Understanding Schools and Schooling

Clyde Chitty

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9781138144965
• eBook ISBN: 9781134555413
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

Understanding Schools and Schooling provides students with the knowledge about school policy and process that they need in order to address and respond to current trends and discourses in critical, well-informed ways that will enhance their teaching and job satisfaction.
The book presents issues, questions and dilemmas and invites the reader to find their own answers through guided activities, discussion with colleagues and further reading. The book provides a philosophical context for teachers' developing classroom practice and empowers them to participate fully in local and national debate about the nature, purposes and future of compulsory education in the UK and elsewhere.

1 Introduction: perspectives on schooling

This chapter serves as an introduction to all the chapters in the book by propounding the thesis that educational policy making is influenced both by the events of the past and by current debates about the relationship between education and society. It highlights three broad perspectives on modern schooling: as individual fulfilment and the development of human personality; as preparation for the world of work; and as a crucial element in the process of social change. Within this third view of schooling as a social function, the chapter highlights the right-wing view of schooling and society that was dominant in the 1980s and some of the characteristics of a more dynamic and progressive view of education’s social purpose that is often categorised as ‘social reconstructionism’.

INTRODUCTION

When we read about, or, in some cases, infer the existence of, fierce and far-reaching debates about educational policy, whether taking place in Parliament, in the DfEE (Department for Education and Employment), recently renamed the DFES (Department for Education and Skills) in state agencies such as OFSTED (Office for Standards in Education) or the TTA (Teaching Training Agency), in the Education Committee of a local authority, or in the governing body of a school, we become acutely aware of widely differing conceptions of schooling–and of its precise role in preparing young people to operate effectively within adult society. One of the main arguments underpinning all the chapters in this book is that educational policy making, at all levels, is profoundly influenced both by what has happened in past decades and by contemporary debates about the exact relationship between schooling and society. At the classroom level, teachers are in the difficult position of having to constantly rethink and reconfigure their role in the light of fresh demands being made upon them by parents, governors, local community leaders and national politicians.

It seems clear that schooling is called upon to perform many essential functions in a sophisticated democratic society. While the forms it takes is a matter that will affect, either directly or indirectly, every member of that society, individual and group analyses of its true nature and purpose will be infinitely varied–in accordance with the social, political and philosophical outlook of the individuals and groups concerned. It does not, of course, follow that all such analyses will be forever competing on equal terms; for a study of the history of education in this country reveals that particular views about the function of schooling have tended to be dominant at certain key stages in our historical and social development. The ascendancy of any particular set of ideas, whether long-term or short-lived, will always depend on a variety of factors, the nature of which ensures that the future is always open and problematic.

In this introductory chapter, we will examine concepts of schooling under three broad headings:

1. as individual fulfilment;
2. as preparation for the world of work;
3. as an essential element of social progress and social change.

It is not suggested that these cover all the available scenarios, but they do constitute a useful context in which to discuss current debates and controversies in subsequent chapters.

Schooling as human fulfilment

With regard to the first of our categories, education is often said to be about individual fulfilment and the development of human personality. A ‘child-centred’ approach to schooling seeks to develop the personal qualities and happiness of each individual child and owes much to the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his romantic stress on self-development and growth. It was Rousseau’s book Emile, published in 1762, with its belief in the natural goodness of individual human beings, that became the ‘bible’ of the child-centred movement both in this country and in America. To educate according to this aim would be to reject, or at least severely modify, traditional approaches to education in favour of a philosophy that emphasises individual differences and ‘discovery’ methods of learning.

Ideas associated with ‘child-centredness’ in education, and with what David Hargreaves (1982) has called ‘a culture of individualism’, had a marked influence on many primary and secondary schools in this country in the years following the Second World War and appeared to receive the official stamp of approval with the publication in 1967 of the Plowden Report, Children and their Primary Schools (DES 1967).

Ye t acceptance of these ideas without reservations has not been without its pitfalls, and it has sometimes led to what Hargreaves refers to as ‘the fallacy of individualism’:

This is the belief that if only our schools can successfully educate every individual child in self-confidence, independence and autonomy, then society can with confidence be left to take care of itself. The good society will be automatically produced by the creation, through education, of good individuals. Education, it is held, cannot directly change society; it must do so indirectly, by creating the kind of individual who will then possess those qualities which are a prerequisite for the realisation of the good society. This belief can then be used to justify a range of divergent teacher perspectives.

(Hargreaves 1982, p.93)

It is Hargreaves’ view that an excessive and exclusive attention to individual needs jeopardises those of society. The growth of individualism can be said to have led to the decline of ‘community’ both in school and in society–with disastrous results.

Schooling as preparation for employment

A second view of the primary role of schooling argues that it is intimately associated with the needs of the national economy. At a time of considerable optimism and hope, the policy makers of the 1960s saw a direct and indisputable correlation between educational reform and economic prosperity. It was generally assumed that an educated workforce would facilitate economic growth, which would, in turn, constitute a firm basis for continuing educational expansion. Education was seen as an important form of investment in ‘human capital’–a superficially attractive notion that secured keen converts across the whole political spectrum in both Europe and America. As Karabel and Halsey (1977) have pointed out, it was able to make a direct appeal to right-wing pro-capitalist ideological sentiment through the claim residing in its insistence that:

The worker is a holder of capital (as embodied in his [sic] skills and knowledge) and… has the capacity to invest (in himself). Thus in a single bold conceptual stroke, the wage-earner, who holds no property and controls neither the process nor the product of his own labour, is transformed into a capitalist.… We cannot be surprised, then, that a doctrine re-affirming the American way of life and offering quantitative justification for vast public expenditure on education should receive generous sponsorship in the United States.

(Karabel and Halsey 1977, p.13)

In this country, ‘human capital theory’ provided the intellectual justification in the 1960s for both widespread comprehensive reorganisation and the rapid expansion of higher education.

In the mid-1970s, as Britain faced economic dislocation, and optimism and hope were replaced by cynicism and despair, the emphasis changed to preparing youngsters while still at school for the challenges to be faced in the ‘world of work’. It was now widely claimed that too many schools were generally reluctant to train students to meet the needs of wealth-producing industry and could therefore be held at least partly responsible for the rising rate of youth unemployment. Indeed, this was one of the messages that Prime Minister James Callaghan was most anxious to put across in a famous speech he delivered at Ruskin College, Oxford, in October 1976, where he argued that ‘there is no virtue in producing socially well-adjusted members of society who are unemployed because they do not have the skills’ (quoted in Chitty 1989: p.171). This economic function of education was reiterated in the 1985 DES White Paper Better Schools: ‘it is vital that schools should always remember that preparation for working life is one of their principal functions’ (DES 1985b, para. 46). This could have divisive implications for the organisation of the secondary school curriculum. As Dan Finn commented at the time:

The guiding philosophy behind educational policy became the creation of appropriate curricula for different groups of pupils, to be derived mainly from their assumed destination in the division of labour.

(Finn 1987, p.168)

For many young people, this new view of schooling meant little more than the acquisition of a number of low-level transferable skills. And for all those being prepared for ‘working life’, there was a new emphasis on the need to become part of a highly ‘adaptive’ workforce. Indeed, this was the message still being highlighted by Gillian Shephard, Conservative Secretary of State for Education and Employment between 1994 and 1997, in her Foreword to the 1996 DfEE consultative document, Equipping Young People for Working Life:

The Government has carried through major reform over the last few years to bring our educational system in line with the needs of a modern competitive economy. Our vision is of a prosperous Britain in the 21st century with a strong economy in which the skills of each individual are developed through education and deployed to the full. Thus, we must do all we can to help… young people to acquire the skills, knowledge and understanding they will need to be part of a highly adaptive workforce.

(DfEE 1996a, p.1)

The social functions of schooling

In the 1960s, the recognition that spending on education was investment as well as consumption could exist side by side with the realisation that all education systems have social functions and consequences. This is our third view of the role of schooling and is obviously capable of an infinite variety of meanings. The early comprehensive schools were welcomed not just because the old selective system had resulted in a great wastage of ability but also because it was felt that society itself would be more stable and cohesive if children from differing backgrounds were able to mix together in the same school. Comprehensive schools could produce a greater degree of social harmony without in any way disturbing the basic class structure of the capitalist system. (This is discussed more fully in Chapter 8.)

But this is a fairly limited and anodyne version of schooling’s social function. It was the view of the great American educationist John Dewey that schooling should equip young people with both the ability and the determination to improve society according to changing needs. In his words:

To say that education is a social function, securing direction and development in the immature through their participation in the life of the group to which they belong, is to say, in effect, that education will vary with the quality of life which prevails in a group.… Particularly is it true that a society which not only changes, but which has the ideal of such change as will improve it, will have different standards and methods of education from one which aims simply at the perpetuation of its own customs.… The conception of education as a social process and function has no definite meaning until we define the kind of society we have in mind.

(Dewey 1916, pp.94,112)

Here we have the idea that schools have the task of preparing their students both to function effectively within society and to use their various abilities to change that society in the light of changing circumstances and developing aspirations.

The problem is that even in a comparatively small country like Britain, there is no one clear overriding view about the kind of society we want to live in. The pessimism of the 1970s gave way to the crude certainties of the 1980s, and as we are now in the third millennium, the legacy of that harsh decade is with us still. In the field of education, we seem singularly uncertain as to how to deal with some of the more enduring elements of the Thatcherite vision of schooling, enshrined particularly in the 1988 Education Reform Act and in the original blueprint for the National Curriculum.

THE THATCHERITE VISION OF SCHOOLING AND SOCIETY

In its heyday, Thatcherism was an uneasy attempt to link the principles of a free-market economy with an atavistic emphasis on the family, traditional moral values and the virtues of a strong state. It involved rolling back the frontiers of the state in some areas while pursuing hard-line policies of repression and coercion in others.

There was a marked hostility to all institutions that mediated between the individual and the state, so that the state could emerge as the only collectivity in a society composed–almost exclusively–of autonomous individuals. These individuals would be encouraged to pursue their own self-interest, particularly in financial matters, with minimum concern for their fellow citizens. It followed that the period of the 1980s was something of a golden age for the speculator and the entrepreneur; in the opinion of a sharply worded editorial in The Independent dating from 23 May 1988: ‘we now live in a society whose representative figure is the moneyed yob’.

As far as education was concerned, there was a clear emphasis on enhanced parental choice and greater competition between schools, particularly at the secondary level. This was hardly ‘privatisation’ in the ‘pure’ form advocated by free-market zealots; but measures promoting independent management of schools and greater diversity of provision within the state system were seen as working towards a situation where, eventually, all schools could be in private ownership and parents would be supplied with education ‘vouchers’ or ‘credits’ to spend at the school of their choice (see Chapter 3 and Chitty 1997b).

At the same time, that section of the New Right which supported the idea of a national curriculum clearly intended that it should instil in youngsters respect for the traditional family, private property and all those bodies that could be said to uphold the authority of the bourgeois state. As Ken Jones (1989, pp.73–4) has pointed out, the Thatcherite project sought to overturn the ‘progressive’ trends of previous decades and substitute ‘a tradition, bulky with inherited authority’, that would ‘re-establish itself as the universal culture of the school, pushing to or over the margin all alternatives resting on “modish” interests like anti-sexism or anti-racism’. Anti-heterosexualism, for example, could easily be presented by right-wing politicians and sections of the media as the encouragement of homosexuality in students in schoo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Understanding Schools and Schooling
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Series Editor’s Preface
• 1: Introduction: Perspectives on Schooling
• 2: A National System, Locally Administered, 1944–79
• 3: Years of Reconstruction and Conflict, 1979–97
• 4: The National Curriculum 1: Origins and Implementation
• 5: The National Curriculum 2: Reversals and Amendments
• 6: School Reform Under New Labour
• 7: Teachers’ Conditions of Service and Professional Responsibilities: Recent Developments
• 8: Issues of Equality and Social Justice: The Role of the Secondary School
• 9: Conclusion: Issues for the Future – Contradictions and New Aspirations
• Appendix A Source: School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document, 1999, pp. 65–70
• Appendix B Source: Annex A, Section D. of DfEE Circular 4/98, p.16
• References