Graphic designer and artist, Anthony Burrill, is widely credited with popularising the maxim, “Work hard and be nice”. His original artwork has been reproduced many times, featuring now in offices, retail spaces, health centres, and schools across the globe. The phrase resonates, perhaps, because it encapsulates two fundamentals of a fulfilling and productive life: effort and diligence, on the one hand; kindness and respect, on the other. It is a simple, almost banal, proposition, whose mystique lies in its clarity and universality - and its elusiveness: many people struggle to embody the invitation to “work hard and be nice”, despite their best efforts. In adopting Burrill’s maxim as a guiding principle, we should be mindful of this difficulty - and wonder at it, and wonder, too, whether we can make it less difficult.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. First, we had best understand what we do and do not mean by “work hard and be nice”. This means that we must choose between interpretations of ‘productivity’.

At first blush, the phrase appears to consist of two separate injunctions: (1) work hard; (2) be nice. In a traditional school setting, the version of productivity they invoke assumes an industrial cast. (1) Work hard: acquire, store, and recapitulate small k knowledge1 effectively and efficiently -- memorise facts, master formal systems (mathematical, lexical, grammatical, scientific, presentational), model effective recall, so as to achieve good grades. The emphasis is on explicit measurable, accreditable ‘learning outcomes’. (2) Be nice: embody ‘well-adapted’ behavioural norms, model compliance, and perform respect: the aesthetic of ‘customer service’. The focus is on docility and biddability, facilitating efficient ‘learning processes’ in the service (ostensibly) of those learning outcomes.

But let’s envisage “work hard and be nice” not as a set of instructions, but, rather, in an Aristotelian vein, as a single, integrated formula for self-realisation: work hard in order that you can be nice; recognising that being nice often requires unwonted effort. From this perspective, “work hard” concerns the cultivation of characterological, tacit, big K virtues like openness, sympathy, perseverance, curiosity, and determination. Through this lens, hard work is only secondarily (and only when appropriate) about internalising abstract, symbolic information; primarily it involves embodied engagement with what Nel Noddings identifies as “the challenge to care”, so that “being nice” in its pragmatic, relational forms presses for nurturing phronesis (practical wisdom) and philia (friendship or goodwill), in instances of lived, intuitive interactions.

Why is this easier said than done? In The Origins of Love and Hate, Ian Suttie outlines what he terms the ‘taboo on tenderness’, arguing that solicitude and relational warmth are often suppressed in modern patriarchal (or WEIRD2) cultures, where emotional vulnerability, need, and both giving and receiving care are construed as weaknesses. In contemporary culture, Suttie suggests, the natural human impulses towards reciprocity, connection, attachment, and affection are widely stigmatised, viewed as incompatible with self-determination, autonomy, and personal strength, which are construed as non-relational, essentially individual traits. If the genesis of the taboo on tenderness is found in the infant’s weaning from the mother (precipitating a “‘psychic parturition’, attended by an anxiety, acquisitiveness, and aggressiveness), its numbing effects are amplified by subsequent defensive manoeuvres practised by a burgeoning human presence, beginning in childhood and developed throughout the life course: protective gambits aimed at insulating the emerging self against further pain and rejection, “a psychic blindness to pathos of any kind”. In time, “the taboo on regressive longings extends to all manifestations of affection until we can neither offer nor tolerate overt affection. The repression of affection seems therefore to be a process likely to be cumulative from one generation to another.” As numbed, precocious parents, we “force, in turn, our own children to ‘grow up’ too quickly to allow them time to outgrow their childishness. We make them ‘serious’ - preferring success to enjoyment - efficient competitors in the struggle for existence.”

Widespread observance of the taboo on tenderness, then, results in learned hesitation to give or receive open care because our culture codes it as weakness, lack, inefficiency, naivety, or incompetence. In valorising principally control and detachment, we develop fluency in procedures and scripts while growing ever more mute around need and emotion. Over time, we fashion emotional armour for ourselves, prefacing feelings with disclaimers, ironising discomfort, and treating help-seeking as a flaw to be hidden. The consequences are various but not diverse: anxiety, misattunement (with self and others), brittle relationships, and narrow normative parameters in feeling and displaying emotions.

In secondary schools, the taboo shows up institutionally as inflexible ‘expectation’ over kindness and impersonal ‘protection’ over care. Students learn to be ‘good’ by being quiet and productive while masking confusion, frustration, or overload; help-seeking is an admission of ‘falling behind’ and so, intentionally or not, stigmatised; the struggle to learn or, more vitally, to find meaning in learning, surfaces as disengagement or ‘defiance’. Teachers feel pressure to be dispassionate ‘professionals’, whose role is to impart factual knowledge, efficiently and effectively: learning is measured in ‘outcomes’; ‘achievement’ is authenticated by tests; planning and feedback become rubric-only and technical; flexibility is labeled ‘making excuses’ or encouraging slackness. To streamline transmission, disciplinary systems prize visible order, not relational mutuality; acquiescence is deemed exemplary; student self- or peer-advocacy is read as disruptive; notional ‘equality’ is favoured over equity. Despite lip service to “social, emotional and mental health” (SEMH), for the most part students’ epistemic apprenticeships lack depth of feeling or emotional resonance: an impersonal school-world is assumed as “preparation for the real world”.

Enabling an Aristotelian programme of personal growth and meeting the ‘challenge to care’ requires disabling the taboo on tenderness. This is an exacting proposition in any system that conceives of ‘niceness’ or ‘kindness’ as frivolous or weak, or as dangerous vulnerabilities, or as ‘unrealistic’ ends; and this, of course, is precisely what characterises systems born and nurtured under the taboo on tenderness, as well as the people who inhabit them. This is the discursive spiral that strengthens the current paradigm, leading to the chronic derogation of health, caring, restorative, and educational services. To break the cycle, the onus, the initial “hard work”, falls, then, on the adults in schools, to transcend the effects of their own emotional training and inculcation, to slip the bonds of what Peter Berger has dubbed their ‘homeless minds’, and to (re)position themselves as people capable of genuine care.

On the strength of this unshowy, perpetual, ongoing work, school can resurface as an emergent safe-fail experiment in becoming, and, to use Noddings’ term, as a centre of care; an institution capable of containing and supporting the questions, concerns, issues, problems, and ambitions that students bring to it: “… Education might best to be organised around centres of care: care for self, for intimate others, for associates and acquaintances, for distant others, for non-human animals, for plants and the physical environment, for the human made world of objects and instruments, and for ideas… at the present time, the curriculum is organised almost entirely around the last centre, ideas, but it is so poorly put together that ideas are swamped by facts and skills.” This we can call a convivial space: informed by and, in turn, informing spontaneous, intimate prosocial big K knowledge.

It is against this backdrop and in the light of this prescription - which is a psychological prescription to transcend the taboo on tenderness - that a new epistemic apprenticeship for students achieves its embryonic form.

***

Peter Berger The Homeless Mind: Modernisation and Consciousness, Pelican / Penguin Books, 1974

Nel Noddings The Challenge to Care in Schools, Teachers College Press, Columbia University (edition 1), 1992

Ian D. Suttie The Origins of Love and Hate, Free Association Books, London, 1988

1 The new paradigm integrates two forms of knowledge: Big K and small k.

• Big K Knowledge refers to tacit, pre-conscious, unconscious, non-linguistic, and non-symbolic knowing. It is the embodied, intuitive, and relational knowledge that connects us to the world in ways beyond words, arising from lived experience and deep awareness.

• small k knowledge refers to abstract, symbolic, explicit, and linguistic knowing. It is the structured, formal knowledge expressed through language, formal semiosis, and notational systems of representation.

2 Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic [Henrich: 2020]