The Right to Learn

Alternatives for a Learning Society

Ken Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134579143
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The concept of the 'learning society' brings to mind access to education for all and a culture of lifelong learning. But government interventions in education such as the National Curriculum and standardized tests have only served to consolidate the connection between learning and schooling. Schools, furthermore, now have to juggle an increasingly diverse and incompatible range of tasks, providing equal opportunities while catering for individual needs and hitting academic attainment targets while preparing pupils for life in the global workplace. In this climate, what is the future for a democratic system of education?
This important book aims to encourage debate about alternative ways of providing education, and discusses how these are being practiced now in Britain, Europe and the USA. Taking the issue of human rights and access as a central theme, the author examines the current state of education provision and the possibilities for its future.
This book will be of interest to specialists in education, politics and philosophy, and also to those seeking alternative ways of educating their children.

1 Introduction

There has been a tendency to treat education as the waste paper basket of social policy—a repository for dealing with social problems where solutions are uncertain or where there is disinclination to wrestle with them seriously.

(Halsey, 1972, p. 8)

A continuing sense of crisis in the UK education system has prompted unprecedented levels of government intervention to raise standards of educational attainment. Scarcely a week goes by without the announcement of another measure to tackle the widely advertised problems in Britain’s schools. Reports of disagreement or disillusionment with previous measures appear in the media almost as regularly. Within a few weeks of his resignation after four years of controversy as HM Chief Inspector of Schools, Chris Woodhead pronounced his own scathing verdict on government education policy in a column in the Daily Telegraph newspaper:

No government will achieve its goals if it lurches from one initiative to another, hoping that the electorate, mesmerised by its hyperactivity and the slickness of its presentational skills, will have forgotten the solution it was proffering a month or two back.

(Woodhead, 01–03–01)

Stimulated partly by unfavourable comparisons between Britain and comparable countries, this plethora of remedial initiatives taken by government and its agencies, however, has drawn little inspiration from alternatives exemplified by the varying provisions for education in other countries. Radical changes in school management structures in recent years have been accompanied by the rhetoric of ‘parent power’. Yet centralised control has been consolidated in the state schools system, principally through implementation of a national curriculum and standardised methods of assessment. Moreover, for most members of the public, as for most educational professionals and politicians, education and schooling are synonymous. Few proposals for raising educational standards omit that familiar mantra, ‘in the classroom’.

This last point was strikingly illustrated in a foreword by Chris Woodhead to the highly controversial critique by Professor James Tooley (Tooley, 1998) of much contemporary educational research. According to Woodhead, that report was inspired partly by anxieties about research standards expressed by the eminent educationalist Professor David Hargreaves, and was sponsored by Ofsted to ‘help raise standards in the classroom’. Significantly, he ignored the fact that Hargreaves’ strictures embraced not only research but also UK education as a whole and its characterising features, schools and classrooms:

Indeed, unless we dismantle and reconstruct many social institutions, including education, conceptions of ‘the learning society’ or ‘lifelong learning’ will remain pure rhetoric. The traditional ‘education system’ must be replaced by polymorphic educational provision—an infinite variety of multiple forms of teaching and learning.

(Hargreaves, 1997a)

The contradiction implicit in these words of Woodhead and Hargreaves comprises the theme of this book; it is the question of viable alternatives to an increasingly expensive, monolithic education system that is seen by many to be failing a significant proportion of its client-group and society as a whole. The objective is not to propose Utopian solutions nor to ponder the daunting task, recommended by Hargreaves, of dismantling educational institutions. It is to consider the intimations of existing alternatives in the UK and elsewhere: to identify some simple, dynamic principles that might encourage a civilised transition to that happy state, ‘the learning society’.

Another recent publication by a UK government advisor suggests that cracks may be appearing in the monolith. Entitled Learning beyond the Classroom: Education for a Changing World, Tom Bentley’s book also calls for institutional diversification to stimulate proactive learning. But a programme of this kind could not be effective as an exclusively top-down initiative; it would be more than likely to crumble into token gestures and half-measures compatible with existing institutional rigidities. Grounds for such anxiety are apparent. Concern is widespread about standards of literacy and numeracy. It seems that nearly one quarter of the people of the world’s great industrial democracies are ‘functionally illiterate’ (Times Educational Supplement for Scotland (TESS), 11–02–00). According to some very recent research in the UK, this already depressing average includes figures for certain inner-city areas which suggest that between 30 and 40 per cent of their populations cannot read the kind of basic information contained in timetables and recipes or work out how much change they should receive in a typical corner-shop transaction (TESS, 12–05–01). Schoolchildren on a slightly higher rung of the educational ladder are said to have a generally poor grasp of science and mathematics. In addition to such mainstream educational problems are others concerning standards of behaviour and a proliferating youth drug-culture. Some voices express distaste for the prevalence of ‘rote-learning’ in schools and disaffection is widespread among professional educators, already deprived of much of their traditional autonomy by a highly specified national curriculum.

Despite all this, a relentless flow of official literature fosters the myth of the omnicompetent school, catering for the ‘individual needs and aptitudes of students’; ensuring that all ‘reach their full potential’. This school provides an education not only in traditional core-curriculum subjects but also in the beliefs and values of a multicultural society, addressing such complex social issues as adolescent sexuality, racialism and bullying. One index of the all-encompassing influence ascribed to schools by government and the general public is the periodic convocation of expert representatives to deliberate on a form of words with which teachers will convey socially acceptable attitudes about human relationships and other values to their pupils.¹ Irrespective of increasing government spending on education, a suspicion must remain that reality will differ profoundly from the myth. There is, too, the vital question of the rights of children and parents to exercise choice in, and about, education.

Education policy is increasingly dominated by a vocational emphasis that prioritises individual and collective economic efficiency as objectives. Such a view is often supported by the assertion that it is only on the basis of the production of wealth that other social goods can be realised. But it faces an obvious objection: an education orientated towards the acquisition of workplace skills might do very little to equip future generations with the intellectual resources for questioning values implicit in the organisation of wealth production. Conflation of the aims of vocational training and education is an accelerating trend that substitutes for the ideal of individual critical autonomy a servile adaptability to the caprices of a global market economy. Ostensibly, this burgeoning language of ‘skills’ addresses difficulties posed by rapid social, technological and economic changes that, almost by definition, are unpredictable. It might be argued that the more tightly skills are specified in the interests of ‘effective’ pedagogy, the less adaptable they are likely to prove; that the more desirable educational objective remains that of cultivating individual critical and creative abilities through a broad, liberal curriculum. But there are more fundamental issues concerning the realisation of liberal, democratic and egalitarian ideals that again highlight the institutional perspective. How could a centrally directed, hierarchical system of mass schooling, largely isolated as it is from society at large and from the intimacies of family and community life, adequately address the diversity of individual children’s needs, aptitudes and aspirations? And how might we apportion responsibility for determining educational purpose, content and method more equitably between children themselves, their parents and the state?

These are fundamental questions concerning the rights of individual citizens that have been endorsed through explicit agreement between the governments of many western democracies, including the UK. But interpretation of these rights by individual states has varied considerably. The UK government, for instance, subscribes to a principle enshrined in Article 2, Protocol 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights and also in the Human Rights Act 1998 which came into force in October 2000. This is that ‘the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure…education and teaching in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions’. Acceptance of the wider implications of this Article is still qualified in the new Act, however, by the UK government’s 1952 requirement for ‘efficient instruction and training, and the avoidance of unreasonable public expenditure’. Apart from the controversial status of concepts of educational efficiency and cost-effectiveness, there are glaring contrasts in the extent to which different countries have anticipated or interpreted the rights in question within their legislative and policy frameworks, as expressions of the constitutional relationship between individual citizen and state. Rather than limit parental supervision of education, for example, the Dutch government insisted on the need for official financial support to ensure the exercise of that right. The Irish government endorsed the relevant section of the Convention and elaborated it by asserting the right of parents to educate children at home or in state or private schools of their own choice. Moreover, the notion of ‘efficiency’ espoused by the UK government is epistemologically and psychologically complex and there is a neglected legacy of debate on this issue that cannot be resolved simply by implementing assessment regimes throughout the education system. Likewise, determination of the cost-effectiveness of educational method is ultimately a political and philosophical question, linked internally to different social values and ends. After all, what price should we be prepared to pay for citizens equipped by their education to contribute positively to the future of democracy?

Insight into the complexity of these issues is furnished by some more extreme international comparisons. Experience in the USA provides a strong prima facie case for the claim that a wide range of typical school-age children meet or surpass standardised criteria of assessment in the absence of state involvement in—or significant expenditure on— the education process. It is estimated that between one and two million American children are now educated at home and a series of academic studies indicate significantly higher average levels of attainment in this sector than those achieved in public (state) schools and, perhaps more significantly, in private sector schools. Much the same seems to be true of putative measures of that much-vaunted but over-general concept, socialisation. Successive actions by American parents to secure a legal right to ‘home educate’ appear to have succeeded on the basis of such evidence and in 1999 the movement achieved nation-wide endorsement when the US Senate passed a resolution calling on the President to recognise ‘the contribution that home-schooling families have made to the nation’.² If governments stipulate the criteria of sound educational performance within the formal education system, there must be a case for regarding identical or superior performances by those educated otherwise as one important benchmark for assessing the effectiveness of the system itself. Indeed, this and other alternatives suggest that the most basic assumptions of that system require more critical appraisal than they have so far received—and, I will argue, that the issue of educational rights and freedoms should be treated with greater respect by governments and their agencies. American disillusionment with state education is not necessarily a repudiation of the idea of schooling; a recent trend has been the development of family ‘networks’ to exploit learning resources and expertise in the wider community. Nor, on the other hand, is the school recognised universally as a necessary context for the effective education of children in western democracies. Government provision of distance-learning facilities in remote regions of Australia, Canada and Alaska furnishes examples which have relevance to remote rural areas in Britain and other European countries, but also more generally, as a route to educational diversification.

Arguably, the radical departure of home education reflects the paucity of alternatives within state schooling and neglect of available expertise within and outside the educational community and the ever-expanding possibilities of distance-learning through developments in information technology. Initiatives exist in the UK with the aim of reforming the education system so that state-funded schools become more diverse and responsive to citizens’ rights of self-determination, models for which have been supplied by the educational policy and practice of countries like the Netherlands and Denmark.³ Important questions are raised, however. To what extent does the idea of a ‘learning society’ imply an ethos of self-motivation, and where do the rights, interests and responsibilities of citizen and state intersect? Do parental rights, recognised by international agreement, conflict with those of children, also the subject of international agreements? If so, how should such conflicts be resolved and by whom? How far is recognition of greater educational autonomy on the part of citizens and their children consistent with long-standing commitments to equality of opportunity? And, of course, what evidence is there that a reformation could be achieved within the constraints of ‘reasonable public expenditure’?

This book is predicated on a conviction that schooling, during the years of compulsory education, has acquired an unjustifiable aura of specialist autonomy from other areas of social and political life in which it is, nonetheless, deeply enmeshed. One apparent exception has been the growing assimilation of the aims of education to those of industry and commerce within government policies. This vocational emphasis, too, has acquired an aura of technicality through the introduction of what are described as ‘generic skills’.⁴ But no single definition of educational ends and means is above criticism, particularly as they are so closely connected with the diverse aspirations of the individuals and groups who make up a pluralistic society. And effective criticism involves the right to explore and evaluate alternatives. That, rather than a commitment to particular initiatives, like the home education movement, will be the rationale for drawing on research in the USA and elsewhere which suggests that various informal modes of education can be at least as effective and economical as formal state schooling—in terms defined by that formal system. Devolved control of education is also more consistent with international agreements on the rights and liberties of children and citizens. I will examine some significant contrasts in this respect between educational legislation and policy in the UK and some other European countries to identify practical opportunities for educational diversification and the extension of choice.

Thus, a theme that runs through the following pages concerns the legitimate extent of government powers in education. This is really a sub-text, though an important one, to more general questions about the scope and limits of political, moral and intellectual authority that have had far-reaching consequences in the emergence of western liberal democracy. A tradition of thought reaching back to John Locke, powerfully reinforced in the nineteenth century by John Stuart Mill, identifies individual political liberties with the liberation of human intellectual potentials and the possibility of social progress. The point which I will develop in a later chapter is that the ultimate justification of democracy is an epistemological one, a justification in terms of the nature of human knowledge and the proper conditions for its acquisition and growth. One of these conditions may be summed up as the principle that authority, political or otherwise, is legitimate only insofar as it remains open to effective challenge by those held to be subject to it. And that implies significant freedoms to experiment; to pursue varying ways of life and to value different social and moral ends.

The Danish government, for example, has been forthright in accepting the contemporary educational implications of this principle. Affirming the right of parents to state support for their own educational initiatives, as well as their right to educate their children at home, an official publication identifies this respect for civil liberties as a legacy of nineteenth-century political reform and a cornerstone of its educational legislation: ‘[t]here is broad agreement among the population at large and in Parliament that it cannot be left to a monopoly of public authority to lay down rules on the true way of life’ (Carlsen and Borga, 1994, p. 18). On the other hand, many states formally committed by international agreement to respect educational freedoms have interpreted the right to self-determination much more restrictively. An important aim in the following pages will be to consider how this widely endorsed principle is applied in educational policies and practices and to highlight its vulnerability to alternative conventions, even in countries historically associated with the liberal democratic political tradition.

Education policy in Britain has performed a volte-face since the publication of the Plowden Report in 1967. Since then, successive UK governments have repudiated the ‘progressive’ education which that report promulgated and have introduced sweeping reforms involving highly prescriptive curricula and didactic teaching methods. Yet the educational and social problems addressed in the late 1960s are still officially acknowledged and many of the general solutions recommended by Plowden form the basis of present-day UK government education policy. This paradox raises the issue of official fallibility and the rarely acknowledged controversiality of theories that inform government policy. I argue in Chapter 2 that the limited recognition of civil rights and liberties in British education cannot be adequately defended on the grounds that a variety of alternative approaches are necessarily less effective, more costly or more socially divisive.

Chapter 3 reviews the aims of education in democratic societies and the respective rights of governments and citizens to define those aims, a question involving some consideration of the liberal, Enlightenment tradition to which I have already referred. A closely related issue is the tendency of some western governments to define the educational needs of children in terms of the perceived economic and commercial skill-requirements of society. These, I argue, are ill-defined and controversial and such deliberate prioritisation can easily subvert liberal democratic tradition. Consequently, Chapter 4 addresses the subject of international agreements on educational rights and the extent to which these authoritative declarations have been realised in educational law, policy and practice in some western democracies. Chapter 5 is concerned with the apparent tension between the rights and liberties of citizens and their children and the responsibility of the state to ensure that education is both efficient and cost-effective. A major consideration, here, is that conce...