Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN SCHOOL OF EDUCATION “FROEBEL’S SPIELPAEDAGOGIK AND THE PLAYFULNESS OF POSTMODERNISM” DR AIDAN SEERY FEBRUARY 2012 OCCASIONAL PAPER NO.2 PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE WITHOUT PERMISSION Abstract This paper examines some of the origins and features of Froebel’s concept of play and its educational and developmental function in his “Spielpaedagogik”. A close reading of key Froebelian texts reveals a distinctive adaptation and application of Hegel’s dialectic as developed in the Phenomenology of Spirit. The relationship between the inner self of the child and her play is mirrored by that of the natural self and culture. This connection of self and culture and the subsequent centrality of culture in Nietzsche allows a link to be made between Froebel’s ontological theory of development in play and certain postmodern ideas on an epistemological self-creation in play. Two main strands of postmodernist theory on play are distinguished. The purely “ludic”, ironic playfulness of postmodernism with its absence of any depth below the superficiality of fashion, fad and parody offers little for education. However, another interpretation based on the role of play in a creative, imaginative restructuring of traditional and transmitted knowledge allows for a contemporary or postmodern view of play that allows for common features to be drawn between Froebelian and postmodern ideas of self-formation. Introduction This paper examines some of Frobel’s central ideas on the nature and function of play in the education and development of children. A close reading is made of Froebel’s The Education of Man (EoM) and Education by Development (EbD) that appeared originally in Berlin between 1861 and 1862. I argue that the central passages concerning the nature and role of play can be interpreted in a Hegelian manner to reveal a number of characteristics of children’s educational play that are lost in a more Romantic reading of childhood and play that views childhood as representing the fulfilment of an adult yearning for a return to the unity, harmony and innocence of an earlier time. Interpreting play as a stage and element in a Hegelian Bildungs process, on the other hand, highlights particular play characteristics such as those of tension, negation, struggle and semiotics that firstly, supports the argument that Froebel was a deeper and more subtle educational thinker than Pestalozzi for instance, and secondly, brings certain aspects of Froebelian play into relationship with some features of the “playfulness” of postmodernist thought. This juxtaposition, it is hoped, can throw some light on the fundamental commitments of both Froebelian education through play and a postmodernist education as the restructuring of language games. A Hegelian Reading of Froebel There is nothing new in the discovery of Hegelian influences on Froebel’s thought particularly in the later writings in which this influence is strongest. The absence of a 2 Hegelian influence would indeed be more surprising, if for no other than biographical reasons. Not only were the two men contemporaries, it is well-known that in 1799 Froebel travelled to Jena to study philosophy. In 1800 Hegel arrived also in Jena to teach philosophy until his move to Nuremberg in 1808. During this time it is most likely that Froebel heard Hegel’s lectures. There is also a strong tradition of later Hegelian interpretation of Froebel. For instance, the Hegelian philosopher and influential educationalist William Torrey Harris had a major influence on the thought of Susan Blow in the United States in the 1870s. Harris, a major figure in American public school education after the Civil War and a principal figure in the “St. Louis Movement”, edited Blow’s influential book, Letter to a Mother on the Philosophy of Froebel. (Blow, 1899) Blow’s book is a thoroughly Hegelian view of kindergarten education informed by Harris’ work and it provided the theoretical underpinning for the new school movement in St. Louis. The analysis offered in this first section belongs in this interpretative tradition but focuses on the evidence for an identification of Froebel’s “law of opposites” with the Hegelian dialectic in the understanding of play. The case is made that this identification is valid by showing that play takes on the role of the objectification of the child’s inner self in the first stage of a dialectical process of knowledge and learning. The assertion is supported by the evidence that Froebelian play satisfies two substantial conditions of dialectical opposites: firstly, that they are always part of an emerging unity of opposites, and secondly, that the dialectical process is a necessary one. Once this is established the claim can then be made that play assumes a number of characteristics associated with the negation of first subjectivity in the dialectic. It is these particular aspects of play that are not frequently mainstaged and that can form a tenuous link to some postmodernist thinking on play. The first step is to make the case for this Hegelian reading of the role of play on the basis of the writings of Froebel himself. For this reason, a careful reading of two of Froebel’s most important works: The Education of Man and Education by Development is undertaken. However, a useful and more general starting point is another passage from Froebel in which he indicates, in the clearest possible manner, the dialectical nature of his concept of education. Halfter quotes Froebel on the influence that the early death of his mother had on his thinking: In diesem frühen Tod meiner Mutter, verbunden besonders auch mit dem von ihr empfangenen Gemüte fand ich frühe und finde ich noch bis jetzt den Mittelpunkt meiner Lebensschicksale; denn meinem Gemüte wurde so frühe die größte Aufgabe gegeben, Leben und Tod, Einigung und Trennung, Unsichtbares und Sichtbares zu einen; 3 mein besonderer Beruf wurde also dadurch: die größten der Gegensätze, der Entgegensetzungen im eigenen Leben und durch das eigene Leben in seine Widerspruchslosigkeit aufzulösen. [The centre of my life’s fate I have found and still find in the early death of my mother and particularly in the sensibility that I inherited from her. My personality was charged with the greatest of tasks: to unify life and death, union and separation, the invisible and the visible. My special calling was therefore to resolve into agreement through my own life the greatest of contraries, the contraries of one’s own life.] (Halfter, 1926) [author’s translation] This single passage contains three defining characteristics of a dialectical process. Firstly, the formative friction of opposites but secondly, and more importantly, the idea that these opposites reside and are active in one body or entity and finally, the resolution in a unityin-difference of transformed opposites. Froebel’s thought and its connection with the Idealism of Hegel At the very beginning of his important work The Education of Man, Froebel situates his thought in the late idealist tradition of spiritual emergence and evolution “Education is the lifting into consciousness of the divine essence of man” (EoM, 4). This strong conviction of emerging consciousness with its promise of the ultimate perfectibility of mankind in divine life is a characteristic of the contemporary inclination towards a romantic pantheism. However, while the origins of Froebel’s thought and much of his language and vocabulary emerge from this general atmosphere, he has a distinctive philosophical anthropology, metaphysics and philosophy of education that distinguishes him starkly from the romantics with whom he is often associated. In particular, all of Froebel’s works reveal a view of education that has less to do with the epistemological project of the development of mind than with a concern, shared by both Hegel and Nietzsche with their roots in Greek tragedy and philosophy, for questions about how human beings flourish. One could say that Froebel shares with Hegel and later Nietzsche the conviction that the subject knows itself in a deeper way through interaction with others (in a dialectic) than through the Cartesian and even Kantian method of introspection. This distinctive philosophy leads Froebel quite obviously to favour a dynamic, anthropological growth model for education rather than a “categorical, mandatory education” (EoM, 10). A result of his philosophy of the nature of human beings is that it is not possible to justify prescriptive, interfering education on the grounds of external 4 truths or external models of behaviour. Truth and the model and moral life are to be found within the individual but not as pre-formed and static forms but as a growing resolution of a dialectical play. On the traditional starkly dichotomous distinction between work and play, Froebel offers an alternative view that both equally are manifestations of the same realisation of the divine spirit in life. In the case of play, this is the work of the child. The play-work of the child is a dialectical objectification or externalisation of the inner life: “Primarily and in truth man works only that his spiritual, divine essence may assume outward form”. (EoM 32) The argument is made even more obviously Hegelian in the phrase that immediately follows the last quote: “… that thus he may be enabled to recognise his own spiritual, divine nature” (EoM, 32). In a distinctly Hegelian moment, the assertion is made that the objectification of the self is not the production of something completely separate and different from the self. On the contrary, it is precisely this objectification that leads the self to its own realisation in and of itself. As indicated above, the clearest statement of the Hegelian nature of Froebel’s thought comes in his syntactically less than clear exposition of his law of the connection of opposites which mirrors faithfully the Hegelian dialectic. “Every thing and every being,…comes to be known only as it is connected with the opposite of its kind, and as its unity, its agreement with this opposite, its equation with reference to this is discovered; and the completeness of this connection with the respective opposite, and upon the complete discovery of the connecting thought or link” (EoM, 42). This time the description of the process includes the crucial Hegelian element of necessity in the phrase “only as it is connected”. In Education by Development, it is put in this way: “we must therefore necessarily recognise a fourth law of development, education, and cultivation, viz.: the co-working of limitations opposite to, yet like one another, and by the comparison and connection of these factors in and through life.” (EbD, 175). In a letter, written in 1828 and quoted in Education of Man, he also states “I see the simple course of development progressing from analysis to synthesis, which appears in pure thought, also in the development of every living thing” (EoM, 42) This passage reveals clearly the distinctly Froebelian adaptation of the Hegelian process to the development in all living things through the interaction of competing and constitutive parts. This differentiates Froebel’s thought from Hegel’s vision of the dialectical process as being a universal historical and even theological one. Also, the idea that a dialectical process in which the tensions and interactions of opposites and differences are the mechanisms of growth is fundamentally different to the Aristotelian idea (common in contemporary curriculum theory) that human growth comes about as a linear development of potentialities. 5 Specific Hegelian features of Froebel’s play Having established firmly the Hegelian ancestry of Froebel’s thought, it remains to connect specifically the Froebelian concept of play with the dialectic of development and the law of opposites. Froebel begins this in the Education of Man (EoM,48) with the description of the beginning in the child of the external representations of the internal. This gives the theme for his whole theory of play. Play is the externalisation, or objectification of an internal state. “[The child]… wishes that what is hidden within him, and lives in him, may also outwardly exist.” (EbD, 59). Or also in Education by Development: “Play is thus actually engendered by the connection of opposites which are also alike, by the combination of the free activity of the child with the dependent movability of an object and its consequent power of taking form” (EbD, 183). This dialectic of the inner self and play seems significantly to mirror the dialectical dynamic in the Geist chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit between the natural self and the cultural self. Hegel claims that it is through culture that the natural self is firstly externalised in order then to be overcome or set aside (Aufheben). The verb Aufheben also means “to lift up” and this reading of the verb establishes that the objectification or externalisation of the natural self through culture is not meant to imply that the natural self is rejected. On the contrary, the cultural self includes the natural self. Turning again to Froebel the consequence is that play is not simply a way of representing the child’s mind to the child itself or to others but also the means by which the self moves from being just “for itself” or just “outside itself” to a higher state of knowledge in the synthesis of these two transformed modes of being. Play, then, while representing the internal state of the child in a physical and external manner is not to be seen as completely separate to it. Evidence for this ultimate “unity in difference” is found in his discussion of the first playful movement of a child’s hands and feet. Froebel suggests that all such simple play with limbs should be observed “less the child contract habitual …movements that have no inner meaning…thus inducing…a separation between gestures and feelings, between body and mind, between the inner and the outer.”(EoM, 48). Here we see for the first time the enormous significance attributed by Froebel to play. In its role as the objectification of the inner state of the child and its role in the wider dynamic of the dialectic of human growth and development, it is an intrinsic and necessary part of the dialectical development and emergence of the self. It is for this reason that Froebel can claim that “play is the highest phase of childdevelopment...it is self-active representation of the inner- representation of the inner from inner necessity and impulse.” (EoM, 55). As part of a dialectical process, play is then not externalisation in the way in which a painting is an externalisation of some inner vision, feeling or inspiration. Dialectical processes occur within things and not between separate 6 things. For this reason, play is part of the life of the child and Froebel can claim, with dialectical logic on his side, that “play is the purest, most spiritual activity of man at this stage and …typical of human life as a whole – of the inner hidden natural life in man and in all things.” (EoM, 55). It is spiritual in the sense that the dialectical process of the growth of inner life through the interaction with its external representations (in play) is one that occurs firstly in the child itself and secondly as a process in which spirit or consciousness comes into its own and realises its true nature. A few lines shall serve as a guide to the true inner relation of this plaything to the children… a life in which spirit, mind and power of action, feeling, thinking, and handling first penetrate and strengthen, as being intimately united, before they are necessitated to enter into the outer life in the separation which is an unavoidable requisite for higher consciousness (EbD, 212) The parallel between the dialectics of Froebel and Hegel seem evident. Further evidence for the closeness of fit is provided by showing that two of the fundamental characteristics of the Hegelian dialectic are satisfied by Froebel’s law of opposites. These refer firstly to the location of opposites in the same being and, secondly to the necessary nature of the process. In both cases, it would seem that the dynamic of child and play meet these conditions. Play, while being an external representation of the inner life is not separate from it. The self consists of both parts of the dialectic. Also there is sufficient evidence, particularly in relation to the use of the playthings, to claim that play emerges from the inner necessity of a child to express and form themselves. One example is provided in a passage on the play with sticks “..the stick-laying, steps forth in the whole of plays and employments , like each of the other plays, with inner necessity (EbD, 119) [author’s italics]. …. Some consequences and summative thoughts on Froebel’s play In summary the importance of Froebel’s play lies in the fact that it is not just a simple representation of self but that play has a crucial function in the development of self and is actually part of self and self-understanding. Play is the “first negation” of the inner life of the child in a dynamic dialectical process that results in both the self and play being transformed and forming the new, “next-stage self”. The inner life of the child is not either logically or developmentally prior to the child’s play. The actions of the child in play are indeed part of what it is to be the child. The whole development of self is connected to and rooted in action in the world, specifically cultural action though the 7 medium of symbol and sign. Thus clearly Froebel’s conception of self is not a twentieth century psychological one based on a Cartesian idea of a “real self” found in introspection. Indeed, it bears closer resemblance to a more postmodernist view in its acknowledgement of the roles of culture and interaction with the “other”. However, in contrast to a postmodernist stance, the process by which the child comes to know herself in the interaction with Froebelian play is not the “ludic”, free play of popular culture and some educational theories. In keeping with its Hegelian interpretation, play is a necessary part of self. As such it is characterised, ironically, by a seriousness that suggests that Froebelian play is somewhat joyless! Finally, Froebelian play, as the interaction of dialectical opposites, cannot avoid the tension and friction of those opposites. The child sees in her play the mirror of herself but does not simply gaze. The experience of play informs and changes the knowledge of self which in turn expresses itself in new play and so on. In the course of the development of the child, the nature and type of play changes, both reflecting and forming the self. It can be surmised that Froebel considered the process to be one that continued perhaps all through life. The child’s engagement with the playthings marks the first stage in the dialectical process of self-recognition, not the end or culmination. Because of the nature of Froebel’s interest in early education only, the further development of the process, however, is not charted in his writings. The connection to postmodernism. If a Hegelian interpretation of Froebel is legitimate then it is through Hegel that the connection can be made between the world of eighteenth century idealism and certain strands of postmodernist thought. This connection is interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, it provides the possibility of a contemporary interpretation of Froebel’s work in the light of much more recent theory. Secondly, and more generally, it provides a possibility of reclaiming play from its commodification as an attribute of educational activity at a time when defining the quintessential attributes of educational action is more important than it has been for some time. Thirdly, the dialectic of play and self in Froebel seems to offer an educational parallel of the post-modernist relation between self and other in alterity. Returning briefly to history, from Hegel there is a direct line, in particular, to Nietzsche’s critique of rationalism, which, in its striving to go beyond Hegel’s attempt to reform this tradition, claims that life can be justified only aesthetically (Nietzsche 1999). This powerful idea, at the core of Nietzsche’s critique, marks the beginning of the turning 8 away from the project of modernism (Habermas) that leads directly to some of the main themes of post-modernist thought. The centering of the aesthetic, which has led to the emergence of culture as both a central theme and an inescapable co-defining moment for much of contemporary philosophy, is perhaps the enduring popular legacy of Nietzsche. One consequence of this move it that hereafter all attempts to do philosophy from an impersonal or universal standpoint are viewed with deep suspicion as is the associated methodology of introspection. The situated individual in her historical, cultural and social context is thus the new object of philosophical reflection. It is in this focus on the individual as historical and cultural being that a first connection can be made between Froebel and contemporary thought. The rootedness of the child in her play is a principal feature of Froebel’s adaptation of Hegel’s dialectic to the development of individual human beings. In contrast to Hegel, the dialectic is not an historical movement towards the realisation of Universal Spirit but the movement towards the realisation of a concrete, individual life. “For, as the child proves himself in this way (in play) to be a creative being, he also shows himself just as surely, on the other hand to be a member of the great living whole and of all life. He is destined to develop himself as a creating and as a created being…” (EbD, 68). Culture, in modern philosophy, as a domain of knowledge and experience, complements the positive sciences in their attempts to understand how things are by asking questions about what things mean. The dialectic of culture in Hegel and Nietzsche, therefore, can be said to parallel the dialectic of education and self-formation in Froebel. In a similar way in which the individual is an “inner self” in subjectivity and an “objective self” in play, there are, in Nietzsche, two senses of culture, the first, the subjective concept of Bildung and the second concept of objective culture in customs, artifacts and representations. Both of these senses of culture mirror the ideas of the inner self and play in Froebel. In both cases too, the synthetic reconciliation and Aufhebung of the friction between the subjective and objective is to be found in both cases in the knowledge of living well, flourishing, or as Jurist terms it “self-fathoming” (Jurist 2000, p.65). So, if it can be claimed that the roots of much post-modernist thought is to be found in Hegel and Nietzsche’s critique of rationalism and if there is a clear connection between Froebel and Hegel with a parallel between the dialectic of culture in Nietzsche and that of education and self-formation in Froebel, what specifically can be said about the connection between Froebel’s concept of play and the “playfulness” of postmodernism? To answer this question, an attempt must be made to sketch at least in outline some of the salient features of the post-modernist concept of “playfulness”. 9 Firstly, the term “postmodernism” can be traced to theorising in architecture and art in the 1970s (Best & Kellner 1991, p. 11) and is thus inextricably linked with the realm of the aesthetic. Both postmodernist theory and aesthetics share a concern about representation. Modernism is concerned with problematising the representations we have of reality, their structure, validity and promise of progress through disinterested knowledge. Postmodernism is also about representations but the representations of postmodernism are non-neutral, reflecting value commitments, life situations and power relations. In a postmodernist culture, the hope has been completely dispelled of ever finding the Truth, objective knowledge or ultimate meaning. Mining the depths of mind, the world, language and interpretation to find certainty is futile and nonsensical. The impossibility of discovering deeper meaning results in the celebration of superficiality, parody and irony. This is the new, free and sometimes dark and subversive “playfulness” of postmodernism. Clearly, a postmodern playfulness that is the expression of a complete relativism and a conceptual, linguistic and semantic “free-for-all” is a far remove from the Froebelian idea of play as the necessary objectification of the developmental inner life of a human being. One of the central features of a certain type of postmodernist thought is, indeed, the complete displacement of the self as the central, founding presence in knowledge so that there cannot be a privileged knowledge of self as inner life, either through the dialectic of play or by introspection. If this is the case then there is no doubt that a postmodernism of this purely “ludic” nature firstly bears no relation at all to the play of Froebel and secondly, is antagonistic towards many, if not all, of the usual aims and modes of legitimation of education. The principle of “anything goes” relativism is not one that can inform or sustain an endeavour so crucially bound up with notions of development, growth, learning and assessment. It is for this reason perhaps that play is regarded with some suspicion in modern educational discourse concerned, as it often is, with the rhetoric of progress and development. (Sutton-Smith, 1997, p. 203). Aligned with a postmodernist ideology, it is a subversive force that threatens much of which is held, or has been held, dear for generations of educators. As Nagel argues, this kind of play “can be used to conjure up (in a Nietzschian analogy) the death of man” (Nagel 2002, p. 5) as a self-grounding, selfknowing being. There is, however, a remaining question: is this ludic, anti-educational “free-for-all” the only possible interpretation of modern play or can play be redeemed for education by interpreting it in a different manner and if so what would such an interpretation look like? A different interpretation of play that is at home in postmodernist thought but avoids a complete playful relativism in favour of a Wittgensteinian language game interpretation of knowledge and learning can admit of an important kind of play. 10 In this regard, Rømer makes the useful distinction between postmodernity as an instance of complete playful relativism on the one hand and, on the other hand, of “the gradual learning of local competencies” (Rømer 2003, p. 313). (All learning is of local competencies in the light of the impossibility of any “grand narrative”.) As argued above, there is no way to defend a role for a frivolous, random play in the educational progress or adaptation of a human being. However, there is a reading of the “learned competencies” view of postmodernism that does allow a role to a “play as transformation” (Sutton-Smith 1997, p. 127). This view of postmodernism has its roots in the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein with his suggestion that language and thus the ways in which we can represent the world (and ourselves as part of the world) is made up of “language games”. There are two standard interpretations of the nature of these language games. The first states (and this is probably closer to the original Wittgenstein) that a particular language game is a fairly stable, objective thing that is governed by grammatical rules which consequently govern the way in which we see and think about the world. The education of a child consists in entering, or being initiated into, a language game from the outside by learning how a term or a word is used in the language game. This usage has been determined by others and has been formed by tradition and forms the established knowledge and language of a society. The second interpretation of the nature of language games is the more ludic view that language games have no fixed structure and that each linguistic encounter is an “event” whose structure is constantly being reshaped in new ways depending on the context of the language encounter. Once again, this interpretation of the nature of language games leaves education in the difficult position of not being able to develop any way of legitimising or evaluating student responses nor therefore of being able to access or evaluate student knowledge. Language on this view is pure contingency. Because of the cul-de-sac presented by the “language as event” view the only possible home for a contemporary or postmodernist notion of play lies in its possible role within the dynamics of flexible language games. If language games are viewed not as rigid, objective categories that children have to learn in ostensive knowledge and if they are not considered “islands of language” (Lyotard, 1984) that do not permit of translation or communication but are open to new interpretations, new voices, new accents and reorganisation, then it is here that a postmodernist play can be situated. Play, according to this reading, is to be found at the centre of learning understood as the re-structuring and re-organisation of knowledge. So according to one branch of postmodernist thought advocated, for instance by Richard Rorty, education and learning 11 involves two components: the handing down to the next generation of traditional knowledge structures or language games and also the playful breaking up and recombining of traditional knowledge and learning in a new and satisfying way that ultimately provides personal meaning and understanding of the world. The energy for this play is provided by either the quest for personal meaning or simple Aristotelian curiosity or hunger for stimulating and satisfying ideas in Lyotard’s postmodernist concept of “paralogy”. (Lyotard 1984) If understood as the creative and imaginative restructuring of traditional and transmitted knowledge, this postmodernist play can have educational and developmental significance. It differs from the play of Froebel in at least two significant ways. Firstly, there is no sense in this epistemological play of the service to an emergent true self. The notion of an ontologically fundamental self realising its nascent potentialities is one of the grand narratives rejected by postmodernism. Secondly, while the playful and creative re-structuring of language games will be influenced by life-world factors, this type of play is not bound in any way by the kind of universal necessity characteristic of the Hegelian or Froebelian dialectic. The two kinds of play nevertheless have two important common features. In both cases play is a cultural act, action in meaningful symbols and an expression of self. It is also, but in different ways, concerned with self-formation, in one case in an ontological sense and in the second case as “edification” (Rorty) or “self-creation” (Foucault) in an epistemological sense. Children all the while continue to play and in doing so challenge our understandings of its function for themselves, for their education and for society. List of References Blow, S. E. (1899) Letters to a Mother on the Philosophy of Froebel, New York: Appleton and Company. Froebel, F., (2001/[1888]) Friedrich Froebel’s The Education of Man, trans. W. N. Hailmann, London: Routledge Froebel, F. (2001/[1899]) Friedrich Froebel’s Education by Development, trans. Josephine Jarvis, London: Routledge. Gadamer, H-G. (1989) Truth and Method 2nd ed trans. Weinsheimer, J. and Marshall, D. G. London: Continuum. Halfter, F. (1926) Das Vermächtnis Friedrich Fröbels an unsere Zeit, Leipzig: Verlag Quelle &Meyer. Hegel, G. W. F. (1977) trans. A. V Miller, The Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 12 Jurist, E. L. (2000) Beyond Hegel and Nietzsche: Philosophy, Culture and Agency, Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press. Lyotard, J-F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Mineapolis MN, Nagel. M. (2002) Masking the Abject: A Genealogy of Play, Lanham MA, Lexington. Nietzsche, F. (1999/[1871]) eds. Geuss, R. and Speirs, R (trans) The Birth of Tragedy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rømer, T. (2003) Learning and Assessment in Postmodern Education in Educational Theory, 53 (3), 313-327. Sutton-Smith, B (1997) The Ambiguity of Play, Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press. Note: the author wishes to acknowledge his debt to his colleague Dr. David Limond, TCD, for his insightful critique and helpful comments on an early version of the text. 13