Education and Schooling

W. Kenneth Richmond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138340916
• eBook ISBN: 9780429803123
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In the early 1970s the crisis in schools, particularly in urban areas, had escalated. At the same time a number of writers had advocated either the abolition or the recasting of the school system as a whole. The late Kenneth Richmond saw these phenomena as symptoms of a struggle towards a much-needed new theory and practice of education. Increasingly, he felt, it is realised that a schooled society is not synonymous with an educative society, and that learning which stops at the age of sixteen and which makes the learner the submissive receiver of instruction and training is simply inadequate in an age of technology.

The 'generative theory' of education outlined in this book, originally published in 1975, would conceive of the learner as the controlling agent in a network of educational resources, and of education as a lifelong process. Learning can no longer be confined within the frames and classifications imposed upon it by traditional pedagogy. Recent research evidence indicates that the importance attached to formal schooling is greatly exaggerated and that the financial and other resources devoted to the expansion of so-called educational services are largely wasted.

There is a need, the author stresses, for a much wider definition of education – one that would recognise the validity of the numerous skills acquired outside the classroom (at home, in the peer group, at the work-place) and would deliberately foster a 'school without walls' policy, whereby community institutions and organizations could be used as learning environments. Only by taking steps in this direction, he believes, can we overcome the apparently intractable problems of the schools today.

1 Introduction

Faced with a world energy crisis which looks like being unresolved in the immediate future, we are obliged to reflect on the pros and cons of power cuts in the education industry. That some hefty cuts are inevitable is probable; that they may actually be desirable seems, on the face of it, highly contentious. To suggest that as standards of living rise so the quality of life declines is to invite incredulity; and to argue that the steady expansion of the educational services which has been taking place since 1870 has now reached the point where it can be seen as a form of cultural pollution that needs to be checked is to risk being called a fool.

Significantly, however, anyone who adopts this line of argument need not be unduly depressed when it meets with stiff resistance, as it is sure to do, for he finds himself in good company nowadays. Although they may disagree in other respects, some of the best minds in the business now share a sense of profound disillusion with the established system of education and all it stands for. As yet they remain a minority (conceivably a creative minority), but it is only a matter of time before others awaken from the intellectual torpor which addiction to the educational services provided for us has induced. The disavowal of ideas and assumptions whose validity was taken for granted until quite recently is bound to be disconcerting, as when Adam Curie declares that ‘Education enslaves: men and women become free through their own efforts’,¹ or when Jerome Bruner acknowledges that the school may itself be part of the problem of curriculum reform, not a solution to it² - or, again, when the National Children’s Bureau report Born to Fail finds that ‘school compounds rather than eases the difficulties of the disadvantaged child’.³ The disavowal manifests itself in unexpected places and at all levels - in professors of education who vacate their chairs because they can no longer keep up the pretence that education in terms of normal school provision is necessarily a Good Thing, as well as in the million and more truants who daily show their contempt for it. While it may be true that the deschoolers have shot their bolt in the sense that any wholesale dismantling of the school system cannot really be entertained and would almost certainly do more harm than good, the spirit of deschooling informs our thinking today to an extent undreamed of in the philosophy of the 1960s. Not that the influence of radical extremists like Ivan Illich, Paul Goodman, Jonathan Kozol and John Holt is primarily responsible for what looks like a U-turn in educational thought: the reversal of century-old convictions which have hardened into dogmas stems from a variety of causes, not least those as yet dimly understood as the ‘information revolution’.

Inevitably, the suddenness of this reversal looks like a betrayal. Until 1970 the annual increase in the educational budget and the progressive lengthening of the learner’s school life were regarded as a cause for congratulation, part and parcel of an improvident philosophy of perpetual economic growth. As a secular substitute for religion, education was universally held to be the indispensable means of achieving the good life. As a commodity, it was impossible to have too much of it and only dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries could dream of protesting that ‘More means worse’ (a dictum which still sounds curiously wrong-headed in the context in which it was first uttered). Living in a precariously affluent society, most of us remained blind to the extent to which conspicuous consumption was giving way to conspicuous waste, indifferent to the fact that the escalation of costs was yielding something like a nil return. In the USA this has led such influential bodies as the Ford Foundation and the Rand Corporation to recommend radical, immediate and far-reaching revisions of current school finance policies. After reviewing the available research evidence, both concluded that schooling was largely ineffective and that the massive resources devoted to it needed to be deployed in other directions.

In this situation the immediate reaction tends to be one of panic. Like motorists who have come to be dependent on a plentiful supply of petrol, the thought of having to go without luxuries which have come to be regarded as necessities - and which we can no longer afford - fills us with alarm. The trouble is that we are as dependent on the educational services as we are on public transport, electricity supply and all the other services on which any industrial society relies. ‘Doing your own thing’ may be the motto of an ascendant counter-culture which embraces austerity among other unfashionable virtues, but hardly one that is calculated to appeal to the vast majority conditioned by an education based through and through on competitive materialism.

While it would be naive to suppose that the connection between policies of educational expansion and economic growth is one of cause and effect, or vice versa, it is evident that the one is implicated in the other. As a subsystem, the education industry is geared to the same set of assumptions, values and objectives as the wider economic system. Once this is recognized two of the most carefully cherished myths in educational theory are exposed as essentially fraudulent.

The first is the myth of education as an agent for people-processing, the theory (which has never worked in practice) that human beings, like raw materials in any industrial process, can and need to be converted into finished products by being subjected to graded treatment in special institutions designed for that purpose. On this reckoning, schools are to the education industry as factories are to industry at large.

The second myth, which feeds upon the first, is the one which sees education as the means of achieving equality of opportunity. The assurance that there is always room at the top and that the way to it is open to anyone who cares to scale the educational ladder has kept theorists happy since the days of Plato. Equality of opportunity is a sine qua non for any policymaking aimed at social justice, but there is no longer any excuse for clinging to the illusion that education is the route leading to this highly desirable state of affairs. Sociological analyses reveal what common sense should have told us all along, that all education systems, even those which pride themselves on being egalitarian, serve to promote and safeguard the interests of a dominant élite. Thus, in Bruner’s latest judgement,

Both the American and the British experience show that equal opportunity to be educated does not overcome the effect produced by unequal access to power and well-being determined by class or race or religion. Children start school in the American system with matching I.Q.s, and end up after a decade of schooling with the black child or the poor child ten or more points down.⁴

Of the two myths, the first is by far the more insidious. In the first place, it has led to education becoming confused in the popular mind with schooling. Thanks to this, learning in the classroom has come to enjoy a prestige and legitimacy out of all proportion to its educational importance. Moreover, it has monopolized the available resources of manpower and finance. Operating as a closed shop, the teaching profession has consistently failed, if it has not actually refused, to exploit resources for learning in the community or to recognize any kinds of learning other than those which fall within its own arbitrary classifications and pedagogical frames of reference. Even today, when the school system in several of our larger cities is perilously close to breaking down altogether, the more adventurous RSLA schemes, schools without walls, truancy centres and other moves towards breaking or bending the laws of compulsory attendance are eyed with official disfavour. So deep-rooted is the conviction that the proper place for adolescents is the classroom that any suggestion that school-bound experience is precisely what many of them do not need if they are to fulfil themselves is more often than not brushed aside. Against all the evidence, the authorities continue to insist that only an insignificant minority are disaffected. Public opinion, moreover, is not disposed to give much credence to research findings which demonstrate that full-time five-day school attendance makes relatively little difference to eventual educational achievement and may, to that extent, be reckoned very largely a waste of time and money.

Worst of all are the effects of a protracted school life on teenagers who are not cut out for academic studies. Quite apart from the all-too-frequent news items reporting unruliness, hooliganism and acts of violence on and off the premises of secondary schools, there is increasing evidence that a law of diminishing returns sets in around the age of thirteen to fourteen. The restiveness of the young who are legally compelled to remain in statu pupillari is of course an international phenomenon; and the danger is that, in the absence of any major shift in their outlook, the authorities will seek to contain it, as they have done in the past and for the most part are still doing, by imposing more rigorous bureaucratic controls. But to pretend that the system must be maintained at all costs is futile when the costs are as prohibitive as they are and when the returns are so minimal.

In the US James Coleman notes, as many educationists have already done, that the student role of young persons has become so enlarged as to constitute the major portion of their youth. The parts formerly played by the family, the workplace, the peer group and the community have gradually been ousted as the school has taken over more and more of the responsibilities - and more and more of the time - for their upbringing. In general, adolescents have been relegated to a passive role, always in preparation for action, rarely or never acting. ‘They are shielded from responsibility, and they become irresponsible,’ Coleman says. ‘They are held in dependent status, and they come to act as dependents; they are kept away from productive work, and they become unproductive.’⁵ The answer to the problem, he thinks, is to put the young where everyone else is and where the action is, ‘inside the economic institutions where the productive activities of society take place’.

Much the same verdict has been reached by educationists who do not necessarily share the ideology of the deschoolers. From now on, some de-emphasizing of the importance which has come to be attached to the kind of organized, institutionalized learning catered for in schools, colleges and universities has to be bargained for. The search for alternative forms of organized learning, already begun, needs to be undertaken with a new sense of urgency. More necessary still, we need to revise our ideas about what counts as ‘learning’. How far the application of modern technologies of communication will help in the devisal of a new institutional framework remains to be seen. The Open University may be seen as a tentative step in this direction, arguably the most significant British achievement in recent decades. If only from the point of view of cost-effectiveness, it represents a more rational use of resources, its course offerings and performance to date comparing more than favourably with those of any of the lavishly endowed conventional foundations, old or new. Despite its critics and detractors, not to mention the political and other handicaps under which it operates, the OU has at least gone some way towards releasing students from the age-old constraints of time and space. While the personal relationship between teacher and taught remains as desirable as ever, it is no longer absolutely necessary to require students - or for that matter adolescents who have mastered the basic skills - to assemble at a given place and time, or to insist that they reach given standards of attainment by a certain age. While the ideal of a ‘learning society’, in which education is no longer confined to the early years of life and becomes instead an ongoing, all-involving process affecting the individual’s work and leisure activities throughout his career, may seem utopian and remote, any idea of schooling as a once-and-for-all ‘preparation for life’ is clearly due for revision. Changes in the life cycle demand a life style which admits of no clean break between ‘learning’ and ‘living’. A logical consequence of ceasing to regard schooling as the be-all and end-all of education is a shift in the focus of attention, hitherto concentrated on the learner’s life between the ages of five and sixteen, and a greater concern with the parts played by agencies other than the statutory system. As community service, education can no longer afford to put all its eggs in one basket.

Among other things, this explains why forward thinkers the world over are impressed by the prospects opening up in the field of lifelong education and why plans and policies to this end are now being formulated - more actively by our colleagues in the European community as a whole, be it said, than here in Britain. Torsten Husén, for one, is sceptical about the effectiveness of schooling as it is organized at present. In his valedictory address to his associates on relinquishing his chair of educational research at the University of Stockholm, he made it plain that an open disavowal of their professional faith was called for:

It might seem impertinent, not to say mindless, to appear before an assembly of educators to challenge the merits of the school as an educational institution. It would be like addressing a congress of clergymen to question the competence of the Church to minister to man’s religious needs. During the hundred years that have passed since public elementary education became universal in Western Europe, much of what the school does has become so institutionalized that the resulting pronounced matter-of-course character is somehow assumed to be rooted in the metaphysical.⁶

There lies the initial difficulty which has to be overcome. We are all creatures of history, living in a schooled society. The latter’s rise and progress in England has been accurately charted by David Wardle. The point he makes at the outset of his survey of the formative period of the English system provides a fitting preamble for the arguments to be pursued in these pages. As he says,

As an intellectual proposition most people are prepared to accept, if they are asked to ponder the matter, that more learning takes place outside than inside schools. Indeed, it is obvious that in the first five years of life and in the lengthy period after formal schooling is completed, the great majority of our learning is done unconsciously without deliberate intent, and certainly without the intervention of teacher or building.

And yet, unless our attention is specially directed to the question, we continue to see education as an activity which takes place in an institution specially set aside for the purpose, and which is given by professional teachers. In all advanced industrial societies, and in an increasing number of ‘developing’ countries, all children spend a substantial period in formal schooling, and as the de-schoolers point out, there is a tendency for the length of this period to be used as an index of a society’s progress. Among the most advanced nations length of schooling is being replaced as an index by the proportion of pupils who proceed to higher education - and higher education, of course, is carried on in colleges and universities, institutions of formal learning in the same class as schools.

A mental effort is needed to think away the identification of ‘education’ with ‘schooling’, but in historical terms the dominance of the school is very recent.⁷

All of which helps to explain what this book is about and why much of what it has to say may either exasperate or baffle the reader who dislikes being asked to ‘think away’ assumptions and ideas which he has long accepted.

The first task, accordingly, is to tease out the necessary distinctions between ‘education’ and ‘schooling’. That done, the next step is to examine the ways and means by which, over the centuries, ‘learning’ has come to be regarded as a commodity purveyed by professional teachers in the classroom - to the extent that nowadays any significant ‘learning’ in the absence of instruction tends to be played down, if it is not ruled out of the reckoning altogether. Criticism of the effects and defects of formal schooling is becoming widespread nowadays, and not only among the ranks of the deschoolers. There is a good deal of loose talk about the need for ‘alternatives’, very little about the practical implications. Administrators, teachers and parents cannot be blamed if they remain unimpressed by theoretical arguments which seek to draw a vital distinction between formal schooling and education: they require some demonstration of what can be done and what happens when the attempt is made. At this point, therefore, it seemed timely to include an account of one small-scale project modelled on the original Parkway Program, the first ‘school without walls’; small-scale and short-lived because of the constraints imposed upon it by a bureaucratic system. The idea of learning outside the school raises two major issues in any future theory and practice of education. The first of these is the one which is commonly referred to, for want of a better name, as ‘lifelong learning’. The other concerns the as yet largely unexplored domain of informal learning - in the home, at the workplace, in community life - in which the normal teacher-pupil relationship does not apply. Instead of envisaging education as people-processing, a generative theory is proposed which treats the learner as a responsible agent, free to act on his own initiatives, not necessarily submissive to the controls imposed upon him by his mentors, in short, capable at all stages of development of getting an education for himself.

Husén’s summary of his own position, arrived at as a result of analysing the mass of research evidence made available by International Educational Achievement and other investigations, provides as appropriate a starting point as any for a critique of education and schooling:

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Education and schooling: what’s the difference?
• 3 Education and schooling: a spectrum of opinion
• 4 The knowledge market
• 5 Learning in the community: organizing a school without walls
• 6 The vision of Edgar Faure
• 7 Lifelong learning in an age of technology
• 8 Towards a generative theory of education
• 9 The two cultures and the information revolution
• 10 Beyond schooling: the search for a new paradigm
• References
• Index