be writtenabout Macmurray on education, but the collection of his writings in its present form seemsunlikely to be published.

[2] The extent to which Blair’s government follows Macmurray’s principles is of course aseparate issue, and is not tackled here.

[3] This work is linked to more extensive research on the nature and role of support in schools,being undertaken by the author at the London University Institute of Education.

[4] It has been pointed out to me by a former colleague of Macmurray, that Macmurrayco-opted much of Judaism, along with Jesus, in his attack on dualism (Somerville, 1999).

[5] He goes as far as to say that ‘modern Communism might well be that half of Christianitywhich had been dropped by the Church in favour of an accommodation with Rome’(Macmurray, 1995a, p. 27). Macmurray, incidentally, accepts Marx’s criticism of idealism(religious and philosophical), but thinks Marx wrong to reject all religion as necessarilyidealist, especially ‘the religion of his own Jewish ancestors … [as] that religion at least is notidealistic in Marx’s sense, but materialist’ (Macmurray, 1991b, p. 153ff.).

[6] Rudolf Steiner himself said, of spirituality, that ‘[w]e human beings cannot � y like the birdsbecause we have no wings. However, dear children, we can � y into the element of thespiritual, and we have two wings to � y there. The wing on the left is called ‘hard work,’ andthe other wing on the right is called ‘paying attention.’ We cannot see them, but these twowings—hard work and paying attention—make it possible for us to � y into life and becomepeople who are really ready for life’ (Steiner, 1996, p. 30).

[7] Macmurray was not an unambiguous supporter of all ‘modern’ disciplinary methods. ‘Theolder disciplinary methods, if they rested upon fear, yet avoided the more subtle dangers ofexploiting the child’s natural affection and reverence for authority’ (Macmurray, 1995b,p. 37).

[8] Macmurray himself, it should be noted, warned against his own clarity. ‘Unfortunately, Ihave a capacity of writing so clearly that people are often inclined to think they understandit when they don’t’ (Macmurray, 1991a, p. ix).

[9] Macmurray’s concerns about fear run through his personal, religious and philosophical life.In a late article (� rst published when he was 73 years old), he writes:

For Jesus, the mortal sickness from which men suffer is fear. It is from fear that

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38 J. Stern

we need to be saved. ‘Indeed!’ you may say, ‘don’t you mean from sin?’ No; Ithink not. Sin doesn’t seem to trouble Jesus so much. He dealt with sin byforgiving it. His judgement of fear was much more drastic. Do you remember theman in the parable of the talents—the one who had one talent only? Youremember, when he came to give his account to his master, he said: ‘I was afraid,and hid my talent in the earth.’ And for that he was cast into the outer darkness.(Macmurray, 1979, p. 7).

[10] Macmurray’s view, already quoted, that ‘[t]he golden aim of education [is] to teach thechildren how to live’ (Macmurray, 1968, p. 114), in a community of equals, itself can beused to refute his explicit views on religious education. However, that is a matter for anotherarticle.

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