Class, Ideology and Community Education

Will Cowburn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138225299
• eBook ISBN: 9781000639513
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The cultural, social and political existence of the working class were critical factors leading to the nineteenth century provision of a class-based education system. Changes in the organisation of this system have sought to pursue many of its original aims. Community education is an important new mechanism which would guarantee the continued pr

Chapter One
An Elaborate Facade

“Altruism is cutting off a dog’s tail, eating the meat and giving the bones to the dog” Gerald Kersch, ‘The Angel and The Cuckoo’.

Ursula felt her heart faint inside her. Why must she grasp all this, why must she force learning on fifty-five reluctant children, having all the time an ugly, rude jealousy behind her, ready to throw her to the mercy of the herd of children, who would like to rend her as a weaker representative of authority. A great dread of her task possessed her. She saw Mr. Brunt, Miss Harby, Miss Schofield, all the schoolteachers drudging unwillingly at the graceless task of compelling many children into one disciplined, mechanical set, reducing the whole set to an automatic state of obedience and attention, and then of commanding their acceptance of various pieces of knowledge. The first great task was to reduce sixty children to one state of mind or being. This state must be produced automatically, through the will of the teacher, and the will of the whole school authority, imposed upon the will of the children. The point was that the headmaster and the teachers should have one will in authority, which should bring the will of the children into accord.¹

Ursula Brangwen and her teacher colleagues in Lawrence’s Rainbow had a hard time teaching at Brinsley Street School, and the harshness of their experience was not softened by any understanding of why schools and education were as they were. For them, their school was simply one in which a particular way of teaching had to be pursued: it expected and demanded of them that they operate a pedagogy of oppression and none of them really asked why this should be so. Their fatalistic, unquestioning acceptance of their situation stands as the antithesis to an educated response, where education is concerned with trying to understand the world, with trying to make sense of it. In The Rainbow the teachers show us how necessary it is for them to behave as they do, within the setting of the school: they do not give us any explanation as to why the school should provide the setting it does. And it is this point which is crucial if we wish to understand education in fiction and fact: the actors’ accounts for their actions can only tell us part of the story, can only present some of the picture. To make sense of the way in which Ursula and her colleagues had to teach we have to go beyond their explanations and beyond Brinsley Street School.

Seventy years after our fictional characters were doing their duty the question of understanding education and how it is practiced is as important as ever; and again, if we are to understand it we have to go beyond the accounts given to us by the principal actors. This poses certain problems for our principal actors are teachers and educationalists and they tend to be reluctant to accept that their accounts of the practice of education may be at odds with its reality. To clarify what is meant here we can think of football supporters, who, when arrested for violent behaviour, explain that they simply hate the supporters of the opposing team. Serious students of ‘soccer hooliganism’ may well give an account of the violent behaviour which talks of working class culture, of locality, of masculinity; one which, in short, has a higher level of adequacy to it. With regard to teachers and educationalists, we have to ask whether there is any valid reason as to why their accounts should be accepted as adequate explanations of education’s practice. For it is the case, whether we are dealing with ‘hooligans’ or teachers, we are dealing with people, actors in a social world. If soccer violence can be addressed by social scientists, so too can education. In both areas social scientists can seek to go beyond the reasons given by the interested parties in order to try to explain what is really going on. If the point we are making is disturbing and upsetting, if there is resentment at having teachers bracketed with soccer hooligans, then it is important to ask why there should be such a reaction. Is it assumed that the ‘educated’ are exempt from sociological analysis. Are they ‘special’ people whose thoughts as to what is going on correspond with that which is going on?

The demand we are making here, provocative or not, is simply that we avoid making the mistake of treating what teachers and educationalists say about education, as the only material to be subjected to analysis. Their accounts are important, but they are only accounts, which may or may not come near to explaining the way in which, and to what purpose, the education system operates. For, of course, the subject of our work is the education system, not the teachers and educationalists, as individuals, working within it. It was the school, as an expression of the education system, which demanded that Ursula and her colleagues ‘chose’ to teach as they did. How similar today’s system is to that of Ursula’s time is not at issue; rather, what is at issue is an education system, the ‘function’ of which may be hidden from and misunderstood by many who work within it.

We will be concerned to illuminate that which is hidden and to facilitate understanding, and with specific reference to an aspect of the education system, that is, community education. Throughout this work ‘community education’ will be used to refer to and describe those mainstream educational changes being organised around community schools and community colleges. It will not be used to include the radical adult educational writing and work of Lovett et al for such approaches to education will be utilised as critical aids in the debate with community education. They will be seen, in many ways, as community education’s opposites. The task then is to offer a way in which community education can be located and understood.

Broadly there are two methods of inquiry which we describe as the mechanical and the theoretical. The mechanical would examine the explanations of, and claims made for, community education by its practitioners and advocates: it would be concerned with evaluating the chances of success for the aims and objectives of community education. Depending upon the country in which the inquiry was to be made questions would be asked concerning the origins and roots of community education and, in the main, the answers would be accepted at face value. For example, in Britain Henry Morris might well be identified as the founding father of community education owing to the key role he played in establishing the first community college in Cambridge-shire² Whilst in the United States of America, Charles Stewart Mott and the C. S. Mott Foundation might we11 be similarly identified for the role played in founding the first community school in Flint.³ Having received these explanations for community educations becoming, the mechanical inquiry would then concern itself with the changes which had taken place since and would be interested to discover to what extent community education was succeeding. The theoretical method of enquiry, however, would pursue a different path. With regard to the origins of community education, the mechanical method seeks to discover how it came into existence, whose idea was it: the theoretical method is more concerned with explaining why community education arrives on stage, and who owns the theatre. With regard to the practice of community education, the mechanical method seeks to find out whether community education is achieving some of its declared aims, improving the quality of life, for example: the theoretical method is more concerned with explaining why and how community education comes to be the thing having the aims it has. The theoretical inquiry treats the claims to objectives and aims as the problematic to be addressed, not something to be taken for granted.

For us the theoretical method is a more valuable one because it aims to tell us why things happen, as opposed to how they happen. The theoretical method does not over-rely upon the accounts and explanations offered by the actors; there is no necessary correspondence between what community education is doing and what its practioners believe it is doing. Adopting the theoretical approach means we are not tied to a particular aspect of our subject; we can go behind the aims and objectives, the words of our actors in order to discover the meaning of the script to which they work. As we unravel the various threads of community education we will discover important factors common to community education in different countries; factors deeper in meaning that the similarities between the claims made for community education by its advocates in the different countries. These deeper common factors will show to us community education in a most interesting and rewarding light.

The mechanical method of enquiry was, in many ways, the mode of operation for the sociology of education until the early 1970’s. It accepted as non-problematic its overall subject area and tended to enquire whether x or y was working or not according to its stated purpose. It saw no need to challenge and demand that stated purposes explain themselves. This mechanical way of studying and researching education was seen as the only valid method, according to Plowden.

Because education is an applied discipline, the relation between research and practice is and should be reciprocal. From studies of what individual teachers are doing, useful pointers can be obtained to fruitful directions for experiment and research: research in education or such ancillary sciences as child development, social psychology or learning theory will throw up ideas with which the innovating teacher can experiment.⁴

Plowden accorded a value to research only if it directly contributed to the work of the teacher in the classroom, and was openly sceptical of all educational research until “the value of research to classroom practice is demonstrated”.⁵ Research and inquiry, constrained in such a manner, cannot treat certain aspects of school and education as problematic; consequently it is unable to deepen its understanding and this cannot help but lessen its value, despite the insistence from Plowden that these constraints actually gave it its value. By the early 1970’s educational research had begun to break free of this methodological straightjacket and had begun to adopt a theoretical approach and enter hitherto restricted areas. It started to go behind the mechanical ‘how’ of education to its theoretical ‘why’. It began to abandon an approach wherein the demands of school and classroom were treated as given and non-problematic. This new approach to research came primarily from the sociologists and it sought to practice as independently as possible; to carry out its work no longer as a supplier to a customer. The new research saw the Plowden, mechanical type, having as its fault, the very element which Plowden praised so highly, the close functional relation to education’s practitioners, the teachers in their schools.

This new approach to research would make problematic the areas and things previously accepted at face value. It would aim to “examine, to question, to raise doubts about, to criticise the assumptions on which current policy, current theory and current practice are based”.⁶

This will be our approach: not simply to argue with community education’s theories, but to challenge the assumptions upon which such theories are based. As we address education and community education we will be asking questions about real purposes, not only those purposes which have been articulated by teachers and educationalists. As we address and begin to answer theoretical questions we cannot but help answer the more mechanical ones for once we comprehend why a phenomenon occurs, we are well placed to understand whether it can work or not. And our assessment will be a more valid and sophisticated one for it will not have confused the objective purpose of community education and education overall with the purpose as stated by interested parties. Reality will not be confused with rhetoric.

Before we begin to deal with the realities of education and community education it is necessary to put forward the analytical tools to be used in the work. In order to comprehend education it is essential to step outside it in order to understand the society of which it is a part and in which it plays a role. Consequently we must have concepts appropriate to the facilitation of a social understanding. We need to be able to characterise the society if we are to understand fully the role of education in it, and for this we must use the concepts which have been proved valuable in explaining the social world. Education is, of course, about educating individuals, but it is about much more and this cannot be grasped unless conceptual tools of social analysis are used. Individuals were educated in the age of the coach and four as they are in the age of the space shuttle but it is apparent that the ways in which these individuals were and are being educated are not the same. The way of educating is different as is the society in which it takes place. Without the conceptual tools of a social analysis we cannot explain the changes which have taken place both in the educating and in the society. To understand the education of our individuals we have to understand the setting in which it takes place; we have to have an explanation of the social. This social explanation will never account for every individual, but, of course, social explanations have never claimed to do so.

Though the education system might claim to be concerned only with individuals, individuals, per se, will not be our concern: we will be concerned with individuals as members of classes and the individual/class dialectic will be present through-out our work. In the work we will show how the strong emphasis given to the individual within education is part of a process which aims to deny the significance of class and indeed how it can be seen as a way in which a class constructed education is represented as being class free, as being concerned with individuals regardless of class. We will explore the argument that knowledge is more usefully related to class interest in the world than it is to individual ability.

But the child’s consciousness is not something ‘individual’ (still less individuated), it reflects the sector of civil society in which the child participates, and the social relations which are formed within his family, his neighbourhood, his village etc. The individual consciousness of the overwhelming majority of children reflects social and cultural relations which are different from and antagonistic to those which are represented in the school curricula.⁷

The validity of what will be our class approach to the analysis of education will be proven as we explore our subject areas, and what we mean by class will best be seen as we use the concept in our practice of theoretical analysis. However, it is necessary to give something of an outline of the concept so as to avoid confusion. Categories of social classes, such as the Registrar General’s in Britain, do have their uses, though they will not be used by us: we do not see class as a way in which societies are stratified, that is, wholes which are arranged hierarchically according to occupation; instead we see class in a conflictual light. Here it is not a whole which is stratified, rather it is opposites constituted whole by their opposing. Though class does relate to occupation, it is not as rungs of a ladder, each nearer to the top, but all still parts of the same ladder.

For the purposes of clarity we need briefly to follow Marx here. “All production is an appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society.”⁸ For Marx this first historic act, production, is the starting point. Man in whatever society must reproduce himself and those means which facilitate self-reproduction. Marx abstracts production in general in order to place and comprehend it, and having done so his concern is then with the specific forms of society with their specific modes of production. For Marx and for us, “human beings never produce simply as individuals but only as members of a definite form of society”.⁹ The society may be feudal, agricultural, capitalist or socialist; whatever form it takes, it is fundamentally a social arrangement which is more than the total of all individuals within it. All societies then, have been and are engaged in production and classes are aspects of the relations of production; they are the outcome of how production is arranged and undertaken. Within a capitalistic society this model of class is basically a dichotomous one with a dominant and dominated class. The dominant class is the one which owns, effectively if not juridically, the means of production; the dominated class owns only its capacity to labour. Marx, naturally, was aware that the position in the real world was not so simple for classes derive from sets of relations of production, one of which may be in the ascendant or the descendant; thus we have a dominant class structure reflecting a dominant, rather than a single set of relations of production. In other words, in a capitalist society there are ‘leftover’ modes of production from the preceding society and hence ‘leftover’ aspects of the class system of that society. For Marx and for us it is only necessary to look out of the window at the world in which we live to see that classes are not inert homogeneities without internal contradictions and fractions. For Marx the two major and opposing classes of capitalist society are the bourgeoisie and proletariat and it is how they stand in relation to the means of production that is the most crucial factor in giving them their identities. The critical point to Marx’s concept of class is the one of classes opposing each other for it is only in the opposing, the struggle, that they become truly visible. And for Marx, it was this opposing, this struggle, which was the primary motive force producing societal change. As a concept it explains the motive force of change ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 2. SOME FUNDAMENTAL FORCE
• 3. THE COMMUNITY SCHOOL
• 4. NEITHER MINERS NOR MECHANICS
• 5. TRADITIONAL METHODS OF INDOCTRINATION
• 6. WOMEN WEREN’T SUPPOSED TO
• 7. OF SELF AND COLLECTIVE EMANCIPATION
• 8. INDIFFERENT TO THESE RIGHTS
• APPENDICES
• INDEX