It is remarkable, given the relatively high level of teacher militancy in England in the late Sixties and early Seventies, that the current ideological attack on education has caught left-wing teachers so unawares. So far the left's contribution to 'the Great Debate' initiated by Callaghan last October has been negligible. Only now is it possible to appreciate fully the limitations of the purely economist campaigns fought by Rank & File for the London Allowance and Houghton awards. Ken Jones's contribution to the last issue of International must therefore be welcomed as timely and important: it represents one of the very few serious attempts made by Marxists to analyse the current crisis of British education in the context of the history of educational development since the Second World War. And for this very reason, it is all the more important to examine his arguments with care.
The substance of Ken Jones's position seems to be this: the English educational system, at present under attack from the bourgeoisie, is essentially the product of thirty years of working class gains. The bourgeoisie can no longer fulfil working class demands for educational expansion, because of the current economic crisis and also because it fears a crisis of ideological legitimacy in the schools. It is in this context that we are invited to see the William Tyndale debacle: the school offered a good example of the exploitation and extension of working class educational gains, and so was selected by the bourgeoisie for target-practice, prior to a generalised attack on the existing educational system.
However, this straightforward thesis is qualified by the following observations, among others: the working class too is aware of a crisis in education, and sections of it have responded not by defending their historic 'gains' but by drifting into a 'thoroughly retrogressive' movement attacking them; the post-war movement for educational reform was in any case inspired by social democratic ideals of inter-class unity, so much so that it won support even from the Bow Group; furthermore, progressive educational ideas failed to win any significant audience in the working class.
After these qualifications, what is left of the substantive thesis? Little enough, it appears. We are presented with the enigma of a bourgeois attack on an educational system largely devised by the bourgeoisie itself; a system which at the same time represents thirty years of 'working class gains', but which the working class still shows little or no inclination to defend. What his thesis seems to come down to is the unexceptionable but limited observation that the increased political weight of the working class after 1945 was a major factor in post-war educational development; what his qualifications demonstrate is that the actual history of the educational debate, policy and practice cannot be explained away by that alone.
The Logic of Jones's Argument
However, the problem is not merely one of analytical 'balance'. What is at issue is a definite political logic that determines the peculiar emphases and oversights of the article as a whole. The net effect of the argument summarised above is to suggest that 'the working class' exists as a social force taking positions and making demands, somehow apart from or even in spite of the political and trade union organisations that represent it at any given time. Dubious as a general principle, this view is quite untenable in a situation such as ours, where social democracy and a reformist trade union movement enjoy a monopoly of working class representation. How does comrade Jones imagine that the working class is collectively to define its views on education or anything else, except through these organisations? How does he know that 'the masses perceive a crisis in education' other than that which their leaderships have defined for them? The available evidence suggests otherwise. As he himself would agree, the manifestations of working class unease have so far been purely negative — the Tyndale crisis could not have ended, as it now has, in disaster, had the local working class come to the teachers' defence.
But the logic of his article makes it difficult even to focus this crucial aspect of the educational crisis with any precision, For the effect of these appeals to an abstract 'working class' is actually to place the educational issues themselves beyond the pale of discussion. If, in spite of social democratic dilution, the CP's supra-class progressivism, and a quarter-century of capitalist recuperation, the educational reforms of the post-war years remain essentially 'working class gains', then there is no need to evaluate them afresh; the business of militants is quite simply to defend them. The list of IMG demands with which Jones concludes presupposes all this. If it were really the case that the working class perceived the educational system as a precious gain, then these trade union and community-control initiatives might well be powerful means of struggle, But as he himself admits, the working class is not content with the educational status quo, much less eager to defend it, The fact is that the educational system itself is now being called into question, at every level of British society. Any socialist plan of action that fails to take this into account is doomed from the outset to complete inconsequence.
For all that, specifically educational questions find very little space in Ken Jones's text, For example, the perplexing problems of the Tyndale affair are raised only to be dismissed. 'The Tyndale issue', he argues, 'allowed the bourgeoisie to pose as the defenders of a new layer of working class children, underprivileged as a result of progressivism,' But if the school represented, as he believes, 'a real extension of the gains previously made' in working class education, how could working class parents have seen the bourgeois attack as they did? In an attempt to deflect such questions, comrade Jones concedes only that the teachers may have made 'tactical' mistakes. One good reason why he cannot see the errors that they did make is because he shares at least some of them, as these sentiments reveal: 'the watchword of this campaign [against Tyndale] is "accountability", which signifies an obedience of teachers to the dictates of industry, sometimes disguised as popular control." Jones fails, as the Tyndale teachers consistently did, to offer an alternative definition of 'accountability', thus laying himself open to serious charges of arrogance and irresponsibility. If teachers are not accountable to any outside authority, then they can only be accountable to their own corporate interest. This position, which can never be more than a radical variant on the old fetish of 'professionalism', is surely untenable for socialists. It was because the Tyndale teachers failed to clarify their responsibilities to the working class whose children they taught that their appeals for workers' solidarity in the face of victimisation had such faint resonance, Thus isolated, they stood little chance against the bureaucratic brutality of County Hall. The real question raised by the issue of accountability (to whom should teachers be accountable?) is not seriously broached in Jones's article; and the omission, as I have suggested, is no merely 'tactical' error.
His airy dismissal of accountability is matched by his inadequate characterisation of the critics of the educational status quo, and his failure to distinguish the two main currents that are involved. On the one hand there are the Black Paper supporters, an avowedly elitist offshoot of the humanist tradition fighting for the maintenance of different forms of education for the different social classes. On the other there are the social democrats who serve the general interests of advanced capitalism. Until recently this current favoured progressive methods and comprehensivisation, expecting thereby to achieve increased social mobility and an adequate supply of the administrative and technical cadres required for social and economic 'modernisation'. Callaghan, in his October speech, took care to distinguish this tendency from 'those whose concern for standards conceals a defense of privilege'. The affinities and contrasts between these two tendencies require scrupulous examination, if the real character, strength and design of the bourgeois attack on education are to be assessed. To conflate them, as Ken Jones does, in the category 'reactionary' is to license an entirely uncritical defence of the educational status quo. The 'Great Debate' is not merely the creature of a monolithic bourgeoisie, manufacturing reactionary fantasies and slanders as a smokescreen for public expenditure cuts. To abstain from intervention in it, or to fail to explore the issues raised in it with the utmost seriousness, is in effect to grant the bourgeoisie an ideological monopoly in the public discussion of the most persistent and disabling contradictions of British capitalism (most notably its failure to modernise successfully).
Comprehensives and the Working Class: Notes for an Analysis
It is obviously impossible, in a short comment of this kind, to do more than indicate a few possible lines of inquiry and debate, The paragraphs that follow do not claim to be any more than that. It is of great importance, however, to emphasise the premise that unites them. Socialist analyses of education and the working class must never, it seems to me, lose sight of the distinction between the possible individual interests of individual working class children (that is, within a capitalist framework) and the historic interests of the class as a whole, There are very few socialist teachers who are not personally and practically aware of this distinction: it confronts them daily in the classroom. However, it has not often been borne in mind in theoretical discussions of education. It is relevant first of all to the capitalist rationality of comprehensivisation; secondly, to the working class experience of comprehensives as a social reform; and thirdly, to the perspectives of socialists in the classroom.
Within progressive education, three essential strands can be distinguished: (1) egalitarianism: the abolition of the tripartite secondary system and of 'eleven plus' selection; the dissolution of 'streamed' classes in favour of attempts to encourage children of all classes and abilities to learn together; (2) the movement away from authoritarian and uniform classrooms towards individualised and group-learning situations; pupils are offered limited opportunities to take decisions about their own work-pace, areas of study and collaborators; the teacher becomes a source of opportunities for learning; this encourages a more relaxed and informal relation between teacher and pupils; (3) an emphasis on the study of the social sciences, and the reorganisation of the traditional disciplines into an 'integrated' syllabus, so that children can use these disciplines for social rather than academic purposes.
Why have these forms of school structure, classroom organisation and curriculum been tolerated, indeed encouraged, by the bourgeois State? I believe it is because comprehensive schools were designed to facilitate the formation of a new petty bourgeois layer: the clerical, administrative and technical workers whose numbers have multiplied since 1945, in the conditions of late capitalism. The rigid, class-divided educational system of the pre-war period had to be reformed, because these new personnel could not be recruited entirely from the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie: in order to produce them in sufficient quantity, it was necessary to develop the hitherto wasted potential of the working class. Educational provision for flexible upward mobility was therefore indispensable. This was the fundamental bourgeois logic of comprehensivisation. 'Selection' — final, lifelong, social selection — was not abolished in the new system; it was merely deferred to the age of 14, 16 or 18.
This new social layer had to be capable of working under minimum supervision, as part of a team, of internalising the norms of the firm or organisation, and of making responsible decisions on the basis of information supplied. The more open forms of classroom organisation were much more conducive than their predecessors to the development of these skills and habits. This layer was required also to be able to relate its own functions to the needs of society as a whole, to understand at least some of the processes at work in society, and to identify, in one way or another, with the 'common weal' — this was provided by the new emphasis on the social sciences.
This is not to say that the educational system relates in a purely functional way to the capitalist economy. On the contrary, the insertion of nominally egalitarian and non-authoritarian forms into the capitalist educational system has given rise to a number of contradictions, of which two in particular may be mentioned here. The first is between the proclaimed social objectives of the system and the actual experience of the class for whom their appeal is strongest. The mechanism of social mobility promotes gifted individuals from the working class into the petty bourgeoisie, while making no perceptible improvement in the social situation of the class as a whole. Individual social mobility is moreover a much more limited phenomenon than social democratic apologists have ever allowed: the profound inequalities of capitalist society — many times more powerful than the 'countervailing' egalitarianism of the school — are reinforced by rooted cultural habits to ensure the generational self-reproduction of the working class. However, this contradiction, with all the bitterness and disillusionment that it brings, is intersected by a second, which can be made to work against it. For in the course of winnowing a small minority of working class children, the bourgeois State risks providing the remainder — the working class of tomorrow — with a certain surplus of educational possibilities, The characteristic norms and practices of progressive education, with all that they imply politically and ideologically, are instilled not only in the 'successful' ones who 'need' them, but also in the 'failures' who, in strictly capitalist terms, do not. Thus, if the comprehensive system cannot simply be entered as a 'working class gain', it is nevertheless rich in possibilities.
If we as revolutionary socialists ask what form of education will best prepare the working class for socialism, would it not be something along these lines? The working class needs the confidence to take its own decisions, needs to suspect and resist all forms of authoritarianism, and to perceive the needs of society as a whole, and not just its own sectional interests. Comprehensive education and progressive teaching methods approved by a capitalist system to serve its own needs may also be the best preparation for socialism. The bourgeoisie at present seems more aware of this contradiction than do left teachers, many of whom are becoming demoralised and sceptical about progressive principles.
I do not want to argue, in traditional Labour fashion, that comprehensivisaton can serve the interests of all classes equally; I am simply trying to highlight some of the contradictions within it, in a preliminary attempt to outline a non-social democratic defence of comprehensives, and a means whereby socialist teachers can function within them. Such a course involves a struggle against another strand within progressive education that renders it safely conservative: the emphasis on the development of each individual child to the limits of her/his ability, which neatly complements the ideology of equality of opportunity: individual working class children are told that they can 'make it'. There is a neglect of the class component of education: the fact that the working class as a whole is — necessarily — destined to 'failure', and that one of the functions of the educational system is to keep the working class in an economically and ideologically subordinate position, is not understood by many progressive teachers.
The possibilities of introducing children to the development of forms of collective struggle are extremely limited and hazardous. The truth is that teachers are faced with the collective strength of rebellious working class pupils — white and black — in their classrooms, and are often forced, however reluctantly, to break this solidarity by urging individual children to look to their own interests and 'get on', The problem cannot be solved via the naive stratagems adopted sometimes by young teachers who protest, 'I am on your side, so do as I say even if you don't do what reactionary old Mr X says', or simply say, 'decide for yourselves what to do', thus abnegating their responsibilities.
What can be done is to provide examples of working class forms of struggle from history, as Chris Searle has done with considerable success, in order to encourage a sense of class solidarity. Teachers can encourage the growth of the National Union of School Students, and offer support and cooperation from the National Union of Teachers. They can attempt to subvert prevailing ideologies — racist, sexist, class-collaborationist — but it must be recognised that a developing class consciousness can only come from the experience of struggle in the class as a whole. The educational system will not become a significant arena of class conflict until the class struggle in society is much more intense than it is now. The educational system in any society is structurally conservative; its function is to reproduce existing social and economic relations, This is not an excuse for pessimism or inactivity but a realistic assessment of the possibilities open to us. We should not be seduced into the belief that significant working class gains have been or will be made at the expense of the capitalist class. What gains there have been — and I agree with Ken Jones that there have been some, though he has not defined them — we should defend before the working class. Only when the working class recognises them as gains will it be ready to defend them.
Ken Jones's thesis, and the tactics he devises, are an uncritical defence of the 'gains' of the last thirty years, and therefore do not challenge the working class to go beyond the reformist illusions which maintain its economic and political subordination. An argument based rather on a critical examination of the issues involved in progressive education, while recognising the limitations of action based solely on educational issues, will form a part of the process of winning the working class from reformism to the struggle for socialism.