"The walls of society," wrote Peter Berger (1963), "are a Potemkin village erected in front of the abyss of being...a defense against terror." We are bound by our fear of mortality into social artifice, diversionary tactics -inauthentic roles, forms of organization in flight from moral responsibility. The grandest artifice, of course, is the Hobbesian State. For Seery (1996) the failure to escape from a Hobbesian social contract founded upon the fear of death has tainted democracy and made of it "a second-best compromise, a calculated risk". The Hobbesian contract is the secular version of the religious exploitation of mortal fear on which is constructed unimpeachable authority- the outer limits of freedom. He condemns the absence of thought and debate about mortality for this is what prevents the emergence of more sophisticated - e.g. rights-based -versions of democracy.

For Berger, concerned with humanism more than specifically democracy, social inquiry cannot be so bound into the artifices of role and organization. Social science exists to monitor the state of these social compacts and the extent of the fictionalising. Through engaging in the act of inquiry we face - we are obliged to face -the terrors - the closest we come to objective truth. We occupy a role, indeed - another social construct - but one that is privileged by its search for authentic expression and by standing somewhat outside of normal social relations (postmodernist objections notwithstanding).

Death - in its corporeal, most mundane form - is urgent and real enough a theme for educators and educational evaluators. Read Linda McNeil' s critique of an emerging US National Curriculum which starts with the words of a young boy saying school is a refuge from killing and being killed on the streets. Note: reality (the other word for death) is just another poverty disease: artifice, evasion and in authenticity come easier for the middle classes. Dismayingly, what awaits that boy in school is hardly the kind of confrontation with those realities that will eventually allow him to cope with them. School is in the vanguard of the Hobbesian flight.

And, too, my interest in this theme was first sparked when I conducted a case study in a hospice for the terminally ill. There, my evaluation was limited by the fears and tolerances of those who lived and worked in the hospice. The Mother Superior, the Chaplain and the senior medics were all people who were touched by mortality and who transferred their fears - each in their own way - into forms of professional practice and forms of exchange with both patients and families. Where my questioning and my portrayals threatened to articulate those fears- just to give them form - my work was disciplined with recourse to our confidentiality contract and I became complicit with the avoidance strategies. Where I insisted on exposing the interaction between fear and action - publishing an account -there was an attempt at suppression.

Death (says Mellor, 1993) is a threat to the modernist project since it puts a limit on personal projects and, thereby, to our commitment to societal goals - it reduces the attractions of change. Reflections on mortality remind us of the incompleteness of all projects. Hence it is, as they say, privatized - hidden from view, outlawed - as, nowadays, are non-compliance, dissent, failure to meet targets and other sources of important learning. And so this of my two operatic themes (Love and Death) stands for less urgent possibilities. Death in the context of our educational concerns -stands for incompleteness, failure essential for learning, intractable authority - the ever-receding and non-reachable standard. Doctors in the hospice, for example, knew well that medics traditionally reject the death of patients as sign of their medical failures, of the limits to medical knowledge, and so marginalise it (and the terminal patient) from their professional lives. One key mission of the hospice movement is to recover confidence in medical practice - i.e. learn how to come to terms with the limitations of knowledge. Many politicians have barely started to address a similar condition in our education system.

Nor am I claiming that we need to take a lugubrious and negative view of what stands for death. Quite to the contrary - the insistence on inauthentic compliance to the policy plot is a kind of death in itself and a denial of life - i.e. a denial of diversity and idiosyncrasy. "All plots," writes Don DeLillo (in his book Libra), "lead to death." In its own way, the hospice accepted and promoted death (complete pain control allowed the Mother Superior to claim that a dying person was the best audio-visual aid we've got") - the theory was that its acceptance brought a liberation which itself allowed a dogged celebration of life.

In education as in life, mortality is the key issue, death the main protagonist. If we were not haunted by the ephemeral nature of our accomplishments we would not, perhaps, be so obsessive about promoting them in schools. The situation is serious for youth who lie on the wrong side - albeit the fortunate side - of the most fundamental paradox in schooling. Here, for the most part, are people whose consciousness of mortality is barely ignited, but whose same consciousness is being tampered with by people for whom mortality is a never-simmering reality. Here is a hidden struggle, as portentous as it unnoticed.

The sensitivity of this situation is intense - the danger of an accidentals cuff creating an explosive spark in a young mind. I often hear artists in schools talking of wanting to 'pass on the spark of creativity' to the child - as though creativity were an immortal and honorific blessing. A student of mine - an English teacher - talked to me of the personal pain of trying to teach Beckett to his pupils - how do you explain 'Waiting for Godot' without contaminating that luxurious moment of immortality? But then I frequently recall a moment in one of my evaluations when a young(8-year-old) Muslim girl explained to me why, when she joined music workshops in schools, she risked inheriting a narrowing grave for her sin. Too late for the 'spark' to do much more damage there.

I noted this last datum on the evaluation of an orchestral outreach programme, and the story raised a question about how we view educational programmes themselves in relation to those who people them. I asked another child, Richard, from the same school what it was like to be a pupil - "I don't know, "he said, "I've never been a teacher". Well, intentionally or not Richard makes us think of how we lock children up in our educational Potemkin villages, intrigued more by the gravity of our campaigns than with the experience of living in inauthentic states; how we so consistently fail to measure the significance of that campaign in the immortal life of the child, but how obsessively we assume the place of that child in the significance of our ephemeral strategies. So I want to look at educational programmes we evaluate.

Of the existential tricks Berger counts among the Potemkin edifices the programme stands tall. Here is the bulwark against failure, the key vehicle in the modernist forward-moving convoy. Programmes, the mythology goes, once were the social scientists' long-yearned-for laboratories of change, the observed experiment writ-large, where social process could be dissected and analyzed, bombarded and altered and then announced to a waiting world. Small wonder, and for good reason were evaluators attracted to them. 20 years ago Carol Weiss wrote of the co option of evaluators into programme realities and their being career-enmeshed with them. And so we are. One of the underlying biases we live with is our frequent assertion of programme status over that of the individual. Look at the contents page of almost any evaluation report. Context comes first, and that almost always means programme and policy contexts. Young people (where they appear) come later.

This would not be so calamitous if programmes were the speculative theatres of observation they once supposedly were. Now, however, they are unmistakably the purposeful 'colonizers of the future', demanding loyalty to progress, intolerant of hesitancy in respect of change. They are the harbingers of Don Cambell's 'experimenting society' -thoroughly imbued with the ideology of progress and scientific authority; saturated with inauthenticity and intolerant of failure and incompleteness. As I recently heard a radiobroadcaster say, we live in a world where there is no longer a 'Plan B'.

Our tendency to 'read' children's lives through the lens of the 'school' or 'curriculum programme' - to use the programme to shed meaning on the work and lives of so-called pupils - signifies further co-optation into 'Plan A 'and a flight from mortality and tolerance of failure. When evaluators believe in the social status of a social programme and use it as a template of meaning placed on individual thought and action -i.e. when evaluators go along with the artifice of role- this one a 'teacher', this a 'pupil', that one a 'manager' - we, too, engage in evasive action and become part of the exhortatory machinery that drives people on. We need to come at programmes 'from an angle'.

The alternative, of course, is to document people's lives and to use these as contexts in which to read the significance and the meaning of the Programme - i.e. to invert the relationship between programme and person. If I am hard-headed about anything it is this - that in educational evaluation almost all that is intrinsically worth researching are the lives and views of young people - most of all else is avoidance and co-optation. This means a key evaluation task is measuring the significance of programmes in the lives of young people - rather than the inverse of that - and, of course, documenting how educational programmes consistently (and importantly) fail them. And this means little more or less than talking to young people.

Here we walk in less familiar territory for it requires evaluators to engage in an immersion programme - immersed, that is, in young people's lives. But the point is to break the link between programme and progress -to search for Plan B - as often to frustrate and not to service decision-making. We need, as one of my students once alleged of me to be 'in love' with our respondents.

This was a moment when I exposed my students to the questionable privilege of wading through (you might dignify this by saying 'deconstruct') an archive of one of my evaluation projects which was located in a music conservatoire. I asked them to identify me and how I appeared in various guises. "It's obvious," said Ed, "you were in love with the students!" And so I was - though I have to say in a social-cerebral form of the affliction which is how Ed meant it.

Well, I have written about this (Kushner, 1996) so I will not dwell too much on it here. What Ed did mean was that he noticed evidence of mutual dependence, mutual exploitation, joint celebration and a fascination with the emotional precipice of social intimacy. Here was evidence of engagement, an intermingling of interests -but, ultimately, as in all good tangos, of final betrayal. I talked as a friend but slunk off to write as a scientist - 'the eyes of a sinner, the hands of a priest', as Sting's lyric goes.

The point about this is that this is what is involved in the privileged role hinted at by Peter Berger - the social inquirer who cannot enjoy the luxury of inauthenticity, who comes at our edifices to inauthentic experience from the angle of immediate perception. To document the lives of young people involves an essential betrayal - a drawing close and an eventual distancing.

I started out on this track, actually, encouraged by Bob Stake's notion of portraying "the mood and even the mystery" of a programme -"mood" and "mystery" - two words I least expected to read when being inducted into programme evaluation. I still consider this to be a radical aspiration yet to be widely realized by us. Here - I suppose to love and death - is where this has led me for here lie programme mysteries. I do not lose my interest in programmes and nor my obligation to report on them. But I think we can do a more accurate job of measuring their significance than we do - we ought to do more of a job to locate programmes as iterative renewals of the social contract and to see each, thereby, as an opportunity to re-evaluate that contract and to expose its artifices. It is Thomas Hobbes, not John Stuart Mill, who hovers as the dark eminence over the field of evaluation.

So I worry about the continued focus on programmes in the Responsive approach. I worry that in treating the programnme as 'stimulus' we are dealing with the surrogate, and that what we need to do to properly understand programmes is to forget about them for a while.

There is, in this respect, a particular application of my proposed inversion between programme and young person, and it relates to another of the monolithic artifices which looms menacingly over education - standards. The elegance of the myth, the sheer aesthetic neatness of the concept of a reachable standard renders it virtually unimpeachable in public discourse. Here is the hardest clause in the social contract between educational practitioner and citizen - achievement delivered in exchange for social status. We cannot, in my view, resist this movement fighting, as we have to, with the clumsy, Heath-Robinson weaponry of complexity.

What we might do, however, is to expose the artifice with the undeniable voice of the 'client' - the young person (by which I include their families, of course). A key task for evaluators of educational programmes might to be to work with young people to identify what counts for them as reasonable and relevant educational standards. I am not talking of administering student 'happy sheets', nor of chance interviews asking students' views of school. What I propose implies more complex methodological strategies. They are informed views we must seek, educational criteria discovered out of comprehensive analyses of lives, sociologies and school experiences. We need to approach young people not merely as the sources of information and data, but as participants in the process of analyzing and understanding data.

This way, at least, we might generate accounts and visions of schooling suffused more with a celebration of life than with the submissive awareness of its passing.

    Berger, P (1963) An Invitation to Sociology, London: Penguin Books

    Kushner, S. I. (1996) To Have and Have Not: Critical Distance and Emotional Proximity in Music Education Evaluation with a Critique of' Connoisseurship'' in Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 130: Fall, pp. 52-64

    Mellor, P.H. (1993) 'Death in high modernity: the contemporary presence and absence of death' in D. Clark (Ed.) The Sociology of Death, Oxford: Blackwell

    Seery, J.E. (1996) Political Theory for Mortals: Shades of Justice, Images of Death, London: Cornell University Press