Education State and Crisis

A Marxist Perspective

Madan Sarup

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780415791366
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351815512
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First published in 1982, this work is a critical survey of contemporary educational debates and themes which took on new urgency and importance at the time. In particular, it explores the problematic nature of 'progressive education' and 'discipline'; the changes in the labour process and youth unemployment; the nature of the state and its relationship with schooling; the growth of state intervention and the specific forms of discrimination suffered by women and black people.

It argues that trends in education at the time can be explained by a Marxist analysis. It suggests that the changes taking place in schools and colleges were expressions of the contradictions of capitalism and of the state's attempt to restructure education.

Chapter 1

The attack on progressive education

Introduction

As the economic and social crisis develops more and more people are asking: What are schools for? Has progressivism failed? What should be the relationship between schools and industry? Why is there increasing state intervention in education? These themes have been taken up by capitalist organizations and trade unions, by parents and politicians, by teachers and students. The media, too, have been quick to take up the new interest in the politics of education.

Let me begin the story in 1976; in that year Prime Minister James Callaghan gave a speech in which he criticized education for failing to provide pupils with the basic skills necessary for industry. The schools, he said, were failing to prepare children for their role in the economy. The Minister of Education endorsed this view and regional conferences were arranged. The topics discussed are significant: the school curriculum, the assessment of standards, teacher training, schools and working life.

It is now apparent that it was decided by the Department of Education and Science (DES), before the ‘Great Debate’, that there had to be more effective control of the content of the school curriculum: the DES increased its control of the Schools Council, an institution largely concerned with the creation of new curricular approaches. There was talk of a ‘common core’ curriculum, and the DES set up the Assessment of Performance Unit whose task is to formulate methods of national monitoring of standards of achievement in maths, language and science teaching in schools.

In the ‘Debate’ there was no discussion of the DES itself and its role. Nor was there any discussion of the financing of education and the question of available economic resources. But how did the debate come about and why was it instituted? It would be inadequate to analyse these events only in terms of ‘pressure groups’. The concept of a large number of shifting pressure groups coalescing over different issues, is a liberal view of power. A historical materialist analysis would see these ‘groups’ as representing fundamental economic interests, and the events as expressions of class struggle. One hypothesis is that the Right was becoming vociferous in its criticisms of education; it was being said that moral and educational standards were falling drastically and that the Labour Party tried in a defensive reaction to capture the initiative from the conservative Right. It could also be said that the debate about education was a ploy, a distraction from increasing unemployment and factory closures. At a time of economic crisis, the educational debate was an attempt to shift the responsibility for the crisis on to the schools when the causes lay elsewhere.

But the crisis is not only an economic crisis, it is also political and ideological; though its source may be economic, there are expressions of the crisis in education. Consider the development of the following events: In the dispute at William Tyndale School, London, the teachers were accused of left-wing political indoctrination. Many of the teachers used progressive methods and so child-centred education was blamed for declining standards. A year later, in 1976, Neville Bennett’s book Teaching Styles and Pupils’ Progress was published; it suggested that children taught by informal methods made less ‘progress’ than those taught by formal methods. These ‘moral panics’ were not isolated happenings; they were a developing sequence of events orchestrated by the press.¹ Suddenly, teaching became too important to be left to teachers. The old consensus was broken and there was a call for new controls. External agencies, such as the Assessment of Performance Unit, were therefore set up to monitor standards and control teachers’ work. The Gould Report followed in 1977, asserting that ‘Marxists’ should be excluded from educational institutions. There was the reemergence of genetic theories, like those of Jenson and Eysenck, utilized by fascist groups, which made racism in education a vital issue. These disparate empirical events are connected; they illustrate a fundamental shift in the structure of the British social formation and its institutions. What are the main characteristics of this shift in the field of education? They are: the attack on progressivism, the enforcement of stricter discipline, the emphasis on work-socialization, and the increasing concentration of power. These problems, which have to be analysed and explained, are the central themes of the following chapters. Let us now begin with a consideration of progressivism; after noting (schematically) some of the differing stances towards it, we will examine two critiques of progressivism, the first one stemming from the Left, and the second one from the Right.

The disagreement about progressivism

Progressivism, which was popularized in the 1960s at the height of the economic ‘boom’, can be said to be the mode of education where the child, considered to be the centre of the educational process, largely chooses activities according to its own needs and interests. In such a mode there is a rejection of imposed discipline and external authority, of the excessive use of punishment on the one hand, and extrinsic rewards on the other. A movement against inert, meaningless learning, it attempts to dissolve the distinction between ‘work’ and ‘play’. But such definitions do not really help us; the problem is: what functions does it perform? What does it really do? There seems to be no agreement, as the following attitudes towards progressivism show:

1 some believe that progressivism is a form of romanticism, a spontaneous ideology which has an anti-intellectualist stress on self-fulfilment; they are therefore critical of it. For example, Brian Simon, a leading communist educationalist, is fiercely critical of progressivism because it ‘explicitly denies the need for systematization and structure. The roots of progressivism lie in anarcho-liberalism. Such ideas … lead to a kind of romantic revolutionism that denies the need for political action and sees the isolated classroom as the focus and lever for social change.’²

2 There are others, like Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, who think that progressivism is a good idea but has never been practised. They write: ‘thus there are some grounds for the opinion that the modern liberal view of the self-developmental capacities of schooling has not been falsified by recent U.S. experience; rather it has never been tried.’³

3 Some argue that progressivism is genuinely ‘progressive’ in the sense that it is inimical to capitalist discipline. Progressivism has provided space for left-wing teachers, and that is the reason for recent attacks upon it by the political Right.

4 Against the above view, other theorists argue that progressivism is merely a more subtle, sophisticated method of socialization under the guise of an apparent freedom. Progressivism and the innovations associated with it give participants the impression that authoritarianism is not present, but usually this is not the case. A characteristic of bourgeois education in general is that it presents mental production as an act of the isolated individual mind. Solutions to most problems are seen in terms of individual psychology; individualist theories are the basis of progressivism. Subjectivist individualism and phenomenological approaches, it is argued, should be regarded sceptically at a time when collective, social, structural changes are urgently required. This view is most clearly expressed in the study to which we now turn.

The attack on progressivism from the Left

At the time Sharp and Green were writing Education and Social Control, which is a study of progressive primary education, the social-phenomenological research was very influential. This approach, used by the ‘New Sociology of Education’, was individualistic; it stressed consciousness and ignored power structures and economic determinants. In contrast, Sharp and Green wanted to develop a materialist viewpoint.⁴ They challenged the ideology of child-centredness – the notion that there are ethical, psychological, sociological and pedagogical reasons for considering the individual child as the teachers’ central concern.

The authors studied three infant classes, the teachers and the parents in a progressive school in a homogeneous working-class area. What did the researchers find? The children, given a wide discretion to choose between many activities, had to satisfy their teachers that they were ‘busy’. It seemed that the teachers were rather unclear about their own precise role and how they were going to further their pupils’ knowledge. The rationale of the teachers had strong undertones of two perspectives: ‘deprivation’ and ‘social pathology’. These theories stress that working-class children and those of ethnic minorities are culturally deprived and/or genetically deficient. The school functioned as a socializing institution to ‘civilize’ the deprived; in this way the teachers legitimized their therapeutic ideology.

Whilst the teachers displayed a moral concern that every child mattered, in practice there was a subtle process of sponsorship developing where opportunity was being offered to some and closed off to others. Moreover, there was not merely a developing hierarchy of pupils, but the content of education was being selectively organized and transmitted. In the authors’ view, ‘the social structuring of the pupils’ identities can be seen as the intial stages of the institutionalization of social selection for the stratification system.’ Education in this view, then, is a crucial mechanism for socialization and social control, initiating people into those skills, attitudes, and values which are essential for effective role performance. It is thus involved in social selection and role allocation.⁵

Their argument is that educational institutions have ‘a crucial role to play in the reproduction of socio-economic systems that depend at one level on the production of human capital through the inculcation of knowledge and skill and at another level on the social transmission of varying levels of ignorance’.⁶ In other words, industrial societies are faced with the problem both of satisfying a demand for skilled and trained personnel, and of providing some institutional means for soaking up or consuming surplus labour which results from advancing technology.

Thus Sharp and Green believe that the character of interaction, and the perspectives of the actors involved, may camouflage the real structure of relationships in which groups and individuals are embedded:⁷ whilst educators and parents may view the educational system as the locale where talent is developed and individual needs responded to, its ‘real’ function may be very different and related more to the social demands of established interests in the macro structure than to the requirements of individual pupils.

These authors argue that the rise of progressivism and the institutional support that it receives are a function of its greater effectiveness for social control and structuring aspirations compared with more traditional educational ideologies whose legitimacy was already being questioned. Within child-centred progressivism, far wider ranges of the child’s attributes become legitimate objects of evaluative scrutiny.⁸

In short, the researchers found that teachers often used a rhetoric to hide certain features; they found explanations which hide the fact that classrooms reproduced hierarchies or that certain children’s identities were being reified (that is, treated as natural rather than social products) through labelling. Though teachers often said that children should develop their own needs and interests, underlying this was an unexplicated assumption that children should develop their needs and interests ‘according to the community’. The term ‘guided discovery’, for example, was used with a different stress at different times for the purpose of self-justification. Indeed, teachers thought of themselves as experts, and this separated them from parents, who were cast in a passive role.

According to Sharp and Green, the educational ideology of child-centred progressivism fails to comprehend the realities of a stratified society where facilities, prestige and rewards are unequally distributed. It cannot explain these phenomena but takes them as given. The authors believe that a progressive educator, whose Utopian solutions are ineffective, is little more than an unwilling apologist for the system. Modern child-centred education is an aspect of romantic, radical conservatism. It involves an emotional turning away from society, an attempt to bring about a change of individual consciousness. This romantic conservatism is very influential, and it underlies not only progressivism in the state primary sector but also the deschooling movement.

Education and Social Control, then, presents an argument against the liberal individualism of progressive educators; it is an attack on child-centred education and the so-called radicals who support it. The research draws our attention to one of the dilemmas of progressive education: whilst it stressed the development of autonomy and the self, it inevitably provides a socializing environment – but one in which the rules and principles are not made explicit. On the other hand, it could be argued that in truly progressive education the rules of socialization could become explicit. But it should be noted that Sharp and Green’s attack is directed against progressive education in state schools. In my view, most of these schools have either never really practised it, or practiced only ‘watered down’ versions of the principles proposed by pioneers such as A.S. Neill.

My main criticism of the study is that Sharp and Green do not have have a theory of the relationship between the economic base and the superstructure. (By ‘base’ I am referring to the forces and relations of production; by the term ‘superstructure’ I mean both the level of political and legal institutions, and the level of ideology, culture, theory and consciousness.) This is partly a question of the relationship between the ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ levels of society. The authors state that Marxist work on the interrelationship between childhood and education is underdeveloped.⁹ There is a lack of adequate concepts and theory for the study of ideological aspects of interaction in schools. It may be noticed that though the book is a critique of idealism the methodology used is that of symbolic interactionism (a notoriously un-materialist approach which stresses that human beings are active agents in the construction and interpretation of social situations and their meanings). Sharp and Green, lacking a consistent approach and vocabulary, tend to be eclectic.

Moreover, they do not address the question of the place of the teacher in the class structure. Is the teacher a productive or unproductive worker? This is an important question for me because through it I have begun to see how the educational sector is related to the productive forces and the relations of production. I will develop this point in a later chapter.

Nevertheless, Sharp and Green do raise important issues: is progressivism or ‘libertarianism’ a more subtle form of social control – a cloak for manipulation? Perhaps some teachers used progressivism because it does enable them to do something practical – at least seating arrangements can be changed even though the struggle to change structures is a harder task. Is progressivism, then, merely a ‘managerial solution’, or has it provided a space for left-wing teachers to develop elements of a Marxist pedagogy? That there are opposing views can be clearly demonstrated by considering the attack on progressivism not only from the Left but from the Right.

The attack on progressivism from the Right

As representative of the many attacks on progressivism from the Right, let us consider Neville Bennett’s research on Teaching Styles and Pupils’ Progress.¹⁰ He asks: What is the relationship between teaching style and pupil attainment? Believing that there may be a waste of money and human potential in some present teaching styles, he asks: are children learning enough? In his view many of the assumptions of the Plowden Report (1967) have remained untested; though the Report is committed to progressivism, he could find no research evidence for it. Let me, first, outline his research before...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 The attack on progessive education
• 2 The enforcement of discipline
• 3 The emphasis on work-socialization
• 4 Schooling and the state
• 5 The increase in state intervention
• 6 The growing nexus between state and capital
• 7 Women and education
• 8 Race, imperialism and education
• 9 Summary and conclusions
• Notes
• Index