Managing possibilities:

What English schools do to teachers and students –

and why we let them

Contents

Abstract 2
Prologue: in the library 3
Introduction: the problem of schooling 4
Chapter 1: methodology — in theory and practice 5
Chapter 2: recent history 7
Chapter 3: theories of reproduction — the 1970s and now 11
Chapter 4: assessment and examination — the ‘micro-physics of power’ 17
Chapter 5: management — the ‘endless frontier’ 22
Chapter 6: re-schooling or de-schooling? 27
Bibliography 30

1
 Institutions are to be judged by the good or harm they do to individuals.
Bertrand Russell

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it be called.

John Stuart Mill

Abstract

This report provides a critique of the English education system, using a range of
theoretical perspectives, and material from interviews with teachers as further evidence.
The argument runs as follows. The debate between progressives and traditionalists in
state education has been running since the 60s; while the former has retained rhetorical
influence in policy, the latter, in aligning with economic interests, has largely dictated the
shape of current practice. The effect is to stifle children’s, and teachers’, creativity and
agency. Explanations for this can be found in 1970s theories of cultural reproduction, and
in Foucault’s theory of ‘disciplinary institutions’. The discourse of ‘management’ provides
the illusion of choice and empowerment while in fact internalising oppression. Alternative
visions of education that present young people with the freedom to learn as they choose
would require the transformation of society as a whole.

2
Prologue: in the library

The scent of the shelves made my heart sink: a musty mosaic of shiny turquoise and matt
black spines, bold puce lettering slashed across cream covers — the once radical slants
and contrasts of now creaking prose. I silently acknowledged my prejudice against books
sold in old money. This was the Sociology of Education section, which, given the
irrelevance of the new generation of gender bending, body popping, burger baiting
anthropology to my chosen subject, I had ruefully entered. I felt like a square
archaeologist.

And then the ironies began to dawn. Is no one writing critiques of English education any
more, or are libraries no longer buying them? Which would reflect more tellingly on the
state of the education system? New literature is easy to find, however; it has titles like:
‘Assessment and Your School’, ‘Teaching the New History Curriculum’, and ‘Classroom
Management’. The British government has expounded education as its top three priorities;
but while its competence is questioned, the assumption that ‘more’, as measured by
quantitative indicators such as grades, class sizes and university admissions, is ‘better’,
goes largely unexamined. The modern debate on education seems at first glance to be all
‘how much’ and no ‘why’.

For academics to question the education system is not just to bite the hand that feeds
them, but also to examine the mould that made them. It’s not that anthropology has
sidelined education on principle; it’s just that in today’s global savannah, fat cats and
media sharks make for juicier and less challenging prey. This report, therefore, looks to
authors from a range of decades and disciplines that have asked fundamental questions
about the nature of education as it is and as it could be. Further reading has endeared me
to the humanist sentiment beneath those tasteless covers — a passion that I have
struggled to find behind the seductive photomontages of their successors.

3
Introduction: the problem of schooling

The problem is fundamental. Put twenty or more children of roughly the same age in a little room,
confine them to desks, make them wait in lines, make them behave. It is as if a secret committee,
now lost to history, had made a study of children and, having figured out what the greatest number
were least disposed to do, declared that all of them should do it. (Kidder 1989:191)

This report is a brief anthropological critique of English education. My perspective on it

comes partly from personal experience, which it may help to summarise.

Working for a development education charity a few years ago, I saw children in remote
Himalayan villages and in shacks on the Nile lined up in front of flaking blackboards,
copying diligent English into those ubiquitous two-staple exercise books. Few understood
what they were writing, let alone why. Meanwhile, the UN and international charities were
campaigning hard to ensure that all the world’s children are educated in school, with far
greater emphasis on attendance than on what is being taught1. This British model of
school education has perhaps been the country’s most prolific export. As I came to
question the appropriateness of its imposition on people with radically different cultural and
economic lives, I also began to ask questions about its impact on English children. My
formal research for this report has strengthened my previously held belief that schooling is
something we do to children, rather than for them, and that it is shaped by powerful
economic interests that alienate the young in the North and South alike.

Chapter 1 explains my methodology, covering the use of theory and approach to research.
Chapter 2 is a brief overview of major policy changes in state education in the last 30
years, a background for the rest of my argument. Chapter 3 evaluates some of the critical
perspectives of the 70s — principally, correspondence theory and the ‘hidden curriculum’.
It relates these theories to ethnographic evidence, and asks how useful they are in
explaining inequality in 2002. Chapter 4 is an analysis of assessment and evaluation in
schools from Foucauldian and postmodern perspectives, which argues that they inhibit
children both by narrowing their horizons and through their sheer inefficiency. Chapter 5
looks at metaphors of management in the modern workplace, and at the way these
discourses have shaped education policy and the experience of schooling. Finally,
Chapter 6 asks what may be possible in education if we explore radical alternatives, and
what that might mean for wider society.

This is a partial and impressionistic snapshot of the English school system and the
economic and political forces behind it. I am more concerned to provoke the reader into
original thought than to garner agreement for my particular views. What I believe this
debate needs above all is a flood of engaged creativity that does justice to our sense of
what is possible for children. Heated disagreement would be infinitely preferable to our
current lethargic seesawing between complacency and resignation.

1
For example, see Oxfam’s ‘Education Now’ site: http://www.oxfam.org.uk/educationnow , and the following
UNESCO document: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001200/120058e.pdf

4
Chapter 1: methodology — in theory and practice

If the development and testing of theory is to be pursued effectively, the research focus has to be
narrow. Attempts to provide a rounded and detailed description of the institution or behaviour
under study, or to integrate macro and micro levels of analysis, are its seems to me,
counterproductive as far as theorizing is concerned. (Hammersley 1990:108)

I start with this quotation as the antithesis to my approach, which is in Hammersley’s terms
broad, integrationist, and counterproductive. I examine theories of education not to
validate or negate them but to add to the collage of my argument. It is precisely the
favouring of theory over hazy reality, and of analysis over understanding, that I find most
disheartening in some of the recent literature on ethnography in school contexts. Looking
for static, law-like theories to explain inequalities between schools and children raises
ethical questions, since it implies inevitability on the one hand, and disregard for the
agency and awareness of individual pupils and teachers on the other. Wearing an
anthropologist’s hat does not give access to a realm of understanding denied to the
humble teachers under study, nor need it confer a sense of dramatic irony that is likely to
backfire:

It is at least anomalous or arrogant when the teacher is given a lesson in what she is actually doing
in her classroom by a researcher visiting for a few afternoons and apparently making up methods
as he or she goes along. (Shipman 1985:278)

My ethnographic research consists of 10 extended recorded interviews with English

schoolteachers from different schools, primary and secondary (including state, private and
Steiner schools), in the first months of 2002, plus other less formal conversations. This is
far too small a number to be representative of the teaching profession; yet the near
unanimity of opinion on many issues led me to believe that much of what I heard would be
reflected in a wider survey. Cold-calling on schools proved remarkably unsuccessful in
getting interviews; my impression was that there is a whole stratum of teachers who are
unwilling to discuss their view of the education system, and their role within it, outside of
their own social network. Instead, I contacted friends of friends, who were generally very
willing. My fear was that people I interviewed this way would to some extent reflect my
own opinion — in practice, I felt that most of these connections were so tenuous that they
did not greatly influence the range of opinion I canvassed. Out of respect for those I
interviewed who did not want their comments to be identified, I have used first names and
general location only. They are written in a different font to distinguish them from textual
quotations.

My first question to each teacher was, ‘What do you understand by the idea of ‘young
people’s potential?’. There were two reasons behind this. First, ‘achieving potential’ is a
popular phrase in current Department for Education and Skills literature2, which it seems to
me is open to various interpretations; secondly, I hoped the question, being unusual,
would illicit an unmediated response from teachers about their perceptions of the young
people they teach, and their own motivation. Other questions focussed on their
relationship with the school and the education system as a whole, and their view of the
National Curriculum, new regimes of monitoring and assessment and other major policy
2
Notably in the preface to the 2001 DfES publication, Education and Skills: Delivering Results.

5
changes over the last 30 years. I also asked how they felt education would ideally be
organised. By asking about my particular areas of interest I was leading the interviews to
some extent; yet most of my questions were open-ended, and the responses seemed
unconstrained. The most noticeable absence in this report is young people themselves. It
looks at how their voices are lost in the dialogue between teachers and the state – but I
felt it would be beyond the remit of this work to attempt to represent them myself.

My own educational background left me both highly qualified and deeply sceptical of the
value of what I had been taught. This bias is inevitably reflected in this report, which is
more of a tempered polemic than an open-handed assessment. My hope and belief is that
I have not twisted the words of my interviewees to serve my ends.

6
Chapter 2: recent history

In this chapter, I look at some of the major themes in educational policy and its change in
England over the last 35 years. I will concentrate on the progressive / traditionalist divide,
and on changes to organisational structure.

Education in the 60s and 70s and its contested legacy remain the subject of whimsy and
vitriol — hailed by some as a golden age, and by others as the start of a catastrophic
national moral decline. The Plowden Report of 1967, in Roy Lowe’s words, ‘marked the
high-water mark of progressivism in English primary education’ (1997:50). Its central
concept was ‘child-centred development’ in primary schools:

A school is not merely a teaching shop... It is a community in which children learn to live first and
foremost as children and not as future adults... It lays special stress on individual discovery, on first
hand experience and on opportunities for creative work. It insists that knowledge does not fall into
separate compartments and that work and play are not opposite but complementary. A child
brought up on such as atmosphere at all stages of his education has some hope of becoming a
balanced and mature adult and of being able to live in, to contribute to, and to look critically at the
society of which he forms a part. (Department of Education and Skills, 1967)

The child is seen here not as a malleable homunculus but as a being in his or her own
right, able to develop in his or her own time if given the appropriate surroundings and
support. The child’s world is intrinsically valid and precious, rather than characterised by
the lack of adult understandings and motivations. This draws, though only modestly, on
the radical tradition of Rousseau, who in his account of an ideal education, Emile, argues
that (male) child should be left to come to his own understanding of and relationship with
the world, with as little interference as possible from his parents and teachers (Rorty
2000:248). It is more strongly influenced by the psychologist Jean Piaget and his theories
of child development in the 1920s. He argued that children progress through various
superseding constructions of the world on the basis of their own experiences and
experiments (Gardner 1991:27). The metaphors here are intrinsic and biological, as
summarised by Nixon et al.:

There is a distinctive teleology underlying such a [child-centred] conception of education.

Individuals grow and develop in a way which unfolds their inner potential. The task of education is
to foster that potential so as to realize the powers and capacities of each individual. (1996:38)

Young people here are part of the natural rather than the cultural realm, and it is only
through ‘natural’ behaviour that their potential is realised, and they can become mature
enough to become useful members of society. Seeking to direct this growth or determine
its ends can only result in damage to the child. It is essentially an individualistic
philosophy: learning is a personal journey, and people contribute to society by bringing
their unique qualities to it, rather then by fitting into what is already there; critically
evaluating, not conforming.

Much freer and more creative.., the discovery thing of the 60s and 70s, that is
what my children had, and it really seemed to suit them - it was more
enjoyable and quite anarchic, which they thrived upon, although in that

7
anarchy I do think that some children fell through the net - but it does seem
like a golden age to me. (Nicola, London)

Despite the strong impression left by this philosophy and the schools that adopted it, Lowe
argues, the HMI inspectorate report of 1978 showed ‘how little primary schools had
progressed beyond the heavily didactic methods and restricted curriculum of the
elementary schools’ (1997:53). The Oracle research project carried out in primary schools
in Leicester between 1975 and 1980 suggested:

The promotion of enquiry or discovery based learning appeared almost non-existent... There was
little evidence of any fundamental shift, either in the content of education or in the procedures of
teaching and learning. (in Lowe 1997:53)

Whatever the extent of implementation of the Plowden report, its conservative and
traditionalist critics regarded it as a serious threat.

There was a cynicism about the academic side of teaching, of people who
wrote and talked and thought about education. The Black Papers went right
against Plowden. (Lester, Isle of Wight)

In the 1969 Black Papers, a collection of traditionalist essays on schooling, CWJ Crawford
argued:

To have strict silence and rigid discipline with much mindless learning by repetition is unnecessary
and undesirable, but to go to the other extreme is, if anything, rather worse.... it would seem to be
a negation of commonsense if one were to deny the right of a cultivated adult to pass on his
knowledge in anything like a didactic way’ (in Lowe 1997:52).

This is a fundamentally opposed position to that of the progressives. Knowledge is ‘passed

on’ rather than discovered, and the prospect of giving children free reign to learn is seen
as ‘rather worse’ than a draconian traditional regime. The right of the child in education is
substituted for the right of the teacher to teach how and what he or she likes — as long as
it is seen to be ‘cultivated’. Cultural imprinting is here privileged over ‘natural’
development, process over progress; the metaphor for children is the ‘blank slate’. The
Black Papers also called for a return to the ‘three Rs’ as the basis for primary education,
the goal being that they ‘should be learned as soon as possible’ (Lowe 1997:52). The
tension between these positions is still reflected in the current debate; it is the
traditionalists, I now argue, that have had the most impact on policy.

Since the 70s there has been a significant trend towards the centralisation of the
curriculum. The Assessment of Performance Unit was created in 1975, the first move of
which was to require that all local authorities report on the curricula followed in their
schools, leading towards the establishment of a common core of subjects (Lowe 1997:53).
This culminated in the Education Reform Act of 1988, which established a National
Curriculum under the direct authority of the Secretary of State for Education, (Lowe
1997:54). This move was linked to an increasingly explicit demand by government that
education be linked to future employment — a call that grew louder during the financial
downturn of the mid 70s, and continued during the Thatcher government of the 80s:

8
It is vital that schools should always remember that preparation for working life is one of their
principal functions. The economic stresses of our time and the pressures of international
competition make it more necessary than ever before... (Better Schools, DES 1985:15)

This was an entirely new conception of education — from personal growth to economic
growth. The paper continues, ‘our focus must be on the strategic questions of the content,
shape and purpose of the education system and absolutely central to that is the
curriculum’. This pseudo-military language reflected a desire to shape children into
successful contributors to the global marketplace. The government believed that strict
guidelines as to what children were to learn and when would enable more effective
assessment and monitoring, instigating nationwide testing for all children at ages 7, 11, 14
and 16 (Nixon et al. 1996:2). This in turn would ensure both equal opportunity for all, and a
common cultural heritage.

Another parallel change was in the power structure of the school system. In the post-war
period, school governing bodies were largely token institutions with little direct authority
over the running of school affairs (Lowe, 1997:141). Following a series of reforms by the
Conservative government during the 80s, the Education Reform Act required that
governing bodies, now with substantial parental representation, control admission,
guarantee equality of presentation in political issues within the school, ensure a collective
daily act of Christian worship, promote ‘family values’ within sex education, hire and fire
staff, and take responsibility for the school budget (Lowe 1997:141). Governing bodies
were also given the power to initiate a consultation and vote on attaining Grant Maintained
status, meaning that the school opts out of local authority control with a substantial bonus
from central government. The result has been that the running of schools has been
progressively taken out of the hands of teachers.

The policy of centralisation has been complimented by the language of ‘choice’. The new
Conservative administration of 1992 published a White Paper, Choice and Diversity, which
encouraged schools to specialise:

‘The reality is that children have different needs. The provision of education should be geared
more to local circumstances and individual needs: hence our commitment to diversity in education.’
(Diversity and Choice, Department of Education, 1992:3-4)

This opened up the way for selection through parents’ choice of school, rather than as
previously through the 11-plus examinations; instead of children taking entrance exams,
their parents buy houses in middle class areas that poorer parents cannot afford to live in.
This trend has continued under the New Labour administration, which has set a target for
half of all comprehensives to become specialist schools.

Finally, under the 1992 act the role of school inspections was transferred to OFSTED, a
‘non-ministerial government department’3. They currently have the power of inspection
over schools, LEAs, nurseries and youth services. They have the power to demand
schools take remedial action if they deem schools to be failing, and ultimately to demand
their closure.
3
See www.ofsted.gov.uk

9
In summary, the past 30 years has seen a radical shift in control over education away from
teachers and local authorities, and towards the state, the Department for Education and
Skills (DfES), school governors and parents. At the same time, ideas about teaching have
changed from intrinsic and child-centred to external and economy-centred. The following
chapters examine the significance of these shifts in power and methodology, and analyse
the forces behind them.

10
Chapter 3: theories of reproduction — the 1970s and now

How is it that, after over a century of state education, the circle of poor school attainment
and poverty remains largely intact? In this chapter, I examine the arguments of those who,
in the Marxist tradition of the 1970s, argue that our current system of education inevitably
reproduces inequality, such as Bowles and Gintis, Ronald Dore, Pierre Bourdieu and Paul
Willis. Looking at their arguments in the light of recent government statements, I will
suggest that their theories are still relevant to the situation in the early 21st century, and
that the government’s commitment to equality in education contradicts with their more
fundamental commitment to maintaining an economic system that is inherently divisive.

Current Labour politicians and officials from the Department for Education and Skills
(DfES) claim, in accordance with reformist governments since the turn of the 20th century,
that they are actively promoting equality of pupils’ opportunity and attainment4. They
believe that to do so is essential in tackling the massive income equalities between rich
and poor — yet their own statistics suggest that their efforts so far have largely failed:

There is a demonstrable link between poverty and underachievement. While two-thirds of pupils in
schools in more prosperous areas get 5 good GCSEs, only a fifth in schools with the poorest
intake achieve the same. (DfES 2001)

A report in 2001 by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation also concludes that recent
educational initiatives have not tackled this problem:

Disadvantaged families in Britain are benefiting from rising standards in schools and falling
unemployment. But there has been no corresponding reduction in income or health inequalities,
according to the latest available statistics...The 1998/9 figures show no reduction in the 4 million
children living in households with less than half the national average net income (after allowing for
housing costs).5

Traditional Marxism argues that the inequalities between the middle and working classes
are reproduced physically through the infrastructure of capitalist society, and culturally
through its ideological superstructure. Althusser adds that it is not enough to reproduce the
means of production — the state must also reproduce the relations of production (1984:6).
Influenced by this position, Bowles and Gintis developed ‘correspondence theory’, which
states that the school reproduces social inequalities because it mirrors systemic economic
inequalities:

Like the division of labour in the capitalist enterprise, the educational system is a finely
graded hierarchy of authority and control in which competition rather than co-operation
governs the relations among participants, and an external reward system — wages in the
case of the economy and grades in the case of schools — holds sway (1981:47).

In other words, the school is moulded and determined by the hierarchical and
undemocratic nature of capitalist production in wider society; grades are a currency that
4
One of the DfES’s key commitments is to ‘narrow the attainment gap’ between children from privileged and
less privileged backgrounds. See Education and Skills: Delivering Results, DfES, 2001
5
See http://www.jrf.orp.uk/pressroom/releases/111200.asp

11
buys access to well-paid and secure employment. Given that schools are asked to prepare
young people for life in the working world, this correspondence is inevitable.

According to this analysis, the stated efforts of government to narrow the income gap
through increase the general level of educational attainment among young people is
doomed to failure. The labour market demands that qualifications act as a system for
differentiating the minority who will gain elite jobs from the majority who must take up
lower-paid and often tedious jobs. Employers are looking for the highest achieving
percentiles to take up the better-paid positions, not for more qualifications as such.
Egalitarian measures, like the establishment of comprehensive schools in the mid 60s to
replace the traditional hierarchical system of grammar and secondary modern schools,
have not addressed this underlying systemic inequality. The more young people are
encouraged, therefore, to take higher-level examinations, the more employers look for
those with even higher and rarer certificates as proof of their relative merit. This is what
Ronald Dore calls ‘the qualification-escalation ratchet’ (1976:5): the more young people
aspire to ‘good’ jobs, the more oversubscribed they become. Broadening access to
educational provision heightens competition, but does not tackle the division of labour in
the marketplace, and the corresponding difference in income and status.

The government’s parallel commitment, to create a meritocratic job market by broadening

educational access and making better jobs available to poorer children, also meets
resistance. Middle-class parents are prepared to pay premiums to move to the catchment
areas of state schools that top the league tables — or to educate their children privately —
to maintain the grade differential.

I’m dead against league tables. What you can tell is what kinds of children
attend the schools. Are they middle class? Are they working class? You can tell
that. (Belinda, Havant)

The universities have also been drawn into this process, becoming another mountain for
young people to climb in the hope of differentiating themselves from the majority, and one
where the declining amount of state support for students means that the option of further
study becomes much more accessible to the children of richer parents. Again, the
government’s own research confirms this:

Studies have shown that family attitudes to learning, play an important role in determining success,
with 73% of 18-year-olds from professional families entering higher education, compared with 17%
of those from less privileged backgrounds. (DfES 2001)

Teachers’ concern arises from their having been given two contradictory mandates: for
society, to provide young people with a broad and balanced education, regardless of
background; for the economy, to run them through an educational Nautilus machine
designed to separate them in accordance with the facility with which they have learned to
pass examinations — and generally along class lines.

Education is the primary way of social ranking in this country. Blair’s a prime
example – he didn’t send his kids to a local school because it didn’t meet up
with his expectations. (Lester, Isle of Wight)

12
The introduction of the National Curriculum, rather than working to level standards, has
further swung the balance in favour of differentiation by increasing the emphasis on test
performance, and therefore on competition, rather than on co-operation and liberal values
(Nixon et al. 1996:11-12). But the drive to open up educational opportunity has ensured
that is no simple correspondence between school and market. Inequality is reproduced
only through a protracted and increasingly expensive battle between employers and
wealthy parents who want segregation, and teachers and civil society, whose stated aim is
equality of opportunity. In an attempt to incorporate and explain this conflict of agendas,
Bowles and Gintis have built into their existing argument the concept of different ‘sites of
social practice’. The effect of progressive attitudes in education policy, therefore,
represents a transportation of a distributive practice from the relatively egalitarian site of
the liberal state into the hierarchical site of the economy (1981:49). This explanation may
be conceptually neat, but it does not in itself provide a psychologically satisfactory
explanation of why teachers and the poor continue to lose out in this conflict, or why the
school system has proved so ineffectual in bringing about social change.

Clues to this failure can be found in the language and context the government cites in
promoting equality through the education system:

There is now wide acceptance that to build an economy that will continue our success in the global
market place we will need an even belier educated and more highly skilled workforce. Equally
importantly, to build a fair and inclusive society everyone-must have the opportunity to realise their
full potential. The work of the new Department for Education and Skills is central to achieving both
of those aims. (DfES 2001)

As Stuart Hall points out (1981:7), there is a crucial difference between ‘equality’ and
equality of opportunity’. In committing itself to the latter, the government subtly privileges
economic motives over social ones. The pressure of external competition is used here as
a justification for the system of competitive qualification and the ratchet effect; there is no
acknowledgement, however, of its internal contradictions. ‘Potential’ is used in an
ambiguous way: it is aspirational, without being defined as either innate self-realisation
(the progressive aim) or achieving economic success (the traditionalist aim) — an
ambiguity which is felt by teachers:

They don’t know what the options are, so they don’t know what their potential
is... It’s all about jobs, in the end, isn’t it? It is about what they’re going to do
with their lives. (Jenny, London)

The DfES passage talks of building a ‘fair and inclusive society’ in order for young people
to ‘realise their full potential’, thereby using the language of the progressive position; yet
this is set in the context of the undisputed need for international competitiveness and a
highly trained workforce. This is a rhetorical elision between two conflicting perspectives
under the unifying principle of economic growth, which promises to satisfy liberal demands
for equality within the framework of the capitalist economy. Rather than seeking to
redistribute wealth, the government impresses on the teaching profession and young
people the necessity of simply producing more. Michael Apple describes this process in
terms of competing ideologies:

13
By integrating varied ideological elements from differing and often contending groups around its
own unifying principles, consensus can be gained and the sense that practices based on these
hegemonic principles actually help these contending groups can be maintained. (Apple 1995:27)

In practice economic growth primarily benefits the owners of capital, thereby further
increasing the income gap between rich and poor, yet the ideological consensus achieved
through this elision justifies the maintenance of the capitalist structure.

A second aspect of Bowles and Gintis’ theory provides a further explanation as to how
young people are psychologically prepared for acceptance of this structure. They argue
that it is the form of school life, quite apart from its content, that educates young people in
practices and dispositions that prepare them for an unequal working world (1981:46). Dore
among others calls this the ‘hidden curriculum’:

At least those who get the certificates and the jobs will have been well prepared, then.... They will
have learned the virtues of punctuality, regularity, hard work, conformity to regulation, obedience to
the instructions of superiors. (1976:11)

This perspective sees the process of schooling as a ritual where the meaning is not in the
content, but in the performance. Children are ordered to attend school, often against their
will, for 7 hours a day, 5 days a week, for at least 12 years; whether they succeed or fail,
they will be accustomed to spending a full working week doing what they are told. Meighan
argues that the first and most important thing children learn is boredom:

We learn reading and boredom, writing and boredom, arithmetic and boredom, and so on
according to the curriculum, till in the end it is quite certain you can put us to the most boring job
there is and we’ll endure it. (1981:61)

One teacher justified the value of this lesson to me in everyday terms:

Life is full of things you don’t want to do. I mean, there are loads of things
around the house I hate doing - but because I been trained to do things I don’t
want to do, I just grit my teeth and get on with it. (Belinda, Havant)

The hidden curriculum may accustom all students to boredom and obedience, ready for a
life of employment, but there is also a differentiating mechanism at work. Bourdieu and
Passeron argue that this depends on their level of engagement with the ‘magisterial
language’ of stylised, critical detachment used by teachers and the school as a whole – a
language that is the natural property of elite society (1990:119). This language, they
argue, comes more naturally to middle-class children whose parents have raised them
within this idiom, and far less so to working-class children, who are required to adopt and
be examined within a form of discourse that is not their own. The school thereby
‘consecrates and helps to perpetuate inter-class linguistic differences’ (1990:127). The
academic discourse of comprehensive schooling therefore disposes working-class
children to fail from the start.

14
Paul Willis goes further, arguing that children, faced with the prescriptiveness of
compulsory schooling, adopt different coping strategies, leading to the formation of
separate subcultures. His ethnographic research with one group of boys in a midlands
comprehensive, who he calls ‘the lads’, attempts to show that their resistance to authority
and flouting of the regulations and principles of the school in fact acts as preparation for
employment in the factory:

They [shop-floor workers] exercise their abilities and seek enjoyment in activity, even where most
controlled by others. Paradoxically, they thread through the dead experience of work a living
culture which is far from a simple reflex of defeat. This is the same fundamental taking hold of an
alienating situation that one finds in counter-school culture and its attempt to weave a tapestry of
interest and diversion through the dry institutional text. (1980:52)

Willis’ conversations with the boys show how they are bound together in a common culture
through dissent, rough play and violence, staving off the boredom of institutional life
through the excitement of disobedience (1980:34). It is in this solidarity of resistance that
they develop a sense of self- worth and superiority over those boys who co-operate with
the functions of the school. Opposed to the academic principles of the school, they come
to take pride in the manual, and the prospect of factory work, arduous and meaningless as
it may be, at least provides for a sense of masculine prowess. The relations of labour are
reproduced as the underlying economic structure is mediated through the level of culture,
at which point it is appropriated and celebrated by the lads (1980:173-4). The process,
however, relies on their consent, and thereby has potential for resistance, and even radical
subversion.

The point of difference between Bourdieu and Willis is that whereas Bourdieu sees power
in the form of ‘cultural capital’ deriving solely from the language and hierarchy of the
school, Willis sees it also deriving from the ‘conflictual creativity of interaction-based
agency’ (Collins 1993:134) The implication is that the ‘hidden curriculum’ is dialectical and
volatile, rather than simply determining. George Marcus is right to point out in his critique
of Willis that he ‘develops ethnographic representations of working class experience to
refer to it in a way that serves his theoretical exposition’ (1986:184) – the lads become
symbolic heroes who are presented as the embodiment of a ‘working class critical theory’
(ibid). Yet despite his framing of the boys’ experience within a Marxist framework that is
not their own, Willis also demonstrates that in an analysis of the relation between
education and class inequality, young people’s senses of self-worth and belonging
deserve to be studied alongside the brute facts of income distribution in assessing quality
of life. Not to do so is to fall into the reductionist economic perspective that these theorists
are criticising.

This chapter has sought to demonstrate that these theories of the reproduction of
inequality from the 1970s retain much of their explanatory force. Yet since that time many
of the central structures of the society they describe – class, management vs. industry,
manual vs. mental – have shifted, or been undermined. The decline of manufacturing
industry and the casualisation of labour has partially eroded shop-floor culture, and also
the sense of the job-for-life in management. Mass media entertainment has at the same
time reduced the distance between the cultural worlds of children from opposite economic
backgrounds. The linear hierarchy of elite jobs along class lines has branched out – with

15
new and lucrative opportunities to be found for some, regardless of class, in fields such as
entertainment, sport and journalism. The counter-cultures that Willis describes have
increasingly been commodified, and sold back to consumers as simulacra of identity. The
‘magisterial language’ described by Bourdieu provides less security in a modern globalised
marketplace that increasingly values the sheer accumulative power of capital alone.
Inequality may no longer be tied so closely to traditional class identity, but it is nonetheless
real, and the school system remains its ally. In the next chapter, I look at assessment and
examination, arguing that Foucault’s theory of ‘disciplinary technologies’ provides a deeper
explanation of how students and teachers submit to a hierarchical school system.

16
Chapter 4: assessment and examination – the ‘micro-physics’ of power

When I asked teachers for their views on current programmes of assessment and
examination in schools, their answers ranged in tone from uneasy ambivalence to outright
hostility; the introduction of the National Curriculum and assessed ‘key stages’, as
described in chapter 2, has become a dominant feature of their working lives. In this
chapter I question what the aims and outcomes of testing are on young people, setting
teachers’ concerns within a theoretical framework. I first look at Foucault, arguing that he
develops the ‘hidden curriculum’ thesis by linking the curriculum and knowledge to power
and modernity. I then evaluate Hartley’s argument that assessment is moving towards
‘authentic testing’ in response to postmodern, post-Fordist trends. I look at Illich and
Gardner’s contention that assessment-centred schooling creates dependency, and in
going against young people’s natural ways of learning, is highly inefficient. In conclusion, I
suggest that young people’s opinions and experiences are ignored in favour of a narrow
instrumentalism that robs them of the very creativity and opportunity it purports to offer.

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault argues that institutions such as prisons, the
army and schools exert strong ‘normalising’ pressures on their human subjects, regulating
them into discipline, obedience and conformity. His sub-title, The Birth of the Prison,
serves as a metaphor for all of these ‘carcerial’ institutions. (1991:293). Among the
concepts critical to education are ‘docile bodies’, ‘examination’ and the ‘case history’ –
together they show how the inequalities and disciplines of the economic order are not
reflected among students, but systematically produced. James Marshall argues that
Foucault’s critique of disciplinary institutions derives from a wider project:

His philosophical project is to investigate the ways in which discourses and practices have
transformed human beings into subjects of a particular kind. It is important to note that for him,
‘subject’ is systematically ambiguous; it means both being tied to someone else by control and
dependence, and being tied to one’s own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. (Marshall,
1990:14)

Foucault is talking about a transformation of the subject as part of a new and modern
conception of statehood; through bodily control and submission to prescribed practice
comes a new sense of identity – the body becomes the path to the soul:

A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved.... It was a question not of
treating the body, en masse, ‘wholesale’, as if it were an indissociable unity, but of working it
‘retail’, individually; of exercising upon it a subtle coercion, of obtaining holds upon it at the level of
the mechanism itself. (Foucault 1991:136-7)

The principle of engendering obedience and specific utility through unquestioned adhesion
to minor details of movement has been crucial to military training for centuries. In schools,
students are increasingly subject to this ‘infinitesimal’ discipline, with the National
Curriculum as the archetype:

Now, I know what I’m doing in five weeks’ time, six weeks’ time - I can tell you
what I’m doing in the third week of the Autumn term, because I’ve got my
whoLe year Learning programme... More and more focus on key skills, fulfilling

17
Little small pieces of information - they learn this, you teach them that, they
learn it, they’ve done it. You’re not free, time’s constrained. Everything’s been
segmented and broken up. (Francis, Isle of Wight)

Children and teachers are doubly ‘subjected’ here: bodily, through timetabled attendance
and, for the children, the direction to sit, listen and behave; mentally, through the
segmentation of knowledge into measured parcels – all in accordance with a national
programme:

Now everything’s very rigid. Everyone’s doing the same thing - you go to a
school down the road, they’ve got the same displays you’ve got up. (Margaret,
Isle of Wight)

In practice, it’s [the National Curriculum] too prescriptive.... The range of

knowledge is so vast, who’s to say what’s important and what’s not? (Helen,
Isle of Wight)

Teachers and pupils no longer have any substantial say over what is taught in the
classroom, which is now the preserve of centralised authorities; they are no longer the
judges of ‘what’s important and what’s not’. Even the emotional and spiritual lives of
students do not escape ‘subjectification’:

In their March 1994 discussion paper on spiritual, moral, social and cultural
development OFSTED seeks to provide guidance on how we might understand
and define each of these critical areas of personal development and formulate
outcomes for each. (Inman and Buck, 1995:11)

Even in the most personal and incalculable areas of thought and belief, teachers are
increasingly charged with delivering the curriculum, and students with meeting the
appointed targets at the appointed time. This allows for efficient assessment and
surveillance at local and national level – what Foucault calls a ‘micro-physics’ of power (1
991:149) – that seeks measurable levels of discipline and achievement in body, mind and
soul.

Every teacher I interviewed attested to the importance of assessment; yet all believed that
assessment should be a matter for teachers, pupils and parents:

The key to assessment is observation. If I can to sit back and observe the class
working, and allow myself to be uncritical, non-judgemental, and really
observe, what is this child doing - then I get a good picture of how they’re
progressing, what their weaknesses are, what they’re stuck with.... Comparing
A to B doesn’t help very much. (Mark, Lancaster)

This is a relational form of assessment, situated in the knowledge and trust between
teacher and pupil. What he rejects is ‘normalising’ assessment: the quantified and
comparable measurements demanded by the National Curriculum. The combination of
fixed attainment goals and tests to measure them envisages a linear and fictional

18
progression through school education – the reification of the median result into the steady
and disciplined passage of the ‘normal child’. Assessment then becomes a comparison of
the individual student against a statistical fiction, with difference measured in moral terms:
to score higher than the average is good, to score lower, bad.

I feel strongly about [the fact that] this May, all children in this year group will
do this test regardless of where they are. I’m more interested in looking at
testing children when you think they’re at the stage. Some children learn
things at different times.., some are just late starters, and a lot of pressure can
be put on to get them going, and something can click, and they can whiz and
catch up when they’re ready. It could even be a week after the test! (Helen,
Isle of Wight)

This teacher clearly feels the need to defend those of her pupils who fall short of the norm,
and to stand up for their individuality in patterns of learning. She also illustrates the fact
that examination is the decisive point in the assessment process:

The examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a normalizing
judgement. It is a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and
to punish. (Foucault, 1991:184)

The power of the examination is in creating a hierarchical spectrum of achievement out of

a chaos of variables. Across a range of disciplines, the examination also produces a
personal profile of achievement – a measure of personality articulated in quantitative terms
(good at Maths, average at science, poor at English, for example). The individual, as well
as the field of knowledge, is broken down and reconstituted in measurable form. The exam
‘engages them in a whole mass of documents that capture and fix them’ (Foucault
1991:189):

I think that there’s so much of this testing business, and endless assessments,
and we write it down and we record it, and we put it in children’s folders.., who
looks at them? I’m quite sure the next teacher doesn’t... (Belinda, Havant)

If the teachers do not use them, what use could they serve? Foucault suggests that this
process of assessment and documentation turns each individual into a ‘case’ in the
medical sense. According to his or her vital statistics, particular treatments and regimes
can be suggested to improve performance, or failing that, weaknesses acknowledged.
Disciplines take on the appearance of natural facts, against which concrete standards
pupils can be judged – by others, and most importantly, by themselves.

The kids that I teach are being taught to jump through hoops, to get good SATs
results, and I think that so much is taught to the test now instead of to the
individual child’s needs. There’s too much testing, and ultimately it’s Like IQ
tests, it tests only a certain sort of intelligence. (Lester, Isle of Wight)

A Foucauldian analysis implies that ‘hoop jumping’ is precisely the ‘certain sort of
intelligence’ that the school system produces in students, in direct parallel to modern

19
methods of production in the capitalist economy; except the product here is ultimately not
the grades but the students themselves.

Yet as Keith Hoskins argues, Foucault may have been too quick to relate the rise of
carcerial institutions to the rise of modern statehood. The school, after all, arose from the
monastic tradition of study dating back to at least the twelfth century (1990:45), though
examinations were oral, not written. In the case of the early church the examination
system resulted in the inculcation of authority at a local level through credentials and
licences. The motive of general surveillance was absent, but that of generating power
through a discourse of professionalism certainly pre-existed the Enlightenment period.
Disciplinary education is not a by-product of a capitalist age; although it has been used to
maintain inequality, it has also been instrumental in other contexts. I will finish with three
critiques of education that extend Foucault’s argument in the light of recent trends.

David Hartley argues that the school system, although explicitly a modernist institution
celebrating progress, comparative assessment and efficiency of operation, has had to
incorporate postmodern perspectives in the face of current cultural and economic trends.
But, he argues, rather than embracing ‘a postmodern vision for the curriculum, one which
encourages chaos, non- rationality, and zones of uncertainty’ (1997:121), the UK
government has largely maintained the status quo, while making some moves towards
continuous assessment through coursework:

The government generates a double code: an over-arching, bureaucratic systematisation of

assessment and credentials, and the criteria for awarding them; and a legitimating discourse which
appeals to postmodernism by weakening the temporal and spatial contexts in which assessment
occurs. (1997:121 -2)

Freedom from the staged examination is traded for the necessity to discipline the self, and
to open oneself for further scrutiny, through continuous assessment – the bureaucratic
gaze is thus internalised and taken into the student’s home. This form of self-monitoring is
preparation, perhaps for the postmodern workplace of ‘just-in-time’ management methods
and ‘branding’ oneself. The spontaneity and flexibility coursework allows is strictly
bounded within the set task (1997:120). Continuous assessment increases the sense of
produced knowledge as private property – the coursework folder adding to Foucault’s
image of the student as a ‘case’. It is an appropriation of the progressive 60s spirit of self-
expression under the remit of increasing productivity – much in the spirit of modern
advertising. Hartley sees no opportunities for the loosening of the bureaucratic
straightjacket in contemporary assessment policy.

Howard Gardner casts doubt on the whole exercise of examination, calling it:

the ultimate scholastic invention, a “decontextualized measure” to be employed in a setting that is

itself decontextualized’ (1991:132-3).

His argument is that school, as separated from the working world, cannot adequately
prepare people for it, and that in turn the examination does not reflect the everyday
practices of the school. He quotes Ulric Neisser:

20
Academic knowledge is typically assessed with arbitrary problems that a student has little interest
in or motivation to answer, and performances on such instruments have little predictive power for
performances outside of a scholastic environment. (in Gardner, 1991:133)

The assessing school cannot afford to engage with the particular interests of students, as
that would undermine the curriculum; therefore, student’s true competencies and potential
cannot be assessed. Instead, their ability to do what they are told is gauged:

I don’t think it’s terribly good for anybody to be jumping through hoops. People
who jump through hoops and do very well, they get very dependent on people
saying, oh, marvellous, brilliant!”.... And those who don’t manage to jump
through hoops feel pretty bad about themselves, and don’t think of themselves
as very bright. (Jenny, London)

This dependency that schooling fosters is elaborated by Illich:

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They
school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is
assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success...
Health, learning, dignity, independence and creative endeavour are defined as little more than the
performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends. (1971:9)

Illich argues that we are no longer alienated from our labour at the workplace, but at
school: we institutionalise our children within a bureaucratic process that does not allow for
substantial personal development (1971:51). Genuine creativity and self-sufficiency is lost
as we surrender our agency to a range of institutions. We now mistake schooling for
genuine learning to the extent that we are only discussing our current misgivings about the
quality and direction of education in the UK in terms of increased funding for, and
tampering with the curriculum of, the school system. This is the very opposite of
Rousseau’s vision of the self- reliant learner.

In this chapter, I have sought to show that quantitative assessment and examination are
not only, in Foucault’s perspective, technologies of repressive power, but that they are
arbitrary, ineffective and possibly damaging to the learner. One teacher summed it up
perfectly in saying, “A plant doesn’t grow its best if it’s pulled out of its pot every five
minutes to examine its roots.” In the next chapter I relate this to the rise of managerial
language and practice in schools.

21
Chapter 5: management – the ‘endless frontier’

Our work will be organised around what we must deliver. Effective project and programme
management will be key, working closely with other government departments, partners and
customers to support shared objectives and to meet measurable, published targets. (DfES 2001)

In chapter 2 I argued that the 1980s saw a radical shift in the government’s aims in
education from promoting self-realisation towards promoting economic growth, and a
commitment to achieve this through the incorporation of the working and values of the
market into the educational system. In this chapter, I will argue that the language, culture
and practices of management, now in use in our schools, are moving us towards an
American model that has serious implications not just for the freedom of teachers and
young people, but for democracy itself. I will start with Stephen Ball and Shore and Wright
on management and ‘audit culture’, its effects on teachers and their resistance. I then
move to America as a logically continuous model for managerial education: Emily Martin’s
analysis of American company management and ‘flexible bodies’ in the ‘endless frontier’
between workers and their environment, and Henry Giroux’s work on privatisation of space
and values in American schools. I will suggest that there is a contradiction when it comes
to education between the values of the market and those of a healthy democracy.

The movement towards ‘managerialism’ in the 1980s, Hartley argues, went hand-in-hand
with ‘pruning the welfare state’ (1997:124). With much justification, workforces across the
country have in the last 20 years come to equate new jargon such as ‘downsizing’,
‘restructuring’, and ‘efficiency savings’ with cuts, cuts and more cuts. The teaching
profession has been no exception – the number of full-time support staff employed in
England and Wales fell from 253,000 to 209,000 between 1975 and 1986. As Lowe points
out, it was teachers who were required to make up the clerical shortfall (1997:136); they
also lost out on supported in-service training. During the same time, the size and powers
of the DES increased, and even more so the power of the Downing Street Policy Unit,
meaning that ‘policies.., were increasingly dictated by unelected gurus working in
Government ‘think tanks” (1997:138). As I argued in chapter 4, one of the most visible
outcomes of this new managerialism has been an ever-growing paper trail of case
histories, lesson plans and progress reports. The result was to leave many teachers
feeling undervalued and marginalized – they have been given ‘responsibility without
power’ (Shore and Wright 2000:70):

I got the brunt of it because I was head of a little school... there was so much
happening, so much paper, so many demands on you, without any
consultation. It hit primary schools first of all... it was just overwhelming.., the
feeling that things were being done to you, that you weren’t much bloody
good, and that you were going to toe the line, and even the head was someone
that wasn’t very important. (Lester, Isle of Wight)

Stephen Ball argues that management has a self-fulfilling definition of its own importance:

Management is a professional, professionalizing discourse which allows its speakers and

its incumbents to lay exclusive claims to certain sorts of expertise – organizational

22
leadership and decision-making – and to a set of procedures that casts others,
subordinates, as objects of that discourse... (1990:157)

During the 60s and 70s it was presumed that the best people to organise and run schools
were teachers; they were, after all, professionals. Yet managerialism introduced a
hierarchical perspective that saw executive control as a discipline in itself, separate from
operation, which was the role of functionary staff. Professionalism, within management
terminology, has become ‘expertism’. Teachers fulfil designated roles in which they are
deemed ‘expert’, that is, in the classroom; their attributes and capacities in other areas are
not perceived as valid. This phenomenon has spread across the public sector in recent
years to the National Health Service, which doctors no longer run, and even to the Church
of England. A stock response by Conservative politicians to the criticisms of their
economic policies by Church leaders during the 80s was, “I look to the bishop for spiritual
guidance...” The implication was that, since priests were not economic ‘experts’, they had
no right to comment on them, nor by implication on anything else that happened outside of
consecrated ground. Furthermore, it implied that economics and spirituality were entirely
separate spheres. This separation of policy and practice serves a dual purpose of
discrediting criticism and recreating social and class hierarchies.

The bottom line for management is performance, or, as the DfES quotation at the head of
this chapter states, meeting ‘measurable, published targets’. Ball calls this ‘a view which
contends that social life can be mastered scientifically and can be understood and
organized according to law-like generalizations’ (1990:157). It is the numerical and
comparative immediacy of this discourse that gives it power over the qualitative,
humanistic and immeasurable aspirations of the traditional professions. But God help the
‘managed’ church that produces league tables of ‘bums on pews’, or even, ‘souls saved’;
is the ‘managed’ school any less absurd? From where does managerialism derive its
credibility?

Management theory views the social world as locked into irrational chaos, as needing to be
brought into its redeeming order.... It is the linguistic antithesis of crisis and as such it has a central
political role in the 1980s. (Ball 1990:157)

In a time of economic uncertainty and financial cutbacks, management theory made a

virtue out of vice. Accountability has made the penetrating Foucauldian gaze public, the
world of figures acting as proof to expert and layperson alike:

Transparency of operation is everywhere endorsed as the outward sign of integrity. (Strathern

2000:2)

By setting definite targets for such tangibles as exam passes, it is possible to avoid major
and increasingly problematic questions such as, ‘what is the purpose of education?’, which
raise intractable political and moral issues. It claims scientific neutrality, deriving validity
through the self-referencing totality of its target-based perspective. League tables divert
attention from job cuts. Audit culture provides reassuring, mercifully comprehensible
answers, assimilating the moral and economic spheres in a quest for continuous
improvement. The appearance of management is emotionally as well as politically neutral:

23
We had to write a report about what we thought of our inspection, and one of
the main criticisms was that the language was joyless... joyless neutral prose....
But that’s their policy – they’re not going to use joyful prose at all. So it leaves
you with a sour taste in your mouth. (Jenny, London)

Ball sees this as a tactic to contrast against the emotive attitudes of teachers, whose
complaints against managerialism can thereby be discounted as irrational (1990;155). This
lack of emotion, combined with rigid systems of measurement and a nexus of self-
validating moralistic theory, makes it impossible to argue with – like asking a calculator
why it arrived at a particular answer. Its truth is pragmatic and arithmetic. It has become
‘unopposable as virtue itself’ (Shore and Wright 2000: 61) – certainly, at least, in the
British press. Even the left-leaning Guardian slated Nigel de Gruchy, outgoing leader of
the NASUWT, for his attack on 30 years of ‘self-serving politicians’ on the 5th of April this
year; the leader cites improvement in grades and resources as proof in itself of improving
education6. This is a hegemonic discourse disseminated from the centre and resisted on
the periphery, where we find the teachers themselves fighting a rear-guard action to
uphold their professional and humanitarian integrity in the face of alienation:

I got into really hot water at the university by saying, “I already audit my
performance - I’ve even let the kids feed back regularly on my classroom
behaviour.... I see it as part of my professional brief to always assess and
evaluate what I’m doing. So if you now say to me that this needs to be done to
me, I have to say to you, are you accusing me of being unprofessional?
(Roland, Nottingham)

If the complete submission of English education to market forces and the discourse of
management still seem distant, the American example is ominous. Martin, in her study of
management in American companies, describes how the alienation of workers is
overcome by giving them ownership of their work, and a sense of belonging within the
company that aims to fulfil their social and spiritual needs as well as pay their bills. The
aim is to break down the barrier between work and leisure by offering total integration, and
therefore fulfilment, through the ethos and activities of the company:

At the extreme, self-definitions merge (at least temporarily) with the shared definitions of the
culture, suggesting the collapse of the boundaries between self and organization. (Martin
1997:250)

This is the progression of the internalised self-management of Foucault taken further: no

longer out of fear of surveillance, but out of passionate commitment to the dominant
discourse. The key is company emphasis on re-skilling: encouraging staff to constantly
adapt to a changing market. This offers the employee the opportunity for constant re-
invention of the self in a sequence of empowering and euphoric transformations — from
‘docile bodies’ to ‘flexible bodies’ (1997:244). Martin quotes Donzelot, describing that the
subject of this new technology:

6
See http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/0.6957,,00.html

24
‘...subsists only in his capacities, that he is a potential to be realized, not a truth to be
deciphered; and that history is a myth since reality lies only in the environment that
surrounds us, in the organized forms of our social relations, which it is for us to modify
according to the capacity change offers us to realize ourselves more fully. (1997:245-6)

This is a vision of the consumerist soul: entirely relational and infinitely malleable through
a series of economic and social transactions. Martin argues that it is this constant quest for
meaning and belonging in an unanchored social and moral context that creates new
business opportunities:

‘The interface between subject and environment represents an endless frontier, an eternally
receding horizon for exploration and development.’ (1997:247)

Martin confesses to ‘cringing’ at the ‘superficial’ way these companies envision their
‘cultures’ (1997:251); historically uprooted, they are mere fig-leaf epiphenomena of the
vulgar pursuit of profit, and a degrading basis for human identity. Giroux, however, argues
that it is precisely this transparent pseudo-culture that increasingly forms the environment
of most American schools:

In this perspective teaching is completely removed form the cultural and social contexts that shape
particular traditions, histories, and experiences in a community and school. Hence, this model of
educational reform fails to recognize that students come from different backgrounds, bring diverse
cultural experiences with them to the classroom, and relate to the world in different ways.
(2000:90)

So, in the absence of varied, local, cultural models for identity, what are children offered?
Giroux outlines the link between declining state funding for education, and the schools
resorting to seeking corporate sponsorship – through anything from adverts in the toilet
cubicles an on the covers of exercise books to a maths reader that ‘purports to teach third-
graders math by having them count Tootsie Rolls’ (2000:96). They are saturated with the
ersatz identities of branded products to the extent that ‘as culture becomes increasingly
commercialised, the only type of citizenship that adult society offers to children is that of
consumerism.’ (2000:19) Giroux also argues that the individualist and competitive values
of managerial/consumerist society are directly in conflict with those of democracy. The first
privilege under threat is that of dissent:

I would never go to an interview now and say this, because I wouldn’t get the
job, but what’s most important about the classroom you teach, I’d say, is that
the kids are happy... I’d have to follow that up very carefully with how it would
enable them to learn better. (Lester, Isle of Wight)

Students’ happiness is not productive, so to stand for it is to display conflicting interests to

those of the managed school. Managerialism’s first requirement of staff is that they remain
loyal to the organisation and its values, since dissent may damage competitiveness. This
has in many organisations created a climate of fear:

For example, one professor wrote to a national newspaper correcting his university’s claim that
larger class sizes and reduced resourced had in no way lowered educational standards. As a

25
result, the professor was given an official warning that staff should not bring their institution into
disrepute as this was a sackable offence (Shore and Wright 2000:73).

Here a professor’s public sector privilege, to criticize with impunity, has been compromised
by private sector organisational culture. Wherever ‘failure’ is punished and ‘excellence’
rewarded, there is no space for speaking one’s mind; audit culture renders everyone
accountable while itself being beyond question. As for children’s right to contribute to the
debate on education, it has yet to enter into the picture. School offers a functionalist
hierarchy, not a participatory democracy, as a model for young people. Is it any wonder
that they are failing to register an interest in democratic participation in record numbers?

It is clear, however, that many teachers in England – perhaps the majority – are a long
way from subscribing wholesale to the culture of self-management. Through their
resistance, indirect or direct, we can see that seemingly all-powerful regimes remain
vulnerable:

But I think most people adapt to it, I mean, the inspectors come along and they
sort of change for a week... (Nicola, London)

I think we’ve gone through a period of everybody being in fear of OFSTED, of

not doing the right thing. I think in primary schools particularly we haven’t
stood up for ourselves, we’ve accepted everything the government has thrown
at us... Now we’re beginning to question and answer back a bit more, and
saying no – enough’s enough. We do know best – let us decide. (Francis, Isle of
Wight)

Management hierarchy cannot be everywhere at once, nor can it survive without the
cooperation of its functionaries. Collective action remains a powerful weapon. The
commitment of many teachers to the progressive ideals in teaching remains strong, as
does, I hope, the public commitment to a publicly funded education system. Yet long-term
resistance to the allure of managerialism’s ‘quick fix’ to wider societal concerns will depend
on a public debate on the very nature and ideals of education – one that must be explicitly
linked to the attitudes and practices of democratic participation and equality. In chapter 6, I
look at some of the radical educators who have sought to instigate such a debate.

26
Chapter 6: re-schooling or de-schooling?

“The longer I live the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good
enough for us.” Oscar Wilde

Basil Bernstein famously said, ‘Education cannot compensate for society’ (1977:64). In
this report I have attempted to support this by showing how even the most well-meaning
teachers and policy-makers have failed to tackle systemic inequalities. In this chapter, I
look very briefly at some of those who believe that education can transform society
instead. I will highlight two alternative forms of education in England today as possible
models for democratic and empowering learning; I will also quote some of my interviewees
on how they think it should be done. Finally, I will suggest that education presents a
fundamental challenge to all of us in our perception of, and participation in, the social
world.

Paolo Freire, who spent his early life in Brazil before being exiled for his criticisms of state
education, saw traditional schooling as employing:

the ‘banking’ concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends
only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. (1972:36)

This approach ‘regards men as adaptable, manageable beings’, and prevents them from
developing a ‘critical consciousness’:

The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to
adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them. (1972:47)

This system not only perpetuates inequality, but denies the humanity of the learner:

Apart from the inquiry, apart from the praxis, men cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only
through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry men
pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other. (ibid.)

Genuine knowledge, he argues, is not an inert commodity, but the result of an intensive
creative process in which the learner examines, criticises and transforms his or her social
world. This is closer to practical wisdom than fact storage – a ‘coming into being’ where
the subject and object of learning are bound in action and self-realisation. It stems from
the learner’s curiosity and passion, which is expressed through learning with or without the
assistance of teachers. This ideal supported by many of the teachers I interviewed:

A good teacher teaches you how to teach yourself better. (Roland, Nottingham)

If I ruled the world, I’d have primary schools to teach the basics, then I’d have
a system of cooperative learning where children were taught by people could
give them a variety of experiences within the bounds of those things that
interested them. (Mary, London)

27
Freire sees anything more restricted or directed than this as an act of violence. An absurd
example may serve to explain this: how would you feel if some official, such as a
policeman, stopped you in the street and required that you jump up and down on the spot
– stating merely that it was in your long-term self-interest? What if it was your child at
school? Separating learning from the context of intentional self-realisation, Freire argues,
is ritual humiliation.

Nixon et al., however, see this intentional personal growth as possible within the context of
reformed state education:

The central task of the learning school is the reconstruction of agency. The motivation young
people need to sustain this reconstruction can only grow out of a sense of purpose, that the
struggle to develop as a person has some point. (1996:117)

Furthermore, they believe that schools can in time overcome the formative influences of
an unequal society:

Education, of all the public services, can seek to illuminate so as to dissolve the impact of those
deep cultural processes of social classification which erect boundaries of inclusion and exclusion,
of self and other. (1996:119)

This seems like wishful thinking. The logic of this report suggests that even mildly liberal
policies in schools come into conflict with the demands and stipulations of a capitalist
marketplace. For Freire, young people would be free only if they have the opportunity to
transform their social relations. Timetables and curricula have no place in this vision.

A possible compromise exists in the Steiner school movement, which, although it has a
loose curriculum and compulsory attendance, is committed to learners’ self-realisation:

I’ve got a threefold take on what these faculties are. They’ve got their
thinking.., their feeling – their emotional intelligence.., and also their willpower,
so that they can actually achieve what they plan in the world. Their potential, I
think, is maximised by leaving them in freedom, by giving them the tools to
approach those three areas. (Mark, Lancaster)

Unattached to the state, Steiner schools do not face the economic pressures of their state
counterparts, and in my experience are able to provide a humane, exciting and socially
responsible learning environment. Their approach is to let children choose when they want
to learn basics such as reading and writing, rather than force it upon them: ‘We wait until
they’re so keen to learn the alphabet that they can do it at the drop of a hat.’ Yet as Mark
admitted, ‘I do sometimes consider that I’m working with a middle-class elite.’ The success
of Steiner schools may reflect to a large extent the values of the parents who pay to send
their children there. How easily transferable Steiner’s values would be to children from
deprived and angry communities remains to be seen.

Another steadily growing alternative is home education, which follows lllich’s call for
‘deschooling society’ and replacing them with a series of ‘learning webs’ designed to make
information, peer support and tutoring accessible to all to use as they see fit (1971:75).

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Organisations in England such as Education Otherwise provide a mine of information
designed to enable parents to create learning environments for their children within their
communities. There are, however, two principal constraints that limit this model’s
application to society as a whole: first, it requires that parents (or their extended networks)
have the necessary skills and dedication to support their children’s learning; and secondly,
it requires they have the free time. In a capitalist society, one of the key functions of the
school is to remove children from their parents for most of the working day, allowing them
to sell their labour without constraint – it acts as an institutionalised childcare system for
those compelled to work all day. Under current economic conditions, this form of education
would only be an option for certain social and economic classes.

We had a boy for whom, it was quite clear, it wasn’t the place to be at all, and
he left.... Clearly it wasn’t a great moment for him to be at school, but
something else has to happen, doesn’t it, in our urban society. They have to be
doing something! I mean, don’t they? (Jenny, London)

Ultimately, home education issues a challenge to a society that excludes children from
most of its economic and social affairs, seeing them as ‘in the way’. I believe this reflects
the fact that England is a society terrified by young people, whose instinctive desire for
self-expression regardless of social norms, and acute ability to detect insincerity and
domination in adults, represents a direct challenge to an inflexible, market-led society. The
papers scream, ‘Tame these feral monsters’7 at disobedient and violent children, rather
than commit themselves to understanding the depths of their alienation in a system that
merely offers them a choice of ways to conform. The transformational, learner-led
education envisioned by Freire and others can only be realised on the large scale if we are
prepared to create a more humane and democratic society. In the meantime, we must
chain children to their desks until their fresh eyes, which see straight through our civilised
hypocrisies, glaze over.

7
Bruce Anderson in The Independent, April 29th” 2002

29
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