Teachers and Classes

A Marxist analysis

Kevin Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315407401
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this study, first published in 1982, the author draws on his considerable experience at all levels in the school system to present a radical Marxist critique of that structure. He argues that the schooling process within contemporary corporate capitalism is inimical to education, while true education in turn is inimical to capitalism. He argues further that teachers, who are participants in ongoing class struggle, can begin to be concerned primarily with education only when they perform the function of the collective labourer. This title will be of interest to students of education and sociology.

Chapter 1

Teachers and education

INTRODUCTION

Given that this book has kicked off with the dismal notion of teacher-failure, it is important right at the outset to indicate clearly just what it is that teachers are being charged with failing at. The Introduction might have made it appear that the failure in question was a matter of not getting all children through senior high school or university. Well, teachers certainly do fail to do that; but I take this to be a contingency related rather distantly to the far more fundamental issue which I am concerned to examine. Put bluntly and crudely (the charge will be sharpened and refined later), teachers fail to Educate.

Now the charge, of course, lacks substance until we indicate what is meant by ‘Educate’ – the capital E is deliberate – and clarification here is all the more necessary because of the different ways in which the terms ‘educate’ and ‘education’ are commonly used today.

There was a time when ‘education’ was used only in a generalised way to refer to any process or occurrence which influenced a person’s development, but over the last century particularly we have seen the emergence of a far more specific application of the term. In 1867, John Stuart Mill drew a distinction between a wide meaning of ‘education’ – ‘whatever helps to make the individual what he is, or hinders him from being what he is not’ – and a narrow meaning referring to the ‘culture’ purposely transmitted to new generations, ‘in order to qualify them for at least keeping up, and if possible for raising the level of improvement which has been attained’.¹ In the following years educational theorists produced many variations on the theme of the ‘narrower’ meaning. For instance R.M. Livingstone spoke of educational activities as being tinged with a ‘vision of greatness’; T.P. Nunn declared that ‘the primary aim of all educational effort should be to help boys and girls to achieve the highest degree of individual development of which they are capable’;² A.N. Whitehead looked to education to produce people ‘who possess both culture and expert knowledge in some special direction. Their expert knowledge will give them the ground to start from, and their culture will lead them as deep as philosophy and as high as art’;³ D.H. Lawrence asserted that, ‘Education means leading out the individual nature in each man and woman to its true fullness’;⁴ and R.M. Hutchins insisted that, in contrast to the family and the church, ‘Education deals with the development of the intellectual powers.’⁵ And a century after Mill, R. S. Peters, in more complicated fashion, drew much the same distinction between an ‘undifferentiated’ sense of ‘education’ referring to socialisation processes in general, and a ‘differentiated’ normative sense associated with the production of the educated man (sic), who could be identified thus:⁶

(i) An educated man is one whose form of life – as exhibited in his conduct, the activities to which he is committed, his judgments and feelings – is thought to be desirable.

(ii) Whatever he is trained to do he must have knowledge, not just knack, and an understanding of principles. His form of life must also exhibit some mastery of forms of thought and awareness which are not harnessed purely to utilitarian or vocational purposes or completely confined to one mode.

(iii) His knowledge and understanding must not be inert either in the sense that they make no difference to his general view of the world, his actions within it and reactions to it or in the sense that they involve no concern for the standards immanent in forms of thought and awareness, as well as the ability to attain them.

Now, regardless of the excesses and extravagances that tend to creep into such discourse, it is clear that we do have two different general senses of ‘education’ in common usage today. On the one hand there is that sense which is largely synonymous with socialisation (and this we shall refer to as education with a small ‘e’); while on the other hand there is a sense which points specifically beyond socialisation, usually in the direction of full personal development with special emphasis being placed on cognitive or intellectual development – and it is this general sense (for we are hardly endorsing any of the specific statements quoted above) that we are gracing with the capital ‘E’.

With the distinction now made we can re-state our central thesis thus: teachers in general educate in that they act as agents of socialisation, but they fail to Educate in the sense of going beyond socialisation to bring out and develop the full capabilities of their charges.

How much bite this thesis has, however, is dependent largely on what it is that teachers are called upon or looked upon as doing: and there can be little doubt that the general body of rhetoric concerning the aims, duties and functions of teachers points well beyond mere socialisation and, if not quite to the heights envisaged by Livingstone or Whitehead, then at least in much the same direction. Academic education texts, curricula preambles, graduation addresses, and teachers’ journals continually represent the teacher as a figure leading (or striving to lead) children in the highest cultural, personal, and intellectual directions possible: and, while the function of socialisation often gets mention, it tends to be raised as a general and incidental process which teachers necessarily assist with, but which teachers qua teachers should proceed beyond. In fact it is often this ‘something extra’ which is used to differentiate teachers from all those other people who are influential in the formation of children as social beings; and teachers themselves appear to have been caught up in and by the rhetoric, for, as numerous studies show, they perceive their work primarily in intellectual and moral terms, and look on the task of general social training with comparative indifference.⁷

Teachers are charged (theoretically) with the task and responsibility of Educating – of going beyond socialisation – and this they fail to do. But it remains to be seen now whether they could possibly go beyond socialisation within the conditions placed upon them.

SCHOOLING, EDUCATION AND EDUCATION

Teachers, or at least the teachers this book is concerned with, work in schools. Now what goes on in schools is, at a basic operational level of definition, schooling. In our ordinary, everyday language, however, we tend to refer to what goes on in schools as education; so much so that the two terms tend to be taken as synonymous or coextensive. We speak of going to school to get an education; the level of people’s education is commonly measured by or equated with the number of years they have attended school and the awards gained there; schools themselves are generally categorised and described in terms of being part of the education system; and schools of course come under the control and auspices of education departments, local education authorities, and ministers of education. The school/education nexus is an extremely strong one; so strong in fact that the equivalence of ‘schooling’ and ‘education’ is largely taken for granted.

When we consider conjunctions which have come to be taken for granted, or as part of ‘the way things are’, we often find that both the strength and the tenuousness of the nexus become more clearly revealed by the effect brought about when the nexus is deliberately broken. This is particularly so with regard to the schooling/education nexus. George Bernard Shaw complained that his education was interrupted by his schooling; and Margaret Mead has noted that her grandmother wanted her to have a good education and so kept her out of school. These statements emerge as credible and startling. Their credibility lies in the fact that they were made by people generally considered to be highly Educated; they are startling because they turn on the paradox that schooling is antagonistic to, rather than compatible with, Education. The statements entail far more than a begrudging notion which any of us might make about ‘not getting much of an education at school’ – they point to a distinct incompatibility between the institution of schooling and the notion of Education; an incompatibility so surprising on first contact that the actual statements themselves have achieved the status of modern epigrams, and tend to appear regularly on desk calendars, as epigraphs to books and articles, and among lists of ‘quotable quotes’.

Now there are really two points at issue here; points which actually concern different sides of the same coin. First, there is the problem of the very conflation of ‘schooling’ and ‘education’, and turning with this is the issue of which particular sense of ‘education’ is being conflated with ‘schooling’. Consider carefully the following two statements. The first is by Herbert Gintis, and has been extracted from a broadly Marxist context:⁸

The function of education in any society is the socialisation of youth into the prevailing culture. On the one hand, schooling serves to integrate individuals into society by institutionalizing dominant value, norm and belief systems. On the other hand, schooling provides the individual competencies necessary for the adequate performance of social roles. Thus education systems are fundamental to the stability and functioning of any society.

The second is by I.L. Kandel, a liberal conservative, commonly charged with being an essentialist:⁹

The earliest and most persistent reason for the establishment of schools as formal agencies of education is the desire on the part of a group, society, or state to conserve and transmit its cultural heritage to the younger generation and to equip this generation with those habits, skills, knowledges and ideals that will enable it to take its place in a society and contribute to the stability and perpetuation of that society.

There are three things there deserving of particular note. First, although they are speaking from quite different and opposed contexts, both Gintis and Kandel spell out the same message – that the function of education is conservative, being directed towards integrating new generations into the prevailing culture, and providing knowledge and skills geared towards ensuring social stability and perpetuation of the status quo. Second, both authors use the words ‘schooling’ and ‘education’ interchangeably (and in doing so they are anything but unusual or exceptional). Third, it is abundantly clear that what they are really talking about is socialisation: the point both authors are making is that schooling is basically a socialising agency or institution.

Now I take it (without providing any argumentation at this point) that Gintis and Kandel are perfectly correct in this regard. Schools are agents of socialisation, and they always have been – at least they have been ever since they became compulsory and universal. Thus we find that the schooling/education nexus holds. But where does Education come into the picture?

As far as our discourse is concerned it is largely smuggled in through a sort of halo effect (of considerable ideological force) arising out of our imprecise usage of a single word to refer to two distinct processes – both of which relate to the development of human beings, and more especially to development in the areas of knowledge, values and skills, and thus to the daily practice of schooling – but which relate in quite different ways. Schooling has much to do with socialisation and the production of socialised beings, but very little to do with Education or the production of Educated people.¹⁰

It is, of course, one thing to make such assertions and quite another thing to provide convincing arguments for them. Now one way to provide support for the assertions would be to undertake a detailed analysis of the schooling process in order to see whether what goes on there is more ascribable to socialisation or Education. This very common form of empirical analysis, however, is fraught with problems. On the one hand, due consideration would have to be given to everything that went on in schools. We would have to be aware that things like how movement takes place around the building, the existence of separate staff and student toilets, the dynamics of decision making, and the different rituals of interpersonal relations (depending on who is relating with whom) are just as much a part of schooling as the teaching and learning that goes on in the classroom is. Virtually all empirical studies of schooling have assumed the teaching-learning aspect to be central, and not surprisingly have assisted in building up an image of schooling as a place primarily concerned with those activities more closely related to the notion of Education. What has been sadly lacking, however, is attention to what has recently become known as the hidden curriculum of the school. But even if it were possible to study every aspect of schooling another huge problem then arises; that of interpretation. It is very dangerous to take empirical data at face value: appearances have to be interpreted and penetrated, and different observers might see different things, interpret them in different ways, and penetrate them to different degrees. What is seen by one observer as a class learning its seven-times table might be seen by another observer as a highly structured exercise in participating in a complex social ritual centred around compliance with authority. Again it is not surprising that empirical studies of this type tend to reinforce the preconceptions of the investigators rather than throw light on the object under investigation.¹¹

A second means of supporting our assertions could be to examine the products or graduates of schooling in order to determine whether they have been socialised or Educated; and given that we have fairly tight criteria for determining each, this should not be too much of a problem. We could attempt to see whether schooled people are able merely to perform social roles and have the habits, skills, knowledge, beliefs, ideals, values and norms that will contribute to social stability, or whether they measure up to (say) Nunn’s fully developed people or the Peters prototype of an Educated person. And if this proved too much of a task we could at least tune in to expert commentary on the matter, where, despite the occasional principals who get carried away with their own perceived achievements on speech nights, the general drift of informed educational commentary tends to bemoan the fact that our schools are either not Educating enough people or not Educating people well enough, or both. The same R. S. Peters, for instance, openly laments the fact that the majority do not care about the ideals embodied in the concept of ‘Education’ and pursue ways of life which are ‘largely the outcome of habit, social pressure, sympathy and attraction towards what is immediately pleasurable’:¹² and in tandem with P.H. Hirst he sets up the Educated person ‘in stark contrast’ to the ideal and orientation towards consumption which, it is claimed, has become the ‘predominant feature of Western society’.¹³ It would appear, then, that our schools are doing a pretty bad job of Educating (and a pretty good job of socialising); and I for one have yet to read the work which heaps all praise on their current Educative effects.

This proposed study of school graduates, however, might not take us as far as we wish; for it could easily be argued that the poor success rate of schools in Educating is a result of contingent factors (like lack of funds) and that, given the prevailing circumstances, schools are really doing an excellent job. The fact that they seem to be producing socialised people rather than Educated people means only that they are contingently agents of socialisation, and nothing has been said which seriously challenges the view that their real purpose is one of Educating. In the face of this objection a new tack must obviously be sought.

A third possibility for supporting our assertions lies in analysing the function that schooling performs within the total dynamics of reproduction of social relations. This is the tack we shall, in fact, be taking, albeit at a much later stage in this work. But two preliminary remarks have to be made here. First, it might appear that the dice have already been loaded in that we are going to work within a context of reproduction of social relations; a context which appears to exclude development, change or betterment. This, however, is not so. ‘Reproduction of social relations’ refers to the continuance of the same basic form of a society, wherein there could be marked historical transformations occurring, and not to an endless repetition of the same daily ways replayed by each succeeding generation. For the last (say) 200 years Britain, America, and the Boro Indians have each been engaged in the reproduction of particular social relations, but while things have hardly changed at the day-to-day level for the Boro there has, of course, been demonstrable change and development within the other two societies even while the basic social relations have been constantly reproduced. Second, such a tack requires setting down a categorisation of social relations, and elaboration of a theory of the dynamics whereby these social relations are reproduced. Again this will be filled out later; but we can at least note here that we shall be categorising social relations (or characterising the ‘basic form’ of a society not in terms of governmental types (aristocracy, oligarchy, monarchy, democracy) nor in terms of dominant types of production (agrarian societies or industrial societies) but rather in terms of modes of production (slavery, serfdom, capitalism, socialism); and also that our following discussion will be concerned primarily with the context of contemporary capitalism.

TEACHERS, EDUCATION AND EDUCATION

We asked earlier whether teachers could possibly go beyond socialisation within the conditions placed upon them, and we have now recognised two of those conditions as the context of schooling and the context of capitalist social relations. Now schooling is a process in which the directive agents are teachers, such that certain claims made regarding the schooling process can also generally apply to or be connected with teachers; and schooling is also a process which (as we shall see later) is structured by dominant social relations. We can therefore now amend our (unsupported) claim regarding schooling having much to do with socialisation but little to do with Education to read: ‘Teachers, under contemporary capitalist social relations, have much to do with socialisation and very little to do with Education’: which gets us back, with a little more precision, to where we were earlier. While the process of schooling can not (and will not) be ignored, we must not lose sight of the fact that teachers are the immediate agents of the process under consideration, and our discussion must focus on and continually return to the work they do and the function they perform.¹⁴

It should also be emphasised very strongly here that the extremely negative claim we have made about teachers is not intended to constitute a personal indictment against them, especially at the individual level, nor is it intended to slight the great amount of effort many put into their day-to-day work – especially that effort which is directed, even if circuitously – towards the end of Educating. The claim that teachers fail to Educate does not necessarily point to teacher-incompetence, and the argument and analysis which follows has nothing to do with that. It may, of course, be the case that some teachers are incompetent, lazy, or merely serving time, but that is not our concern. What we shall argue is that, even given the most able, enthusiastic and idealistic teachers, teacher-failure-in-general is inevitable in ...