People's Republic of Neverland

State Education vs. the Child

Robb Johnson

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781629638119
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Essays in Education

There once was a time when teachers and communities were able to exercise democratic control over their schools. Now that power has been taken away, both centralised and privatised, under the guise of "reform." There is a forgotten history of the time before reform, and within it a bright horizon is visible, reachable only if educators and society at large can learn the lessons of the past.

Robb Johnson entered the classroom as a new teacher in the 1980s and has spent a lifetime alongside his pupils encouraging both creativity and a healthy distrust of authority. This book is both memoir and polemic, a celebration of children's innate desire to learn, share, cooperate, and play, as well as a critique of bureaucratic interference. Johnson details how we ended up with the contemporary mass education systems and why they continually fail to give children what they need. Combining practical experience as a teacher with detailed pedagogical knowledge, and a characteristic playful style, Johnson is both court chronicler and jester, imparting information and creatively admonishing the self-important figureheads of the reform agenda.

This book considers how schools and education relate to the wider society in which they are located and how they relate to the particular needs and abilities of the people who experience them. It shows that schools and education are contested spaces that need to be reclaimed from the state, and turned into places where people can grow, not up, not old, but as individuals. It offers alternative ways of running classrooms, schools, and perhaps even society.

PART ONE

A BRIEF HISTORY OF MASS EDUCATION

All You Need Is Love and Comprehensive Schools

Little Edie Annie Spinks likes the Beatles and the Kinks

Living in a council house quieter than a silent mouse

never passed eleven-plus, rides the number 13 bus

To the secondary moderns where she gets forgotten

Mum and dad work all the hours, Edie’s good at growing flowers

Edie likes to sing along to her favourite Beatles song

All you need is love, love, love

And Comprehensive Schools

Esmeralda Fortesque spends her whole life feeling blue

A lovely room, lovely home, a lovely garden all her own

She goes to such a lovely school, to learn her Latin grammar rules

How can you be lonely when you’ve got a pony?

She practises her scales for hours, she’s not allowed to pick the flowers

Mummy’s never ever there, Daddy likes the new au pair

All you need is love, love, love

And Comprehensive Schools

Every child should have the chance to learn and grow and sing and dance

It doesn’t matter where you’re from, cos you can go wherever you want

Round the corner over the moon beyond the stars it’s up to you

Whether you’re Edie Annie Spinks or Esmeralda Fortesque

All you need is love, love, love

And Comprehensive Schools

Remote Control

Let’s start with a brief history of the hundred years of education development that formed the background not only to my teaching experience but, more importantly, to the imposition of the right’s Great Education Reform Bill in 1988.

The wealthy and powerful had, of course, been educating their (usually male) children for centuries before the British state passed its first education act. Kings School in Canterbury claims to be the oldest school, having started in 597 (girls were only admitted in the 1970s), and Eton dates back to 1440. The cost of attending these fee-paying “public” schools was—and still is—far beyond the economic means of the majority of the British public. Mass education only came to be seen as an essential element of a successful modern society and economy in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Directed by the state, this was primarily education characterised by quantity rather than quality.

Compulsory attendance at schools funded by the state became law in Britain in 1870. The British state, concerned with maintaining Britain’s efficiency as an industrial power and also alarmed by the growth of autonomous working-class education projects, passed legislation—the Elementary Education Act (1870)—making it mandatory for children to attend state-run schools. Schools would teach children just enough to enable them to function as efficiently as possible as workers in British industry. As the technology became more sophisticated, British industry needed workers with greater literacy and numeracy skills, so they would be able to make as much money as possible for British industry’s bosses. Successive legislation meant state education became a reality for more and more categories of working-class children by the start of the twentieth century, effectively closing down any attempt by those within the working-class movement to organise independent schools and autonomous educational initiatives.

Prime Minister Gladstone also thought that Prussia’s educated population had played a significant part in Prussia’s victory over Austria in 1866. Throughout Europe, state education was perceived as a politicised institution intended to serve the interests of the nation state: “Society wants servile automata for its barracks and factories, and the mission of schools is to provide them”, declared Victor Serge in France in 1910, adding, “the child enters school with his intelligence growing, alert and wanting to blossom. He leaves it … stupefied”.¹

The Prussian model was also perceived as the template for the growth in mass education in the United States at the start of the twentieth century. Former New York City Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto writes, “compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table…. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant ranking on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever reintegrate into a dangerous whole”.² Gatto cites Principles of Secondary Education, written in 1918 by Alexander Inglis,³ which breaks down the purpose—the actual purpose—of modern schooling into six basic functions:

1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority.

2) The integrating function. This might well be called the “conformity function,” because its intention is to make children as alike as possible.

3) The diagnostic or directive function. School is meant to determine each student’s proper social role.

4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been “diagnosed”, children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits.

5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin’s theory of natural selection as applied to what he called “the favoured races”.

6) The propaedeutic function. The social system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed, so that government might proceed unchallenged, and corporations might never want for obedient labour.

Gatto adds that the outcome of schooling is a deliberately infantilised population: “Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the revitalising emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up”.⁴

By the middle of the twentieth century, the authority of the industrialised nation state had been seriously weakened by the eruption of two successive world wars. In 1914, conflicts within the ruling class, divided along the lines of European nation state interests, caused the slaughter attendant upon imperialism to spill back from overseas colonies onto the domestic territories and populations of Europe. The ruling class response was effectively to arm and organise the working class along nation state dividing lines. Although this diminished the working class’s capacity to think and act as an international organisation, the working classes and their political organisations were able to make significant political advances in different ways in different parts of Europe, including in those areas of the world previously controlled by European imperialism, particularly after the end of World War II.

In post-war Eastern Europe, this took the form of actually existing socialism, but that’s another story. In Britain, it led to the establishment of the welfare state and the concept of political consensus. One of the state’s primary duties was now defined as providing and running services—health, education, housing, public utilities—to meet the needs of the people. This rather cosy accord, a very British version of Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), also allowed for the continuation of institutions of privilege, particularly private schooling and private health care—doctors initially threatened strike action to oppose the creation of the National Health Service (NHS), unhappy at the prospect of having to treat the great unwashed fairly. Although major industries were nationalised and run by bosses on behalf of the perceived shared interests of government and people, there was ample opportunity for private enterprise.

This new understanding of the state’s responsibilities impacted upon the mass education it was providing. Beginning with the Education Act of 1944, there was a significant expansion of provision; the Education Act ensured free secondary schooling for all children and also raised the school leaving age to fifteen. The act called for an expansion to both nursery and higher education provision and provided schools meals and milk for all primary school children. To staff these new initiatives, a new generation of teachers needed to be trained. Many had served in the armed forces during the war, and many of them were also animated by a commitment to the aims of the welfare state, the creation of a more equal society rather than a return to the class-ridden social system that was seen as being responsible for two devastating world wars. An integral element of this new vision of mass education would be an attempt to develop a pedagogy that valued quality of education and the quality of each individual’s experience of education over the simple quantities of mass.

Alternatives and Radicals

Throughout the twentieth century, the issues of education and child development attracted the attention of radical thinkers and radical thinking around the planet. The state view of mass education as a means to instil basic skills along with its values of patriarchy, patriotism and religion was opposed by alternative voices insisting on alternative values. American anarchist Emma Goldman proclaimed:

The underlying principle of The Modern School is this: education is a process of drawing out, not of driving in…. The Modern School, then, must be libertarian. Each pupil must be left free to his true self. The main object of the school is the promotion of the harmonious development of all the faculties latent in the child”.⁵

and:

I fail to understand how parents hope that their children will ever grow up into independent, self-reliant spirits, when they strain every effort to abridge and curtail the various activities of their children, the plus in quality and character, which differentiates their off-spring from themselves, and by the virtue of which they are eminently equipped carriers of new, invigorating ideas. A young delicate tree that is being clipped and cut by the gardener in order to give it an artificial form will never reach the majestic height and the beauty it would if allowed to grow in nature and freedom.⁶

The compulsory schooling imposed upon the vast majority of children was opposed not only by polemic but by the establishment of alternative models of education. In Barcelona, Francisco Ferrer had set up the Escuela Moderna in 1904. In its prospectus he declared, “I will teach [children] not what to think but how to think”. The school was co-educational, welcomed children from all classes, refused to operate a system of rewards and punishments, and saw no need for examinations and grades. In 1911, a Ferrer school—later known as the Modern School—was opened in New York. These initiatives offered an alternative pedagogy to the mass conformity that characterised state schooling. Ferrer’s commitment to equality not uniformity actively promoted ideas of social progress and the importance of individual development.⁷

Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner asserted that the focal point of the education process ought to be the teacher’s holistic understanding of the individual child. “The true teachers and educators are not those who have learned pedagogy as the science of dealing with children, but those in whom pedagogy has awakened through understanding the human being”.⁸ The first Waldorf school opened in 1919 in Stuttgart, based upon Steiner’s ideas. Waldorf schools emphasise the importance of a holistic approach to development: “A teacher concerned with developing humans affects the students quite differently from a teacher who never thinks about such things”.⁹

Two years after the first Waldorf school opened, Scottish educator A.S. Neill started Summerhill School, in Suffolk, England. Neill’s philosophy provides a perfect articulation of a militant child-centred pedagogy:

The happiness and well-being of children depend upon the love and approval we give them. We must be on the child’s side. Being on the side of the child is giving love to the child—not possessive love—not sentimental love—just behaving to the child in such a way that the child feels you love him and approve of him…. A child is innately wise and realistic. If left to himself without adult suggestion of any kind, he will develop as far as he is capable of developing…. My own criterion of success is the ability to work joyfully and to live positively.¹⁰

Summerhill School, however, like Waldorf schools, existed outside of the state schooling received by the majority of children. But by the time Neill wrote the book Summerhill, in 1960,¹¹ the post-war welfare state’s understanding of its responsibilities toward children appeared to be enacting Bakunin’s definition of the child’s developmental rights:

It is the right of every man and woman, from birth to childhood, to complete upkeep, clothes, food, shelter, care, guidance, education (public schools, primary, secondary, higher education, artistic, industrial, and scientific), all at the expense of society.¹²

It is also interesting to note how, as successive legislation made state education a reality for more and more categories of working-class children by the start of the twentieth century, teaching increasingly attracted socially committed individuals who saw in compulsory state education opportunities for subverting the intentions of the state and promoting social progress. It was the clash between radical, progressive teachers Annie and Tom Higdon and representatives of the established order, the Reverend Eland and the school managers, at Burston village school in rural Suffolk, in 1913, that precipitated Britain’s longest running strike. Sixty-six children walked out on April 1 on a strike that lasted twenty-five years. In 1917, the daughters of Derby working-class anti-war activist, suffragette, socialist and vegetarian Alice Wheeldon, Hettie and Winnie, both trained as teachers, were arrested in front of the classes they were teaching when the state fabricated a charge of attempting to murder the British prime minister against the Wheeldon family.

Indeed, education has also attracted, albeit sometimes only temporarily, many individuals famous for their radicalism in other fields. Vincent Van Gogh worked as a teacher in Turnham Green, West London, and George Orwell taught in Hayes and Uxbridge (West London again!). In France, both Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre spent fourteen years as teachers in various lycées, while radical teacher and Delhi university professor Randhir Singh declared: “Everything around me including my politics in shambles, I sought a new foothold in life. I started teaching…. After ‘revolution-making’, teaching perhaps holds the maximum possibilities for a non-alienated life”.¹³ Songwriter Leon Rosselson worked briefly as a teacher, singer Roy Bailey, who worked with both Leon and Tony Benn, had a day job as professor of sociology (co-editing the best-selling sociology book “Radical Social Work”),¹⁴ and the 1960s pop culture “Mersey poets” Roger McGough and Adrian Henri taught French and art respectively.

The tension between radicalism and state control would become openly confrontational again in the 1960s and 1970s. The conflict between radical teachers and conservative employers, the conflict that caused the Burston strike in 1914, would resurface in the state schools of post-war welfare state England, when teachers attempted to assert the priorities of the children they taught over the remote social control function of education prioritised by the state.

Workers’ Control

The creation of the post-war welfare state and the consensus politics of the post-war decades enabled a degree of increased participation of workers’ organisations, particularly the bureaucracies of the larger industrial unions, in the processes of government. This would later translate into a confident rank-and-file tendency attempting to assert worker authority in the workplace. This was also to be a significant feature of teacher self-organisation in the 1970s. This section will look at how the increased confidence of the teaching workforce encouraged many teachers to address not only issues of their own professional well-being—successful industrial action to end the requirement to supervise school lunchtimes and National Union of Teachers (NUT) 1969 strike action in pursuit of better pay—but also to advance progressive pedagogies and, thereby, actively progressive visions of society.

The post-war consensus was constructed on a shared lived experience of recent history, where the ideology of the right had manifestly failed to meet the needs of the British people in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as failing to avoid World War II, and where the collective democratic endeavour of the people was understood to have ensured the military survival of Britain in the first half of the 1940s. The most obvious evidence of the strength of this narrative was the landslide defeat of Churchill and the Tories in the 1945 general election; it wasn’t really until his death in 1965 that the sentimentalised Churchill myth—cleverly edited and shorn of its more embarrassing realities—was able begin to develop as an active political rather than vaguely nostalgic social narrative. In 1945, however, the working class were in uniform, armed and running out of patience. There were increasingly mutinous and increasingly successful strikes within the armed forces. As the rest of Europe was having to come to terms with the successes of armed communism—whether ...