Unpopular Education

Schooling and Social Democracy in England since 1944

CCCS, CCCS

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134706938
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Historia de la educación

Published in the year 2006, Unpopular Education is a valuable contribution to the field of Media and Cultural Studies.

Part One

Social democracy: the making

1 Perspectives on schooling and politics

In this opening chapter we explore some of the general problems of writing a critical study of post-war schooling. We do not want to produce, in advance, a general, formal theory of education, but to sketch some key features of our own approach. These have been formed in a three-sided engagement. We have learnt, first, from the theoretical debates of the last ten years, especially from the proliferation of sociologies of education, old and new, and from the revival of Marxist analysis. Second, we have drawn on these theories to the extent that they have helped us to make sense of the pattern of post-war changes. We have valued or criticized them for their explanatory power or weakness. Third, our approach has been formed by the very events we describe, especially, of course, by the developments of the 1970s. Like all students of social developments, we stand inside the social relations we describe, not outside them. We have consciously taken sides and have not held back from arguing political preferences. In particular, we have been influenced by a growing sense of the need for a more adequate socialist politics of education.

Chapter 1 is the most theoretical part of this book, but we will not spend a great deal of time describing the arguments of other theorists; we will concentrate instead on saying what, from our point of view, has proved useful or problematic in them.¹

Approaches to policy

There is a large literature on state education policy and policy-making. Until recently most of the historical writing on education has focused on these topics at the expense of a more social history of schooling.² There are many similar studies for other policy areas and similar paradigms operate in orthodox political science.³ The main feature of most of this work is that it is written from a standpoint internal to the policy-making process itself. Our attention is directed to the most apparent generative processes — to legislation, administration and the formal politics of education — and towards the most immediately responsible persons and organizations: politicians, civil servants, departments and boards of government, local authorities and the various organized interest groups. We stand at the elbow of the policy-maker; certainly the policy-makers’ voices reach us most insistently from the sources. It is difficult to emancipate ourselves from their assumptions, or transcend their limitations of vision. So politics tend to be treated as a specialist, expert realm into which the rude noises of ‘the population’ rarely intrude, or, if they do, they do so mainly as ‘constraints’ on policy-makers’ solutions or through accredited representatives or the media. As I. G. K. Fenwick has put it, in a useful study of the politics of comprehensive schooling:

For the most part it is necessary to concentrate on interested groups, parties, Parliament, bureaucrats and the Press as being, in this country, the most active and well-established gatekeepers of the political system.⁴

In the older histories of education reconstructions of the intentions of authors may stand in for more complicated accounts of why changes happened. Active and concerned persons deal with passive but potentially dangerous problems (which are actually constituted in the life activity of the underlying social groups and classes). Events are characteristically coupled with key authors: from Forster’s or Fisher’s or Butler’s Education Acts to the Geddes Axe. Even the best histories of policy-making resemble the most traditional, conservative and widely read of historical genres: biographies or autobiographies of leading public figures.⁵

Certainly it is important not to lose a sense of authorship or agency, or of the rush and muddle of decision-making ‘at the top’. Both are correctives to the tendency to ascribe perfect knowledge and conspiratorial intent to politicians or to ‘the state’. But this type of account is deeply problematic, theoretically and politically. It excludes the living, active force of the vast majority of historical populations and tends, qualitatively, to take the side of the dominant and articulate minorities. This can happen even where there is no deliberate attempt to uphold the status quo. It follows from accepting, as given, features of politics, ‘education’ or social conditions in general, which ought to be appraised critically and which have an intricate history of their own. One example is the tendency to identify the peculiar British post-war combination of parliamentary democracy and bureaucratic statism with ‘democracy’ or ‘the modern political system’, and therefore to accept as given the political disorganization which occurs when ‘the gates’ are kept only too well. It is not enough to note, as Fenwick does, ‘the largely negative role played by large numbers of legitimate participants’ and to concentrate, therefore, on ‘the major elements of the population actively interested in education, the education public’.⁶ We have to ask how and why educational politics have been constructed in this way, why there has been no vigorous post-war popular politics and what, in the absence of such movements, the more diffused forms of resistance have been.

Another example of the same conservative form is the tendency to identify ‘education’ with the work of schools, colleges and other formal ‘educational’ institutions. As we shall see, this reduction was characteristic of the ‘old’ sociology of education, but it has also been a persistent feature of public debates, as everyday language testifies: ‘education system’, ‘education cuts’, ‘education debates’, etc. It is, in fact, very important to distinguish more carefully between ‘education’ and ‘schooling’; the first term refers to all forms of learning, the second to that specific historical form which involves specialized institutions and professional practitioners. Mass, public, compulsory, state schooling is a still more specific educational form, limited historically to the last 150 years or so.

The identification of schooling and education is very conservative .in its effects. It tends to present schools as natural rather than as historical products. It tends to devalue and marginalize the more spontaneous and more diffused ways of learning. It constructs a very sharp divide between school-like institutions (where we learn/are educated) and life outside these walls (where we work/play). It enhances the professional teacher and the organized curriculum over other sources of wisdom and, often, over practical knowledge as such. Above all, it hides from view a whole history of the construction of schooling – or encourages the belief in some simple history of progress, a history with no costs, no struggles, no ambiguities. Throughout this book, we shall explore the gap between capitalist schooling and education. We shall also present modern educational arrangements in the form of state schooling as particular historical products.

There are, more generally, three main ways of breaking out of the conservatism which we have described. Each involves a more critical or ‘external’ way of writing about policy or about the state. The first strategy is to continue to inhabit the world of the policy-makers but with a more critical eye. This approach reads policy statements, public debates and professional discourses not as they present themselves (as a humanitarian concern for ‘the poor’ or as a preoccupation with ‘equality’) but according to the underlying logic or ideological character of a practice or a text. The focus is less on intent than on tendency; less on what is said than what is hidden or implied. Critiques of this kind have been common within the radical sociology and social history of the last decade or so,⁷ but it is worth looking, briefly, at a very sophisticated variant, the work of the French historian Michel Foucault.⁸

In his more historical work, Foucault is especially interested in areas which are often taken to be natural but which, as he shows, have been socially constructed.” the definition and regulation, for instance, of sexuality, of childhood, of criminality or of madness. The subjects of Foucault’s histories are not individual politicians, authors or even social classes or groups, but what he calls ‘discourses’ or ‘discursive practices’. In using these terms Foucault insists on the intimate connection between knowledge and power, between the defining of a practice and its regulation. ‘Discourse’ includes worked-up forms of knowledge, usually those associated with a professional practice such as law, medicine or religion, but also the material or bodily concomitants of such power: imprisonment, hospitalization or the act of the confessional. These ‘modalities’ of control and incitement are minutely described, each discourse having its own peculiar character. Foucault thus preserves and explores the complexity of regulative disciplines without accepting their legitimacy, either as scientific knowledge or a necessary means to social order. Foucault is interested in the knowledges of policy-makers not because they are true but because they create ‘regimes of truth’ and are part of the operation of a ‘micro-physics of power’.

Foucault’s histories suffer, however, from problems common to all abstracted or decontextualized studies of ideologies or policy statements. The micro-physics of power are supposed to work in the way described in the official manuals of method or the authoritative descriptions of ‘the system’.⁹ Foucault retains a place – in theory — for relations or forces that exist outside the discourses he describes, but in his histories these are rarely elaborated. Recent work in Britain, owing much to Foucault’s method and style, has tended to accentuate this problem rather than solve it.¹⁰ In such work we stay inside discourses, unconcerned with their adequacy as knowledge and ignorant of the forms of resistance to them. We stay, in other words, in the fool’s paradise of the powerful. It is impossible to explain, from this perspective, why regulative practices and their attendant knowledges collapse or are forced to innovate. A Foucauldian critique of post-war educational policy could certainly show us how certain professional knowledges and practices were implicated in a logic of domination. It could not tell us why the 1960s’ policies fell apart or were transformed. This was not a product of discourse alone, but also of powerful social forces which the dominant knowledges failed to anticipate. Certainly a non-purist Foucauldian method may contribute to a history of policy but it provides no complete model. We do have to attend closely to the internal logic of public knowledge, but we also have to move it away from the centre of the stage to consider agencies and determinations which it does not describe. We need accounts of these too, as complex and subtle as Foucault’s own histories of discursive formations.

A more common riposte in Britain to state-orientated research, and the second main tendency on which we draw, has been to take the side of ‘the people’. The writing of popular, working-class or labour history has been a longstanding preoccupation of intellectuals within, or to the left of, the Labour Party. The tradition of sympathetic social histories of popular experiences and movements goes back at least as far as John and Barbara Hammond and the inter-war founders of ‘labour history’. It remains a lively and growing historiographical presence today.¹¹ The focus here is upon the experiences of the governed. In itself this standpoint renders problematic a view from ‘above’, but much more is involved than an inversion of perspective. The popular histories have often been written by socialists or Marxists who have seen the struggle of classes as the principal historical dynamic. E. P. Thompson’s polemical and historical writing, for example, is a sustained exploration of these themes.¹² The emphasis is on the working class or the populace as an active force which has shaped social institutions and values. Far from being a docile object of policy, popular struggle constitutes the policy-makers’ problems in the first place. It builds its own resistances, modifies the direction of social development and sometimes forces the law to perform in practice what its rhetoric of impartiality declares. Without abandoning a notion of the state as a means of control, Thompson presents popular struggles as actually constitutive of state policies and state forms. They are a principle of movement in the whole system.

We have taken a great deal from the popular histories and from radical sociologies with a similar perspective. We have tried to view post-war history from a standpoint on the side of subordinated or oppressed classes and social groups. We have stressed the formative influence of popular interests and experience as the ground or basis of politics itself. We have looked at a long history of popular educational struggles, including working-class counter-education of an independent kind. In general, taking the popular standpoint seems to us a prerequisite for any socialism worth the name.

Yet, taking the viewpoint of the people is a much more complex business in analysis today than, for example, in writing about the counter-revolution in the 1790s or the Chartist insurgency of the 1830s and 1840s. It necessarily involves lengthy evaluations of the agencies that claim to represent working-class people, especially, nearer the present day, the Labour Party and the trade unions. It involves the recognition that whole sections of the population, with specific and important interests in education — most working-class mothers for instance — are not represented adequately at all. It necessarily involves looking at struggles, in and around the schools, that are not normally regarded as political, but exercise their own force on outcomes at an individual or structural level. It may involve, in the end, a quite fundamental questioning of what passes as politics today — of the content of policy, but also of its peculiar political forms. Such questions are best discussed in particular cases. The problem of the popularity of the Labour Party, for example, is a key issue for this book and the whole question of the nature of popular interests in education and of the ways in which they might be represented is, similarly, central to the argument.

Although there are important and interesting examples, notably the work of Brian Simon,¹³ popular histories have not been the most common way of writing about education in the 1970s. The dominant tradition, especially on the left, has been more ‘sociological’. We do not intend, in this introduction, to review the field of the sociology of education — partly because sociologists will figure as active makers of history in the account that follows! We want, however, to stress our debts to, and our quarrels with, a third body of critical writing relevant to our theme: Marxist, neo-Marxist or Marxist-feminist accounts of the state, the state’s ideological functions and of the relation between state policy and the requirements of capitals.

If the historian’s question has been ‘how was this system produced?’ these theorists have concentrated on the question ‘how does the education system function?’ or ‘what work does it perform for other institutions or interests?’ This investigation has rarely been concerned with the experiences of the policy-makers or of the dominated: it has rested on a more external appraisal of the structures of domination. Since most of the theorists have been Marxist or Marx-influenced, they have been interested mainly in the functions which education performs for capital, capitalism or for the reproduction of social classes. The intellectual pedigree of much of the writing can be traced back to Marx’s discussion of ‘reproduction’ in Capital, especially the discussion of the reproduc...