A cartoon appeared recently in the national press that showed a lecturer saying disdainfully at his students. "Some of you students have urged me to teach that bourgeois society is corrupt. Bourgeois society is corrupt. Returning now to the question of congruent triangles..." In other words, education is education is education, and is nothing to do with politics or class ideology. "How do you spell 'cat' under socialism?" [illegible] writings or education were less reserved in their political judgements. Any attempt to trace the evolution of our present educational system will bring us up continually against the hard realities of class politics and class ideology.
When the possibility of educating the 'lower orders' was first being seriously discussed, the ruling class had strong ideas as to how the workers should spell 'cat'.) They should not be allowed to [illegible] at all, a prohibition was cast against [illegible] of reading and writing. These skills would lead to political education. The GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE of 1797 expressed this argument with vigour: "Industry is the duty to impress on the lower classes. A little learning makes a man ambitious to rise, if he cannot by fair means then he uses foul. His ignorance is a balm that soothes his mind into stupidity and repose, and excludes every motion of discontent, pride and ambition. A man of no literature will seldom attempt to form insurrections, or form idle schemes for the reformation of the state."
It was this line of thought that was dominant in the ruling class well into the nineteenth century. Education was identified with subversion. However, this purely reactionary stance steadily became less viable. The master engineer, Alexander Galloway gave evidence to the 1824 Report on Artisans and Machinery. "I have found from the mode of managing my business, by drawings and written descriptions, a man is not of much use to me unless he can read and write". As capitalism developed it needed a skilled work-force, It demanded the education of the working class. It was therefore the rising bourgeois who championed the rights of workers to literacy against the opposition of the landowners. Not that the bourgeois ignored the warnings of the landowners. They were very aware of the political problems. Education would be given, but it had to be ideologically correct. The minds of the workers had to be moulded "like wet clay in a plastic hand". These ideas emerged with the Utilitarians, but soon spread until they had even reached the Tories. Kay-Shuttleworth, an early educational administrator, addressed the party in the 1840s: "It is astonishing for us, that the party calling themselves Conservative should not lead the van in promoting the diffusion of that knowledge among the working classes which tends beyond anything else to promote the security of property and the maintenance of public order. To restore the working classes to their former state of incurious and contented apathy is impossible... if they are to have knowledge, surely it is the part of a [illegible] power to secure them useful knowledge, and guard them against pernicious opinions."
The frankness of the ruling class is in no little part due to their arrogant assumptions that the workers, like well-trained domestics, would go deaf while their betters were discussing. In fact, the workers did hear and took note that their rulers were using education as a "social policeman". Working-class education, whenever the workers controlled it, became independent working class education. They formed schools around their Hampden Clubs or Chartist branches which taught reading and writing, politics and economics, using their texts and newspapers.
Thomas Hodgskin, a pioneer of the labour theory of value, wrote: "A man had better be without education... than be educated by [his] rulers; for them education is but the mere breaking-in of the steer to the yoke; the mere discipline of a hunting dog, which, by dint of severity, is made to forego the strongest impulse of his nature, and instead of devouring his prey, to hasten with it to the feet of his master."
It is not surprising that the working class evolved a strategy of independent education. It had proved very successful for the bourgeoisie. They had set up their dissenting academies, and their proprietary schools (the latter were formed by, possibly, the first major use of the new capitalist tool of joint stock companies), and even started their own university - University College, London. When the capitalist class became strong enough to control the machinery of the state, they changed their strategy and instituted a series of Royal Commissions to mould the educational system to their use. The [illegible] public and grammar schools were pummelled until they could provide a useful education for the middle class. Via legal swindles, they changed the charters of "their" schools to eject the working class scholarship holders. The Newcastle Commission came forward with proposals that enabled the capitalist class to cut the money spent on working-class education by 25% in three years. The class society built a class system in its own image.
In the twentieth century the educational opportunities for the [illegible] class were systematically attacked. When the locally-elected school boards started giving a more than elementary education in their Higher Grade schools, the state noted. These schools were seen as competitors to the grammar schools and a threat to the "real pre-eminence on knowledge" of the middle class. The Higher Grade schools were closed and the school boards dissolved.
Just as the workers had to be taught to read and write to service capitalist industry in the nineteenth century, now the needs of the scientific revolution demand that the potential work force has to be highly trained. The contradiction at the heart of education in a class society is intensified. Education can still act as an initiator of 'subversion' and a radical questioning of class divisions. It is also, more than ever, crucial to the progress of the economy. Whereas return capital increased between 1900 and 1956 by a factor of 44 times on real values, the human capital or money invested in the education of the labour force increased 94 times. The relationship between economic growth, political power and investment in education is shown by the crash educational schemes initiated in the U.S.A. in 1957 - the year of the sputnik. In the eighteenth century, Mandeville wrote of working class education: "I would not care to ride a horse that knows as much as I", neither would the capitalist class today.
To the extent that they are forced to invest in more education, to that extent it becomes imperative that they control the universities, colleges and schools. And that is why the Confederation of British Industries, Ted Short and Walter Adams are so upset about the events at the L.S.E.