Fiona Millar writes in the Education Guardian (14.4.09) of her altercation on the radio with a former Tory politician (unnamed but obviouly true to type) who had nothing to say on public education but it was cynical. “Failing state schools “, with the implication that they were all like that, was the central mantra.
It is constantly astonishing how a combination of bat-witted ignorance and largely southern, class-ridden attachment to an unquestioning belief in the superiority of private education can close its eyes to the long, steady advance of public education over the years – the eloquently titled ‘Long Revolution’ of the social philosopher Raymond Williams. Distortions and half-truths persistently fostered by coteries of the bourgeoisie self-isolated in their mentally gated enclosures, detached from the real life of the nation, through endless repetition have become pronounced by them as facts – when they are merely artificial ‘factoids, the neat term coined by Norman Mailer.
And why did ‘county and voluntary schools schools’ in the old days of local education authorities – technically and in law ‘maintained schools’ – come to be known in the middle class parlance as ‘state schools’, the sub-text being that these were by nature inferior to private schools? The so-called ‘public schools’ and the ‘independents’ were never besmirched, were they, as a form of parasite institution, sponging on the state – and so on the backs of ordinary, honest citizens – through charitable, tax-evading status. The estimable AH (Chelly) Halsey, once Professor of Sociology at Oxford, never referred to them but as ‘commercial schools’. Pity the moniker never took on. Too near the bone of mercantile sharp practice?
The other unending faslehood is of ‘local authority control of schools’, as though the LEAs fettered the minds and activities of their schools – so far from the truth it’s laughable. In the days pre-’88 the teaching profession, burgeoning as it was in the universal system promoted by the noble 1944 Education Act, enjoyed as much freedom as the general culture, defined for schools mainly by its examination industry, allowed them. Never before in the whole of history did so many teachers enjoy so much freedom from interference upon their vocation, as they carried forward all manner of curriculum developments along with advances in the analysis and exploitation of learning processes.
All this achievement, of course, was halted in its tracks when it was ignored by the really giant myth, the one that justified the pernicious 1988 Education Act through unsubstantiated claims of school system underperformance. That myth is all that still holds the walls of the Edukremlin together, as its denizens try to hold to the mindset that continues living the lie that the ‘88 Act was necessary; they do so with less and less power of conviction, in the ofir yet unspoken acceptance that their shallow ligitimation has been rumbled. The ‘Reform’ of the Baker-Thatcherites was a big ideological con-trick. Their present successors in government know this, and they know that you and I know it, and you and I know that legions of commonsense parents, closer to their local schools than the Edukremlin can ever be, know it too.
An end to the smoke screens of myth and the trickery of myth makers! Their presence over the last twenty years has tried educationists to the limit. Prospect of another generation of such nonsense must be intolerable.
Juvenile
edu-can-do 