managing possibilities

8/14/2019 Managing Possibilities

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Managing possibilities:

What English schools do to teachers and students and why we let them

Contents

Abstract 2Prologue: in the library 3Introduction: the problem of schooling 4Chapter 1: methodology in theory and practice 5Chapter 2: recent history 7Chapter 3: theories of reproduction the 1970s and now 11Chapter 4: assessment and examination the micro-physics of power 17Chapter 5: management the endless frontier 22

Chapter 6: re-schooling or de-schooling? 27Bibliography 30

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Institutions are to be judged by the good or harm they do to individuals.Bertrand Russell

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it be called.John Stuart Mill

Abstract

This report provides a critique of the English education system, using a range oftheoretical perspectives, and material from interviews with teachers as further evidence.The argument runs as follows. The debate between progressives and traditionalists in

state education has been running since the 60s; while the former has retained rhetoricalinfluence in policy, the latter, in aligning with economic interests, has largely dictated theshape of current practice. The effect is to stifle childrens, and teachers, creativity andagency. Explanations for this can be found in 1970s theories of cultural reproduction, andin Foucaults theory of disciplinary institutions. The discourse of management providesthe illusion of choice and empowerment while in fact internalising oppression. Alternativevisions of education that present young people with the freedom to learn as they choosewould require the transformation of society as a whole.

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Prologue: in the library

The scent of the shelves made my heart sink: a musty mosaic of shiny turquoise and mattblack spines, bold puce lettering slashed across cream covers the once radical slantsand contrasts of now creaking prose. I silently acknowledged my prejudice against bookssold in old money. This was the Sociology of Education section, which, given the

irrelevance of the new generation of gender bending, body popping, burger baitinganthropology to my chosen subject, I had ruefully entered. I felt like a squarearchaeologist.

And then the ironies began to dawn. Is no one writing critiques of English education anymore, or are libraries no longer buying them? Which would reflect more tellingly on thestate of the education system? New literature is easy to find, however; it has titles like:Assessment and Your School, Teaching the New History Curriculum, and ClassroomManagement. The British government has expounded education as its top three priorities;but while its competence is questioned, the assumption that more, as measured byquantitative indicators such as grades, class sizes and university admissions, is better,

goes largely unexamined. The modern debate on education seems at first glance to be allhow much and no why.

For academics to question the education system is not just to bite the hand that feedsthem, but also to examine the mould that made them. Its not that anthropology hassidelined education on principle; its just that in todays global savannah, fat cats andmedia sharks make for juicier and less challenging prey. This report, therefore, looks toauthors from a range of decades and disciplines that have asked fundamental questionsabout the nature of education as it is and as it could be. Further reading has endeared meto the humanist sentiment beneath those tasteless covers a passion that I havestruggled to find behind the seductive photomontages of their successors.

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Introduction: the problem of schooling

The problem is fundamental. Put twenty or more children of roughly the same age in a little room,confine them to desks, make them wait in lines, make them behave. It is as if a secret committee,now lost to history, had made a study of children and, having figured out what the greatest numberwere least disposed to do, declared that all of them should do it. (Kidder 1989:191)

This report is a brief anthropological critique of English education. My perspective on itcomes partly from personal experience, which it may help to summarise.

Working for a development education charity a few years ago, I saw children in remoteHimalayan villages and in shacks on the Nile lined up in front of flaking blackboards,copying diligent English into those ubiquitous two-staple exercise books. Few understoodwhat they were writing, let alone why. Meanwhile, the UN and international charities werecampaigning hard to ensure that all the worlds children are educated in school, with fargreater emphasis on attendance than on what is being taught1. This British model of

school education has perhaps been the countrys most prolific export. As I came toquestion the appropriateness of its imposition on people with radically different cultural andeconomic lives, I also began to ask questions about its impact on English children. Myformal research for this report has strengthened my previously held belief that schooling issomething we do to children, rather than forthem, and that it is shaped by powerfuleconomic interests that alienate the young in the North and South alike.

Chapter 1 explains my methodology, covering the use of theory and approach to research.Chapter 2 is a brief overview of major policy changes in state education in the last 30years, a background for the rest of my argument. Chapter 3 evaluates some of the criticalperspectives of the 70s principally, correspondence theory and the hidden curriculum.

It relates these theories to ethnographic evidence, and asks how useful they are inexplaining inequality in 2002. Chapter 4 is an analysis of assessment and evaluation inschools from Foucauldian and postmodern perspectives, which argues that they inhibitchildren both by narrowing their horizons and through their sheer inefficiency. Chapter 5looks at metaphors of management in the modern workplace, and at the way thesediscourses have shaped education policy and the experience of schooling. Finally,Chapter 6 asks what may be possible in education if we explore radical alternatives, andwhat that might mean for wider society.

This is a partial and impressionistic snapshot of the English school system and theeconomic and political forces behind it. I am more concerned to provoke the reader into

original thought than to garner agreement for my particular views. What I believe thisdebate needs above all is a flood of engaged creativity that does justice to our sense ofwhat is possible for children. Heated disagreement would be infinitely preferable to ourcurrent lethargic seesawing between complacency and resignation.

1 For example, see Oxfams Education Now site: http://www.oxfam.org.uk/educationnow, and the followingUNESCO document: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001200/120058e.pdf

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Chapter 1: methodology in theory and practice

If the development and testing of theory is to be pursued effectively, the research focus has to benarrow. Attempts to provide a rounded and detailed description of the institution or behaviourunder study, or to integrate macro and micro levels of analysis, are its seems to me,counterproductive as far as theorizing is concerned. (Hammersley 1990:108)

I start with this quotation as the antithesis to my approach, which is in Hammersleys termsbroad, integrationist, and counterproductive. I examine theories of education not tovalidate or negate them but to add to the collage of my argument. It is precisely thefavouring of theory over hazy reality, and of analysis over understanding, that I find mostdisheartening in some of the recent literature on ethnography in school contexts. Lookingfor static, law-like theories to explain inequalities between schools and children raisesethical questions, since it implies inevitability on the one hand, and disregard for theagency and awareness of individual pupils and teachers on the other. Wearing ananthropologists hat does not give access to a realm of understanding denied to thehumble teachers under study, nor need it confer a sense of dramatic irony that is likely to

backfire:

It is at least anomalous or arrogant when the teacher is given a lesson in what she is actually doingin her classroom by a researcher visiting for a few afternoons and apparently making up methodsas he or she goes along. (Shipman 1985:278)

My ethnographic research consists of 10 extended recorded interviews with Englishschoolteachers from different schools, primary and secondary (including state, private andSteiner schools), in the first months of 2002, plus other less formal conversations. This isfar too small a number to be representative of the teaching profession; yet the nearunanimity of opinion on many issues led me to believe that much of what I heard would bereflected in a wider survey. Cold-calling on schools proved remarkably unsuccessful ingetting interviews; my impression was that there is a whole stratum of teachers who areunwilling to discuss their view of the education system, and their role within it, outside oftheir own social network. Instead, I contacted friends of friends, who were generally verywilling. My fear was that people I interviewed this way would to some extent reflect myown opinion in practice, I felt that most of these connections were so tenuous that theydid not greatly influence the range of opinion I canvassed. Out of respect for those Iinterviewed who did not want their comments to be identified, I have used first names andgeneral location only. They are written in a different font to distinguish them from textualquotations.

My first question to each teacher was, What do you understand by the idea of youngpeoples potential?. There were two reasons behind this. First, achieving potential is apopular phrase in current Department for Education and Skills literature2, which it seems tome is open to various interpretations; secondly, I hoped the question, being unusual,would illicit an unmediated response from teachers about their perceptions of the youngpeople they teach, and their own motivation. Other questions focussed on theirrelationship with the school and the education system as a whole, and their view of theNational Curriculum, new regimes of monitoring and assessment and other major policy

2 Notably in the preface to the 2001 DfES publication, Education and Skills: Delivering Results.

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changes over the last 30 years. I also asked how they felt education would ideally beorganised. By asking about my particular areas of interest I was leading the interviews tosome extent; yet most of my questions were open-ended, and the responses seemedunconstrained. The most noticeable absence in this report is young people themselves. Itlooks at how their voices are lost in the dialogue between teachers and the state but Ifelt it would be beyond the remit of this work to attempt to represent them myself.

My own educational background left me both highly qualified and deeply sceptical of thevalue of what I had been taught. This bias is inevitably reflected in this report, which ismore of a tempered polemic than an open-handed assessment. My hope and belief is thatI have not twisted the words of my interviewees to serve my ends.

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Chapter 2: recent history

In this chapter, I look at some of the major themes in educational policy and its change inEngland over the last 35 years. I will concentrate on the progressive / traditionalist divide,and on changes to organisational structure.

Education in the 60s and 70s and its contested legacy remain the subject of whimsy andvitriol hailed by some as a golden age, and by others as the start of a catastrophicnational moral decline. The Plowden Report of 1967, in Roy Lowes words, marked thehigh-water mark of progressivism in English primary education (1997:50). Its centralconcept was child-centred development in primary schools:

A school is not merely a teaching shop... It is a community in which children learn to live first andforemost as children and not as future adults... It lays special stress on individual discovery, on firsthand experience and on opportunities for creative work. It insists that knowledge does not fall intoseparate compartments and that work and play are not opposite but complementary. A childbrought up on such as atmosphere at all stages of his education has some hope of becoming a

balanced and mature adult and of being able to live in, to contribute to, and to look critically at thesociety of which he forms a part. (Department of Education and Skills, 1967)

The child is seen here not as a malleable homunculus but as a being in his or her ownright, able to develop in his or her own time if given the appropriate surroundings andsupport. The childs world is intrinsically valid and precious, rather than characterised bythe lack of adult understandings and motivations. This draws, though only modestly, onthe radical tradition of Rousseau, who in his account of an ideal education, Emile, arguesthat (male) child should be left to come to his own understanding of and relationship withthe world, with as little interference as possible from his parents and teachers (Rorty2000:248). It is more strongly influenced by the psychologist Jean Piaget and his theoriesof child development in the 1920s. He argued that children progress through varioussuperseding constructions of the world on the basis of their own experiences andexperiments (Gardner 1991:27). The metaphors here are intrinsic and biological, assummarised by Nixon et al.:

There is a distinctive teleology underlying such a [child-centred] conception of education.Individuals grow and develop in a way which unfolds their inner potential. The task of education isto foster that potential so as to realize the powers and capacities of each individual. (1996:38)

Young people here are part of the natural rather than the cultural realm, and it is onlythrough natural behaviour that their potential is realised, and they can become matureenough to become useful members of society. Seeking to direct this growth or determine

its ends can only result in damage to the child. It is essentially an individualisticphilosophy: learning is a personal journey, and people contribute to society by bringingtheir unique qualities to it, rather then by fitting into what is already there; criticallyevaluating, not conforming.

Much freer and more creative.., the discovery thing of the 60s and 70s, that iswhat my children had, and it really seemed to suit them - it was moreenjoyable and quite anarchic, which they thrived upon, although in that

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anarchy I do think that some children fell through the net - but it does seemlike a golden age to me. (Nicola, London)

Despite the strong impression left by this philosophy and the schools that adopted it, Loweargues, the HMI inspectorate report of 1978 showed how little primary schools hadprogressed beyond the heavily didactic methods and restricted curriculum of the

elementary schools (1997:53). The Oracle research project carried out in primary schoolsin Leicester between 1975 and 1980 suggested:

The promotion of enquiry or discovery based learning appeared almost non-existent... There waslittle evidence of any fundamental shift, either in the content of education or in the procedures ofteaching and learning. (in Lowe 1997:53)

Whatever the extent of implementation of the Plowden report, its conservative andtraditionalist critics regarded it as a serious threat.

There was a cynicism about the academic side of teaching, of people who

wrote and talked and thought about education. The Black Papers went rightagainst Plowden. (Lester, Isle of Wight)

In the 1969 Black Papers, a collection of traditionalist essays on schooling, CWJ Crawfordargued:

To have strict silence and rigid discipline with much mindless learning by repetition is unnecessaryand undesirable, but to go to the other extreme is, if anything, rather worse.... it would seem to bea negation of commonsense if one were to deny the right of a cultivated adult to pass on hisknowledge in anything like a didactic way (in Lowe 1997:52).

This is a fundamentally opposed position to that of the progressives. Knowledge is passedon rather than discovered, and the prospect of giving children free reign to learn is seenas rather worse than a draconian traditional regime. The right of the child in education issubstituted for the right of the teacher to teach how and what he or she likes as long asit is seen to be cultivated. Cultural imprinting is here privileged over naturaldevelopment, process over progress; the metaphor for children is the blank slate. TheBlack Papers also called for a return to the three Rs as the basis for primary education,the goal being that they should be learned as soon as possible (Lowe 1997:52). Thetension between these positions is still reflected in the current debate; it is thetraditionalists, I now argue, that have had the most impact on policy.

Since the 70s there has been a significant trend towards the centralisation of thecurriculum. The Assessment of Performance Unit was created in 1975, the first move ofwhich was to require that all local authorities report on the curricula followed in theirschools, leading towards the establishment of a common core of subjects (Lowe 1997:53).This culminated in the Education Reform Act of 1988, which established a NationalCurriculum under the direct authority of the Secretary of State for Education, (Lowe1997:54). This move was linked to an increasingly explicit demand by government thateducation be linked to future employment a call that grew louder during the financialdownturn of the mid 70s, and continued during the Thatcher government of the 80s:

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It is vital that schools should always remember that preparation for working life is one of theirprincipal functions. The economic stresses of our time and the pressures of internationalcompetition make it more necessary than ever before... (Better Schools, DES 1985:15)

This was an entirely new conception of education from personal growth to economic

growth. The paper continues, our focus must be on the strategic questions of the content,shape and purpose of the education system and absolutely central to that is thecurriculum. This pseudo-military language reflected a desire to shape children intosuccessful contributors to the global marketplace. The government believed that strictguidelines as to what children were to learn and when would enable more effectiveassessment and monitoring, instigating nationwide testing for all children at ages 7, 11, 14and 16 (Nixon et al. 1996:2). This in turn would ensure both equal opportunity for all, and acommon cultural heritage.

Another parallel change was in the power structure of the school system. In the post-warperiod, school governing bodies were largely token institutions with little direct authority

over the running of school affairs (Lowe, 1997:141). Following a series of reforms by theConservative government during the 80s, the Education Reform Act required thatgoverning bodies, now with substantial parental representation, control admission,guarantee equality of presentation in political issues within the school, ensure a collectivedaily act of Christian worship, promote family values within sex education, hire and firestaff, and take responsibility for the school budget (Lowe 1997:141). Governing bodieswere also given the power to initiate a consultation and vote on attaining Grant Maintainedstatus, meaning that the school opts out of local authority control with a substantial bonusfrom central government. The result has been that the running of schools has beenprogressively taken out of the hands of teachers.

The policy of centralisation has been complimented by the language of choice. The newConservative administration of 1992 published a White Paper, Choice and Diversity, whichencouraged schools to specialise:

The reality is that children have different needs. The provision of education should be gearedmore to local circumstances and individual needs: hence our commitment to diversity in education.(Diversity and Choice, Department of Education, 1992:3-4)

This opened up the way for selection through parents choice of school, rather than aspreviously through the 11-plus examinations; instead of children taking entrance exams,their parents buy houses in middle class areas that poorer parents cannot afford to live in.This trend has continued under the New Labour administration, which has set a target forhalf of all comprehensives to become specialist schools.

Finally, under the 1992 act the role of school inspections was transferred to OFSTED, anon-ministerial government department3. They currently have the power of inspectionover schools, LEAs, nurseries and youth services. They have the power to demandschools take remedial action if they deem schools to be failing, and ultimately to demandtheir closure.

3 See www.ofsted.gov.uk

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In summary, the past 30 years has seen a radical shift in control over education away fromteachers and local authorities, and towards the state, the Department for Education andSkills (DfES), school governors and parents. At the same time, ideas about teaching havechanged from intrinsic and child-centred to external and economy-centred. The followingchapters examine the significance of these shifts in power and methodology, and analyse

the forces behind them.

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Chapter 3: theories of reproduction the 1970s and now

How is it that, after over a century of state education, the circle of poor school attainmentand poverty remains largely intact? In this chapter, I examine the arguments of those who,in the Marxist tradition of the 1970s, argue that our current system of education inevitablyreproduces inequality, such as Bowles and Gintis, Ronald Dore, Pierre Bourdieu and Paul

Willis. Looking at their arguments in the light of recent government statements, I willsuggest that their theories are still relevant to the situation in the early 21st century, andthat the governments commitment to equality in education contradicts with their morefundamental commitment to maintaining an economic system that is inherently divisive.

Current Labour politicians and officials from the Department for Education and Skills(DfES) claim, in accordance with reformist governments since the turn of the 20th century,that they are actively promoting equality of pupils opportunity and attainment4. Theybelieve that to do so is essential in tackling the massive income equalities between richand poor yet their own statistics suggest that their efforts so far have largely failed:

There is a demonstrable link between poverty and underachievement. While two-thirds of pupils inschools in more prosperous areas get 5 good GCSEs, only a fifth in schools with the poorestintake achieve the same. (DfES 2001)

A report in 2001 by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation also concludes that recenteducational initiatives have not tackled this problem:

Disadvantaged families in Britain are benefiting from rising standards in schools and fallingunemployment. But there has been no corresponding reduction in income or health inequalities,according to the latest available statistics...The 1998/9 figures show no reduction in the 4 millionchildren living in households with less than half the national average net income (after allowing forhousing costs).5

Traditional Marxism argues that the inequalities between the middle and working classesare reproduced physically through the infrastructure of capitalist society, and culturallythrough its ideological superstructure. Althusser adds that it is not enough to reproduce themeans of production the state must also reproduce the relations of production (1984:6).Influenced by this position, Bowles and Gintis developed correspondence theory, whichstates that the school reproduces social inequalities because it mirrors systemic economicinequalities:

Like the division of labour in the capitalist enterprise, the educational system is a finelygraded hierarchy of authority and control in which competition rather than co-operation

governs the relations among participants, and an external reward system wages in thecase of the economy and grades in the case of schools holds sway (1981:47).

In other words, the school is moulded and determined by the hierarchical andundemocratic nature of capitalist production in wider society; grades are a currency that

4One of the DfESs key commitments is to narrow the attainment gap between children from privileged andless privileged backgrounds. See Education and Skills: Delivering Results, DfES, 20015 See http://www.jrf.orp.uk/pressroom/releases/111200.asp

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buys access to well-paid and secure employment. Given that schools are asked to prepareyoung people for life in the working world, this correspondence is inevitable.

According to this analysis, the stated efforts of government to narrow the income gapthrough increase the general level of educational attainment among young people isdoomed to failure. The labour market demands that qualifications act as a system for

differentiating the minority who will gain elite jobs from the majority who must take uplower-paid and often tedious jobs. Employers are looking for the highest achievingpercentiles to take up the better-paid positions, not for more qualifications as such.Egalitarian measures, like the establishment of comprehensive schools in the mid 60s toreplace the traditional hierarchical system of grammar and secondary modern schools,have not addressed this underlying systemic inequality. The more young people areencouraged, therefore, to take higher-level examinations, the more employers look forthose with even higher and rarer certificates as proof of their relative merit. This is whatRonald Dore calls the qualification-escalation ratchet (1976:5): the more young peopleaspire to good jobs, the more oversubscribed they become. Broadening access toeducational provision heightens competition, but does not tackle the division of labour in

the marketplace, and the corresponding difference in income and status.

The governments parallel commitment, to create a meritocratic job market by broadeningeducational access and making better jobs available to poorer children, also meetsresistance. Middle-class parents are prepared to pay premiums to move to the catchmentareas of state schools that top the league tables or to educate their children privately to maintain the grade differential.

Im dead against league tables. What you can tell is what kinds of childrenattend the schools. Are they middle class? Are they working class? You can tellthat. (Belinda, Havant)

The universities have also been drawn into this process, becoming another mountain foryoung people to climb in the hope of differentiating themselves from the majority, and onewhere the declining amount of state support for students means that the option of furtherstudy becomes much more accessible to the children of richer parents. Again, thegovernments own research confirms this:

Studies have shown that family attitudes to learning, play an important role in determining success,with 73% of 18-year-olds from professional families entering higher education, compared with 17%of those from less privileged backgrounds. (DfES 2001)

Teachers concern arises from their having been given two contradictory mandates: forsociety, to provide young people with a broad and balanced education, regardless ofbackground; for the economy, to run them through an educational Nautilus machinedesigned to separate them in accordance with the facility with which they have learned topass examinations and generally along class lines.

Education is the primary way of social ranking in this country. Blairs a primeexample he didnt send his kids to a local school because it didnt meet upwith his expectations. (Lester, Isle of Wight)

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The introduction of the National Curriculum, rather than working to level standards, hasfurther swung the balance in favour of differentiation by increasing the emphasis on testperformance, and therefore on competition, rather than on co-operation and liberal values(Nixon et al. 1996:11-12). But the drive to open up educational opportunity has ensuredthat is no simple correspondence between school and market. Inequality is reproduced

only through a protracted and increasingly expensive battle between employers andwealthy parents who want segregation, and teachers and civil society, whose stated aim isequality of opportunity. In an attempt to incorporate and explain this conflict of agendas,Bowles and Gintis have built into their existing argument the concept of different sites ofsocial practice. The effect of progressive attitudes in education policy, therefore,represents a transportation of a distributive practice from the relatively egalitarian site ofthe liberal state into the hierarchical site of the economy (1981:49). This explanation maybe conceptually neat, but it does not in itself provide a psychologically satisfactoryexplanation of why teachers and the poor continue to lose out in this conflict, or why theschool system has proved so ineffectual in bringing about social change.

Clues to this failure can be found in the language and context the government cites inpromoting equality through the education system:

There is now wide acceptance that to build an economy that will continue our success in the globalmarket place we will need an even belier educated and more highly skilled workforce. Equallyimportantly, to build a fair and inclusive society everyone-must have the opportunity to realise theirfull potential. The work of the new Department for Education and Skills is central to achieving bothof those aims. (DfES 2001)

As Stuart Hall points out (1981:7), there is a crucial difference between equality andequality of opportunity. In committing itself to the latter, the government subtly privileges

economic motives over social ones. The pressure of external competition is used here asa justification for the system of competitive qualification and the ratchet effect; there is noacknowledgement, however, of its internal contradictions. Potential is used in anambiguous way: it is aspirational, without being defined as either innate self-realisation(the progressive aim) or achieving economic success (the traditionalist aim) anambiguity which is felt by teachers:

They dont know what the options are, so they dont know what their potentialis... Its all about jobs, in the end, isnt it? It is about what theyre going to dowith their lives. (Jenny, London)

The DfES passage talks of building a fair and inclusive society in order for young peopleto realise their full potential, thereby using the language of the progressive position; yetthis is set in the context of the undisputed need for international competitiveness and ahighly trained workforce. This is a rhetorical elision between two conflicting perspectivesunder the unifying principle of economic growth, which promises to satisfy liberal demandsfor equality within the framework of the capitalist economy. Rather than seeking toredistribute wealth, the government impresses on the teaching profession and youngpeople the necessity of simply producing more. Michael Apple describes this process interms of competing ideologies:

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By integrating varied ideological elements from differing and often contending groups around itsown unifying principles, consensus can be gained and the sense that practices based on thesehegemonic principles actually help these contending groups can be maintained. (Apple 1995:27)

In practice economic growth primarily benefits the owners of capital, thereby further

increasing the income gap between rich and poor, yet the ideological consensus achievedthrough this elision justifies the maintenance of the capitalist structure.

A second aspect of Bowles and Gintis theory provides a further explanation as to howyoung people are psychologically prepared for acceptance of this structure. They arguethat it is the form of school life, quite apart from its content, that educates young people inpractices and dispositions that prepare them for an unequal working world (1981:46). Doreamong others calls this the hidden curriculum:

At least those who get the certificates and the jobs will have been well prepared, then.... They willhave learned the virtues of punctuality, regularity, hard work, conformity to regulation, obedience to

the instructions of superiors. (1976:11)

This perspective sees the process of schooling as a ritual where the meaning is not in thecontent, but in the performance. Children are ordered to attend school, often against theirwill, for 7 hours a day, 5 days a week, for at least 12 years; whether they succeed or fail,they will be accustomed to spending a full working week doing what they are told. Meighanargues that the first and most important thing children learn is boredom:

We learn reading and boredom, writing and boredom, arithmetic and boredom, and so onaccording to the curriculum, till in the end it is quite certain you can put us to the most boring jobthere is and well endure it. (1981:61)

One teacher justified the value of this lesson to me in everyday terms:

Life is full of things you dont want to do. I mean, there are loads of thingsaround the house I hate doing - but because I been trained to do things I dontwant to do, I just grit my teeth and get on with it. (Belinda, Havant)

The hidden curriculum may accustom all students to boredom and obedience, ready for alife of employment, but there is also a differentiating mechanism at work. Bourdieu andPasseron argue that this depends on their level of engagement with the magisteriallanguage of stylised, critical detachment used by teachers and the school as a whole alanguage that is the natural property of elite society (1990:119). This language, they

argue, comes more naturally to middle-class children whose parents have raised themwithin this idiom, and far less so to working-class children, who are required to adopt andbe examined within a form of discourse that is not their own. The school therebyconsecrates and helps to perpetuate inter-class linguistic differences (1990:127). Theacademic discourse of comprehensive schooling therefore disposes working-classchildren to fail from the start.

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Paul Willis goes further, arguing that children, faced with the prescriptiveness ofcompulsory schooling, adopt different coping strategies, leading to the formation ofseparate subcultures. His ethnographic research with one group of boys in a midlandscomprehensive, who he calls the lads, attempts to show that their resistance to authorityand flouting of the regulations and principles of the school in fact acts as preparation foremployment in the factory:

They [shop-floor workers] exercise their abilities and seek enjoyment in activity, even where mostcontrolled by others. Paradoxically, they thread through the dead experience of work a livingculture which is far from a simple reflex of defeat. This is the same fundamental taking hold of analienating situation that one finds in counter-school culture and its attempt to weave a tapestry ofinterest and diversion through the dry institutional text. (1980:52)

Willis conversations with the boys show how they are bound together in a common culturethrough dissent, rough play and violence, staving off the boredom of institutional lifethrough the excitement of disobedience (1980:34). It is in this solidarity of resistance thatthey develop a sense of self- worth and superiority over those boys who co-operate with

the functions of the school. Opposed to the academic principles of the school, they cometo take pride in the manual, and the prospect of factory work, arduous and meaningless asit may be, at least provides for a sense of masculine prowess. The relations of labour arereproduced as the underlying economic structure is mediated through the level of culture,at which point it is appropriated and celebrated by the lads (1980:173-4). The process,however, relies on their consent, and thereby has potential for resistance, and even radicalsubversion.

The point of difference between Bourdieu and Willis is that whereas Bourdieu sees powerin the form of cultural capital deriving solely from the language and hierarchy of theschool, Willis sees it also deriving from the conflictual creativity of interaction-based

agency (Collins 1993:134) The implication is that the hidden curriculum is dialectical andvolatile, rather than simply determining. George Marcus is right to point out in his critiqueof Willis that he develops ethnographic representations of working class experience torefer to it in a way that serves his theoretical exposition (1986:184) the lads becomesymbolic heroes who are presented as the embodiment of a working class critical theory(ibid). Yet despite his framing of the boys experience within a Marxist framework that isnot their own, Willis also demonstrates that in an analysis of the relation betweeneducation and class inequality, young peoples senses of self-worth and belongingdeserve to be studied alongside the brute facts of income distribution in assessing qualityof life. Not to do so is to fall into the reductionist economic perspective that these theoristsare criticising.

This chapter has sought to demonstrate that these theories of the reproduction ofinequality from the 1970s retain much of their explanatory force. Yet since that time manyof the central structures of the society they describe class, management vs. industry,manual vs. mental have shifted, or been undermined. The decline of manufacturingindustry and the casualisation of labour has partially eroded shop-floor culture, and alsothe sense of the job-for-life in management. Mass media entertainment has at the sametime reduced the distance between the cultural worlds of children from opposite economicbackgrounds. The linear hierarchy of elite jobs along class lines has branched out with

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new and lucrative opportunities to be found for some, regardless of class, in fields such asentertainment, sport and journalism. The counter-cultures that Willis describes haveincreasingly been commodified, and sold back to consumers as simulacra of identity. Themagisterial language described by Bourdieu provides less security in a modern globalisedmarketplace that increasingly values the sheer accumulative power of capital alone.Inequality may no longer be tied so closely to traditional class identity, but it is nonetheless

real, and the school system remains its ally. In the next chapter, I look at assessment andexamination, arguing that Foucaults theory of disciplinary technologies provides a deeperexplanation of how students and teachers submit to a hierarchical school system.

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Chapter 4: assessment and examination the micro-physics of power

When I asked teachers for their views on current programmes of assessment andexamination in schools, their answers ranged in tone from uneasy ambivalence to outrighthostility; the introduction of the National Curriculum and assessed key stages, asdescribed in chapter 2, has become a dominant feature of their working lives. In this

chapter I question what the aims and outcomes of testing are on young people, settingteachers concerns within a theoretical framework. I first look at Foucault, arguing that hedevelops the hidden curriculum thesis by linking the curriculum and knowledge to powerand modernity. I then evaluate Hartleys argument that assessment is moving towardsauthentic testing in response to postmodern, post-Fordist trends. I look at Illich andGardners contention that assessment-centred schooling creates dependency, and ingoing against young peoples natural ways of learning, is highly inefficient. In conclusion, Isuggest that young peoples opinions and experiences are ignored in favour of a narrowinstrumentalism that robs them of the very creativity and opportunity it purports to offer.

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault argues that institutions such as prisons, the

army and schools exert strong normalising pressures on their human subjects, regulatingthem into discipline, obedience and conformity. His sub-title, The Birth of the Prison,serves as a metaphor for all of these carcerial institutions. (1991:293). Among theconcepts critical to education are docile bodies, examination and the case history together they show how the inequalities and disciplines of the economic order are notreflected among students, but systematically produced. James Marshall argues thatFoucaults critique of disciplinary institutions derives from a wider project:

His philosophical project is to investigate the ways in which discourses and practices havetransformed human beings into subjects of a particular kind. It is important to note that for him,subject is systematically ambiguous; it means both being tied to someone else by control and

dependence, and being tied to ones own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. (Marshall,1990:14)

Foucault is talking about a transformation of the subject as part of a new and modernconception of statehood; through bodily control and submission to prescribed practicecomes a new sense of identity the body becomes the path to the soul:

A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved.... It was a question not oftreating the body, en masse, wholesale, as if it were an indissociable unity, but of working itretail, individually; of exercising upon it a subtle coercion, of obtaining holds upon it at the level ofthe mechanism itself. (Foucault 1991:136-7)

The principle of engendering obedience and specific utility through unquestioned adhesionto minor details of movement has been crucial to military training for centuries. In schools,students are increasingly subject to this infinitesimal discipline, with the NationalCurriculum as the archetype:

Now, I know what Im doing in five weeks time, six weeks time - I can tell youwhat Im doing in the third week of the Autumn term, because Ive got mywhoLe year Learning programme... More and more focus on key skills, fulfilling

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Little small pieces of information - they learn this, you teach them that, theylearn it, theyve done it. Youre not free, times constrained. Everythings beensegmented and broken up. (Francis, Isle of Wight)

Children and teachers are doubly subjected here: bodily, through timetabled attendanceand, for the children, the direction to sit, listen and behave; mentally, through the

segmentation of knowledge into measured parcels all in accordance with a nationalprogramme:

Now everythings very rigid. Everyones doing the same thing - you go to aschool down the road, theyve got the same displays youve got up. (Margaret,Isle of Wight)

In practice, its [the National Curriculum] too prescriptive.... The range ofknowledge is so vast, whos to say whats important and whats not? (Helen,Isle of Wight)

Teachers and pupils no longer have any substantial say over what is taught in theclassroom, which is now the preserve of centralised authorities; they are no longer the

judges of whats important and whats not. Even the emotional and spiritual lives ofstudents do not escape subjectification:

In their March 1994 discussion paper on spiritual, moral, social and culturaldevelopment OFSTED seeks to provide guidance on how we might understandand define each of these critical areas of personal development and formulateoutcomes for each. (Inman and Buck, 1995:11)

Even in the most personal and incalculable areas of thought and belief, teachers are

increasingly charged with delivering the curriculum, and students with meeting theappointed targets at the appointed time. This allows for efficient assessment andsurveillance at local and national level what Foucault calls a micro-physics of power (1991:149) that seeks measurable levels of discipline and achievement in body, mind andsoul.

Every teacher I interviewed attested to the importance of assessment; yet all believed thatassessment should be a matter for teachers, pupils and parents:

The key to assessment is observation. If I can to sit back and observe the classworking, and allow myself to be uncritical, non-judgemental, and really

observe, what is this child doing - then I get a good picture of how theyreprogressing, what their weaknesses are, what theyre stuck with.... ComparingA to B doesnt help very much. (Mark, Lancaster)

This is a relational form of assessment, situated in the knowledge and trust betweenteacher and pupil. What he rejects is normalising assessment: the quantified andcomparable measurements demanded by the National Curriculum. The combination offixed attainment goals and tests to measure them envisages a linear and fictional

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progression through school education the reification of the median result into the steadyand disciplined passage of the normal child. Assessment then becomes a comparison ofthe individual student against a statistical fiction, with difference measured in moral terms:to score higher than the average is good, to score lower, bad.

I feel strongly about [the fact that] this May, all children in this year group will

do this test regardless of where they are. Im more interested in looking attesting children when you think theyre at the stage. Some children learnthings at different times.., some are just late starters, and a lot of pressure canbe put on to get them going, and something can click, and they can whiz andcatch up when theyre ready. It could even be a week after the test! (Helen,Isle of Wight)

This teacher clearly feels the need to defend those of her pupils who fall short of the norm,and to stand up for their individuality in patterns of learning. She also illustrates the factthat examination is the decisive point in the assessment process:

The examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a normalizingjudgement. It is a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify andto punish. (Foucault, 1991:184)

The power of the examination is in creating a hierarchical spectrum of achievement out ofa chaos of variables. Across a range of disciplines, the examination also produces apersonal profile of achievement a measure of personality articulated in quantitative terms(good at Maths, average at science, poor at English, for example). The individual, as wellas the field of knowledge, is broken down and reconstituted in measurable form. The examengages them in a whole mass of documents that capture and fix them (Foucault1991:189):

I think that theres so much of this testing business, and endless assessments,and we write it down and we record it, and we put it in childrens folders.., wholooks at them? Im quite sure the next teacher doesnt... (Belinda, Havant)

If the teachers do not use them, what use could they serve? Foucault suggests that thisprocess of assessment and documentation turns each individual into a case in themedical sense. According to his or her vital statistics, particular treatments and regimescan be suggested to improve performance, or failing that, weaknesses acknowledged.Disciplines take on the appearance of natural facts, against which concrete standardspupils can be judged by others, and most importantly, by themselves.

The kids that I teach are being taught to jump through hoops, to get good SATsresults, and I think that so much is taught to the test now instead of to theindividual childs needs. Theres too much testing, and ultimately its Like IQtests, it tests only a certain sort of intelligence. (Lester, Isle of Wight)

A Foucauldian analysis implies that hoop jumping is precisely the certain sort ofintelligence that the school system produces in students, in direct parallel to modern

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methods of production in the capitalist economy; except the product here is ultimately notthe grades but the students themselves.

Yet as Keith Hoskins argues, Foucault may have been too quick to relate the rise ofcarcerial institutions to the rise of modern statehood. The school, after all, arose from themonastic tradition of study dating back to at least the twelfth century (1990:45), though

examinations were oral, not written. In the case of the early church the examinationsystem resulted in the inculcation of authority at a local level through credentials andlicences. The motive of general surveillance was absent, but that of generating powerthrough a discourse of professionalism certainly pre-existed the Enlightenment period.Disciplinary education is not a by-product of a capitalist age; although it has been used tomaintain inequality, it has also been instrumental in other contexts. I will finish with threecritiques of education that extend Foucaults argument in the light of recent trends.

David Hartley argues that the school system, although explicitly a modernist institutioncelebrating progress, comparative assessment and efficiency of operation, has had toincorporate postmodern perspectives in the face of current cultural and economic trends.

But, he argues, rather than embracing a postmodern vision for the curriculum, one whichencourages chaos, non- rationality, and zones of uncertainty (1997:121), the UKgovernment has largely maintained the status quo, while making some moves towardscontinuous assessment through coursework:

The government generates a double code: an over-arching, bureaucratic systematisation ofassessment and credentials, and the criteria for awarding them; and a legitimating discourse whichappeals to postmodernism by weakening the temporal and spatial contexts in which assessmentoccurs. (1997:121 -2)

Freedom from the staged examination is traded for the necessity to discipline the self, and

to open oneself for further scrutiny, through continuous assessment the bureaucraticgaze is thus internalised and taken into the students home. This form of self-monitoring ispreparation, perhaps for the postmodern workplace of just-in-time management methodsand branding oneself. The spontaneity and flexibility coursework allows is strictlybounded within the set task (1997:120). Continuous assessment increases the sense ofproduced knowledge as private property the coursework folder adding to Foucaultsimage of the student as a case. It is an appropriation of the progressive 60s spirit of self-expression under the remit of increasing productivity much in the spirit of modernadvertising. Hartley sees no opportunities for the loosening of the bureaucraticstraightjacket in contemporary assessment policy.

Howard Gardner casts doubt on the whole exercise of examination, calling it:

the ultimate scholastic invention, a decontextualized measure to be employed in a setting that isitself decontextualized (1991:132-3).

His argument is that school, as separated from the working world, cannot adequatelyprepare people for it, and that in turn the examination does not reflect the everydaypractices of the school. He quotes Ulric Neisser:

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Academic knowledge is typically assessed with arbitrary problems that a student has little interestin or motivation to answer, and performances on such instruments have little predictive power forperformances outside of a scholastic environment. (in Gardner, 1991:133)

The assessing school cannot afford to engage with the particular interests of students, asthat would undermine the curriculum; therefore, students true competencies and potential

cannot be assessed. Instead, their ability to do what they are told is gauged:

I dont think its terribly good for anybody to be jumping through hoops. Peoplewho jump through hoops and do very well, they get very dependent on peoplesaying, oh, marvellous, brilliant!.... And those who dont manage to jumpthrough hoops feel pretty bad about themselves, and dont think of themselvesas very bright. (Jenny, London)

This dependency that schooling fosters is elaborated by Illich:

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They

school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic isassumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success...Health, learning, dignity, independence and creative endeavour are defined as little more than theperformance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends. (1971:9)

Illich argues that we are no longer alienated from our labour at the workplace, but atschool: we institutionalise our children within a bureaucratic process that does not allow forsubstantial personal development (1971:51). Genuine creativity and self-sufficiency is lostas we surrender our agency to a range of institutions. We now mistake schooling forgenuine learning to the extent that we are only discussing our current misgivings about thequality and direction of education in the UK in terms of increased funding for, andtampering with the curriculum of, the school system. This is the very opposite ofRousseaus vision of the self- reliant learner.

In this chapter, I have sought to show that quantitative assessment and examination arenot only, in Foucaults perspective, technologies of repressive power, but that they arearbitrary, ineffective and possibly damaging to the learner. One teacher summed it upperfectly in saying, A plant doesnt grow its best if its pulled out of its pot every fiveminutes to examine its roots. In the next chapter I relate this to the rise of manageriallanguage and practice in schools.

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Chapter 5: management the endless frontier

Our work will be organised around what we must deliver. Effective project and programmemanagement will be key, working closely with other government departments, partners andcustomers to support shared objectives and to meet measurable, published targets. (DfES 2001)

In chapter 2 I argued that the 1980s saw a radical shift in the governments aims ineducation from promoting self-realisation towards promoting economic growth, and acommitment to achieve this through the incorporation of the working and values of themarket into the educational system. In this chapter, I will argue that the language, cultureand practices of management, now in use in our schools, are moving us towards anAmerican model that has serious implications not just for the freedom of teachers andyoung people, but for democracy itself. I will start with Stephen Ball and Shore and Wrighton management and audit culture, its effects on teachers and their resistance. I thenmove to America as a logically continuous model for managerial education: Emily Martinsanalysis of American company management and flexible bodies in the endless frontierbetween workers and their environment, and Henry Girouxs work on privatisation of space

and values in American schools. I will suggest that there is a contradiction when it comesto education between the values of the market and those of a healthy democracy.

The movement towards managerialism in the 1980s, Hartley argues, went hand-in-handwith pruning the welfare state (1997:124). With much justification, workforces across thecountry have in the last 20 years come to equate new jargon such as downsizing,restructuring, and efficiency savings with cuts, cuts and more cuts. The teachingprofession has been no exception the number of full-time support staff employed inEngland and Wales fell from 253,000 to 209,000 between 1975 and 1986. As Lowe pointsout, it was teachers who were required to make up the clerical shortfall (1997:136); theyalso lost out on supported in-service training. During the same time, the size and powers

of the DES increased, and even more so the power of the Downing Street Policy Unit,meaning that policies.., were increasingly dictated by unelected gurus working inGovernment think tanks (1997:138). As I argued in chapter 4, one of the most visibleoutcomes of this new managerialism has been an ever-growing paper trail of casehistories, lesson plans and progress reports. The result was to leave many teachersfeeling undervalued and marginalized they have been given responsibility withoutpower (Shore and Wright 2000:70):

I got the brunt of it because I was head of a little school... there was so muchhappening, so much paper, so many demands on you, without anyconsultation. It hit primary schools first of all... it was just overwhelming.., the

feeling that things were being done to you, that you werent much bloodygood, and that you were going to toe the line, and even the head was someonethat wasnt very important. (Lester, Isle of Wight)

Stephen Ball argues that management has a self-fulfilling definition of its own importance:

Management is a professional, professionalizing discourse which allows its speakers andits incumbents to lay exclusive claims to certain sorts of expertise organizational

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leadership and decision-making and to a set of procedures that casts others,subordinates, as objects of that discourse... (1990:157)

During the 60s and 70s it was presumed that the best people to organise and run schoolswere teachers; they were, after all, professionals. Yet managerialism introduced ahierarchical perspective that saw executive control as a discipline in itself, separate from

operation, which was the role of functionary staff. Professionalism, within managementterminology, has become expertism. Teachers fulfil designated roles in which they aredeemed expert, that is, in the classroom; their attributes and capacities in other areas arenot perceived as valid. This phenomenon has spread across the public sector in recentyears to the National Health Service, which doctors no longer run, and even to the Churchof England. A stock response by Conservative politicians to the criticisms of theireconomic policies by Church leaders during the 80s was, I look to the bishop for spiritualguidance... The implication was that, since priests were not economic experts, they hadno right to comment on them, nor by implication on anything else that happened outside ofconsecrated ground. Furthermore, it implied that economics and spirituality were entirelyseparate spheres. This separation of policy and practice serves a dual purpose of

discrediting criticism and recreating social and class hierarchies.

The bottom line for management is performance, or, as the DfES quotation at the head ofthis chapter states, meeting measurable, published targets. Ball calls this a view whichcontends that social life can be mastered scientifically and can be understood andorganized according to law-like generalizations (1990:157). It is the numerical andcomparative immediacy of this discourse that gives it power over the qualitative,humanistic and immeasurable aspirations of the traditional professions. But God help themanaged church that produces league tables of bums on pews, or even, souls saved;is the managed school any less absurd? From where does managerialism derive itscredibility?

Management theory views the social world as locked into irrational chaos, as needing to bebrought into its redeeming order.... It is the linguistic antithesis of crisis and as such it has a centralpolitical role in the 1980s. (Ball 1990:157)

In a time of economic uncertainty and financial cutbacks, management theory made avirtue out of vice. Accountability has made the penetrating Foucauldian gaze public, theworld of figures acting as proof to expert and layperson alike:

Transparency of operation is everywhere endorsed as the outward sign of integrity. (Strathern2000:2)

By setting definite targets for such tangibles as exam passes, it is possible to avoid majorand increasingly problematic questions such as, what is the purpose of education?, whichraise intractable political and moral issues. It claims scientific neutrality, deriving validitythrough the self-referencing totality of its target-based perspective. League tables divertattention from job cuts. Audit culture provides reassuring, mercifully comprehensibleanswers, assimilating the moral and economic spheres in a quest for continuousimprovement. The appearance of management is emotionally as well as politically neutral:

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We had to write a report about what we thought of our inspection, and one ofthe main criticisms was that the language was joyless... joyless neutral prose....But thats their policy theyre not going to use joyful prose at all. So it leavesyou with a sour taste in your mouth. (Jenny, London)

Ball sees this as a tactic to contrast against the emotive attitudes of teachers, whose

complaints against managerialism can thereby be discounted as irrational (1990;155). Thislack of emotion, combined with rigid systems of measurement and a nexus of self-validating moralistic theory, makes it impossible to argue with like asking a calculatorwhy it arrived at a particular answer. Its truth is pragmatic and arithmetic. It has becomeunopposable as virtue itself (Shore and Wright 2000: 61) certainly, at least, in theBritish press. Even the left-leaning Guardian slated Nigel de Gruchy, outgoing leader ofthe NASUWT, for his attack on 30 years of self-serving politicians on the 5 th of April thisyear; the leader cites improvement in grades and resources as proof in itself of improvingeducation6. This is a hegemonic discourse disseminated from the centre and resisted onthe periphery, where we find the teachers themselves fighting a rear-guard action touphold their professional and humanitarian integrity in the face of alienation:

I got into really hot water at the university by saying, I already audit myperformance - Ive even let the kids feed back regularly on my classroombehaviour.... I see it as part of my professional brief to always assess andevaluate what Im doing. So if you now say to me that this needs to be done tome, I have to say to you, are you accusing me of being unprofessional?(Roland, Nottingham)

If the complete submission of English education to market forces and the discourse ofmanagement still seem distant, the American example is ominous. Martin, in her study ofmanagement in American companies, describes how the alienation of workers is

overcome by giving them ownership of their work, and a sense of belonging within thecompany that aims to fulfil their social and spiritual needs as well as pay their bills. Theaim is to break down the barrier between work and leisure by offering total integration, andtherefore fulfilment, through the ethos and activities of the company:

At the extreme, self-definitions merge (at least temporarily) with the shared definitions of theculture, suggesting the collapse of the boundaries between self and organization. (Martin1997:250)

This is the progression of the internalised self-management of Foucault taken further: nolonger out of fear of surveillance, but out of passionate commitment to the dominant

discourse. The key is company emphasis on re-skilling: encouraging staff to constantlyadapt to a changing market. This offers the employee the opportunity for constant re-invention of the self in a sequence of empowering and euphoric transformations fromdocile bodies to flexible bodies (1997:244). Martin quotes Donzelot, describing that thesubject of this new technology:

6 See http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/0.6957,,00.html

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...subsists only in his capacities, that he is a potential to be realized, not a truth to bedeciphered; and that history is a myth since reality lies only in the environment thatsurrounds us, in the organized forms of our social relations, which it is for us to modifyaccording to the capacity change offers us to realize ourselves more fully. (1997:245-6)

This is a vision of the consumerist soul: entirely relational and infinitely malleable through

a series of economic and social transactions. Martin argues that it is this constant quest formeaning and belonging in an unanchored social and moral context that creates newbusiness opportunities:

The interface between subject and environment represents an endless frontier, an eternallyreceding horizon for exploration and development. (1997:247)

Martin confesses to cringing at the superficial way these companies envision theircultures (1997:251); historically uprooted, they are mere fig-leaf epiphenomena of thevulgar pursuit of profit, and a degrading basis for human identity. Giroux, however, arguesthat it is precisely this transparent pseudo-culture that increasingly forms the environment

of most American schools:

In this perspective teaching is completely removed form the cultural and social contexts that shapeparticular traditions, histories, and experiences in a community and school. Hence, this model ofeducational reform fails to recognize that students come from different backgrounds, bring diversecultural experiences with them to the classroom, and relate to the world in different ways.(2000:90)

So, in the absence of varied, local, cultural models for identity, what are children offered?Giroux outlines the link between declining state funding for education, and the schoolsresorting to seeking corporate sponsorship through anything from adverts in the toiletcubicles an on the covers of exercise books to a maths reader that purports to teach third-graders math by having them count Tootsie Rolls (2000:96). They are saturated with theersatz identities of branded products to the extent that as culture becomes increasinglycommercialised, the only type of citizenship that adult society offers to children is that ofconsumerism. (2000:19) Giroux also argues that the individualist and competitive valuesof managerial/consumerist society are directly in conflict with those of democracy. The firstprivilege under threat is that of dissent:

I would never go to an interview now and say this, because I wouldnt get thejob, but whats most important about the classroom you teach, Id say, is thatthe kids are happy... Id have to follow that up very carefully with how it wouldenable them to learn better. (Lester, Isle of Wight)

Students happiness is not productive, so to stand for it is to display conflicting interests tothose of the managed school. Managerialisms first requirement of staff is that they remainloyal to the organisation and its values, since dissent may damage competitiveness. Thishas in many organisations created a climate of fear:

For example, one professor wrote to a national newspaper correcting his universitys claim thatlarger class sizes and reduced resourced had in no way lowered educational standards. As a

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result, the professor was given an official warning that staff should not bring their institution intodisrepute as this was a sackable offence (Shore and Wright 2000:73).

Here a professors public sector privilege, to criticize with impunity, has been compromisedby private sector organisational culture. Wherever failure is punished and excellencerewarded, there is no space for speaking ones mind; audit culture renders everyone

accountable while itself being beyond question. As for childrens right to contribute to thedebate on education, it has yet to enter into the picture. School offers a functionalisthierarchy, not a participatory democracy, as a model for young people. Is it any wonderthat they are failing to register an interest in democratic participation in record numbers?

It is clear, however, that many teachers in England perhaps the majority are a longway from subscribing wholesale to the culture of self-management. Through theirresistance, indirect or direct, we can see that seemingly all-powerful regimes remainvulnerable:

But I think most people adapt to it, I mean, the inspectors come along and they

sort of change for a week... (Nicola, London)

I think weve gone through a period of everybody being in fear of OFSTED, ofnot doing the right thing. I think in primary schools particularly we haventstood up for ourselves, weve accepted everything the government has thrownat us... Now were beginning to question and answer back a bit more, andsaying no enoughs enough. We do know best let us decide. (Francis, Isle ofWight)

Management hierarchy cannot be everywhere at once, nor can it survive without thecooperation of its functionaries. Collective action remains a powerful weapon. The

commitment of many teachers to the progressive ideals in teaching remains strong, asdoes, I hope, the public commitment to a publicly funded education system. Yet long-termresistance to the allure of managerialisms quick fix to wider societal concerns will dependon a public debate on the very nature and ideals of education one that must be explicitlylinked to the attitudes and practices of democratic participation and equality. In chapter 6, Ilook at some of the radical educators who have sought to instigate such a debate.

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Chapter 6: re-schooling or de-schooling?

The longer I live the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not goodenough for us. Oscar Wilde

Basil Bernstein famously said, Education cannot compensate for society (1977:64). In

this report I have attempted to support this by showing how even the most well-meaningteachers and policy-makers have failed to tackle systemic inequalities. In this chapter, Ilook very briefly at some of those who believe that education can transform societyinstead. I will highlight two alternative forms of education in England today as possiblemodels for democratic and empowering learning; I will also quote some of my intervieweeson how they think it should be done. Finally, I will suggest that education presents afundamental challenge to all of us in our perception of, and participation in, the socialworld.

Paolo Freire, who spent his early life in Brazil before being exiled for his criticisms of stateeducation, saw traditional schooling as employing:

the banking concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extendsonly as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. (1972:36)

This approach regards men as adaptable, manageable beings, and prevents them fromdeveloping a critical consciousness:

The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply toadapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them. (1972:47)

This system not only perpetuates inequality, but denies the humanity of the learner:

Apart from the inquiry, apart from the praxis, men cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges onlythrough invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry menpursue in the world, with the world, and with each other. (ibid.)

Genuine knowledge, he argues, is not an inert commodity, but the result of an intensivecreative process in which the learner examines, criticises and transforms his or her socialworld. This is closer to practical wisdom than fact storage a coming into being wherethe subject and object of learning are bound in action and self-realisation. It stems fromthe learners curiosity and passion, which is expressed through learning with or without theassistance of teachers. This ideal supported by many of the teachers I interviewed:

A good teacher teaches you how to teach yourself better. (Roland, Nottingham)

If I ruled the world, Id have primary schools to teach the basics, then Id havea system of cooperative learning where children were taught by people couldgive them a variety of experiences within the bounds of those things thatinterested them. (Mary, London)

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Freire sees anything more restricted or directed than this as an act of violence. An absurdexample may serve to explain this: how would you feel if some official, such as apoliceman, stopped you in the street and required that you jump up and down on the spot

stating merely that it was in your long-term self-interest? What if it was your child atschool? Separating learning from the context of intentional self-realisation, Freire argues,is ritual humiliation.

Nixon et al., however, see this intentional personal growth as possible within the context ofreformed state education:

The central task of the learning school is the reconstruction of agency. The motivation youngpeople need to sustain this reconstruction can only grow out of a sense of purpose, that thestruggle to develop as a person has some point. (1996:117)

Furthermore, they believe that schools can in time overcome the formative influences ofan unequal society:

Education, of all the public services, can seek to illuminate so as to dissolve the impact of thosedeep cultural processes of social classification which erect boundaries of inclusion and exclusion,of self and other. (1996:119)

This seems like wishful thinking. The logic of this report suggests that even mildly liberalpolicies in schools come into conflict with the demands and stipulations of a capitalistmarketplace. For Freire, young people would be free only if they have the opportunity totransform their social relations. Timetables and curricula have no place in this vision.

A possible compromise exists in the Steiner school movement, which, although it has aloose curriculum and compulsory attendance, is committed to learners self-realisation:

Ive got a threefold take on what these faculties are. Theyve got theirthinking.., their feeling their emotional intelligence.., and also their willpower,so that they can actually achieve what they plan in the world. Their potential, Ithink, is maximised by leaving them in freedom, by giving them the tools toapproach those three areas. (Mark, Lancaster)

Unattached to the state, Steiner schools do not face the economic pressures of their statecounterparts, and in my experience are able to provide a humane, exciting and sociallyresponsible learning environment. Their approach is to let children choose when they wantto learn basics such as reading and writing, rather than force it upon them: We wait until

theyre so keen to learn the alphabet that they can do it at the drop of a hat. Yet as Markadmitted, I do sometimes consider that Im working with a middle-class elite. The successof Steiner schools may reflect to a large extent the values of the parents who pay to sendtheir children there. How easily transferable Steiners values would be to children fromdeprived and angry communities remains to be seen.

Another steadily growing alternative is home education, which follows lllichs call fordeschooling society and replacing them with a series of learning webs designed to makeinformation, peer support and tutoring accessible to all to use as they see fit (1971:75).

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Organisations in England such as Education Otherwise provide a mine of informationdesigned to enable parents to create learning environments for their children within theircommunities. There are, however, two principal constraints that limit this modelsapplication to society as a whole: first, it requires that parents (or their extended networks)have the necessary skills and dedication to support their childrens learning; and secondly,it requires they have the free time. In a capitalist society, one of the key functions of the

school is to remove children from their parents for most of the working day, allowing themto sell their labour without constraint it acts as an institutionalised childcare system forthose compelled to work all day. Under current economic conditions, this form of educationwould only be an option for certain social and economic classes.

We had a boy for whom, it was quite clear, it wasnt the place to be at all, andhe left.... Clearly it wasnt a great moment for him to be at school, butsomething else has to happen, doesnt it, in our urban society. They have to bedoing something! I mean, dont they? (Jenny, London)

Ultimately, home education issues a challenge to a society that excludes children from

most of its economic and social affairs, seeing them as in the way. I believe this reflectsthe fact that England is a society terrified by young people, whose instinctive desire forself-expression regardless of social norms, and acute ability to detect insincerity anddomination in adults, represents a direct challenge to an inflexible, market-led society. Thepapers scream, Tame these feral monsters7at disobedient and violent children, ratherthan commit themselves to understanding the depths of their alienation in a system thatmerely offers them a choice of ways to conform. The transformational, learner-lededucation envisioned by Freire and others can only be realised on the large scale if we areprepared to create a more humane and democratic society. In the meantime, we mustchain children to their desks until their fresh eyes, which see straight through our civilisedhypocrisies, glaze over.

7 Bruce Anderson in The Independent, April 29 th 2002

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