Education and the Community

Eric Midwinter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351840095
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First published in 1975, this book is the first to set out a blueprint for how schools can move from a 'traditional' to a 'community' base at local authority level. After presenting a historical analysis of the organisational development of the local education authority, it goes on to put forward a detailed proposal for an across-the-board, radically reformed education service at pre-school, school, post-school and college levels. Finally, it locates such a reformed 'community education' system in the context of community development at large.

PART ONE EDUCATIONAL AND SOCIAL PROVISION

Introduction

An ageing yarn tells of the seven-year-old youngster who, while doing his homework, confronted his father with the poser: ‘Daddy, where did I come from?? Like parents before and since, he reviewed the dilemma. Should he reveal all or stick with the myths? He had read of sex education films in the junior school, almost as if the much-prized ‘discovery’ method, which had served many in its time, had grown redundant. Contrarily, he had read of commentators who managed to rank sex education and Danish Blue on the same pornographic menu. So he stayed with the legends. ‘Son,’ he said, ‘the stork brought you in a white sheet.’ The boy pursued his tack. ‘Where did you come from, daddy?’ he enquired. ‘The doctor brought me in a Gladstone bag’, the father explained. At that moment the child’s grandmother entered, and he put the question to her. Daddy tipped her a wink, and, with the shrewd mental agility of grannies throughout history, she caught on immediately. ‘I was found’, she announced solemnly, ‘under a gooseberry bush at the bottom of the garden.’ The boy finished his homework and retired to bed, and the father, alive to the needs of well-informed home-school relations, decided to read his son’s little essay. It began: ‘As far as can be safely ascertained by puristic, scientific investigation, there has been no sexual intercourse in our family for at least three generations.’

The father had mistaken a general social factor for a specific educational point. He had forgotten that children learn all the time and from all sources, and that what traditionally has been regarded as ‘educational’ (that is, the academic element of the school) is but a part of this. The social context in which schooling occurs is more important than the schooling apropos—and this is the savagery of the irony—the actual schooling itself. Because the totality of a child’s experience, from birth and from every quarter, contributes to the manner and quality of his achievement in school, the school itself is often no more than an agent of affirmation.

For the majority of children one can make fairly accurate prognostications, simply from a knowledge of the accident of their birth. One can, for too vast a majority, anticipate, not only how they will fare scholastically, but what sort of height, health, jobs, spouses and, sorrowfully, children they will enjoy or otherwise. It is this prophetic character about our social system which explains what has rightly been called ‘the cycle of deprivation’, and, by the same token, it explains ‘the cycle of affluence’. It explains what, despite the many exceptions, must be seen as a hereditary characteristic persisting in our society.

The final phase of this coming realisation about the nature of the education process has occurred over the last twenty years. It had long been noted and accepted that what often had been the privilege of education had been bestowed by the already privileged on their offspring. It was believed, naively in the event, that if the opportunity was accorded at all, then privilege would be, in the case of education, vanquished and the ramifications of that conquest would affect the rest of the social commonwealth. This was the ultimate educationist’s arrogance: despite the fact that education would be unaffected by social factors, it would, nonetheless, affect those social factors itself.

There is no doubt that, in a technical and legal style, the promise of equal opportunity has been reasonably well kept, in so far as no child is barred, socially or economically, from a full negotiation of the educational process. But the consequence of this equalisation of technical and legal opportunity has been disappointing, and the overall irony of schooling has been revealed.

Social composition remains a firmer guide to educational form than type of education. One can estimate, from a knowledge of the social classification of a district, approximately the numbers of its children who will obtain the nap hand of five O-levels, stay on in the sixth form or move on to higher education. Knowing that an area has this or that type of secondary organisation is much less useful a piece of information. Study, for example, the following figures.

	Population in Socila Classes I and II	Population in Socila Classes IV and V	Age-Group in 6th Form	Age-Group in Higher education
	%	%	%	%
United Kingdom	20	30	19	1
Wallasey	20	28	19	7
Bristol	17	28	19	7
Solihull	36	14	27	19
Barnet	34	17	35	16
Newham	9	38	10	3
Barking	9	36	9	3

Wallasey and Bristol, which, in social class terms, form a sort of miniature United Kingdom, have very nearly the same rates of educational striking. The more upper-crust—Solihull and Barnet—and the more bottom-drawer—Newham and Barking—are appropriately educated for better or for worse.

All in all, the number of sixth-formers has doubled in the last twenty years, but the proportion of working-class sixth-formers remains obdurately the same. The proportion of working-class youth in higher education—and this includes the polytechnics—is only marginally more than it was in 1926, the year of the General Strike. Given a cross-the-board sample of one hundred children, the thirty middle-class pupils (Classes I, II and IIIa on the Registrar-General’s scale) will produce twelve with five O-levels apiece, while the seventy working-class pupils (Classes IIIb, IV and V) will produce only eight. The business executive’s or manager’s son has a seven-to-one shot of higher education; the miner’s or postman’s son has a thirty-five-to-one shot.

In the railway journey of life the school is the waiting-room rather than the signal box. It is a kind of sociological Calvinism by which the child’s destiny is frequently dictated, for good or ill, by his social constraints. Eton does not change ordinary schoolboys into foreign secretaries with the flourish of the legendary magician transforming frogs into princesses. Eton is a stretch of that particular avenue of life along which future foreign secretaries have been routed. The city secondary school is, by the same measure, no more responsible for the unemployment and poor housing and juvenile delinquency of its clients than the public school is responsible for the disasters of our cabinet ministers.

Put another way, schools cannot be held to be the scapegoat of social dislocation, nor can the lack of, or ‘wrong’, education be held culpable for social troubles. Such a hypothesis heavily overestimates the ability of the school to alter people or affairs. There are schools in deprived districts where, in spite of brilliant teaching, the children produce poor results. There are schools elsewhere in which the children perform brightly in spite of outmoded teaching.

It is possible to analyse the components of the social context which so compellingly influences a child’s educational performance. One cannot, of course, deny some genetic element, although, if that be elevated to the heights of an absolute explanation, it posits a dark, malevolent cloud descending on Bootle, leaving the Midwich Cuckoo-land of nearby Southport untouched. It is to do with income, with culture, with life-style, with peer-groups, with aspirations, with facilities, with housing, with parental know-how and drive, and with a dozen other features. They add up to a devastating paradox about the nature of education, so much so that we must reverse the normally received equation. Once we thought of the school educating, and the rest intervening where possible. We must now accept that it is the rest—the community, more particularly the home—which educates, and it is the school which is forced to adapt and come to terms where it may.

The school, as is the nature of institutions, is reluctant to change. This is understandable, for this is defeatist talk: if attainment is predetermined, what price the teacher? It is not quite as tidy as that, however. The school is not in neutral gear. By remaining an agency in seclusion, proffering its wares in something of a social vacuum, in the belief that its academic product has an exclusive being of its own, it has helped maintain and perpetuate the existing system.

The school has, by and large, a single cutting-edge, despite the many—but usually superficial—differences up and down the country. It serves a multivariant society, and it offers that society very much the same product everywhere. This would not be too bad if the product were alien to all; if it were, so to speak, equally estranged from everybody. But it is not. It has a built-in tendency to find a communion of values, aims, culture and so forth with the Richmonds rather than the Warringtons of our world. We have uniformity, rather than equality, of opportunity, and that uniformity has a Barnet rather than a Barking-bias.

This is not said critically of teachers or administrators, who work unceasingly to bring succour to less privileged environs. It is because education, along with all the other forms of social outlay, forms an intricate mesh of social provision. We have too often analysed education in a crude cause-effect sequence. Either the school has changed or created society, or society has changed or created the school. These are simplistic views. It is much more a circular process in which the elements both underwrite and are underwritten in cyclic sequence. Thus one would scarcely expect schools to be more fluently aligned with the under- than the over-privileged, just as we would hardly predict that the health service or the legal system might be more valuable for the poor than the rich.

The chief lesson is the interdependability of all forms of social provision. Just as health, good or bad, affluence or otherwise and so on affect education, so is any of those influences affected in turn by an amalgam including education. We more or less accept that health cannot be observed independently: nor should education logically be examined in an autonomous fashion. If a child is ill, we may look for causes in poor housing or malnutrition; only recently have we, and then usually only in the extreme cases of ‘problem’ families, admitted the crucial effect of such factors on schooling. Even when we have done this, our approach has been negative. We have assessed how the child has not been educated, how his schooling has been impeded by extraneous factors; less readily have we acknowledged the input of what we would regard as adverse conditions, that is the ‘educational’ messages of one sort or another transmitted to the child by those conditions.

It is important to see education in this total sense, as a dimension with which, knowing or unknowing, we are in constant communication. One does not, for instance, have a period of ‘non-health’. One has, obviously, some form of health perpetually. The question is about its quality and its degree of badness or goodness. Similarly, education should be seen not as something one did, but as something one is, like health, ‘in’!

The sticking-point is our long-held ‘apprenticeship model’ of education, whereby we have viewed it as the preparation of the young for society to the point where leaving school has adopted some of the aura of the initiation ceremonies of older societies. Education is overgeared, in our image, to children in school and students in colleges. But it is, in reality, total and constant, partly because we continue learning in some form or another, and partly because we all contribute, in more or less degree, to the learning of others, especially children. Each individual has a kind of current account with the educational bank, with deposits as well as withdrawals.

Once this is accepted, the interconnectedness of social provision follows. We remark the interconnection of social ills; rationally, an interconnected treatment might be a consequence.

Society has normally been heir to four categories of social ill. This macabre quartet comprises poverty, disease, crime and ignorance. These are the four horsemen of the social apocalypse. They represent the chief ways in which individuals or groups fall short of the norms current in their society. For whatever reason, the social casualty is, to resort to educational jargon, an ‘under-achiever’. For whatever reason, he has less income or goods than is normatively needed in his society; his state of health hinders him, even prevents him from fulfilling the expected role of the citizen in his society; he will not or cannot meet the legal requirements deemed necessary by his society for the sustenance of its stability; his skills and knowledge are inadequate for him to cope normally in his society. Usually, of course, two, three or all brands of social difficulty are present in a cumulative form.

In practically all societies there is evidence of arrangements to deal with these problems. Sometimes the treatments—like the troubles—have been co-ordinated. Perhaps education has been linked less than the others, and that perhaps because of its early critical phase. In other words, whereas poverty, crime and disease are very evident in adulthood, the issue of ignorance has frequently, if misleadingly, been restricted to childhood. Nonetheless, social provision in many societies has encompassed all four areas.

Often the act of co-ordination has been deliberate, as when some bold policy or comprehensive formula has been implemented by the governing body. Possibly more frequent have been examples of an unconscious togetherness. This is because social ills and, by projection, social provisions are automatically characteristic of their socioeconomic context. The evils themselves are perpetual—the poor are always with us—but their shape and fashion vary. The life-styles of the impoverished in the Scottish Highlands of the eighteenth century and in modern Calcutta are different. The colour of these life-styles is determined by their respective socio-economic formats. Consequently, what is attempted to assist them is dictated by those same constraints, not least because the question is posed within these constraints. One might go further and argue that, even when some apparently clear-cut governmental policy has emerged to meet a range of problems, this has also been created by the context it serves.

The inability of a piece of social provision, such as education, to escape the dictates of its social and economic bounds is an important consideration. It cannot be accomplished purely and in a vacuum. Any theoretical notion or practical proposal for education must meet the strict ordering of its social confines, otherwise it becomes, at best, shallow and false, and, at worst, disruptive and damaging.

Another reason, naturally enough, for the apparent coherence of social policy has been, in most societies, the control exercised by one group or class over another. The incidence of social ills, or at least their most troublesome ramifications, has generally fallen most heavily on the governed rather than the governors, on the unprivileged rather than the privileged. It was mentioned earlier that none need be surprised by this. Those in control do, to a large extent, outline normalcy in terms of social policy; almost by so doing they avoid overdue contravention; and they can ensure that social and economic regulos are suitable for their own well-being. Indeed, not to be suffering from social ills is not much less than saying you are well-placed in the social, political and economic hierarchy.

Peoples get, therefore, the social provision they deserve, and that includes education. Their type of society governs, that is, the type of social treatment meted out to them. We have probably, in education, been long in error about this, viewing the problem in isolation as a puristic and academic consideration. Of course there have been administrative and other practical devices envisaged, but have they always investigated, deliberately and consciously, their valid and proper relationship with their social and economic surrounds?

It could be argued that, by seeing the school and the education authority as academic things-in-themselves, teachers and educational administrators have been out-manoeuvred. A system has resulted, which, by a mixture of default and accident, does reflect some of the needs and some of the traits of our society. As was argued above, it could hardly do otherwise: the character of an institution must inextricably be flavoured by its host society. But if the education system could be consciously steered, with open eye, towards meaningful and aware integration with all social provision, indeed with all social and communal development, then hopes for a more productive pay-off might be raised.

If education recognised its place in the cycle—in part manipulated by and in part manipulating the rest of social provision—it would mean a move from the rather restricted bureaucracies of the day, busily guaranteeing the legal and technical requirements of school accommodation and attendance. This is not to say that the incumbents of the bureaucracies wish it this way. We are all, to some extent, imprisoned by the remorselessly cabining effect of attempting to operate a blinkered system. Rather might there be release for the inmates—both teaching and administering—of that system, if it could be aligned more fluently and purposefully with its natural social and economic environs.

The aim here is to examine further the nature of social provision, with the purpose of developing a frame of reference for the reform of our educational mechanics. Thereafter there will be detailed discussion of these reformed educative devices, and, in conclusion, an effort will be made to realign these in turn on the fuller spectrum of social provision and communal development.

Chapter 1

The Historical Development of Educational and Social Provision

The extreme pessimist might gloomily argue that the education system is totally determined by the character of society. The supreme optimist might gaily contend that the world is the educational administrator’s oyster, and he can create the system he wishes. The middle and, hopefully, saner view is that the process is cyclic and occasionally developmental. One can, that is, innovate and change within the margin left by social and other determinants and in so doing, those very margins are altered. This could allow for a developmental factor in which the knowledge and experience garnered may have an accumulative effect on the system. Thus an understanding of how the situation (with which one has, as teacher or administrator, to grapple) came to pass is important in any appraisal of that situation. Neither the austerity of pristine theory nor the enthusiasm of ‘good practice’ are of value unless they can meet in harmony with the organic context of the issue faced.

Herein should lie the virtue of the much-maligned ‘History of Education’, characterised too ofte...