Ken Jones
THE BREAK-UP of the welfare state, deindustrialisation and the end of full employment have been essential elements of neoliberalism. They have created social and educational problems which have deepened since the crash of 2008, reducing Britain to a critical condition.
Yet crisis has not produced a radical political outcome. One of the most striking features of the years since 2008 has been the political success of the Conservative attempt to present the solution to the problems of neoliberalism as a stronger dose of the same: permanent austerity becomes the answer to recession. Likewise, in education, the mix of tradition and market which animated Conservatism in the 1980s – and led to the 1988 Education Reform Act – was taken to a new level of intensity in the programme launched by Michael Gove when he became Secretary of State in 2010. Nearly a decade later, the problems of that programme are evident – in teacher supply, in the stagnation of the academy project, in school cultures strongly shaped by the demands of tests and examinations. Faced with this situation, the thinking of those committed to the legacy of 1988 has mutated. This is especially clear around issues of curriculum and assessment. The stifling effects of hyper-accountability are admitted, and schools are chided for their near-exclusive focus on good exam results. But the remedy for these miseries is found on another page of the conservative educational primer, where the advantages of a ‘knowledge-rich’ curriculum are set out. As Ofsted emerges as an authority on curriculum, schools are faced with a new agenda for change – but once again the impetus will come from the right.
Why should this be the case? Why, in the context of appalling levels of austerity-induced child poverty and chronic problems of teacher burnout, should educational debate still be dominated by proposals of this sort? And on what resources and traditions could alternative approaches draw?
To sketch the beginnings of some answers, it is useful to return to the moment of Michael Gove, to the situation in which he intervened and the rhetoric he crafted.
‘The process of ‘seeking out’, which amounted to a willingness to recognize, positively evaluate and make sense of working-class youth cultures, was to influence greatly the generation of teachers entering urban secondary schools in the later 1960s.’
Empowered by the Conservative-Lib-Dem Coalition’s presentation of itself as an emergency regime, which needed to use forceful measures to exit from a once-in-a-century crisis, Gove seized the opportunity to pursue a strategy of restructuring that compressed the patterns of the 18 years of Conservative policy under Thatcher and Major into one fouryear ministerial span. He concluded that, more than twenty-five years after the Education Reform Act, which was supposed to have settled such matters, there was still much to be done to break the influence of progressive educational ideas and the organizations that harboured them. To do this, he aimed to extend the ‘achievements’ of the Thatcher period, so that schooling was reinvigorated by competitive mechanisms, private sector influence, tight control from the centre and what he saw as academic rigour.
The claim to rigour was central to the way in which Gove justified his agenda. He described himself as an ‘unashamed elitist’ who wanted to ‘proclaim the importance of education as a good in itself’ and to ‘argue that introducing the young minds of the future to the great minds of the past is our duty’1. Policies based on these principles would ‘provide children with the opportunity to transcend the circumstances of their birth’, ‘spreading knowledge to every open mind’. He claimed to be for the poor, against the privileged; for a good education for everyone, against the growth of intellectually un-rewarding and functionally valueless vocational qualifications. In short, he attempted to make ‘social justice’ the property of Conservatism, and to win the argument that established knowledge traditions were a means by which social justice in education could be realised.
It is this perspective which continues to dominate policymaking, while other kinds of thinking about knowledge traditions and students’ learning are eclipsed. The problems which such alternative traditions have sought to address are well summarised by Lew Zipin2:
‘Winning school learners to the sense that their intelligence is recognised and challenged, such that they engage with teaching-and-learning invitations, is a most difficult project when learners’ culturally inherited ways of knowing do not match those privileged in school curriculum. A justice-orientated strategy, [entails designing] a curriculum that makes meaningful connection with ways of knowing in learners’ lives beyond school. To do so, it is vital, observes Lewin, to ‘become ethnographers in the true sense’ that is, to become open to learning about and from the lives of others, with conviction that these lives embody both intelligence and knowledge assets (rather than biological and cultural ‘deficits’).’
Zipin is writing in a US context, but similar perspectives have been a feature of educational thinking in Britain too. In Education in Britain3 I discussed the work of teachers and educational thinkers in the 1950s and 1960s, when schoolbased curriculum experiment was licensed, and the question of the relationship between students’ cultures and the school curriculum was there to be explored. They felt lucky, one teacher recalled:
‘to be at that point in England’s history because no one was saying you have to teach this or you have to teach that, although there were A level and GCE examinations. I think we were free to invent a new curriculum and there were people saying the comprehensive school needs a new curriculum. It needs a new curriculum that fits it, it’s no good it taking another curriculum. So the invitation was there to create.’4
‘We would expect English work to be rooted in the concerns, hopes and fears and daily lives of the pupils’ wrote Harold Rosen,5 one of those who brought a distinctive ‘London English’ into being. One of Rosen’s colleagues, John Dixon, suggested to an NUT conference that, ‘there exists not merely this sort of elite culture … but some different kind of culture which it is necessary to seek out by going into other people’s experience’6. The process of ‘seeking out’, which amounted to a willingness to recognize, positively evaluate and make sense of working-class youth cultures, was to influence greatly the generation of teachers entering urban secondary schools in the later 1960s. The idea that part of the teacher’s role was to understand and mediate through curriculum innovation the social and cultural changes that students were living through gave a new purpose to the work of teaching, a purpose which underlay approaches towards race, and class in later decades.
This sense of classrooms as places of cultural encounter, in which established knowledge traditions were not taken for granted as embodiments of excellence, was later marginalised. When Harold Rosen, died in 2008, his son Michael Rosen reflected on the meaning of his work and the fate it had encountered. His father had spent a lifetime arguing that culture, language and education were inseparable: ‘whatever language the pupils possess, it is this which must be built on rather than driven underground.’ Yet these years of ‘thought, theory and practice’ had been forgotten – or, more precisely, ‘wiped out’ – by the governments of the 80s and 90s.7
At this point, where we consider the ‘wiping out’ of a body of work, it is useful to recall a point made by the American writer, Corey Robin8: conservatism since Edmund Burke has insisted on the impossibility of the idea that the politics and cultural life of a society should be shaped by the majority of the people who live in it. Everything that is good in a society -its sense of beauty, civility, order, truth – can only be contaminated by mass influence. Excellence is elitist. From this perspective, traditions of thought and practice of the sort developed by Rosen and Dixon, can only be damaging.
This is the tendency of Ofsted’s thinking, as embodied in its new curriculum framework. Its emphasis falls on that which should be known, something which is external to the culture of learners. The resources which learners bring to school are of no interest. This is not an approach likely to encourage new thinking about pedagogy, nor about how to support the learning of students whose ‘culturally inherited ways of knowing’, to quote Zipin9, ‘do not match those privileged in the school curriculum’. It may thus contribute to prolonging a crisis of education, by introducing new and unproductive norms to pedagogy and curricula. In this situation, the experiences of an earlier period provide a rich alternative to policies which repeat, rather than escape from, the terms of an educational impasse. Attending to the relationship between formal curricula and student experiences and requires a complex pedagogy, and a readiness to commit to a cultural dialogue which passes Ofsted’s understanding.
- Gove, M. (2011) Speech at Cambridge University 25th November. (DfE). https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/michael-gove-tocambridge-university
- Zipin, L. (2009) Dark Funds of Knowledge, deep funds of pedagogy: exploring boundaries between lifeworlds and schools. Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education 30 (3) 317-331
- Jones, K. (2015) Education in Britain (Polity Press)
- Simon Clements, quoted in Gibbons, S. (2009) Lessons from the Past. English Teaching 8 (1) 64-75 p66
- Harold Rosen (1969), quoted in Gibbons, S. (2009) Lessons from the Past. English Teaching 8 (1) 64-75 p69
- Dixon, J. (1961) Contribution to NUT Conference: Popular Culture and Personal Responsibility (Verbatim account, unpublished) p31
- M. Rosen (2009), quoted in Jones, K. (2011) ‘Democratic Creativity’ in J. Sefton-Green, P. Thomson, K. Jones, L. Bresler (eds) Routledge International Handbook of Creative Learning (Routledge)
- Robin, C. (2011) The Reactionary Mind: conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (Oxford University Press)
- Zipin, L. (2009) Dark Funds of Knowledge, deep funds of pedagogy: exploring boundaries between lifeworlds and schools. Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education 30 (3) 317-331