The Free School

W. Kenneth Richmond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000544831
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Sekundarschulbildung

First published in 1973, The Free School explores the roots of the educational malaise- sociological, historical, and psychological- and looks at what could be done and what is being done to free education from its rigid and hierarchical nineteenth-century organization. By placing schooling within its larger social context, the author illuminates many reasons behind the troubled situation in our secondary schools. Our mistake has been, he thinks, to confuse education (in its truest sense) with schooling. He concludes his analysis with a valuable account of the ways in which new educational ideas are being tried out in such places as Countesthorpe, Wyndham, the Parkway Program in Philadelphia, and the Open University. This book is a must read for schoolteachers and educationists.

Section II WHAT’S WRONG WITH SCHOOLING ANYWAY?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003262992-3

The unrealistic sound of these propositions is indicative, not of their utopian character, but of the strength of the forces which prevent their realization. The most effective and enduring form of warfare against liberation is the implanting of material and intellectual needs that perpetuate obsolete forms of the struggle for existence.

Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

WHAT’S WRONG WITH SCHOOLING ANYWAY?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003262992-4

1 Schooling conditions everyone to the acceptance of schooling as necessary

Of all the points in the argument, this is the one which is most difficult to get across. Far from striking us as odd, the fact that school is the only institution in which everyone is legally compelled to spend ten or more years of his life has come to seem perfectly natural. We forget that compulsion is less than 100 years old and that the leaving age was raised to eleven as recently as 1893. We forget J. S. Mill’s warning in his Essay on Liberty:

A state which dwarfs its men in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands, even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men no great thing can be accomplished. The Mischief begins when, instead of calling forth the activities and powers of individuals and bodies, it makes them work in fetters, and bids them stand aside, and does their work for them.

We forget Mrs Baker. Remember Mrs Baker? Her book Children in Chancery caused quite a stir at the time of its publication, being a blow-by-blow account of the series of legal actions, lasting from 1952 to 1962, in which she sought to establish her right to educate her children at home. Even at the time, public opinion seemed to waver between lukewarm sympathy and sheer indifference for a cause which the vast majority of parents had long since given up as hopeless. The cause itself might be just; but the man or woman who fights for it is only asking for trouble. This is the consensus view. The case of Baker v. Norfolk Education Committee is significant because, as E. G. West points out:

it shows how far we can become slaves of conformity and suppress individuality and spontaneity by our mistake of concentrating power instead of dispersing it. In reading this case one gets the distinct impression that Mrs Baker’s main shortcoming in the eyes of the local authorities was not her ‘failure’ to educate her children according to their needs but her refusal to obey official commands and to show exact equality with other parents[1].

Even the moral courage of a Socrates, it seems, is nullified by the socio-political forces embodied in the education system, Schooling creates its own norms of behaviour and those who refuse to toe the line are classed as deviants and treated accordingly. As a result, it is virtually impossible to find anyone nowadays who has not been subjected to a lengthy process of formal schooling, which means that belief in the necessity and propriety of such processing has become wellnigh universal.

We tend to have faith in the processes we are subjected to – to the extent even, as educationists have made great play of in connection with the practice of streaming, of fulfilling the prophecies made about us by these processes. (It is now generally agreed that once pupils are labelled ‘bright’ or ‘dull’ the tendency is for them to behave accordingly.) No one can deny that ‘School prepares [children] for their future in a world of organization and bureaucracy… . Punctuality, quiet, orderly work in large groups, response to orders, bells and timetables, respect for authority, even tolerance of monotony, boredom, punishment, lack of reward and regular attendance at place of work are habits to be learned in school’[2]. The end products of this process will, not unnaturally, defend it. We are schooled to accept the process of schooling as both inevitable and necessary.

Let us examine some of the conditions which make modern schooling so extraordinary. The first, compulsory attendance to the age of sixteen or beyond, in some ways represents a flat denial of the concept of children’s rights. The notion, both popular and legal, that children have rights which need to be respected and protected is of fairly recent origin. According to one view, there was no such thing as ‘childhood’ until late medieval times: it was only when infant mortality rates declined that parents could afford the luxury of loving their little ones. As for ‘adolescence’, it is almost certainly an invention of nineteenth-century industrial urbanization. The Factory Acts designed to mitigate the evils brought about by the exploitation of cheap child labour were the precursors of the Education Acts ‘which invoked the principle of compulsory school attendance. Initially, government intervention was intended to be protective: in the long run, its effects have been to delay the assumption of adult roles to the point where protection becomes overprotective. By degrees, the patria potestas which enabled the Roman father to treat his sons and daughters as personal possessions, if necessary as chattels, has been transferred in a large measure to the state. On the whole, the imposition of bureaucratic controls has ensured that children are cared for more humanely than used to be the case and that they are not exposed to ill-treatment from brutal parents or unscrupulous employers. In this sense, the gain in children’s ‘rights’ has been enormous: in another, their status has arguably been diminished. There is, for example, no place now for the kind of autonomy enjoyed by schoolboys in less paternalistic days.

The eighteenth-century public school has been described as an enormous society of boys between the ages of eight and eighteen governed by an unwritten code of its own making, an almost free republic of 100, 200 or 500 members. The traditional view was that outside lessons schoolboys had the right to freedom from adult control. A boy had to attend at meals, prayers, classes and bedtime, otherwise he could go where he liked and do as he pleased.

As a result of their freedom over many years, Victorian youth in all the public schools inherited a code of rights covering the use of its leisure, whether it was in sport or games, fighting, fishing, hunting, fagging or dramatics. Both juniors and prefects defended these rights against all corners, even the headmaster[3].

It is true that there was never any question of the nineteenth-century elementary schools being allowed to develop as little republics, for they were bound to a code which effectively ruled out anything in the way of pupil participation, but the gradual encroachment on the public schoolboy’s right to run his own affairs must be seen as part of a general movement in the direction of total regulation of the learner’s behaviour. The paternalistic policy, of course, justifies itself as being in the pupil’s own interests. It depends on the belief that adults know best what is good for children.

Even in the relaxed atmosphere of the nursery school it has been estimated that under-fives are constrained (i.e. forcibly prevented from doing as they please) ten times per hour. The built-in constraints of the average day school are a good deal more severe, and continue until pupils reach the age when they are capable of having children of their own, of voting, of fighting and dying for their country. From California to Kiev, schoolchildren are required to ‘freeze’ on the spot once the teacher’s whistle blows, then form into straight lines and march into school like so many clockwork mice. Once inside, freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom of assembly and freedom of thought (despite disclaimers to the contrary) are denied to them. Any attempt on the pupils’ part to organize themselves as a pressure group is ruthlessly stamped out, and anyone who aspires to the role of a juvenile shop steward is immediately singled out as a troublemaker and dealt with accordingly. As the Little Red School Book rightly noted, ‘In most schools corridors are places for chasing children out of or through… . Most playgrounds look like car parks or prison exercise yards.… Most classrooms look like waiting rooms.’

The waiting room simile is apt because it underlines another peculiar condition of modern schooling, the segregation of the young from the rest of society. It would be an exaggeration to say that the child is somehow transformed by the separation from his family and the initiation into the impersonal routines of the classroom. Though it is true that the pupil has to spend a large proportion of his waking hours in school, school can hardly be called a ‘total’ institution.

The school itself, as custodian of even larger numbers of people, for increasing proportions of their life span, for an ever-growing number of hours and interests, is well on the way to joining armies, prisons and insane asylums as one of society’s total institutions. Strictly speaking, total institutions are those which totally control the lives of their inmates, and even armies, prisons and asylums do this completely only for certain inmates.

Only vacationless boarding schools could strictly be called total institutions, but perhaps the strict definition gives too much attention to the body and too little to the mind and spirit. Schools pervade the lives and personalities of their students in powerful and insidious ways and have become the dominant institution in the lives of modern men during their most formative years[4].

Statements of this sort are such a blend of overstatement and truth that it is possible to agree whole-heartedly with parts of them and disagree violently with others. To add to the confusion, sociologists and psychologists are by no means unanimous in their views about the nature of so-called ‘total’ institutions or about their effectiveness in forming people’s personalities. In general, there is little doubt that public schools do succeed in stamping pupils with a recognizable brand image of ‘character’ and that orphanage children exhibit personality traits quite different from those reared at home. There is no doubt, either, that the scope^* and pervasiveness† of the school’s sway over the lives of its pupils have steadily widened. The gradual assumption of responsibilities formerly discharged by parents – school meals, medical care, school uniform and the rest – is but one aspect of this increase in the exercise of normative controls. Another, less obviously noticeable, is the erosion of the learner’s responsibility for making his own decisions and his own mistakes. As we have just seen, it used to be understood that the teacher’s job was only to teach: today his role could be described as all-purpose.

*‘scope – the number of activities in which members are jointly involved.’ † ‘pervasiveness – the range of activities both within and outside the school for which it sets standards and has clear expectations’ Frank Musgrove op. cit. p. 21.

However, the main reasons for thinking that the segregation of schoolchildren from the rest of society is an artificial contrivance are really quite different. That the hiving-off has inevitably led to the formation of a separatist youth culture and the phenomenon which we have come to know as the generation gap is one reason. Another is that the gradual lengthening of school life has kept older pupils in a state of dependence, this at a time when the trend towards early physical and emotional maturity is more pronounced than it has ever been. Lastly, and most damningly, the conclusion to which we are driven must be that whatever the ostensible motives for requiring full-time attendance to the age of sixteen, the undeclared purpose is simply to keep young people off the streets because there is nowhere else for them to go. In the many mansions of modern society the school serves as an antechamber. The irony of it is that whereas the society they will enter is permissive, schooling remains authoritarian. For some, the protracted period of waiting is so tiresome that they vote with their feet and become dropouts. For others, the risks involved in trying to escape are too great and the only refuge to be found is in daydreaming. For most, of course, the response is one of cheerful acceptance: going to school, they say, is ‘not so bad’ after all and there is no point in trying to make it out to be worse than it is. To remain in statu pupillari is not the same as serving a prison sentence, (even if it does feel like it to some teenagers).

Schooling constrains its subjects physically and mentally; it isolates them from society; and thirdly it continuously monitors their performance. In no other institution is the regulation and control of human behaviour applied so consistently or so rigorously. The state of affairs in the English grammar school described by Lacey, King et al [5], in which too many pupils compete for too few rewards, exemplifies in an acute form a general characteristic of schooling. It is a process in which, in the nature of things, there are few winners and many losers. It is not merely the disadvantaged child who finds himself in a learning situation which is essentially punitive. And if this sounds like a sweeping generalization how are we to explain away the preoccupation of educational theorists (and teachers) with problems of discipline and punishment?

This process – with its threefold arms of constraint, isolation and monitoring – produces an end result which can be given in one word – compliance. The ease with which innocent minds can be moulded more or less at will, by suggestion, by intimidat...