Education and Democratic Participation

The Making of Learning Communities

Stewart Ranson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315295916
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Education and Democratic Participation is an important and timely contribution to the emerging debate surrounding the value of educating citizens and communities in order to empower them to participate in democratic change. Responding to the effects of neo-liberal ideology on comprehensive education and public services, this book examines the purposes and conditions for reimagining an educated democracy.

Arguing that social divisions and cultural misrecognition have intensified to the point of crisis, Ranson explains that a just society must create opportunities for diverse, cohesive and tolerant neighbourhoods to flourish. In order to achieve this, education will need to reimagine learners as prospective citizens and as cooperative makers of the democratic communities in which they live and work. Showing that participation in public forums, councils and associations can provide a real means of enabling members of different communities to learn how to respect and value one another, this book provides persuasive arguments that a broader pedagogy of democracy is needed to confront the common dilemmas facing society.

This work is aimed at researchers, academics and postgraduates, particularly those lecturing and studying in the areas of education, the social sciences and politics. It will also appeal to professional and practitioner communities in school and college teaching, as well as in local authorities and related public services.

Chapter 1
Conjunctures

Dismantling social democratic education

Introduction: neo-liberalism and the defeat of social democracy

The political settlement (1943–45) between the estates of the realm – Labour, Capital and the State – was designed to constitute a new world, one which would replace 1930s’ mass unemployment, poverty, exclusion and hopelessness with opportunities for all to learn, gain a career, work hard and achieve a comfortable, independent life. A polity which served and reinforced the privileged classes was to be replaced by a just social democracy that represented the voice and served the needs and opportunities of all its citizens equally. The social democratic state played the key role in rebuilding the economy, securing full employment and universal welfare for periods of insecurity. Following the Second World War a new international order was constructed at Bretton Woods, principally between America and Britain to support the conditions for regeneration within nations and trading expansion between nations. A regulatory environment held entrepreneurs and markets in check. Two decades of economic growth and social development followed. However, the economic crises of the early 1970s, precipitated by the OPEC oil embargo,¹ led to rising unemployment, inflation and declining growth, undermining the owners of capital whose wealth had already been constrained by the post-war political settlements in favour of the working class.

The initial response to the crisis, in Britain, America and Europe, was to strengthen the corporate power of the state, for example controlling wages and prices and introducing regulatory employment policies. By the end of the 1970s, however, this corporatist approach was giving way to radically different ideas and practices of economic regeneration given political credence by the emergence of right wing party leaders in America (Ronald Reagan, in 1981) and Britain (Margaret Thatcher, 1979) from the late 1970s. This theory of neo-liberalism² proposed that a society’s freedom depended upon individuals having the liberty to pursue their private interests in competition with others. The role of the state is to withdraw from most social provision and create the institutional conditions for such entrepreneurship by securing competitive markets, deregulating business, privatising public ownership and protecting property rights. The success of these ideas grew out of their potential to appeal to a wider public in a time of structural change, but David Harvey is clear that they served to legitimatise the interests of economic elites and ruling classes who were threatened by the crisis and sought to throw off the yoke of the state and its regulatory constraints: neo-liberalism is ‘a political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites’.³ The experience of neo-liberal market liberalisation has been, he argues, to provide a rhetoric that masks the consolidation of corporate power and the embedding of hierarchies of inequality.

The ideological agenda of neo-liberal regimes in Britain and America since the 1980s has been pursued in a number of policy arenas, especially the signifi-cant public service of education. Bound up with the way a society determines the purposes and opportunities of each new generation is an understanding of its own political form and a conception of its future. Because the arrangements for educating young people are formations for shaping their horizons and thus their sense of place, the institution of education helps to mediate the relationship individuals have to their society through time and space. Thus, the practices and organisation of education tells us everything about the emerging shape and codes of a social and political order and its patterns of regulation. These organising assumptions are rarely made explicit but profoundly affect the processes and purposes of learning. They shape the orientation of an institution, establishing what is known and how what is known is to be interpreted and valued. They ensure that the power of an institution resides in its capacity to generate provinces of meaning which its members internalise to make sense of their worlds. Cultures and traditions codify the essential boundaries of social classification of who we are and what we can become, who is included and who excluded. These practices of institutions, argues Alasdair MacIntyre, are constituted by living traditions that form ‘an historically extended, socially embodied argument about the goods which constitute that tradition.’⁴ The field of education has been a principal site of political struggle between different social and political traditions which it is the aim of this book to explore.

I begin this chapter by identifying the deep-seated rivalry between three different traditions and conceptions of what the purpose of education is and how it should be organised: elite, social democratic, and neo-liberal. In Section II, I then discuss the distinctive characteristics of the neo-liberal dismantling of social democratic comprehensive education, concluding by pointing up the significance of these changes in England and including a vignette of comparable change in America. The restructuring of education, its purposes and organisation, has taken place against a background of fundamental structural change in economy, society and politics which is set out in Section III, including the contemporary crisis facing democracy following elections on each side of the Atlantic, clarifying what is at stake for social democracy.

I The struggle between rival traditions

There has been over the decades an agonistic struggle between rival traditions of education – selective, comprehensive, market choice – reflecting fundamentally different conceptions of democracy and society: elite, social democratic, and neo-liberal. The latter has been the dominant orthodoxy over the past thirty years leading to the present beleaguered state of public democratic education. It is the purpose of this book to understand these rival traditions and our present predicament by analysing their separate, though overlapping and competing, narratives. An outline here of each of the traditions, and the contrasts between them, is presented (summarised in Figure 1.1) before I focus discussion

Table 1.1 Post-war traditiol ns of education

	Lriberal of education Democracy (1950s) The Grammar School (1920s–1965)	Social democracy Age of Professionalism (1960s) The Comprehensive (1955–1976)	Neo-Liberal Democracy (from 1980s) The Academy (from 2006)
The object of education Values and purposes	The aristocracy of talent Talent is given and fixed	Children and young people Meritocracy Equal opportunity Personal need Social justice	Individuals as trainees Aristocracy of talent Sectional interests Choice
Function	Reproduction of the class hierarchy Social segregation	Service/provision Need identification Potential	Classification Selection Certification Control
Culture	Selection of elites	Professional/client Endeavour Personal development Potential/opportunity Becoming	Business Consumer choice Competition Possessive individualism
Institutions	‘Tripartism’: Grammar, technical and secondary modern schools The 11-plus exam	Comprehensive school Public services Hierarchy of authority Teachers/professions The LEA	Academy/free school Corporations/contractors/agencies Contracts The Chain
Polity	The Establishment	Representative democracy Welfare state Local Council Place/Loyalty	Markets Corporations Exit (consumers sanction by switching brands)
Pedagogy	Transmission of knowledge	Child-centred teaching and learning	Knowledge Differentiation Instruction Exams

on the Conservative-led neo-liberal government restructuring that has sought to erase the final vestiges of comprehensive education in favour of choice and competition.

The tradition of selective education (1918–1965; 2016–)

Following the First World War, there was a growing demand for secondary schooling. In the planning, however, expansion was balanced by considerable restriction on opportunity. When it became difficult in the public arena to justify a hierarchy of schools based on birth, the ruling class developed what they believed to be a proxy that would substitute science for divine right to secure the same class hierarchy. Children were judged to be fundamentally different in human type, and thus should be allocated to different types of school and prepared for different occupations. Educational opportunities would be provided according to the purported distribution of innate and unchanging aptitude and ability between types as judged by psychological tests of intelligence set at eleven and earlier. These tests were to secure an assessment of nature: biology was fate. Social selection determined by a nature forged in the cultural capital of the privileged would reproduce the social hierarchy. The average varied between local authorities but a norm of 15–20% of each cohort would be selected for a place at grammar school and a future in the professions with the remainder consigned to poor secondary moderns and a future in the factory. Though this policy was developed in key public committees (Haddow, 1926; Spens, 1938; and Norwood, 1943)⁵ with its iconic statement of tripartite education in the Norwood Report of 1943,⁶ the ideology of innate intelligence, was unfortunately grounded in forgery and fabrication masquerading as science (cf. Simon, Lowe, Chitty).⁷ Tripartism was not described explicitly in the 1944 Education Act which established universal secondary education, but it became the dominant ideology of organising education from the 1920s to the mid-1950s and remains official policy in a few local authorities such as Kent and Trafford. With the accession to the premiership of Conservative leader Theresa May, in 2016, selection and the expansion of grammar schools has, once more, returned to the centre of education policy.

The tradition of social democratic comprehensive education (1955–1976)

In the post-war period extending to the mid-1970s, education substantially expanded opportunity to ameliorate class disadvantage and division. While the purpose of universal secondary education was constituted by the 1944 Education Act, the opportunities it expanded only took on the semblance of reality when local authorities began to reform their school systems from the late 1950s:⁸ to end the practice of segregating most working-class children to receive an elementary education in poorly provided secondary modern schools as a preparation for factory employment. The comprehensive school erased social distinctions, enabling all children to share in an extended common curriculum through practices of teaching that encouraged enquiry and learning through activity as well as accumulation of knowledge. Public trust was afforded to the specialist knowledge of professionals and the necessary requirements of answerability could be fulfilled by heads, teachers and local advisors – only the trained eye could judge the quality of teaching and pupil progress.⁹ Public goods were conceived as requiring collective choice and redistribution. Thus, the democratic Local Authority Education Committee formed the arena for dialogue on public policy accountability to respond to the needs of particular communities.

What was achieved? The recent work of Melissa Benn and Janet Downs,¹⁰ and of Henry Stewart,¹¹ together with social scientists,¹² is now demonstrating how comprehensive schooling has transformed the level of children’s educational attainment, warranting comparison with the NHS as one of the great accomplishments of post-war social democracy. By 1980, 90% of secondary school students were educated in comprehensive schools.

This laid the groundwork for the expansion in achievement that has taken place since, and the move from education beyond the age of 16 being from a minority to it being the norm. The proportion of young people achieving five O-levels or GCSEs has risen from less than one in four in 1976 to more than three in four by 2008. The proportion in education at the age of 17 rose from 31 per cent in 1977 to 76 per cent in 2011, even before it became compulsory. While some argue there is an element of ‘grade inflation’, there can be no dispute about the increase in students going onto higher education. The number achieving a d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series editors’ introduction
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Conjunctures: dismantling social democratic education
• 2 Beginning anew for the common good
• 3 Remaking democracy for citizens
• 4 Participation as a way of life
• 5 A pedagogy of cooperative learning
• 6 Volunteer citizens, voice and participation
• 7 Towards democratic community governance
• 8 Democratising comprehensiveness: a concluding prospectus
• Coda: a life transformed by a comprehensive school
• Index