Staring at the bird in the tree: ‘mind rights’ in schools
by Helen E Lees
Submitted to a journal.
School experience for children and staff is significantly characterised by attainment and performance. Within such a... more School experience for children and staff is significantly characterised by attainment and performance. Within such a mentality lies a theoretical and practical omission relating to the role of discrete experiences, where nothing is deliberately gained or performed. This paper presents the idea of ‘mind rights’ as a theoretical framework to address this omission. Using a metonymic example of a child looking out of the window at a bird in a tree, having the right to be attendant to one’s mind, independent of the school as function, form and institution, is presented as a part of the growing respect for various ‘silence practices’ in schools. Furthermore these rights are suggested as ‘educational rights’, intrinsic to an educational education, which is here conceived of as underpinned not by legal and social frameworks but enabled by ideas such as love, trust, openness and generosity and a dialogic relational attitude between teacher and student. Using theoretical resources about the ‘educational’, the emergent field of ‘silence studies’ for schooling and the idea of rights, the article argues that ‘mind rights’ are rights to have personal regard for the state of one’s mind in school, irrespective of the institutional, social and political drives of schooling and society. ‘Mind rights’ are seen as part of a package of necessary educational school-based conditions to facilitate the child staring at the bird, which together can act coherently as a potential agent for the transformation of the nature of schooling from instrumentalism to educational purposefulness.