Your Visionary Voice is Needed

Why Visionary Writing Matters Now...

I quit teaching when Michael Gove introduced his nationalist agenda onto the National Curriculum. Well, that wasn’t the only reason. The ten years of burnout and six months of stress-related sick leave prior to the mutually agreed termination of my contract played a big part. But I was past ready to move on. I could sense in my body that the school system was sick, and it was only getting worse.

I didn’t stick around to see the results of imposing the rigid criteria that English Literature meant no longer studying a diverse range of essential global literature written in English, but was solely restricted to books that were actually written by (mostly white) English writers, in England. The effect of removing books from the GCSE syllabus, such as John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men that enabled teenagers to talk about a range of issues including racism, misogyny, mental health and poverty in a safe and inspiring context that encouraged genuine enquiry and critical thinking.

The impact of erasing the entire ‘Poetry from Other Cultures’ module that included contemporary postcolonial poets – such as Grace Nicholls, John Agard, Kamau Brathwaite, Imtiaz Dharker, Sujata Bhatt, Derek Walcott, and Moniza Alvi – writing back to colonialism in ways that invited working class British young adults to experience their shared humanity with displaced and diasporic people while opening up discussions about cultural diversity and inequality.

I’m sure those modules weren’t perfect – and we as teachers certainly had never been encouraged to do any of our own trauma healing or decolonisation work – but they were a window into a world that became lost and obscured when the curriculum was suddenly co-opted by an openly nationalist government agenda. Or at least, that’s how it felt at the time. Because I didn’t stick around, I don’t know what the real outcomes were, or what really happened. I like to imagine or remember that Steinbeck didn’t really get pulled, and those poems didn’t really get erased – that the teachers found ways to keep that legacy alive within the new restrictive system, or that it wasn’t as bad as I am making out. Maybe someone who stuck with it can tell me.

But what I woke up with this morning – as I straddled this world and the dreamworld – was a sense of clarity about what happens when our education is so stifling as to place a stranglehold on our cultural imagination, rather than opening doors of enquiry and explorative possibility.

Because, those young people I taught in UK secondary schools in the southeast of England between 2004 and 2014 are now today’s adults, parents, workers, educators, and to an extent, agenda setters. And I don’t just mean that relative handful of people who crossed my classroom threshold – I mean, more generally, in the western cultural world (in Britain and America specifically, where books by diverse writers that question the status quo are currently being banned) that this is the world we’ve inherited and co-created.

And it didn’t start there.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

I was educated in Thatcher’s Britain, under the early days of the newly-conceived idea of a ‘national curriculum’. All of a sudden, teachers’ creativity was taken away and a nationalist government agenda imposed. In many cases, I’m sure there may have been good reasons to bring the standard of education into greater coherence and clarity. Where individual teachers were inflicting harm with their own misguided worldviews, perhaps. But the result, in my schooling as well as in the education system I left behind as a teacher, was greater restriction and centralised control. Control of the narrative of what it was possible to think and believe. Restriction of the infinity of possibilities that are available to us as humans in this ever-evolving cosmic universe.

I was deeply interested in British pre-history – I wanted to learn about our ancient ancestors, what life on this land was like before the Roman invasion. But that wasn’t possible. History lessons only went back as far as the Romans. And the GCSE syllabus was entirely Euro-centric and obsessed with the recent military history of war. I dropped it in disappointment, and chose to study Religious Education instead. Here, I thought, I would be able to open to more exposure to the world’s wonder and mystery.

But no. I was one of only six people taking RE in my all-girls secondary school. And our choice was limited to studying Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Are you kidding?! I ask myself now… ALL the patriarchal religions. Out of all the world’s culture and all the world’s mystery. This was what we were served up?

Of our two RE teachers, one was so pious that she made several of us tender teenagers leave the room in tears (actually, three out of six, so that’s half the class!) when she told us quite matter of factly that our parents were going to hell because they got divorced. It was both heartbreaking and terrifying.

Although I complained and rebelled, I also took all this in as pretty much normal at the time – who doesn’t when the entire culture is structured around making you believe that this is it.

But I’d always been looking outside the system. I was always seeking what my heart knew was real: that there was more, so much more, to this vibrant and complex living world than I’d been able to learn about at school.

I left school as soon as I could and started exploring life on my own terms. Always seeking the spiritual, the mystical, the deeper and more powerful truths. It would be years before I encountered the inner peace and stillness of my first yoga class, the whispering wisdom of John O’Donohue’s Anam Cara; and decades before the living history of ancient British culture and mythology really began to open up to me, as writers such as Manda Scott, Sharon Blackie and Carolyn Hillyer began publishing and sharing their work.

And now – only now – am I beginning to truly find my voice. To hold the confidence to write what I feel and know and have found to be true, through my own research and lived experience, and all the deconditioning work that I am doing.

If, like me, you are a Visionary Writer who hears the whispers of another world that echoes through the simulacrum of this one, your voice is needed. Your story is medicine for yourself and others, and the world. Your vision is part of the reweaving of the tapestry of the web of life.

Now more than ever.

You are called to write.

If you are a Visionary Writer and you know you want to (need to) write, but your words are getting stuck before they get onto the page, you can subscribe to the stack for regular updates, or get the book, to find out how to break this cycle and Find Your Visionary Writing Voice.