Trained to Fail: The Tory plan for education

As you may know we are occasionally able to post the talks given at our local branch meetings. This is the talk on education given a few weeks ago. We hope you find it interesting!

A good education under capitalism?

 I wanted to start this talk with a positive, since so much of the subject is, unfortunately, not. So I wanted to talk about what education could be, if we had a different group of people making decisions.

I would like to make a distinction between what education might be in the best of all possible worlds – a future socialist education – and what good education can look like under capitalism. The kind of education that would be possible in a future socialist society would be one where we were freed from the capitalist system and our systems could be decided on by the majority of people to suit not simply our social needs but to encourage the flowering of the human spirit. That would be the an idea of education which represents highest possible aspirations. It would also be a great topic for a future meeting, but take us somewhat off the topic tonight.

On the other hand there is the best kind of education system which we could hope for under capitalism and that is still pretty good. We can have good educational experiences even under a system which most of our students will ultimately enter as hands to be exploited. This is because education is a field of contest between the great classes of capitalism, and the ruling class do not always get their own way. Gove was a ruling class ideologue who spoke the language of the petty-bourgeoisie to scam them into agreeing to a substandard education for their kids and ours, but we have had glimpses over the last half-century of a better alternative. Within teaching unions we often talk about Finland, where children start school aged 7 and have no formal exams until they leave secondary education; there are no league tables and none of the rhetoric of 'choice' that the Tories and New Labour favour. Finnish children do much better than UK children and are top of the world rankings in the international PISA scores which, in a far from perfect way attempt to compare student progress in different countries.

But you don't have to go as far as Scandinavia, or other radical projects like Germany's Laborschule and Spain's Ramiro Solans School – in the UK the comprehensive movement had the potential to provide a high-quality, broad education in a local school to every child. A good comprehensive school can embody a great vision in education. Students mix with a range of children from a variety of social classes. They have the opportunity to have a broad education in academic, practical and vocational subjects. They have some choice over which subjects they take forward to Key Stage Four. In really good comprehensives students understand that skills they learn in one subject can be transferred to others, with whole-school investigations and projects. Melissa Benn in her recent book School Wars: The Battle for Britain's Education gives this example:

a child who is set to building, with others, a bridge over a small stream, will, over the course of that intricate, important task, encounter many discrete subject areas: geology, biology, mathematics, physics, design / aesthetics, history, literature and so on. The more deeply a child is involved in the process of making something beautiful or useful, the more likely the child is to retain, and be able to apply, the knowledge acquired during the course of the task. [2012:181]

She goes on

A good schooling should explore, and help children to develop, the vital balance between compulsion and trust-in-self, duty and creative freedom. It should be about doing and finding out, as well as reading, note-taking and imbibing knowledge. [2012:182]

The comprehensive ideal has never really been fully supported by our ruling class, for reasons that will hopefully become clear during this talk if they aren't already, but here's an example of the kind of education that is possible within our capitalist society – the project method.

The project begins with a theme or issue introduced by the teacher of pupils. This is discussed freely and critically, so ideas and questions emerge.

The next stage is independent research or enquiry, with each group or individual student choosing to investigate a particular aspect. In the final plenary stage, each group presents to the class and stimulates further debate. Where possible, there is a fifth stage, involving a real-world outcome.

Here is an example of this that came from student teachers in Edinburgh. The issue was asylum seekers.

This isn't socialist education in the sense of being offered under the conditions of socialism, but it is a way of educating students which is multi-disciplinary, cooperative, practical, allows for a variety of approaches of foci and can provide a really satisfying learning experience for students which will help them to engage. To be clear, I am not suggesting that this is the only appropriate form of education or that it is a panacea that will turn all students into geniuses. This example simply illustrates what most parents and students already understand, if they think about education in a broad sense – that it does not have to be an alienating, isolated experience primarily aimed at the successful assimilation of a prescribed body of 'knowledge' decided upon by the great and the good.

Reactionary Education - Gove and his allies

 

Unfortunately for students today, this latter, narrow form of education is the one currently being pursued by the government. Gove might be gone, but Nicky Morgan is showing no signs that she wants to depart significantly from his agenda. The right's approach to education can be illustrated in many ways, but I think the attack on so-called 'child-centred education' shows their approach quite neatly.

The bizarreness of the right is shown from the start in their choice of target, much like their recent campaigns against human rights. Really, who could be against education being centred on the needs of the child? If it isn't about helping the child to develop the knowledge and skills needed to be a confident, active citizen, what is it for? If you don't use pedagogical theory to understand how your teaching needs to be accessible to the child and help them to understand effectively the material at hand, how is schooling anything other than a waste of time for student and teacher?

The Daily Mail, luckily, was on-hand to help me to understand why education should not be 'child-centred'. I don't usually go near the Mail's website in case my computer appears on a register for deviants somewhere, but for this meeting I braved it. “Let us cheer Michael Gove for waging war on child-centred claptrap” wrote Mark Dooley in 2012, who feared 'the liberal crusade against academic excellence.' To Dooley, education is 'a means of morally and intellectually civilising children.' He went on

There is nothing elitist in saying that education should be knowledge-based, or that it should inspire children to shun mediocrity for the ‘best that has been thought and said’. There is nothing elitist in teaching them how to make distinctions between what is true and false, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly. To anyone but those dedicated to its demise, the purpose of genuine education is to replace subjective emotion with rational objectivity.

One person who gets this is British Education Secretary Michael Gove.  Some years ago, I had the pleasure of co-authoring an article with Mr Gove. In the course of our deliberations, I realised that he is one of the most brilliant minds of his generation.

Having read some of this guff, I am forced regard this man as an idiot. Let's take his huff apart a bit.

Is education a means of 'morally and intellectually civilising children'? Let's be clear: Dooley's words here are profoundly paedophobic and speak of a belief that children are fundamentally savage beasts who need taming with the whip of 'civilisation'. It is a view of humanity typical of the right, which sees society as a kind of imposition on individuals that is the only thing separating us from nature 'red in tooth and claw'. The idea that human beings are fundamentally social and that schooling is only one way in which children can learn to make moral judgements is not one which he considers explicitly, and yet it is implied in his statement that children should 'shun mediocrity for 'the 'best that has been thought and said'.' This is another typical trope of right-wing thinking, which tends to take the existing social order as somehow a natural phenomenon, whose laws are as inexorable as those of gravity or photosynthesis. 

This is a viewpoint that utterly fails to answer the most important questions whenever anyone talks about a 'knowledge-based curriculum': whose knowledge? Whose ideas of the best? In a society like ours, where there is a fundamental antagonism between the rulers and those who are ruled, there are competing understandings of a whole set of ideas, priorities and events that children might need to learn about. Yet Dooley wants to pretend that education can be impartial, universal and free from fundamental clashes of ideas. But there is no single uncontested body of 'knowledge' hanging out there like a Platonic form, waiting to be snatched by a well-trained philosopher-king. The obvious examples that leap to mind are subjects like history. Gove himself weighed in on World War One, trying to persuade us that it was a 'just war' – and to his class it probably was. To ours, it was an horrific slaughterhouse that threw body after body onto the altar of imperialism. But the same applies to the natural sciences, where new ideas and challenges to existing theories are commonplace. In history such an attitude would reduce historical investigation to a narrative with good kings and bad kings, plucky Brits and perfidious foreign types. In science it would lead children to the erroneous view that science is about dogma rather than data. In media studies it would lead us to understanding how good a film is by the number of Oscars it was given.

So it is disingenuous of Dooley to say that there is 'nothing elitist' in saying that education should be knowledge-based – a claim which he goes on to immediately (if unconsciously) ridicule by suggesting that when he was at school he was given the Big Official List of Beauty, which presumably contains a complete list of the things which are genuinely pretty. I wish right-wingers wouldn't keep these secret truths to themselves, because it would have saved me the trouble of having to respond to art myself and work out what I thought about, say Joan Miro's gigantic tapestries. In fact presumably Dooley doesn't even have to bother with going to a gallery in person. He can just look at a catalogue and tick the ones that are on his list.

Right-wingers like to pose a false dichotomy between 'knowledge-based' and 'skills-based' education, where evil 'liberals' (an oddly vague term from people so obsessed with knowledge) want kids to learn no facts at all, just skills, which presumably exist in a vacuum. In practise of course, no education is all-skill or all-knowledge, but it is true that teachers today who are still largely in receipt of some pedagogical education despite Gove's best efforts, don't favour 'chalk and talk' or other didactic methods, but rather try to find ways of getting the students motivated to do their own research, selection of evidence, analysis and evaluation. It's not that there is no knowledge there you see, but rather that we tend not to see children as passive vessels waiting to be filled up with a quota of facts. It is possible that this is not news to anyone who has ever actually met a child. This is what child-centred education really means: not no knowledge, but critical engagement with both ideas and facts.

Dooley concludes his defence of Gove by claiming that anyone who is serious about education will accept that 'the purpose of genuine education is to replace subjective emotion with rational objectivity.'

This is another wonderful false dichotomy, as absurd as the line in Kipling's If about

'If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
  And treat those two impostors just the same;

to which I always want to respond, why on Earth would you do that? Clearly triumph and disaster are hugely different things. Why would anyone react to those in the same way? And more fundamentally, what is wrong with reacting differently to two different things?

In much the same way do I greet this idea that any human being is a detached, rational observer who sees all the game and yet is not a part of it. This is completely counter to how our world actually works. Our world is dynamic and full of contradictions and as we are ourselves both objects and subjects so our world is full of both subjective and objective factors which coexist simultaneously. Who would seriously want their child to grow up imagining themselves to be an object and not a subject? Yet this is the implication of Dooley's article.

Living in Goveworld

 

So why would Gove want to push this vision of education, and how has he done it?

There has been considerable disagreement about the extent to which Gove ever had a coherent vision of education. Certainly as an education secretary his speeches and policies were full of contradictions: a man obsessed with his own version of 'academic excellence' yet who refused to pay attention to the opinions of educational researchers or professionals; he set up free schools and academies because he wanted schools to have freedom in what they taught and then set up the most prescriptive national curriculum ever; he said that 'There is no profession more noble, no calling more vital, no vocation more admirable than teaching', yet allowed schools to hire teachers with no teaching qualifications whatsoever, and when teachers went on strike suggested that their jobs could be done by pretty much any parent with nothing to do.

Gove made many u-turns and sometimes changed policy seemingly on a whim. For example, after announcing in 2010 that schools would be failing if fewer than 35% of students achieved a certain grade benchmark, the next year he announced that by 2015 the benchmark would be 50%. Needless to say the massive increase in funding that would be required to achieve this was not forthcoming.

In addition we shouldn't underestimate the extent to which Gove was building on Labour policies. The competition between schools through league tables, constant focus on grades, academisation, using Ofsted as a blunt tool to create fear amongst teaching staff and school leadership and creeping privatisation were all introduced or extended under Labour. Ideologically Gove was further to the right but he did not represent a radical break from the practices already in place, rather a deepening entrenchment of them.

Nevertheless, there are a few strands of ideas which we saw repeatedly from Gove during his tenure in office. Whether the actual system which he has left behind reflects these ideas is a somewhat different matter. The first is an idealisation of a mythical golden age in the past, somewhere around the 1950s, where standards were high, children wore school ties, and you  received corporal punishment for misbehaviour. According to Gove's view of education, which Dooley's article reflects quite well, British education was failing, and it was failing because there were too many non-traditional subjects being taught, too much coursework was being done and too many students were getting good grades in their exams. It should be emphasised that for all his rhetoric there is no reason whatever to believe that education as a whole was better in the past. As the general secretary of heads' union NAHT said: "There was no golden age of education. It felt good then because we were only concerned about the education of a minority of children. If it feels bad now, it is because we consider ourselves accountable for the education of every one of them."

It follows that Gove would want to see a narrowing of educational opportunities for students so that they pass a smaller range of subjects  using a smaller set of skills (exams necessarily entail long written responses within a tight time frame so tend to reward a combination of rote recollection and application, analysis and evaluation of rote-recalled facts) and a devaluation of vocational qualifications which offer practical skills. This is indeed what has happened, but too an even greater level of ridiculousness than many in education could ever have envisaged. Children are now tested at the age of four for 'school-readiness' and woe betide a four year old who cannot sit still for long periods, for these will be earmarked for academic failure.

Once school-ready the child – and her teachers – will be subject to a tyranny of data for the next fourteen years. What I mean by this is that student 'progress' is the new be-all and end-all. Student achievement is predicted by a 'flight path' which assumes that a child will routinely make a particular amount of progress every half term, which must be demonstrated by assessments and, preferably assessed tasks between assessments to ensure that the data that is required is available. If a child fails to make this progress then the teacher is held accountable for this. Such a model will fit the Dooleys and Goves of the world, because of course it is a sterile and objective model. After all, nothing happens to children during their development which might cause them to miss their flight path. Tests are always objective and produce useful data, in this view, and so are a good use of class time. This was reflected in Gove's comments that all aspects of a child's behaviour were the responsibility of their teachers. This is part of his rhetoric about teacher 'accountability,' but in practice teacher 'accountability' means accountability to the flight paths of their students. There are many reasons which teachers have for not liking the 'accountibility' that Gove wanted, but a central concern is this: if you're accountable for test results you will spend all of your time teaching to the test. You will spend more and more time teaching ways to pass the test and have less and less opportunity to open a subject out or adapt lesson content to the ways that a class responds to the subject. In a rather nifty piece of bureaucratisation, Gove hit on a method of narrowing a child's education without formally abandoning a single subject.

Finally of course, they will be put towards their EBacc. In its original incarnation, the EBacc was to be the only qualification which children would be allowed to sit, which would have resulted in more than half of all school-children in Britain being drilled relentlessly in how to pass tests from toddler to young adult, and still leave with precisely nothing. Gove also said that if it looked as though too many students might achieve the top grade, he would add another grade on top of that, ensuring that not only would the goalposts shift regularly but that students who the previous year might have been at the top of the system would now no longer be.

When this failed togo through, Gove decided to attack vocational qualifications and coursework to place the emphasis on final exams, weeding out as many working class students who benefited from the opportunities that coursework and resits offered to get their work into the formal language that comes so naturally to the bourgeoisie but has to be learned by others. This point was made by Terry Wrigley in Another School is Possible, written under the last Labour government.

Gove made an infamous speech where he branded teachers as 'enemies of promise' who wanted to fail working-class children. The reason that working-class students do not do as well as middle-class children in exams is because of either feckless parenting or do-gooding child-centred teachers. As Wrigley says, however, 'Britain, alongside the US, has one of the widest social divisions in educational attainment. This is because the gap between rich and poor in society at large is greater than in most developed countries, and because the link in school achievement and family background is stronger than elsewhere.' [2006:18] Wrigley goes on

inspiring examples of school improvement in working class areas have been based on genuine empowerment. ... teachers and heads were driven by a commitment to the children and families, a belief in social justice and the desire to encourage young people's concern about social and political issues. Sadly, these are not the principles driving official school improvement under New Labour, with its insistence on quality control and "effectiveness". [2006:34]

What went for New Labour goes doubly for Gove.

This phrase, quality control, relates directly to the second strand of Gove's thinking, which is a belief in the virtues of competition. This applies within schools, where he has encouraged a return to house systems where students compete amongst themselves, and between schools, where league tables and Ofsted judgements have become the obsession of leadership teams. Gove ensured competition in several ways. One was by removing local authority planning so that instead of new schools being opened as needed to meet growing populations, new free schools and academies began sprouting in areas where there was no shortage of school places. Although in theory these schools were not allowed to be selective, in reality academies often practice 'covert selection' through being perceived by parents as somehow offering a superior experience (although this is not supported by the much-coveted data) to local authority-maintained schools. The intended result of these pressures on schools themselves would surely be a two-tier system, where perceived 'desirable' (i.e. middle-class) schools pay higher salaries to lure qualified teachers and have the resources that wealthier parents bring to offer a broader education, while other schools are poorly resourced, with unqualified staff and the students and teachers run the data treadmill continuously.

Together these produce an education system which is modelled more closely than ever before on the structures of consumer capitalism. The students become data which are processed into discrete quantities by teachers, with grades as the products. Education becomes as alienated and dehumanised as any other factory floor. And schooling becomes another range of products to buy, with parents given a choice between the Tesco value option or, if you've got the income you can splash out on a Waitrose education for your progeny. And just like with consumer capitalism the central difference between the two options is the quality of the packaging. The academy down the road might have nicer blazers and the building has more plate glass windows than the local authority school in Victorian brick, but the same industrial process is being applied to your children. The Waitrose kids will still be more likely to go to university than the Tesco kids, but it will be for the same reason as before - the cultural capital that middle-class parents have access to, and working-class parents don't.

Why would anyone do this? Why create a narrow, prescriptive curriculum where children are constantly tested and ranked, practical skills are devalued and academic 'knowledge' that is more attuned to the values of the middle-classes elevated? Why increase competition between schools that will concentrate the obsession with data still further? Partly it no doubt reflects Gove's class position and the way he has bought into the golden-age gloss that the reactionary ideas I've discussed cover themselves in. However, in my opinion there may be a deeper reason for this production-line education, which is because Gove was deeply cynical about the need for a good quality education system in the UK at all. He was an enemy of promise. He had decided that capital no longer needs large numbers of qualified, skilled workers for the labour market. The proletarianisation of many formerly skilled professions means that only a relatively small number of students need the skills that further and higher education can offer, and the student riots showed us that too much education can be a dangerous thing for a ruling class. The clear implication of a two-tier education system is that it is better for most of us to know our place, and reserve access to the academic heights to nice middle-class children who will know theirs.

RIP Gove?

However, it should be emphasised that this was Gove's vision, not the vision of the ruling class as a whole. In fact there was disagreement with Gove's policies from a large section of the ruling class. In November 2013 the head of bosses' organisation the CBI John Cridland told the press that schools were turning out 'exam robots' and demanded that education offer a broader curriculum than students were currently getting, so clearly sections of capital felt that they needed more students who had a broad range of opportunities rather than fewer. A July 2014 opinion poll by Ipsos MORI showed that Gove was the least popular senior politician in the country with a net likeability rating of -35. Reasons for this dislike have many causes other than ideological ones – a series of high-profile scandals involving his much-vaunted free schools project (which led to the utterly amazing discovery that if you allow any random group of people to set up a school, give them millions of pounds and remove virtually all oversight that the wheels can come off pretty quickly); the acute shortage in primary school places that these policies of competition produced; the chaos unleashed by his repeated, rushed changes in policy; his proposals for unqualified teachers and fast-tracking ex-soldiers into classrooms; or perhaps his fining of parents taking children out of school during term-times may have helped in levering him out of the Department for Education and into the obscurity of the Chief Whip's office. For many, dissatisfaction with Gove was as much about the simple fact that many of his ideas were unworkable, as they were to do with objections to his vision for education.

The education battleground

At the start of the talk I referred to the way that education is always a battleground as forces from above and below seek to set its agendas. The failure of Gove to persuade a majority of the public that teachers were wrong to strike over his changes to the education system, and the way in which the two major unions (and the NUT in particular) were able to make these strikes about education and not simply about terms and conditions of employment show that the right have not had it all their own way. Indeed the NUT has taken advantage of the onslaught from the right to offer a more progressive manifesto for education and launched the Primary Schools Charter as an alternative.

Under capitalism there is much about education which benefits the system. An emphasis on competition is often a part of students' education. Students are encouraged to know their levels and target grades and judge themselves according to where they fall on these scales. 'Meritocracy' – the idea that those who have the highest grades deserve more than those with lower grades – is implicit. On a more basic level, bells and timetables teach children the expectations of the workplace and the management structure of the school reinforces ideas about hierarchy. Many of those who are critical of Gove might accept uncritically some of these hidden ideas about schooling as 'natural' rather that constructed, though constructed they are. But there is also a constant battle for the kind of ideas we want our children to learn and the ways in which we want them to conceive of themselves and the world they enter into. As socialists we need to be active in this fight, to reject the ideas of the right, both explicit and implicit, and build a movement for comprehensive education reforms in the here and now, as part of our fight for a different society in the future. Building within teaching unions to support further industrial action is a vital part of this. In recent weeks we have begun to see Nicky Morgan, Gove's successor, being forced to give way on certain teacher issues, and continued pressure from teachers and parents can begin to reverse much of the damage of recent years.

Further reading
There is a wealth of great work on education out there, from the Socialist Teachers' Alliance's publication Education for Liberation to the Anti-Academies Alliance, and the NUT's manifesto for education and NUT-led primary schools' charter but two books that I found particularly helpful in writing this speech were Terry Wrigley's Another School is Possible and Melissa Benn's School Wars: The Battle for Britain's Education.  These and others are available from the socialist bookshop Bookmarks here.