(Education for Democracy edited by Rubinstein and Stoneman. Penguin, 6/-.)
Education for Democracy states that it is not a reply to the Black Papers. However, most of the contributors do directly address themselves to arguments raised in these pamphlets. The book fulfils a need by presenting simply-written summaries of "progressive" educational research. Brian Simon contributes an essay on streaming which gets down most of the evidence in eight pages, while Stoneman and Owen present a very useful piece that attacks the simplistic views of Burt and Jensen on the relatively static nature of IQ. One striking point made is that in a research project carried out in eleven countries it was found that the difference in mathematical ability among the social classes are on average twice as great in England as in the other countries concerned in the study.
Some of the more interesting material, however, focusses on problems outside the horizons of the Black Paper writers. Such an area is that of compensatory education for the underprivileged child. Nicholas Tucker extends the Plowden concept of Educational Priority Areas to a general discussion of massive aid to the twilight areas. Coates and Silburn take up this theme but argue that there are no purely educational problems: "Education in such an environment, if it is to succeed in encouraging people's full capabilities, must start out as training for community action, for self-help and mutual defence." A very telling point is made against equating school catchment areas with EPAs. The St. Ann's study (a survey of poverty in a Nottingham slum area) found that only 1.5% of the St. Ann's children went to grammar school. The Nottingham Director of Education made great play, using figures based on school catchment areas which included parts of a middle-class district, of the fact that 6% of the children in St. Ann's schools achieved a grammar school place.
Basil Bernstein attempts a critique of compensatory education. He starts from the work of Rosenthal and Jacobson. These workers arbitrarily designate children as "spurters" and told their teachers that these children had undertaken tests that indicated that they would increase their IQ in the next year. An average increase of IQ of between 10 and 12 points occurred. Obviously the low expectations held by the middle-class teacher of the working-class child play a crucial role in the under-achievement of deprived children. Bernstein argues that it is important to focus on deficiencies in the school and that compensatory education distracts from this by concentrating upon the failures of the community, family and child.
One of the most closely-argued essays is by Dennis Marsden on "How Comprehensives Missed the Tide", He finds two components in the pro-comprehensive case the egalitarian which called for unstreaming, a common curriculum and flexible methods; and the meritocratic which wanted to allow a larger proportion to be given a grammar school education and rationalise the use of scarce specialised staff and produce the highly skilled technicians required by neo-capitalism. Marsden charts the increasingly feeble intervention of the Wilson government and the victory of the meritocratic cause. A new tripartite system has been fashioned: independent/direct grant, grammar/unskimmed comprehensive, and skimmed comprehensive/secondary modern. Marsden ends by quoting Tawney: "Onions can be eaten leaf by leaf, but you cannot skin a live tiger paw by paw."
There is always a severe problem that arises with leftish educational writing. That is the persistence of reformist illusions, gross idealist deviations, an extreme overestimation of the possibility of social change via education and a confusion of enhanced social mobility with the millenium All these tendencies exist in this book but a new note is being struck. The heavy determination of the educational system by a matrix of economic and political pressures is being recognised. More importantly, the real agencies of social change are being identified, however hesitantly, when the editors write: "Another characteristic of the recent situation has been that most progressive educationists in research and teaching have believed that right and reason must surely prevail. Seeing for themselves progressive methods and organisation working better and more fairly than the old methods, they could hardly believe that they would not prevail over the entire system. They underestimated the power that was being wielded behind the scenes and the success that various indirect defences of the status quo were beginning to enjoy...From now on it may be necessary for the demands of the underprivileged themselves to play as great a part in educational advance as the findings of educational research." Two cheers for the editors.