In the autumn of 1976 the British Government and sections of the educational state apparatus launched a major effort to restructure the existing education system, particularly in its relation to the economic and ideological requirements of industrial capital. This has led it to instigate an attack aimed at the gains made by the working class in education over the last 30 years. But this attack has not taken an explicit form — instead it has seemingly been directed at previous trends in bourgeois educational thought, and their results in practice.
In the post-war period, and especially in the 1960s, discussion of education in relation to the needs of the British economy had in practice been over-shadowed by a persistent emphasis on the educational needs of the individual child. Debate in this style has been definitively ended by the statements of the last few months. The ‘Yellow Book’, prepared by sections of the national school inspectorate in response to a request from James Callaghan, put the new emphasis very concisely:
‘Schools may have overemphasised the importance of preparing boys and girls for their roles in society, compared with the need to prepare them for their economic role.’ [1]
In October 1976 Callaghan made a speech in Oxford which, in spite of certain verbal gestures in the opposite direction, was a clear encouragement to the reactionaries: ‘He spelt out the goal of education. “It is to equip children to the best of their ability for a lively and constructive place in society.”’ [2] Taking his cue, John Methven, Director-General of the CBI, responded: ‘A shift from unrestricted freedom of choice towards a sharper concern for the national interest in the shaping of educational policy is necessary.’ [3] By the end of the year, the Department of Education and Science had announced the opening of a ‘Great Debate’ on (preselected) educational issues, and the chairman of the Schools Council [4], Sir Alex Smith, felt able to denounce the education system in the most vehement terms yet: ‘Education... has rejected any serious economic responsibility. From this morally reprehensible stance, the education service has no right, in my judgement, to a larger portion from the resources of our struggling economy.’ [5]
What was the reasoning behind this concerted attack on an education system which until recently had enjoyed an inter-class consensus? Primarily, of course, the over-riding motive for the attack lies in the impossible contradiction between the present economic crisis of British capitalism and its previous attempts to expand and modernise the education system. Secondly, the bourgeoisie is acutely aware of a social crisis which, in some areas of society, imperils its ideological legitimacy.
Education is one such area. But the relative success of the initial bourgeois attacks on the education system does not rest upon their ability to spread ideas of necessary sacrifice in the face of economic disaster. No — the fact is that the themes of the attack on education have been able to grip the popular consciousness because they relate simultaneously to a deep crisis in reformist thinking and seem to respond to what is experienced by the masses as a crisis in education. What is new in the present situation is the spectacle of sections of the working class being drawn into a movement whose aims are thoroughly retrogressive.
William Tyndale: the Birth of a Scapegoat
One issue above all has forced open the floodgates of mass consciousness to the new wave of reactionary propaganda: that of William Tyndale, a junior school in Islington, where the bourgeoisie through the media, through an ‘independent’ inquiry, and through its local government apparatus — has been able to ‘prove’ that certain ‘progressive’ teaching methods, particularly when allied to radical political views, result in the lowering of educational standards. It has been able to fabricate an image of irresponsible teachers, both dilettante and elitist, presiding over an educational chaos in which the life chances of children — particularly of working class children — are seriously damaged. It has been able to ‘establish’ an equation between certain forms of teaching — democratic collaboration between teachers, a substantial measure of free choice for children — and educational crisis. Moreover, it has been able to do this without any serious counterposition being put by the National Union of Teachers, by any section of the labour movement, or by well-known ‘progressive’ educators.
Why has the ruling class been successful on this issue — so much so that it is applying the rhetoric it learned from the Tyndale case to ‘explain’ the educational crisis as a whole? [6] Certainly the teachers have made tactical mistakes, but even if these were gigantic, they could not explain the teachers’ present isolation. What is revealed is the inability of reformism to provide any explanation for, answers to, or action around the crisis in education. But it is not only the weakness of reformism that has been spotlighted by the Tyndale case and the ‘Great Debate’ — it is also the fact that no alternative exists to it in the working class at large, and that even within the far left a response to the new educational crisis has been slow and grossly inadequate.
But it is the political spinelessness of reformism that is immediately most evident. Tribune drew crumbs of consolation from a sentence in Callaghan's speech which spoke of ‘those who claim to defend standards but who in reality are simply seeking to defend old privileges and inequalities’ [7], while ignoring the fact that the speech as a whole was welcomed by Rhodes Boyson, newly appointed Tory spokesman on education. [8]
The Communist Party went even further. It welcomed the Auld Report on Tyndale (which connected what it saw as the teachers’ attempts to make ‘school a vehicle for social change’ with educational inefficiency — and thus provided a basis for the Inner London Education Authority to take action against the teachers), and defended in its teachers’ journal not the Tyndale teachers but the state apparatus: ‘We want good authorities and a good DES. It is (their) responsibility not to allow any developments which may be to the detriment of children: to... prevent deterioration of educational standards, be it through... staff turnover... or incapability’ [9] (my emphasis). The Morning Star later commended the Auld Report as ‘forthright’ and ‘patently objective’. [10]
Why is such paralysis and capitulation widespread in the face of the most sweeping attacks on the educational gains of the working class? Obviously everything is overshadowed by the collaboration of the workers’ leaderships with the Labour Government's attacks on living standards, and the resulting demoralisation. But the reason lies specifically in the process whereby the reforms fought for by the working class have been ‘twisted to fit the logic of capitalist society’ (to utilise a phrase of Robin Blackburn's), with a resultant loss of political consciousness on issues such as education: and in the historic inability of the working class leaderships to develop any programme of struggle that would maintain the independence of working class politics from the bourgeois state that tries to incorporate it. In the course of economic struggles this process of incorporation is continually interrupted by the spontaneous and elemental upsurge of the mass movement (for example, the opposition to the Industrial Relations Act, the miners’ strikes, etc.). In education, on the other hand, the bourgeoisie has had thirty uninterrupted years to ‘twist’ the initial democratic reforms forced upon it by working class pressure into measures geared to fit education to the technical and ideological requirements of capitalism, and to depoliticise (at least up until now) much of the education debate.
How exactly has this process occurred? Undoubtedly the 1944 Education Act was passed amid a strong working class desire for educational change. It marked a certain ‘democratisation’ of the education system — grammar schools were brought into the state system, and working class children were given a greatly increased access to the education system as a whole. GCT Giles, a CP member and President of the NUT in 1944-45, gave an account of the agitation for a democratic education system: ‘For the first time there was real evidence of a popular demand for a democratic system of education... The Council for the Educational Advance (was) the first direct and official alliance between the NUT and the working class movement... Education was a live issue in the General Election, and at the municipal elections. The combined result is a lively and sustained interest among parents. Meetings and conferences dealing with the Act are almost invariably well attended.’ [11]
But the limits and weaknesses of this movement are also revealed. Giles criticised the existing education system because it was ‘inadequate for an epoch of rapid scientific advance, and unsuitable for the age of the common man’ [12]. This vulgar stress on social unity rather than class struggle characterised the entire reform movement, and was entirely in keeping with Labour Party social philosophy. In no way could it inspire any programmatic alternative to the ‘44 Act — nothing related to the content of education, or to its ideological function. Giles conceived of the movement's task only as to add ‘punch’ to the state proposals.
It was with this ideological equipment that the working class fought in the 1950s for comprehensive education. The Labour Party-inspired London School Plan of 1947, for instance, motivated comprehensive education on the grounds that, ‘It was a matter of first rate importance for modern society that life in school should promote a feeling of social unity...’ [13] The reformers ultimately received the backing of the Bow Group of the Tory Party and the Gaitskellite right wing of the Labour Party, who found no difficulty in adapting the ideology of the movement to their own ideas of social engineering. Indeed, it came to form a major strand of the Government's own reports. [14]
The working class movement did not challenge this framework. It left others to decide questions of the content and organisation of the curriculum, of the regime in the schools. No tradition of an independent class attitude to education was developed.
But direct bourgeois control of education was nevertheless weakened — not by a planned, politicised working class campaign, but in a profoundly unconscious, spontaneous way. This process had several aspects; the most conscious was the determination of the labour movement to continue to extend the availability of education to working class children, and to restrict privilege. This continual demand for equality of educational opportunity set limits to the ruling class's ability to determine the structure of the education system. In addition, the general realisation that ‘economic development’ impelled changes in educational method meant in practice that a ‘progressive’ wing of the educational state apparatus developed — with the twin aims of gearing education to technical change and increasingly integrating a previously relatively ‘unsocialised’ layer of working class children into a role as ‘citizens’ of a skilled, modern society. This, coupled with the pressure of the spontaneous resistance to schooling of working class youth, meant that a flexible and ‘child-centred’ curriculum developed, together with a certain relaxation in the schools’ regime.
Moreover, the existing ethical and humanist bias of English education — dating from Matthew Arnold — has built into it a strong attachment to the development of the ‘individual’ as well as a general hostility to the sort of utilitarian principles invoked by the ‘needs of industry’. The post-war capitalist strategy of expanding and modernising education has thus not only found itself cramped by the pressure of the working class, but filtered through entrenched ideas of a humanist, individual-centred, critical curriculum. Sir Alex Smith signals the bourgeoisie’s sour, retrospective perception of this process: ‘The Robbins Report contained one big flaw — the assumption that a large stock of well-educated people is unquestionably good for the country. It is an assumption that is wrong — if the process of educating them is such as to create in them a dislike for being involved in the means whereby the country earns its living among nations.’ [15]
These processes, developing relatively autonomously from the main front of class struggle, created a sharper contradiction between what happened in the schools and the direct economic and ideological needs of capitalism. The bourgeoisie is now thoroughly alarmed that ‘its’ reforms have created in education a major area of social crisis, where its authority is spontaneously challenged by growing numbers of teachers and students. Yet it moves now not just to ‘de-autonomise’ education but, with characteristic opportunism, to exploit the fact that the crisis in education affects layers of the working class as much as it does the bourgeoisie, and to present itself demagogically as the saviour of the workers from a crisis it explains as progressive-engendered. In this way it hopes not merely to re-stabilise education, but to win support for authoritarian solutions to the crisis in society as a whole. In education, specifically, it aims by its campaign to lead a popular crusade that will brush aside the opposition and ultimately have the effect of displacing the ideology previously dominant in education — which could be termed democratic/humanist — with a new technicist ideology that will have as a major form of social integration a forceful initiation into the role of wage labourer, accompanied by a far more technocratic conception of society.
The main factor which permits this is the historic weakness of the working class on these questions — a weakness that takes the form of a reliance upon the bourgeois democratic state to realise educational reform, and a consequent lack of involvement in the educational debate — so that the bourgeoisie’s new demagogy has some plausibility for an unprepared and inexperienced class, which is nevertheless profoundly dissatisfied with education as it is. On top of this, the response of ‘progressive’ educationalists to the attacks has been a stunned silence. Deprived by the right-wing turn of its base in the state apparatus, historically isolated from the working class movement, into whose ranks their ideas did not penetrate, they are easily browbeaten by the new ranting of the ‘Yellow Book’ of ‘hard and irreducible economic facts’ that compel changes. The silence of these figures alone would have a powerful disorienting effect on progressive classroom teachers. But it is not the only hostile circumstance...
The National Union of Teachers: Collaborators with the State
The NUT, despite the wage militancy which pushed it into membership of the TUC in the late 1960s, does not in any sense define its perspective on education from the point of view of the working class. Rather, it rode the tide of social reform to place itself in a good position to determine its outcome — in some cases it entered into the state apparatus to do this (for instance, its preponderance on the Schools Council). The heights of its influence have been gained by political collusion with the state, and by accommodation to the prevailing ideology. As Schools Council publications show [16], the NUT has been practising a ‘social compact’ in education for a number of years, in which it exchanges an independent voice on education for an agreement to accept the ideological consensus among the dominant class. [17]
Thus the NUT leadership's response to the attacks has so far been motivated primarily by its desire to maintain its influence in the state apparatus. It has, for instance, avoided any comment on the content of Callaghan's speech. The basic strategy is not to fight the offensive but to make sure that the NUT has a part in helping, if need be, to implement its outcome. Hence remarks from the NUT executive such as: ‘No reform or development can be achieved without the willing cooperation of the teaching profession.’ [18]
Faced only with this response, the state is increasingly confident that — given the continued collaboration of trade union leaders with the Government on the central issues of the day — it can substantially alter the character of education and reverse many of the historic gains of the working class, through a popular and demagogic campaign culminating in a more direct intervention of ‘industry’ into the schools, and by an alteration of the role of sections of the state apparatus, particularly the inspectorate. [19]
The watchword of this campaign is ‘accountability’: which signifies an obedience of teachers to the dictates of industry disguised in many cases as a form of popular control. In this way progressive experiment and teacher autonomy would be curbed. The consequences of excesses in the previous course are dramatically epitomised for the media by the case of Tyndale, whose lesson can be summed up as ‘progressive education causes the crisis in the schools’. Anti-democratic, politically motivated teachers are seen as the bringers of disorder: ‘“Mr. Haddow wanted to destroy this society, didn't he?” asked barrister John Williams of Ellis during the enquiry.’ [20]
Consequently teachers like this are portrayed as the worst enemies of working class children, particularly those children set on using educational quality as a means of individual advance. It is this theme which is at the heart of the anti-Tyndale propaganda. Whereas right-wing opposition to reform in education had in the past been patently elitist in character [21], the Tyndale issue allowed the bourgeoisie to pose as the defenders of a new layer of working class children, underprivileged as a result of progressivism.
What actually happened? The teachers explained their practice in the book they wrote: ‘Instead of opting for putting all their efforts into satisfying the group (middle class parents) which could wield the most power, perhaps at the expense of other children, the Tyndale staff concentrated on the disadvantaged child, and in accordance with their policies of greater involvement of parents were completely open about this. This led to pressure, both from the aspiring working class, who already felt hostility towards this group of families, and the middle class, who wanted the school run exclusively for their children.’ [22]
It was this choice that aroused the wrath of the ‘muddle class’ parents — who would have accepted progressive methods alone, but not the corresponding allocation of resources and teaching time that the staff made. [23] It was this real extension of the gains previously made through the relaxation of authoritarianism, the further eroding of competitiveness between children, a flexible and child centred curriculum, accompanied by an almost unknown practice of collective decision-making, and the allowing to children of a real degree of choice, that made the Tyndale teachers exceptional, and provoked an attack on them; even though it was not proved that the children’s standards of educational attainment were falling. For in what they did they implicitly broke the ‘social compact’ between teachers, the state and the ‘community’ which normally ensures that teaching takes place within the values and purposes of the ‘accepted ideas of society’. As the teachers put it, in the present system, ‘Power is granted to the heads only so long as they exercise it in accordance with the wishes of the political masters.’ [24]
The political aftermath of the Tyndale affair centres on the realisation by the bourgeoisie that this ‘social compact’ is far too lax and ill-defined to provide an adequate framework for a project that aims to draw the education system much more closely towards ‘the needs of industry’. This was brought out at the ILEA inquiry into Tyndale. Harvey Hinds, the discredited Labour Party head of ILEA, put the conventional view of the relation of teachers to the state apparatus and to the dominant ideology: ‘In the English system, the attitude of the education authorities is one of leaving teachers to teach and managers to manage, relying on a mutual confidence which in experience is rarely shown not to exist.’ [25]
But this ‘mutual confidence’, which rested on an ideological consensus, can no longer be said to exist with the developing contradiction between the schools and industry. Therefore a sharper intervention has to be made by the industrial bourgeoisie into the education debate, complemented by decisive steps by the central state apparatus to end the tradition of educational autonomy which had helped to allow similar — though not as thorough-going — practices to those at Tyndale to develop. Two astute bourgeois observers summed up the difference between the old and the new lines like this: ‘The main point here is that whereas the Auld view demanded of the inspectorate that it assess, judge, and in the last analysis act as the agents of control of what went on in schools and classrooms, the Hinds view did not.’ [26] The writers finish off with a call for action by the Secretary of State and the inspectorate.
Rarely can an imperative have been so rapidly met. The DES has proclaimed the ‘Great Debate’ on the themes of the content of the curriculum, ‘monitoring and assessment of standards’, teacher training, and ‘the school and working life’. The key element in all this is the last one. It is the ‘needs of industry’ which are defining themselves more and more vociferously as the touchstone of educational performance. The DES initiative has licensed the crudest outbursts from captains of industry who have suddenly been presented with a platform from which to utter reactionary simplicities: ‘Reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic seem to have been dropped. But for what? If the three Rs cannot be replaced by something better very soon, then I maintain that we should return to those basics of education... (schools go) too far towards permissiveness and free choice studies — preferences being for music rather than maths, social studies rather than science.’ [27]
The labour movement has remained largely silent. It has confined itself to reiterating the inter-class arguments that were a commonplace in the 1960s but are entirely redundant now, when what is required is an intransigent critique of the bourgeois education system and a repudiation of working class responsibility for any aspect of the social crisis. [28]
The historic separation of the labour movement from bourgeois progressive educational thought, and its inability to pose any alternative to the incorporation of working class demands into the projects of bourgeois democracy, have prevented the taking of any critical standpoint towards developments in the education system. Now the price is being paid. In the Tyndale case, for instance, the Labour Party school managers and the Labour-controlled ILEA were able to play on this lack of critical intervention, and of the elementary procedures of working class democracy, by a combination of secret manoeuvring and public demagogy that aimed to capitalise on the insecurity of working class parents. It appeared completely legitimate that the ILEA should ‘arbitrate’ between the parents and the Tyndale teachers to settle the dispute — that, after all, is the accepted role of the state. It appeared legitimate, also, for the Labour-controlled ILEA to threaten action against the teachers because they went on strike (thus damaging the children’s interests) without the teachers receiving any support from other trade unionists. So powerful is the idea of education's ‘neutrality’.
The teachers faced squarely up to the fact that many working class parents determinedly rejected their aims and methods, supporting reactionary ideas. But ultimately they turned away from resolving the problem: ‘It is extremely naive to think that bringing in parents and ancillary workers to run the schools is the answer. It may be a consciousness raising question to bring them in and let them know as we're doing, but these are the most reactionary forces in education.’ [29] This is both a recognition of the size of the problem and a failure to attempt to solve it. It is an approach that can only separate radical teachers from the working class and assist the right wing.
How should revolutionary Marxists approach the problem? First, we must recognise the roots of the problem: the way the bourgeoisie has been able to use the working class movement's commitment to the procedures of bourgeois democracy in the field of education (i.e. its willingness to see it as a matter for the state and the ruling political party), and to use its long separation from the debates which have gone on in the education system about its content and purpose, in order to drum up support for a reactionary solution to the social crisis and to promote splits between teachers and the working class. Rarely, too, has it been more concretely shown that issues having a substantial importance for the overall balance of class forces can be raised in an area apparently peripheral to the central clashes of the class struggle.
At the Radical Education conference in November 1976 the IMG put forward the following demands as a tentative attempt to concretise an alternative line to that which the bourgeoisie is employing so successfully:
(a) To explode the demagogy of the bourgeoisie about community control likely to be expressed in the Taylor Committee recommendation that 25 per cent of school managers should be nominated by local capitalists — we should explain that we are not against school management boards, but that they should be in their entirety elected by a general vote in the community, that they should be recallable, and that their meetings should be open to all observers.
(b) We should be absolutely against intervention by capitalist interests in the existing school curriculum.
(c) We should demand the withdrawal of the NUT and other trade unions from the Schools Council. Although the Schools Council is coming under attack from the inspectorate, it is nevertheless the place where, through such schemes as the CBI-TUC backed ‘Industry Project’, a new pattern of education is being developed which, sugared by such descriptions as ‘a partnership between the world of education and the world of work’, is drawing education closer to the needs of the CBI. Opposed to this, we should say that the NUT should collaborate locally and nationally in developing a curriculum that is in the interests of working class children, and that defends the existing gains of the curriculum.
(d) Since the inspectorate — local and national — is more and more going to be a leading force in implementing the new campaign on ‘standards’, and since in the current circumstances to fight them by excluding them from the schools is to provide ammunition for the right wing, we should counter their campaign by demanding that inspections of schools be completely open. The staff at a school should have the right to discuss collectively with the inspectorate before any report is published, and the right of simultaneous public reply. Delegations of parents and trade unionists should be allowed to see what is going on in the school, and, most important, when any inspection is announced, teachers and other trade unionists should demand the right to open the books of the local authority to see exactly the extent of the cuts, to determine exactly who really is damaging education.
(e) In addition to these general ideas, which we think start to provide a framework for general working class involvement in the fight against the right in education, we think it is absolutely necessary to resist immediately, without any preconditions, each and every victimisation of schools and teachers by the LEAs, the media, the DES. We should demand especially that the NUT organises such a campaign.
NOTES
Many of the points in this article are the result of discussion with the [illegible] Teachers Commission of the IMG.
1. Quoted in the Times Educational Supplement, 15 October 1975.
2. The Times, 19 October 1976.
3. TES, 29 October 1976.
4. The Schools Council is a quasi-independent State body, charged with overseeing the curriculum.
5. The Times, 30 December 1976.
6. The Education Minister, Shirley Williams, now feels able to say that: ‘Poor schools are more often so because of weaknesses in staffing and lack of leadership from the head, than simply because the building is old or the locality difficult’ (London Evening Standard, 7 January 1977).
7. Tribune, 5 November 1976.
8. The Times, 30 December 1976.
9. Education Today and Tomorrow, Summer 1976.
10. Morning Star, 22 July 1976.
11. G.C.T. Giles, The New School Tie (London 1946), pp 42-43.
12. Ibid, p vii.
13. Quoted in Rubinstein and Simon, The Evolution of the Comprehensive School 1926-1972 (London 1973), p 44.
14. ‘There is much unrealised talent especially among boys and girls whose potential is masked by .... the limitations of home background. The country [illegible] afford this wastage, humanly or economically speaking’ (Half Our Future: The Newsom Report 1963).
15. TES, 10 September 1976.
16. E.g. Schools Council Working Paper 53, The Whole Curriculum [illegible].
17. There are reasons for this which obviously go beyond the political positions taken by the NUT leadership, but there is not room here for a discussion of the class position occupied by teachers.
18. The Teacher, 22 October 1976.
19. [illegible] Taylor Committee on the management of schools, [illegible] July 1976.
20. William Tyndale: the Teachers’ Story, Terry Ellis et al (London 1976), p.59.
21. E.g. ‘In an influential book (1940) Eric James, High Master of Manchester Grammar School, argued the case for a separate education for the intellectual elite; the common school, he said, would lead to a “narrowing and impoverishment of the whole content of education”. Quoted in Rubinstein and Simon, op. cit., p47.
22. Ellis et al, op. cit., p.71.
23. For this point, and a very good commentary on the issues raised by Tyndale, see an article by Dave Bailey in Radical Education 8, Spring 1977.
24. Ellis et al, op. cit., p.12.
25. William Tyndale: Collapse of a School — or a System? John Gretton & Mark Jackson (London 1976), p78.
26. Ibid, p.79.
27. Sir Arthur Bryan, ‘head of the Wedgwood china firm’, in London Evening Standard, 6 January 1977.
28. See, for instance, the article by Max Morris, NUT Executive member, in Labour Research, December 1976.
29. Terry Ellis, interview in Red Weekly, 21 October 1976.