The tension really exists between those who feel education is about selection rather than helping people of all ages to think critically. All students of all ages when shown how to analyse, compare and evaluate learn to challenge accepted views and common sense arguments. Common sense is no more than a statistical average of what a mode of people think to be the truth. It may be that our inability to make of our lives what we would wish is a product of the society and class we live in. Gandhi commented once that "Our education has made us hug the chains that bind us". When the head of OFSTED says that league tables for schools becomes more important than giving our children a chance to sit them then we know something is dangerously wrong.
I have sat the 11 plus and passed it and yet I know it was nothing more than a method of social selection. I was trained, practised its approaches and was terrified that if I failed it I would be condemned to a life of being second class. Yet now I know that these fears were not mine they came predominately from my Mother. I thrived at a Welsh Comprehensive and at my Quaker Kindergarten yet when regimented when controlled, when told what to read and ways to be I shrivelled and my curiosity vanished. Yet when self directed the opposite was true.
All we really need to educate ourselves is the ability to read and write and count and be creative. In many cases the Education System exists to make us docile, to educate us to be quiet. To break up knowledge into non connected parcels that prevent us thinking. The Theresa May Grammar School is simple a means of replication other little Tories, of the creation of snobbery and an outlook of superiority
At Dynvevor Comprehensive I learnt to be Street Wise, I learnt to appreciate Shakespeare and understand how things fit together. At the Quaker Kindergarten I learnt to despise violence and to pick up a knowledge of folklore , myth and legend. My father read to the myths of the Norse, the Greeks and the Ancient Egyptians. I knew long ago that all is myth if you like, a lens through which we see the world. Nothing has changed really in nearly 60 years yet my outlook is reinforced and my doubts about common sense and the need for educating for work lessens each day. If we teach how to be critical the rest will come..its that simple. You can teach someone to read in about as little as 30 hours if the topic interests them. That should be the real key to education and I am afraid as 2018 moves on I see that most politicians and the media still do not understand this.
When I studied Social Anthropology I came across the Bowles and Gintis hypothesis on Education. I think it is as valuable now as it was in the 1970s. I long remember a Headmaster of a large School in northern Sketty refusing to allow A level Sociology because it made the Sixth form too rebellious. I rest my case. This is the Bowles and Gintis hypothesi. It comes from my notes taken years ago. It was an assessment of the American education system in the 70s yet it is valid to describe ours in 2018...
B&G engage in a lengthy analysis of the education system in modern capitalist society , faulting liberal educational theory for its failure to recognize the position of the educational system with respect to broader social institutions, namely the economy. They believe that the future of educational theory must be tied in with a 'comprehensive intellectual reconstruction of the role of education in economic life,' which in their work takes the form of Marxist analysis.
What school does is prepare youth psychologically for work, a function which they believe employers are not unaware, nor have they refrained from applying considerable political influence in order to have the educational system produce the kinds of workers they want. B&G root their model on classic tenets of Marxism that would make little sense to repeat here. They believe that education plays a dual role in the social production of surplus value:
1) it increases the productive capacity of workers, and
2) helps defuse and depoliticise the potentially explosive class relations of the production process - thus serving to perpetuate the social, political, and economic conditions through which a portion of the product of labor is expropriated in the form of profits.
Several major implications follow from this model of education:
1) prevailing degrees of economic inequality and types of personal development are defined primarily by the market, property, and power relationships which define the capitalist system;
2) the educational system serves to perpetuate the social relationships from which develop an overall degree of inequality and repressive personal development;
3) there is a close (formal) correspondence between the social relationships which govern personal interactions in the work place and the educational system;
4) although the school system has sometimes served the dominant class interests of profit and political stability, it is an unwieldy and often unpredictable weapon/tool prone to the influence of contradictory external forces;
5) the organization of education evolves and takes on distinct and characteristic forms in response to political and economic struggles associated with the process of capital accumulation, extension of the wage-labor system, and transition from an entrepreneurial to a corporate economy.
B&G believe that past attempts at educational reform have failed because they refuse to call into question the basic structure of property and power in economic life. B&G believe that the key to reform is the democratization of economic relationships: social ownership - thus educational reform is linked to the grand scheme of neo Marxist solutions, namely -socialism. Despite the fact that education has often been used as a central instrument of liberal reformers, the range of effective educational policy (in the US) has been severely limited by the role of schooling in the production of an adequate labor force in a hierarchically controlled and class-structured production system.
In the eyes of most liberal reformers, education has three functions:
1) integrative: helps integrate youth into various occupational, political, familial, etc adult roles;
2) egalitarian: gives each individual a chance to compete openly for privilege and status; and
3) developmental: promotes the psychic and moral development of the individual.
B&G outline what they believe to be the two dominant traditions of liberal educational theory:
1)The Dewey School: believe that the 3 functions of education are not only compatible, but also mutually supportive; education can promote the natural movement of industrial society toward more fulfilling work, hence bringing its integrative and developmental functions increasingly into a harmonious union.
2) Technocratic-Meritocratic: argues only for compatibility of functions of education; this view is based on a conception of the economy as a technical system where work performance is based on technical competence; inequality of income, power, and status are, consequently, seen as a reflection of the unequal distribution of mental, physical, and other skills
B&G believe that the politics of education are best understood in terms of the need for social control in an unequal and rapidly changing economic order - by providing a means to integrate 'uncouth and dangerous' elements (among others) into the social fabric of American life. Thus education serves to preserve and extent the capitalist order - which consistently provides disproportional advantage to the dominant class.
It's is only when we rebel do we truly exist and then and only then do achieve perception as we learn at long last to truly be....
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