Education and the Good Society

Education and the Good Society

Also by Fred Inglis PEOPLE’S WITNESS: The Journalist in Modern Politics (2002) THE DELICIOUS HISTORY OF THE HOLIDAY (2000) CLIFFORD GEERTZ: Culture, Custom and Ethics (2000) RAYMOND WILLIAMS: The Life (1995)

Education and the Good Society Edited by

Fred Inglis Professor Emeritus of Cultural Studies University of Sheffield School of Education, UK

Selection and editorial matter © Fred Inglis 2004 Chapters 1–12 © Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 2004 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–333–80234–9 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Education and the good society / edited by Fred Inglis. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–80234–9 (cloth) 1. Educational sociology—Great Britain. 2. Politics and education— Great Britain. 3. Education—Great Britain—Philosophy. I. Inglis, Fred. LC191.8.G7E37 2004 372.16′21—dc22 10 13

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Contents Notes on the Contributors

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Editorial

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1 Education and the Good Society (1) Roy Hattersley

12

2 Education and the Good Society (2) Fred Inglis

23

3 Pluralism, Dissensus and Democratic Citizenship Chantal Mouffe

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4 Theses for an Extensive Reform of Education Ulrich Beck

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5 The Success of the Comprehensive Schools John Dunford

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6 Teaching and the Good Teacher Richard Pring

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7 The Transformation of the Idea of a University Peter Scott

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8 A Malediction upon Management Fred Inglis

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9 School Students and the Good Society Tamsyn Imison

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10 Beyond Lippmann: Media and the Good Society Richard Howells

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11 The Good Society: Informal Education and the Young Tom Wylie

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12 The Governance of Learning Jon Nixon, Melanie Walker and Wilfred Carr

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Index

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Notes on the Contributors Ulrich Beck is Professor of Sociology at the University of Munich. John Dunford is General Secretary of the Secondary Heads Association. Roy Hattersley is a member of the House of Lords, a prominent journalist and novelist, a former deputy leader of the Labour Party, and held high office in Government. Richard Howells is Lecturer at the University of Leeds Institute for Communication Studies. Tamsyn Imison was until recently Head Teacher of Hampstead School. Fred Inglis is Professor Emeritus of Cultural Studies at the University of Sheffield School of Education and has been four times a Parliamentary candidate for the Labour Party. Chantal Mouffe is Professorial Fellow at the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster. Jon Nixon and Wilfred Carr are Professors of Education and Melanie Walker a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield School of Education. Richard Pring was until recently Head of Department of Educational studies at the University of Oxford. Peter Scott is Vice-Chancellor of Kingston University and was for many years editor of the THES. Tom Wylie is Chief Executive of the National Youth Agency and former Senior Staff Inspector at OFSTED.

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I This book had its conception in a lecture which Roy Hattersley gave at the invitation of the University of Sheffield School of Education. The lecture commemorated the name of Anthony Crosland as being one of the very few Secretaries of State in any British government with the intellectual gifts allied to the seriousness of purpose to understand the peculiar responsibilities of his office as striving for a better, even a good society. Hence the title of Lord Hattersley’s lecture and of this collection. Hattersley did honour to his friend and mentor, just as he had himself done honourably on behalf of the State and state education during his extended periods of senior governmental and Party service. More than that, he stood and stands for a long tradition in British political life whereby a certain section of the middle classes devoutly devotes itself to the repair of civic values and to the expression of public-spirited concern and agitation on behalf of the social collectivity, and – in a sometimes self-righteous but still moving echo of the two great revolutions of 1649 and 1832 – of the common wealth and the common good. This is the class fraction which forged links with the working class and trade union movements, which together formed the Labour Party. It provides the origin of the Fabian Society, that excellently highminded body of egalitarians which, not without the sanctimony bestowed upon it by the Webbs and Woolfs, has proved, during the 120-odd years of its existence, such an indispensable workshop for the provision of practicable policies. It is one main source of the local version of an intelligentsia, a body of joint intelligences characterised not by the severity and theoreticism of their French counterparts from 1

2 Editorial

the Hautes Ecoles, nor by the stateless and unPartied allegiance of American intellectuals to the Pragmatist ideal of the Constitution, but by something pleasantly more domesticated. The British intellectual, not without philistinism, borrowing theory more from novels than politics, shaped by Wordsworth not Hegel, Darwin not Marx, 1 and as Michael Frayn once put it, is more ‘herbivorous’ than slavering for the body and blood of the ruling class. 2 I speak affectionately of a tradition whose educational heritage is sketched out here in Chapter 2. Its sharp relevance is that it was this group, compounded of the always-ready-to-compromise segments of the social classes of Britain, which formed the present educational system, staffed its schools and further education colleges, and their supporters in universities and government departments (the vast influx of new Labour MPs after the landslide victory of 1997 was numerically dominated by teachers from all levels of the official institutions). Schoolteaching, of course, was for most of the twentieth century the thickly thronged avenue of social promotion for the bright children of the working class. Between 1945 and 1979 (or a year or two later) the idealistic offspring of the cultivated bourgeoisie also trod a modestly money-renouncing path into schools, colleges and universities, in search of the happiness, freedom and fulfilment with which teaching would replace the well-paid nullities of management. In 1979 the world changed for ever. This was, first of all, raucously announced to our civic-minded, public-spirited herbivores, by the coming to power of a new and, for them, lethal political agency, bristling with sharp cutting weaponry and shrewdly equipped with improvised and irresistible rituals of humiliation. Mrs Thatcher and her robotic monster of a Secretary of State, Keith Joseph, a man quite unable to soften the ideas and convictions which so overheated his brain with the experience of the lives in which they had to live, together cut off schoolteachers from the intellectual sources and spaces which gave their minds play and their lives energy. In the name of relevance to job-training and – in the fraudulently forceful metaphors they borrowed from the mendacities of the advertising industry – ‘driving up’ standards, they took away both the art and the craft of teaching in order to subject all classrooms to the routines of Taylorised production and organisational method. Once the carceral structure of National Curriculum, with its standardised tests and stages, its specified contents, its annual targets and its inspectorial police was, in another neologism of the day, ‘in place’, then the foundations of the mighty Panopticon could be bedded in competitively allocated quantities of cash. Head

Editorial 3

teachers turned themselves with eager complicity into CEOs, senior staff into senior management teams, class-teachers into delivery boys and girls, trusties were duly rewarded with performance pay, everybody watched indifferently as the status and independence of teachers disintegrated and idealistic young men and women stopped going into schools or even into the academy, shelved their ideals and were recruited by the banks. The utter instrumentalisation of education as a political entity was completed by applying the criteria of productivity to the manufacture of scholarship in a familiar tale narrated once more in Chapter 7. By 1997, what had happened was the almost severance of the tradition whose formation I have drawn and whose familiar incarnation is yet to be found in these pages in the substantial figure of Roy Hattersley. Of course, such a tradition rarely vanishes entirely. The essential nature of all education, innate as it is with such inevitabilities as mutual trust, love of learning, care of the young, defence of the weak, collaborative effort, is such as to ensure the immortality of old flames of virtue and value. But there has been a keen loss, a draining of blood from the veins of the body politic so that a vital part of it has been, without anybody really knowing what they did, made gaunt and weak in just those organs developed to protect the next, hungry generation and the aspirations which would feed it. The loss is located in our title. For more than 20 years, the aims and ideals of a national education system in its innumerable manifestations, from the reception class of the infant school to outreach meetings of middle-aged students taking first steps in learning Italian for their Tuscan tour, have been so drastically compressed at the behest of industrial systems and economic forecasting that education itself has turned into a mere adjunct of that economy and its glad purposes, once ringing with hopefulness, have been set to the mad dance of consumer footwork. It must of course be added that – as is several times remarked in the chapters which follow, but especially in Chapter 12 – just now a large majority of the consumers are having a lovely time in a riot of happy self-indulgence, and getting along just fine without their citizenship. That this will not last is not only easy to predict with a glance down the canonical list of anxieties in the postmodern world (famine and plague and weather), but is already terminated. Whatever savage hatreds went to immolation in the World Trade Center, the atrocity itself puts with hideous cruelty the blunt question, ‘What is your society worth to you? What are you worth to yourself?’

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II It is a question, no doubt, which capitalism cannot, by definition, answer. Mention worth and the capital computer asserts in reply: there are no values, only prices. At the same time, capitalism is the only system of production we have and we can do nothing other than live off it. What we must not do is live for it, and it was the exhilarating promise of socialism that, once fulfilled, it would prevent our being in thrall to the machine, the money and the boss. Well, history bade goodbye to all that; but the hopes of a good society in one country inextricably entangled in the world economies have been sustained by the wrangling disputes and temporary settlements between the old parabolas of socialism and the even older hesitations of liberalism. This is the veering compromise of social democracy and, after the depredations of that simple-minded system well-named Thatcherism, it was widely expected that Labour politicians of old and new persuasion would, as far as education was concerned, be quick to restore the imaginative connection between learning and hoping, between knowledge and value, between the little world of classrooms and the possibility of a good society. So it has been a deep, even a bitter disappointment to hear nothing of the kind even gestured at; once again to have to point out, as Richard Pring does below, how schoolteaching is still incarcerated in the toils of Taylorism or, to specify with an appropriate scorn, as the London School of Economics did in 2001, just how arid and wasteful are the deserts of time and paper and dead exposition left by the sterilities of Quality Assurance. The old putdown by those with money and power of those with nothing but hope is to call them utopians. There has never been a bloody victory won from or over capital but by utopians. But a more important truth than that familiar historical revelation is that a society’s education entails (in all senses) its future. To allow the utopian imagination to become so stunted that the practices and contents of teaching carry no message to the future about its emancipation, nor hold out, in Stendhal’s great phrase, a promise of happiness, is only to ensure that the future society will be an awful one. The worst thing these blasted mission statements have done is so to have cheapened the words ‘mission’ and ‘vision’. Once upon a time, political seers had visions, and teachers found a vocation which dispatched them on a mission to make a decent world by showing its children how to do things better than their elders.

Editorial 5

The representatives of the High-minded Tendency who took its vocation into schools, colleges, universities, extra-mural classes and youth work in the 1960s and who have written the essays in this collection, are all doubtless utopians as well as social democrats; and proud of it. In admitting to the charge of utopian, aligning themselves, not without diffidence, alongside St Thomas More, James Harrington and William Morris,3 they do not for a moment suppose that the old ghosts and totems can be made to march again, that the point of sticking to former principles is to ensure one’s consignment to the dustbin of history, and that egalitarians, the motley procession of seekers after social justice and lockjawed quondam socialists should follow an antique drum into the mists of time. Indeed, a great many of these essays insist upon the accuracy of the postmodern analysis: that the grand narratives of emancipation – Lyotard’s grands récits – are over; that making sense of the present is a chancy business, in which an only fragmentary, improvised and highly provisional theory of what is going on may be contrived; that the narratives we confect with which to equip a new generation of puzzled students in their passage from present to future will have limited applicability and swift obsolescence; that ‘globalisation’, the treacherous catch-all with which we cover all eventualities outside the neighbourhood, is a compound of tumultuous forces only very approximately under human control, and that control largely as dominated by what one of their own spokesmen calls ‘the reckless and self-absorbed Americans’.4 One thing this collection may be said to lack is a sufficient account (not necessarily anything as full-blown as a ‘theory’) of what globalisation is, as it burst in upon our own self-absorption in the two-thirds of British society with enough money, shelter, health and private satisfactions to keep terror and accident at bay. It is certainly a name for a colossal expansion of economic competition, such that production itself, the steady accumulation and distribution of commodities according to classical laws of supply and demand, is even more abruptly liable to disruptive, sudden collapse in unpredictable zones of manufacture, staccato movements from high to low activity and back again, all regulated from another land by the imperious computer,5 and together constituting an unprecedented world capitalist system more than ever riven by contradiction, more than ever at once heartless and abundant. Inasmuch as present students must learn to become future producersand-consumers, then they must learn to accommodate the demands of

6 Editorial

the Thing, globalisation. Mrs Thatcher and her creatures, however much they may be blamed for not knowing what they did, and when they did know for not caring that individual lives and entire communities were sacked and blasted by their efforts, did not invent the new economy. Working from deeply and anti-intellectual convictions combined with a hand-to-mouth expediency itself the product of reflex class hatreds, they invented a politics to match the mad world’s economics. Thatcherist political reason remained slave to those passions. It is the grave purpose of the conscientious worthies congregating in this book to propose, on behalf of that limited but – as we all say – crucial constituency of educational life an alternative politics of education to the one ruling the roost since Lord Joseph first instructed his civil servants to read the work of Hayek.

III All of our contributors acknowledge the drastic changes in the world since heavy industry and the workers who did it pretty well vanished from Britain, and since the previous epoch closed so spectacularly with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. What might be added by the editor to this recognition is, as Bobbitt observes, that this transformation did not push the world off the edge of history into tranquil evolution towards All-Americanness for everybody, but launched us all into a chartless Oceania. All we have with us in this not-desperate, part-joyous, part-fearful venture are the moral and cognitive instruments of the day; some new, some old. We can only find out which work by using them – by, in the phrase, conjecture and refutation. This is then a matter of intelligent decision and moral judgement, rather than of choices, a concept which in the guise of both action and value has had rather too much credit given to it of late (‘Thank you for choosing Virgin trains’ – as though one would if one could avoid it.) In Lord Hattersley’s rousing restatement of the old values we cannot ditch without breaking the compass, he makes a crucially novel move. If freedom is his senior value for the polity, as liberals must agree according to their self-definition, then the conditions necessary for the exercise of freedom lived as a virtue are equality and social justice. No one can be truly free in an inequitable and unjust society. To say so is to rebut the patron saint of liberty-according-to-liberalism, Sir Isaiah Berlin, for whom liberty and equality are necessarily at odds. 6 Making this move, Hattersley produces the line of the socialist tradition

Editorial 7

into the next version of political ethics and, in doing so, of course challenges capitalism to deny him. A free citizen’s education will be a just and equal education. Chantal Mouffe at once adds a qualification. It is a premise unifying the collection that all educational institutions and practice reflect and renew the political forms of life of the parent nation, let alone the human race. Mouffe, as she says, starts from similar principles to Hattersley and further aims to disconcert classical liberalism (the value-structure of British schooling) by commending what she calls ‘agonistic’ forms of democratic exchange. Suitably agonised, democratic argument must needs to accommodate what is plain to see, which is perhaps the irreconcilable disagreements of civil society, but do so by dropping the old rationalist’s presupposition that agreement is always discoverable by reasonable men and women if only they will move their confounded prejudices out of the way. Mouffe, on the contrary, commends our differences to the principle of difference itself. Hence she advises against anybody’s taking ‘the third way’, purportedly and impossibly a melding of the old two ways which turned off Left and Right. Only by the Left’s keeping left and the Right rightward will democratic politics, she claims, be able to think straight; only if radical disagreement is kept uncomfortably in view will the argument be inclusive enough to summon back to attention those who have given up on politics. Insofar as a school or a college embodies a democratic model of how the world ought to be in the good society, Mouffe’s difference principle not only makes sense of local antagonisms as well as international ones, it implies a code of discipline and a pedagogy to go with it. Nixon, Walker and Carr, in their dignified envoi, sing along with Mouffe without collusion. Summarising our political argument, they are at pains to find the politics in educational practices but, to do so without quoting that infernal politicisation of absolutely everything, the attitude apotheosised in the dictum ‘the personal is the political’ (one main consequence of which has been to make many ex-citizens so fed up with politics as to despise their suffrage). Their politics is given form and content by the very practice of moral-political argument itself, whose only origin can be practical and educational. To discuss and argue what might be done for the best is to find the good society in action. Democracy itself has its better and its worse forms; best to strive for the best, at which point one will not so much find democracy to be a synonym for the good society as the means we have to hand first for transcending what we do now and finding something better; then for

8 Editorial

the attainment of many goods, not necessarily political ones: happiness, fulfilment, self-criticality, loving-kindness and the fruits of the spirit.

IV It is one of liberalism’s least attractive habits to conclude its moralpolitical diagnoses with a call of generalised uplift for everyone to try harder, since it is a precept of liberalism not to tell people what to do (that being up to them). The several convictions of the collaborators to hand (including me) make it naturally impossible not to imply or state outright their moral-political preferences and the enemies of these, but only to do so in full acknowledgement, not only of the truths in relativism7 and the hard ripostes history and geography will deal to any too-confident declarations of moral-political independence, but also of the plain fact that tentativeness-of-manner, openness-of-exchange, readiness-to-change-one’s-mind-in-the-face-of-the-better-argument are so much part of their worldview as to count among those absolute presuppositions one cannot get behind or below. When, therefore, Richard Pring so strongly criticises government policy for its reduction of the human artistry intrinsic to teaching and its pitiful diminution of the intellectual content in the training of teachers, he is arguing from some of those absolute presuppositions we all share. The same is true of my own attack on the machinery of Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) inspection, quality assurance, audit and all that. At the same time, however, we are the pair of us intent upon thingsas-they-are. Pring starts out from the universal presupposition that art is cherishable and of its nature seeks unenvisageable ends. Since the whole point of the two past governments’ curricular policy has been to provide clearly set and measurable ends, artistry is thereby removed from the teacher. By the same token, in the argument I deploy (which owes so much to Michael Power), my allegiance goes to the supreme political value of trust (recently so nobly reaffirmed in similar terms and on an eminent platform by Onora O’Neill8). But this is not, as the liberal would have it, merely a matter of a subjective value-choice. Trust, as John Locke first pointed out,9 is more than just a value; it is constitutive of a society and of a world. The present inspectorial delirium is therefore destructive of society in its most formative areas. Politicians cannot be intending this damage. They have lost their sense, vital to their trade, of what it is to trust (and to educate) what David Hume so finely called ‘the civil affections’. The best recourse, after the critique of mistakes politicians make, is to point out to them what the people can actually do, given suitable help.

Editorial 9

The most inexplicable and dismaying aspect of 20 years of policy has been the unyielding deprecation of the comprehensive schools 93 per cent of our children attend by law with, as John Dunford points out, their parents’ approval. In part, no doubt, this ignorant derogation is a feature of all European Union countries. The everyday journalism of the French, the Italian, the Spanish and the German press is full of the routine, unevidenced assumption that their children are becoming illiterate, standards falling through the floor, civilisation at an end any minute. There are always weaknesses to be found and criticisms made (Ulrich Beck makes one about linguistic achievement in German schools in his Theses). But it is heartening to hear, for once, so round and steady a defence of what comprehensive schools have done to hold onto the continuity of a culture through the noticeably stormy seas of the global economy, since the end of civilisation was last prophesied by the authors of the Black Papers in the 1970s. Whether, of course, Dunford’s calm and factual rehearsal of both consolidation and emancipation in a system not of uniformity but of locally grounded, individually responsive schooling would change the foam-flecked, hot-cheeked opinionation of the Daily Mail is another matter. Our only weapons are the canons of customary argument, reason and the authority of historical experience. This being so, it is a pleasure to be able to add to Dunford’s aerial report of the country at large, Dame Tamsyn Imison’s inspiring epistle from the Head’s desk of what a preposterous press spokesman for the Government once described as the ‘one-size-fits-all’ comprehensives. Her Hampstead includes Church Row and the High Street but her school would be better named Cricklewood High, and as she nonchalantly lets fall, the district is vividly caught in that admirable novel of a former pupil, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth: the mixed-race, multicultural-metropolitan, teeming, boring, thrilling, quarrelsome, drab and colourful street world of Cricklewood–Hampstead. That is what it is to be comprehensive and (as I also happen to know on my own account) Tamsyn Imison’s school both mimics and shapes the life of its neighbourhood in the image of the good society. As the present indicative tense of her letter serves to emphasise, hers is a school doing these things now. Ulrich Beck’s magisterial Theses serve not only to return our collection to the larger European waters in which we must and should practise our education swimmingly, but in its inclusive generality dispatches us into the future with a rather fuller preparation than is allowed for by on-the-job training and Standard Assessment Testing. Beck, one of the most distinguished sociologists of the imaginable future on the continent, offers something for which

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that much-abused word ‘vision’ may for once be accurately used. He sees a society in which to count as educated, students become citizens of a republic of letters whose less lettered members nonetheless are deemed honourable, whose technical accomplishments are lightly worn because swiftly superannuated, whose deep allegiance will be to the moral, aesthetic and humanitarian identities inscribed in the hierarchies of knowledge they have learned. Peter Scott is, by his years as editor of the THES, strikingly wellequipped to turn his former South London Polytechnic into the new idea of a university of all the systems of knowledge and of the systematisation of knowledge also. That this grand ambition has proved inseparable from the contrivance of a moral economy of information capable of matching that information to moral necessity and political requirements is common ground to him and Beck. Richard Howells is also of the same view. His is an argument I have long waited to see, one in which the educator recognises that educated and customary knowledge are mutually embedded and companionably permeable, and that, as one might say, seriously to consider and criticise what education does for a country, it is necessary to understand what stories a country tells about itself. Through our television flows the alloverwhelming torrent of our tales, and to guess at what we might one day make of our glorious shot at how things ought to be, television is the most sheerly obvious of the stuff to scrutinise. Like all our contributors, but perhaps with greater austerity than most, Howells restates the duties of the secular intellectual towards the conservation of the spirit, and the university as the proper place to guard a secular religion from corruption by mere money, but it is heartening to see likenesses between his position and Tom Wylie’s. Wylie has spent a lifetime in what is formally known by the term of art, ‘informal education’, and in reporting his range ridership from its unmarked territories, he joins Howells across the border of politics in the badlands of culture, that large, quaggy, unplannable geography without whose unpredictable harvests there will be no society, good or bad, nor education, but only nomads and monads, wandering a wasteland. Even in a society now largely forgetting of the prose of the Authorised Version, it is moving to recall these lovely lines and to address them to this book: ‘ “Ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls.” But they said, “We will not walk therein.” ’ The authors of this book would say to the authors of the Good Book that we have come to the end of the old paths. This new book, however, is intended as a small signpost on the good way.

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Notes 1. This latter is a point taken from Edward Thompson’s famous essay ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, reprinted in his The Poverty of Theory, London: Merlin Press, 1978. 2. In Michael Frayn and Michael Sissons (eds), The Age of Austerity, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. Frayn’s essay tells the tale of the Festival of Britain. 3. Each given his due by Krishan Kumar, Utopias and Anti-Utopias, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 4. Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History, London: Allen Lane, 2002, p. 458. 5. What Robin Murray called ‘the Benetton economy’ in The Politics of Thatcherism, Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (eds), London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983. 6. Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two concepts of liberty’, collected in Berlin, Concepts and Categories, H. Hardy (ed.), London: Hogarth Press, 1985. 7. ‘The truth in relativism’ is a relevant paper by Bernard Williams in his essays collected as Moral Luck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. 8. Onora O’Neill, A Question of Trust, Harmondsworth: Penguin and BBC (the 2002 Reith lectures), 2002. 9. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, P. Laslett (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

1 Education and the Good Society (1) Roy Hattersley

We live in the age of ecumenical politics, a moment in history when the prime minister – a party leader admired and supported for some years by more than 70 per cent of the population – believes that all men and women of goodwill share almost identical views about how the good society is properly defined. I am a survivor, some of my critics would say a relic, of a more ideological age. So I must begin with my own definition of that desirable condition. It is built on three precepts. The first, though generally regarded as self-evidently right is open to argument. Paradoxically, the other two, though self-evidently correct are regarded as contentious, particularly by those who find them morally or economically inconvenient. My first precept is the assertion that the primary duty of a democratic government is to protect and, when possible, increase the total sum of liberty. The good society promotes the greatest possible degree of freedom for the largest possible number of people. I hold that view without doubt or reservation. But I accept that it is possible to argue that the state has other, and superior, purposes. My other precepts are not theories but facts. They are beyond argument but often disputed. My second assertion is that liberty and equality, far from being mutually exclusive, are indivisible. Freedom is not the theoretical right to enjoy privileges of which, in practice, we are unable to take advantage. To pretend that, because there is no legal prohibition on such activities, the children of the inner cities are free to go to Eton and that their grandparents are free to enjoy Caribbean cruises is a cruel deception. Freedom is the practical ability to make the choices which we wish to make. Without agency, the power to choose, there is no liberty. Distributing a millionaire’s income amongst 12 poor families would reduce one 12

Roy Hattersley 13

man’s agency. But it would increase the agency of dozens more. In consequence, the sum of liberty would be increased. Liberty and equality go hand in hand. The practical application of equality is assisted by John Rawls’s Difference Principle1 – the contention that the redistribution of power and wealth should be pursued to the point at which those most likely to benefit from greater equality “prefer their prospects with the old inequality to their prospects without it”. And it is from Rawls that I take the third precept in my definition. “When liberties are left unrestricted they collide with one another.” It is the duty of a democratic government to adjudicate between the conflicting demands for liberty. As Tawney puts it, freedom for the carp is death to the minnow. I think that we can take it for granted that the minnow would not cite the difference principle as a reason for allowing the carp to retain its freedom to eat what it wished. In fact, I go rather further than Rawls. I do not simply insist that the state, adjudicating between rival claims for power and resources, has no right to be neutral. I assert that it is incapable of being neutral. If, to pursue the analogy of carp and minnow, the ruling authority does nothing to regulate the pond, the carp becomes replete and the minnows are dead. In the conflict between liberties – and the distribution of the material ability to enjoy them – the government has constantly to decide whose side it is on. It can pretend that it is possible to adjudicate on each issue on the individual merits of the case. But the result will be at best chaos and inconsistency and at worst constant victory for the articulate, the self-confident and the well-connected. In adjudicating between conflicting liberties, a government in the good society protects and promotes the interests of the disadvantaged and dispossessed – if necessary at the expense of the rich and powerful. The only moral argument against that view is based on the “trickle-down effect”, a self-serving theory which I hope we have come to despise as well as reject. The sort of community which I have defined, my vision of the good society, has one overwhelming advantage, social and economic, moral and material, to the benefit of every class and income group. It promotes tranquillity. It is at this point that I rub shoulders with – or, more appropriately, tug forelock to – J.K. Galbraith, whose book The Good Society 2 inspired at least the title of this lecture. Despite my admiration for Galbraith – ending on only just the respectable side of idolatry – my good society is, in many ways, different from his. But, like The Good Society itself, I aim to offer a practical antidote to the Culture of Contentment – the contemptible middle-class view that, since everything is all right for

14 Education and the Good Society (1)

them, everything must be all right. I also, like Galbraith, want to describe an improvement in society – in my case limited to education policy alone – which is, in his phrase, “achievable”. But unlike him, I do not argue that the Culture of Contentment3 is self-defeating – that the rich, if they neglect the poor, will pay a terrible price. In my class-conscious way I wish that the Culture of Contentment would produce The Bonfire of the Vanities. But I fear that the prosperous can insulate themselves from the penalties of a divided society. It is easier, and cheaper, to attack crime rather than the causes of crime. The good society will come about by argument that leads to conversion and conviction not by an appeal to self-interest. That too, in my opinion, is a practical goal, which accepts Galbraith’s rules for “achievable policies”. It accepts that some barriers to achievement are immobile, decisive and must, therefore, be accepted . . . Any useful identification of the good society must therefore take into consideration the institutional structures and the human characteristics that are fixed and immutable. They make the difference between the agreeably irrelevant and the ultimately possible.4 It is, for example, for that reason that I say nothing, or at least very little, about the wholly malign effect that public schools have on the state education system. Much to my regret, private schools are here to stay – made popular not by the academic excellence of the best, but by a status which even the worst enjoy. Private education is a positional good, the possession of which proclaims that the owner is a superior person. However, we shall soon legislate to give independent education statutory protection. One of the basic liberties which is specified in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is a free choice in education. Clearly the authors of the convention either had not read or did not understand John Stuart Mill. For the liberty which he described and rightly glorified included the acceptance of “a specific duty to the public” to avoid what he described as “constructive injury to others”. The public school’s crime – prejudicing the whole education system in the interests of an already advantaged minority – is a “constructive injury”. But we must learn to live with and work round them. I use the public schools as no more than a bridging passage between my description of the good society and suggestions about how education can help to bring it about – speaking almost exclusively about secondary education. Private schools are the extreme examples of what, if the good

Roy Hattersley 15

society is to come about, must be avoided at all costs – an education system which divides rather than unites. And let us dispose at once of the libel which suggests that a unified education system – I freely admit a milestone along the road to a more equal society – is based on the assumption that we are all born the same or can, by rigorous early conditioning, be forced into becoming the same. R.H. Tawney said all we need to know on the subject. While natural endowments differ profoundly, it is the mark of a civilised society to aim at eliminating such inequalities as have their source not in individual difference, but in its own organisation . . . Individual differences, which are the source of social energy are more likely to ripen and find expression if social inequalities are, as far as practicable, eliminated.5 That is, of course, the case for comprehensive education – the belief, indeed the certainty, that natural talent is more likely to flourish in a society of equals than in one which is arbitrarily divided. The statistics confirm that view. Comprehensive education has immensely improved the overall level of educational attainment in this country. That judgement is neither impaired nor invalidated by the fact that most of the “comprehensive schools” that attract criticism are not comprehensive at all. They are old secondary modern schools with the name changed on the board at the school gate. Think how well the system would work if it was genuinely not selective. However, education cannot, on its own, end the inequalities in society and bring about the benefits of a united community. Indeed, it is much easier for the wrong sort of education system to divide society than for the right sort to pull it back together. One of the faults of the government’s education reforms is the reckless reliance on what, in economic policy, would be called the “supply side”. For, we know, in the words of Professor Chelly Halsey that teachers cannot reconstruct the community unaided. If they are successful at all, the needs of the neighbourhood for health, housing, employment and other services will be found to impinge directly on their teaching task. The implication is clear: educational priorities must be integrated into community development. 6 It is because the government does not seem to accept that elementary truth that I have very great doubts about the success of the Education

16 Education and the Good Society (1)

Action Zones (EAZ) – at least in terms of improving the prospects of disadvantaged children. Much of the criticism which has been levelled against the EAZs has focused on the invitation of private companies to participate in their management and the consequent downgrading of Local Education Authorities (LEA). I share the doubts about how much commerce and industry, committed as it rightly is to profit, can contribute to the improvement of education in deprived areas. But, alas, that does not seem to be the EAZ’s prime purpose. They exist as a test-bed for new forms of educational management and an opportunity to persuade private enterprise to involve itself in that process. This is not the moment to discuss the view, now widely accepted, that private enterprise is appropriate to every field of human endeavour – health, prisons, geriatric care, public hygiene. Suffice it to say that the profit motive has little to offer to those who most need help. Two years ago, Bernard Clarke, Headmaster of Peers School in Oxford, told the Oxford Department of Educational Studies about a girl he called Nicola, “a bright student in Year 11 who was rapidly losing her way with GCSE work”. [Nicola] had a part-time job in one of the college kitchens. She served at tables, cleaned up and helped with the washing-up . . . Nicola was not working to earn pocket money. She was working because of family poverty. Her tiredness was the result of clearing tables for several hours every evening after school with two work shifts on Saturday and three on Sunday . . . Nicola left school at sixteen with one or two GCSEs. She lived within three miles of two universities but that kitchen is the closest she will get to either.7 The minimalist view of equality of opportunity, the open road without the equal start, did not do much for her. The Nicolas of this world are not going to be helped by an avenging angel, in the form of Christopher Woodhead, descending on their schools and announcing that the teachers must do better. Nor will their prospects be improved by ministers announcing that deprivation is no excuse for failure. Published results and league tables, of which more later, will do nothing to enhance their life chances. Nor will the government’s assault on mixed-ability teaching, which seems to be based on the Prime Minister’s mistaken belief that it is employed by most teachers in most schools for most subjects. Nicola may be an extreme, even a sentimental, example. But her condition is by no means unique. Poverty remains the single greatest barrier to improved standards. Pupils who are hungry when they arrive at school

Roy Hattersley 17

do not do well. Nor do students who are constantly humiliated by the symbols of poverty or are born and brought up in the ethos of failure. And do not cite a rare example of a child who has risen from poverty to win a Nobel Prize, run a great international company or lead a great political party. Of course there are, and will be again, occasional exceptions. But, for the generality of pupils, social background is the essential determinant. They are, in the words of the National Children’s Bureau after its 1958 census, Born to Fail. If the government were to ask what is the single greatest cause of educational failure, the answer is clear enough. We can give it in a paraphrase of the Clinton election slogan that so impressed Tony Blair’s advisers: “It’s poverty, stupid.” There are, of course, ways in which the government can compensate for failure. None of them is a complete remedy. But all of them are better than neglect. We should, and I do, applaud the decision to extend preschool education. As we know, the pattern of nursery provision has followed the traditional route of all public expenditure. The middle classes took a disproportionate share. So the children who needed it most were the children who were least likely to receive it. But the decision, laudable beyond doubt, to extend pre-school provision does raise, by implication, a question about another policy item. It is clearly right to provide the facilities which enable single parents to work when that is their choice. But should those who wish to stay at home with their children be coerced into taking a job? Remember, most single mothers are not teenage girls with miniskirts, six packs of lager and deplorable habits. They are mature women who have been divorced, deserted or widowed. Can we be sure that their children’s education prospects would not be improved by close maternal contact during the years before they take up their pre-school places? Let nobody suggest that anything which I have said, or am about to say, implies that I am complacent about or satisfied with present levels of attainment. Indeed, all my views on the relationship between education and poverty are an affirmation of the view that too many of our children fail to achieve their true potential. That is bad for the nation as a whole and disastrous for them personally. I simply do not believe that the methods which the government has chosen to remedy the chronic problem are adequate. I have held that view since David Blunkett first chanted the mantra – “standards not structures”. For anyone who takes education seriously must know that the two elements cannot be separated. Those who believe in selection believe that a few grammar schools pull the rest along behind their high standards. Those of us who believe in the comprehensive

18 Education and the Good Society (1)

principle know that separation depresses the performance of the rejected majority and denies them essential resources as well as esteem. If I were to give one reason for Britain’s poor, comparative, education performance, it would be what Professor Geoff Whitty described as “a history in which the selection of children for unequal provisions has been the dominant principle on which English secondary education has been organised”. A competitive system – and that is what testing, league tables and the closure of “failing schools” amounts to – can only exacerbate that problem. The “standards not structures” slogan was invented by Peter Mandelson8 and included in a book which he co-authored with Roger Liddell. Jeffrey Archer has received better reviews. And quite right. The philosophy of his novels is better than that on which The Blair Revolution was built. “Standards not structures” was invented as an excuse to slide away from complete comprehensive education. The standards in which Mandelson and Liddell were interested were electoral rather than educational. With the exception of the approval I have expressed for the government’s pre-school programme, all that I have said up to now about improving education in this country has concerned expenditure in other services. I want to leave you in no doubt about the need to increase the DfES budget, both capital and revenue. The government’s public expenditure programme provides an excellent example of liberties colliding – the freedom of the taxpayer to spend the marginal penny in the pound in head-on collision with the freedom to enjoy a good education. The government’s adjudication, whether it realises it or not, has come down on the side of the prosperous taxpayer. That decision lacks the slightest economic justification. There is not a shred of evidence to support the view that an extra penny, for that matter an extra three or four pence, on the standard rate would make the slightest difference to this country’s economic performance. A gratuitous decision has been made to favour the rich against the poor. If we are to improve the performance of the disadvantaged children in our society, we need to invest extra-compensatory resources on their education. If you care to call it positive discrimination, I make no complaint. That is what it is and if we are afraid of the words, we will not have the courage to implement the idea. But there are other areas in which general expansion in spending is necessary. One is the school building and improvement programmes – bigger but not yet big enough. The detriment of working and learning in a dilapidated building – or teaching in a school which is spread across two sites – is far greater than the

Roy Hattersley 19

Treasury concedes. Another – in my view of crucial importance within the context of this lecture – is expenditure on teachers’ salaries. The unpopular truth is that we need better as well as more teachers. Of course I do not subscribe to the populist nonsense about generally low standards within the profession. But I do want to see some improvement. It can only be brought about by the application of two related changes – more money and more esteem. Yet as well as holding down salaries – the inevitable result of the absurd decision to accept the spending levels which the government accepted from its predecessor – much of government policy is certain to reduce teachers’ morale and the respect with which they are held in the country at large. “Naming and shaming” is the most obvious and least defensible example of a general policy which makes teachers believe that the government holds them responsible for all the problems of the system. Why should a young graduate of high ability enter a low income and exacting occupation which may result in the acceptance of indignities which no other profession would be asked to tolerate? Teachers are now subject to a system of inspection which one Chief Education Officer called “a reign of terror”. Newspapers are bombarded with publicity about new techniques to ensure the swift dismissal of incompetents, giving the clear impression that incompetence is teaching’s endemic disease. The private sector is invited to use its experience and expertise to advise and assist public sector neighbours who are, by implication, inferior. The determination to close “failing schools” is publicised with a fervour which suggests that they form a major part of the maintained system. The publication of what amounts to league tables – whether they are made up of crude results or calculate the value which had been added by devoted teachers – is bound to create a hierarchy of good, mediocre and bad schools. Add all those potential embarrassments together and the young graduate is entitled to feel that a career as a wall-of-death rider has more security. At least wall-of-death riders are allowed to drive their own motorcycles. Teachers are increasingly required to teach according to somebody else’s instruction. The national curriculum is part of the problem. Constant testing is another. So is the campaign against mixed-ability teaching which, even when it is allowed, will be held responsible for all the difficulties in the “failing schools” where it is practised. If there is a shortage of teachers, particularly of teachers with high level qualifications, it will be the most disadvantaged children in the most disadvantaged schools in the most disadvantaged areas who suffer. Bonuses for teachers in Education Priority Areas do not match supply to

20 Education and the Good Society (1)

demand. Nor will the special wage levels which are possible in Action Areas. If there is a shortage of teachers, expressed either as quantity or quality, the areas of greatest need will suffer most. That is particularly true in a system of competitive secondary education. Such a system is not compatible with the good society. But it is, much to my regret, the system which is being extended by the present government. And let us hear no nonsense about grammar schools providing an “escape route” for talented children from poor homes. I do not doubt that from time to time they produce that result, though the old municipal grammar schools produced results of which most comprehensives would be ashamed. But consider for a moment the implication of that metaphor of escape routes and ladders out of deprivation. Calling for the protection of escape routes is an admission that working-class children are often located in a system from which they need to escape. It is also the acceptance that, as long as a handful escape, it does not matter that the majority are left locked in disadvantage. The good society aims at a system of education which aspires to end the disadvantages, not allow a minority to escape from it. Escape routes may promote mobility. But mobility is just a constantly changing pattern of inequality. Increased competition, and the inequalities it guarantees, is not what we expected. You will recall Brighton 1995 and David Blunkett promising “No selection by examination or interview.” Those were his actual words, though during the following winter they were reinterpreted as “no more selection . . .”. Even the modified promise has been broken. For, extraordinarily enough, selection has been extended by the Labour Government. I hope I do not need to remind you of the objections to selection in the good society. The creation of a hierarchy of schools not only causes divisions within the society, it depresses the prospects of those who are arbitrarily, and often wrongly, designated as only suitable for the second or third rank. When a hierarchy is created, logic, as well as the national interest, demands that resources are concentrated on pupils who are deemed to need extra help. But the “failures” of the competitive system almost invisibly receive less help than their more fortunate contemporaries. Despite all that, a Labour government formed by the party which once believed in equality has protected and extended selection. 1. It has guaranteed the status of the 168 existing grammar schools until and unless a parental ballot decides that they should be incorporated into the non-selective system. The regulations which set out how the ballots are conducted are not yet finally decided. Yet they seem certain to be biased against change. We know that the classification

Roy Hattersley 21

of parents eligible to vote is prejudiced in favour of retaining the grammar schools. We know too that the ballot will involve two stages, 20 per cent of parents calling for a vote and a majority favouring comprehensive education. Both will be subject to legal challenge. I fear that most grammar schools are safe. 2. It has extended selection by the creation of specialist schools, to which pupils will be admitted after tests of aptitude. In a piece of gobbledegook of which he should be (but is almost certainly not) ashamed, Stephen Byers, ex-Minister of State, offered a distinction between ability and aptitude which he claimed justified specialist selection. “Ability is what a child has already achieved. Aptitude is a natural talent or interest – a potential which might flourish or blossom.” The net result is that designated specialist schools are allowed to select and receive extra funds to pursue their speciality. 3. Partial selection will remain in schools where it is already practised and other schools – not designated as specialist – will be entitled, under the law when the School Standards and Framework Bill is passed, to select 10 per cent of their pupils on the basis of a selfdetermined speciality. The enthusiasm for specialist schools becomes all the more puzzling when we hear from Professor Tony Edwards of the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He concluded that (a) there is no general parental demand for specialist schools; (b) specialisation is hard to separate from selection by ability; (c) selection by interest produces a socially segregated intake; and (d) “The early identification of promise remains a problem without technically well grounded and educationally acceptable solutions.” The truth is that if, in our good society, we hope to help those in greatest need, the creation of every different class of school leads to the creation of an extended hierarchy, if nowhere else, in parents’ minds. That was, and remains the objection to Grant Maintained Schools being given the fancy name of Foundation Schools rather than incorporated into the maintained system. Once some schools are popularly regarded as “good”, whilst others are inadequate, the most articulate and selfconfident parents will take their children into them. Then, since their pupils include the most motivated children from the most supportive homes, they will become the “best schools”. And the disadvantaged and the dispossessed will be left to take up places in whichever schools are not fully subscribed. Then – when those schools produce worse results than their more favoured neighbours – they will be publicly excoriated. And the process of division goes on and on.

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If the government really does want to prevent what it calls diversity turning into selection and segregation there is one thing which it must do at once. It must prohibit by law – specifically and categorically – head teachers interviewing either the pupils who have applied for places in their secondary schools or their parents who have guided their choice. The interview is a more insidious form of selection than the examination. By all means let the head teachers talk to their new pupils after the admission decisions have been taken. Good heads will do that as a matter of course. Putting the question of denomination schools aside, there should be only two admission criteria – proximity to the school and siblings within it. Any other system automatically advantages the articulate and the self-confident parents. The paradox of this government is that the first Labour Leadership formally to reject the goal of creating a more equal society persists in pretending that we are all equal in our ability to pursue our personal interests. The whole history of the welfare state illustrates a more depressing truth. The middle class always, given the chance, expropriates a disproportionate share of national resources. That injustice can only be remedied by increasing what they pay towards the cost of a fairer society and ensuring that wherever possible the allocation of those resources is, in the words of David Shepherd, “biased to the poor”. It is pure coincidence that I end this lecture with a reference to an Anglican bishop. I do not aspire to create the City of God or even the New Jerusalem. My good society simply takes practical steps towards greater equality. Tony Crosland, to whom this lecture is dedicated, would – had he lived – be urging the Labour Government to lift its eyes up to the same horizon.

Notes 1. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1971, pp. 62–63. 2. J.K. Galbraith, The Good Society. 3. J.K. Galbraith, The Culture of Contentment, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992. 4. Ibid. 5. R.H. Tawney, Equality, London: Allen and Union, revised edition, 1952, p. 49. 6. A.H. Halsey, Educational Priority Areas and Community Development, London: HMSO, 1972, p. 39. 7. B. Clarke, mimeograph, University of Oxford Department of Education, 1996. 8. Peter Mandelson, The Blair Revolution: Can New Labour Deliver, London: Faber, 1996.

2 Education and the Good Society (2) Fred Inglis

I It is a truth much forgotten that the point of education is to help ensure that the society which is home to us all is capable of carrying on and will continue into a recognisable future. Schools, universities, colleges; classes, seminars, libraries, computers; teachers, students, professors, technicians, cleaners, dinner ladies; books, essays, examinations, questionand-answer sessions, homework; the whole vast institution, sometimes crazy, sometimes dreary, often exhilarating, frequently boring, is intended to teach children, and the young men and women they become, how to keep the colossal show of a society on the historical road. The great cultural psychologist, Jerome Bruner, once observed that schooling is the one experience we all of us have pretty well in common with everybody else on the globe. Only a handful of peoples are so poor or so different that they cannot build and staff schools for their children. Across the world, schools so regulate the little souls in each classroom of five- or six-year-olds such that in no time at all they know the difference between work and play, school and not-school, the working week and the workless weekend, important subjects to learn (in the morning) and less important ones (in the afternoon, especially Friday), boredom and absorption, concentration and distraction, good children and bad ones, dutiful and feckless teachers, passing and failing. These classifications go deep into every pupil and are reproduced as dispositions of character and the customisation of being. Out of the rich interplay of these dynamic quantities, bombarding and allocating every individual self which comes their way, there will emerge a modern citizen and, where there is the money, a modern consumer, each steadfast enough 23

24 Education and the Good Society (2)

to grow up as a student, accept a social class membership, be obedient to the rhythms of employment and unemployment, capable of loving, parenting and dying in good order, eager to commit a new generation of children to the same matters of life and death. Amongst all this, according to the needs and derived from the abilities of each, the children and the students they become grow familiar with the trustworthiness (or otherwise) of the state which directs the whole business, judge it for justice, love spontaneously whatsoever things they find which are beautiful, hope for the happiness of which they read or see in stories on the screen, and without ever really setting out a picture of such a thing in their imaginations, compose a collective version, recognisable to each of their immediate circle of friends and associates, of what it would be like to live in a society and a world in which everything went well, whose members were healthy, happy alike in work and play, fulfilled in their lives, loving and responsible towards a natural world which they tended without exploitation, and which in return would harbour them without disaster. Every society holds somewhere in its moral imagination a picture of some such secret garden the low door to which children of the future will one day discover the key. The German cultural critic Walter Benjamin once wrote on the inevitability of this universal gift to dream of utopia: To the form of the new means of production, which to begin with is still dominated by the old (Marx), there correspond images in the collective consciousness in which the new and the old are intermingled. These images are ideals, and in them the collective seeks not only to transfigure, but also to transcend, the immaturity of the social product and the deficiencies of the social order of production. In these ideals there also emerges a vigorous aspiration to break with what is out-dated – which means, however, with the most recent past. These tendencies turn the fantasy, which gains its initial stimulus from the new, back upon the primal past. In the dream in which every epoch sees in images the epoch which is to succeed it, the latter appears coupled with elements of prehistory – that is to say of a classless society. The experiences of this society, which have their score-place in the collective unconscious, interact with the new to give birth to the utopias which leave their traces in a thousand configurations of life, from permanent buildings to ephemeral fashions.1 One may find such traces scattered everywhere in the everyday rubbish of consumer life: in the paradise islands of holiday brochures, in the

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dazzle and rich colours of advertisements for the ideal home, in the trivial perfections of a new car’s interior, in the lavishness of department stores, and in the glass, gilt and indoor fountains-with-palms of giant shopping malls. Even there, where the point of the fantasy is to sell you something, one finds, as Benjamin puts it, the dream of classlessness, a world without subordination or exploitation; those who serve on paradise islands are free, smiling, equal, beautiful; the fountains and the arcades of the historical surroundings of the very rich are open to everybody who happens to show up. So, too, in the details of children’s stories from a whole century in Beatrix Potter, Enid Blyton, in the town of Trumpton, on the Magic Roundabout, and in the little world of the Clangers and the Teletubbies, the kindly cultural inquirer will find the same dream of a society of equable equals, an unblemished natural habitat home to a useful and controllable technology, in which strange creatures cohabit peaceably with the human family, and where the occasional mishap or temporary danger is put down with cheerful adventurousness and a self-confident ease of being. An educational system must also, for very continuity and for the sake of its parent republic, cherish and construct its own versions of the same dreams. The best self of a school or a university implies a strong version of utopia. One gets a glimpse of this necessary function in one or two new schools. Architecture is the art of configuring past and future in a single construction. It is, as Ruskin pointed out, the public art, and so we ought to be able to see in its effects what sort of public utopia we may contrive. In Britain, the public art has had a thin time of it for several decades. The mood of happy self-indulgence allied to avid greed for money which descended upon its free people round about 1979 did terrible damage to its never-very-strong sense that, without the civic virtues and their public-spiritedness, private life and its voluptuary smallness would have a hard time of it. British public spaces – parks, benefits offices, schools, hospitals – are notoriously scruffy; its private atria – banks, corporations, hotels – famously opulent. It was not always so. Even at the summit of nationally high capitalism in Britain, the grand Victorian families who ran the big cities – Sheffield, Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Birmingham – built swaggering and solid city centres on a metropolitan scale – town hall, art gallery, municipal offices, public library, hospital. There was an implicit recognition in such large gestures that the vast private fortunes owed rather a lot to underpaid labour and helpless opposition, and that public munificence while tending of course a rich man’s vanity, was

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a debt paid to keep a plentiful citizenry not without its militant insubordination more or less obedient. When it became a matter of civic pride as well as economic necessity to establish a city’s own university, then the Firths in Sheffield, the Chamberlains in Birmingham, woolmen in Leeds, shipowners in Liverpool, shipbuilders in Glasgow wrote the cheques which paid for those massive stone façades, pediments and flights of steps. These are the monuments of a public educational system and it is an easy matter to read the stately and self-satisfied values which speak from such buildings. It is just as straightforward to perform the same exercise with the city and market town grammar schools built, first for boys and mostly in the 1850s or so, then for girls 30 or 40 years later. It is a far harder task to read back the values and the vision staring at you from the educational edifices of the great wave of school and university building which took place in the 1960s still housing such a large proportion of the student population today. The explanation for the change is more than financial, of course. System-building and the prefabrications of brutalism – cast concrete, coloured plastic cladding, unidentifiable entrances, slab windows, flat roofs – were cheap enough for sure, but they also professed a style of occupancy defined largely by negatives: no history was legible on these flat expressionless surfaces, no identity in these blank corridors and classrooms, no concession to nature in the patternless rectangles of grass and asphalt, no neighbourly spaces for sociable life or seclusion for the solitude of scholarship. This is an old song to sing about the meaningness of modern (meaning 1960s) architecture. Venturi’s postmodernist revolution, now 40 years old, is a mark of its familiarity and the widespread, long-lived revulsion from those now cracked, dirty, splintered and unkempt schoolhouses still trying to offer a welcome on bleak housing estates to the children creeping unwillingly towards them across the local wastes.

II That these places lacked history, identity, meaning of the old kind, was no accident. In its genteel, gradualist way, the post-war Labour government announced a recrudescence of public life enshrined in such open institutions as the new National Health Service and the takinginto-public-ownership of all that it believed should be the materials necessary to a decent life in every household; hence water, electricity, the coal and steel industries and the railways would be held as common wealth, to be paid out to the common good.

Fred Inglis 27

It did not quite work out like that, of course, and many people objected that the national boards administering the utilities looked and behaved pretty much the same as their predecessors managing returns on capital for their shareholders. But the idea of common wealth for the common good in despite of class advantage and hostility ran deep. So when Anthony Crosland became Secretary of State for Education in 1964, he drew on an old vein of feeling in his party and, impatient to reform the deep and hateful class bias in English education, ordered all local authorities not already doing so to prepare for a fully comprehensive education. Crosland, like his Tory predecessor Edward Boyle, was a remarkable exception to the normal rule which has generally run, before and since in British politics, that the Cabinet Minister in charge of education be as little qualified by intelligence, intellectual interest or cultivated experience for the job as possible. He had of course solidly utopian books to his credit,2 and the dominant values he sought to place at the foundations of national education were equality, social justice and – less worked out and more vaguely optimistic – a hoped-for combination of meritocratic jostling and a consequently modernising bent which would eventually make for a better because more egalitarian, less class-conscious society. The new buildings, in their self-effacing way, might be thought to express this turn to an imagined future. Once or twice, in a dramatically purposive form, a school was so designed – at Countesthorpe in Leicestershire or Stantonbury just beside the similarly egalitarian Open University (OU) in Milton Keynes – that its shape and spaces would conduce to the social and intellectual thriving of a school community living as it was hoped its pupils would grow up to live in the good society. So Countesthorpe had no staffroom and Stantonbury looked across at the OU, and the traffic of the school swished amiably through a congeries of undefined areas, some for study, some for sociability, none hierarchically placed, all clean, well-lit, giving onto green and pleasant grassy slopes with little acer trees at their centre. If such places look dated now, you cannot say they were ever given a chance. Whatever their mistakes – and it was an error to suppose that learning has no hierarchies, teachers need no privacy nor the good society no boundaries – the new comprehensives expressed for a season something good and strong about the necessary interpenetration of new forms of inquiry, new subjects to study, new ways of teaching social obedience and occasional subversion, new sets of human relations between knower and known, authority and innovation, desire and actuality.

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In 1966 the great British sociologist of these processes, Basil Bernstein,3 published an essay which would have been an indispensable policy document if there had been anyone around ready to effect the structural changes required by Crosland’s commitments to his values. Bernstein saw the identity question very early. He had learned lessons from Durkheim, repugnant to Anglo-Saxon educationists of a devoutly voluntarist persuasion, for whom the liberal individual was the realm and fount of value. Bernstein pointed out just how deep was the mark put upon its pupils, their minds and bodies, by the old grammar schools and he insisted that if the new schools were to count in the making of a new social order, they would need a symbolism, a customary life, a culture and an ethos capable of training its children and similarly marking them for life. The old schools set their brand on their pupils by way of uniform (visible membership in and out of school territory); by symbolising institutional memory and success (honours boards, cups, named prizes, sporting colours, former pupils’ associations); by formalising aetiology as seniority and tying both to authority and privilege (year membership, dress rules, spatial allocation, prefectorial system); by the public reward of distinction and achievement in the school’s name; all this identityconfirmation deepened by public rituals (school assemblies, speech days) at which there was constant intonation and evidence of the institution’s longevity (prayers to the founder, old pupils in attendance). It is no wonder there was such a to-do when all this was despatched into the rubbish bin of history. But Bernstein pointed out that although much of this charivari was maintained by snobbish mimicry and was irrelevant to the incipient lives of its pupils, if it were struck away then an identity vacuum would prevail, to be filled by the strongest currents of new identity-formation now looking for receptacles to fill. These flowed from the forces of commercial culture, weaker by far in 1966 than now; they would make all the running for pupils – define accomplishment, set styles of appearance, order value and magnetise allegiances – if, as seemed to be the universal tendency, schools stripped down and made ever more porous and transparent their modes of being, their self-explanations and their very reason for existence. For what was happening to education, as the class structures its institutions expressed – élite universities, grammar schools, secondary modern schools – dissolved and began to reconfigure in quite different forms, was its steady instrumentalisation. Education, in other words, was losing its outline as a good in itself, and becoming one more instrument in the struggle for status, for wealth, for mere subsistence. Insofar as it made

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itself less apparent – often quite literally, by removing its gates and railings, by obliterating its historic signs and adornment (architectural symbols, uniform for staff or students), by steadily diminishing its legislation (school rules, sex on campus) – so its presence in identity formation reduced as well. To put things like this can quickly turn into a traditionalist’s lament, routine enough in its way but in those still fired by hope, even by great expectations of a decent society, one painfully inviting submergence in what Raymond Williams once called ‘the interfused depths of social and personal sadness’. 4 Those are the depths at which defeatist and reactionary ideology is mined and treasured, and neither this essay nor this collection has any room for it. Bernstein’s relevance is therefore that he adjures us, if we want education to tell in the making of a good society, to devise for our institutions a culture and ethos capable of conferring intellectual identity and collegial membership upon a new kind of citizenstudent. At the same time as it bestows the looked-for instrumentality, it should be the source, in a secular society, and R.G. Collingwood’s phrase, of ‘principles to live by and ideals to live for’.5

III Putting things in that bald way usually seems to emanate from the sort of breezy voluntarism which disgraces the pages of many a green paper or policy document. It is an abiding error of the liberal-minded doctrines which stand behind contemporary management theory that anything may be planned for, and that a political will is all that is needed to find a way. Classical liberalism was thought out by men lethally impatient with conservatism and its inheritance; the Enlightenment taught that the past could be fired, and that the application of new (but timeless) reasoning could pick out a straight route, lined with the facts, to a better because rational society. Much has been done with these convictions; without them the noble ideals of a universal civilisation of free and fulfilled individuals could never have taken shape. But it is not only conservatives who have to learn to respect history. In his much-quoted dictum, it was Marx who said that ‘men make history but not in circumstances of their own choosing’, and the obvious ambiguity of this alerts us to the paradox ignored by so many reformist zealots, that history-making takes place in the always-disappearing present and immediately joins the rest of the past in shaping this present. Radical impatience with the obstacles to progress is necessary and admirable, but those unchosen circumstances will have

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unenvisageable consequences. The most damnable thing that management planning has taught is that a sequence of planned stages may not only be made inevitable, but that what are called, in the unspeakable but much spoken jargon, ‘outcomes’ and their sibling ‘targets’ may be named and must be met. In a grisly union of psychologistic behaviourism (reward-and-punishment learning curves) and can-do get-up-and-go entrepreneurialism, the social reformer of the day drives straight over the freedoms and resentments of all those quirky little monads waiting to be reformed. There is the grossest disparity between the calmly rationalising repetitions of Secretaries of State and their policy-polishing creatures, and the raucous resentments in schools of what the egalitarian society might look like, once called ‘half our future’. The vision in question belonged to an association of worthies appointed to a Royal Commission back in the prehistoric days of 1963 and under the benign chairmanship of Sir John Newsom. The fact that it is now forgotten is one condemnation of the amnesiac managerialist and the coarse bullying which has characterised government policy between, say, 1979 and the present day. Newsom’s report addressed, with the cheerfully optimistic condescension typical of such bodies, that half of the school population counted out of serious recognition and social reward by its lack of interest in and success at school. Calling on that still strong current of social egalitarianism released by the exigencies and triumphs of the World Wars, the report nominated schools to be the historic agent with which the nation could begin to repair the cruelties of old British class oppressions, their ruthless prohibitions, their capricious rewards. The central relation for such a transformation was to be between the pupil and the curriculum; by this token, freedom and fulfilment in a new kind of genteelly democratic society would follow a modern treaty to be drawn up between the knower and the known. Accordingly, the so-called Schools Council was established, with all sorts of unexpected people on its books, even including schoolteachers and trade unionists, and suchlike unregenerates, to devise new curricula (the Humanities Project, the new geographies, biologies, oracies, classics, mathematics) and the new ways of assessment with which to rejoin the two halves of the future. When it was discovered, as might have been obvious to less blithely angelic planners of the future and much-improved society, that secondary schools could not of themselves complete the long revolution, a new commission was appointed, chaired this time (naturally) by a woman to effect a programme of reform for the primary schools which had not

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been dignified by such a thing since the Lord Hadow’s not-very-radical efforts in 1929. Lady Plowden and her little team of excellently intentioned progressives drew up a two-volume design for the utopian primary school, grounded in the pedagogy of the tiny and libertarian nursery school initiated by Maria Montessori and promulgated by Susan Isaacs and Dora Russell in the 1930s. Its syllabuses favoured the arts, its precepts kindly encouragement and individual latitude, and its mastersymbols commemorated the grand names of romanticism: creativity, expressivism, self-definition, moral autonomy, all asserted with a due degree of educated eloquence. It is not likely that a feasible version of the good society fashioned from liberal doctrine and scheduled, let us say, for 2025 of the present era can dispense with many of these icons of the cultivated British bourgeoisie of the past century or so. As, however, it was once again the blunt and disobliging concern of Basil Bernstein to point out, first in a short paper for the weekly New Society, second in a short book for the series ‘Students’ Library of Education’, ‘Education cannot compensate for society’.6 Bernstein’s prior work on what he designated the linguistic codes of different social classes led him to identify not only the social-class advantage easily won by children who came to school equipped with powers of conceptual abstraction and disengaged generalisation, but whose cognitive habits were unencumbered by the densely localised and familiarly implicit turns of speech learned by working-class children in crowded houses and compacted neighbourhoods. Bernstein was, as one would expect in the touchy and competitive climate of academic life, misunderstood and vilified 7 for alleging the ineducability of the working class. His polemical point, however, was made in his title; schooling cannot dissolve or cancel the deep-seated formations compelled in their members by social class divisions and membership. Moreover, when he turned to study the intellectual forms, curricular structures and pedagogic methods which were presupposed by Newsom, Plowden and the Schools Council reformers, he warned that these too were adjusted to the instant advantage of those middleclass children who absorbed such principles and classifications with the morning cereal in devoutly broadsheet-reading households. Far from compensating for society, education on this showing confirmed and deepened its inequalities and abetted its symbolic violence. Shaken by his contention – it is indeed a rarity for educational politics to be so attentive to intellectual objections – but also roused to misgiving about the British achievement in an education system widely criticised for failing to prepare its children for global competition and

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technological hypertrophy, a third commission was summoned to study the very language of the nation and its classroom mutations. What the Bullock Committee nobly entitled A Language for Life represented, in spite of the rancour and philistinism which inevitably disfigure consensual exercises in a still unformed democracy, a pious effort to accommodate the facts of class hatred and the hopes of liberal education between one pair of book covers. Newsom (1963); Plowden (1967); Bullock (1975): the trinity sufficiently configures a social programme and a theory of progress. Across the same years it suddenly seemed as if the long-heralded emancipation of the serfdom of schoolteachers, such that their status became commensurate with their significance, was taking place. A new degree was brought into being with which to mark off a distinctive field of knowledge and inquiry such as was jealously patrolled in their own domains by the grand professions of law and medicine. Not only the bachelor but the master of education entered the rituals of academic nomination, and for all the British universities’ invincible snobbery towards them, the advent of Schools of Education did much to remind the parent institutions of the joys and duties of parenthood, let alone their obligations to the parents and teachers so distastefully necessary to the academy as providing their students as well as the future of the society. By 1979, the year of the she-rhino, the accomplishments of the preceding 20 years seemed about to lead along a clear road signposted ‘progress’. The social historian might reasonably have hoped to summarise the two decades as an era in which teachers won their social prominence, commanded their own intellectual field, moved decisively closer to the centres of power and policy, and became active agents in the making of a more equal and a decent society, one in which the fulfilment of self-education was cherished as a good in itself alongside freedom, justice, mutuality and trust. A neo-Whiggish interpretation of history has foundered irreparably since then. Two stupendous events blew open the frame of feeling which held together the social democracy inaugurated in 1945 by the anti-Fascist victory. First, the firestorm of inflation ignited by the 400 per cent rises in the price of world oil in 1973 instantly dissolved the only serious single salary increase (awarded by Lord Houghton in 1974) enjoyed by teachers in their history, and deleted a large portion of that increase in public esteem which marked the decade. Secondly, the end of Cold War in 1989 declared the simultaneous death of actually existing socialism and its longed-for realisation, and lethally wounded those more or less

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Leftish principles of solidarity and equality which had been close to the intellectual vanguard of the educational constituency. Consumer capitalism took off on a riot of happy self-indulgence and what Raymond Williams called ‘mobile privatisation’, 8 much encouraged by a British government with an unexpectedly illiberal and raucous disdain for the main tenets of educational reform as codified by Anthony Crosland and his many sympathisers. There were deep currents swirling beneath these surface breakers. Across the years of Mrs Thatcher’s rule and the wholly successful projection of the doctrine to which she gave her name, a sequence of her ministers, first of all did all they could to turn British education into a training adjunct of the economy, and second, all they could to make it the repository and transmitter of a fixed and partisan body of knowledge under the headings of a National Curriculum. All knowledge has its ideological bent. All governments seek to fasten knowledge to the caravan of their own preferences and their inevitable stupidity. Some manage so to do, by way of lucky opportunity and mastodon flatfootedness, that they change the way things are for ever. After 18 years of what is accurately called Thatcherism, Britain was changed utterly and, with it, the versions of pastoral utopia it is now possible to imagine.

IV The acute contradiction in government education policy since 1979 tears open at the twistpoint between capitalist requirements for the economy and Conservative stipulations for cultural changelessness and curricular subordination. Thus, training and vocational courses and qualifications prepare future employees for dutiful submission to the stormy arrivistes of the electronic economy: deregulation, privatisation, antiunionism, casualised labour, obligatory retraining, all rebranded with the lying jargon of new public management – flexibility, down-sizing, performance incentives, targeting, stock specificity, leadership style and all that – a language in which it is impossible to tell the truth. At the same time as it hangs onto its dividends, a Conservative government must conserve; must, that is, repeat and not renew society, restore and not reform culture. Mistrusting teachers themselves as too much in thrall to old ideals of equality and social justice (the secondary schools) and self-discovery and self-expression (the primary schools), Conservative governments during their protracted fiefdom, having broken union power, destroyed the art of teaching by bureaucratising its contents as

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a sequence of key stages and performance targets policed by a newly absolute if intellectually variable corps of inspectors. They then did their best to turn the complex transformations by which inquiry produces knowledge, and knowledge accrues value, into a regulated and regulative ‘delivery’ (a cliché-word in the industrialisation of schooling) performed, therefore, by the delivery-women and men. After the welcoming applause for what was expected to be a much more sympathetically social democratic Labour government swept to power in 1997 by great expectations and an unprecedented majority, education policy followed the tracks laid down by Thatcherism and deepened by such innovations as special payments for special teachers, designated ‘literacy hours’, league tables, ‘naming and shaming’ schools in a mess, the final disappearance of intellectual graduate study and the substitution, with the complicity of universities, of fatuous machinemanagement, and the laying waste of time and life by forcing schools to pay for themselves by compiling elaborate bids for tantalising pots of money attached to urgent-sounding, short-lived and indeterminate educational purposes. So the tenders were dispatched for grant-in-aid of action zones, social exclusion, literacy strategy, school, local authority and national appraisal, and the nurturing of those easily distinguished and underencouraged desirables, ‘gifted and talented children’. The enormous weight of busywork, the centripetal suction of government powers, the legislated stripping down of teachers’ creativity and reordering it as teaching technique, the dissolution of subject-loyalty in the training of teachers and the consequent induration of intellectual activity in pedagogy, have done terrible damage to a precious constituency in the British polity. Teachers, as David Hargreaves once put it, 9 are chronically liable by the nature of the work to become boring, exhausted, and hating the job. Well, now it is compulsory. A civic-minded, publicspirited, low-key humanitarian profession, which once ran local Labour and Liberal parties, collected for Oxfam and Shelter, did all it could for immigrants, minorities, the evicted and bewildered, held up protesting hands at the coming of Cruise missiles, has had its political energies and neighbourly virtues run down dangerously low, and its intellectual and imaginative vivacity heavily sedated. Nor is this long commination to be confined to schooling. There is no space here to develop much of an account of the present state of higher and further education, beyond saying that to a once unimaginable degree, money values have come to drench and saturate the climate, the culture and ethos of either. A recent vice-chancellorian instruction exemplifies the tendency in-the-round.

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To Heads of Funding Units Promoting Excellence and Innovation Meetings These meetings are not formally part of the annual planning cycle, instead they provide an opportunity, post-RAE, for the Senior Management Group (SMG) to engage departments in discussions to stimulate the review and refreshment of their portfolio of activities. They will include consideration of teaching research and third-leg activities in the light of wider corporate objectives, including interdisciplinarity. It is intended that all departments attend a Promoting Excellence and Innovation Meeting prior to their Triennial Review . . . and are asked to give thought to their current activities, their strengths, weaknesses, future opportunities and threats. ‘Third-leg activities’ – what have these people got against the English language? – turn out, on inquiry at the relevant university’s countinghouse, to mean the commercial exploitation of research developments. For the rest, for the mouth-filling invocation of portfolio of activities and strategic SWOTting, one can only feel contemptuous resignation; these are the ways and these the valuations of the contemporary university. It is important to note two things. First, this language contaminates all that is done in its name. It will not do to say that these are merely the outward and visible forms of administration, and that the inward and spiritual grace of scholarly life glows as sacredly as ever. Research is tied to and hired by policy-makers, including governments, with a strong preference for the job in hand to be done at top-speed and in a way which suits their prior ends, especially their reputation. Books are finished in a hurry whatever the damage to the thought in order that they may weigh in on the department’s cheque at the research assessment exercise. Secondly, this poison is home-made. The corporate superpower across the Atlantic pays out vast cheques to university research, no doubt, but independent, even critical inquiry remains entirely feasible and is published without a schedule. The universities of France, Germany, the Netherlands – to go no further south or east – get by without the trussadvertisements of strapline and mission statement. Money values, as Pierre Bourdieu10 emphasises, are everywhere in intellectual life. The only way to beat them back is to affirm and pursue one’s essential interests single-mindedly. That is to say, the scholar, the scientist, the schoolteacher, all distributors of culture – should attach themselves completely

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to the intrinsic forces which fix their place in social structure, define their allegiance to social identity, and direct their energy in social competition. Nothing in what I have said should be allowed to obscure the complicity, venality and simple cowardice of much of the educational constituency over the years of the locust. The wretchedly overworked primary head, helplessly unable to balance her books without sacking a teacher her pupils need, and the smoothly calculating vice-chancellor on his way to a knighthood by keeping more and more post-doctoral staff of thirty-five on short-term contracts, are alike complicit in the violation of their own best interests. And then, as everybody in the somnambulist polity of Britain will always say, ‘there’s nothing I or anybody else can do’. In one banal, important way, they are right. The changes of the past twenty years are irrevocable; they even chime with deep currents of feeling in the culture. A quite sufficient number of people, some of them teachers at whatever level, wanted Thatcherism to happen the way it did. They believed that their children were only half-literate and they knew how accurate was Harry Enfield’s parody figure of the unspeakable teenager, Kevin. And in any case, the pervasion of the national sensibility by the passionate longings and disappointments of consumer totalitarianism is felt in the blood and felt along the heart by everybody. For a hungry generation or more, any utopian thinking will have to encompass the joys of the dutiful consumer. For it is certainly the case that, as usual, the Sibyl of History is having her say even though, also as usual, we cannot interpret her. As I remarked, the political economy marches alongside our spirits, enjoining us to spend, conjuring us to the undoubted happiness of retail therapy and Mediterranean holidays. These fulfilments call to us with peculiar stridency because so many other of the narratives which instruct us on life topics – on how to be good; how to be successful; how to be responsible; how to grow up, to age, to die, and to leave happy and independent children behind – no longer retain their grip or their audiences. Eric Hobsbawm and Anthony Giddens, in their very different idioms, have alike pointed out that the present suffers from an acute hiatus in the procreation of believable narratives along which to string the beads of a continuous past sliding into a comprehensible future. Giddens11 observes that modern consciousness is weighed down by the anxieties of mountains of half-understood and unassimilable knowledge – knowledge of environmental menace, pharmaceutical obsolescence, corporate piracy, terrorist monstrosity, political babel – which stands in no conceivable relation to rational action. Hobsbawm 12 speaks a pitiless valediction over

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the various utopian doctrines of his ‘short twentieth century’, whether Marxist or liberal capitalist or under the desperate compulsions of ‘intellectual nullity [combined with] mass emotion’ which fills the sails of so many religious-political movements with savage and justified resentment. Both writers – and dozens of others – comment gravely on the dissolution of the once humanly constitutive links between the generations, which is to say, as Hobsbawm adds, between past and present. What I have called consumer totalitarianism and Raymond Williams calls mobile privatisation, requires for its continual advances a refusal of social connection and an affirmation of radical personalisation, a denial of the facts of social structures and their bonds. It is none the worse for being the cry of the old Fabian Left in Britain, once vociferous in the National Union of Teachers (NUT), to repeat that it is capitalism which has brought these consequences. The British Conservative Party, by its lights rightly regarding itself as the custodian of capitalism, pursued a bifurcated as well as punitive educational policy. It had to facilitate the working of the free market by training up a society of casualised, flexible, non-unionised but technologically literate consumers and it had to instruct pupils in how to become unpolitical private citizens who would work all the hours demanded, accept dismissal obediently, ration out judicious ambition to its children and live quietly under the flag of a unitary nation-state.

V Such a policy was utterly contradictory; politics mostly has to be. That is to say, insofar as politicians contrive a tale with which to contain the times, it is put together from such bits and pieces of past narratives as still seem to hold up and may be used once more to plug the holes and caulk the sprung timbers of the ship of state. Hence for politicians and private homes alike, the acknowledged importance of education. In the Labour administrations since 1 May 1997 this central place has been publicly recognised by the Prime Minister, so much so that he at first appointed only dutiful philistines to the office of Secretary of State, while keeping policy-business to himself and one cherished adviser working in the next room. But like all members of international political élites these days, 13 the Prime Minister tries to keep democratic policy-making well away from democratic publics. As far as education goes, policy and the value-forms which make it are decided in Whitehall and only then handed over to the robots of delivery in classrooms and seminars.

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It is however a happy truth, whatever the official stipulations, the regulations and benchmarks of instruction, the fearful admonitions of inspectors, that human transformations and pedagogic artistry cannot be completely squeezed out of education by either money or bureaucratic power. The exigencies of everyday life and involuntary tradition require that a teacher present to students something like a coherent picture of the world. Even in the discontinuous present, cynical egoism has not yet suffused the doctrines of national education and it would be as well if governments were to count into their reckoning the idealism and public-spiritedness still common in schools and universities, the strong recognition among teachers of all persuasion of the doom that awaits a nation with no civil society, and inscribe in their plans a space for the unplannable transfigurations of culture as they work up children, students, nations and transnational unions into the unforeseeable shapes of the future. Suppose they did so. Suppose that a government understood that, along with the acquiescence, stolidity and modest philistinism of the teacher class, there was also to be found a deposit of imaginative and radical feeling and a rich cultural sediment. Suppose it dawned on them that the experience of teachers demands of them the anxious reconciliation of social-class hatreds and ethnic conflict; the coaxing of obdurate lads and silly girls into mild and politic good manners; the earthing of high tension fantasies in low voltage domesticity; suppose this degree of sympathy and recognition, how could such a polity become aware of what its future needed from the official culture of its educational institutions? What will the good enough society look like, if we were to ask the morally excellent MP, the righteous teacher, the conscientious professor? She might say in each case that it be a society neither whose institutions nor whose people humiliate one another. 14 It is a society based on the premise that human nature is such as to find the expression of its key meanings in work, but only insofar as that work is free from the taint of exploitation and the clear implication that in being exploited one has been deprived of something which is in truth one’s own. It is a society which respects all respectable self-definitions. A good enough society will not have lost its sense of shame at the wrongs it does. The decent society is an advance on the just society. It must be one in which rights are duly specified and conceded, but one in which such concessions are framed by a commonly shared sensibility about their propriety – the rightness of rights, so to speak. Margolit says, rather blankly, ‘Institutions do not love’; 15 but on the contrary it is easy to speak of a hospital or a school as ‘loving’.

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Those few precepts of the good enough society would provide enough for our MP to cogitate upon. But it is to be expected of educational institutions that they practise rather more exacting habits of mind. They not only endorse social values, they challenge, at times oppose them. In either attitude, it is their duty as well as an inevitability, that they find and hold the middle ground of values, as well as discover how much of that ground is hollow or polluted, quaggy or sterile. The practice of education is given by the study of the sciences, whether natural, life or human, and the tension which supplies science with its energy in each version is between the way the world is and the way it ought to be. Discovering these variations is placed in time. Medical or physical science, as we have learned from Thomas Kuhn and Bruno Latour, are just as historical as history. My first precepts for a decent society, that is, find their embodiments across zones of value changing over time. Let us say, with Charles Taylor,16 that there are five such zones, and the map of human interests which simply is a curriculum includes them all. In the first zone, a curriculum-and-pedagogy places student and teacher in relation to the past. According to the usual conventions, to be modern is to have surpassed the past, but to owe much to its heroes. (Modern science and modern politics, for example, rest on the achievements of mighty predecessors and great discoveries.) In the second zone, students enter the present under tutorial instruction and learn how to practise what they have been taught. They learn to work, perhaps fulfillingly, and they do so according to a fable of progress in which the conscientious student wins modest promotion as part of a general social emancipation. Such emancipation is won, in the happiest endings of these stories, by the individual as representative of the common good. The progress of one’s children (and one’s students – of any age – become one’s children) is synonymous with the gradual diminution of the parents until they dwindle down to a death made serene enough (good enough) by the mutual knowledge that their children will be more prosperous, more comfortable, more fulfilled because better-educated and, come to that, better as a person than one was oneself, and in a better society as a consequence. This is the third zone of learning, darkened by death itself, lit by the future. Coterminous with it is the fourth zone, the realm of nature, where knowledge and inquiry adjure us to find ways of living, of doing science and eating supper, which do not destroy and humiliate the globe and the riches we find in it with which to feed, clothe, house and renew the human race.

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Finally, in the fifth zone, the three fields of science (Natural, life and human) teach, criticise, review and renew those personal values which live in each particular culture as that is defined by history and geography. Our immediate understanding of these is British – or, rather, English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish and, if not also European, so much the worse for us. Such understanding is also contested, at times bloodily. It is the business of the sciences of the curriculum so to attach the values to the story of time and space that the best of them, as well as those values with the most stamina, find due expression in the future, whether expression in the forms of knowledge or the forms of life inseparable from knowledge. Such and such are the connections between education and the good society. I have spoken as though these connections are to be found only on the map of the curriculum, and it is true that there they are most explicit. But the humdrum embodiments of all educational life – its social relations, its architecture and its memoranda, its games and its art, its physical manners and its symbolic rituals – all bespeak what it is not too much to call a vision. The visionary gleams of present educational narratives will have somehow to light up the future on the other side of the horizon. The zeal of the good consumer will not take us very far on that journey, whatever the undoubted pleasure it brings. It also seems likely that the well-upholstered little redoubt of private life can only maintain itself in its delights and privileges if its occupants, victors in the class war and having triumphed over state Stalinism, rediscover their human bonds with the wretched of the earth and with the wretched earth itself. These things are not to be brought about by moral exhortation, the unattractive fallacy of liberal-minded politicians. They are there in the everyday stuff of educational practice for everyone to see. But the holiday which has been taken from thinking about the duties of education to envisage the good society was declared thoroughly ended on 11 September 2001, when one particularly contorted version of Islam demonstrated its hatred of that same state of affairs. Answering such an abominable challenge would be to define our worth to ourselves, and to anyone else who would attend. It is a pressing matter.

Notes 1. Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire: The Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, London: New Left Books, 1974, p. 159. 2. Most notably The Future of Socialism, London: Jonathan Cape, 1956; and The Conservative Enemy, London: Jonathan Cape, 1962.

Fred Inglis 41 3. Basil Bernstein, ‘Ritual in Education’, reprinted in his Class, Codes and Control, vol. III, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975, pp. 54–67. 4. Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters, interviews with New Left Review, London: New Left Books, 1979, p. 295. 5. R.G. Collingwood, An Autobiography, Oxford: Clarendon, 1938, p. 48. 6. Collected in his Class, Codes, Control, vol. 1, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973. R.S. Peters (ed.) Plowden and After, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972. 7. For instance, by Harold Rosen in a pamphlet, Basil Bernstein’s Codes, Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1973. 8. Raymond Williams, ‘End of an Epoch’, New Left Review, 140, July–August 1983. 9. David Hargreaves, The Challenge of the Comprehensive School, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982; see also his ‘What Teaching does to Teachers’, New Society, 9 March 1978. 10. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 337–448, ‘For a Corporation of the Universal’. 11. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991, pp. 144–180. 12. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991, London: Secker and Warburg, 1994, pp. 563–585. 13. Here I follow much of Colin Crouch’s argument in his Coping with PostDemocracy, London: Fabian Society, 2002. 14. I borrow much in what follows from Avishai Margolit, The Decent Society, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996; and Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen (eds), The Quality of Life, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. 15. Margolit (1996). 16. In his paper ‘Interpretation and the Sciences of Man’, Philosophical Papers, vol. II, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, Chapter 1. See also my The Management of Ignorance, Oxford: Blackwell, 1985, ‘Values and the Future’.

3 Pluralism, Dissensus and Democratic Citizenship Chantal Mouffe

What is a ‘good society’? Is it a society pacified and harmonious where basic disagreements have been overcome and where an overlapping consensus has been established about a single interpretation of common values? Or is it a society with a vibrant public sphere where many conflicting views can be expressed and where there is the possibility to choose among legitimate alternative projects? I want to argue in favour of this second view because I am convinced that, contrary to what is usually taken for granted today, it is a mistake to believe that a ‘good society’ is one where antagonisms have been eradicated and where the adversarial model of politics has become obsolete. The central argument that I want to make in this essay is that the type of democratic political theory dominant today cannot help us understand the importance of dissensus in a democratic society. It is unable to grasp the different forms of antagonisms which have emerged in our globalized, post-Cold War world and to envisage a type of democratic politics that could take them into account. This is why I consider that it is necessary to develop a new model, one that I call ‘agonistic pluralism’ and about which I would like to present some reflexions.

The shortcomings of the dominant model Democratic societies are today facing a challenge that they are ill-prepared to answer. Far from having led to a smooth transition to pluralist democracy, the collapse of communism has opened the way to an explosion of ethnic, religious and nationalistic conflicts of which most liberals cannot make sense. In their view, antagonisms belong to a bygone age, a pre-modern time when passions had not yet been eliminated by ‘sweet commerce’ and replaced by the rational dominance of interests and the 42

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generalization of ‘post-conventional’ identities. Hence the difficulty of liberal democratic thinkers in understanding the current proliferation of particularisms and the new emergence of supposedly ‘archaic’ antagonisms. It would be a mistake to see such a situation as a mere temporary problem, soon to be overcome by progress in empirical research. Indeed it could be argued that it is the very structure of the dominant approach in liberal democratic theory that precludes understanding the present conjuncture. Characterized as it is by rationalism, individualism and abstract universalism, this type of theory must necessarily remain blind to the nature of the political and the ineradicability of antagonism. To be sure the term ‘political’ is increasingly present in liberal philosophy, but the domain of the political is always tackled from an individualistic and rationalistic approach which reduces it either to economics or to ethics. As a consequence the dynamics of constitution of collective subjects and the crucial role played by passions and antagonisms in this field cannot be grasped. There resides the explanation for the impotence of most liberals in providing adequate answers to the current problems. According to their scenario, political actors are envisaged as rational individuals driven only by their rational self-advantage, acting in the best of cases under the constraints of morality. Passions are erased from the realm of politics which is reduced to a neutral field of competing interests. By denying the fact of antagonism, this approach forecloses the possibility of grasping the dynamics of its possible forms of emergence. No wonder that, when confronted with the very antagonisms that their perspective aims at denying, liberal theorists can only evoke a return of the ‘archaic’. This type of rationalism has always constituted an obstacle in apprehending the nature of the political in its antagonistic dimension, but in the present conjuncture its shortcomings are more evident than ever. The profound transformations currently taking place as a consequence of the process of globalization require an adequate understanding of the construction of collective political identities and of the possible forms of emergence of antagonism, and this in a variety of social relations. Indeed it is crucial to realize that the political is not something that has a specific, determinate location in society, and that all social relations can become the locus of political antagonisms.

Power and antagonism What is really at stake is the need to acknowledge the dimensions of power and antagonism and their ineradicable character. By postulating

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the availability of a public sphere where power and antagonism would have been eliminated and where a rational consensus would have been realized, the dominant model of democratic politics denies this dimension and its crucial role in the formation of collective identities. On the contrary, this question of power and antagonism is precisely at the centre of the approach that I want to put forward and whose theoretical bases have been delineated in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.1 What we attempted to do in that book was to draw all the consequences for a radical conception of democracy of the ineradicability of power and antagonism, and of the fact that there can never be total emancipation but only partial ones. This means that the democratic society cannot be conceived any more as a society that would have realized the dream of a perfect harmony or transparency. Its democratic character can only be given by the fact that no limited social actor can attribute to oneself the representation of the totality and claim in that way to have the ‘mastery’ of the foundation. The central thesis of the book is that social objectivity is constituted through acts of power. This implies that any social objectivity is ultimately political and that it has to show the traces of exclusion which governs its constitution. The point of convergence between objectivity and power is precisely what we mean by ‘hegemony’. This way of posing the problem indicates that power should not be conceived as an external relation taking place between two pre-constituted identities, but rather as constituting the identities themselves. Political practice in a democratic society does not consist in defending the rights of preconstituted identities, but rather in constituting those identities themselves on a precarious and always vulnerable terrain. The approach that I am advocating involves a displacement of the traditional relations between democracy and power. For the Habermasian vision of ‘deliberative democracy’, for instance, the more democratic a society is, the less power would be constitutive of social relations. But if we accept that relations of power are constitutive of the social, then the main question of democratic politics is not how to eliminate power but how to constitute forms of power that are compatible with democratic values. To acknowledge the existence of relations of power and the need to transform them, while renouncing the illusion that we could free ourselves completely from power, this is what is specific to the project of ‘radical and plural democracy’ that we have delineated in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Another distinct character of our approach concerns the question of the deuniversalization of political subjects. We try to break with all forms of essentialism. Not only the essentialism which penetrates to

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a large extent the basic categories of modern sociology and liberal and educational thought, according to which every social identity is perfectly defined in the historical process of the unfolding of being; but also with its diametrical opposite: a certain type of extreme post-modern fragmentation of the social which refuses to give the fragments any kind of relational identity. By putting an exclusive emphasis on heterogeneity and incommensurability, such a view impedes us from recognizing how certain differences are constructed as relations of subordination and should therefore be challenged by a radical democratic politics.

An ‘agonistic’ model of democracy The consequences of the above-mentioned theses for democratic politics are far-reaching. They provide us with the theoretical terrain necessary to formulate the alternative model of democracy, one which is better suited to the tasks confronting us today and which I have called ‘agonistic pluralism’.2 In order to clarify the basis of this alternative view, I propose to distinguish between ‘the political’ and ‘politics’. By ‘the political’, I refer to the dimension of antagonism that is inherent in all human society, antagonism that can take many different forms and can emerge in diverse social relations. ‘Politics’, on the other side, refers to the ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions which seek to establish a certain order and to organize human coexistence in conditions which are always potentially conflictual precisely because they are affected by the dimension of ‘the political’. It is only when we acknowledge this dimension of ‘the political’ and understand that ‘politics’ consists in domesticating hostility and in trying to defuse the potential antagonism that exists in human relations, that we can pose the fundamental question for democratic politics. This question, pace the rationalists, is not how to arrive at a rational consensus reached without exclusion, for this is, indeed, an impossibility. Politics aims at the creation of unity in a context of conflict and diversity; it is always concerned with the creation of an ‘us’ by the determination of a ‘them’. The novelty of democratic politics is not the overcoming of this us/them distinction, but the different way in which it is established. The crucial issue is how to establish the us/them discrimination in a way that is compatible with pluralist democracy. In the realm of politics, this presupposes that the ‘other’ is no longer seen as an enemy to be destroyed, but as an ‘adversary’, that is, somebody with whose ideas we are going to struggle but whose right to defend

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those ideas we will not put into question. This category of the adversary does not eliminate antagonism, though, and it should be distinguished from the liberal notion of the competitor with which it is sometimes identified. An adversary is a legitimate enemy, an enemy with whom we have in common a shared adhesion to the ethico-political principles of democracy. But our disagreement concerning their meaning and implementation is not one that could be resolved through deliberation and rational discussion, hence the antagonistic element in the relation. To come to accept the position of the adversary is to undergo a radical change in political identity, it has more of a quality of a conversion than of rational persuasion (in the same way as Thomas Kuhn has argued that adherence to a new scientific paradigm is a type of conversion). To be sure, compromises are possible; they are part of the process of politics. But they should be seen as temporary respites in an ongoing confrontation. Hence the importance of distinguishing between two types of political relations: one of antagonism between enemies, and one of agonism between adversaries. We could say that the aim of democratic politics is to transform an ‘antagonism’ into an ‘agonism’. This has important consequences for the way we envisage politics. Contrary to the model of ‘deliberative democracy’ the model of ‘agonistic pluralism’ that I am advocating asserts that the prime task of democratic politics is not to eliminate passions nor to relegate them to the private sphere in order to render rational consensus possible, but to mobilize those passions towards the promotion of democratic designs. Far from jeopardizing democracy, agonistic confrontation is in fact its very condition of existence. To deny that there ever could be a free and unconstrained public deliberation of all about matters of common concern is therefore crucial for democratic politics. When we accept that every consensus exists as a temporary result of a provisional hegemony, as a stabilization of power, and that it always entails some form of exclusion, we can begin to envisage the nature of a democratic public sphere and its implicit modelling in any educational institution in a different way. Modern democracy’s specificity lies in the recognition and legitimation of conflict and the refusal to suppress it by imposing an authoritarian order. Breaking with the symbolic representation of society as an organic body – which is characteristic of the holistic mode of social organization – a democratic society makes room for the expression of conflicting interests and values. To be sure, pluralist democracy demands a certain amount of consensus, but such a consensus concerns only its constitutive ethico-political and educationally formative principles. Since those ethico-political principles, however, can only exist through many different and conflicting

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interpretations, such a consensus is bound to be a ‘conflictual consensus’. This is why a pluralist democracy needs to make room for dissent and for the institutions through which it can be manifested. Its survival depends on collective identities forming around clearly differentiated positions, as well as on the possibility of choosing between real alternatives. To borrow a term from system theory, we could say that pluralist politics should be envisaged as a ‘mixed-game’, that is, in part collaborative and in part conflictual and not as a wholly co-operative game as most liberal pluralists would have it. When the agonistic dynamic of the pluralist system is hindered because of a lack of democratic identities with which one could identify, there is a risk that this will multiply confrontations over essentialist identities and non-negotiable moral values. The current disaffection with politics which we witness in many liberal democratic societies stems in my view from the fact that the role played by the political public sphere is becoming increasingly irrelevant. With the unchallenged hegemony of neo-liberalism, politics has been replaced by ethics and morality, and the leitmotiv is the need for consensus, family values and ‘good causes’. In many countries this has been accompanied by the growing dominance of the juridical level. Political decisions are taken to be of a technical nature and better resolved by judges or management technocrats as bearers of a supposed impartiality. Today, because of the lack of a democratic political public sphere where the agonistic confrontation could take place, it is the legal system which is often seen as being responsible for organizing human coexistence and for regulating social relations. Given the growing impossibility of envisaging the problems of society in a political way, it is the law which is expected to provide solutions for all types of conflicts and education as grounding being in obedience. There is an undeniable link between the dominant trend in liberal political theory which tends to conflate politics with morality and the current retreat of the political. In fact, the present situation can be seen as the fulfilment of a tendency inscribed at the very core of liberalism, which because of its incapacity to think in truly political terms, always has to move to another terrain: economic, moral or juridical. This is very clear, for instance, in the work of John Rawls, who gives the supreme court as the best example of what he calls the ‘free exercise of public reason’, and sees it as the very model of democratic deliberation. Another example of this trend can be found in Ronald Dworkin who in many of his essays gives primacy to the independent judiciary seen as the interpreter of the political morality of a community. According to him, all the fundamental questions facing a political community in the field

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of employment, education, censorship, freedom of association and so on are better resolved by judges, provided they interpret the constitution by reference to the principle of political equality. Very little is left for the political arena. Even pragmatists like Richard Rorty, despite carrying out a far-reaching and important critique of the rationalist approach fail to propose an adequate alternative. The problem with Rorty is that, albeit in a different way, he also ends up privileging consensus and missing the dimension of ‘the political’. To be sure, the consensus that he advocates is to be reached through persuasion and ‘sentimental education’, not through rational argumentation; but he nevertheless believes in the possibility of an all-encompassing consensus. Such privileging of the consensus is, in my view, inimical to democracy because it tends to silence dissenting voices and this is why I believe that an approach which reveals the impossibility of establishing a consensus without exclusion is of fundamental importance for democratic politics. By warning us against the illusion that a fully achieved democracy could ever be instantiated, it forces us to keep the democratic contestation alive. An ‘agonistic’ democratic approach acknowledges the real nature of its frontiers and recognizes the forms of exclusion that they embody, instead of trying to disguise them under the veil of rationality or morality. By being aware of the fact that difference is the condition of possibility for constituting unity and totality, at the same time that it provides their essential limits, such an agonistic approach could contribute to subverting the ever-present temptation that exists in democratic societies to naturalize frontiers and essentialize identities. It would therefore be much more receptive than the deliberative democracy model to the multiplicity of voices that a pluralist society encompasses and to the complexity of the power structure that this network of differences implies. Thanks to recognizing that identities comprise a multiplicity of elements, such an approach is in a better position to envisage an identity which accomodates otherness, acknowledges the porosity of its frontiers and opens up towards that exterior which makes it possible. Accepting that only hybridity creates us as separate entities, our recognition of difference may contribute to defusing the potential for violence that exists in every construction of collective identities and create the conditions for a truly ‘agonistic pluralism’. Such a pluralism is anchored in the recognition of the multiplicity within oneself and of the contradictory positions that this multiplicity entails. Its acceptance of the other does not merely consist in tolerating differences, but in positively celebrating them because it acknowledges that, without alterity and otherness, no

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identity could ever assert itself. This is a pluralism that valorizes diversity and dissensus and does not try to establish a public sphere from which they would have been eliminated; rather, it recognizes in them the very condition of possibility of a striving democratic life.

A new left-wing project Envisaging modern democracy as a form of agonistic pluralism has very important consequences for politics and its educational nurseries. Once it is acknowledged that this type of agonistic confrontation is what is specific to pluralist democracy, we can understand why such a democracy requires the creation of collective identities around clearly differentiated positions, as well as the possibility of choosing between real alternatives. This is precisely the function of the Left/Right distinction. The Left/Right opposition is the way in which legitimate conflict is given form and institutionalized. If this framework does not exist or is weakened, the process of transformation of antagonism into agonism is hindered and this can have dire consequences for democracy. This is why discourses about the ‘end of politics’ or the need to go beyond Left and Right towards a ‘third way’ should be resisted. The blurring of the frontiers between Right and Left that we have witnessed in Western Societies and which is often presented as a sign of progress and maturity is, in my view, one of the clearer manifestations of the weakening of the political public sphere. It is also at the origin of the growing success of populist rightwing parties. Indeed when passions cannot be mobilized by democratic parties because they privilege a ‘consensus at the centre’, those passions tend to find other outlets, in diverse fundamentalist movements, around particularistic demands, non-negotiable moral issues or in populist antiestablishment parties. It is clear that the lack of a dynamic democratic life with real confrontations among a diversity of democratic political identities leaves open the terrain for other forms of self-identifications of an ethnic, religious or nationalist nature. This should make us understand that the Left/Right distinction should not be abandoned but reformulated. I am not arguing for the reactivation of its traditional meaning but for a new definition which would take into account the new forms of antagonisms. It is a mistake to believe that Left and Right are linked in an essentialist way with certain signifiers like ‘class’ and that the emergence of new struggles means that they have become obsolete. Understood as providing the dynamics of the agonistic struggle such categories should be seen a central to the very nature of democratic politics.

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Today, there is an urgent need to re-establish the centrality of politics and this require drawing new political frontiers capable of giving a real impulse to democracy. Those new political frontiers need to incorporate a multiplicity of democratic demands, but there is no denying that one of the crucial stakes for democratic politics is to begin by providing an alternative to neo-liberalism and to do so in the educational forum. It is the current unchallenged hegemony of neo-liberalism which explains why the left is unable to formulate a credible alternative project that could provide the basis for the establishment of a chain of equivalence among a wide range of democratic demands. The usual justification for the ‘there is no alternative’ dogma is globalization. Indeed the argument often rehearsed against redistributive type social-democratic policies is that the tight fiscal constraints faced by governments are the only realistic possibility in a world where voters refuse to pay more taxes and where global markets would not allow any deviation from neo-liberal orthodoxy. This kind of argument takes for granted the ideological terrain which has been established as a result of years of neo-liberal hegemony and transforms what is a conjunctural state of affairs into an historical necessity. Here, as in many other cases, the mantra of globalization is invoked to justify the status quo and to reinforce the power of the big transnational corporations. When it is presented as driven exclusively by the information revolution, globalization is detached from its political dimension and appears as a fate to which we all have to submit. This is precisely where our critic should begin. Scrutinizing this conception, Andrè Gorz has argued3 that, instead of being seen as the necessary consequence of a technological revolution, the process of globalization should be understood as a move by capital to provide what was a fundamentally political answer to the ‘crisis of governability’ of the 1970s. In his view the crisis of the Fordist model of development led to a divorce between the interests of capital and those of the nation states. The space of politics became dissociated from the space of the economy. To be sure, this phenomenon of globalization was made possible by new forms of technology. But this technical revolution required for its implementation a profound transformation in the relations of power among social groups and between capitalist corporations and the state. The political move was the crucial one. The result is that today corporations have gained a sort of extraterritoriality. They have managed to emancipate themselves from political power and appear as the real locus of sovereignty. By unveiling the strategies of power which have informed the process of globalization, Gorz’s approach allows us to see the possibility of a

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counter-strategy. It is of course futile simply to refuse globalization or to attempt to resist it in the context of the nation-state. It is only by opposing to the power of transnational capital another globalization, informed by a different political project, that we could have a chance of resisting successfully this version of neo-liberalism. To begin envisaging such an alternative, this is the more urgent task facing the Left today. This is indeed the precondition for the revitalization of the democratic public sphere that the agonistic model of democratic politics requires. It is clear that such an alternative to neo-liberalism cannot simply consist in a return to the Keynesian social-democratic model with all its shortcomings. The struggle for equality which was at the core of social democracy needs to be envisaged in a wider way by taking account of the multiplicity of social relations in which inequality exists and should be challenged. Indeed, the deficiencies of traditional social democracy were due to its lack of understanding of the forms of subordination not exclusively of an economic nature. This is why the emergence of the new social movements was a defining moment in the crisis of the socialdemocratic model. In many countries the right was able to take advantage of this crisis to mobilize support for the neo-liberal backlash against the welfare state. What is called for today is some form of ‘post-social democratic’ politics, but on condition that this does not mean regressing behind social democracy to some pre-social democratic liberal model. Yet this is precisely the kind of move which is behind the logic of many policies advocated by the ‘third way’.

Which unit for democratic self-governance? There is a last question that we should address when we try to imagine the conditions for a good society today. It is clear that there are sets of issues which cannot be tackled at the level of the nation-state but only in a wider context. Indeed one of the most debated issues today concerns precisely the so-called crisis of the nation-state. To be sure, this crisis is often exaggerated by the advocates of the neo-liberal model of globalization who have an interest in asserting that the nation-state with all its regulations has become obsolete and that all the barriers to the free movement of capital should be dismantled. But there are also those who, while being critical of neo-liberalism, similarly announce the demise of the nation-state, but in this case what they call for is the development of a ‘cosmopolitan democracy’ and of a ‘cosmopolitan citizenship’. What they overlook is the fact that democratic governance requires the existence of units where popular sovereignty can be exercised and that this

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requires boundaries. It is a dangerous illusion to imagine the possibility of a cosmopolitan citizenship that would be based exclusively on an abstract idea of humanity and that would be coextensive with the whole planet. Democracy is unthinkable without the idea of a ‘demos’. No democratic self-governance can be effective without such a demos. This is not to argue that the nation-state is the only possible form of demos and that we should not try to imagine other forms. It seems evident to me that the process of globalization is affecting the conditions of exercise of democratic citizenship and that one should not hold desperately onto the nation-state as the only possible shell for democracy. There is a lot to be argued for the coexistence of smaller and bigger units of democratic decision, according to the kind of problems to be resolved and the types of issues to de decided. If instead of envisaging globalization as the creation of a vast homogenous space – which is clearly inaccurate – we view it as proceeding under the mode of a set of regionalizations, as a new form of articulation between the local and the global, we will be in better condition to imagine which forms of political associations will be better suited to secure the exercise of democracy at various levels. It is in this context that I find the diverse attempts to formulate a new form of federalism, one that would be appropriate for our present conditions, especially promising. For instance, some proposals have been made in such a direction by Massimo Cacciari, the former Mayor of Venice who argues that what we need today is a Copernician revolution that would radically deconstruct the centralistauthoritarian-bureaucratic apparatus of the traditional nation-state. He affirms that the modern state is being torn apart as a consequence of two big movements: one micronational, and another one supranational; on one part, from the inside, under the pressure of regionalist or tribal movements, on the other part, from the outside, as a consequence of the growth of supranational powers and institutions and of the increasing power of world finance and transnational corporations. In his view federalism is the answer to such a situation, a federalism that would recognize the specific identity of the different regions, of the different cities, not in order to separate them from the other places but on the contrary in order to establish the conditions of an autonomy that would be conceived and organized on the basis of multiple relations and exchange between those regions and those cities. Federalism, he says, should be envisaged as combining solidarity and competition, as a form of autonomy exercised in systems which are integrated in a conflictual mode. If we want to impede the consequences of globalization as leading to the imposition of a single and homogenizing model of society, with

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all the possible forms of ‘tribal’ reaction that this would certainly entail, it seems to me that it is urgent to imagine new forms of associations in which pluralism could flourish and where the capacities for popular participation should be enhanced, and this is why I find such a federalist vision very suggestive. By allowing us to envisage new forms of solidarity based on recognized interdependence, it could constitute one of the central idea around which democratic forces could get organized, and would certainly put some life in the agonistic struggle that I am advocating. As against the antipolitical illusions of a cosmopolitan world governance, and against the sterile and doomed fixation on the nation-state, the rediscovery and the reformulation of the federalist ideal provides a crucial insight for our inquiry about the form that a good society should take in the twenty-first century.

Notes 1. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London, 1985. 2. This approach is developed in Chapter 4 of my book The Democratic Paradox, Verso, 2000. 3. André Gorz, Misères du présent, Richesse du possible, Galilée, 1997.

4 Theses for an Extensive Reform of Education Ulrich Beck

What do people have to know and what do they have to be able to do in order not to be overrun by the changes in economy and society but instead understand and structure them? When labour is restricted or replaced by knowledge and capital, its value has to be increased by knowledge. People have to be given the chance to develop all their abilities, by themselves or with others and by an improved participation in a knowledge-and-education society enhanced and renewed in its content, in order to stand on their own feet. THESIS 1 The aim of education is an economy of ideas and renewal and no longer an economy of things. In a mass industrial society, which is shaped by employees, people are educated to be copyists of blueprints who are as perfect as possible. Copyists of that kind are indispensable for activities that can be standardised. However, their importance decreases in times of rapid change and global competition. On the other hand, those people who are creative in economy and society, who act in the best sense ‘entrepreneurially’ and who are able to undertake responsibility for themselves and for others are increasingly important. The stress on individuality, creativity, selfconfidence and self-responsibility as central models of twenty-first century education presupposes a change and a new evaluation of former principles in the system of education and at the level of content and organisation. THESIS 2 Demand-directed qualifications will increasingly be seen in relative terms. Those who want this to set the agenda in education policy wrongly pursue this slogan: a central answer to the high rate of unemployment is 54

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the orientation of training in schools and universities towards the needs of the economy. Neither the individual nor the economic institutions know what the jobs of the future will be like. It is far too problematic to direct education policy in schools and universities towards the economy since its future requirements are not known to that economy either. Very few people predicted what today calls into question the very bases of the labour society: full-time work transformed into ‘flakey’1 employment; information technologies which rearrange and revolutionise jobs in shorter and shorter periods of time; meanwhile the whole of economic life undergoes drastic alteration in the course of globalisation. Economic requirements are split into present and future. Those who successfully finish training orientated to present job requirements will probably not find a job or at least not the job which was the point of their training. One example is the job of the programmer, greatly in demand in the 1980s. It took years to establish the necessary training. When the first programmers came to the labour market the corresponding profiles of activity had already been rationalised away by a new computer generation. This example can perfectly well be generalised. The more emphatically ‘economic need’ serves as the basis on which to reform and plan education, the more likely it is to guide whole generations of these requirement-oriented training into a professional offside position. Already the burden of a mortgage taken out on a narrow job-orientation is heavy. THESIS 3 Education policy has not thereby become impossible. On the contrary, far more than in previous times there must be an investment in education and research. Many politicians in the age of globalisation have not yet understood that the most important resources of a country are the ability and readiness of its citizens to solve complex future tasks, rather than the provision of technology or capital, themselves already highly mobile. Knowledge and ability determine a country’s prosperity since they stimulate the actual development of new technologies, form capital or attract it. At the same time traditional and institutional forms of responding to insecurity lose their influence – in families, marriage, the role of the sexes, social class, political parties and the churches. Individuals themselves are required to cope with these difficulties; the capacity to cope with insecurities will be a future key qualification. That is to name a new major task of all areas of education – schools, job training, universities and further education.

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THESIS 4 Let us steer ourselves consequently by one familiar demand of the economy, and revive the ideal of an education couched in terms of our common good and our humanity! We must master this educational paradox politically. The future belongs to easy-riding specialist-generalists. Soundly specialised knowledge will enable them to recognise and construct patterns of relations for themselves, and to solve mobile problems and tasks in an inventive way. As a result, it is not only the job outline which must be the centre of attention in training; full learning, by contrast, connects to the manifold activities through which people may control their own lives. Job training is therefore extended to one’s daily bearing up under experience in an increasingly globalising economy and society. THESIS 5 Job-training turns into lifelong learning. Social forms like further education or the continuation of one’s education by one’s own initiative, so far been marginal, will be a central zone of life. This is a matter of the acquisition of robust competence in information – sorting, rational understanding, interpersonal negotiation and problem-solving, all of which will be no longer strictly divided between private and professional experience. By developing such competence in every area the abilities to handle difficulties are so formed that even if the difficulties are not overcome they become bearable. So there is an increase in both directions: in a new level of productivity and in the energy as well as in the happiness to be found in life. THESIS 6 The strengthening of the personal responsibility of schools and universities; the promotion of yet further education. The model of job training as a matter of funnelling stuff into receptacles simply does not work anymore: Pupils, apprentices and adults are not empty vessels, which knowledge and values pour themselves into, as distributed by school, enterprise and university. The aim, in contrast, will be the creating of a self-possessed identity, its own centre of self-direction and purposeful activity. However, young persons have to learn how to position and find themselves in an insecure world. This process is wide open; it must be acquired and tested during the time of education. A reform of education, which puts the distinctiveness of the learning individual at the centre of attention, leaves behind the bureaucracy of an authoritarian state, one which insists that it regulates the contents of education, and therefore deny the importance of teachers, tutors and mentors. The freedom of pedagogy seen as inseparable from educational responsibility has to be further extended. Schools and universities have

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to release their students into the insecurity of late modernity, and thus become free and independent locations for the practice of their own initiatives, inventions and development. No doubt, they can also learn from a properly understood entrepreneurship, practise the ‘creative destruction’ (Schumpeter) of well-worn routines, and imagine the novelty of a ‘common welfare’ and a public good in order to help fill the contemporary vacuum of meaning and value. Lifelong employment will be an exception and many people will have to change their job more than once. Therefore they need educational preparation to match. That means that they must find, invent and conserve their abilities for themselves. The traditional signpost to the job by way of training maintains old-fashioned expectations which are no longer fulfillable. It is also necessary to make isolated specialisations permeable since in most cases they act only as prohibition against competition. It is equally necessary to found an innovative culture of renewal and self-initiative for education at schools, universities and even in corporations, and put it into the place of a salary-dependent attachment to jobs. Creative talents are at present rather coincidentally, if at all, looked after and supported. This other way, learners would be especially empowered not to grow into the fixed attitude of an employee, whose basic right is the right to a ready-made job. Instead, they should be given the opportunity to become the initiators of new ideas, new services and networks, and so forth. THESIS 7 So that people can organise their lives as responsible to themselves and participate in and organise the polity more than previously, they need a prompt and ready all-round education that enables them to use their reason by themselves.2 Such a general education would be based on elementary cultural techniques, especially that of mastering language. At the present moment, marked deficits are obvious which will seriously hinder economic and social development in the future. If companies must now establish classes for graduates of the national schools in the national language because otherwise no reliable linguistic communication is possible, this is a sharp warning. What has to be arranged after this point is less definite. Everywhere, fundamental questions arise for solving which knowledge is either scarce, controversial or not available – the problems of sustainable development, unemployment, globalisation, hunger, violence, drugs, and so forth, offer obvious examples. Opinion-leaders, press and television, all react to this

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state of affairs with gross simplification. New scapegoat theories and one-sided solutions are exaggerated and, in the rapid turnover of topics, disperse. At this point, debate, reflection and new resolution must grapple with the question: what does all-round, common or general education for a better if not a good society mean, and what is its purpose in and for the future? THESIS 8 An education addressing this question will introduce the adolescent to all realms of culture. In such a general education, the decisive content, the basic questions and the modes of inquiry, all the forms of which define method and accommodate answers as usable knowledge, should be taught in their specialist structures. General education is not a phase-out model, but instead presupposes the development of a broad spectrum of interests together with the will to continue studying. It presupposes the whole person rather than serving an immediate purpose; gives bearings in an uncertain world, helps towards self-assurance and confidence in one’s position. It helps shape identity, anchored as it is to cultural and humanistic values, such that it remains stable in times of crisis, independent of professional status. THESIS 9 Establish and teach key qualifications. Finding cognitive direction in terms of specific contexts becomes possible for the mass of people when the knowledge of subjects and key qualifications are extended and thought of in relative terms. Lexical knowledge soon becomes obsolete, in contrast to a context-and-competence order of knowledgeable frameworks and distinctive ways of thinking. Key qualifications develop all those abilities that go beyond specific professional knowledge and adequacy. They translate into key capacities for decision, recognition and resourcefulness. They create the conditions nowadays essential for powers of self-renewal in the individual and in society. Intellectual abilities like logical, analytical and abstract thinking, judgement and problem-solving have always been encouraged at school. However, the transmission of key qualifications has to be perceived more consciously and systematically today. Basic professional abilities like independent work, persistence, powers of concentration, reliability and accuracy should be reinforced. Personal dispositions of independent action and judgement, decision-making in the sense of a deliberately developed responsibility must be inculcated. Social adequacy, teamwork, conflict-resolution (and all these attributes as conducing to ‘integrated

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thinking’) will also be crucial in the future. Dealing with one’s own self must as much be taught as dealing with other people and with nature. Simultaneously, a new contract develops in all areas of job training and especially at universities: all educational institutions claim to teach secure knowledge, which yet superannuates itself continually and simultaneously. In social situations, obvious ignorance increasingly recoils from its own acknowledgement. For example, nobody today knows the consequences of genetic engineering. Optimistic and pessimistic prognoses are equally at risk of intellectual inadequacy. Unanswered questions everywhere commit communal life to a tug-of-war. Tolerant and revisable procedures for decision-making despite this insecurity are one key attribute that schools, job training, universities and further education all have to equip people with. In future, people are going to be ‘commuters’ who are furthermore dependent on (contrastive) frameworks of moral interpretation and valueorientation as they move between disciplines, vocations, honorary offices and the multiple activities of family and social life. Such frameworks enable them to bear themselves meaningfully. Ethics, social sciences and humanities as well as political education therefore take on outstanding salience in the future. These disciplines must be shifted to represent and contrive patterns of relation which develop historically, and will themselves be socially and politically transformed in radical ways. Only thus can the centrifugal constituents of knowledge on the human horizon be intelligibly configured. THESIS 10 By and large, to the extent that strictly occupational direction is completed or replaced by such key qualifications, so the application and contexualisation of knowledge must be extended by further and broader education. This extension of education can then answer in a flexible and concrete way to ad hoc requests from the economy and society. Above all, the three classical areas of education – school, professional training and university – have to take in the fourth estate of further education, itself already established and well-proven. They should not close their minds to the increasing demand to open up new markets for their services and seek out sources for additional means. THESIS 11 Internationalise educational formations in schools, universities and subsequent training. Transnational operations need employees who are able to act in transnationally oriented ways. This presupposes a practical learning of foreign

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languages in an openly European society, in which young people grow up with (at the very least) English as a second native language and the British themselves with at least one other tongue. A component of the practice of globalisation is to replace obsolete attitudes towards learning by dialogic scrutiny. The inward-lookingness of many German universities is alarming. At the beginning of this century, the world’s elite went to German universities, but today these universities have lost nearly all their attraction for foreign students. What is common at attractive places of teaching and learning has to be re-established in Germany: the international interweaving of universities; exchange programmes among professors as well as among students, a course of action which presupposes a high rate of comparison among the curricula and final examinations; research co-operation at the level of the project to be made conditional upon the grant of research support, transnational courses of study and ‘global studies’, which bring together and introduce teachers and students of different cultures and nations to the questions of a transnational world. On the way into the unknown European and global economy, a journey on which we have been launched for a long time now, all this is indispensable. Universities also have to be confronted with the competition of ideas and services, in comparison with internationally leading suppliers and in comparison with the customers and those who are interested in university services. University autonomy must no longer be invoked as a shield with which to conceal hostility to renewal. Universities and individual disciplines have to break out of the maze of self-referentiality and ask themselves these self-critical questions: Wherein lies the singular contribution of this university, this discipline to the current and future development of society? How can it be guaranteed that the questions which preoccupy members of society and the political public become an object of scientific and pure research? How can the argument about the foundation of future society be brought into the sciences and become an object of publicly informative research and academic moderation? All these questions can only be answered if university regulations permit them to be opened up by the principle of reference to practice in universities themselves – this by way of contributions to and situations of exchange and mediations, such that the protocols of knowledge and

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inquiry become transparent, and in that way mutually referable on all sides. The fact that this could bring about an independent view of universities on the part of users and enquirers after their knowledge – a renewed autonomy of the universities in society – could well improve the standing of universities in the future. THESIS 12 Reforms of education with this objective raise an exclusive problem: What happens to slow students and those who are differently talented, who are not a match for the requirements of a fast-changing world? What happens to those who are forced out and excluded from society by such standards? The law that is in force is as following: no employment without training; no accommodation without employment; no existence in society without employment and accommodation. The more we fit ourselves to the world market and develop from a society of employees into a knowledgeable society, the more social inequalities will become apparent. What role does the education system play in this situation? Where and how does training become a mechanism of exclusion? (For Germany, this is already revealed these days at the lowest level of the hierarchy of training: in the Hauptschule.3 In view of the inflation of certification currency, qualified secondary school leavers are driving students from Hauptschulen out of their traditional access to employment.) It is at this point that our duties to conceptions of a good society are sharpest. THESIS 13 Larger inequalities will confront society in the future with the difficulty of legitimisation. Are such inequalities fair and justifiable? Questions of justice arise again and fundamentally. These questions can only be answered in practice if a politics of equality of opportunity deliberately counteracts inequalities of outcome. Virtue will then be our reward. The education system of a good society must promote every single person separately and with due regard to talent and inclination in order to reach his or her level of qualification. Hierarchies of achievement raise only minor problems of legitimation. Achievement is always individually distinguishable in terms of individual capabilities. Only if we succeed in including as many people as possible in the established and common goods of a general education no longer exclusively job-oriented, have those people the chance to work towards a recognised position in society. Without education and a reform of education as regards content and organisation – hence, corresponding strenuousness in education policy! – the future is gambled away.

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Notes 1. Also metaphorical in German, so translated literally. 2. This is, of course, Kanr’s precept in his celebrated essay, ‘What is enlightenment?’ 3. School in Germany for children who are 10–16 and who usually start job training after finishing school.

5 The Success of the Comprehensive Schools John Dunford

That which the best and wisest parents want for their children, so must the community want for all its children. (John Dewey) Comprehensive schools have been in existence for around 50 years and, by the end of the twentieth century, 90 per cent of young people up to the age of 18 were educated in these schools in England. Of the others, seven per cent attended independent schools and a small number were in selective state schools. With indicators of educational standards in secondary schools rising for the last 20 years, the comprehensive schools can take most of the credit for this improvement. Considered against a background of social upheaval and increasing family instability, the performance of the comprehensive schools is the more remarkable. This optimistic introduction will surprise many people, who have been led to believe that comprehensive schools have been a failure and that all the educational woes of the time can be laid at their door. This chapter aims to set the record straight, offering a fair assessment of the performance of comprehensive schools. This will offer reassurance to those who recognise the successes of these schools and will demand from others a reassessment, even if it is too much to expect a recantation. There is also a sense in which comprehensive schools have not been judged to have succeeded because the comprehensive system has never been fully in place. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, selective schools continued to exist in at least 36 local education authorities (LEAs) and schools which bore the word comprehensive as part of their name suffered through the creaming of their brightest pupils by other schools. This happens in places such as Birmingham, where there is a clear hierarchy of schools, with those of the King Edward’s 63

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Foundation at the top of the pupil ability range, and in other areas such as Kent where grammar schools in some parts of the county reach well down the ability range. In this chapter we shall see how the Labour government, far from removing selection, as many Labour party members would wish, have extended it through a substantial planned increase in the number of specialist colleges.

Evidence of success The 1980s and 1990s have seen a sustained year-on-year rise in GCSE and A level results. The proportion of young people gaining at least five good grades at GCSE at age 16 has doubled and this benchmark is now achieved by nearly half of the cohort. During this period, the proportion of 18-year-olds gaining two Advanced level passes has more than doubled – from 14 to 30 per cent – and this has enabled the government to increase the participation rate in higher education fivefold since the 1960s. Right-wing critics allege that these increases result from a fall in the standard of the examinations, but independent studies have not supported their case. Surveys of the views of parents consistently reveal a very high satisfaction rate with the performance of the schools that their children attend. As Benn and Chitty (1996, p. 468) noted, ‘in both government and national media circles, there so often was (and still is) no understanding of the widespread support that the comprehensive principle enjoys among the majority’. The overwhelming majority of comprehensive schools receive good reports from the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED), the independent school inspection body. Although OFSTED generates a great deal of negative comment on the performance of schools and teachers in the press, most OFSTED reports on individual schools are largely positive, identifying a number of key issues for improvement, but commenting on many more strengths than weaknesses. Only around two per cent of comprehensive schools ‘fail’ OFSTED inspections and are subject to special measures, with a further seven per cent being identified as having serious weaknesses. Comparative studies of the performance of schools in areas with a similar socio-economic profile indicate that counties with a fully comprehensive system, such as Cheshire, perform better than counties with a selective system, such as Kent. (Guardian Education, 3.11.98) David Jesson published research (Jesson, 1999) analysing the improvement of pupils between the ages of 14, when they took their key stage

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3 tests, and 16 when they gained their GCSEs. He found that pupils in areas with comprehensive schools improved more in these two years than those in selective areas. Although the results of this research support the case for comprehensive education, there is considerable danger in comparing the progress of pupils between these two sets of examinations. Many secondary schools do not regard key stage 3 tests as a significant milestone and do not specially prepare pupils at this age in the way that they do two years later for GCSE examinations. Key stage 3 is seen more as a preparation for key stage 4 than an end in itself, although the government’s determination to improve the performance of secondary schools at key stage 3 may force schools to place greater emphasis on key stage 3 tests. I can cite further evidence of the success of comprehensive schools from my own experience as a teacher and head teacher, witnessing the opportunities that came to the full cross section of the population in the schools in which I taught between 1970 and 1998. For the last 16 years of that period, I was head of Durham Johnston Comprehensive School, an LEA-maintained 11–18 mixed school with a good socio-economic range in its intake. Durham City itself has a high proportion of middleclass people, working at the university, County Hall, the National Savings headquarters and further afield. The school also drew in children from the former coal mining villages around the city. These communities had experienced their share of unemployment after the rapid closure of the pits and the ensuing social problems remained in the families living there. As is often tragically the case in such communities, many parents have few aspirations for their children and show little interest in their education. One of the prime motives for the introduction of comprehensive schools was the worthy aim of creating the maximum number of opportunities for all the young people in the neighbourhood of the school. Creating opportunities for success was my motto as a head teacher and it has been the driving force for many in comprehensive schools. The teachers’ union action in the mid-1980s caused a large reduction in the number of extra-curricular opportunities and they disappeared completely in many state schools. Although they have gradually returned to a reasonable level in most places, the damage was irreparable and children who had few opportunities in life outside school were deprived of more than they realised. The dispute with an intransigent Secretary of State in the mid1980s had been over pay and Sir Keith Joseph never understood the depth of the damage caused by his stand. At Durham Johnston we partly overcame the consequences of the teachers’ action and the narrowing

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of the curriculum caused by the national curriculum Statutory Orders by introducing an activity time on Friday afternoons. Teachers and young people engaged in a wide range of activities, from rambling to Russian and from origami to orienteering. Many other examples could be cited from comprehensive schools of the range of opportunities available to all.

Serving all the children The principle of comprehensive education – indeed, the word comprehensive – carries an obligation to educate all the people. The early comprehensive schools had rigid catchment areas, but local authorities, such as Leeds, tried to draw the boundaries of these areas in a way that provided secondary schools with a good social mix of pupils. The Inner London Education Authority and others used a method of banding by academic ability in order to achieve a balance. There was little problem in drawing the boundaries of the catchment in rural areas, where a greater social mix usually existed, but large housing estates in cities, normally with a homogeneous population, provided a sufficient number of pupils for a viable comprehensive school without drawing from elsewhere and these schools are inevitably monocultural. Because it serves all the children in its area, except for a very small proportion attending special schools, the city comprehensive school has to cope with many of the most demanding children. When a school has to educate these in large numbers, the problems sometimes appear insurmountable and schools are expected to grapple with the difficult social problems in the community outside their gates. The policy of open enrolment, in which parents could express a preference for the school of their choice, made it very difficult for LEAs to create a balanced intake into any but the most rural schools. Admissions were based on the school’s Standard Number and, when open enrolment was introduced, this was artificially increased to the 1979 figure. Since secondary school rolls were falling dramatically for demographic reasons in the 1980s, and 1979 had been the peak year for 11-year-olds, this gave parents greater flexibility in expressing a preference for schools some distance from where they lived. Very quickly, the most popular schools filled up to their Standard Number and the size of the less popular schools shrank, sometimes to the point where the school became unviable and had to be closed. ‘Parental choice’, as the politicians liked to call it, soon became a mirage for most of the population, since places are frequently not available at popular schools, which have to draw up admissions criteria in order to exclude all children beyond the Standard

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Number. For the more popular schools, parents are not choosing the school; the school chooses the children. Most schools use admissions criteria based on where children live, but other criteria enable some schools to choose the more academically able and better motivated pupils and to reject the less able and less well motivated. Church schools have been able to select on the basis of religious affiliation and have sometimes widened this criterion to create a more favoured intake. City technology colleges select on the basis of interview and, even when they attempt to select a balanced intake, they can only select from those who apply, who tend to be the more aspirational parents. The extension of the technology colleges initiative to languages, arts and sports specialist schools, with the capacity to select 10 per cent of their intake on the basis of aptitude for their speciality, is a further move towards diversity within the system and away from the original concept of the comprehensive school. This means that some schools, especially in urban areas, but not only in the inner cities, have to educate a high proportion of children with difficulties or special needs. This is particularly the case in areas where there is a perceived hierarchy of schools. In places such as Kent, where there is a hierarchy within the selective schools themselves, this creates in the public mind the concept of the sink school, to which only the least aspirational parents send their children. The extent of the uphill struggle in such places cannot be underestimated and sometimes the situation is cruelly exposed. This happened notably in the case of the Ridings School, Halifax, where the area’s admissions policies contributed substantially to the difficulties which exploded so publicly in 1996. In spite of the occasional publicity surrounding schools such as the Ridings, comprehensive schools cope well with potentially disruptive children. OFSTED reports repeatedly praise the behaviour management of comprehensive schools and the way in which they deal with difficult children. The challenge for the comprehensive school system is to educate well all the young people in the country. The challenge for each teacher is to teach the whole ability range of children, from those with the most serious special educational needs to those who are destined for the most demanding university courses. Nearly all of my 26 years in comprehensive schools gave me the opportunity to teach that full range and I believe that there is no greater professional reward in teaching than to tackle successfully this variety of challenges. In any system of universal schooling, there are some young people who find it impossible to work within a normal community. Head teachers find it necessary to exclude these pupils in order to safeguard the good

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order of the school and uphold the right of the majority to their education. During the 1990s, the number of young people excluded from school grew alarmingly under the pressure for schools to improve their examination results. Local education authorities failed to create an adequate supply of places in alternative provision, such as pupil referral units, and consequently many of these excluded young people led wholly unstructured lives and got into even more trouble than when they had been at school. In 1999, the government’s social inclusion unit determined to solve this problem and the DfES introduced Circular 10/99, constraining the powers of head teachers to exclude. Although the philosophy of social inclusion has widespread support among those who work in schools, Circular 10/99 created a substantial problem for comprehensive schools, especially those with a large number of potentially disruptive pupils and the Secretary of State, under pressure from head teachers, twice had to change the provisions in the Circular during 2000. Two years later, there is a welcome determination by the government to support schools in dealing with extreme behaviour. Many more places are available to teach excluded children. Local Management of Schools (LMS) is based largely on per capita funding. Under open enrolment, the funds follow the pupil and this inevitably creates funding disparities between schools. Taken with other funding disparities created by the current funding methodology (the standard spending assessment, or SSA), this creates considerable inequity between the funds available to each school, and hence between the educational opportunities open to their pupils. Some schools in urban areas, where open enrolment and parental preference reduce their pupil intake numbers, have persistent acute funding difficulties, causing them to employ fewer teachers than they need and having large classes for young people who would derive great benefit from learning in smaller groups. All systems of universal education that contain an element of choice create hierarchies of schools. It is the task of government to reduce the extent of these hierarchies so that all young people may be well served. In England and Wales, the funding system and the policy of open enrolment have increased the inequalities between schools and have made it more difficult for teachers to serve all the young people as well as they would wish.

The public perception The public perception of comprehensive schools has been formed more by the problems than the successes outlined in the previous sections. In

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an article in the Guardian (08.09.98), Martin Stephen, the high master of Manchester Grammar School, claimed that There is growing evidence that our [comprehensive] schools are failing pupils and parents . . . If our maintained system is failing pupils and parents, is it because the ideal of the comprehensive school has become that most awful of hybrid animals, a cross between a sacred cow and a white elephant? An Exeter University study of parent attitudes towards schools found that only nine per cent of parents thought that standards were poor at their own child’s school, while 37 per cent thought that standards were falling nationally (Hughes et al., 1994). Part of the problem has been the inappropriate criteria by which comprehensive schools are judged. School performance tables contain many columns of information, but the greatest attention is paid to the proportion of 16-year-olds gaining five high-grade passes (A* to C) at GCSE. This is a poor performance indicator for any type of school, but especially for comprehensive schools in which the prime aim must surely be the raising of achievement of every individual student, from the most academically able to those with the greatest level of special educational need. A sensible measure of success should reflect the efforts of teachers and pupils at all levels. Instead of giving credit only to those who gain grade C and above, and hence forcing schools to place special emphasis on the grade C/D borderline, performance indicators should give equal credit for all improvements in grade. One such measure is the average points score for GCSE grades, which gives the same credit for raising a grade B to an A, or a grade F to an E. Better still, performance should be judged according to the value added by the school to each child’s level of attainment on entry. The deficiency of the government’s performance indicator for secondary schools was never more apparent than when David Blunkett, then Secretary of State, in a speech to the Social Market Foundation in March 2000, threatened with closure of all schools which had less than 15 per cent higher grade GCSE passes for three successive years. The 80 schools, identified in the Times as being in this category, included many which had previously received glowing reports from OFSTED, acknowledging the high quality of their performance under very difficult social conditions. The list also included nine secondary modern schools in Kent – the county with the largest concentration of selective schools – which could hardly be blamed for the low academic ability of their pupils in an area where such a high proportion attend grammar schools.

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The use of a deficient performance indicator in drawing up league tables of schools contributes greatly to the poor public perception of comprehensive schools. These league tables appear in national and local newspapers twice every year – when the examination results are published in August and again when the government publishes more definitive lists of school performance in November. It is little short of scandalous that comprehensive schools and selective schools appear in the same tables, leading to headlines in some newspapers, such as Grammar schools scoop GCSE laurels (Guardian, 25.08.00). The way in which the league tables are structured by the government invites such a response, with its conscious or unconscious denigration of the performance of comprehensive schools. One has to ask, as Benn and Chitty (1996, p. 469) asked, ‘what kind of a society spends so much time trying to undermine the education system upon which almost all its population depends, while declaring its commitment to the welfare and educational development of these very same pupils?’

A crisis in confidence The widespread public perception of the failure of comprehensive schools, which is at odds with the views of the parents of young people who attend them, has been caused by more than a decade of negative comment from sections of the media and, shamefully, from government ministers. The Conservative governments from 1979 to 1997 repeatedly belittled the achievements of the state schools for which they were responsible. This lack of government commitment to the schools extended to a lack of trust in state-school teachers. Mark Carlisle, who was the first Secretary of State for Education in Margaret Thatcher’s administration, has said that, at the time of his appointment, he ‘had no direct knowledge of the state sector either as a pupil or as a parent’ (Ribbins and Sherratt, 1997, p. 55) and his successor, Sir Keith Joseph, did not believe that there should be a state education system at all (Chitty in Ribbins and Sherratt, p. 80). Carlisle introduced the assisted places scheme, under which the government paid for bright children to be educated at fee-paying schools. This scheme conveyed a damaging and misleading message to the public that comprehensive schools did not give a good education to academically able pupils (Chitty and Dunford, 1999, pp. 1–3). The abolition of the assisted places scheme was one of the first Labour election manifesto commitments to be honoured, but any vote of confidence in comprehensive schools that might have been conveyed

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by this measure was soon dissipated when a junior education minister, Stephen Byers, ‘named and shamed’ the 18 schools with the worst examination results. Inevitably, most of these schools served socially deprived communities and the crisis of confidence was deepened. Only in the last 15 years has education been such a high profile political issue. While this has increased the pressure on governments to provide more resources for education, it has put greater pressure on schools, which have been performing constantly under the spotlight of publicity. Much of this publicity has been negative. The accountability of schools to their governing bodies and to the LEA ensures that watchful eyes are kept locally on their performance. Increasingly, however, education has become a national service and the accountability of schools to national bodies has grown. The injustice of nationally published league tables of performance, which take no account of the socio-economic circumstances of a school or the prior attainment of its pupils, has already been mentioned. During the 1990s, accountability through inspection has grown, with the change from an occasional visit by Her Majesty’s Inspectors to a regular programme of OFSTED inspections. The OFSTED Framework for Inspection enables schools to be categorised as ‘having serious weaknesses’, or failing to give an adequate standard of education and in need of ‘special measures’. It is debatable whether schools placed in these categories are helped or hindered in their drive for improvement. Certainly, the effect of the local publicity always given to these decisions is traumatic for the teachers and students. Until 1992, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate had stood between the government and schools, fiercely critical and independent of both. Under Chris Woodhead as Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools (HMCI), OFSTED became an arm of government, exerting massive pressure on schools and contributing to a situation in which schools are over-accountable to the point where they fear to experiment. Over-accountability increases the price of failure and there is some risk that the richness and creativity that characterised the first three decades of comprehensive education will be lost. Fortunately, we have not reached that point yet. Comprehensive schools remain exciting and vibrant places in which the benefits of the social and academic mix are complemented by the variety of the contributions made by the teachers. Of all the problems faced by state schools at the start of the twenty-first century, the greatest is teacher recruitment. With the economy booming and graduates having little problem obtaining well-paid employment, it is becoming increasingly difficult for schools to recruit the brightest and best young graduates into teaching. The long-term problems, especially in secondary school subjects such as

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mathematics, physical sciences and modern foreign languages in which the problems are already acute, give much cause for concern.

The way forward Although this chapter started on an optimistic note, proclaiming the successes of the comprehensive school system, much of the last few pages has been an account of a system that is seriously under-regarded. It has to be admitted that comprehensive schools have an image problem. The Independent Schools Information Service (ISIS) performs a valuable public relations role for fee-paying schools, ensuring that statistics on the performance of the schools are collected and disseminated, and placing stories in the media that project a positive image of the sector. During the first half of the 1990s I tried, on behalf of the Secondary Heads Association (SHA) and the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), to establish an Information Centre for State Schools. The aim was to create a body that would do for the state schools what ISIS does for the independent sector. Unfortunately, we could not raise the pumppriming funds required to establish an office and start work, and the project foundered. A State Schools Information Service was also advocated by Mike Baker, the experienced BBC education correspondent, in a lecture at the Institute of Education (Baker, 2000). The establishment of the General Teaching Council (GTC) in England, and a sister body in Wales, under energetic leadership, provides an opportunity to project a better image of the teaching profession, and hence of the state schools in which most GTC members work. There can be some optimism that this body will redress the false public perceptions about state schools, which have done so much to create the crisis in confidence about their work. Although it is important to build a better image for comprehensive schools, it is essential to create a clear vision for their future. The prime minister is an advocate of diversity, adopting similar slogans to those used by the Conservative government, when choice and diversity were principles to be followed at all costs. Tony Blair wants to extend the number of specialist colleges and to create city academies as a way of introducing greater diversity in more localities. Increases in the number of schools aided by religious bodies and those taken over by private companies are also likely. When the Conservative Party next comes to power, one can foresee an acceleration in the growth of diversity, as schools are encouraged to become independent of any democratic local framework. The most damaging area in which independence would be widely exercised under such a system is admissions, for which the absence

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of a coherent policy in each locality would set school against school and exacerbate the problems outlined above. The comprehensive system is not the homogeneous monolith that is often portrayed. It is certainly not a one-size-fits-all system, an untruth that has been repeated so often by Prime Minister Blair and various secretaries of State that people must surely have started to believe it. Visit any town with more than one comprehensive school and the local people will tell you about the differences between the schools. One school may be especially good at drama, another at sport, a third at educating children with special educational needs. One may organise all its teaching in common ability sets, while another may have more mixed-ability groups. Diversity already exists and is an important part of the tradition of British schooling. Within a coherent system of comprehensive school provision, with equitable arrangements for admissions and funding, there is scope to develop the principle of the self-managing school. Building on the success of LMS, some of the benefits of grant maintained status could be introduced without recreating the damaging divisions of the grant maintained era. An important part of the solution lies in introducing a national funding entitlement for schools, with an inbuilt index of disadvantage that targets substantial additional resources at schools serving deprived areas. There must also be a recognition that the problems of such schools are rooted in the communities they serve. There must be support for problem communities, not just for problem schools. As the Lancashire HMI, William Kennedy wrote in his annual report in 1870, Give us better homes, better dwellings, better streets, better habits, better social life among the poor, and better food, and then we should have better schools everywhere . . . It is false to blame the school for not being good when the sole fault lies in the social condition of the people. The school is the focus of hope in a disadvantaged community and, in supporting these schools and communities, governments are investing in the success of both educational and social policies. (Committee of Council on Education, 1869–1870, 152) The situation is particularly difficult when schools are polarised by the circumstances of the communities they serve. This was graphically illustrated in a series of articles in the Guardian (14.09.99) by Nick Davies, who charted the way in which comprehensive schools in different parts of Sheffield had developed over a period of 10 years, leaving Abbeydale

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Grange School in a very difficult situation, socially, academically and financially. A subsequent OFSTED report on Abbeydale Grange showed how well the school was performing, yet this was unlikely to persuade middleclass parents in other parts of Sheffield to send their children there. The problems created by such contrasts cannot be solved overnight, but creating a more diverse structure of schools is likely to exacerbate the difficulties. The comprehensive system remains the best structure for school education in the twenty-first century, but the reality will be damaged by the perception unless other measures are introduced. Funding must be better targeted, admissions must be independently controlled, measurement of performance must be based on prior attainment. The associated national league tables should be abolished (as has happened in Wales and Northern Ireland) or, at least, should be based on the value added by the school, not on raw results. The qualifications structure must be changed too, so that the early success of the GCSE as a unifying force is rescued from the subsequent changes that have threatened to reintroduce a bipartite examinations system for 16-year-olds. A unified post-14 qualifications framework, avoiding the academic–vocational divide that has beset English education for generations, is now urgently required. The vision of the twenty-first century comprehensive school as the focus of community learning, linked to local primary schools and charged with the promotion of lifelong learning, represents the best way forward. This will build on the proven, but largely unrecognised, success of the first half-century of comprehensive schools and will involve the community in a way that will give people a more accurate perception of the work of the schools.

References Baker, M. (2000) Does Education Get the Media It Deserves?, Institute of Education, University of London. Benn, C. and Chitty, C. (1996) Thirty Years On: Is Comprehensive Education Alive and Well or Struggling to Survive, David Fulton. Chitty, C. and Dunford, J. (1999) State Schools: New Labour and the Conservative Legacy, Woburn Press. Committee of Council on Education (1869–1870), Report. Hughes, M., Desforges, C. and Holden, C. (1994) Dissatisfied Customers? Parents’ Views on Their Children’s Schools, School of Education, University of Exeter. Jesson, D. (1999) Evaluating Performance at GCSE in LEAs and Schools of Differing Types, Centre for Performance Evaluation and Resource Management, University of York. Ribbins, P. and Sherratt, B. (1997) Conservative Secretaries of State and Radical Education Reform since 1973, Cassell.

6 Teaching and the Good Teacher Richard Pring

Introduction It is increasingly the case, both in Britain and elsewhere, that central government includes within its remit the responsibility for ‘driving up standards’. Moreover, it seeks to do this, not by empowering teachers to think more deeply and carefully about those standards and by providing them with the qualities of mind and the resources to do so, but by setting out clearly the targets or goals which the teachers must reach, on the attainment of which the teachers will be rewarded, and for which they will need to be specifically trained. I shall give examples of this later in this chapter. But it is important to ponder on the deeper assumptions behind such central direction, howsoever well meaning it might appear to be. First, there is the assumption that those who wield immense power, through legislation and control of funding, know best – know what the ultimate aims of education are or should be; hence, the frequent reference by politicians and their senior civil servants to their ‘mission’ and to their vision. Second, it is assumed that teaching is the ‘evidence-based’ or ‘evidence-informed’ most likely route to achieve those ends. That is, the ends to be pursued (frequently translated into precisely delineated targets) are logically disconnected from the means to achieve these ends. The ends themselves are outlined by government, which sees more clearly than teachers or parents what is best educationally. The means, based increasingly on research into ‘effectiveness’, are adopted by teachers who use their skills to ensure that those ends are reached. No doubt there will, in such a focused understanding of a ‘teaching activity’, be a lot of measured improvement of ‘output’. Already we are seeing this in Britain, reflected in the increased percentage of pupils 75

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who score higher on literacy and numeracy tests or in the measured improvement of university departments in the Teacher Quality Assessments set by the Quality Assurance Agency. However, I wish to argue that there is something fundamentally wrong with the underlying conception of teaching. There is a failure to see the place of teaching in a genuinely educational activity or practice. And, therefore, whatever the benefits attached by the prevailing political understanding of teaching (and clearly there are some), there is at the same time an erosion of an educational tradition which both embodies and enriches what it means to live a fully and distinctively human life. This chapter, therefore, is divided as follows. First, I shall reflect on what we understand by teaching – not simply as a discrete act but as a professional activity, subscribing to certain values. Second, I shall focus upon the educational quality of teaching in particular the participation in a tradition of understanding and appreciating as the cultural resource upon which teaching draws. Thirdly, I shall show how such a tradition, always vulnerable to subversion by those who want to control the human spirit, is being undermined by those who employ different metaphors to account for a teaching and an educational practice. Finally, I shall say something about the way forward.

The concept of teaching In clarifying what we mean by teaching, we need to attend carefully to how we employ the word in the very many forms of discourse we engage in. Quite clearly, to teach is to do certain things with a view to other people’s learning. But, so it might be observed, the people who are learning bring to this transaction a particular level of understanding. In teaching, therefore (that is, in trying to enable these students to learn), the teacher should have in mind the mental state, the level of understanding of the learners. For example, the physicist describing the minutiae of nuclear reactions to a class of five-year-olds may well be lecturing; but he could not be described as teaching. He simply ignored the thoughts, the state of mind, the cognitive development, the level of understanding of his class. They did not enter into his planning at all. On the other hand, to teach is to intend the learners to learn something. And just as one condition of teaching is that the teacher should attend to the level of understanding of the learners, so another condition is that the teacher must attend to the logical structure of that which is to be learnt. Learning physics is different from learning history; learning how to play the piano is different from learning to appreciate a symphony;

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learning to ride a bicycle is different from learning the laws of balance, gravity and so on. Thus, the minimal conditions of any claims to teaching are: first, the intention that certain specifiable people will learn something; second, that the teacher, in carrying out that intention, does things which take into account the mental state and level of understanding of the learner; and, third, that what the teacher says or does should be in some way logically related to that which is to be learnt. These purely conceptual points may not take us very far – except that they help us both to exclude certain activities, which often are wrongly associated with teaching, and to include other activities, which too often are neglected when the qualities and characteristics of ‘good teaching’ are analysed and commended. And this is important for the argument of this chapter. The distinction between ‘bad teaching’ and ‘failing to teach at all’ is necessarily blurred. A teacher who fails to attend sufficiently to the level of understanding of the children and who talks ‘over their heads’ might be described as teaching badly. But there comes a point where what the teacher says or does is so out of relation to how the children think that it would be more appropriate to say that he or she is simply not teaching them. Not only is the teacher having no impact, but that lack of impact is due to total neglect of the way in which the children make sense of what is said or internalise the messages sent. Furthermore, these conceptual points about teaching remind us of the need for the teacher to have grasped and made sense of that which they are trying to teach – the ‘logical structure’ of the mathematics they want the pupils to learn, the concepts which are to organise the historical perception of the students, the distinctive mode of enquiry which is to characterise ‘doing science’. These points are well illustrated in Bruner’s The Process of Education (1960) – the need, on the one hand, to identify the key ideas which structure the ‘bodies of knowledge’ which we have inherited and, on the other hand, to represent these ideas in a way that makes sense to the learner, given his or her level of understanding. Indeed, the art and skill of the teacher is to be able to ‘live in’ these two worlds, and thereby to bridge the gap between them. This theme I shall return to later. It is crucial to our understanding of teaching – and yet sadly neglected as the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of teaching is increasingly dictated by those who inhabit neither world – neither that of the children and students, whose mode of representing reality often bears little relation to the material they are supposed to learn, nor that of the public traditions of knowledge and enquiry which alone should be the resources upon which the

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teacher draws to help the young people understand and make sense of experience. These conceptual points about teaching also indicate what can and should be included in our conception of teaching. Too often teaching is associated with instruction. But one can teach by structuring experience in such a way that the pupils will learn, let us say, how to solve certain problems or how to relate with understanding to other people. One might teach by purposefully setting certain sorts of example of, say, how to perform or how to behave. One might teach by writing texts with particular learners in mind. The practice of teaching, therefore, is identified not by a distinctive set of behaviours, but by acts or activities which have certain intentions embedded within them and which are related to the kind of learning which they seek to bring about. And such a practice clearly includes many different sorts of behaviour or actions or activities.

Teaching and educational practice By a ‘practice’ I mean a collection of different activities which are bound together by a common purpose and embody certain values; such common purpose and values make the different activities intelligible. Thus, teaching embraces a range of activities throughout the day or week. But what makes these otherwise quite distinct activities intelligible is the overall aim to get pupils to learn the values which are embodied both within the procedures adopted and in the selection of what is to be learnt. The teacher of history does many things to help the pupils understand the doctrinal differences between Catholic and Protestant at the Reformation, but that particular set of activities is intelligible within a wider set of understandings and implicit values concerned with the teaching of history in general and the Reformation in particular. Teachers are generally speaking selected, trained and appointed to further that practice. They are initiated into a tradition which embodies certain assumptions about what is worth learning and about how that learning should be brought about. In that respect, teachers belong to a specific social and educational practice – coming to acquire the values and purposes inherent within it, whilst at the same time contributing (through their constant reflection and critical appraisal) to its development. An ‘educational practice’ is necessarily a ‘contested area’ – embracing, as it does, a range of values over which there is not, nor could there ever be, a complete agreement.

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Such a tradition both of what is worth learning and of how morally that learning should take place has in an important sense ‘a life of its own’. It is something which cannot be deliberately created anew. Its development arises from critical appraisal from within the tradition as much as from external pressures and regulations. Teachers, seeing the demotivation of alienated young people, will question the value of this learning objective for these pupils. They will reassess what it means to educate this or that child, given the particular economic and social circumstances. They will draw upon the cultural traditions they have inherited to make sense of the situation and to help the learners to make sense. In other words, teaching as part of an educational practice must include deliberation about the end or values of teaching, as much as it does the deliberation about the means or techniques. It is, of course, the case that there is constant attempt to hijack such a tradition by government. The sort of people formed by an educational practice – the attitudes, understanding and skills that are learnt – are obviously of interest to those who are in positions of power and who assume responsibility for the economy and the social well-being of the citizens. Hence, there will often be a tendency for a government to try to dictate what should be learnt and even to influence how it should be learnt – that is, to intervene within the educational tradition and to redirect it. And new teachers, when such occurs, might well fail to comprehend their distinctive role within an educational practice, having been trained solely to know of and to reach particular targets. It was not always thus, and indeed there is something inherently self-contradictory in such an attempt by those in positions of power to redefine an educational practice. When appointed to the Central Advisory Council for Education (England) in 1947, Dr Marjorie Reeves asked the then Permanent Secretary, Reginald Maude, what the main function was of the members of the Council. His reply was that they must be prepared to die at the first ditch as soon as politicians get their hands on education. There was a belief then that ‘educational practices’ were too important to be controlled by politicians – indeed, something inherently incongruous about it. An educational practice is the range of activities together aimed at the improvement of the mind, the capacity to think, to understand and to appreciate. And what counts as ‘thinking’, ‘understanding’ and ‘appreciating’ is not something which politicians have the wisdom or authority to pronounce upon. An educational practice, therefore, in which teachers are engaged, which they develop through their participation and for which they are appointed, is the product of years of critical enquiry and questioning.

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The ‘practice’ draws upon the intellectual and artistic traditions of enquiry, which they themselves develop through new discoveries and through criticism. The teacher is, or should have been, initiated into such traditions, and his or her job is to enable the next generation to be likewise introduced to them. The practice embodies certain values, requiring of the teacher particular intellectual and moral virtues. What we teach in schools cannot be insulated from what is discovered or developed in the intellectual and aesthetic life of the wider society, in particular the universities which have the responsibility for producing new knowledge and yet for guarding this distinctive tradition of intellectual enquiry and criticism. Such a critical tradition necessarily has a life of its own, changing through its own internal questioning and enquiry; and those educational practices which draw upon such a tradition must a fortiori have within them the power for self-development. Teachers, therefore, are the custodians of such a tradition. They have a responsibility to the learners certainly – and thus to protect those learners against the interventions of government when these no longer are in the interests of the learner; and they have a responsibility to those intellectual and artistic traditions upon which they draw. The practice of teaching, therefore, since it seeks to bring about learning, depends upon the nature of that which is to be learnt. To teach physics requires putting across, in a way that the pupil will be able to make sense of, the key ideas which structure that kind of scientific enquiry. The teacher will himself have to have identified what those key ideas are. He needs to respect the structure of the subject matter, which is itself intelligible within a public and accessible body of knowledge, well corroborated within a tradition of enquiry and criticism. Teachers of literature are themselves inhabiting a tradition of appreciation and of criticism, a tradition which is selective of what is judged to be worth reading and understanding. It is that tradition which they are seeking to initiate the students into. The expertise and the authority of the teachers lies in their own understanding of those traditions, a recognition of the key ideas and values inherent within them, and an acquaintance with the important texts. ‘Learning’, therefore, is ‘learning something’ – a range of interconnected ideas or concepts, a way of enquiring, a set of principles, a mode of perceiving. And assessment of that learning – of its success or failure – depends on whether those ideas or ways of enquiring, those principles and modes of experiencing have been internalised. Not anything counts as having understood a theorem or as doing history. Of course, the nature of that which is to be learnt is never static. The way in which

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poetry comes to be written and appreciated evolves over time, through experience or changing circumstances or criticism and argument – as, indeed, does our understanding of the physical world. To understand and to appreciate a discipline of thinking and appreciating is, also, to enter into this very argument about what is valid, correct, or true. It is a form of knowledge, a way of experiencing, an engagement with ideas, a kind of dialogue or conversation with what others have said and done. The teacher is both the guardian of such traditions and the promoter of them. The classroom is not a place in which the teacher should convey his or her private opinions, however worthy those may be. The authority of the teachers lies in a public world of knowledge and appreciation, which they have access to and have mastered, and which they might convey to their pupils. The views of the teachers qua teachers should be disciplined by the nature of that which they are teaching – by the text or by the publicly agreed body of knowledge. And, of course, it thereby follows that the authority of the teacher is always open to challenge in the light of the learners’ understanding of the text or their grasp of that body of knowledge. In that way, the teacher participates in a way of life and a tradition of thinking which is independent of government intervention. Indeed, it provides the base upon which such intervention might be examined and criticised. One problem with educating people – putting them in touch with a world of ideas and with the ‘conversations which take place between the generations of mankind’ – is that such people have thereby the tools to think independently of the very restrictions others might seek to impose upon them. Teaching, therefore, is essentially a transaction between, on the one hand, the ‘impersonal knowledge’ which is publicly accessible in books and artefacts, and, on the other, the ‘personal ways of thinking’ of the students or pupils. The art and the skill of the teacher is to make the connections between the two. The educational practice of the teacher, therefore, involves many different kinds of activities, different judgements and assessments, different kinds of competence and expertise. What brings all these activities, competences and judgements together is the conscious purpose of making these connections. Such connections or transactions are permeated by values – the judgement that this or that knowledge or text has something of worth for these learners, the respect that is given to the learners’ knowledge and understanding (even where that is disagreed with), the importance attached to accuracy of judgement or to validity of argument or to the truth of the conclusion reached. And ‘accuracy’, ‘validity’ and ‘truth’ imply standards, against which our deliberations and reflections are

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assessed and yet which cannot be created or defined by particular people. The teacher, therefore, is concerned to impart not simply the answers to certain problems or the concepts through which those problems might be understood. He or she is concerned, too, to convey a way of valuing the truth in its different forms and the processes by which we approximate to the truth in our arguments and enquiries. This is not easy, for the very demanding standards of an ‘educational practice’ often go against the grain. It is not easy to stick to the demands of truth and accuracy where those appear to go against one’s own interest. It has often been thought that only certain sorts of learners are really capable of benefiting from educational practices and for whom therefore there should be teachers, in the sense I am talking about, rather than merely trainers and childminders. The Norwood Report (1943), which helped shape the post-war reorganisation of education on tripartite lines, based its proposals for three types of schools (grammar, technical and modern schools) on the need to match schools to the nature of the child. A few were capable of abstract thought and were interested in ideas; another group had a natural bent for applying ideas rather than for engaging in learning for its own sake; the majority were more concerned with practical activities and the sort of practical know-how associated with the immediately practical demands of everyday life and of finding work (either unskilled or craft-based). Hence, there was a need, so it was claimed, for quite different forms of education in quite different establishments. Even when the comprehensive system of education was introduced in many parts of the country after Circular 10/65, either these distinctions remained or the erstwhile modern school streams within the comprehensive school very often had to follow a curriculum which was dominated by ‘abstract thought’, ‘learning for its own sake’ and ‘interest in ideas’. The problem arose particularly at the raising of the school-leaving age in 1972. There was concern that an extension of compulsory schooling for the group, which previously had been classified as motivated by practical and immediate interests, would exacerbate behavioural difficulties in schools. Therefore, it was thought by some that what was needed was vocational training – a practical preparation for the world of work. ‘Educational practice’, which I explained above, seemed to be quite inappropriate. Furthermore, much of that vocational training should be work-based – learning on-the-job. Utility, rather than engagement with the world of ideas, would help the young person to be more employable; it would also enhance the skill-base of a society which was endeavouring to survive in an ever more competitive world.

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The tripartite way of thinking has survived through a long sequence of differential qualifications post-16 with General Certificate of Education (Advanced Level), General National Vocational Qualification (GNVQ), National Vocational Qualification (NVQ ) and so forth. The last focuses upon specific competences, devoid of any engagement with the world of ideas, and the GNVQ (following the influential justification of Jessup, 1991), and then its successor sadly followed the same route. There have, however, always been voices who have resisted this sharp distinction between types of child, between types of curriculum supposedly to match each type of child, and thus between education for some and training for others. In anticipation of the raising of the school-leaving age in 1972, there was developed an approach to the teaching of the humanities which recognises the capacity of all young people to engage seriously with the ideas embodied within a literature, drama, history, political discourse and religious enquiry. For what are these forms of thinking and enquiry at their best other than the exploration of what it is to be human? The Schools Council Working Paper No. 2 argued that the humanities was that part of the curriculum where the teachers emphasised their ‘common humanity with the pupils and their common uncertainty in the face of significant and personal problems’ (Schools Council, 1967). Properly taught, the themes of great literature and drama, the narratives of history, attempt to explain the human condition within religious and theological studies, the ‘embodied meanings’ within the different art forms, the accounts of society within political and social studies – all these are as pertinent to the interests of Norwood’s second and third categories of young people (those who are good at applying ideas and those who are good at practical things) as they are to those who feel at home with ‘abstract ideas’ and with ‘learning for its own sake’. The themes of great literature – the use and abuse of political power, sexual relations, the pursuit or abuse of justice, of the exercise of authority, ethnic relations and racial intolerance, jealousy, ambition and hatred, the use of violence to pursue political goals, high ideals and aspirations – are also the daily concerns of all young people, part of their thoughts and conversations, however inadequately understood or inarticulately expressed. The art and the skill of the teacher is to help them understand those themes more profoundly but in the light of how others have developed such themes within the various arts and human studies, and in the light of the very best evidence available. It is to introduce the young people to a world of ideas within which their own thoughts and aspirations can

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be articulated, challenged, defended, deepened, made intelligible to others and thus to themselves. The text (the play, the poem, the historical narrative) or the artefact (the work of art, the building) is, if you like, the ‘impersonal’ reference point of several students. Of course, it embodies a particular meaning, but that meaning is constantly explored and challenged, as the learners ‘struggle to make sense’ or ‘try to understand’ or relate it to their own ‘personal’ meanings and understandings of themselves and of the social world they inhabit. The teacher’s task is to help bridge this gap between these ‘impersonal worlds’ of text and artefact and the ‘personal worlds’ of the learners as they struggle to make sense. And the end result of such a transaction cannot be predicted with any certainty. We come to differ and to disagree, but the important thing is that we do so in the light of what has been said and made intelligible by others and in the light of relevant evidence. Indeed, there can be no end result, because any conclusions reached are only provisional. Such conclusions are ever open to challenge in the light of further evidence, further insights, further argument and further reflection. That, then, is at the centre of an ‘educational practice’ – the attempt to make sense of the physical, social, moral and aesthetic worlds which one inhabits in the light of the ideas which one has inherited. It is a ‘practice’ involving many activities aimed at helping the learner to make sense of his or her world, but knowing that there is no definitive sense to be attained. And, hence, an educational practice, led and promoted by the teacher, skilled in the conduct of such transactions and rooted in those intellectual and cultural traditions which feed into that attempt to make sense, is integral to a fully human form of life. Such a view of an ‘educational practice’ is not alien to the practice of many able and inspiring teachers. It was clearly most articulately reflected in the Humanities Curriculum Project (see Stenhouse, 1975) and in Bruner’s ‘Man: A Course of Study’ (see Bruner, 1965). But that exploration of what it means to be human (‘how did we become so?’ and ‘how can we become more so?’) lies at the base of the human studies – their rationale and their justification – however disguised that may be by the external purposes imposed upon intrinsically worthwhile pursuits.

The subversion of an educational practice The difficulty that many find with an educational practice is that there can be no one predicting the exact outcome. The person who has been

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encouraged to think and to evaluate in the light of evidence may arrive at conclusions (interim and provisional conclusions if they have fully grasped the rules of an ‘educational practice’) which are not perceived to be the most desirable ones. What the teacher hopes for is not specific conclusions, but the arrival at conclusions through respect for certain values and procedures – taking seriously criticism and alternative points of view, relating conclusions to evidence, respecting the views of others, endeavouring to resolve conflicting ideas. However, such an understanding of an ‘educational practice’, rooted as it is in a view of what it means to live a distinctively human form of life, is not always attractive to those who find uncertainty, openness to ideas and variety of ‘learning outcomes’ difficult to accept. We have been enjoined to think ‘in business terms’. And successful businesses need to define exactly the objectives or targets of their business. Only in the light of such clear definitions can we decide the most efficient means for attaining those targets or can we evaluate whether or not we have met them or can we reward teachers for being effective and efficient. Increasingly, the educational system at every level is set targets which are cascaded down from Treasury, to the department of state, via the various government agencies, to universities and schools, finally to teachers. These targets define the ‘output’ and the conditions on which funding or rewards will be made available. The Quality Assurance Agency defines what it means to do history, say, or to do mathematics, and university departments are assessed according to such predefined benchmarks, thereby foreclosing the deeper philosophical debate (permeating the ‘doing’ of history) about the nature of historical enquiry. The Department for Education and Skills (DfES) sets out in considerable detail the standards of competence required of teacher trainees, thereby both defining and limiting the understanding of an ‘educational practice’ to which those trainees are being introduced – and, thereby, defining and limiting the idea of an ‘educational practice’ to which they will be introducing the children. The 1998 Green Paper Teachers: Meeting the Challenge of Change advocated a much tighter system of accountability in which performance against agreed standards will be the basis of rewarding teachers through pay and promotion (DfES, 1998). Based upon the work of Odden and Kelly (1997), the policy of performance-related pay and the large and expensive apparatus of performance management depend upon the setting of a large number of precise targets – for the school, for the head teacher and the head’s deputies and assistants, for each teacher and for

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each pupil. Such targets require tiers of external inspectors and advisers, helping to set the targets and to check that they have been reached. The language, through which that transaction between teacher and pupil has been explained and made intelligible, is thereby transformed. ‘Teaching’ becomes ‘the delivery of a curriculum’, the aims inherent within the transactions between teacher and pupils are translated into specific behavioural targets, the value of the transaction (the quality of the struggle to make sense) is defined in terms of measurable behaviours or ‘outputs’, professional judgement gives way to external audits against explicit benchmarks or ‘performance specifications’, ‘effectiveness’ is decided in the light of controlled interventions in the absence of any open discussion about ‘effectiveness for what’; learners, no longer apprentices within a community of learners, become clients or customers of a service. There is then a different language, a different set of metaphors. But it is through language and the metaphors embedded within that language that we come to understand the world in a particular way and attribute a particular moral significance to it. The language of ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’, of ‘performance indicators’ and ‘audits’, of ‘value addedness’ and ‘efficiency gains’, of ‘targets’ and of ‘curriculum delivery’, is a very different language from that of ‘engagement with ideas’, ‘struggling to make sense’, ‘initiation into a conversation’ (‘between the generations of mankind’), ‘promoting rationality’, ‘finding value’ and so forth. There is, thus, a change in, an impoverishment of, what is understood by an ‘educational practice’ and thus in what it means to be a teacher within such a practice.

Conclusion There is always a temptation of those in power to seek to control those who are governed, and to ensure that the different institutions within society are encouraged to serve the social, moral and economic purposes defined by government. There is nothing malevolent in that. Often those who are in power believe sincerely that they do know what is good for society, and, hence, they frequently talk in terms of their ‘vision’ or their ‘mission’. But one constantly needs to be reminded of the necessary limitations in such ‘visions’ and ‘missions’. Politicians and civil servants dwell as much in the world of uncertainties as the rest of us, and a major task of society, as Popper (1945) so well argued in The Open Society and Its Enemies, is not so much to find ways of ensuring infallible leaders as to protect society against their fallibility and their limitations.

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One such way is to ensure a rigorous educational tradition, one which respects the centrality of an ‘educational practice’ wherein teachers are able to introduce young people to the world of ideas through which they make sense of the physical and social worlds they inhabit and through which they engage seriously with the moral and aesthetic understandings of those worlds.

References Bruner, J. (1960) The Process of Education, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Bruner, J. (1965) ‘Man: A Course of Study’, in Towards a Theory of Instruction, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Department for Education and Employment (1998) Teachers: Meeting the Challenge of Change, London: DfES. Jessup, G. (1991) Outcomes: NVQs and the Emerging Model of Education and Training, London: Falmer Press. Norwood Report (1943) Curriculum and Examination in the Secondary Schools, London: HMSO. Odden, A. and Kelly, C. (1997) Paying Teachers for What They Know and Do, California: Corwin Press. Popper, K. (1945) The Open Society and Its Enemies, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Schools Council (1967) The Raising of the School-Leaving Age, London: HMSO. Stenhouse, L. (1975) Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development, London: Heinemann.

7 The Transformation of the Idea of a University Peter Scott

The University is an institution of great normative significance. Its quasi-religious origins meant that, like the Church, the University’s dominion was a moral project that could not simply be reduced to the sum of its institutional effects on the shaping of successive ‘leadership classes’. Later, as Christian faith ebbed before the advancing tides of industrialisation and urbanisation, the University came to represent a new religion of science and to embody a new culture of rationality – belatedly, perhaps, because the original sources of enlightenment were not be found in Blake’s ‘dark Satanic mills’. John Henry Newman, of course, was profoundly ambivalent about the University’s new-found secular mission. In his celebrated address at University College Dublin in 1851 he attempted to reconcile the old University, with its Christian commitment, and the new University animated by Science and moved by emergent, and urgent, forces of Modernity. Not very successfully, it could be said, because his actual prescriptions were ignored; but powerfully so, it could be counter-argued, because ever since his intervention the University has both been required to celebrate but also been burdened by its own ‘Idea’. Even the most dry-as-dust administrative reforms have had to embody attempts to redefine that ‘Idea’; ‘principles’, as with the Robbins report of 1963, or ‘compacts’, in the language of the Dearing report thirty-four years later, have been derived from this quasi-moralistic discourse that goes back to Newman and beyond. Scholars, too, have struggled to reinterpret this elusive ‘Idea’ in the new environment of the multiversity and mass higher education – in terms of ‘uses’ (Kerr, 1963), ‘meanings’ (Scott, 1995), even ‘super-complexity’ (Barnett, 2000). It is both natural and inevitable, therefore, that the University and now the extended higher education systems of which it remains the 88

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centre-piece still engage issues of morality. The Academy embraces, however obliquely and (perhaps) apologetically, the good society. Nor is this identification with a moralistic discourse a falling note, a fading echo of the University’s past. In the shape of ubiquitous mission and vision statements it is a thoroughly contemporary phenomenon. The convergence of two previously antagonistic discourses, the academicnormative and the managerial-instrumental, is one of the most intriguing characteristics of modern higher education. As a result of the splintering of the (mythical?) academic common culture into specialised disciplinary fragments, the former discourse has retreated from the high-ground once occupied by Newman and other eminent Victorians (some born out-of-time), while the latter has not only cynically adopted a sententious moralising as a persuasive technique but also quite genuinely accepted the utility of more ‘cultural’ perspectives in producing ‘business’ efficiency. The language of students-as-stakeholders, of needs-analysis, of foresight-strategy combines elements from both discourses. Which discourse has come to be dominant may be less clear-cut than is commonly supposed. It can be argued that the greater threat to the University’s ability still to articulate some vision of the good society comes from ‘inside’, from the decay of notions of academic authority (through which a culture, and codes, of rationality are expressed) and of scientific and professional expertise (which imply social and ethical responsibilities as well as power and privilege), rather than from ‘outside’, from the intrusion of alien, instrumental and anti-intellectual, values. The University is both a moral institution and a modern institution, in the sense that morality and modernity are embraced within a wider secular framework. The aims of this chapter are to consider the future direction(s) of the University against the background of post-modern and post-industrial change, and to evaluate these directions in the context of the overall theme of the book, Education and the Good Society. The argument-in-brief can be presented as follows. Although the post-Newman university became disconnected from religion, which provided the moral foundations of pre-modern society, it exhibited a bureaucratic regularity and espoused a secular rationality, which provided an alternative basis for morality. Now as industrial society is succeeded by post-industrial society and the modern university shades into the post-modern university, that alternative basis too is threatened. The authority of science, like that of religion before it, has been challenged. Secure morality may now appear as outmoded as the religious codes it superseded. Is there a ‘Third Way’, another basis on which moral codes

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can be constructed in a world where structures and systems (intellectual as well as institutional) have lost much of their organising capacity? The idea of a post-modern university is inherently problematical. Perhaps the university is inescapably a ‘modern’ institution which cannot survive the transition to post-modernity. Although the university has proved to be a highly adaptable institution (the longevity of the title is convincing evidence of this adaptability; the continuity of the university is essentially rhetorical), there may be limits to that adaptability. One limit may be imposed by the fact that the university is an institution – which has a double significance in the context of this presentation. First, it is part of the larger socio-economic, political and cultural structures of modernity; and secondly, it plays a key role in the institutionalisation of scientific and professional knowledge. Another limit may be imposed by the fact that the university is intimately associated with promoting a progressive science (not in naïve nineteenthcentury terms but in the sense that it applies standard research methodologies and imposes rules of academic conduct) and with certifying and validating knowledge traditions. In other words the university still aspires to discriminate between the more and less truthful and the more and less useful. Despite the development of mass higher education and despite the incorporation of novel and diverse knowledge traditions, the university continues to inhabit a world inhabited by more-or-less stable institutions arranged in more-or-less discrete social sub-systems (the political, the economic, the cultural, the scientific systems and so on) and in which valid or useful ‘knowledge’ can still be distinguished from the mass of data and jumble of images which clutter the ‘information society’. Both qualities – the functional differentiation of society into sub-systems, and the systematisation and rationalisation of ‘knowledge’ – are characteristic of modern society. Both have deep roots in the culture of the Enlightenment, and reflect the evolution of a secular, urban and industrial standard which during the past two centuries has come close to being established as the global standard. The links to the good society are plain. The good society has become defined in terms of that standard, an apparently rational environment that is both ordered and progressive which patterns codes of behaviour – and penetrates deeply into the sphere of individual morality. But both functional differentiation and systematic knowledge are fundamentally challenged by the onset of post-modernity. Post-modernity, uneasily cohabiting with high technology, may be producing a de-differentiation of functions in future society. Individual identities

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and social relationships are now increasingly defined in reflexive (and voluntaristic?) rather than structural (and deterministic?) terms. This, in turn, may be eroding the integrity of established institutions – which are also being undermined by other forces such as the triumph of the ‘market’ and the erosion of the welfare state and the impact of new communications and information technologies. These technologies, however, are not only undermining the technical rationales for many institutions (public bureaucracies, private corporations – and, of course, universities); they are also creating new ‘virtual’ communities while eroding physical communities – and so contributing to the re-evaluation of personal identity and re-configuration of social relationships implied by the impact of post-modern thought. Post-modernity may also be undermining the foundations of the scientific system – not simply as a ‘system’ but as ‘science’. To imagine that under post-modern conditions ‘anything goes’ in the sense that absolute relativism reigns in the intellectual sphere, is plainly wrong. But post-modernity implies much more than the evolutionary incorporation of new knowledge traditions into the scientific ‘canon’. It is not enough merely to give more room to alternative and previously suppressed traditions within existing intellectual spaces; nor is it sufficient to acknowledge, more-or-less willingly, the legitimacy of new methods of scientific inquiry. At issue are not only – or, even, mainly – challenges to the content or the methods of science; both can be accommodated with relative ease, as the growth of mass higher education systems incorporating more pluralistic interpretations of ‘knowledge’ has demonstrated. The real challenge may arise from the threatened de-construction of the scientific (or, more widely, academic) system. It is not simply that ‘academic’ knowledge is socially constituted – and, therefore, subject to distortions that arise from social inequality; it may be that ‘academic’ knowledge (as opposed to other forms of knowledge) may be dissolved, as ‘research’ becomes a pervasive and highly distributed rather than a professionalised and institutionalised social activity. Again, the implications for a discussion of education and the good society are plain; systematic knowledge was governed by rules of conduct (and, in order to be successful, it also required high standards of personal integrity). Such rules, and standards, were not only instrumental in the sense that they supported effective science; they were also normative in the sense that the scientific paradigm offered a generalisable model of responsible, and moral, behaviour that combined self-interest and altruism. They are undermined, apparently, by trends in the evolution of society and of science. Ron Barnett has characterised these changes

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as a double-undermining of higher education, both sociological and epistemological (Barnett, 1990). It is possible to go much further, by arguing that de-differentiation (and de-institutionalisation) of social forms and economic structures and the wider distribution of knowledge potentially threaten the traditional bases of the good society.

The re-shaping of society An extensive – and exponential – literature exists on post-modernism and social change. Much of this literature is highly theoretical and some of it is frankly speculative (Touraine, 1995; Featherstone, 1998). There is little space in this chapter to offer either a review or a critique of that literature; nor to describe all the fundamental forces that appear to be re-shaping future society (Castells, 1999). Instead it will concentrate on three clusters of forces. The first is often summed up in the phrase ‘risk society’, although it is perhaps better to describe it as a society characterised by the inherent generation of uncertainties (Beck, 1992). The basic idea is simple enough. Once the production of risks (and of unintended consequences) could be regarded as an unfortunate but inevitable by-product of progress. As in any war there were bound to be casualties. But these could be minimised through careful planning. Risks could be assessed – and thereby reduced. Today we appear to face a new situation in which ‘risks’ proliferate as fast as ‘benefits’ (and it is not always possible clearly to tell them apart). Two points deserve to be emphasised in this respect. First, ‘risks’ cannot be equated with ‘bads’ (the opposite of ‘goods’). At issue here are not simply nuclear accidents, or global warming, or cloned sheep. My fellow-contributor Ulrich Beck has referred to ‘a new twilight of opportunities and hazards’. It is possible to go further and claim that ‘the inherent generation of uncertainties’ represents the margin of creative potential possessed by society. Secondly, ‘risks’ are not external phenomena, events ‘out there’ that impinge on ‘us’. They are also internal, in the sense that they generate uncertainties about ourselves, our identities and roles. Scepticism, that great invention of the Enlightenment, is no longer applied to the ‘other’, to external objects, but has been turned inwards on ourselves. The university clearly plays a key role not only in producing ‘risks’ but also in realising the potential produced by the generation of uncertainties. This acts as a bridge to a second cluster of forces. Our world is increasingly reflexive. Again there is an extensive literature comprising notions of among others, ‘reflexive modernisation’, a phrase popularised by the

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British sociologist Anthony Giddens (Giddens, 1990). But, as with ‘risk society’, the basic idea is simple enough. All social actions and categories are not only constructed (in the sense that they are not ‘natural’ or ‘objective’) but also reflexive (in the sense that they are ceaselessly being interrogated, de-constructed and re-constructed). As a result the lives of individuals are no longer – or no longer so much – structured by external forces; instead individuals create their own reflexive biographies – in which being a student or a graduate may play a crucial role (which I will return to later). This is both a bewildering and intoxicating experience. As the ‘social mapping’ associated with industrial society, class-based and gendered, dissolves, new opportunities arise. But as social relations are increasingly disembedded from familiar contexts, individuals may also suffer anomie and alienation. Reflexivity, therefore, is closely linked to individualisation, which is one element within this second cluster. The ‘headline’ to describe the third cluster is globalisation (Albrow, 1996; Urry, 1998). The conventional view of globalisation is that it is first, a technological phenomenon and, then only second, an economic and cultural phenomenon. Although it is difficult to overestimate the significance of the communications revolution that has produced round-the-clock round-the-globe markets (especially in financial services), instantly recognisable global brands and, arguably, a ‘world’ popular culture which, through the Internet, reaches deep into the domestic and intimate arenas of human existence, there is a danger that parallel cultural phenomena, notably radical reconceptualisations of time and space, will not be given equal weight. We now live in the extended present; time has a new ecology (Nowotny, 1994). Space has not been so much obliterated – some physical barriers have actually been heightened (an example is the increasingly elaborate security apparatus in both work-place and home) – as radically reconfigured (for example, the creation of a ‘global village’ by the mass media has fundamentally disturbed notions of relative wealth and poverty). Globalisation has also had an obvious impact on relations between nation states and global corporations (are we citizens of Denmark or Britain, or of Microsoft-land?), and a less obvious impact on relations between people and organisations (by contributing to the hollowing-out of ‘local’ institutions and the aggrandisement of ‘distant’ global institutions). These fundamental forces are tending to erode the great categories around which the modern world is organised. First, the idea of the State has been transformed. Nation states are being challenged from ‘above’, by supranational entities such as the European Union and by the forces

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of globalisation, and from ‘below’, by the growth of competing identities based either on cultural particularity (French Canadians in Quebec or ethnic minorities in western Europe) or global affinity (women’s networks or environmental activists). The demarcation between ‘state’ and ‘market’ arenas is becoming much less clear, as Governments ‘privatise’ public services and apply quasi-market principles to public administration while at the same time intruding more into the private lives of their citizens and developing new regulatory regimes to control the triumphant advance of new technologies. Finally political discourse has been transformed as the power of politicians to curb the power of global capitalism has dwindled; the politics of style (and soundbite) has been substituted for the politics of substance; state-craft has been replaced by stage-craft. As a result the State has become a transgressive institution, penetrated by but also penetrating markets and social movements. Something similar seems to be happening to the market, that other great pillar of modernity. First, the market is now often more metaphor than mechanism. It is an infinitely pliable discourse used to describe the flows and counter-flows of a wide range of social-symbolic goods which go far beyond classic market exchanges. Second, these metaphorical-market exchanges have not only been accelerated; they are often become instantaneous. Because of the importance of global brands and ‘virtual’ products the market is as deeply engaged at the micro-level, with individual feelings and perceptions, as at the macro-level, with the overall allocation of resources and rewards. The market is everywhere – and nowhere. Third, old demarcations between producers, suppliers, distributors and customers are tending to break down. Products can be instantly redesigned to match individual preferences, so playing havoc with the conventional configuration of market exchanges. Finally, the market has invaded the domain of intimacy – for example, through the commodification of family life and sexual relationships (Giddens, 1992). So it is not only a global but also a personal phenomenon. It no longer has clear frontiers. But this absence of clear demarcations between market and other arenas (such as State and Culture) means that classic market forms have been compromised. Culture, too, has become a transgressive domain. Once regarded as an autonomous space, insulated from and opposed to political and market demands, Culture is now compromised by, and compromises, both. First, ‘cultural’ images play a key role in both political action and market exchanges. In the former, post-modern rhetorics have superseded social-democratic programmes; in the latter the ‘cultural industries’ have become one of the most dynamic sectors in the contemporary

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economy. Culture, at any rate in its high-bourgeois form, has been transformed. Aesthetic creativity no longer takes place in the segregated territory of the ‘artist’, in a significant sense we are all artists now (although generally bad ones). Cultural canons have been reduced to life-style options. As a result all three great categorisations of modernity – State, Market and Culture – have become transgressive; they invade each other’s territories at will. In effect, the differentiation of society into discrete sub-systems appears to be in the process of being reversed. If this is indeed happening, it has important implications for the historical links between university education and the good society. The latter have been articulated within a specific context, the coherent structures (both institutional and intellectual) created by modernity. As this context changes, new articulations may emerge – or, more threateningly, existing articulations may atrophy.

Changing patterns of knowledge production Just as the State, Market and Culture have become not only fuzzy but also transgressive categories, so too has Science. This de-differentiation of the characteristic sub-systems of modernity poses particular challenges to the university which is pre-eminently – and pervasively – a scientific, or ‘knowledge’, institution. It not only produces new knowledge and refines existing knowledge through research and scholarship; it disseminates knowledge through its teaching programmes, transmuting knowledge into skills and technologies; most important of all, the university codifies knowledge in both research and teaching modes – in the former through its sponsorship of disciplinary communities (what Tony Becher has called ‘academic tribes’ [Becher, 1989]) and its legitimation of new specialisms; and in the latter case, by accrediting courses of study and awarding academic qualifications. So changing perceptions of knowledge and new patterns of knowledge production will vitally affect the university. There are two overarching changes. The first is that knowledge production is no longer regarded as a largely linear process whereby advances in fundamental science are ‘applied’ or technology is ‘transferred’. Of course, this was always an incomplete and inaccurate account of knowledge production. But, as a heroic myth, it has been very influential. Nations have calibrated their prestige in terms of scientific prowess, as measured by the incidence of Nobel prizes or proportions of worldwide scientific publications (Adams et al., 1998). Also, the myth of linear science has been associated with the belief in

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a progressive science. Scientific methodologies, as a result, were not only efficient mechanisms but also validated the predominance of theoretical frameworks as determinants of experimental techniques and empirical inquiry. Now knowledge production is likely to be seen as a much more pervasive, distributed and multi-dimensional activity in which the roles of diverse actors and agents are confused, and hierarchies of intention and effect are much more difficult to establish. The second key change is that ‘knowledge’ is no longer owned – or not to the same extent – by particular scientific communities which define valid knowledge in terms of specific disciplines, rooted in cognitive affinities or professional allegiances, and which act as gate-keepers and quality-assessors. Although such communities remain strong, they have been diluted – first, by reductionism, the splintering of disciplines into narrower and narrower specialisms; next, by multi- and inter-disciplinarity, the result both of the recombination of these specialisms into new (and looser) disciplines and of a desire to reassert broader and more holistic scientific perspectives; and finally, by the increasing intrusion of ‘users’ into the once-autonomous domain of scientific decision-making. As a result new definitions of scientific communities have emerged which are inclusive rather than exclusive. For example, in medicine, patientgroups have been embraced within once-specialist communities (the influence of AIDS-sufferers is perhaps the most eloquent example). Opponents of nuclear energy as well as nuclear scientists and engineers, it can be argued, now form part of a more comprehensive, but also more contested and divisive, ‘nuclear community’. These new ‘knowledge’ communities are characterised by contestation rather than consensus, which puts new strains on how ‘reliable knowledge’ and progressive science are defined. These key changes in knowledge production have been conceptualised as a shift from Mode-1 science to Mode-2 knowledge production (Gibbons et al., 1994). The latter has four distinguishing features: First, it is produced within ‘the context of application’, by which is meant not that new knowledge is discovered and subsequently applied but that the context in which it is applied shapes it from the start. So demarcations between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ science, or between science and technology (and, obliquely but intriguingly, between science and the arts) have become anachronistic. Second, Mode-2 knowledge is transdisciplinary. Although existing disciplinary perspectives are used, the aim (and also the effect) is not to produce a new discipline, sub-discipline or specialism. Instead the

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process of Mode-2 knowledge production is ‘problem-solving on the move’. Research teams move on to the next problem, again making an eclectic selection of the most effective disciplinary perspectives. Third, Mode-2 knowledge is widely distributed, in the sense that it is produced by many research agents (in universities, government, industry, professions, even the community) who may collaborate on a global basis thanks to new communication and information technologies, and also heterogeneous (in the sense that not only knowledge-producers, that is researchers, but also knowledge-users and knowledge-brokers play key creative roles). Fourth, Mode-2 knowledge is subject to different forms of quality control. In the case of Mode-1 science, quality is determined by a process of peer-review policed by the relevant disciplinary communities. The quality of Mode-2 knowledge must be judged according to more pluralistic criteria; such knowledge must not only be ‘reliable’ in the narrow scientific sense that it is replicable (indeed, that may not always be an essential quality) but must also be ‘socially robust’. The argument is not that Mode-1 science is being superseded by Mode-2 knowledge production, but rather than the former is being overlaid by the latter and that the two must now cohabit in ways that explain both the dynamism and the instability of contemporary research. Three aspects of this shift are especially relevant to any discussion of the post-modern university. The first is that all knowledge production is now contextualised – and not simply in the shallow sense that scientific research is subordinated to existing social hierarchies and power relationships, but in the deeper sense that its values, methods, substantive content and the interpretation of its results are decisively shaped by its context. Indeed, distinctions between the subjects and objects of research, between science and its context, have become increasingly problematical. In the humanities and (some) social sciences this transgressivity is hardly a novel experience; even in engineering and technology it is not unfamiliar, but in the natural sciences it is a new and disturbing idea. The second aspect is that traditional epistemologies are being attenuated. One, dramatic, way to describe what is happening is to say that the epistemological core is empty. There is no longer an irreducible core of norms, practices and methodologies which lies at the heart of scientific research. Another, less controversial, way to describe things is to say that the epistemological core is not so much empty as crowded with

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competing cognitive norms and social practices. There is evidence that good science can be done without recourse to, or dependence on, what we regard as core epistemologies and methodologies. The third aspect has already been alluded to the fragmentation and fracturing of modern ‘knowledge’ communities. Consensus has become difficult; closure impossible. Of course, science has always been provisional, in the sense that one problem leads to another, and current solutions are displaced by better ones. Nevertheless, comparatively stable consensus has been able to emerge. But the post-modern knowledge production system is becoming more and more unstable. There are too many voices, too much dissonance. Generally this is seen in negative terms; it is becoming more and more difficult to do good science. But these trends can be interpreted in a much more positive light. Contestation, however painful, is potentially creative, producing more socially robust science and stimulating the growth of new scientific fields. This is most obvious in the environmental sciences. Old style scientific communities, enclosed and elitist, are being superseded by what has been described as a new agora, where market, political, social, cultural and scientific perspectives jostle and combine. Certainly this account of new patterns of knowledge production is consistent with the overarching account of social change offered in the previous section of this chapter and both together pose radical challenges to the university.

The transformation of higher education If it is right to argue that the societal sub-systems characteristic of modernity are being eroded and becoming transgressive, our traditional conception of the university needs to be revised (Scott, 1995). It can no longer be treated as a bounded ‘space’ – whether justified in terms of the reproduction of social and professional élites, the realisation of democratic entitlements or the creation of human and scientific capital. Nor can the university any longer be regarded as a ‘place’, whether physically as a campus access to which is policed normatively and structurally as a specialised and privileged institution. Instead, the academic system, like the political, economic, cultural and scientific systems is becoming fuzzy. On the one hand, the demarcation between universities and other parts of the educational system is becoming much less clear; on the other hand, the boundaries between ‘pure’ science, technology and social and economic development are being eroded. It is not possible in a short chapter to offer a comprehensive account of the implications of these changes for the university – its norms, social

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practices and institutional structures. Instead three broad topics illustrate the extent, and also the depth, of these changes. They are: first the expansion of student numbers; second the diversification of systems and differentiation within institutions; and third the impact of new knowledge upon conceptions of the good society. Expansion In the expansion of higher education systems – and the concomitant increase in the scale of institutions – the figures are well known; but their academic and social consequences are less well explored. Even in Britain, where nostalgia for academic selectivity and social exclusion has been strongest, there are now 1.8 million students, 93 universities and a participation index of 35 per cent of the age group. Throughout Europe, with the possible exception of some central and eastern European countries which are still struggling with the legacy of Communist rule, there are now mass systems of higher education. Secondary education, once regarded as the terminal stage of compulsory education (perhaps topped-up by part-time technical education or on-the-job training), has become a preparatory system for entry into higher education. However, although this transition from élite to mass higher education followed (approximately) the same trajectory as the similar transition in the United States, the same may not be true of future expansion which will carry us into a universal higher education (Trow, 1973). In America this movement beyond mass higher education took place at a time when public investment in higher education and, more crucially, faith in institution and system-building were still strong. Or, to put it another way, the moral economy of modernity was still in full force. Neither can any longer be taken for granted. Also new technologies are tending to erode the integrity of institutions; traditional economies-of-scale and divisions-of-labour no longer apply. Finally, new kinds of institutions are developing, such as corporate and virtual universities, to challenge the hegemony of traditional (or fairly traditional) universities (KenneyWallace, 2000; Middlehurst, 2000). Private universities of a traditional (that is, charitable) variety presented few challenges to the ‘public’ values of higher education. But now for-profit universities have been established, like the University of Phoenix in the United States, which do challenge these values – and fundamentally, because their goal is to train ‘knowledge workers’ not to sustain academic cultures, however democratic and pluralistic. However, there is another consequence of expansion which must be considered. If higher education systems enrol not only mass

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student populations but near-universal populations, if these systems are supplemented by new kinds of institutions which have little in common with universities and if new forms of delivery provide little or no opportunity for socialisation into wider academic and professional cultures, are we entitled any longer to talk of ‘higher education’? Should another term be preferred instead – ‘lifelong learning’ perhaps, which acknowledges the de-institutionalisation of higher education and the shift from traditional combinations of academic instruction and social experience to more autonomous and atomised forms of self-instruction? Just as in the last half of the 20th century ‘university education’ was superseded by ‘higher education’, because of the need to embrace the former polytechnics, fachhochschulen, HBO (or higher professional) schools and so on, perhaps in the first half of the 21st century ‘higher education’ will itself become a redundant category. Diversity and differentiation Traditionally, diversity in higher education has taken the form of rationally ordered systems in which different institutions with different missions were ranked in tidy hierarchies. This is still the case in large parts of Europe where binary systems comprising traditional universities on the one hand and higher vocational schools on the other have persisted, and in the United States where three-tier hierarchies of research universities, state universities and community colleges (the California Master Plan remains the best example) have been maintained. In Europe only Sweden and Britain have created unified higher education systems, although in southern Europe there are examples of pre-binary systems where there is little articulation between universities and higher vocational education. Higher education systems are being eroded in two ways. First, they are too inflexible to cope with the velocity and volatility of new social and market demands for higher education. State higher education systems are no longer able to ‘grow’ alternative institutions as readily as in the past. Instead alternative institutions are developed by other stakeholders in the burgeoning knowledge sector of the market. New technologies have also lowered the entry price, in the sense that universities no longer require the elaborate and expensive apparatus of buildings and other physical facilities or even of permanent staff. Second, even within the established university sector, the emphasis has switched from external diversification to internal differentiation. Institutions are no longer comfortable with pre-assigned missions – which, for example,

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discourage research universities from engaging in technology-transfer or community-outreach tasks; or which discourage mass institutions from experimenting with new forms of knowledge production, that lead to their increasing involvement in research. In order to enhance their capacity to adapt, universities are reluctant to be pigeon-holed. Even if they seek a niche, it is unlikely to fit pre-assigned patterns of stratification. As a result, much more pluralistic systems of higher education are likely to develop (although ‘systems’ may be the wrong word, because it implies a rational and rationalised structure). This pluralism will be expressed in two different ways – the growth of new kinds of learning and researching organisations which no longer look to the university as a model, and growing heterogeneity within universities as they take on novel roles. The key-note will be transgression – transgression of the once-accepted boundaries of higher education; and transgression of the traditional roles of the university. Frontiers of all kinds will become increasingly permeable. As a result, the academy will have been ‘economised’ and ‘socialised’, a phenomenon with which we are all too familiar, while at the same time society and the economy will have been ‘academicised’. Knowledge and the good society Social perceptions of higher education have been transformed. Once linked to notions of social progress and democratic participation (and so unambiguously categorised as a public service), higher education is now being progressively redefined as a consumer good, or lifestyle option. This perceptual shift – combined, of course, with the retreat from the welfare state and the increasing cost of higher education – has weakened the case for public support of higher education, and also eroded our sense of the university as an institution that embodies public and altruistic rather than private and selfish values. But that is only half the story. The growing recognition that future society is also a knowledge society in which scientific production will be the key sector has emphasised the centrality of knowledge-producing institutions, among which universities remain pre-eminent. This recognition has not necessarily rebuilt the case for increased public investment in higher education, because of the key role (allegedly) played by markets in wealth generation. It is important to recognise that universities are subject to two different forms of ‘privatisation’. The first treats higher education essentially as a consumer good, to be funded more and more by those who directly benefit, on the grounds that it

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produces fewer and fewer ‘social benefits’ and other ‘externalities’. The second regards higher education as a key sector within the new knowledge economy – and as such, highly attractive to private investors. Even where public investment in higher education has been maintained, it has shifted from being seen as a public service to being regarded as the state’s investment in a wider public-private partnership designed to enhance national competitiveness. Both forms of ‘privatisation’ tend to undermine the traditional links between higher education and the good society, which were rooted in notions of individual enlightenment (rather than empowerment) and social altruism (rather than economic development). Of course, there is a danger of exaggerating innovation at the expense of conservation, in the life-world of the university. It would be wrong to suggest that the more traditional liberal functions of the university have become an anachronism. Clearly the main driver for expansion remains the familiar desire on the part of individuals to participate in higher education, which reflects both an innate curiosity and the pursuit of social advantage, and the determination of democratic societies to provide equal opportunities for all their citizens. To reduce either to mere consumerism is to belittle their significance. Similarly, the pursuit of disinterested knowledge remains perhaps the most important driver of the university’s mission – and one that is endorsed by Government, for all the talk of linking knowledge production to economic competitiveness. Achievements in pure science remain a powerful indicator of national success and prestige. It is not that the traditional meanings and justifications of higher education have been superseded by new meanings and justifications; rather that the former have been overlaid by the latter – increasing the strains and stresses on the integrity and identity of institutions. However, the scale of the challenge facing the university – at any rate, in its traditional form – should not be underestimated. Two dimensions of that challenge perhaps deserve to be emphasised. First, a much more radical account of the causes and effects of the expansion of higher education is needed. The standard account articulated in the 1970s and based on the American experience of the 1960s emphasises the successive transition from élite (up to 15 per cent participation) to mass (15–40 per cent) to universal (more than 40 per cent) systems; it is a largely quantitative account, although it also attempts to capture some of the dimensions of qualitative change. Today a new tripartite account is needed, an idea of the university which interweaves three strands of meaning and value.

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the first sustains universities as élite institutions, which essentially order social hierarchies, while providing limited opportunities for social mobility, and preserving a clear demarcation between scientific inquiry on the one hand and technological improvement and social activism on the other; The second fulfils economic demands, not in the obvious sense of the drive for greater efficiency but in the wider sense that higher education’s main responsibility is seen as servicing the needs of the economy (political as well as market economy) in order to produce growth and wealth, and, not irrelevantly, individual needs for status and careers; The third answers to ‘Identity’ demands such that one main purpose of higher education is to confer social meanings in an otherwise atomised and febrile society in order to construct individual biographies that substitute for traditional identities of class, locale, nation and profession. The second drastic challenge is to the university, its institutional integrity and its duties to the Good and the True. In the modern university research and teaching, liberal education and professional formation, the socialisation of young adults and continuing education have been bundled together – not necessarily because there are permanent and irresistible affinities between these various activities, but because they reflect existing political and cultural assumptions, social practices and technologies of delivery. As a result, characteristics which are often regarded as essential may be merely contingent. So the university could face a double unbundling. New technologies will no longer require the spatial association of these activities; and the growing influence of new social movements and the erosion of traditional academic cultures may undermine the justifications for their association. Both – new technologies and new social movements – will demand quite new alliances between knowledge and ethics, values and activism, intra- and extra-mural.

Conclusion To what extent can the links between the University and the good society, explicit in the age of faith and implicit (but equally powerful) in the secular era which succeeded it, continue to be valid in a postindustrial and post-modern environment? Or is the post-modern university a contradiction in terms? The nominal longevity of the university demonstrates both its resilience and adaptability. It is difficult to imagine a world without universities; indeed it is especially difficult

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to imagine our world of powerful brands and symbols without its ‘trophy’ universities. Even if the specialised societal sub-systems characteristic of modernity and their ‘expert’ institutions are eroded by the advance of post-modernity, the desperate desire to re-invent personal identities and the demands of sophisticated technology will be enough to secure the survival of the university. But more detailed questions arise that are more difficult to answer. If the account of social change presented here is broadly accurate, actual (as opposed to virtual) institutions are likely to become weaker. On the one hand, that may imply a weakening of the authoritarian structures embodied in institutions which reflect inequalities. A ‘good thing’ surely, on the assumption that virtual institutions, more of which will have been created by mass-media corporations than new social movements and global alliances, are less authoritarian? On the other hand, at least under conditions of modernity, universities have provided ladders of social opportunity, even been agents of equal opportunities, have also and powerfully embodied future aspirations as well as reflecting past-and-present allegiance. If the account presented here of changes in knowledge production is accepted, a similarly ambivalent balance-sheet is likely to be constructed. On the one hand, repressive epistemologies, reductionist methods and restrictive practices may be swept away; gendered discrimination, still prevalent in many academic disciplines, may be mitigated; and the case for more democratic forms of higher education may be strengthened. On the other hand, the contextualisation of knowledge production within the agora, in which clashing voices compete on unequal terms, may represent a threat to intellectual freedom. Science, like Culture, will no longer be allowed to stand aside from the bustle of politics, the market and society. Although the claims of the liberal university and of disinterested science have certainly been overstated they cannot be dismissed. The balance, therefore, is uneasily poised. A new moral economy may emerge which transcends the inequality and discrimination endemic in the moral economies of the past and present, religious and secular. If that happens, the social constitution and intellectual construction of democratic higher education will be among the main sources of new, and more generous, definitions of the good society. The individual biographies written by the new higher education will shape, and reflect, these new definitions. However, there is a darker alternative. The connections between the University and the good society may further fray and even snap. No ‘Third Way’ may emerge in succession to the

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dominions, first of Religion and later of Science. Normative systems may be impossible to sustain in the absence of the institutional structures that once supported them. Individualised values may fail to cohere into a new moral economy. Either way, higher education will be crucial in producing such sombre consequences. Its influence will remain decisive, whether in the reconstruction or deconstruction of the good society.

Bibliography Adams, J., Bailey, T., Jackson, L., Scott, P., Pendelbury, D. and Small, D. (1998) Benchmarking of the International Standing of Research in England: Report of a Consultancy Study on Bibliometric Analysis, University of Leeds: Centre for Policy Studies in Education, and Philadelphia: Institute for Scientific Information. Albrow, M. (1996) The Global Age, Cambridge: Polity Press. Appiah, A. (1998) ‘Africa: the hidden history’, New York Review of Books, 17 December 64–72. Barnett, R. (1990) The Idea of Higher Education, Buckingham: Open University Press. Barnett, R. (2000) Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity, Buckingham: Open University Press. Becher, T. (1989) Academic Tribes and Territories, Buckingham: Open University Press. Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage. Castells, M. (1996–1999) The Rise of the Information Society, 3 vols, Oxford: Blackwell. Featherstone, M. (ed.) (1998) Post-Modernism, London: Sage. Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P. and Trow, M. (1994) The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies, London: Sage. Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press. Giddens, A. (1992) The Transformation of Intimacy, Cambridge: Polity Press. Kenney-Wallace, G. (2000) ‘Plato.com: the role and impact of corporate universities in the third millennium’, in P. Scott (ed.) Higher Education Re-formed, London: Falmer Press. Kerr, C. (1963) The Uses of the University, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Middlehurst, R. (2000) The Business of Borderless Education, London: Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals. Nowotny, H. (1994) Time: The Modern and Post-modern Experience, Cambridge: Polity Press. Nowotny, H., Scott, P. and Gibbons, M. (2000) Rethinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty, Cambridge: Polity Press. Scott, P. (1995) The Meanings of Mass Higher Education, Buckingham: Open University Press. Touraine, A. (1995) Critique of Modernity, Oxford: Blackwell. Trow, M. (1973) Problems in the Transition from Élite to Mass Higher Education, Berkeley (CA): Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. Urry, J. (1998) ‘Contemporary Transformations of Time and Space’, in P. Scott (ed.) The Globalization of Higher Education, Buckingham: Open University Press.

8 A Malediction upon Management Fred Inglis

I In 1975 Jurgen Habermas remarked, in what he identified as a crisis of legitimation,1 that the governments of advanced capitalist societies sought to take the strain incurred by economic upheavals beyond their reach by transposing the centre of reference from the economic to the ideological realm. In his turn, Anthony Giddens has remarked 2 that crisis, while probably a term for which we grasp too readily, is likely to remain a pretty well permanent feature of our political landscapes because modernity is such that we have an increasing stock of halfprocessed, variously unreliable and always copious information waiting for distribution through the hierarchies of our anxiety system. Anxiety being, as Auden foresaw, the furrowed expression on the face of the age, and the sheer surge of information proving itself to be both tidal wave and cliché, we may designate all events to be critical exactly because so much income can find no determinate outcome. Legitimation is even more acute a corner of public and private existence, over a quarter of a century later. Since then, the Cold War has come to its unexpected and exhilarating end, leaving us bereft of the necessary tale of good and evil, of the call to endless vigilance on behalf of our good freedoms and fulfilments as against their thought police with snow on their boots. In these circumstances, however, the inescapable question, ‘What for? What ultimately for?’ which people catch themselves putting to their own lives and the life of their society lacks even the simple answer, ‘Well, in order not to become like them’ – them, other countries which do as they do, and do not enjoy, as Mr Podsnap had it, the divine privileges of the English order. 106

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Come to that, the order of old England is looking a bit queasy, what with Scottish secessionists and the only available expression of loyalty to the Union Jack coming in the repulsive form of Ulstermen emphasising its value by brutally humiliating their neighbours. Most comprehensively of all, since 1975 what Edward Luttwak has called ‘turbo-capitalism’ has been released upon the world at large, starting with the assorted forms of delirium known as the deregulation of capital flow, and adding to that the not necessarily consequent but ideologically convenient practices of the casualisation of contract labour, the legislation (in many nations) for the weakening of trade unionism, the holding down of wages and the correspondingly gross and disgusting enlargement of salary for the tiny numbers in the international executive class, the ruthless and absolute reduction of those employed (‘downsizing’ as they unspeakably speak it), and the development of computer-dominated production systems capable of the immediate switching of rhythm from fast to slow (‘flexibility’) when markets waver, and therefore of throwing out its sweatshop and cottage labour the very week it is not wanted. The most lethal of these changes hits only that exposed and vulnerable third of each wealthy nation which has been so ill-advised as to have no capital of its own stored up, nor enough education to keep it sufficiently employable when the going gets rough (‘cyclical downturn’). One tasty bromide in circulation is that the capitalist nations, in virtue of their virtuous economics, have made social class more porous than ever before, and almost a redundant sociological category, although this is not a view shared by those closer to the damage done by the regardless new turbines. In this vast, imaginary agora it is no surprise that self-pity is so much to be found among the educated of the day. As never before, they enjoy longevity, good health, freedom from famine and plague and war, but they are much burdened by the weight of knowledge. There is such a lot to worry about from outside human control (global warming, the plague’s return, the instability of currencies, the refusal of Mother Nature to permit her continued violation), let alone such a lot to worry about within the scope of human preparation but towards which humans show themselves so inexcusably indifferent (the marabout zealots of terrorism, decaying nuclear reactors, hideous poverty, noise, motorways, the disappearance of songbirds, oh! everything). In these comfortable, frenzied states of body and mind what is abstractly called legitimation turns, in daily life, to a repudiation of politics; a commitment only to the small, more or less controllable space of private life; a shrinking of history to the reach

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of television news; an utter scepticism towards the idea of a common, mutual citizenship; a loss of trust. Trust, said John Locke, is the central value of the polity, contradicting Plato who put justice there. Annette Baier and Onora O’Neill, backing Locke,3 suggest that justice in being, so to say, isolable and testable-for in terms of clear criteria, has lent itself to the dominant concerns of masculine political science. Trust, on the other hand, much more plainly but also confusingly one of Hume’s ‘civil affections’, is not only a more metaphysical concept, as pervading the absolute presuppositions and pre-judgements (prejudices) we have to make in order to move through the world at all, but may by these tokens be thought of as a more distinctively feminine property of the world. That is to say, while trust is clearly a sentiment as well as a value, this clarity does not extend to its amenability to analysis as justice does, on this definition a more obviously scientific concept. In the intellectual divisions of labour, men are assigned the hard, cognitive and laboratory-experimental stuff which really runs the public world. Women are left with the soft, sentimental, intuitive-domestic scheme of things which only hold us in private and get broken up when the big ideas, especially power, burst rowdily in. So much the worse for this division of labour, says Baier. The human sciences have much busied themselves of late with power-spotting as their favorite game. Since power, on this vulgar definition, is (obviously) to be found everywhere, it is a very easy game to play, never more so than when played by sanctimonious men purporting to help out their sisters by showing them the little sallies and dashes for power made by men that the women may not have spotted for themselves. It has been one of the many contributions to sanity in the present intellectual climate made by Clifford Geertz to point out how completely our imaginations are still dominated by the giant ghosts of the nineteenth century, ‘Power and Women and Horses and War’ as he genially quotes, 4 and goes on gently to deprecate the obsession of such a grand luminary of the academic day as Foucault with theories of power derived from the simplifications of Victorian metaphysics. Instead, Geertz advises, ‘let us study the shows and spectacles of rule’, and this will tell us, by way of its tropes and rhetoric, its dress and conveyances, its manners and mendacities, what kind of thing it is. If then you can find it trustworthy, I shall add for my part, then that rule will be precious. Given our formation and, in spite of all the century has done to it, given our capacity for hope, that rule may then even be sufficiently democratic.

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II A crisis in legitimation translates as a breakdown of trust. But trust goes both ways. Subjects must trust sovereigns unless, as Hobbes brutally concluded, power is made synonymous with violence. Sovereigns, however, must also trust subjects. Where the sovereign power is the people itself, then, of course, it must devise instruments with which to represent itself to itself, to mitigate the arbitrariness and cruelty of rule, express its trust in and of itself. It will hardly do to treat trust as a system.5 The thing (whatever it is) is too fluid and fragmentary for that. Perhaps, as John Dunn suggests,6 trust is best understood and grasped in practice, and the method of inquiry best fitted for the task is that of the anthropologist or even the student of literature, intent upon discovering the values at work in human transaction, of which the only analysis can be a report. Trust, after all, may last much longer than rational inquisition should allow. One fundamental putting of trust in any society, as Keynes noticed, must be in its currency, for money is, he went on, 7 our promise to ourselves (‘Promise to pay the bearer . . .’) that we can carry present safeties into the always-fearful future. So people only give up such trust in desperation, carrying cash in wheelbarrows, or so it is said of post-war Germany’s notorious inflation in the early 1920s, until they could not believe in the stuff any longer and resorted to barter. Trust therefore is both tenacious, needful and precarious. As Giddens also points out, trust entails risk. If there is nothing at stake, trust is redundant. Like rights and duties, one entails the other, 8 such that to commit oneself to a trust in another it follows that something must be, however slightly, endangered or, at least, out of one’s care but part of one’s future. A crisis in legitimation is therefore in part a sudden uncertainty about what to value and put one’s faith in, and in part (as consequence) a loss of trust in oneself or one’s society to provide good reasons for living. People will go on fretting and chafing and making their usual uproar, no doubt, but in such circumstances there is a general loss of belief in the common good, in the dependability of the mutual and civic virtues and, crucially for our purposes in this chapter, a turning away from the theory of justice implicit in the noble ideal of equality.9 These things are happening all about us, in Britain (and, specifically, England), in the richer states of the European Union and in North America. At this level of generality, the argument belongs happily enough on the letters page of the Daily Telegraph or, indeed, in a different jargon, in the defunct columns of the much lamented Marxism Today, for these are

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contentions common to the conservative aspects of both the left and the right. It is a measure of our loss of bearings that this is so. At such a time, governments and peoples alike look to reassure themselves with such doses of certainty as they can concoct, hence Habermas’s aside. The headlong juggernaut of turbo-capitalism, accelerated by the dynamics of neo-liberal economic theory – cut public expenditure, reduce taxes, give the market its head, tie everything to contracts – goes careering on its way while a trillion dollars a day10 invisibly circle the globe and are beamed down to green screens from the satellites. By their own actions, governments have cut themselves off from action and intervention in a system whose consequences are much less global than is contended, and much more a fierce rivalry between the dollar, the yen and the evilly named euro. At the same time, precisely in order to legitimate and justify themselves, governments must govern, which means show that they can be efficacious, and Get Things Done. Having so largely counted themselves out of direct fiscal intervention, they become – none more so than British governments of either stripe since 1976 or so – regulators, managers of possibility, enablers, facilitators and a lot more such canting terminology as should wither the tongue of any honest man who tries to speak it. With the election in 1979 of a stridently neo-liberal government in Britain, buoyed up by the victory of the same colours at the same time in the USA, New Public Management (as it styled itself ) was ensconced in the seats of national power. New Public Management professes freedom from ideology, a position famously identified by Alasdair MacIntyre as itself sanctimoniously ideological.11 Inasmuch as it operates through agencies set up by the government but functionally independent of it, such management can claim to be about the people’s business. It is my conviction, for what it is worth, that the briefly exhilarating landslide vote in Britain’s General Election of 1997 was, in its excellently vengeful dedication to getting a particular party out of power, also a vote for a new government to do its own managing for a while, to be directly answerable as executive to the Parliament which represented the citizenry, and for those citizens to feel once again that a new victory had been won in the long bloodless revolution towards an emancipated and free state. What we have, however, had better be understood in order to be rationally criticised. It is an American-influenced, heavily ideological preference for making states not into protectors of the weak, the old, the sick and the small, but into entrepreneurs in their own right. New public management is the product of the old lie that the unprecedentedly wealthy economies of northern Europe and North America cannot

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afford to pay for their social welfare, especially now that education and health care have become so expensive, and so many elderly people have so inconveniently refused to die on time. It is further a product of the self-serving preferences of the rich that they shall remain so, and that those who are not rich shall be able to dream of becoming so without any disagreeable obstacles placed in their way by taxation officers. It is a doctrine promulgated by the army of dreadfully earnest convictionconsultants who profit from it that, as a matter of definition, the hierarchical bureaucracy of social services is inefficient, that a competitive market in all matters is super-efficient, and that by dividing up all social transactions as between purchasers and providers, the redefinition of mutual exchange as competition will, by a wave of the invisible hand, be to everyone’s benefit because it is economic, efficient and effective. (That the helots of these systems think in terms of silly slogans which can be wastefully scrawled on flipcharts at mind-numbing conferences is one eloquent measure of popular inanition.) It is contended, by government and, naturally, by the hordes of the philistine consultants, that these new forms of management are purposed to act for the good of the taxpayer.12 The taxpayer has been a familiar cartoon figure in the rhetoric of governmental self-justification for some decades, but with the advent of Mrs Thatcher’s ‘populist authoritarianism’ turned into a quite new, though always dumb and passive figure in the structure of official ideology. The oxymoron ‘populist authoritarian’ was, as is well known, Stuart Hall’s coinage, 13 and it vividly captures the pretence that heavy authority will be wielded by government strictly on behalf of and answerable to the people. It will be wielded against all those special and vested interests guarded by professional élites (phrases particularly succulent in the mouths of the poujadiste) who conspired to defraud little people by deploying their cabbalistic secrets, closed shops and restrictive practices to their own advantage. To bring to heel these ‘enemies within’, intellectuals some of them very probably, new professional élites with vested interests would be appointed to scrutinise them and make them give an account of themselves. No one can doubt that the bosom of the Daily Mail quivered ardently in gratitude for such a programme. The petit-bourgeois press in Britain has routinely used ‘the state’ and ‘bureaucracy’ as swear words ever since the days when it was not thought egregious to join Churchill in identifying Attlee’s welfare reforms as Stalinist. Mrs Thatcher, whose Grantham shopkeeper susceptibilities were formed by that press in that era, set herself avowedly to ‘roll back the state’ and the ideology

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of managerialism as propounded by the handbooks of New Public Management14 was to hand in order to explain how and why to do it.

III The first reason given, as we saw, was what was offered as, in the allpurpose cliché, the crisis of public spending. The real motive here was less demographic than psephological: cutting taxes by cutting public spending is supposed to win votes. The fact that the sums failed to come out like that had no bearing on the policy. The second reason given, which was strongly justified by the class prejudices at stake, was that everybody wants to know that they are getting value for money when each of them, as taxpayers, enjoys the attentions of their teachers, doctors, nurses, dustmen, or rating valuation officials. Calls for ‘value for money’ are worth a pause as locating another drastic evacuation of the spaces of our public political life. As capitalism has turned of its own monster volition from a giant system of production to one of consumption, so the individual subject of the constituent nationstates in the system has come to have his or her civil rights defined less as a worker, more as a consumer. Quentin Skinner observes15 that liberty herself lives now in ‘a political arena swept bare of all concepts except rights’; she is hard put to it to affirm anything very much except the trivial rights of consumer choices. In Britain this decline was openly acknowledged when the then Tory Prime Minister enacted a ‘Citizen’s Charter’, the content of which was that consumers would have rights of redress if their trains ran late or their inessential surgery took a long time to be arranged. To be a citizen, on this token, is to be a plaintive plaintiff and this, in turn, not only matches the strong narcissism16 of a highly individualised culture, but also draws on the self-pitying tendency implicit in an ethics which puts so much emphasis on blame. 17 All this is not to fall into a generalised malediction spoken over the moral state of the nation. But there was undoubtedly a coincidence of forces which made for a widespread ‘structure of feeling’ into which the precepts of New Public Management fitted quite well. ‘Value for money’ was one such precept. Consumer politics was the only politics in town; it matched the self-assertiveness of the new petitbourgeoisie; it was indeed a way of bringing to book the more self-protective aspects of mandarin power. Its agents were auditors, themselves more than a little mandarin in their mystery and methodology, but reassuringly practical-sounding in their anachronistic invocation of ‘the books’, the

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balances and the budget. In a way new to the politics of policy, however, the ideological matrimony of Mrs Thatcher and President Reagan inaugurated a politics the content of which was money, one to which questions of larger human ends and purposes were wholly subordinate. Thus and thus was Marx’s diagnosis fulfilled just as the prophet himself was stripped off his robes, and the notorious ‘fetishisation of commodities’ fully achieved. The duty of the auditors is to use the battery of their specialist procedures in order to ensure compliance of technical conduct (technique is important, this is not a moral matter). ‘Audit’ itself has become an invocation of ultimate and mysterious authority going far beyond any narrowly financial interpretation. It encompasses the grisly rise of quality assurance reviews which have long since obliterated the reasonable hope that seniors may be reviewed by their peers, and juniors by seniors, and both by an equality of representation, in order to determine that duties are being done and rights being regarded. Quality assurance, which it is now hardly possible to utter without a spasm of self-loathing at touching the hypocrisy innate in the phrase, is subsumed within auditing and taken to be a new entitlement in the unwritten bill of rights of modernity. At first blush, mine sounds like a simple plea to be left alone, as indeed it is. But it also implies more than a hint of that self-protective obduracy which has alike characterised the closed shops of British Medical Association (BMA), Law Society and the Amalgamated Engineering Union. The rise of consumerism as constitutive of contemporary identity and the litigious affirmation of consumer rights has gone some way to breaking down those tight-shut doors, and about time, too. Universities (to go no further) partook of the same hauteur and the slovenliness it masked. They flourished the banners of humanistic custodianship and scientific pioneering but Laurie Taylor’s egregious Dr Piercemuller lived a life of perfect indolence within their walls. There was no necessity in this. Peer review may perfectly well be an incorruptible procedure, as in times of extremity it is (consider how postings to Bletchley Park were decided upon in 1940), or as it is where a moral and intellectual tradition is more or less coterminous with the institution (as in certain monastic or political cadres, or at the Collège de France). Failing in crucial aspects of their traditional responsibility – to teaching, to scholarship, to thought itself – university teachers (along with other regiments in public service) found themselves in thrall to the very different, punitive and bureaucratic surveillance methods enjoined by the principle of accountability.

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Accountability is legal, not moral. It is a principle of bureaucratic rationalisation; it plants the bars in Weber’s cage. It also brings out the poverty of a blind insistence on rights. The principle holds that duties are subordinate to rights, and that the determination of rights-fulfilment is only secured by tabulation. A right is satisfied when evidence is produced, not so much that duty has been done but that the documentation on hand codifies its doing. A bureaucratic procedure is translated from the realm of efficiency to that of legislation. Rights command duties, trust is dissolved by surveillance, deceit and mendacity have their hour. Weber is right and Durkheim is wrong. That this is indeed a transformation in Britain is clear from a glance at the history.18 The construction of a non-venal and independent civil service, open to all the (male) talents was one of the great innovations of Reform Britain. The Factory, the Public Health, the Prisons’ and the Schools’ Inspectors were immediate and uncomplicated agencies on behalf of human happiness, safety and emancipation, especially children’s. Naturally, employers declared that to remove six-year-olds from up chimneys and from down coal mines would strike a death blow at national prosperity, but the thing was done nevertheless. In 1866 Gladstone established an Exchequer and Audit Department, with the independent Comptroller and Auditor General at its head. His function was to ensure the strict financial propriety of the executive and to report their dealings to Parliament. That remained the duty of Comptroller and staff until 1989, when the new order came into being, and financial management subsumed all questions of ends and values. The date will serve to mark the coming of what Michael Power justly calls the audit society.19 It is continuous with the picture of the modern state as painted by Foucault (studiedly absent from Power’s bibliography, since he has a much more loose-limbed kind of social theory to deploy). Neo-Foucauldianism, after all, has dominated the human sciences for a couple of decades because the great man could be enlisted in a theory of the totalitarianism of the modern state, achieved largely by its capacity so to order and generate the fields of language that discourse itself coerces all conduct, and men and women are everywhere in chains forged by linguistic legislation. Foucault’s own argument, of course, is that the dominance of discourse is peculiarly a feature of modernity, and his compelling spatialisation of knowledge and its entailment in the formalisation of power is deliberately shorn of agency. But theory and theorists are committed to finding and writing conspiracies, and what more satisfying plot than one which dissolves knowledge into power at the behest of the state? Edward Said notes this almost inexplicit

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but severely political cast in Foucault’s cartography of knowledge-as-power as being ‘deeply linked to his vision of statements as carefully fashioned extensions and instruments of governance’.20 The completeness of the theory, the interlocking finality of all modern discourses, health, sanity, crime, education, sex, has much confirmed the more indolent sections of the dissident intelligentsia from doing anything political except to advance their academic careers by writing articles to show that nothing political can be done because discourse fixes the fight so that it always wins. The audit society is a less than perfect extension of the carceral or surveillant society. Certainly, auditing is a method of control. But it transpires less from Foucault’s sombre vision of totalitarianism, and more from that breakdown in trust as a central political value with which we began, and which social theorists as various as Mary Douglas and Edward Said have remarked upon as a feature of the day.21 Auditing is an act of policing. There is nothing necessarily forbidding about that. We all check up on ourselves and others. Certain corners of social life need more checking than others (shady corners, unfamiliar ones, ones where you do not know what’s going on). Pockets of doubt and checking may be created and instutionalised but surely not as an entire principle of social organisation? The more one thinks about it, the more apparent it is that the imperative ‘never trust, always check’ could not be a universalisable principle of social order: constant vigilance is somehow autodestructive.22 Not only can one simply not have a society in which nothing is to be trusted, but the development of auditing techniques, especially when audit as an idea so overreaches its originally financial limits, become first, ideological; second, pathological; and third, venal. As the new careers open in auditing, volunteers pop up, sometime everyday creatures of the practices they now offer to review according to the latest objective techniques. The opportunity is there along with the legitimation. But as soon as the ideology is accepted in the conversation of the culture – and for our post-modern antirealists all you ever have to go on is ‘conversation’ 23 – it breeds, as all parasites must, its own pathology. It insists on accountability as necessary where before there had been the inevitably messy give-and-take of human dealing. ‘Accountability’ is, after all, not the same thing as responsibility, still less as duty. It is a pistol loaded with blame to be fired at the heads of those who cannot answer charges. The pistol is fired in public. Its lesson

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is that wounds shall be visibly inscribed on reputation. Pathology turns to psychosis, or the unbroken cycle of the application of checks as to quality and answerability from which there is never any escape. Finally, of course, the process becomes corrupt. Auditors must invent new auditing because these are labours for the conclusion of which no ideological justification can be given. (What will actually happen will be that people will simply get fed up and pack them in.) They cannot honestly discharge the new duties and the old are wide open to being scanted; to ceding friendly concessions; to sheer incompetence which must at all costs be concealed; to commonplace bribery; to shocking waste. Any self-definition by even the most upright and (as they say) transparent auditor, is an impression of optimism, of how things ought to be not how the audit will actually be conducted. Reference to the audit has merely become a new way for old legitimation, a condition of respectability. This ideal audit and the actual techniques and technology involved in the detail of the instances, I shall shortly claim, are laughably far apart. What happens is that the audit ideal shapes our view of the problems it will solve, while it directs us also to see the solutions it offers (not so much solutions as simply the way the report comes out) as precisely matching the problems. That is to say, alleged gains in efficiency, effectiveness and economy, can be made no other way (and what other gains would one want?) This is the psychosis: circular is as psychosis does. Abstract managerialism addresses a milieu whose everyday way of life and its peculiarities are refocused as problems and difficulties. The resolution of these will be accomplished by the application of abstract managerial techniques whose success will be made visible in the appearance of those same techniques in the way of life of the milieu.

IV This state of affairs is now general in the welfare institutions of Britain, and widespread also in the manufacturing and service industries, although it is worth pointing out that it is comparatively absent in the cultural industries, presently so much praised as the repository of national creativeness. The study of its omnipresence, its demoralisation of a moral service and its expensive inapplicability would be best told about Britain’s National Health Service, but that is well beyond the scope of this chapter. Instead, I shall take the business of good government as embodied since 1 May 1997 by the Labour Party, and its preoccupation,

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much trailed in opposition by its leader, with auditing the national education system. It was dismaying to have to observe a perfect continuity between the policies of a broken-backed and desperately incompetent Tory government humiliated by just and utter defeat and a glowingly confident and selfcongratulatory new Labour government appointing as its first Secretary of State for Education somebody who had been a conspicuous advocate and practitioner of humane, liberal and egalitarian policies in his local government offices in a northern metropolis. But it has been the whole contention of this chapter that the governments of the wealthy nations of the West are in like case, and that moreover there is a match between their frame of feeling and the values around which it settles, and the general feelings-about-the-world felt by that largish fraction of the middle classes which more or less intermittently attends to political matters, whose votes change governments and who have been completely victorious in their hardly noticed class war with both the traditional ruling and traditional working classes in Britain. This being so, there was no popular objection at all to the then Tory Secretary of State trotting round to the Queen to sign the death warrants of her very own Inspectorate of Schools in 1994. ‘I thought these people were important’, she is reported to have said. ‘What have they done wrong?’ The improbable answer, confected by the obedient Kenneth Clark and his predecessor Kenneth, the Lord Baker, was that a newly discovered mandarinate, the Education Establishment, had so connived at permissive education, a Summerhillian laxity of discipline, a selfdiscovery curriculum and an abandonment of reading and writing that the nation’s children were becoming ungovernable and illiterate. To put all this right, there was not only to be a compulsory National Curriculum, but also a new government office of standards in education which would conduct its own audits of schools, of their teaching, their maintenance of standards and their handling of the fatuously inequitable budgets recently devolved (as the jargon goes) to their care. Half the inspectorate would be pensioned off; it was elderly and acquiescent anyway. The other half would, in its way, audit the auditors as they did their auditing. It is a timely example of the circularity of psychosis described already. Technicians of the trade will point out that this is to elide inspection and auditing. Whatever the conceptual distinctions, there are no practical ones to make. Let us now audit, which is to say, describe the practice, in hand. In order to conduct the statutory number of inspections (at first, every school to be inspected every four years) an enormous number of

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new recruits was needed. Where HM Inspectors were each laboriously inducted for a full year on appointment before being allowed off on their own authority, the monstrous new regiment of Registered Inspectors, recruited from the ranks of teachers in early retirement and of decidedly varying intelligence and cultural literacy who had recently been blamed for the end of civilisation as grammar school boys knew it, were trained for one week. They were hired by inspectorial consortia (this is language filthy with dishonest use) started by superannuated HMI and advisers from the local education authorities who had been paid off as a hostile government declared civil war on locally elected councillors and their recalcitrant education committees. Standardly, the Registered Inspectorial team arrives in a school late on a Monday morning (they are not paid to start out on Sunday) and shake hands. They inspect (audit) such classes as they can attend for three days. Intelligent head teachers ensure that the best teachers are on prominent show, the lousy ones have the general assistants at the ready, the shakiest subjects are not taught that week and all the children are carefully briefed and unnaturally well-behaved. The inspector-auditors pack up at Thursday lunchtime, write their reports on Thursday afternoon and push off that night, leaving the boss to report back to the Head and Chair of Governors on Friday morning. On Friday evening the staff goes out and gets plastered. If the report is passable, the school will write a meaningless Action Plan, and that is the last anybody will do about it, auditing, or the cultivated standards of the nation for another six years (the interval having been increased in 1996 by 50 per cent without threatening civilisation). And that is about it. Lessons are graded (audited) impressionistically on a series of infantile five- or maybe seven-point scales. All that needs to be said about the books by the inspector-auditors is that they are not being fiddled. The children will have taken the Standard Assessment Tests for which, quite rightly, they will have been coached, but none of the essential experimental design materials will have been published: the pilot tests, the Facility and Discrimination values, the comparability of tests year against year. There is no effort to test procedure by comparative sampling; there could not be, because the procedures are not comparable. All this is best summarised in hysterical accents by saying that £150 million is spent annually in this way, with untrained researchers using inadequate technology and instrumentation which would not pass muster for an elementary essay on a master’s degree course. Insofar as the auditors are men and women of good faith, the results might serve to guide and correct practice if they were discussed and reciprocally

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criticised24 in a collaborative atmosphere with no executioner down the corridor. As it is, the reports, presented as though they are ‘objective results’ with verifiable ‘findings’ confirming the conclusions, are pronounced without redress and promptly published. Where they are bad, in a degrading spasm of nursery punishment, the politician in charge of the nation’s education apparently believes that such a public show of badness will shame everyone into making everything better. Necessarily, this whole operation was put in the hands of a publicity hound and controversialist. Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector between 1994 and 2001 was someone with absolutely no prior record of achievement. Chris Woodhead then proved himself, in the face of a series of sharp challenges to his discretion, his veracity and his integrity, an adroit and raucous populist, accomplished at making his contacts with his own chief executive as personal as possible, allegedly capable of editing key reports to suit his own, as it seems, punitive turn of temperament25 towards the educational division of labour. Such officers are a mere sign of the times, a Sejanus looking for Ben Jonson. The dramaturgical reference is to the point. For this little tale of auditing turns out to be a tableau in government by spectacle; it is a performance by our kind of theatre-state. To say so is not to strip away the mask and reveal the truth; it is to point out something about contemporary government. It would be a pleasure to make, at length, the same points about the vacant rituals of quality assurance in Higher Education. (It is an indication of incredibility in a ritual when one notices it to be a ritual rather than the proper way to do things.) It is of course the way of bluffing old buffers to try to do down social science with an anecdote. All the same, when one thinks how Wittgenstein would have fared in the Research Assessment exercise with one slim book (the Tractatus) the ground of his immediate appointment at Russell’s behest to a Fellowship at Trinity, and then another 30-odd years while the Investigations piled up in scraps of paper kept in shoeboxes . . . Better still, how would the quality auditors have proceeded, sitting on one of Wittgenstein’s deckchairs in the bare room in Whewell’s Court with the cleverest undergraduate philosophers in Cambridge afraid to utter a word for fear of enraging their tutor, when they heard Wittgenstein burst out, after minutes of clenched, silent thought, ‘You have an abominably stupid teacher!’ 26 Would they have asked him for his course handouts, his summaries of the term’s topics, his aims and objectives? By the same token, when I was a pupil of Leavis’s in the Cambridge of 1960 there is no question but that his very large seminar group included

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sycophants, that many students (including me) were too terrified to speak, that the old boy often conducted things pretty much as a monologue. At the same time, it is right to be frightened of a great teacher, and listening to such a teacher think aloud, trying to follow faithfully, even (as so many did) mimicking turns of speech and inflexions both piously and mockingly, is a crucial part of what the stooges of quality assurance would call, in their leaden way, the learning experience. Few people are lucky enough to have great teachers and tales of this kind have, no doubt, an obscurantist function. But the case of genius brings out that whatever else it does to bring mediocrity up to a level of universal dullness, quality assurance cannot, in virtue of its very method, assure quality. So who on earth and in any case are these creatures who agree to do such work for the Funding Council, in the audit society, now the most important institution in all British intellectual life? They are not – one hesitates delicately, are they? – themselves minds of the finest calibre, scholars of the highest distinction, Daniels come to judgement of the best that is thought and known. They are, so far as one knows, either assiduous toadies with no thought of their own other than a desire to wield a bit of power on behalf of the more powerful, or they are honest, broken-down workhorses who need a bit of spare cash. With either henchperson, the overall mission, as Power says, is ‘sustaining systemic control’ and such a mission ‘must continually be reaffirmed and reconstituted in the face of events which threaten its credibility’.27 Plenty of people can see the inanity of what is going on even when they boast intolerably if things have gone well for them (‘We’re a 5-star department’). In the face of scepticism, faith in auditing must be victorious. At a time of the breakdown of trust, the mechanism devised to replace trust must be trustworthy. It is not; as it has been my whole purpose to contend. The auditors, anxious to please and to be paid, have their thought and idiom compelled by the systemic nature of the work to remove themselves from the complexity of things in order to say anything compassable at all. Their true role is to reassure everybody that everything is all right, that traditional hierarchies hold (Cambridge is better than Manchester, Manchester than Lancaster, Lancaster than Sunderland), that bloody old life can be audited, and the usual quarrelling and accusation of the world be stilled and comforted. Such a social practice partakes of mild necromancy, none the worse for that, perhaps, these relativist days, but it will be as well for us to know that is what it is. It has no ground in empirical knowledge, and

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there is no way of telling when it is effective. Indeed a modest programme of research has suggested that uninspected schools may improve more rapidly than inspected ones, having wasted less time on piling up the paper in defence against the coming of the beast.28 In the case of educational auditing, whether of schools or universities, nothing at all is done to satisfy the people in whose name the whole charivari is conducted. Accountability turns out to mean our university’s getting more money from the government if our pile of publications weighs more than theirs. In the many tales which circulate about the failure of the audit procedure itself, about the incompetence of its practitioners and the inaccuracy of what are so inaccurately called ‘findings’, everything is done to suppress evidence of any lapse, nothing done to analyse and improve the procedures themselves. It is a dismal narrative; within the educational institutions of the welfare state perfectly unamenable to improvement, or even to rational debate. In universities the purportedly brightest people in the country collude, out of cowardice and moral idleness, in a vast and meaningless system which seriously damages what they do best. In schools, 20-odd years of vilification by Secretaries of State, performance pay and decaying buildings in a country glistening with the imagery of wealth has lowered the status and self-respect of teachers through the floor. It would be preposterously easy to repair this state of affairs, with a bit of study time (ha!), a bit of paint, and a properly reflective, open and collaborative exchange over inspections which were also teaching-andtraining seminars, addressed as if to people capable of thinking, and even reading for themselves, given some good will and loving kindness. But legitimation crisis brings the requirement that governments, who cannot do much (though very much more than they admit), must always do what they say they were going to do in the first place. They must never be wrong.

V I take for granted that there is an educational crisis which is, as in modern society it must be, a crisis in culture. Its causes probably lie too deep for thought. Certainly they are far too deep for auditors to be able to do anything about them. I would say that our radical misgivings about pupil progress and academic standards have their source in a cultural hiatus of our day as wide and grave as the Reformation was in its time. One can give many names to such a rupture in continuity, and the end of Cold War did no more than make it unignorable. Eric

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Hobsbawm suggests29 that there has been an acceleration in the disuetude of narratives (my words, not his). I take this to mean that the stories we use to prefigure human and social continuity become inadequate to that task with unusual swiftness at the present time. ‘We cannot bind our children to life’ says Saul Bellow’s hero-Dean in The Dean’s December, and this is so because the thongs of our narratives are not strong enough to tie students to the ground, to history, to the places we want them to love and to belong to, to overcome the unbearable lightness of being. To speak like this is to go quite outside the faintly hysterical, heartfelt nature of my present polemic. It is to gesture at the faint outlines of those monsters swimming in the depths of culture which the ordinary iridescence of surface life prevents our seeing. Nonetheless, it is the business (and the duty) of the institutions of a nation’s education to catch a glimpse of and limn the outlines of monsters whether malign or munificent. The preposterous edifice of auditing, the mad rout of acronyms – HEFCE, TQM, OFSTED, TTA – blinds vision and stifles thought. Their most certain consequence is to make inquiry servile, knowledge instrumental and, above all, to make all of us, teachers at whatever level, boring, exhausted and hating the job. If I am right, all this is going to be damned hard to think about, but no harder than to imagine a more frivolous response to the occasion than auditing school classrooms and counting university publications.

Notes 1. Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, London: Heinemann Educational, 1975. 2. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. 3. Annette Baier, Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1994; Onora O’Neill, A Question of Trust, Harmondsworth: Penguin and BBC Publications (2002 Reith Lecturer), 2002. 4. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, New York: Basic Books, 1983. See especially the chapter, ‘Kings, Power and Charisma’. 5. As Niklaus Luhmann seeks to do, in Trust and Power, New York: John Wiley, 1972. 6. John Dunn, Rethinking Political Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, Chapter 2. 7. John Maynard Keynes, A Treatise on Money, vol. II, Chapter 30, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929. 8. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990, pp. 34–35. 9. Canonically expounded by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1971, then splendidly developed by Brian Barry, Theories of Justice, Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1988.

Fred Inglis 123 10. A slogan taken from the useful polemic by Gregory Millman, Around the World on a Trillion Dollars a Day: How Rebel Currency Traders Destroy Banks, New York: Bantam Press, 1995. 11. In Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘The end of the end of ideology’ in his Against the Self-Images of the Age, London: Duckworth, 1971. But, alas, it was not the end. 12. I am borrowing freely here from the argument of Michael Power’s splendid and scholarly polemic, The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. 13. In his classic essay, ‘The great moving right show’, collected in The Politics of Thatcherism, Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (eds), London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1982. 14. The standard reference book (though a strictly American one) is D. Osborne and J. Gaebler, Reinventing Government, Reading, Mass: Addison Wesley, 1992. 15. ‘The idea of negative liberty’ in Philosophy and History, R. Rorty, Q. Skinner and J.B. Schneewind (eds), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 16. As persuasively asserted by Christopher Lasch, in The Culture of Narcissism, New York: Norton, 1980. 17. For a criticism of the ethics of blame, see Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Glasgow: Collins, 1985. 18. I take the brief history which follows from E.L. Normanton, Accountability and Audit of Government, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966. 19. Power (1997) as cited. 20. Edward Said, ‘Foucault and the imagination of power’ in Foucault: A Critical Reader, H. David (ed.), Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986, p. 150. 21. Mary Douglas (ed.) (1993), Risk and Blame, London: Routledge, 1992; Edward Said (on ‘the politics of blame’), Culture and Imperialism, London and New York: Viking. 22. Power (1997), p. 2. 23. Richard Rorty is the most celebrated and mischievous expositor of this view, though there are signs he thinks he may have gone a bit too far. See his Amnesty lecture, March 1993, collected as ‘Human rights, rationality and sentimentality’ in Rorty, Truth and Progress, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 24. As recommended by E. Wragg and T. Brighouse, A New Model for Inspection, Birmingham Education Office, 1996. 25. The allegations have been made at least twice: once by the then Liberal Democrat education spokesman about HMCI’s confident identification of ‘13–15,000 incompetent teachers’, once about the OFSTED report on the Birmingham Education Authority. 26. The story as told by one of the students present, confirmed by all the others, in Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: A Memoir, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974. 27. Power (1997), p. 138. 28. Carol Fitzgibbon and OFSTED, Schmofsted, School of Education, University of Newcastle, 1998. See also Nick Davies, The School Report, Vintage, 2000. 29. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1989, London: Viking, 1994.

9 School Students and the Good Society Tamsyn Imison

I am very proud of the achievements of the children in our school, achievements above and against the odds; this is a school: where a student who has struggled to be literate and the student who has just come down from Cambridge with a congratulatory First and a million dollar deal are both friends and value each other; where Serbs, Croats and Albanians share a sense of hope that one day things will be different; where miracles still happen and every day there is a feast of learning; where new technologies are exciting aids to learning across the curriculum; where colleagues take ownership and move to improve because they share a deep commitment to learning and raising the achievement of all; and where everyone has learnt to expect only the best. My school is a county-mixed comprehensive school which does not select children either overtly or covertly, where the support of Governors, parents and LEA complements the support of teachers and students. I am convinced that we will never have a good society unless all schools like mine demonstrate that all young people are valued. My school should really be called Cricklewood High. It is a mixed-county comprehensive technology college with nearly 1300 students and over 120 staff. Cricklewood is an area beautifully described by Zadie Smith, a recent student of ours, in her best-selling novel White Teeth. The rich multi-ethnic and varied social mix arises from a complex population. There is a well-established traditional village group, some gentrification, small enclaves of minority communities who retain their own customs 124

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and practices, a challenging group from a newly extended adjacent social priority estate used by the Authority as a ghetto (we are right up against the borough boundary). We also have a more varied assortment of people who have relatively recently found refuge through the borough’s supportive policy towards asylum seekers. We have 135 students in this category, nearly one-third of these arriving as unaccompanied minors. Of our roll 60 per cent (only 20 per cent in 1985) is made up of students from ethnic minorities, 18 per cent at stage 1 and 2 of language acquisition. Our students now speak over 78 different languages and dialects. Our balance of girls to boys is 46 per cent: 54 per cent – not as disproportionate as in other local mixed schools but, recognising that there are 23 more forms of entry for girls than boys locally, this will always be a key issue. We have traditionally taken children from over 40 feeder primary schools. Of our intake 33 per cent is registered for free school meal entitlement. There are 63 students with a statement of special needs, 5 per cent of our roll. Over 400 pupils are on the Special Educational Needs (SEN) register at stages 1–4 comprising 20 per cent of our roll. Over 50 per cent gain 5 or more A*-C at the end of Year 11. Well over 90 per cent of our Year 11 students stay on post-16 (70 per cent in our own inclusive sixth form, 25 per cent in other sixth forms and local colleges). From our own sixth of 250 we send about 80 students from academic courses on to higher education, including Oxbridge each year. About 40 students are successful on a range of vocational courses and also progress on to higher and further education and training. Teaching is not to be regarded as a static accomplishment like riding a bicycle or keeping a ledger; it is, like all arts of high ambition, a strategy in the face of the impossible task.1 A recent OFSTED Inspection Report for my school gave banner headlines as follows: Hampstead School and Technology College provides a very good quality of education for the diverse community that it serves. The strong leadership and the school’s commitment to equality of opportunity for all ensures that there is a positive atmosphere in which all pupils can give of their best. The high standards that are achieved and the good progress made by pupils, particularly at Key Stage 4, are largely as a result of the high proportion of good and very good teaching. The school’s strengths far outweigh any weaknesses and it provides good value for money.

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OFSTED summarised its conclusions as follows: Enthusiastic and energetic teaching generates an enjoyment for learning. Outstanding leadership and management sets a challenge to which both staff and pupils rise. The provision, support and guidance for pupils with special educational needs enable them to make good progress. The value placed upon the contributions of all pupils helps to create a harmonious community in which all can give of their best. Pupils use information technology very effectively as a tool to support their learning. The pursuit of excellence within the creative arts enables pupils to develop their talents to the full. This success follows long-term sustained efforts on the part of all school partners. This includes leaders of learning at all levels – the leadership team, the Governors, the parent representatives, all support teams, the Camden LEA teams, all curriculum teams and, particularly, outstanding practitioners in the classroom. I have been the head teacher for 18 years. In the first five years I built bridges, structures, initiatives and new teams of committed lead learners. I took control of the staffroom. In the second phase of five years I was able to consolidate core developments. I had to deal with a legacy of staff weakness, considerably added to by the placing of teachers in the school, without due process, under the Inner London Educational Authority (ILEA) Identification of Teachers exercise in the late 1980s. After these exigent years, we could bring the school into the really exciting phase – my last eight years, where the combined efforts of all have led to enrichment, strength and ambitious improvements. There is no such thing as a quick fix in education. There is no such thing as a ‘super’ head teacher either. Good schools arise because the whole school community is working for improvement, and is both prepared to learn, excited by learning and confident enough to take on new ways of doing things. There have been four significant factors facilitating success in this last phase. First, a clear embedded vision of the future needs of students and the strategic developments required to achieve these. Secondly, we commit ourselves to the valuing of all members of the school and develop respect for each person’s different and unique contributions to

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the school community. Thirdly, we foster a strong learning culture, particularly by way of the staff’s active participation in their own learning, and the consequent natural drive to support the learning of others, and by the acceptance of the need for continuous improvement at all levels by all partners in learning. Finally, we seek to generate development of ‘an excitement culture’ arising from creative and innovative approaches. Such commitments demand a clear and embedded vision of the future needs of students and of our strategic development in order to meet these. We have taken this very seriously, drawing upon ideas from Valerie Bayliss, David Hicks, Hay McBerr and the report All Our Futures – Creativity, Culture and Education, DfEE 1999, John Abbott and Tom Bentley of DEMOS amongst many others. The trouble with our current schools is that they were created to meet the needs of the industrial age when there were no more than 20 per cent of managerial and thinking jobs and 80 per cent manual employment. It used to be certain that anyone with a degree would be in employment for life. This is no longer true. First degrees are fast losing their currency, with increasing numbers progressing on to graduate study. We need to equip our young people with broader skills, which do not lose their value. We also need to give them the confidence and cultural understanding to work in flexible, changing teams and arenas. David Hicks, speaking in 1998, emphasised the importance of futures thinking and of the imaginative models it requires: cycles of envisioning; inventing, implementing, evaluating, revising and re-envisioning preferred futures. He said that no one future was now certain. We are in a world of continuous, rapid and exponential change. For example, the Internet only began a few years ago. Today there are over two million users in Britain but much of the time the net is turned off. In the next five years there will be, worldwide, over a billion users, with the net on all the time, probably on extended wrist monitors. We can already buy toys in Woolworth’s with a greater technological capability than anything they used to land on the moon. Hicks suggested the key skills needed must be using imagination, creative, analytical and logical thinking, debating and active participation in modelling global citizenship. So, too, Valerie Bayliss in her discussion paper Redefining Schooling, proposed very similar accomplishments and competences to develop well-educated people: literacy, numeracy and Information and Computer Technology (ICT) capability to high levels; understanding ethics, values and how society, government and business work; scientific method and the concept of proof.

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Bayliss went on to claim that all well-educated people will need to know how to: learn new skills and knowledge; to evaluate and appreciate information; to take charge of their own learning; to deal well with other people, and value them; to communicate effectively with others; to work in teams; to cope with changes in their lives; to manage risk; to be assertive enough to get their own concerns addressed; to manage their own time and own financial affairs, let alone their own lives and personal and emotional relationships. She concluded, ‘We can be sure that making schooling better does not mean more of the same.’ The curriculum of the future must be the vehicle for students to demonstrate their acquisition of these vital skills, competences and understandings. This turns the current assessment and curriculum on its head and also makes it essential that non-school experiences become integral to the learning of all young people. Currently school only occupies 15 per cent of a young person’s time. Tom Bentley, Director of DEMOS, makes the point in his book 2 that we must include out-of-school experience in students’ learning. Hay McBerr’s Models of Excellence demonstrates the key characteristics of world-class leaders. He analysed the competences of serving head teachers and found they exhibited the same characteristics shown by top international business leaders. These fall into five groups: [First,] Personal values and passionate conviction, that is to say personal conviction, respect and value for others, the ability to both support and challenge. Secondly, the leader creates vision, impels the drive for improvement. Thirdly, the leader gathers information and offers understanding before proceeding to (fourthly) build commitment and support. Finally, leadership entails planning for delivery, for analytical thinking, understanding others, building a team for developing the potential of others, for taking initiative, for – in a phrase – transformational leadership. These skills, competences or characteristics also mesh well with those of both Hicks and Bayliss and need to be developed in young people if we are to have a good society.

So how is our school organised to do all this? We have recently restructured the school’s senior leadership team after doing a little futures thinking of our own at a residential. We arrived at three core areas of operation for the ‘learning centre’ of the future:

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1. Support, Development and Outreach; 2. Learning and Pedagogy; and 3. Assessment, Monitoring, Evaluation. These are each being led by a deputy head teacher paired with a senior teacher. This pairing has proved to be highly effective. Mutual support and challenge have ensured that each pair delivers far more than the sum of the single individuals. We are committed to providing a series of valuable learning experiences across the HMI recommended ‘areas of experience’:3 the aesthetic and creative, the ethical, the linguistic, the mathematical, the physical, the scientific, the social and political, and the spiritual. These were set out in alphabetical order, so no other order of importance may be inferred. All these areas are essential. What we are also trying to do is to give practical context to skills, practices and accomplishments, for students find it easier to understand the purpose of mastering these as they relate more closely to applications in the world of work and experience post-formal education. (We are doing this through being a pilot school for the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) skills project working first on our Key Stage 3 curriculum.) We imagine that any new teacher or student of any age along with their family learning partners will be welcomed by our Support, Development and Outreach Centre, whose key objective would be to empower learners. Here personal and social skills, testimonials and portfolios, as well as appropriate activities, will be used to assess learners’ confidence, their ability to understand and relate well to others, their team playing and leadership strengths, and their personal goals and action plans. Personal, peer, community and academic mentors will be assigned and they will be allocated to appropriate groups. (We are using Excellence in Cities money to realise this part of our aspirations.) The new members of this learning community will then move on to the Assessment Centre for the assignment and acquisition of detailed learning styles, skills, knowledge and understanding, analyses and debriefing. These would rely upon some testing but more upon the individual’s ‘skills portfolio’ with validated evidence of the best of their past experience. These analyses would be owned by the student or member of staff. They will each take personal responsibility for the maintenance of their own records. Secure records will also be kept in the Centre’s data store in order to assist the Learning Centre and the member for quick referral and comparative performance analysis. The

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key objective of this area is to ensure every learner is aware of their strengths, areas for development and routes for progression. The Learning Centre is the next stop for new members where a personal and group programme will be agreed, building on existing skills and supporting further competence acquisition. Teachers (sometimes designated, by way of local egalitarianism, ‘lead learners’) and student learners will be assigned to appropriate teams and external practitioner attachments, and given a timetable, a programme of additional, external and independent and distance learning activities, a detailed set of learning strategies and resources including access to palmtop computers and modem, with port connections to all parts of the Learning Centre and all the technological capability. The key objective of this centre is to develop multi-skilled, flexible and independent learners. We have already progressed a long way on this. All our students have easy access to ICT across the curriculum and their own email addresses. We are providing distance learning. Our website already has course and other independent learning assignments for students in some subjects. Work experience is expanding and we already have business and academic mentors. We envisage that the new curriculum will include the following overlapping areas of study. It will designate ‘Relate’ sessions to support getting on well and working with others. Emotional intelligence is often forgotten, but for everyone, it is the key to successful learning. We are just begining to run such support sessions (funded by the Excellence in Cities initiative). We teach philosophy as ‘Socratic discussion’. We have carried out several pilot Socratic discussions supported by the Society for the Furtherance of Critical Philosophy. The student evaluation has been so strongly in favour, commenting on these as being profoundly formative experiences, we intend to extend the pilots. Citizenship is taught in our school most effectively through active participation. The school councils provide direct reports to Governors, evaluate staff prior to their interviews for posts, as well as debating, developing political literacy, and holding discussions to clarify an understanding of human rights, of duties and responsibilities, on how to effect change, and what it means to be European. We also have designated weeks on subjects such as refugees, the United Nations, as well as science and technology. These activities make a significant difference to the students’ sense of self worth, their values, their respect for each other and their commitment to the ethos of learning in the school. We send students to English Speaking Union (ESU) debating competitions and to participate in model United Nations assemblies.

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Logic and analysis are marked out for specific treatment. We are involved with the accelerated learning projects in science and maths, run by University College, London. The detailed evaluation programme raises achievement across all subjects by developing students’ thinking skills through involving students in group discussions and problemsolving. We will be offering formal logic as an enrichment activity post-16. Alongside logic, formal study communications study covers the whole range of written styles and accentuates the spoken word and the development of formal speaking such as debating. Our debating societies are already making a real difference to students’ awareness and their ability to articulate logical and coherent points of view. We want students to operate with a richness of vocabulary and to take full advantage of their international cultural heritage. Information communications technology is, naturally, used across the curriculum. It aids all students, motivating and deepening knowledge of key skills as well as supporting the development of the so-called ‘higher order thinking skills’, better thought of perhaps as intelligence. This country has a rich cultural legacy and tradition. We are also lucky to be a truly international school. Our languages events, for example, are a spiritual delight as well as being very moving: they include contributions from students who have fled from war-torn areas. They are true celebrations of a wealth of different cultures. Even if many schools do not have the richness to be drawn from our school’s 60 per cent of students speaking almost 80 different home languages, both virtual and real partnerships can make up these deficits. Creative arts cultivate creativity and aesthetic pleasure for the whole spectrum of students in a school. They profoundly influence the environment for learning. They are central to the definition of the good society. No one dissents from this. Under the heading ‘Explorations, past, future, science, technology’, students in these areas develop scientific method and the concept of proof by way of scientific history and the simulation of experiment and discovery. Fitness and good health are vital in our unhealthily sedentary society. Physical education also makes a massive contribution to formative assessment and key skills. One of the turning points at Hampstead was establishing an outstanding PE department. Before that no student took their physical fitness and health seriously. We are at pains to support independent study, in particular by way of distance learning. Videoconferencing is already happening in many

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schools. In ours it makes it possible both to support the gifted and talented as well as providing access to areas we cannot affort to staff. We run one A-level in Electronics through videoconferencing, and the teacher lives and teaches the students from Whitby. There are other benefits for the students, particularly taking full ownership of their own learning. It also facilitates partnerships with colleges like Trinity College of Music. We organise a system of family learning partners, assignments and support with its own student management, research methodology, assessment interpretation and links with external learning partnerships. When I talk about family learning partners I am recognising that for many of our students the home background may not be able to give support. The most popular sessions we run for parents are those giving parents skills and understanding to support their children’s learning. This should mean that both teachers and students join together with their family learning partners: the moral of that is in John Abbott’s wellknown distinction: ‘ “Work smarter” – the solution in a knowledge economy, not “Work harder” – the solution in an industrial economy.’ The school environment is a critical factor often forgotten. Even the most tatty environment can be made stimulating, a learning experience in its own right. We all need flexible, cabled, bright (some gentle) spaces, meeting rooms, investigation areas, large assembly and performance spaces, decent ergonomically designed furniture and lots of original artwork and valuable, useful display, which can survive fire officer’s decrees. A library and independent learning centre is at the heart of the school. We paid for ours from our Technology College funding and it has already quadrupled its use. Ours is of course beautiful but we were inspired by the public library in Croydon, which everyone should visit. In the sea of concrete and gale-force winds, it is a haven of beauty and a true community resource.

The valuing of all members of the school and developing respect for each person’s different and unique contributions to the school community has led to a collegiate atmosphere amongst staff and students We have placed a huge emphasis on the practice of equal opportunities – valuing all members and developing an ethos where most of the time most people are kind and supportive of others. Staff are seen by students to care for each other and the students mirror those attitudes and values. Students learn to value and respect the many very different

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young people within the school. They arrive as children and the vast majority leave us as mature, confident and socially adjusted adults who enjoy learning. There are in my school many children who would surely have dropped out from a selective system. I shall give a few examples. Sharon came in as a middle-band student below the 20 per cent selection threshold. She had very difficult home circumstances. She started glue-sniffing and truanted. She came back after a year out of school and was supported by her Head of Year and tutor. She became fired up by high quality teaching, particularly in English where she had natural talent, took her A-levels with good grades and has just got a 2:1 from Bristol despite having to take paid work all the time she was studying. She now wants to be a teacher. David was a band 3, large Afro-Caribbean graffiti artist. He was well supported but did not do too well at GCSE. He stayed on in the sixth form; we were full of trepidation but he did brilliantly on GNVQ Art & Design and is now at art college. Martha was one of our Down syndrome students, and was awarded an A* for her GCSE Art. She is now well on her way to distinction in her A-level course. We expect her to be able to make her living as a very talented artist. Seth arrived as an unaccompanied Eritrean and was taken into our Year 10. He was found not to be eating. His comment was, ‘It is enough to be in school.’ He had no change of clothes and no furniture in the men’s hostel he was placed in. He had no English but was a brilliant mathematician. Our school initiated the national charity Children of the Storm and raised the funding to send Seth to London University where he recently graduated with first class honours. Diba was an unaccompanied Muslim from Sarajevo, also with no English, who came into Year 10. She was well supported by students and staff. She successfully gained a place at Wadham College, Oxford. Tyrone, a band-2 black Afro-Caribbean, his mother a prostitute, slept rough. He was in trouble for taking money so we had to give him some. He got A* in Drama, C in English and History, D in Maths and is now at college studying Drama. Philip (band 1) was lazy and unmotivated. His mother was going to pull him out but, after special pleading from me, he stayed. We gave

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him extension activities. He was involved in peer tutoring and became strongly motivated helping our refugees. He is now reading PPE at Oxford. Christopher was very small and frail – a haemophiliac and very vulnerable – but he is doing well and is cared by the tough boys, despite his rather old-fashioned appearance. (As we have no uniform, students have the freedom to express themselves and this is respected.) Adonis, an incredibly highly strung talented musician, had a serious breakdown. Our staff taught him in his home for a year and made special arrangements for him to sit his GCSE exams in private. He gained all A*s and subsequently a place at Cambridge. Richard, a special needs student, was always alone. However, he developed real talents in computers. He is now our most valued member of staff with the patience to train even the most unpromising teachers like me! The heart of a good school has at its centre many linked groups of people who have positive and constructive conversations about many things, including learning and improving. In order to reach this point, colleagues have to develop confidence in each other, to feel supported by each other. There is a strong culture of mutual support. In addition, colleagues are assigned ‘buddies’ and mentors from outside the school. In this connection, we are trying to set up an ambitious link with a major business. We spent ages trying to establish this with Marks & Spencer but their troubles got in the way as each time buddies were assigned they moved on or out of the company! All departments spend time together at weekends and during evenings developing work. They also socialise. They go on regular skiing trips, hikes, climbs and even scuba-diving. They share the provision of a staff bar on Friday evenings and there is a strong staff choir. This sense of being part of something exciting and fun makes others want to come to Hampstead, and many that leave for promotion or extended experience come back. This ethos is also fostered through social and residential activities for students where many teachers join in, from abseiling to dancing on the annual boat trip with all the Year 11s, most of whom will be returning into our sixth. I am particularly proud of raising our staying-on rate to 95 per cent since 1990, from under 30 per cent when I came to Hampstead in 1984.

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The strong learning culture and the staff’s active participation in their own learning We place considerable emphasis on developing the expertise of staff at Hampstead. The school has become based upon the principle that lifelong learning should be a goal for staff and pupils alike. To this end, many staff undertake higher education qualifications, with several recently completing a school-based masters’ degree. The intellectual vitality that this brings to the school is valuable in itself and also in the ethos that it cultivates. All this is very much in line with our emphasis on ‘learning together achieving together’. We consider the professional development of staff to be extremely important. (We were awarded Investors in People status in July 1999 as a result of this strong culture of supportive professional development.) In 1995 I myself gained a masters’ degree in education from the Open University. It was the culmination of three exciting years for me when, despite long hours of reading, studying and researching, I found I was constantly engaged in constructive dialogues with colleagues about learning. In my first year I had focused on students’ perceptions of good teaching and this led to our whole-school re-examination of our teaching and the establishment of an academic code of conduct. In the second year I examined alternative ways of accrediting and re-motivating very low achievers unlikely to gain even one GCSE grade. Using the special awards available and developing strong links with industry, I was able to create an exciting and meaningful course which I believe the students cherished. In the third year I focused on the international and future needs arising from the development of a global economy, and reassessed the curriculum with colleagues. (We are now an RSA pilot school developing a skills-based curriculum at Key Stage 3 where, as we know from our use of CATs scores and follow-up data, many students seriously lose motivation.) This active involvement in change seemed to encourage others to make full use of further personal study and reflection. I became aware that many of my colleagues were pursuing similar studies; there were others who would like to have done so but for financial, domestic or other obstacles. For all those of us who had taken the opportunity to take part in rigorous personal study and individual learning, there seemed to be wholesale benefit for the school. I resolved to make it easy for colleagues to participate in such study. By giving financial support we made it easier for those with family and other commitments to take part. The programme was delivered partly in school, with clumps of

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twilight sessions and some weekends. We found it very easy to attract 15 staff to participate. What will come from this development is still to be determined, but already of the 12 teachers who eventually remained on this challenging programme, all of those involved have become less satisfied with what they and others were doing and have become agents for change, considering seriously, thoughtfully, experimentally as well as playfully, ways in which we might improve the school. They have become more flexible, and have challenged our existing assumptions and preconceptions. They have shown an active attempt to ‘unlearn’, a drive to find, introduce, construct or reconstruct something new. They have raised their sights. Ten have gained significant promotions on the basis of excellent performance – one head teacher, three senior teachers, one acting senior teacher, one head of independent learning, two heads of department, one acting head of department, one has become a teacher governor. One has initiated much more lesson observation and prepared the portfolio for our successful Investors in People bid. One has published a professionally acclaimed paper on developing a history website. She took the initiative for this and has created an elaborate website, which has then been refined further by another teacher in another department inspired by her work. Several have made important inputs into the development of a new curriculum to broaden and enrich the skills curriculum. One has organised a highly stimulating visit to Paris and Giverny, which started out as an art visit but ended up with both students and staff writing poetry, as well as painting and participating in a truly creative journey of exploration. Yet another has been putting together our evidence portfolio for the Excellence Award for links with industry, organising an ambitious buddy scheme to link nearly sixty staff with buddies in industry and commerce. And my last exemplary colleague has been developing the assessment and analysis of examination results and has elicited from middle managers the development of active student involvement in the assessment process. This delighted me because I have been strongly promoting student democracy, involving students in a powerful School Council as well as in the selection of staff. In 1997 we published a book on the creative partnership we had developed with the London Institute of Education while supporting beginning teachers at Hampstead.4 This showed how the articulation of good practice for beginning teachers and the development of learning teams observing

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and evaluating each other’s practice develops those in the host school, particularly those acting as mentors or contributing to the school-based programme. By 2000 we were writing another whole-school case study, this time on the management of information communications technology. Again, the articulation of good practice supports better practice all round and makes us evaluate and clarify our own practice. All of this feeds into a learning school.

The excitement culture There are many ways of changing and improving a department in order to raise achievement. An important effect of being involved in such developments is the increase in collaboration between the staff participating and the increase in professional discussion leading to improved practice in the classroom. Take, for example, the changes in mathematics teaching. The standard practice in Maths had been to leave students to work on their own, or not, with very limited interventions and little whole-class teaching. This resulted in very slow progress and much unrecognised under-performance for students. I suggested three initiatives to the department. The first was to take part in a weekend ‘Socratic discussion’ on prime numbers. This was an opportunity created by Rene Saran, my Vice-chair of Governors, who has been using and facilitating Socratic discussions both here and in Germany as a way of developing ethical approaches, and common understandings and insights into mathematics. It was one of the most exciting weekends I have ever spent and its application is potentially very powerful. We are currently using it with the Schools Council to discuss a range of relevant ethical issues. This mathematical weekend was both experimental and fun. It consolidated support for and partnerships between the Head and Deputy Head of Department, the only two maths staff participating, and strengthened links with a colleague from the University of North London. This led on to a useful pilot study on the involvement and support of parents helping their children with maths at Key Stage 3. The second initiative was to introduce ‘Cognitive Accelerated Learning for Mathematics Education’ (CAME) as part of the pilot project being developed by Kings College London. I had met Philip Adie of Kings and challenged him on the effectiveness of this methodology at a session with John Abbott on Futures Thinking. Philip offered us the

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opportunity to participate. The Head of Mathematics and his deputy with four other staff took on this challenge and the quality of teaching improved dramatically as students and teachers engaged in these searching conversations about practical and relevant mathematical problems. The Kings evaluation showed a significant improvement (nine per cent rise in GCSE scores for the cohort of students who were involved in the pilot). The deputy has now become a part-time CAME trainer and her increased expertise and experience has more than made up for losing her from time to time to training. The Head of Maths then came with me to a meeting about financial numeracy in schools. I am on the steering group for the NatWest Face to Face with Finance initiative and I had ‘volunteered’ the Head of Maths and his team to introduce this. He accepted with enthusiasm and having introduced Financial Literacy successfully at Hampstead has become something of a national expert. The department then put their own proposal to run a numeracy summer school. A significant number of the department participated. Measurable student progress has resulted and many of the strategies used fed into practice at Key Stage 3. A young member of staff has recently been promoted to take on the whole-school co-ordination of numeracy across the curriculum. This numeracy support in 1999 has had a profound impact on all those students who attended. From their previous primary history we would have expected poor attendance and poor motivation. It was not so. Bringing on the weakest students has also supported the others, as there are few disruptive children in that cohort. They have learnt that learning is fun and the teachers have learnt exciting new strategies to motivate and enhance the learning of all the students in maths. I believe the creative arts to be the lifeblood of any successful school. Recently, opportunities arose for us to appoint new heads of music, art and drama. These departments had previously made remarkably few whole-school contributions. The real problem had been a lack of wholeschool vision, the inability to act as catalysts and to engage others in the excitement and creativity which attend on strong aesthetic experience. I wanted the arts to spill out all over the school so it would not be possible to be out of their powerful influence for creative stimulation and active involvement. Now there are exhibitions of examination work in a local gallery, life classes and practitioners in residence are a regular feature of Key Stage 4 and 5 lessons. Private views are regularly held to celebrate achievement with the appropriate ceremonies. Art work is auctioned

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and sold at commercial prices. There is exhibited work all over the school. The messages given out to all about excellence, celebration and valuing creative work are strong. Music also pervades the school. Concerts and recitals are weekly. The different groups are too long to list, but the student, staff and parents choir is superb, as is the unusual boys choir. Concerts are regularly held at Kenwood in the beautiful 18th-century rooms with Vermeers and Constables looking down at the performers. Students also give performances in the intervals of commercial concerts at Kenwood. Drama is one of the most popular and successful areas of experience. There has been a huge expansion of department. The Head of Drama came to us having got to know the school through the National Schools Playwright commissioning group, Plays for Schools. This is a collective of 12–15 successful secondary schools in England and Wales together commissioning a well-known playwright and a composer to write a play with music to a brief set by the staff and the students in those schools. The process encourages teams of specialist staff across the country and cross-schools student involvement in the creation of a new play written specially for young people. There are workshops for small clusters of the schools with the writer and with the composer. Several schools attend performances at other schools to help develop their ideas, skills and understanding of the play and the music. The writer and composer usually come to each school’s production. The Oberon Press publishes the plays. The first writer we commissioned was Adrian Mitchell, who wrote The Siege with music composed by Andrew Dickson. Our second commission was of John McGrath who has written On the Road to Mandalay with music composed by Rick Lloyd of the ‘Flying Pickets’.

Conclusion I have said there are four significant factors in our school which will raise the motivation of our students, make them mirror the learning of their teachers and other staff, develop the whole person for young and old members of the school community. At the same time they do the same for staff. These are: Having a vision of the future; the valuing of all; developing a learning culture and an ‘excitement culture’ – all of these together will support the goal of developing high-achieving, multi-skilled, generous-hearted friends and effective citizens who will create tomorrow’s good society.

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Notes 1. Stenhouse (1983) Changing Schools, Changing Society, edited by M. Galton, London: Harper and Row, p. 189. 2. Learning Beyond the Classroom, 1998, DEMOS & Routledge. 3. December 1977, Working Papers: A Contribution to the Current Debate, London: HMSO. 4. New Teachers in an Urban Comprehensive School: Learning in Partnership, edited by Ruth Heilbronn and Crispin Jones, London: Trentham Books.

10 Beyond Lippmann: Media and the Good Society Richard Howells

There is an umbilical relationship between the media, education and democracy. Traditionally, an umbilical relationship is one in which the larger provides for the smaller. Here, however, we have a three-way relationship in which each both nurtures and invigorates the others. The equal health of all three is essential to the existence of the good society. If we are still to pursue the good society, we not only need to give serious thought to the media but, crucially, to re-think the parameters and even the purpose of education itself. We have long understood the potential of the mass media to educate. Although the cinema began in the late 19th century as a simple medium for spectacle and entertainment, by 1927, John Grierson, the founder of the British documentary film movement, was seeking to persuade the government of the value of what he called ‘socially purposive cinema’. 1 Film, he argued, could provide models for social action. He was non party-political in his approach, and sought to represent the interdependence of the individual and society. In this way, the documentary film could have a part to play in ‘modern citizenship’ and, indeed, ‘civic appreciation, civic faith and civic duty’.2 The film medium, in other words, both could and should be used for ‘civic education’. 3 That, in turn, led Grierson to envisage an ‘informational State’ in which the documentary film-maker assumed the task of explaining social issues to the public.4 This was a key point, because Grierson wished to go beyond Walter Lippmann’s belief that a successful democracy depended on an informed citizenship capable of making rational decisions on civic issues. Lippmann believed that the majority of people lacked the information necessary to participate in a democratic society, but Grierson 141

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was convinced that the mass media could ‘solve the problem’ and thus become ‘necessary instruments in both the practice of government and the enjoyment of citizenship’.5 Grierson set about this in both theory and practice with films such as ‘Drifters’ (1929), which portrayed the daily lives of British herring fishermen. To the modern audience, ‘Drifters’ (which was filmed without sound, in black and white, and which originally ran for almost an hour), may appear, frankly, dull. Viewed in its historical context, however, it demonstrates a seminal attempt to provide the pre-television public with an experience that they would otherwise never have enjoyed. How many of the population of Birmingham, for example, would previously have witnessed a storm at sea from the bridge of a fishing boat? More than that, of course, Grierson and his colleagues had a double agenda: in addition to providing mere information about the process of herring production, they sought not only to stress the interdependence of social endeavour, but also what they perceived to be the essential dignity of both labour and the working man. Grierson continued his mission with zeal. According to Renov, for Grierson ‘the screen was a pulpit, the film a hammer to be used in shaping the destiny of nations’.6 His determination to advance democracy with socially purposive cinema was only a limited success, however. This was due partly to the structures of the British film industry, and partly to the advent of television which rapidly became (as it remains today) a far more fertile medium for the making and showing of documentary programmes. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that after serving as the first Film Commissioner to the National Film Board of Canada (and later as Head of Information at UNESCO), Grierson returned to the UK to end his career in television, where he made over 300 programmes for the Scottish Television series ‘This Wonderful World’. While John Grierson is widely held to have been the founder of the ‘documentary’ medium, the educative function (indeed, obligation) of the mass media was also central to the foundation and philosophy of the BBC. The forerunner to the BBC was a business. Founded in 1922, the British Broadcasting Company was set up by the Post Office as a matter of expedience to allocate valuable airwaves to a single organisation rather than to a plethora of disparate commercial investors. It was united under the autocratic chairmanship of John Reith. Its financial basis soon proved problematic, however, and so the Crawford Committee recommended that it be formed into a public corporation operating in the ‘National Interest’. The BBC was founded in 1926 with a mission, reiterated in its current charter, ‘to provide sound and television

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programmes of information, education and entertainment’. The ordering of these three objectives is, as Colin Seymour-Ure has argued, highly relevant. The mission to inform led to news and documentary programming, while the mission to educate: ‘meant infinitely more than good schools programmes; a whole approach, rather, to broadcasting as a means of widening horizons, opening doors, increasing awareness . . .’7 This emphasis on education in its widest sense is crucial to our understanding of the relationship between the media, education and democracy. For most of us, our formal education is finished at the age of 16. Some continue at school for two more years, fewer continue to complete a degree, usually by the age of 22. The result is that whenever we complete our formal education, we spend the majority of our lives being educated by the media. Education, then, is so much more than schooling. It is a lifelong activity continued not by force but by choice. Up to the age of 16, our education is heavily structured and legally enforced. Until relatively recently it was even imposed with – at least the threat of – physical violence. Even post-16, our education still takes place within a disciplinary framework requiring attendance, participation and examination. Education by the media, on the other hand, is an entirely optional, lifelong pursuit. We seek it only because we wish it. It leads us to an understanding of what Fred Inglis has rightly described as the ‘self-educating’ society.8 Although it is pertinent to dispute the actual – as opposed to avowed – emphasis on entertainment in the BBC both past and present, it is important to understand that the Reithian ideals of the early BBC have been by no means expunged. If we study both the radio and the television schedules, we discover that there is still a significant proportion of factual programming within the BBC. BBC television, for example, claims that half of its peak-time output is factual in content. 9 The BBC is not, of course, alone in providing informational and educational programming. The corporation’s monopoly on broadcasting was broken by the introduction of commercial television in 1955, and since then a variety of independent television, radio, satellite and cable channels have added to the breadth of informational broadcasting available in the UK. It is fashionable to assume that non-terrestrial television in particular is devoid of factual content, but the existence of numerous specialist channels dedicated specifically to informative programming belies this notion.10 The BBC, meanwhile, continues to broadcast television programmes in partnership with the Open University, a relationship which it began in 1960. The current ‘Learning Zone’ programming is broadcast for up to six and a half hours during the early mornings on BBC2, while

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(for example) the Open University programme ‘The Romans in Britain’ received mainstream scheduling and attracted audiences of up to 2.6 million11 – a figure considerably beyond those actually enrolled in Open University courses. 12 It serves as a valuable example of education by media through choice. Education by media is not limited, however, to issues of purely academic interest. It is through the media that the majority of people learn about the great issues of the day, whether they be global warming, HIV, genetically modified foods or race relations. Informational and educational programming has, in recent years, branched out into ‘new media’ such as video, CD ROM, DVD and, of course, the Internet. Broadcasters actively encourage the use of these media in support of – and even in parallel to – mainstream programming. Despite the considerable hyperbole surrounding the so-called information revolution, it is too early to draw reliable conclusions on its real effectiveness. Some academics are already beginning to question the real impact of new media technologies on information and education. 13 Of one thing we can be sure, however, it has not reduced it. So far, so seemingly good. Grierson’s and Reith’s visions of the 1920s have – at least to some extent – been upheld. We have seen that the media still play an active role in education, and presume that this must, therefore, have a beneficial effect on democracy. It is important now to stress, however, that the role of the media need not always be beneficent here, because we need to be able to differentiate between education and persuasion; information and propaganda. Democracy depends upon an informed and critical public; malleability depends upon its being neither. The media, then, can be used both to promote and to suppress democracy. The control of the media is fundamental to social control by totalitarian regimes. Once the Bolsheviks took power following the Russian revolution, they immediately took control of the Russian film industry.14 From June 1918 the Commissariat for Enlightenment produced a weekly newsreel called ‘Cine-Week’. Trotsky was seen reviewing troops; Lenin was shown enjoying the Kremlin gardens. In March 1919 the Eighth Party Congress passed a resolution stating that: ‘Cinema, theatre, concerts, exhibitions, etc. . . . must be used for communist propaganda.’15 Projects such as the three-hour ‘The History of the Civil War’ ensued in 1921 under the subtitle: ‘Pictures of the struggles of Soviet Forces with Counter-Revolutionaries.’ The following year, the celebrated Russian film-maker Dziga Vertov began a documentary series called ‘CinePravda’, ‘pravda’, of course, being both Russian for ‘truth’ and the name of the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

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Stalin continued Lenin’s enthusiasm for cinema. Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s commissar for culture, called it ‘the most important and most mass of the arts’ and so particularly important ‘for the goals of propaganda’. 16 The continuing use of film, radio, television and other media by totalitarian regimes, both left and right, is a matter of historical record. The manipulation of the media for political ends, however, is by no means limited to them. Even in societies which pride themselves in the freedom of information, the ‘truth’ provided by media can still be a deliberately partial one, and democratic governments are no exception. In times of war, truth, as Phillip Knightley’s important study reminds us, is ‘the first casualty’. 17 Even in undeclared wars, such as in Vietnam, the Falkland Islands, Iraq or Kosovo, the military, usually in collaboration with the government it serves, immediately takes command of the flow of information. Knightley concludes that every government wants to control the media in wartime and will, if necessary, lie to the media in order to gain that control. 18 We do not like to think of democratic governments behaving in such a way, but they sometimes do. The information upon which the public judges the success – or even the virtue – of military action can therefore be withheld, distorted, invented or promoted by those who control both the access to and dissemination of it. Even flagrant misinformation may thus be justified ‘in the national interest’. So, where we had originally been thinking of the provision of information as fundamental to the success of democracy, there are those who would at the same time advocate the manipulation of it as sometimes necessary to the preservation of it. This presents us with a dichotomy worthy of considerable study. The politicians’ use of media to persuade is not limited to times of war, however. Party election television broadcasts, for example, provide a sophisticated form of political advertising which has become an accepted – and even regulated – part of the democratic process. No election campaign is complete without them. The advertisers of overtly commercial products try to tell us that they are simply providing us with product information, but we are not (if we are wise) convinced. Similarly, political parties do not seek simply to inform us about their policies with a view to our making independent choices. They seek, just like other advertisers, to persuade. The result, however, is designed not to be the purchase of a particular kind of washing powder but, rather, who will head our democracy for the next five years. 19 Once a party is elected to government, does it then abandon its use of the media to persuade and exploit it only to inform? Clearly, no. Advertisers (of all persuasions) speak glibly of ‘the educated consumer’ when in reality they seek to persuade.

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We need, therefore, to be able to differentiate between lifelong education and lifelong persuasion. In its purest, Griersonian sense, the media serve to inform the population so that citizens can proceed to make their own, educated choices. Individual choices become collective decisions by way of the democratic process, a process in which the citizen is a participant and not a subject. How, though, are citizens to separate information from persuasion? The citizen needs to be able to separate the two in order to make sound knowledge the basis for good social action. It is crucial, then, that we investigate not only the power of the media to educate, but equally that we educate the populace in the power of the media. In this way, the media will not be allowed to become an instrument of the state, but instead a public forum for the interchange of both information and ideas in pursuit of the good society. So far, we have looked at the media’s relationship with democracy in the deliberate areas of news, current affairs and documentary, to say nothing of overtly ‘educational’ schools and university programming. The educative role of the media is much more broad, however, for even the silliest situation comedy has a social or ideological content which, wittingly or unwittingly, plays a significant role in our social and even political education. The feature films of Hollywood director Frank Capra provide excellent examples of a conscious attempt by a commercial film-maker to use the mass entertainment media to promote participatory democracy. Fundamental to the philosophy of these movies is the Jeffersonian ideal that all men are created equal and that, therefore, even the ‘little man’ has rights, dignity and a contribution to make to the good, democratic society. While the 18th century Thomas Jefferson envisaged an agriculturally based union with a deliberately weak central government, Capra’s 20th century version of the same vision was one of small town values keeping big city operators in check. This was applicable to everything from commerce to government itself. In ‘Mr Deeds Goes to Town’ (1936), for example, a small town tuba player called Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper) needs all his home-spun wisdom in fending off the city slickers who seek to separate him from his newly inherited fortune. ‘Meet John Doe’ (1941) has Gary Cooper (again) inspiring a whole political movement from one man’s anonymity, while ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ (1946) is a parable in which mid-Western banker George Bailey ( James Stewart) discovers that one man can make a difference as the whole town learns the value of community action. In ‘Mr Smith Goes to Washington’ (1939), Capra takes on central government at full tilt.

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Here, James Stewart plays Jefferson Smith (the name is not coincidental), a simple but clear-sighted man who is unexpectedly elevated to the US Senate. Smith is a Scout leader from the mid-West whose political ambition is to build a boy’s camp, but as soon as he reaches Washington, he is confronted by vested interests, big business and corrupt practices. But Jefferson Smith holds on to his vision, inspired by his visits to the great shrines of American public life including the Lincoln Memorial. We are left with a rallying call to the tenets of participatory democracy, and to the Jeffersonian conviction that the democratic process cannot be left to others. Throughout these films we are reminded of the need for perpetual vigilance in the preservation of democracy, and of the dependence of democracy upon the essential decency and informed participation of the educated private citizen.20 As Stewart intones: ‘Liberty is too precious a thing to be buried in books.’21 Capra, like Grierson, was on something of a mission. Their promotion of democracy by media was both avowed and deliberate. It is important to realise, however, that even the most inane media product can form a part of our social education whether it intends to or not. Soap operas, situation comedies, drama series all give us glimpses of lives beyond our own. We participate vicariously, and as in reality the modern world is one in which we withdraw increasingly into private life, the entertainment media – frequently unwittingly – serve to provide us with a surrogate community with which we interact not only in our imaginations, but whose lessons we apply to our actual lives. Our culture has always given us what theologian Don Cupitt describes as ‘stories to live by’. 22 Homeric epic, Biblical scripture and chivalric romance have long provided us with stories which may not provide us with literal reflections of the worlds they depict, but whose narratives are loaded with inherent values about what was considered commendable or otherwise at the time. Scenarios are played out; consequences are described. What was true of ancient texts is equally true of more modern forms from fables and fairy tales to movies and serial drama. That is why Cupitt is able to assert that in a contemporary world of mass media, ‘our culture thus remains as much steeped in morally-guiding myths as any previous one has been’.23 Stories, he is able to conclude, ‘teach life’. 24 Cupitt is not alone in this belief. Where his writings have been essentially theoretical, others have found practical examples in surprisingly everyday Hollywood movies such as ‘Rocky’ (1976), ‘Alien’ (1979) and ‘Star Wars’ (1977).25 The stories taught by the media need not necessarily be constructive or democratic, however. Critical theorists T.W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer represented a whole school of sociologists who

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believed from the 1930s that the mass media deliberately sought to persuade the masses of the naturalness, inevitability and overwhelming virtue of industrial capitalism. For them, ‘the triumph of invested capital’ was ‘the meaningful content of every film, whatever plot the production company may have selected’.26 In this way, the ideology of the ruling class was encoded in forms as seemingly innocuous as a Disney cartoon: ‘Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment.’27 Thus, the masses were ‘reduced to stupidity’ and the culture industry became ‘the prophet of the prevailing order’. 28 Not everyone agrees that the entertainment media have a purely right-wing bias. Some contemporary writers have equally argued that film and television drama favour the left. 29 Despite these differences, however, analysts are united in their argument that even the most inane sitcom is an unwitting repository for ideological values. These values are both contended and contentious, as are the conclusions we may draw from the analysis of them. We should ignore them, however, at our peril. Not all the issues raised in film, television and radio drama are, however, deeply ideological. They teach, among other things, forms of social interaction. From the movies we may learn, for example, how to behave at the races or a ‘prom’, or how to act at a hotel of a quality we may not usually be able to afford. For many teenagers, film and television characters provide a ‘virtual peer group’ in which norms (actual or aspirational) can be established. It has been shown, for example, that British Asian girls use soap operas as ‘discussion documents’ for questions of identity and moral responsibility within their own communities. Here, culturally sensitive issues become legitimate topics of debate when projected onto characters from the fictional realm. 30 An example with which, perhaps, everyone can identify is that of sex. If we have received any kind of formal sex education at our schools or colleges, it was surely limited to matters of biology, conception (or the avoidance of it) and reproduction. Parents, equally, may have provided information on the mechanics of procreation, but are as unlikely as schools to have given detailed tuition on the heightening of purely physical pleasure. For the most part, then, our sexual education on everything from etiquette to technique takes place within the media. It is the magazines, the films and the television programmes which tutor us on what is, after all, a major social and personal preoccupation. It is from even the most simple drama that we learn how to proceed. It is crucial to understand, therefore, that our education takes place via the purely popular, in addition to the avowedly educational media.

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It follows, then, that our education about the media should include all the colours of the spectrum. To exclude the popular on the simple grounds of aesthetics, for example, makes no sociological sense at all. A proper appreciation of the relationship between the media, education and democracy demands that we are able to cross the ‘quality threshold’ without looking back. The rigorous and sociological study of the media demands much more than the crossing of the quality threshold, however. It requires the careful analysis of not only the overt but also the latent ideological content of media texts. When we study the media message, in other words, we need to seek not only that which is intentionally being said, but also that which forms the underlying cultural values and assumptions. It is these which are often much more articulate and revealing than the superficial content. It brings us, if we are sufficiently diligent and perceptive, to an understanding of the differences between the natural and the cultural in society. In our mass media we can thus see ourselves writ large; we can look at ourselves and reflect upon change. Whether it is ‘Newsnight’ or ‘Neighbours’, there is no doubting the centrality of the media today. Fred Inglis was entirely correct when he declared: ‘to study public communications is to study one of the most important topics of the day. Such study should be a compulsory part of every citizen’s liberal education’.31 Colin MacCabe similarly argued that the study of film and television should be part of the ‘common stock of knowledge’ in Britain and even part of the national curriculum. 32 Indeed, by advocating the study of film and television, we were ‘arguing for a more democratic Britain’.33 Given the strength of these arguments, it is surprising that the study of the media has only recently become a part of the academic scene. The mere arrival of media papers, options and even degrees at British universities has not, however, sealed the relationship between media, education and democracy. Some of these problems are particular to media education; others are rooted in the parlous state of university education as a whole. As a new field, the academic study of media and communications has had characteristic difficulty in establishing itself. The academy has an inbuilt conservatism, and new fields have always attracted suspicion, if not outright hostility. This has certainly been the case with media and communications studies. Those in the established disciplines have often failed to understand that it is not necessary qualitatively to admire something in order to consider it worthy of rigorous analysis. This has, in turn, led to fears that those who study mass communications are

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secretly seeking to dismantle the established canon of western civilisation and replace it with Donald Duck. As Anthony Quinton trembled, this was ‘comparable to the fall of the Roman empire, and its replacement by the barbarian kingdoms’. 34 Although Quinton has clearly misunderstood the situation, many of those involved in the study of the media (and especially in ‘Cultural Studies’) have reacted to such attacks with an unhelpful overcompensation of jargon and obfuscatory prose in order to make the field seem much more difficult and therefore somehow more ‘respectable’. This has, in fact, done more harm to media and cultural studies than any of the attacks based on the traditional notion of the canon. The struggle of any new discipline to gain acceptance by the academy is not unique to media and communication studies. The threat to the umbilical relationship between media, education and democracy lies in the threat to education as a whole. There appears nowadays to be a widely held belief that a good society is simply an economically successful one. The purpose of the universities, therefore, is to serve the economy. This, in turn, suggests that the purpose of a university education is to train future employees so that they may immediately take their place within a specific workforce. In this way, higher education is becoming increasingly to be seen as a service industry geared to the satisfaction of employers who seek people who can easily be assimilated into the existing system without wishing to change it. As a result, universities are changing from being centres of excellence to becoming mere centres of expedience. Where the universities had used to promote a critical, interrogative approach which was intellectual in both basis and substance, they seem now to be gripped in the thrall of professional training – a service which was carried out much more appropriately by the old polytechnics. This has been the result of successive governmental policy, some of it stated with chilling explicitness. In 1998 the government published a White Paper: ‘Our Competitive Future: Building the Knowledge Driven Economy.’ If the title betrayed the assumption that the purpose of knowledge was to drive the economy, the detail made it specific from the earliest days. Effort was required to ensure ‘that the National Curriculum better prepares young people for the world of work’, together with a ‘determination to increase the employability of students in higher education’.35 If the intrinsic value of knowledge was no longer appreciated in teaching, neither was it valued in research. In the same document, the government declared its intention to: ‘vigorously promote the commercialisation of university research’, 36 while in a consultation paper published two years

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later, the Office of Science and Technology poured scorn upon research which was ‘curiosity-driven’.37 In order to keep the universities to heel, governments of various hues have joined in taking increasing control of the purse strings. The universities, to their shame, have offered little in the way of resistance. Control of university finance has facilitated the control of research, the curriculum and of teaching methods. Controls have increased both the numbers and the powers of bureaucrats who see the universities as businesses whose relevance and success is to be measured, ultimately, by the balance sheet. Quantification and standardisation have inevitably followed. The standards which they seek ostensibly to ensure have, in ironic consequence, fallen. These continued attacks at the autonomy of the universities have effects which are already being felt far beyond the walls of the universities themselves. This is especially true of media, education and democracy. The more the state succeeds in regulating the study of the media, the more the state succeeds in regulating the media themselves. What is needed is a university system in which students are inspired to reflect so critically and intelligently on the existing system that they may even end up no longer wishing to be a part of it. They need to be equipped with the facility for independent thought about the media rather than simply being trained to become conversant with the latest professional techniques. Similarly, academics need to be able to research and publish without fear or favour of being ‘on message’, to be independent of current governmental thinking, and to become free from the need to justify research or thinking by its immediate effect on departmental finances. The universities need, in other words, to become safe for intellectuals again. If the universities are no longer fit places for intellectual life, the question arises as to where the intellectuals, present and future will go. Many will withdraw into private life, others may find that, interestingly, it is the media which nowadays provide a comparatively attractive platform for discussion, dissent and the dissemination of thinking and research. BBC Radio 4, for example, does not gauge the success of its programmes by the consequent employability of its listeners, nor is the content of such programmes thought only to be worthwhile if it has a direct and quantifiable application to business and industry. It is the media (or certainly the enlightened ends of it) that nowadays appear to value the intrinsic value of knowledge more than the universities. It is a depressing conclusion. It may be argued, therefore, that the vital yet delicate relationship between media, education and democracy would be most effectively

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served by scholars of the media bypassing the universities and moving directly into the media themselves. While this would undoubtedly have certain advantages, the proposal would be ultimately flawed in that the media would become the intellectuals’ new paymasters and thus seek to control the extent to which the interrogation of the media was allowed to become sufficiently rigorous and critical. The good society needs an autonomous intellectual class and simply changing the paymasters would not ensure this. As things stand, there appear to be only two reasonable alternatives for the preservation of the umbilical relationship. First, institutes of higher research might be established within the existing university system while remaining independent of undergraduate teaching and of the awarding of degrees. This would liberate scholars from the mechanics of professional training, the culture of bureaucratic control, and the myopic vision of quantifiable research goals. It would, in a small but significant way, make the universities safe for intellectuals again. The immediate benefits for students would be rather less clear. The second alternative is much more radical: a return to the traditional idea of the university. Here, teaching could be conducted in an atmosphere of research free from state intervention as to the required outcomes. This in turn leads us to the necessity of engaging with the far broader question of the sort of society we wish to create and how to encourage the conditions in which that vision is most likely to succeed. Certainly, this necessitates our going beyond such minor concerns as how media students can best be trained to conform to current commercial and industrial practice. Our university system needs to gear itself not towards the training of practitioners but to the education of a regenerating intellectual class which can see beyond the minutiae of practice to envision the good society. This involves the unfettering of thought and the propagation of human – rather than just economic – values. The media, education and democracy are interdependent in the modern world. The welfare of one is conditional upon the welfare of the others. This is particularly true of democracy, which requires the active participation of an educated citizenship if it is to be truly democratic. Without a broadly informed and educated electorate, the concept that one person’s vote is of equal value to another’s lacks validity. For most people, formal education ceases even before they are entitled to vote. It is the media, therefore, which provide the majority of our education in what has indeed become a self-educating society. The media continue to educate, and it is important that they continue to do so freely and responsibly. It is equally crucial, however, that our formal educational

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system – and especially the universities – plays its part in promoting a keen-eyed vigilance over the educational and democratic contributions of the media. There is room for optimism in the commitment of the media to public service broadcasting. This is because the public continues to demonstrate an interest in education of its own volition even when (and possibly especially when) it has no direct vocational relevance. There is cause for much greater concern in formal education, however, a concern which has been fundamental to the whole of this essay. There is hope for the future in the partial recognition of the importance of both the participation and the study of the media as vital to the democratic process. This, in turn, is dependent upon a vision of a good society rather than just an efficient one. Media, education and democracy remain connected by this link; sever it and the threat is not to one but to all three.

Notes An earlier version of this chapter appeared as: ‘Education, Media and Democracy’ in The European Review, volume 9, number 2 (2001), pp. 159–168. 1. Grierson’s views were set out in a memorandum commissioned by the Empire Marketing Board Film Committee in April 1927: ‘Notes for English Producers’, Public Record Office BT 64/86 6880. For a coherent summary of his arguments in this document, see Ian Aitken, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement, Cinema and Society Series (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 97–101. 2. John Grierson, ‘The Challenge of Peace’ in H. Forsyth Hardy (ed.), Grierson on Documentary (London: Faber and Faber, 1946), p. 174. 3. Ibid., p. 178. 4. See Aitken, p. 192. 5. John Grierson, Grierson on Documentary, edited by H. Forsyth Hardy, p. 207. For more on Lippmann and Grierson see Aitken, especially pp. 52–53 and Philip Rosen, ‘Document and Documentary: On the Persistence of Historical Concepts’, in Theorizing Documentary, American Film Readers, edited by Michael Renov (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 58–89, pp. 78–80. 6. Michael Renov, ‘Toward a Poetics of Documentary’ in Theorizing Documentary, American Film Readers, edited by Michael Renov (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 12–36, p. 29. 7. Colin Seymour-Ure, The British Press and Broadcasting Since 1945, second edition, Making Contemporary Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 64. 8. I am grateful to Fred Inglis for the many conversations we have had on this topic. The phrase is his. 9. BBC Annual Report and Accounts 98/99, p. 18. The precise figures given by the BBC are 52 per cent of BBC1 and 49 per cent of BBC2. The BBC additionally claims 328 hours of parliamentary broadcasting on terrestrial television and radio, with an additional 3108 hours on its dedicated parliament channel:

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10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

BBC Parliament. BBC Annual Report and Accounts 98/99, p. 35. For a fuller breakdown of figures, see BBC Annual Report and Accounts 98/99, pp. 71–74. Note, for example, the Discovery, History, National Geographic and BBC Knowledge channels. Commercial radio, on the other hand, has turned out (partly due to the slackening of official controls) to provide relatively little in the way of informational programming. While commercial stations have tended significantly towards popular music, BBC local radio has, in recent years, moved to a policy of speech programming during peak hours. BBC Annual Report and Accounts 98/99, p. 28. Correspondence with the BBC Education Programmes department, 3 July 2000, confirms that students make up only a small percentage of the Open University television audience generally. See, for example, Stephen Lax (ed.), Access Denied in the Information Age (London and New York: Palgrave, 2001). See Graham Roberts, Forward Soviet! History and the Non-fiction Film in the USSR, Kino: The Russian Cinema Series (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1999), pp. 15–17. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 133. Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, revised edition (London: Prion, 2000). See Phillip Knightley, transcript of a speech to the Freedom Council, 23 March 2000, coinciding with the launch of the revised edition of The First Casualty. For an analysis of party election broadcasts of the British general election campaign of 1997, see Nicholas J. Cull and Richard Howells, ‘The Battle for Britain: Political Broadcasting and British Election of 1997’ in the Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television special issue, volume 17, number 4, October 1997, pp. 437–443. I gratefully acknowledge Graham McCann’s lecture series ‘Aspects of American Culture’, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of Cambridge, spring 1993. Dialogue from ‘Mr Smith Goes to Washington’ (1939), directed by Frank Capra, screenplay by Sidney Buchman. Don Cupitt, What is a Story? (London: SCM Press), 1991, p. xi. Ibid., p. 36. Ibid., p. 14. See, for example, Joel W. Martin and Conrad E. Ostwalt, Jr (eds), Screening the Sacred: Religion, Myth and Ideology in American Popular Film (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1995). T.W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, ‘The Culture Industry as Mass Deception’ in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979), p. 43. Ibid., p. 138. Ibid., pp. 144–147. See, for example, Mark Crispin Miller, Boxed In (Evanston, Illinois, 1988); S. Robert Lichter, Linda S. Lichter and Stanley Rothman, Watching America (New York: Prentice Hall, 1991); Stephen Powers, David J. Rothman and Stanley Rothman, Hollywood’s America: Social and Political Themes in Motion Pictures (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996).

Richard Howells 155 30. See Chris Barker, ‘ “Cindy’s a Slut”: Moral Identities and Moral Responsibility in the “Soap Talk” of British Asian Girls’ in Sociology, volume 32, number 1, February 1998, pp. 65–81. 31. Fred Inglis, Media Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 6. 32. Colin MacCabe, On the Eloquence of the Vulgar: A Justification for the Study of Film and Television (London: British Film Institute, 1993), p. 20. 33. Ibid., p. 22. 34. Anthony Quinton, ‘Clash of Symbols’ in The Times Higher Education Supplement, 30 April 1993, pp. 15–16, p. 15. 35. ‘Our Competitive Future: Building the Knowledge Driven Economy’ White Paper presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, December 1998, Cm 4176, p. 66. 36. Ibid., Cm 4176, p. 6. 37. ‘Consultation Paper on the Sixth European Framework Programme for Research, Technological Development and Demonstration (RTD) Activities’, Office of Science and Technology, 14 February 2000, pp. 5–6.

11 The Good Society: Informal Education and the Young Tom Wylie

Young people are the litmus paper of a society. Their status at the opening of the twenty-first century is a useful indicator of the changes wrought in Britain over the previous half-century by the post-war welfare state including the succession of Education Acts from 1944. It is a pointer, too, to the contemporary social contract needed with the young and the education required across the generations, and not just in schools. Most young people are better housed, better clothed and better fed than previous generations. Taken as a whole, they appear better educated. The proportion of the cohort, especially girls, gaining two or more A-levels (three or more Highers in Scotland), has almost doubled in the last two decades. Some two-thirds now stay on in education after the minimum school-leaving age, but the associated growth in higher education has more often reflected the uptake of places by less able people from relatively privileged backgrounds rather than bright but disadvantaged students. Moreover, too high a proportion of those continuing to further education drop out, especially if they are from disadvantaged backgrounds. Any expectations that these broadly positive developments in social welfare would lead all young people inexorably to the achievement of the twin goals of early adulthood – successful, full-time employment and the chance to live independently – have been hindered by changes in the global economy and in Britain’s labour and housing markets. Global economic trends have underlined the need for higher levels of educational qualifications and, possibly, for a different type of young adult who has the skills and resilience to cope with flexible employment and with lengthening, and often disordered, transitions into adult life. These transitional processes no longer take a linear form – into work, then independent housing, followed by family formation. Instead they are often combined in different ways and can be reversed if young 156

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people experience difficulties in sustaining employment, living independently on a low income and maintaining relationships. Marriage has become less popular and parenthood has been postponed – except for a minority, usually the poorly qualified, who contribute to Britain’s position of having the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in Western Europe. The proportion of young adults taking an interest in formal political processes, whether in voting or membership of political parties, has declined even more sharply than that of older generations. The opportunities and experiences of young people and communities have been substantially restructured over the past two decades. Education has yet to catch up with the implications. By 1986 the full-time labour market had virtually disappeared for those leaving school at the minimum age. The previous tradition of craft apprenticeships was only partly replaced by demand for unskilled personnel in the service industries, often working part-time for low pay and on limited contracts. While policy-makers tend to blame problematic transitions to adult life on dysfunctional schools, communities or families, too little attention is paid to the reality of local labour markets which act to reinforce economic and social marginalisation. Excessive concern for choices made by individuals has diverted attention from deeper structural issues. Staying on in education has become the norm, and most welfare benefits have been withdrawn from those aged 16–18 years. Even so, some 172,000 young people aged 16–18 are not in education, employment or training and the size of this group has remained stubbornly resistant to policy intervention. An unspoken assumption has developed of greater, if ad hoc, parental support for adolescents and young adults through the much longer period of transition into independent living, especially in areas where the stock of affordable housing has diminished. Not even the full benefits of the minimum wage are available until individuals reach their mid-20s. Family norms, expectations and social background remain as critical factors both in the choice of routes into higher education and stable employment, and their successful completion. Recent studies point to a growing polarisation in outcomes depending on the relative income of the family home. Over the past 30 years, poverty has increasingly worn a child’s face and childhood poverty is becoming a reliable predictor of labour market disadvantage. Young people who are in low-income households at 16 are much more likely to be unemployed in the early 20s than young people from higher income households. A divergence of adult earnings is evident between those born in 1958 and those born

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in 1970: experience of poverty as a child in the latter cohort had a greater adverse influence on earnings than on the 1958 predecessor. The opportunities for social mobility appear to be decreasing. Education carries a great burden as the engine of public policy. It is presented as holding the key to economic success and to social stability, although few speak now of its role in individual fulfilment or in creating the common wealth. Education, and later training, have increasingly developed as open markets. Those who have negative experiences of learning in school carry this into their working lives and often resist further engagement. Education itself has become narrowed to what happens in schools and universities: popular education, through youth work, adult education and community organisations, has suffered long years of neglect as resources continue to be poured into institutional settings. We rightly expect schools to deliver for the great mass of children. But a society with a minority shut out of education is hardly a recipe for a globally successful or cohesive country, so it is right to expect it also to provide effectively for particular groups – for ethnic minorities, for children in the care of the state, for travellers’ children. Yet it is depressingly evident that there remains a substantial proportion of the population for whom schooling does not mean much. In the latter years of secondary schooling some 60 per cent appear to be getting on, 20 per cent getting by, the rest going nowhere. The latter are not developing the personal resources and skills to get on. They are leaving school, disenfranchised and alienated; they are becoming trapped on the margins of the education system and of the labour market. Those who fail to make successful transitions often accede to an enduring and dogged sense of defeat buried deeply in their spirit. Many are growing up in neighbourhoods from where economic and social capital has fled, signalling decline in local schools, health care and transport. Young people growing up in social housing estates are particularly vulnerable to inequalities in health. In some neighbourhoods young adults eddy between unsuitable work, weak training schemes and periods of unemployment; substantial numbers deal with the stressful uncertainty of their lives through self-medication of alcohol and drug misuse. High levels of unemployment, or poorly paid work, create poverty which in turn affects children’s health, attendance and achievement. They also diminish the perceived relevance of schooling and help to sustain a subculture of derision for those adolescents who are concerned to achieve and to beat the odds. Students expect to go into short-term casual jobs – if they get work at all – and they are not persuaded that

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learning is either instrumental or brings its own reward. As HMI wrote a few years ago in their unique study of urban schooling: Poor levels of education and qualification among many parents complete a cycle of under-achievement which continues to affect the lives of their children. The community does not acquire sufficient numbers of people able to offer role models of educational success. Urban comprehensive schools serving the 10 per cent most advantaged areas have double the proportions of their pupils gaining 5+ A–C at GCSE as the 10 per cent most disadvantaged areas. This gap is widening, not narrowing. School improvement in urban areas can be fragile – difficult to achieve, and hard to sustain, especially where the schools contend with a substantial mobility of population. Moreover, young people often point the finger at the inability of schools adequately to address their needs, to give them positive messages about themselves and to prepare them properly for adult life. Some negativity may be reinforced by the growing – and officially endorsed – hierarchy of structures for educational institutions and in the internal ethos or processes of the institution itself, including how it groups its students. After school, some give further education a try for a year or so, but the qualifications can appear confusing or of limited value, and the teaching uninspiring. Educational Maintenance Allowances may help, but dropout rates remain depressingly high. The standard defence of colleges and training providers – that those departing are going into work – will not wash: as with urban schools, there needs to be robust action on both curriculum and teaching quality, and on institutional attitudes towards hearing the voice of the learner. Here is where features of educational life, of the preferred routes to learning, may clash with the prevailing youth culture. Some forms of learning require one to become a beginner once more – not an easy demand to make of an uncertain adolescent or young adult. Many youngsters need to believe that what they are learning connects to real life and will bring benefits there. Their perceptions are often shaped by a sense of their own identity: what they see themselves becoming – a nurse, a mechanic – determines what they are willing to learn. Such features underline the need for young people to be better supported – not just financially, though that helps; and not just emotionally, though that matters too. They need better educational support as they make those small steps in learning, cope with setbacks, grapple

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with new subjects or skills. The interplay of teaching and learning is at its sharpest in working with the less biddable young. The role of the teacher and the relationships established with students can be as important as the formal construction of the curriculum. Young people need to be encouraged to believe in their ability to make progress in most of the curriculum, especially literacy and numeracy. But it is at least arguable that the arts offer particularly valuable vehicles for raising achievement, for promoting personal development and social skills, and for engaging with a wider community. The aesthetic domain is too often neglected despite its important role in stimulating creativity and discipline. Educational institutions increasingly require processes which widen the range of skills which young people need to use, moving from static knowledge into more dynamic applications by the introduction of multi-disciplinary projects in technology, the humanities and the arts. The role of moving images, for example, is set to become even more intensive and to be infused with a greater interaction between entertainment and education. Information technology can open possibilities because of its capacity to help individuals learn in different ways, on rhythms beyond those of the school timetable, and in forms of learning that are not sequential. Qualifications should include recognition of young people’s achievements gained outside school and enable individuals and schools to escape from the tyranny of too narrow a set of performance measures. Education needs to address more effectively the complex arena of self-esteem. Too much thinking about self-esteem is expressed in terms which have a soft focus: in fact, it is built on a set of key skills in self-control, creative thinking, decision-making, political awareness and teamworking. It should extend into active citizenship – getting involved and finding a voice and place in the world. Over the last 50 years, educational institutions have changed less than young people. They should be judged by how far they have been able to tap their potential, to give opportunities for its expression and to demonstrate improvement across a range of educational endeavours, not just the formal subjects. We need not be just teachers who can light a fire for learning, but should have a much more relevant curriculum which connects more closely to young people’s experiences, to the stories they tell themselves about themselves, their world and their aspirations. Of course such aspirations need to be raised and they need to be moved on in their personal narratives but education has to connect with them first. Some young people use their insights into the teaching process to avoid learning: they turn work into play. Helping

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them to see its value would involve young people being given a greater say in determining and developing the orientation skills and learning they need: to being treated as co-producers of learning and not simply as its consumers. Offered, in short, a congruence between what they hope for and what they do. This is not to be laissez-faire in pedagogy: rather, it is to deploy the authority of teacher in the much harder task than didacticism – that of stimulating and sustaining learning. Education can be expected to play a part in helping young people to handle difficult personal, economic and social circumstances, if not to find individual ways to escape them. But what spaces remain for teachers and students together to explore questions of values, except when rules are broken? Educational processes have yet to generate a more contemporary ethical consciousness which corresponds better to how people are currently living. It is not enough simply to assert moral absolutes or citizenship values: these have to be developed through lived experience, in the institution itself and in the wider world. Education should be playing a larger role in the formation of social capital: rebuilding communities; linking generations; challenging the received codes of disadvantage and of social classification, breaking down the enclaves of social exclusion. It should reflect the ethic of creating a just society. If education is to succeed with these tasks, it needs to pay a good deal more attention to the place of the peer group in adolescence, to its capacity to shape individual biographies and to sustain or undermine personal commitment to learning. Too much attention in school is paid to whole-class teaching or is focused on individual performance; too little on working with peer groups to develop values and teamwork. Such a role is more common in the less formal settings used by youth work. Young people often turn to each other to find support and clarification and their own skills as peer educators can be strengthened. There are limits to the capacity of individuals to take control of their own life courses and some peer groups generate negative bonds, trapping young people into dysfunctional roles – and thus acting as the dark side of social capital formation. Adolescents only spend nine minutes of every waking hour in the classroom. Unsurprisingly they choose other spaces not just for recreation but also for learning: the skills and commitment of those who work with them in such settings deserve greater acknowledgement. Young people are at the leading edge of the cultural changes which are reshaping our society: schools alone cannot hope to connect effectively with their interests in music or fashion, or perhaps, with their greater willingness

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to embrace social diversity in lifestyles. We need to find better bridging devices between the educational institution and youth and community cultures. Youth work offers particular ways of learning characterised by processes which encourage personal and social development. It has often focused its endeavours on the more disadvantaged. What it offers is based on analysis not only of an individual’s personal and social development but also wider social issues – the skills and knowledge needed for their longer term health or employment; the power of groups and communities to insert limiting contours around an individual’s growth. It is not necessary to call to mind the image, based on Orwell, of old maids cycling to Holy Communion past the long shadows falling on the cricket ground, to suggest that our communities have evolved. Just as well: many communities, shorn of nostalgia, were inward-looking, resisted new ideas and achieved solidarity through hostility to outsiders. The ties that bound communities together were often those of geographic and emotional isolation, unremitting labour and, frequently, patriarchal domination. What is emerging in place of the traditional forms of family and community is the growth of friendship threading through life. As well as needing familial or community support, young people often need to break out from their constraining ties if they are to cope with a risk-society and exploit fully the opportunities in a flexible labour market. Those who do battle on behalf of identities based on gender, ethnicity as a way of empowering disadvantaged people, may unwittingly have added to their troubles by making it more difficult for such closer-knit groups to create bridges to a wider world. Ways out of poverty are often provided by networking with people on the edges of communities who have different experiences and wider access to opportunities. A curriculum for social inclusion is not a collection of subjects but is how people learn, are treated and empowered. Much still needs to be done in the school or college to support young people in their learning and to promote their sense of active citizenship. Social policy goals demand practice with young people which strengthens their capacity to manage their lives in ways which allow them to make the most of the opportunities available to them. Many need support to re-engage with mainstream services such as education and to make informed choices. Yet the complexity of contemporary pathways to adulthood means that services for the young, and practice with them, have to be simultaneously aligned to the diverse policy agenda and relevant to the needs, aspirations and demands of young people. Young people have to feel

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a sense of ownership of the individual directions in which they are moving. Many need better access to a cultural life which affirms, or challenges, their identity. The reshaping of public services could produce a new mix of the old values of universality and equity alongside ingenious innovation for individuals and groups. But an infrastructure of justice is not yet in place for the young. Young people do not organise their lives within the boundaries of public service departments. In consequence, they may be the target for various professionals – a teacher, social worker, police officer, youth worker. Many of the issues with which local communities are engaged – safety, economic regeneration, healthy lifestyles – are multifaceted. No single service or local authority department can respond effectively, especially at the level of the neighbourhood. Closer working is required: across education, housing and social services; across different public agencies; and across the public, private and voluntary sectors. There is a need, in particular, to focus on the key transition process in young people’s lives – school to further education; education to working life; and living in the family home to living independently of it. This focus on transition points can offer a vision how to co-ordinate services at local level. Although Britain has diverse youth services which support educational achievement, promote social inclusion and encourage active citizenship, most are stretched too wide for their resources and have much decaying, under-equipped plant no longer always in the right locations. The challenge is to ensure that all young people, wherever they are growing up, have modern, responsive youth services. They need to engage better with young adults, especially those grappling with disordered transitions, and hold at bay an increasingly common cut-off point of 19 years as the limit of state concern and intervention. Despite numerous examples of innovative practice, the infrastructure of youth services is often so weak that both innovation and routine work struggle to be sustained. Youth work requires a critical mass of educational activity, offering a diverse menu of good quality community provision relevant to multiple needs. It needs sufficient skilled personnel to support, challenge and develop young people who can give them access to a broad range of role models of adulthood. Good services for young people need a proper architecture: a national policy framework; strategic and operational planning; proper resources; and staff development. Those who work with the young face particular challenges in responding to urgent social needs, in finding contemporary approaches to promote their personal and social education and in

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responding to their changing interests and enthusiasms in technology, music and culture. Those who work with the young need to be quickfooted enough to handle this cat’s cradle of demands, tensions and social imperatives. At the same time as poverty has grown, governments have become more circumscribed by what they can promise since they are faced with strong global forces. Here is where the macro picture affects the micro – the housing estate on the urban fringe, increasingly peopled by a youthful ghetto-poor living on the edge of the city and of society. Adolescents who have found a way of surviving in economic barrenness by adopting ghetto-related behaviour – a style of speaking, dress and bearing which is designed to appeal to their peers, not their teachers or potential employers. Their life chances can be reshaped not by government alone but by harnessing people to take an active approach to their poverty – and by governmental investment in human and social capital through educational institutions but also through youth work and other forms of popular education. Augusto Boal, the Latin American playwright reminds us that The Actor works with human beings, and therefore works with herself, on the infinite process of discovering the human. This sense of an artist looking for the essence, looking for the true point, is what should also govern our approach to education. And to the young themselves.

12 The Governance of Learning Jon Nixon, Melanie Walker and Wilfred Carr

Throw the forbidden places open. Let the dragons and the lions play. Let us swallow the worm of power And the name pass away. (E.P. Thompson, Collected Poems)

Introduction This chapter argues that the effective governance of learning is dependent upon a tradition of deliberative democracy. By the ‘governance of learning’ we refer not only to the way in which learning is governed, regulated or controlled by the educational institutions of the state but also to how future citizens learn to participate in the civic associations that comprise the kind of civil society that is indispensable to a deliberative democracy. This chapter, therefore, focuses on the role of educational institutions generally, and schools in particular, in sustaining a tradition of deliberative democracy and it highlights institutional practices that point the way forward to new forms of democratic engagement. It argues that the governance of learning is largely a matter of how learners are enabled to govern themselves and it concludes with a discussion of how state and civil society might work together towards a new governance of learning based on the principles of deliberative democracy.

Education and the good society In its most basic sense, ‘education’ is primarily part of the process of ‘socialisation’ or ‘enculturation’: the general process through which 165

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society ensures that the rising generation is prepared to enter into its existing modes of economic, cultural and political life. But, as well as equipping future members of society with the modes of consciousness, forms of knowledge, systems of beliefs, and arrays of social and vocational skills that such membership presupposes and requires, education also serves to ensure that society can maintain its identity across generations. In this sense, education always has a primary role in reproducing the society it serves. It follows from this that any sharp distinction between ‘education’ and ‘society’ will always misrepresent the degree to which education not only contributes to the reproduction of society but is itself a product of the very society which it serves to reproduce. The relationship between education and society is thus integral: each produces and is a product of the other. As well as playing an essential role in the process of social reproduction, education is always, simultaneously, a major source of social transformation, providing learners with those critical and reflective forms of consciousness and understanding that will enable them to participate in the creation of an improved and more desirable form of social life than that which currently exists. This does not mean that education is a form of ‘social engineering’ mechanically implementing external demands for social change. It simply means that answers to practical educational questions about what, how and who to teach inevitably express judgements about which aspects of existing forms of social life ought to be reproduced and which ought to be transformed if learners are to be prepared for the world of the future. Conversely, broader political questions about how society ought to be improved and changed also find expression as educational questions about the kind of knowledge, attitudes and skills that participation in an improved and more desirable form of social life requires. Although education performs both reproductive and transformative roles, these should not be regarded as separate or distinct. Neither is possible without the other and both are essential functions of education in any society as it tries to reconcile the tension that always exists between social continuity and social change. Thus, education can only perform its reproductive role by adopting the new cultural circumstances and social conditions and it can only perform its transformative role by building on the foundations of society as it currently exists. Since different social groups, with different views about which aspects of society should be maintained and which should be changed, have different views about what and how schools should teach, education is always the subject of disagreement and conflict between those holding rival

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views of what constitutes the good society. In this sense, education is always contested. At issue is that disputes about education ‘always reveal the ideological tensions occurring in a society as it struggles to come to terms with changing cultural circumstances and new economic conditions’.1 In contesting education and its purposes and values, we contest interpretations of social life. We argue, therefore, not only for education of a particular form and practice, but also for (or against) the vision of the good society that underpins our views on education. What kind of society should education, then, foster? What kind of social, educational and political arrangements will best enable all members of a society to lead collective and individually fulfilling and worthwhile lives? What narratives and stories (curriculum content) are thinkable and allowable, how are they told (pedagogy) and what processes are used to judge how well they have been told (assessment)? How are knowledge, skills and forms of consciousness reproduced (or transformed)? Is education to be a public good or a private concern? What conceptualisation of the good society are our educational proposals and policy frameworks promoting and making possible? Basic to our argument is that the answer to ‘what constitutes the good society?’ is not straightforwardly ‘democracy’. We have two reasons for saying this. The first is that the meaning of democracy is contested. Under present-day conditions of globalisation and neo-liberal political values, for example, democracy is interpreted as the right to accumulate material goods and the right to the unrestrained pursuit of profit. It is increasingly characterised by the political disengagement of citizens. Democracy is then equated with a particular form of capitalism at a particular historical juncture, a privatised model of citizen-consumers, and widening structural inequalities in and between nation-states and between rich and poor peoples globally. It is based, nationally and internationally, on self-interest, alienation and the privatisation of public interest. Moreover, different visions of the good life, the good society, will have implications for how education is organised and governed – whether dissent is allowed or removed, whether local democratic structures as places of countervailing power and dialogue are fostered or suppressed. If the good life is to be pursued only in a ‘free’ market society in which economic roles (our lives as producers, consumers and workers) are held to be all important, even our dissent will reveal the primary importance of these positionings. For example, after the events of September 11 and the subsequent attacks on Afghanistan, the disquiet in some sectors of

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the UK society was captured in the T-shirt slogan, ‘Don’t go to war, go shopping.’ If our version of the good society is one which can best be realised in a deliberative democracy, 2,3 which we take to involve inclusion across differences, political equality and collective decision-making processes that promote social justice, then our identities as citizens are held to be as important as our economic roles. In this case we might expect education in schools, universities and colleges to be organised so as to develop and foster the social intelligence required for active participation and deliberation. A deliberative democracy would require schools (and other institutions for the provision of formal of education) ‘to provide a democratic culture in which pupils are encouraged to resolve practical, moral and social problems through joint activities and collective decision-making’.4 Yet our educational institutions, schools and institutions of further and higher education, which ought to nurture the civic ideal of individuality as public purposefulness, are an intellectual disgrace under current historical conditions. Schools (notwithstanding the best efforts of some fine teachers) are less about enquiry than about the percentage of students who pass out with the requisite grades; colleges and universities (notwithstanding the best efforts of teachers, scholars and researchers) measure the effectiveness of their enquiry according to the demands of research and teaching quality audits. Moreover, as Monbiot 5 amply evidences, ‘the corporate takeover of Britain’ means that ‘our universities have been offered for sale’ and that schools are becoming an increasingly ‘lucrative business’ as ‘an advertising medium’6 as witness the increasing number of ‘endowed’ chairs particularly in the older universities and the widespread distribution by corporate business of teaching materials to schools (Cadbury’s, Nuclear Fuels and McDonald’s to name but a few). Insofar as we teachers, scholars and researchers collude and collaborate with these tactics (often with the best of intentions), we undoubtedly buy into ‘the treason of the scholars’. Education appears beleaguered on many fronts. What is to be done? In response, we argue that it is always in process. As the Spanish poet Antonio Machado says, ‘We make the road by walking.’ This process of making the good society is then shaped by particular democratic virtues – practices of critical reflection on the society in which we now live, inclusive and equitable deliberation, participatory agreement-making, and commitments to the common good not only in our own society but globally. To this we might add, what Freire 7 describes as ‘opportunities for hope’, and what Halpin8 has recently explored as the importance

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of ‘the utopian imagination’ as aids to our thinking about how to realise an ‘improved’ way of life. A good society, we suggest, is a society within which its members render themselves purposeful by virtue of their continuing enquiry into the nature of what it is to lead the good life. This would require of them (of us) a recognition of the agency of others (not ourselves). It would require a deep thoughtfulness regarding the needs and purposes of the other and a suspension of all claims regarding rights and responsibilities in the interests of one overriding right and responsibility: the right and responsibility to learn and to go on learning beyond the boundaries of self and immediate community. But it would also require that we address the problem of material redistribution, of whose continuing importance we are reminded by Fraser.9 Recognition of interactive agency ought not to be seen as a way of replacing the politics of redistribution with the politics of identity. Our attempts to delineate conceptually and practically the good society must be both social and economic, political and historical, individual and collective. We thus turn to ‘thoughtfulness’ in public life, to ‘human flourishing’ in individual endeavour, to what Arendt 10 called ‘care for the world’ and the ideal of individuality shaped not by self-interest but by the ethic of public purposefulness. Individuals are defined not just by rights, responsibilities and commitments, but also by their quest to make sense, in the public interest, of those rights, responsibilities and commitments. Institutions of education can be other than the negative assessment offered above. They can become the collective memory of those values and practices that are dedicated to a reclamation of the quest for understanding. They can become places of self-development, which Young 3 argues is a key element of democracy and social justice. To be just, she says, society must provide the conditions for all to learn ‘and use satisfying and expansive skills . . . to play and communicate with others and express their feelings and perspectives on social life in contexts where others can listen’. At issue is that the revitalisation of our educational institutions depends not upon the innumerable accounting exercises by which they are now bureaucratically regulated, but upon a renewed sense of leadership by those who strive towards the good society. The problem is not one of inefficiency in respect of means, but of inefficacy in respect of underlying purposes. Our educational institutions are no longer primarily concerned with educating. Indeed, they are no longer primarily places of learning. Their governance is the governance of sorting and grading, selecting and shaping, audit and surveillance: governance by control, regulation and the seductions of corporate business.

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We must remake our institutions, through mutual recognition, understanding, and ‘care for the world’. Among the resources required for their remaking is a different version of ‘governance’ in which governance as ‘control’ and ‘regulation’ is radically reworked and reclaimed in the interests of learning and education.

Institutions and the good society What would schools and universities look like if their governance were conceived in terms of the intrinsic goods of learning: life and the daily business of living conducted, that is, in the interests of learning to live in the world, and to make together a better, fairer society? What would it mean to be a member of such an institution? What rights and obligations would membership confer? What would leadership signify? How would we recognise such an institution if we were to wander into it? What would it feel like? MacIntyre11 provides a useful pointer: The beginning of any worthwhile answer to such questions, posed by some external critic, as ‘What are universities for?’ or ‘What peculiar goods do universities serve?’ should be, ‘They are, when they are true to their own vocation, institutions within which questions of the form “What are x’s for?” and “What peculiar goods do y’s serve?” are formulated and answered in the best rationally defensible way.’ As MacIntyre goes on to argue, however, ‘the best rationally defensible way’ implies an openness to diverse and sometimes incommensurable points of view. The defining characteristic of universities that are ‘true to their own vocation’ is not that they have reached agreement as to what they are for and what goods they serve, but that they agree as to how best to explore disagreement on such matters. If this is true of universities, it is also true of schools, the purpose of which is to initiate young people into those traditions of rational enquiry that are respectful of difference. Indeed, it is only through the limitless reaching out of rational enquiry to other points of view, other ways of seeing, that schools and universities can ensure that their institutional goods sustain the public good. And it is on the basis of the public good that the good society resides and flourishes. MacIntyre’s ‘best rationally defensible way’ requires what Young12 conceptualises as inclusive democratic practices through which people

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can both promote their own interests and hold those in power to account. In similar vein to MacIntyre, she argues for a deliberative democracy which enables collective problem-solving by all those significantly involved in or affected by a decision, under conditions of dialogue which allow diverse perspectives and opinions to be voiced. Such practices, she argues, provide ‘the epistemic conditions for the collective knowledge of which proposals are most likely to promote results that are wise and just’. This does not assume consensus, however. Young eschews a normative view of deliberation, which would bracket out or seek to transcend difference, in favour of one which emphasises difference, communication and dialogue. She supports an ‘agonistic’ model of democratic process which does not obscure conflict and antagonism. She proposes a model of ‘engaged struggle’: over the terms of engagement, to be heard, and to persuade others. While the field of struggle is not level under conditions of structural inequality, at issue is that fair, open and inclusive democratic processes should attend to such disadvantage. Apple and Beane13 remind us that many of these ‘new’ ideas are but the latest expressions of an ‘old’ idea: ‘the idea was, and is, democracy’. The problem, they argue, must be defined in terms of the conditions on which democracy depends. The point is not that these conditions must be met before schools can aspire to be democratic, but that democratic schools are themselves centrally involved in the struggle to establish these conditions. They insist that democracy is constructed in and through the everyday narratives of lives in schools – the realities of curriculum development, teaching and assessment and the experiences of students, teachers and parents who must co-operate to make schools work. Experiencing democratic processes is then critical in building collective social responsibility and ensuring individual and social development. Apple and Beane offer the following principles which might enable us to recognise democratic schools-inaction: 1. The open flow of ideas, regardless of their popularity, that enables people to be as fully informed as possible. 2. Faith in the individual and collective capacity of people to create possibilities for resolving problems. 3. The use of critical reflection and analysis to evaluate ideas, problems and policies. 4. Concern for the welfare of others and ‘the common good’. 5. Concern for the dignity and rights of individuals and minorities.

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6. An understanding that democracy is not so much a ‘deal’ to be pursued as an ‘idealized’ set of values that we must live and that must guide our life as people. 7. The organization of social institutions to promote and extend the democratic way of life. 14 The democratic way of life, in this view, is neither an educational end in itself nor an educational means of achieving the good society. It is constitutive of life lived to the full: life at full stretch, lived to capacity and realising the collective capacity of each individual to achieve her or his unique potential. Learning is itself a way of realising the good society.

Pedagogy and the good society Governance is not just a matter of structure and system but also of process and action. The question then arises as to what all this means in terms of pedagogic practice and how that practice relates to the ends and purposes of education. This brings us to the heart of much current theorising regarding the contexts and aspirations of a revitalised democracy. 15,16,17,18,19 Phillips, for example, makes two distinctions that help provide a conceptual framework within which to address this question. The first distinction is between a ‘politics of ideas’ (that concerned with what policies, preferences and ideas are being represented) and a ‘politics of presence’ (that is concerned with who is to be represented). The latter, she argues, is increasingly influential in arguments about the nature of representative democracy: Many of the current arguments over democracy revolve around what we might call demands for political presence: demands for the equal representation of women with men; demands for a more even-handed balance between the different ethnic groups that make up each society; demands for the political inclusion of groups that have come to see themselves as marginalized or silenced or excluded. In this reframing of the problems of democratic equality, the separation between ‘who’ and ‘what’ is to be represented, and the subordination of the first to the second, is very much up for question. The politics of ideas is being challenged by an alternative politics of presence. 17 The point in making the distinction, Phillips insists, is not to see the ‘politics of ideas’ and the ‘politics of presence’ as exclusionary opposites:

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‘when ideas are treated as totally separate from the people who carry them; or when the people dominate attention, with no thought given to their policies and ideas’.20 Rather, the point is to acknowledge the importance of participation and integration in revitalising institutions: ‘when policies are worked out for rather than with a politically excluded constituency, they are unlikely to engage with all relevant concerns’. 21 Only by acknowledging the ‘presence’ of those constituencies, and thereby empowering their members as citizens, can we be sure that all the interests are represented and all the relevant concerns addressed. A politics that denies ‘presence’ is likely to be not only partial in its view of what the relevant concerns are, but also blind to the extent of its own partiality. It is likely, in other words, to become increasingly ineffective, both in grasping what needs to be done and in doing it. It is not enough, however, just to acknowledge the ‘presence’ of different cultures within society. It is also necessary, argues Phillips, to base that acknowledgement on the ‘idea’ that we owe equal respect to all cultures. Indeed, her belief that this ‘idea’ is worth fighting for is one of the reasons why Phillips holds to the view that the ‘politics of ideas’ and the ‘politics of presence’ are complementary. Phillips draws a further distinction between, on the one hand, a ‘live and let live’ approach to difference and, on the other, an approach based upon the assumption that ‘difference must be recognised and equality guaranteed’. The former she characterises as ‘that frozen tolerance of difference in which each community or sub-group just carries on in isolation from all the others’; the latter is seen as presenting ‘difference more as a challenge, something that challenges dominant groups to reassess their own values and perspectives, but also challenges subordinate and excluded groups to go beyond sectarian loyalties’. 22 The ‘recognition’ of difference is conditional upon the equal valuing of difference, which is in turn conditional upon the willingness to change the deep structures of cultural ontology. This is the central theme of a number of theorists currently concerned with developing what Taylor has termed the ‘politics of recognition’.23,24,25 Taylor26 for example, argues that ‘the further demand we are looking at here is that we recognize the equal value of different cultures; that we not only let them survive, but acknowledge their worth’. Human flourishing requires both ‘recognition’ and ‘equal valuing’: Each consciousness seeks recognition in another, and this is not a sign of a lack of virtue. But the ordinary conception of honour as hierarchical is crucially flawed. It is flawed because it cannot answer

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the need that sends people after recognition in the first place. Those who fail to win out in the honour stakes remain unrecognized. But even those who do win are more subtly frustrated, because they win recognition from the losers, whose acknowledgement is, by hypothesis, not really valuable, since they are no longer free, self-supporting subjects on the same level with the winners. The struggle for recognition can find only one satisfactory solution, and that is a regime of reciprocal recognition among equals.27 The empowered citizen, then, not only has ‘presence’, but has that presence ‘recognised’ as both different and equal. Such a citizen is to be distinguished from those who, although ‘recognised’ as equal and different, have no ‘presence’; for example, members of a group that, although valued and celebrated, has no representation in the main forums of the polity. This active citizen is encouraged to think positively about her or his cultural background, but remains excluded from the centres of power. Token citizens are in a different position again. Although having nominal ‘presence’, their culture is tolerated rather than fully recognised. They enjoy neither respect nor understanding, since there is no presumption of equal worth. Finally, each of these types of citizen is to be distinguished from those who are granted neither ‘presence’ nor ‘recognition’ and who, consequently, are either rendered invisible as members of a disenfranchised underclass or tolerated as loyal subjects. These categories, we would argue, imply radically different modes of learning, each with its own conception of ends and purposes (see Figure 12.1). Underlying the pedagogical and curriculum practices that prioritise the notion of ‘learners as empowered citizens’ are deep codes of participation and integration that are seriously at odds with those other deep codes of selection and exclusion that continue to shape educational policy. That is why a pedagogy of recognition cannot be analysed solely in terms of the innovative practices to which it gives rise. It must also be understood in terms of the professional values that drive it: its orientation, for example, towards community empowerment, studentcentred learning, and interactive modes of enquiry. What teachers believe, think and feel about the underlying purposes of their professional practice matters: not only because it shapes the practice itself, but because in doing so it helps define the ends and purposes of the institutions within which teachers are located. But because those ends and purposes are not only contestable, but actually contested, pedagogies of recognition can only ever be achieved

Jon Nixon et al. 175

Valuing difference Ideology of recognition

Ideology of live and let live

Politics of presence

Learners as empowered citizens

Learners as token citizens

Politics of ideas

Learners as active citizens

Learners as loyal subjects

Empowering difference

Figure 12.1

Contrasting notions of the ends and purposes of learning

Source: Nixon et al.28

through struggle. That struggle, we maintain, is the struggle for a new governance of learning, which does not come ready-made, but which is achieved against the grain of dominant practice and ideology as manifest in pedagogic practice, professional values and the organisational structures of schooling. Moreover, the fledgling democratic structures of any pedagogy of recognition are in the current situation highly vulnerable to the vagaries of the educational market place and the centralising tendencies of educational reform. It is theoretically impossible, therefore, to point to educational institutions where what Honneth 29 terms ‘the struggle for recognition’ has already been securely achieved, since the struggle is generated by the deep ‘moral grammar of social conflicts’. A pedagogy of recognition is always, necessarily, a pedagogy in the making: a pedagogy-not-yet-finished. It is possible, however, to point to key characteristics of schools seriously engaged in this struggle to realise new democratically authentic modes of teaching and learning. Such schools, we would argue, are committed to the following. Redefining of the role of educational stakeholders They seek and support the active engagement of parents as potential complementary educators and of students as active learners. This requirement assumes a reorientation of the institution towards its public in ways that render that relationship at once more reciprocal

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and at the same time potentially more agonistic in its recognition of difference. Parents and students are agents, not consumers: their actions help constitute education as a public sphere. Realigning professional interests A prime commitment of the teacher is to ensure the recognition of divergent viewpoints and interests, while articulating shared purposes and aspirations. Such schools nurture a new kind of teacher professionalism: evident in, for example, the practice of active learning, the organisation of ‘positive’ approaches to school discipline, and the reconstruction of the teacher’s authority in respect of relationships with students, parents and community, and colleagues. Redefining the role of leadership Within such schools, leadership is exercised through a continuing process of deliberation. What distinguishes these institutions are the values upon which leadership is based: values that include the recognition of leadership as a common resource and the commitment to decisionmaking through dialogue and shared understanding regarding the conditions and purposes of learning. Strong and decisive leadership is evidenced through a commitment to inter-professional and communitybased change, rather than through narrowly defined professional-led change. Redefining the boundaries between schools and parents Such schools seek to involve parents and community members as active participants. This participation requires the development of creative strategies aimed at ensuring cultural difference as a presence in the decision-making structures of schooling: through, for example, the empowerment of parent governors, the establishment of public forums that bring parents and community members together, and the development of community action programmes as an integral part of the students’ curriculum experience. The major barrier to ensuring that learners develop as empowered citizens is the process whereby learning itself becomes compartmentalised. Pedagogies of recognition seek to overcome that barrier by insisting that learning is not a place but a kind of action. That kind of action requires places, such as schools, colleges and universities, but these places of learning must not be confused with the action itself, which like all action is boundless, unpredictable and irreversible. To learn is to act and to be a learner is to be in action. In acknowledging learning as

Jon Nixon et al. 177

action, pedagogies of recognition seek to recognise learners as empowered citizens. They do not thereby devalue places of learning, but acknowledge that the governance of these places is, in part at least, the awesome responsibility of all those who seek to learn. The order of such places should not determine, but be determined by, the rule of learning.

The state and the good society We have argued that, within a democratic society, governance and the associated conditions of pedagogic practice are the concern of civil society and that civil society speaks to a principle of civic association that requires educational institutions, whether they be schools, colleges or universities, to appeal across their own institutional boundaries to broader constituencies of interest and principled concern. More specifically, we have argued that the governance of learning concerns all those with an interest in, and principled concern for, learning. To that end, we have further argued, institutions of education must look to the learner as empowered citizen as their moral endpoint. The governance of learning requires of its learners the capacity for self-government and self-determination. The act of learning is a worldly act, not an action prescribed by a particular place of learning. All this highlights the increasing significance of what Gutmann and Thompson 30 have termed ‘middle democracy’: ‘the land of interest groups, civic associations, and schools, in which adults and children develop political understandings, sometimes arguing among themselves and listening to people with differing points of view, other times not’. But governance is not just the concern of civil society. It is also, rightly, a state concern which the state cannot and should not relinquish. At issue is that civil society is not a harmonious whole. We highlight three areas of contestation. First, the conflict between institutions and the social. Institutions fall foul of one another. Parental choice closes some schools and keeps others afloat. Schools compete with one another, as do colleges and universities. The state, under cover of rhetorics of cost-effectiveness and public accountability, has increasingly raised the stakes in the zero-sum game of institutional survival. Secondly, we point to the tensions between the region and the centre. The onslaught on local government conducted during the Thatcher administrations has barely been alleviated by New Labour’s scattergun tactics of hardly ‘targeted funding’. Behind the rhetoric of ‘partnership’ lies a reality of competitive bidding which results in the fragmentation of policy at the local level. Far from enabling Local Education Authorities (LEA) to

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reposition and reconstitute themselves, these tactics have in many cases resulted in their becoming increasingly distanced from the processes of regional governance. The relation between central and regional government remains an unresolved and largely unacknowledged problem. Thirdly, we note the troubled relations between the local and the global and the process whereby the locality accommodates itself to the global and the latter increasingly assimilates the former. Civil society alone cannot resist these global forces: the multinational that pulls out of a locality may experience local resistance, but that experience rarely registers. The state has a key role to play, not only in picking up the pieces, but in mediating and resolving these tensions. Civil society is not a separate sphere, but is permeated by the political and the economic. The governance of learning requires the equalising leverage that only the state can exert. As Young31 points out, there are ‘limits to what citizens can accomplish through institutions of civil society alone’, notwithstanding contemporary disaffections with state institutions and state-sponsored political processes. The state is important; it provides access to the political power that is required for the democratisation of education. We need the state actively to pursue and foster educational aims that are derived from the values of democratic society. This is not to say that the state gets it right. Indeed, recent educational and political reforms have steadily and deliberately eroded civil society and democratic processes of educational decision-making: hence, the endless audits, inspections, reviews, league tables, accountability exercises and so on, whereby the state seeks to represent the concerns of those it governs. The question then arises as to how civil society might speak back, with authority, to the power of the state in such a way as to develop modes of governance that are in accordance with the principles of deliberative democracy. Thus law and public policy, rights and forms of economic activity, are central arenas of democratic struggle in, through and by the state. What would the governance of learning look like if it were to acknowledge the necessary tensions between state and civil society? What would a dialogue between these entail? How might differences be resolved? How would principled agreements be reached? We have no specific answers to these questions which this chapter poses and which we believe to be of supreme importance, but we would point to the importance of the curriculum as a place for critical learning, for connecting with the problems of the wider society, and to pedagogies which both celebrate difference and provide students with the knowledge and skills for participation in economic and political life.

Jon Nixon et al. 179

We also note that democratic participation is necessary but not always sufficient to produce ‘good’ decisions. What if, for example, a democratically agreed educational policy is itself undemocratic? What are required are not only democratic procedures but principles, worked out democratically, which ensure democratic outcomes. For example, Young 32 notes the disabling constraints of systemic ‘oppression’ and ‘domination’, which she further divides into five categories which name practices of injustice embedded in the normal processes of everyday life, including lives in education. By pointing to such injustices we begin to know where democracy is not yet working, or not yet working well. Her five categories are: exploitation, marginalisation, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence. However democratic the decisionmaking process, argues Young, decisions which reinforce such practices of injustice are unacceptable within any state that purports to be democratic. Similarly, Guttman33 formulates two principles, of non-repression and non-discrimination, as principled limits to collective dialogue and problem-solving that must be upheld by any democratic state. The first principle prevents adult members of society from using their deliberative freedom to undermine the future deliberative freedom of children, while the second principle ensures that all children are educated in such a way as to prepare them for deliberative participation in society. Or as Arendt34 put it: education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, not to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something foreseen by no-one, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing the common world.

Conclusion The stanza which prefaces this chapter is entitled ‘a charm against evil’.35 The good society requires such charms, since its ‘goods’ are necessarily contested and always vulnerable. The citizen as learner is central to our vision of the good society; a vision which, we have argued, requires a radical shift in the notion of the governance of learning. That shift acknowledges the need for some measure of state regulation and control, but recognises also the need for new forms of civic association and emancipation. Thompson reminds us that these forms are dangerous, risky and scary. They release ‘the dragons and the lions’, which elsewhere he tells us ‘are furious/They would like to eat us’. 35

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But what if, suggests Thompson, we were to conceive of power not as something ‘out there’, but as something ‘in here’: something we need to ‘swallow’ and digest and that constitutes our capacity and potential? What if we are ourselves the dragons and the lions? Might not then ‘the dragons and the lions play’? And might not power, as something to be ‘named’ and objectified, pass away, and, instead, realise itself through the human capacity to learn and to live together, to flourish, in difference? Then, indeed, we might hope, in good faith, to ‘throw the forbidden places open’. We must try.

Notes 1. Carr, W. and Hartnett, A. (1996) Education and the Struggle for Democracy: The Politics of Educational Ideas. Buckingham: Open University Press, p. 25. 2. Dryzek, J. (2000) Deliberative Democracy and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 3. Young, I.M. (2000) Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 31–32. 4. Carr, W. and Hartnett, A. (1996) Education and the Struggle for Democracy: The Politics of Educational Ideas. Buckingham: Open University Press, p. 63. 5. Monbiot, G. (2001) Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain. London: Pan. (1st published 2000), p. 284. 6. Ibid., p. 331. 7. Freire, P. (1997) Pedagogy of Hope. New York: Continuum. 8. Halpin, D. (2001) Hope, utopianism and educational management, Cambridge Journal of Education, 31(1), 103–118. 9. Fraser, N. (2000) Rethinking Recognition, New Left Review, May/June, pp. 107–120. 10. Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 11. MacIntyre, A. (1990) Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Gifford Lectures delivered in the University of Edinburgh in 1988). London: Duckworth, p. 222. 12. Young, I.M. (2000) Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 30. 13. Apple, M.W. and Beane, J.A. (eds) (1999) Democratic Schools: Lessons from the Chalkface. Buckingham: Open University Press, p. 3. 14. Ibid., p. 7. 15. Hall, J.A. (1995) In search of civil society, in J.A. Hall (ed.), Civil Society: Theory, History, Comparison. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 1–31. 16. Phillips, A. (1993) Democracy and Difference. Cambridge: Polity Press. 17. Phillips, A. (1995) The Politics of Presence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 5. 18. Raz, J. (1994) Multiculturalism: a liberal perspective, Dissent, Winter, pp. 67–79. 19. Taylor, C. (1994) The politics of recognition, in A. Gutmann (ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 25–73.

Jon Nixon et al. 181 20. Phillips, A. (1995) The Politics of Presence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 25. 21. Ibid., p. 13. 22. Ibid., pp. 156–161. 23. Honneth, A. (1995) The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Cambridge: Polity press. 24. Kymlicka, W. (1995) Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 25. Young, I.M. (1995) Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, Princeton University Press. 26. Taylor, C. (1994) The politics of recognition, in A. Gutmann (ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 64. 27. Ibid., p. 50. 28. Nixon, J., Martin, J., McKeown, P. and Ranson, S. (1997) Confronting ‘failure’: towards a pedagogy of recognition, International Journal of Inclusive Education, 1(2), 121–141, 137. 29. Honneth, A. (1995) The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Cambridge: Polity press, p. 89. 30. Gutmann, A. and Thompson, D. (1996) Democracy and Disagreement. Cambridge, Mass and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 31. Young, I.M. (2000) Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 180. 32. Young, I.M. (1995) Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 48–63. 33. Gutmann, A. and Thompson, D. (1996) Democracy and Disagreement. Cambridge, Mass and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, p. 44. 34. Arendt, H. (1977) Between Past and Future, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, p. 196. 35. Thompson, E.P. (1999) Collected Poems. F. Inglis (ed.), Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books.

Index

Since these appear in the title of this book and constitute its themes, there are no entries for ‘education’ and ‘the good society’, and since, moreover, these are both topics impregnated with politics, there is, correspondingly, no entry for ‘politics’ either. Abbott, J. 127, 132, 137 Adams, J. 95 Adie, P. 137 Adorno, T.W. 147–8 agonistic politics 42–53, 176 Albrow, M. 93 Apple, M. 171 Archer, J. 18 architecture 18, 25, 26, 27, 28–9, 40, 84, 132 Arendt, H. 169, 179 arts (and humanities) 8, 10, 31, 38, 59, 76, 80, 81, 83, 84, 86, 97, 129, 131, 133, 133–9, 149, 184 assessment see also certification 9, 63–9, 74, 129–30 Auden, W.H. 106 audit (and auditing) 113–15, 116, 117, 118, 120, 122, 168, 169, 178 Baier, A. 108 Baker, K. 117 Baker, M. 72 Barnett, R. 88, 91–2 Bayliss, V. 127, 128 BBC 142–4, 151 Beane, J. 171 Becher, A. 95 Beck, U. 9, 10, 92 Bellow, S. 122 Benjamin, W. 24, 25 Benn, C. 64, 70 Bentley, T. 127, 128

Berlin, I. 6 Bernstein, B. 28, 29, 31 Blair, T. 12, 17, 18, 37, 72, 73 Blake, W. 88 Blunkett, D. 17, 20, 69, 117, 119 Blyton, E. 25 Boal, A. 164 Bobbitt, P. 6 Bourdieu, P. 35 Bruner, J. 23, 77, 84 Bullock (Report) 32 Byers, S. 21, 71 Cacciari, M. 52 capitalism (and capital) 4, 5, 6, 32, 36, 50, 54, 97–104, 107, 110, 112, 148, 167 Capra, F. 146, 147 Carlisle, M. 70 Carr, W. 7 Castells, M. 92 certification (and qualification) 58, 61, 82–3, 95–6, 124–5, 127, 132–4, 135–6, 152, 156, 159, 160, 164, 165, 169, 172–3, 174, 176–7, 178–9 Chamberlains (Birmingham) 26 Chitty, C. 64, 70 civil society (public sphere, citizenship) 38, 44, 47, 49, 51, 112, 130, 141, 145–6, 161, 162, 163, 165–8, 174, 177–9 Clark, K. 117 Clarke, B. 16 Cold War 6, 32, 40, 106 Collingwood, R.G. 29 182

Index 183 comprehensive education 9, 15, 17–18, 20, 27, 28, 29, 63–75, 82, 124–40 Conservative Governments 8, 33–4, 37, 70, 74, 110, 111, 112, 117, 121 consumerism (and consumers) 3, 5, 23, 24, 28–9, 32, 36, 40, 112, 148 Cooper, G. 146 corporations (transnational) 50, 51, 59, 100, 168, 169 Countesthorpe College 27 Crosland, A. 1, 22, 27, 33 culture (and cultural industries) 10, 13, 14, 23, 28–9, 31, 35, 38, 57, 58, 79, 89, 90, 94–5, 98, 103, 116, 121–2, 127, 131, 134, 135, 137, 139, 148, 149, 161–2, 163, 164, 166–7 Cupitt, D. 147 Daily Mail 9, 111 Daily Telegraph 109 Darwin, C. 2 Davies, N. 73 democracy (and democratic theory) 4, 5, 7, 12, 32, 42–53, 104, 142, 145, 146, 147, 150, 151–3, 165, 167–9, 170–3, 177, 178–80 DfES 68, 85 Dickens, A. 139 difference (political theory of) 42–52, 173–6, 178, 180 Douglas, M. 115 Dunford, J. 9, 70 Durkheim, E. 28, 114 Dworkin, R. 47 EAZ (Education Action Zones) 15–16, 34 Edwards, T. 21 Enfield, H. 36 equality (and egalitarianism) 5, 6, 12, 13, 16, 20, 25, 27, 30, 32, 33, 47, 51, 61, 104, 109, 130, 132, 158, 168, 169, 173 essentialism 44–5, 48, 49 Excellence in Cities 129, 130 Exeter University Study 69

Fabian Society 1, 37 Featherstone, M. 92 federalism 52–3 film 141–2, 144–5, 149, 160 Firths (Sheffield) 26 Foucault, M. 105, 114–15 Fraser, N. 169 Frayn, M. 2 freedom (and liberty) 6, 12, 13, 14, 30, 32, 47, 56, 110, 112 Freire, P. 168 Further Education 34, 58, 59, 125, 129, 163, 176 Galbraith, J.K. 13–14 Geertz, C. 108 General Teaching Council 72 Gibbons, M. 96 Giddens, A. 36, 93, 94, 106, 109 Gladstone, W.E. 114 globalisation 5, 6, 43, 50, 51–2, 55–7, 60, 61, 93–4, 127, 156, 164, 167, 178 Gorz, A. 50–1 grammar schools 17, 20–1, 26, 28, 69 Grierson, J. 141–2, 146, 147 Guardian 64, 70, 73 Gutmann, A. 177, 179 Habermas, J. 44, 106, 110 Hadow (Report) 31 Hall, S. 111 Halpin, D. 168 Halsey, A.H. 15 Hampstead School and Technology College 9, 124–40 happiness 24, 35, 39, 56 Hargreaves, D. 34 Harrington, J. 5 Hattersley, R. 1, 6, 7 Hayek, F. von 6 Hegel. J.W. 2 Hicks, D. 127 Hobbes, T. 109 Hobsbawm, E. 36, 121–2 Honneth, A. 175 Horkheimer, M. 147–8

184 Index Houghton (Lord) 32 Howells, R. 10 Hume, D. 8, 108 identity 44–5, 46, 48–9, 58–9, 90–1, 93, 94, 103–4, 128, 160, 167, 168, 169 Imison, T. 9 Information and Communication Technology (ICT) 5, 55–62, 92, 95–8, 127–8, 130, 132, 144, 160 Inglis, F. 143, 149 insecurity (and risk) 55–62, 92–103, 127–8, 162 instrumentalism 28–9, 85, 86, 101–3, 119–20, 150 Isaacs, S. 31 Jefferson, T. 146 Jesson, D. 64 Jonson, B. 119 Joseph, K. 2, 6, 65, 70 justice 6, 13, 24, 27, 32, 33, 38, 83, 109, 162, 163, 168, 169, 170, 171 Kelly, C. 85 Kennedy, W. 73 Kenney-Wallace, G. 99 Kerr, C. 88 Keynes, J.M. 51, 159 Knightley, P. 145 knowledge (structures of, production of, methods of acquiring, changes in form) 32, 33–4, 40, 50, 54, 55–62, 67, 77, 81, 84, 90–105, 106, 114, 132, 150, 151, 159, 162, 166, 167, 178 Kuhn, T. 39, 46 Labour Governments 1, 2, 8, 16, 18–19, 20, 22, 26, 34, 37, 63, 70, 110, 111, 116–17, 121, 150, 177 Latour, B. 39 Leavis, F.R. 119 Lenin, V.I. 144

liberalism 4, 6, 7, 8, 29, 37, 40, 42–3, 47, 50, 51, 102, 103, 104, 167 Liddell, R. 18 Lippmann, W. 141 Lloyd, R. 139 Locke, J. 8, 108 London Institute of Education 136 Luttwak, E. 107 Lyotard, J.-F. 5 McBerr, H. 127, 128 MacCabe, C. 149 McGrath, J. 139 Machado, A. 168 MacIntyre, A. 110, 170, 171 management (and managerialism) 2, 30, 34, 35, 76–87, 89, 106–23 Mandelson, P. 15 Margolit, A. 38 markets (and financial policy, money) 35–6, 67–8, 73, 91, 94, 102, 107, 110, 111, 138, 150, 151, 158, 167, 177 Marx, K. (and Marxism) 2, 24, 29, 37 Marxism Today 109 mathematics 129, 133, 137–8 Maude, R. 79 media (and media studies) 149–50, 151, 152–3, 160 Middlehurst, R. 99 Mill, J.S. 14 Mitchell, A. 139 mobility 20, 62, 67, 69, 71, 94–5, 98–100, 127, 133, 156–9, 162 Monbiot, G. 168 Montessori, M. 31 morality (and ethics) 43, 47, 49, 59, 71–86, 89, 90, 99, 101–2, 112, 127, 128, 161, 169–71, 173 More, T. 5 Morris, W. 5 Mouffe, C. 7 narratives 10, 36–7, 40, 121–2, 147, 149–50, 167 nation-state 50–2, 60, 92, 95, 167 National Curriculum 2, 117, 150 Newman, J.H. 88, 89 Newsom (Report) 30, 31, 32

Index 185 Nixon, J. 7 Norwood (Report) 82, 83 Nowotny, H. 93 nursery education 17 Odden, A. 85 OFSTED (and HMI, also inspections) 8, 34, 64, 67, 69, 71, 74, 86, 117–19, 121, 122, 129, 159, 178 O’Neill, O. 8, 108 Open University 27, 143–4 Orwell, G. 162 performance (pay and targets) 3, 69, 75, 79, 85–6, 118–21, 122 Plowden (Report) 31, 32 Popper, K. 86 postmodernity 44, 49, 55–62, 89–104, 116 Potter, B. 25 poverty 16–18, 21, 22, 66, 73, 157–8, 164, 167, 179 power 43, 44, 46, 48, 50, 59, 75, 86, 104, 114, 130 Power, M. 8, 114, 120 Pring, R. 8 private schools 14–15, 19, 63, 70, 72 Quality Assurance 4, 76, 85, 97, 113, 116, 119, 122, 149 Quinton, A. 150 Rawls, J. 13, 47 Reagan, R. 113 Reeves, M. 79 Reith, J. 142 Renov, M. 142 Ribbins, P. 70 Robbins (Report) Rorty, R. 48 Ruskin, J. 25 Russell, B. 119 Russell, D. 31

88

Said, E. 114–15 salaries 19, 20, 63, 69, 121 Saran, R. 137 Schools Council 30–1, 83

Schools of Education 1, 32 sciences (life and natural sciences) 39, 40, 72, 76, 80, 84, 88, 89, 90–1, 95–8, 101, 102, 104, 108, 114, 129, 130 Scott, P. 10, 88, 98 selection 15, 18, 20, 21, 22, 63–4, 69, 72–3, 82, 83, 99, 124–5, 174 Seymour-Ure, C. 143 Sheffield, University of 1 Shepherd, D. 22 Sherratt, B. 70 Skinner, Q. 112 Smith, Z. 9, 124 socialism 4, 6, 32 specialist schools 21, 67 Stalin, J. 145 Stantonbury College 27 Stendhal 4 Stenhouse, L. 84 Stephen, M. 69 Stewart, J. 146–7 systems theory 47, 109 Tawney, R.H. 13, 15 Taylor, C. 39, 173–4 Taylor, L. 113 teacher training 3, 19, 32, 34, 71–2, 75–6, 134–7, 138 teaching 76–87, 113, 119–20, 125, 135, 153, 160–1, 171–2, 175 television 10, 25, 57, 108, 143–5, 149–50, 160 Thatcher, M. (and Thatcherism) 2, 4, 6, 32, 33, 34, 36, 70, 111, 113, 177 THES 10 ‘Third Way’ 49, 51, 104 Thompson, D. 177 Thompson, E.P. 165, 179–80 Touraine, A. 92 tradition (in thought, in criticism, in sciences) 38, 76, 78, 79, 80–7, 95–8, 113, 124, 151–2, 161, 170 Trow, M. 99 trust 8, 24, 32, 108–9, 115

186 Index Universities (and Higher Education) 34, 59, 60, 61, 85, 88–105, 113, 119–21, 125, 127, 150–3, 168, 170, 176, 177 Urry, J. 93 values (social, educational, moral) 4, 6, 8, 27, 37, 39–40, 46, 47, 56, 57, 59, 78, 79, 81, 83, 85–6, 99, 103, 108, 109, 111, 128, 132, 152, 161, 163, 167, 169, 174–5, 176 Venturi, R. 26 Walker, M. 7 Webbs, S. and B. Weber, M. 114

Whitty, G. 18 Williams, R. 29, 32, 37 Wittgenstein, L. 119 Woodhead, C. 16, 71, 119 Woolfs, L. and V. 1 Wordsworth, W. 2 work (and employment) 39, 54–62, 82, 99, 103, 107, 127, 157, 158–9 World Trade Towers (11 September 2001) 3, 40, 167 Wylie, T. 10 Young, I.M. 169, 170, 178, 179

1 Zhdanov, A. 145