The Age Of Unreason

by Charles Handy

  The research made it clear that there is no optimal pattern for a marriage. All patterns are possible. It seems essential to have a joint understanding of what the pattern is, how and when it might change, what the consequences are of living in a certain pattern and what are the costs and benefits. People clearly can change their pattern if both parties want to. Separation and divorce often seem to occur because one partner wants to change the pattern and the other does not.

  Bill and Frances had been married 26 years. Their children had all by now left home. Bill was 53 and at the height of his career as a marketing executive in a multinational company. Frances had minded the home and supported his career, moving home and country three times. Now she would, she felt, at last have the opportunity to develop her own career, at the age of 49. She enrolled in art college, with Bill’s enthusiastic support, she met new friends, developed new skills and new interests. She went on trips with them, not as a spouse to Bill’s conferences, she had them home to meals instead of Bill’s business associates. They no longer planned their weeks together as they used to do but kept to their own schedules. Both were busy. Their old friends seldom saw them. Suddenly, one Sunday morning, Bill left home. ‘I was a stranger there,’ he said, ‘Frances has gone into another world where I can’t follow her. She has left the marriage so I might as well leave the house where I no longer belong and find another home.’

  The irony is, of course, that Bill’s career job will finish in a year or two. He will need new interests. A C-C pattern might in their case have been a necessary interlude after long years of a B-D pattern before returning to more of the A-A relationship they had when they first met. Two portfolio lives would then need a portfolio marriage, moving between the patterns. If they do not realize, however, that is only the patterns which are changing then it is the relationship which breaks. Portfolio thinking and talking are both essential.

  In Praise Of Portfolios

  Bits and pieces of work sound a poor second best to a proper job and a proper career. They often are, but they do have great compensations. In 1988 the Henley Forecasting Centre in Britain surveyed the attitudes to work of 2,000 people. They asked them to give a percentage ranking to what they found the most important aspect of their work. The list came out like this:

  1. Having control over what to do. 50%.

  2. Using knowledge and experience to make decisions. 50%.

  3. Having a variety of things to do. 39%.

  4. Amount you earn. 35%.

  5. Being with and making friends. 21%.

  6. Doing a job that you know people respect. 19%.

  (The AB socio-economic group put money even lower at 25% and variety higher at 62%.)

  A portfolio life sits rather well with those attitudes and better than most full-time jobs. The things it lacks – a job title to swank about and lots of congenial company – do not seem to be of much interest. Nor is the money. That’s all very fine, one might think, for those who have the money and the job title. For those without them a portfolio life will seem distinctly insecure. That is true. A portfolio existence comes easiest in the Third Age when, for many, a house is largely paid for and the children are self-supporting when, perhaps, some savings have accumulated or a part-pension is coming nearer, and when there is at least a job title in the past to reminisce about.

  On the other hand, most households now are portfolio homes, with more than one income coming in. Arguably, a tolerable lifestyle is not possible for many households without multiple incomes. Collections of portfolios are themselves a kind of security for not everything goes wrong at once, whereas the one income family is perilously dependent on that one income. Should that one income go, as many studies have shown, there is nothing to fall back on, no other tradition of work or of money-making, no idea of self-sufficiency or of entrepreneuring, no sharing of roles, nothing except an abundance of time and a lack of cash. Employment can be riskier than self-employment, even for the whizz-kids of the money world where they can be fired at ten minutes notice, not allowed even to return to their desks. A high salary or a good wage guarantee neither security nor freedom.

  Ray Pahl ends his fine compendium of papers On Work with a powerful image of a woman ironing. She might, he points out, be a homeworker for a laundry working in piecework for a miserly rate but as an essential part of the family’s income; she might, on the other hand, be making pin money for herself by a spot of occasional extra work; she might be ironing a blouse for her evening out or a shirt for her lover, as a token of her affection; or it might be part of Monday’s daily grind; she might even be doing it for a sick neighbour or to prepare a costume for the local dramatic society. Should it not, indeed, be a person ironing rather than a woman? Pahl observes, however, that if he had used the word ‘person’ most people would still instinctively have interpreted it as ‘woman’. Will they still do so in ten years’ time, I wonder.

  Pahl’s point is that it is all work and always will be. It is social attitudes and social constructions of work which change. If ironing for a wage disappears we shall perhaps do more ironing for love. My point would be that there have, indeed, always been all sorts of ironing, some done with a scowl on the face, some with a smile. It is and always has been a portfolio of ironing; but the portfolio can change, as the times change, as our circumstances change, as our relationships change and as our tastes and priorities change. That is good news. All work is becoming like ironing; a portfolio of choice and necessity. That could be even better news. After all, as Noel Coward said, ‘Work is much more fun than fun.’ It is, but only if it is work of our choice under our control, if we are all Noel Cowards of a sort.

  Leisure, if we think about it, is only truly leisure when it is part of a portfolio, not the whole of it. The idea of a ‘leisure society’ with whole blocks of people with nothing to do except enjoy themselves, is to me a vision of hell not of heaven. The best form of leisure is nearly always active leisure, or work of a sort. The point is that the activity is of our choice, in our time and under our control. When we have had enough of it we can stop.

  This chapter has largely been addressed to the career executive of the big organization because it is his or her way of life which will change most radically in an Age of Unreason and because it is they and their families who will find the idea of portfolio lives most strange. The chapter would, however, be no news at all to all those who have always lived their lives outside organizations – small farmers, craftsmen and skilled artisans, such as plumbers and carpenters, small shopkeepers and publicans, lorry drivers and taxi-drivers, artists and furniture restorers, gardeners and plant-hire people. The world of East Anglia, where I live, is full of such people, so are Italy and Southern Ireland where I visit. So is the USA where I was told ‘In this country, everyone is first a business person and then something else.’ Those people, the independent ones, well understand the necessity of a portfolio life. It may not be as rich or as varied a portfolio as they would like, or as much fun, but they know instinctively that life has to be a mixture, that work does not fit neatly into five days of eight hours, that money comes from many quarters and in different ways, that no one person or organization owns you – and most of them would have it no other way.

  8 Re-inventing Education

  IF CHANGING IS really learning, if effective organizations need more and more intelligent people, if careers are shorter and more changeable, above all, if more people need to be more self-sufficient for more of their lives then education has to become the single most important investment that any person can make in their own destiny. It will not, however, be education as most of us have known it, the old-fashioned learning derided in Chapter 3 or the old British notion of education as something to be got rid of as soon as one decently could.

  Education needs to be re-invented. Our schools first need to be re-designed for they are not immune to the principles of the shamrock or of federalism. But education will not finish with school, nor should it be confined to those wh
o shine academically at 18. Learning, too, as we have seen, happens all through life unless we block it. Organizations therefore need, consciously, to become learning organizations, places where change is an opportunity, where people grow while they work.

  These things will not happen automatically. The changes needed require some upside-down thinking, initiatives by government and determination by organizations. It is no exaggeration to say that we need to re-invent education if we are going to avoid the worst scenarios in this book and to profit from the best.

  The Shamrock School

  The ideas of the shamrock and federalism could turn schools upside-down. At present schools are bedevilled by the need to offer choice to a wide variety of students without running foul of the bureaucracy and anonymity that is inevitable in a large organization.

  I stood one day and watched twenty double-decker buses disgorge hundreds upon hundreds of teenage girls into a cathedral to celebrate a school’s silver jubilee. It was the first time that anyone had even seen the whole school gathered together in those twenty-five years. To me, watching, 1,500 girls was an awe-inspiring and a rather intimidating spectacle. Why, I wondered would anyone want a school so big that it could only meet in a cathedral? The answer is simple. Comprehensive education requires comprehensive institutions. If sixteen subjects are to be offered in the top class to a minimum of ten pupils per class, you will need, working backwards 1,400 pupils in an 11–18 age-range school. More choice at the top would mean proportionately more people lower down to provide the numbers needed in each class. Small schools may be nice in theory, they told me then, but they restrict choice.

  One answer is to hive off the top, creating specialist colleges for the seventeen and eighteen year olds and leaving smaller schools behind for the younger ones. I suppose that principle could be carried even further with schools for the 11–13, 14–15, 16–18 age groups, but being so specialized in age they would not be very satisfactory communities for teachers to work in, or for students to study in, and they would inevitably cost more.

  The alternative is to think upside-down and turn the school into a shamrock with a core activity and everything else contracted out or done part-time by a flexible labour force. The core activity would be primarily one of educational manager, devising an appropriate educational programme for each child and arranging for its delivery. A core curriculum would continue to be taught directly by the school but anything outside the core would be contracted out to independent suppliers, new mini-schools. There might then be a range of independent art schools, language schools, computing schools, design schools and others. These independent suppliers would be paid, by the core school, on a per capita basis, probably with an agreed minimum.

  The job of the school proper would be to set and monitor the standards of these mini-school outsiders, to ensure an adequate variety, to help students and their families decide on an educational programme from all that was available and to manage a core curriculum itself in order to maintain some sense of group cohesion at the centre.

  In this way the school as a whole could be quite big because for most of the time the students would be in smaller mini-schools. The parents would choose, not so much between schools as within schools, between the variety that was on offer. In big schools there could be a number of competing outside institutions offering courses in one particular area, such as art or languages.

  The point, as always with the shamrock, would be flexibility. You do not make your suppliers redundant, you simply do not renew the contract. In a way it happens already. Work experience is now becoming part of the normal curriculum for 14-16 year-olds. Since work experience cannot, by definition, happen anywhere except in real work organizations, this part of the curriculum has, in effect, to be contracted out, although not for a fee.

  Schools will say that it will be more difficult to organize. The shamrock always is more difficult; but it does provide more flexibility, too. The school need not now be run totally on an age-graded basis. The student who is gifted at language school could progress faster, irrespective of age, even though the core groups in the school proper would still be year groups. Everybody progresses at different rates in different subject areas – the shamrock design makes it feasible to recognize this. Of course the school day would have to change. The variety could not be programmed into the 35-minute slots beloved of school bureaucrats. The core curriculum could be taught on four mornings a week leaving the fifth day and every afternoon, and evening, for the mini-schools. There is, after all, no reason why every student has to finish school at the same time or could not learn to have a free afternoon followed by an early evening session in his or her design school. It is, come to think of it, more like the world of work they will be entering.

  The shamrock federal school could go even further. It could give each student their own inverted do’nut in the form of an individual contract. In this contract there would be a core which the school would undertake to deliver and the individual to study. There would then be an area of discretion, out of which the student could pick a range of options. There would be a clear definition of goals and measures of success for the do’nut as a whole, including the demonstration of capacities, such as interpersonal skills, practical competences and organizing abilities which cannot be fully taught in classroom subjects. There would be planned opportunities to review and, if necessary, to revise the contract, on both sides.

  This idea of an individual contract with each student, currently under study in Britain by the National Association of Head Teachers, becomes much more plausible when the school has the flexibility of the shamrock and is really a federation of mini-schools. It would change the relationship between student and school making it more one of partnership under contract and less one of teacher and child or warden and prisoner. School would be seen by more young people as a personal opportunity not a chore, they would be more like customers for some of the time, carrying a per capita income with them to the mini-schools they choose. Everybody might begin to take themselves and everybody else more seriously.

  Some of it is happening already. I telephoned a large community school, where adults study as well as teenagers and where activities go on until late into the evening. I asked to speak to the Head. ‘Which Head?’ said the receptionist, ‘there are several heads of several schools here.’ It was the outward sign of a federal shamrock.

  Upside-Down Schools

  Some years ago I was commissioned to study the organization of some of Britain’s schools. I went to visit some typical big city centre comprehensive secondary schools. I remember that my first ‘getting to know you’ question on those cold November mornings was always ‘How many people work here?’ I always got the same sort of numbers, between seventy and ninety people. When I mentioned this, in some surprise to a Chief Education Officer, he exclaimed, ‘Oh dear, they left out the cleaners.’ ‘No,’ I replied, ‘they left out the children.’

  This was odd because at an earlier briefing session with the head teachers I had asked them what they saw as the role of the children in their schools, in comparison with other organizations. They are the workers, they said unanimously, while we teachers are the managers and the instructors. The early morning instinctive response was the right one, however, because who would expose workers to an organization which required them to work for ten different bosses in one week, in three or four different work groups, to have no work station or desk of their own but to be always on the move? What sensible organization would forbid its workers to ask their colleagues for help, would expect them to carry all relevant facts in their heads, would require them to work in 35-minute spells and then move to a different site, would work them in groups of thirty or over and prohibit any social interaction except at official break times.

  The typical secondary school, I had to conclude, does not really think of its students as workers. Nor are they the customers, for they have no real choice, no consumer power, no right to complain or to be asked for their pr
eference. Schools do not do much market research among their students. Instinctively, I felt, schools see their students as their products.

  Organizationally, that made sense. Products start off as raw material. The material is processed, in batches usually, at different work stations. It is graded and inspected, so are students. The fact that some 40 per cent are below par is regarded mainly as a sign that standards are high. Unfortunately, the inferior batch is not sent back for further processing but is turned out to fend for itself in the world of work.

  That world of work, however, is quite different. In that world people work on tasks in mixed ability groups. Mixed ability in the world of work means a group of people with different abilities of the same level. In schools mixed ability means people with the same ability but different levels. In schools collaborating is cheating, in work it is essential. In work 75 per cent quality is not good enough, in schools it is excellent. In work people see the result of their labours weekly, sometimes even hourly – success and achievement are obvious, and most people feel some success and some achievement each week. In schools success is rationed and you have to wait the best part of a term for it in many places. At work, your output is useful to someone somewhere, at school it is only useful to yourself. Work, most of the time, is interesting and even fun. School, for a lot of people, is not either very interesting or much fun.

  The upside-down school would make study more like work, based on real problems to be solved or real tasks to be done, in groups of mixed ages and different types of ability, all of them useful. Not only would people learn more in such a school, because they would see the point and purpose of what they were doing, but it would give them a better idea of the world they would be entering. Most people’s only experience of an organization and of work before the age of 16 is that of a school. If my investigation is anything to go by today’s students will leave with a rather strange impression of both an organization and of work.