Anthony Minghella on the moral responsibility of drama

…But these issues, along with the perennial concerns of style and mechanism and beauty in play-making, exercised me less than the attempts, however rudimentary, to create a world of feeling, to emulate what I have most responded to in the work of others: moments of insight which enlarge upon the narrow range of direct experience possible for any of us. And here, with the obligation to be accurate, is where drama acquires something like a moral responsibility. The world offered back to the audience, be it magical, funny, or tragic, had better be scrupulous: or else, like Flute’s Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we kiss the wall’s hole and not the lips at all. Which is why the theatre – of all the dramatic media least disposed to adornment or mediation, roughest, live, and the harshest arena of judgement – is finally the one I most respect, most care for, and most fear.

Anthony Minghella, in the introduction to his Plays: One. Methuen, 1992.

Education and the relaxed and expanded self

Experience which, if assimilated, would involve a change in the organisation of self tends to be resisted through denial or distortion of symbolisation. The structure and organisation of self appears to become more rigid under threat; to relax its boundaries when completely free from threat.  Experience which is perceived as inconsistent with the self can only be assimilated if the current organisation of self is relaxed and expanded to include it.

Carl Rogers. ‘Student-Centred Teaching.’ In Teaching Thinking by Discussion. ed. Donald Bligh. SHRE & NFER-NELSON, 1986.