Recent issues of International have opened an overdue discussion on educational issues, and the role of socialist teachers in the education process. If anyone doubted the importance of this discussion, then events such as the 'Great Debate' and the victimisation of Tyndale teachers have shown very starkly that we have neglected this terrain of discussion for too long. This article is intended as a systemisation and extension of the positions put forward in the previous articles, and not as a total counter-position.
The revolutionary left faces a serious problem in trying to come to grips with the issues raised in the education debate. It faces a problem (a) because its practice in the education sector has, as Clara Mulhern puts it, been marked by 'the limitations of the purely economist campaigns fought by Rank & File for the London allowance and Houghton Award', (b) because the debate about educational objectives has been dominated by, on the one hand, Fabian professionalism, which sees the National Union of Teachers as a pressure group to achieve certain democratic advances in education (via an alliance with the state apparatus and by virtue of rational arguments), and on the other hand, by essentially libertarian forces, who have located the critical arena for struggle as the authority relations in the school and classroom. It is significant that these strategies involve an antipodean confusion about the relationship between state and education. And (c) there is a third problem in coming to terms with the debate about educational objectives: there is no simple pattern — the ruling class defending the status quo on one side, the working class, the revolutionary left and their programme on the other. For revolutionary teachers there is an inbuilt contradiction, an inherent dualism, in their role, which can be examined but not solved at this period. In other words there are no definitive answers to a range of questions, only the opening of a discussion.
1. We have to set out a Leninist analysis of the bourgeois educational institutions, so that we can avoid the political errors of social-democratic and libertarian forces. We will have many areas of agreement with these forces in practice, but first of all we must outline an overall theory.
What are the roots of the 'Great Debate' and what are the ideological issues at stake?
We can start by pointing out the central fact in any discussion on education: that the role of education is the reproduction of the existing social and economic system. Secondly, that reproduction is guaranteed by the social structure itself, and only secondarily by the role of teachers and the ideological content of education. For capitalism, education is functional and necessary to the extent that it educates differing components of the future workforce to the requisite technical and cultural levels. All the major extensions in educational provision (the 1870 and 1944 Acts most obviously) have been engendered by material dictates of the mode of production. The post-war comprehensivisation has similar material roots in the expansion of the white-collar sector, and the corresponding need to draw in a substantial layer from working class backgrounds.
Of course, the bourgeoisie is not a grand puppet-master capable of pulling strings to ensure that every aspect of society corresponds directly to its economic interests. Far from it. Even on those occasions when the perceived economic interests of the bourgeoisie correspond to its long term economic interests and it is capable of articulating these in a collective fashion, the anarchic character of its mode of production, its inability ever to complete the democratic restructuring inherent in its economic needs and its 'democratic charter', generally prevents, distorts or retards 'rational' bourgeois solutions. Secondly, there is a considerable elasticity in the fabric of bourgeois society which enables the incorporation and perversion of democratic reforms won by the working class (e.g. the Welfare State, comprehensivisation of education). Demands of the working class are taken up by the ruling class and turned to their own ends.
We must bear such qualifications in mind, but it is necessary to assert unambiguously the role of education in capitalist society. The class structure of capitalist society, and from that its precise division of labour and occupational structure, have to be generated as precisely as possible by the education system. The ruling class has no interest in over-education, or in an excess of graduates. The capitalist education system, and very specifically the exam set-up and selection procedures, are designed to reproduce as exactly as possible the occupational structure.
We should also set out the alternative — a conception of education under socialism; that is, the sort of alternative which would be made possible by the economic and structural changes for which revolutionary socialists are fighting. In a socialist society, education would be genuinely for the individual, to open to the fullest extent possible the capacity of each individual to use and enjoy the greater leisure time and resources made possible by the socialist reorganisation of human and material resources. Marx (in the German Ideology) somewhat over-estimated the extent to which drudgery can be taken out of productive labour (this covers a range of jobs — a residue of repetitive mechanical jobs, the necessary features of administration, tasks involving high personal risk or extreme personal discomfort). Every effort would be made to eliminate or reduce to a minimum such jobs; but it is likely to be a matter of ensuring that such jobs are shared out as equitably as possible. The technological developments which will precede international communism could not have been foreseen by Marx and can only barely be seen today. Education (that is, the reproduction of the scientific, cultural, historical and social acquisitions of humanity for new generations) would be directed towards (a) greater and greater control over productive techniques and nature, (b) a greater understanding of society itself and its needs, (c) fuller modes of personal, artistic and cultural expression.
Of course, this is a long way from the classroom and the 'Great Debate'; but by setting out these two poles, education under capitalism and education under developing socialism, we establish a certain perspective.
Further, it sets a guiding principle: these alternative modes of education are incompatible. A socialist education system which makes selection based on different ultimate occupational goals is not yet socialist, because it implies a society which has not eliminated the division between mental and physical labour and which therefore perpetuates vestiges of a class structure. (This is distinct from specialisation, which deals with differing educational content rather than different education levels.) Similarly, under capitalism, no educational system can be developed which gives full reign to the development of individual capacities, both because the resources will never be there, and because capitalism only provides marginal opportunities for the exercise of such human potential. In education, as in society as a whole, it is socialism that ends pre-history and opens the era of human history.
2. Now we can look at the contradictions within the bourgeois educational system. The differences between Ken Jones and Clara Mulhern over the significance of comprehensivisation are more apparent than real. The extension of secondary education under the 1944 Act, and the subsequent developments from the 1950s towards comprehensivisation, were both in the interests of the ruling class. They satisfied a need. They also corresponded to, and absorbed, the limited demands of the working class organisations and their reformist spokespersons.
The educational demands of the trade union movement never went much beyond 'free access to secondary education for all', and in the post-war period it has supported demands for comprehensivisation. As with most things, the trade union movement has seen educational reform coming through the election of a Labour Government; therefore there is little need for the trade unions to have detailed educational policies, these would be worked out and implemented by the Labour Party. This general tendency of British trade unions to see various questions as non-trade union questions was strengthened, in the case of education, by the non-participation of the bulk of teachers in the TUC, and by their jealous safeguarding of education as something to be discussed only by professionals.
So we can understand the paradoxical situation described by Clara Mulhern: the post-war developments in education were demanded by the organised working class, implemented in their own interests by the bourgeoisie, without these reforms ever being explained or demanded on a mass scale.
Now we come to the role of teachers and the teachers' organisations in implementing these changes and the significance for socialists of these changes. Ken Jones outlines the existence of a 'democratic/humanist' ideology in education. It is important at this stage to separate three different strands which are often lumped together:
(a) the 'humanist' element, essentially the classical notion of a 'liberal education', i.e. the education of children has as its aim certain rationalist 'standards', and does not take its instructions directly from society or the dictates of industry. This is the educational content of professionalism; and if it has a progressive content, as Ken Jones seems to imply, then that is only because of the particular nature of the present attack on education. Our long-term aim must be a struggle against the present curriculum, not justifications of it.
(b) progressive teaching methods — we will be examining these later, but it is very important to separate these from the structural changes in the education system which we examine now.
(c) the democratic tradition/egalitarianism/'equality of opportunity'. This has been the official platform of the teaching unions, and has been the basis for their alliance with part of the state apparatus around educational changes.
The abolition of the tripartite system, the abolition of the 11-plus, comprehensivisation, the weakening of streaming, are attempts to bring about this equality of opportunity. They find their highest official expression in the Plowden Report, which urges positive discrimination — that is, allocation of proportionately greater resources to schools in problem areas (mainly inner-city working class areas). This is motivated partly on general ideological grounds — 'fairness', etc. — partly as a means towards greater social mobility, and partly through seeing education as a direct element in the battle to keep control over the working class by trying to defuse the potentially explosive inner-city crisis.
Equality of opportunity under capitalism is fundamentally unachievable. The working class has suffered generations of economic, social and cultural deprivation; the ruling class has countless ways of handing its privileges and powers down to its children; and, in the educational context, the continuation of the private sector makes a mockery of any other proposals. Furthermore, even if the ruling class were somehow deprived of all its privileges of inheritance, equality of opportunity would not lead to any meaningful social equality. So, the platform of 'equality of educational opportunity' (which has been substantially achieved on paper) produces all sorts of contradictions within the educational system, and conflicts with other aspects of the organisation of capitalist society. These contradictions on the one hand feed the views of those who have always opposed comprehensivisation and de-streaming; and on the other hand lead to the attempts of radical educational sociologists like Midwinter, who try to carry the logic of these proposals through to their conclusions with ideas of community schools and so on.
At this stage we can make clear the differences between the Black Papers and the forces leading the present offensive against educational standards (i.e. the 'Great Debate'). The Black Paperites oppose, root and branch, this conception of equality of opportunity, they oppose comprehensivisation and so on. This is not the programme of Callaghan, Williams and the Labour Government. Ken Jones makes a mistake when he tries to equate Callaghan's speech with the views in the Black Papers.
Socialists should see these as essentially democratic developments, defend them and seek to extend them. And, as with any democratic demands, we use our support for them to indicate that only socialism can complete the democratisation of society promised by capitalism. There is, as yet, no direct attack on these educational gains, although the picture would be different with Rhodes Boyson as Minister of 'Education'. In the context of a Tory Government trying to reintroduce selection and grammar schools, revolutionary socialists should yield to no-one as the strongest defenders of these structural gains. What is at stake from our standpoint is the right of the working class to the best education available, and seeking to extend that.
3. De-streaming and mixed ability teaching — a complex problem, because the conflict between 'equality of opportunity' and the dictates of the capitalist system is posed very sharply via the medium of exams and the prospects of individual children. And this feeds into the vexed questions of challenges to authoritarianism in the schools (and the obverse of that, our attitude to discipline), curriculum content, integrated studies, etc. Underlying these problems is the dilemma: to what extent is it possible for socialist or libertarian teachers to have educational goals which are contrary to the educational goals of capitalism.
This is where the 'Great Debate' and the Labour Government's plans for educational change come in. There is an undoubted dislocation between the output of schools and the human raw material which industry perceives as its needs. It would be totally false to see this as the result of thousands of progressive or Trotskyist teachers undermining the capitalist system from within the schools (would that it were so). Even more preposterous is the claim that the schools are populated with teachers who don't believe that children should learn how to read, write and add.
The roots of this dislocation are multi-fold: over-large classes; old buildings and equipment; the alienation of large numbers of working class children from an educational system they see as irrelevant, or even alien to them, their needs and their values; the inability of the capitalist system and its 'planners' to see beyond the end of last year; failure to cater for the particular needs of immigrant children and their communities. There is also an eternal contradiction between the continual need of the ruling class to assert collective interests ('the nation', 'industry') and a society and educational system geared to individual competition.
[illegible] non-authoritarian approach to education, either (a) these have, by and large, been with children who were 'uneducable' in regular schools, and/or in privileged arenas — free schools, Summerhill, etc; or (b) they have been ruthlessly victimised like Chris Searle and the Tyndale teachers. Other attempts to make education relevant to the real needs of working class children have been re-incorporated into the exam structure.
The 'Great Debate' is an attempt to resolve a series of crises in bourgeois education. It is an attempt to give an ideological basis for cuts in education spending. It is an attempt to restructure aspects of the curriculum, moving away from the 'liberal' tradition towards a more industry-oriented approach. It is an attempt to place blame for under-achievement (which is certainly present in schools, but is a different problem to the Black Paper smokescreen about falling standards) and discipline problems on the back of progressive teachers and progressive teaching methods. Finally, in a manner analogous to the use of institutional racism, it is an attempt to drive an ideological wedge into a weak flank of the working class. By posing 'industry' as the real yardstick by which to judge educational standards it both gears into a more general political offensive being waged by the Government and tries to create a national consensus between the working class and the ruling class.
On all of these fronts, the Government offensive has met with noticeable success.
The fightback against the cuts is a wider question than can be dealt with here; but to all intents and purposes, the teaching unions have accepted the cuts, and will accept more. There have been sporadic local struggles, most of which have been successful in their limited objectives; but the cuts have not been reversed and teaching conditions, resources, workloads, class sizes and consequently standards have deteriorated in most areas.
The restructuring of (or changing the emphasis of) the curriculum is an exceedingly difficult question from the point of view of the ruling class and nothing substantial is likely to be attempted for a while; but an example from personal experience indicates the direction things might take. In Coventry, in the teaching of maths, it has already been suggested that teaching of the aptly-called Imperial Units (feet, inches, rods, poles, perches, bushels, etc.) will be re-introduced, because British industry with its well-known far-sightedness has not, ten years after the beginning of metrication, seen fit to renovate its machinery. Furthermore, it is proposed to introduce a 14+ maths proficiency exam throughout the Coventry Local Education Authority. Passing such an exam would not guarantee a job; failing it, however, would be a perfect passport to the dole, a disqualification for almost any job in the area.
For the purpose of this article it is the other aspects of the 'Great Debate offensive' which are more important. The attack on progressive methods finds an echo, not just amongst those teachers who have never supported comprehensivisation, but also amongst those who are disillusioned because they believed that progressive methods could make schools more rewarding (for teachers and children), and could effect a noticeable change on the occupational prospects of individual working class children.
Our attitude to progressive methods cannot be determined by the fact that there is an apparent similarity between those methods and methods likely in a socialist education system: opposition to arbitrary discipline, corporal punishment, hierarchical structures, etc.; moves away from the exam orientation, emphasis on understanding rather than mimicry, learning through discovery, attempts to integrate school and community, etc.
Our conceptions of what should be taught and how it should be taught depend, in the end, on the extent to which any radical developments can be explained to, and supported by, the working class to whom we are responsible. But these developments in schools have been isolated both from most other teachers and from the parents/community. At this stage, educational developments which pose de facto threats to the rationale and functioning of the capitalist system are not likely to be supported by the establishment, by the bulk of teachers, and nor, in fact, by most working class parents who, whatever their overall political beliefs, are going to fear that the prospects of their children will be damaged by a short-term experiment.
Similarly, progressive methods in education (particularly since the professionalism of the teachers organisations hampers them from explaining widely the rationale of these methods) are going to be the obvious scapegoat for the failures of the education system.
It is necessary to paint a bleak picture before we can begin to salvage something from the situation.
Socialist teachers do have wider opportunities and responsibilities other than just doing their jobs well and being good trade unionists. In education, as in every other sphere, revolutionaries are concerned with long term aims as well as the immediate situation. The growth of the left in the NUT also means the existence of more socialist teachers in the classrooms, and that gives us opportunities.
That is, it must be possible to fuse the roles of revolutionary propagandist and bourgeois educator; the bourgeois education system can play a part in producing a revolutionary working class. Clara Mulhern outlines a reasonable starting point for this: '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'. She adds: 'Comprehensive education and progressive teaching methods approved by a capitalist system for its own needs may also be the best preparation for socialism.' We have tried to cast some doubt on this latter point, and will return to it in more detail.
Clara Mulhern is trying to answer: what can the working class as a whole gain from its passage through the educational machine? As she recognises, this is related to the political goal of working class revolution; so this can only be posed meaningfully as a strategy for socialist teachers when we are in a situation in which the pursuance of revolutionary socialist goals becomes a conscious factor in working class politics and communities. As she says later on: 'The educational system will not become a significant arena of class conflict until the class struggle in society is much more intense [overt — WT] than it is now.'
Relating this to the points made earlier about the isolation of particular radical experiments in education, we can see that it is exactly this factor (that a working class which does not have consciously radical or revolutionary goals is not going to be automatically sympathetic to the work of revolutionary teachers) which explains that isolation.
Revolutionaries have to be prepared to tackle now the issue of 'who controls education?' We oppose the professionalist elitism of teachers who say that only teachers are entitled to discuss the content and form of education. We oppose the attempts of the ruling class to tie education more directly to the needs of industry. We are for the working class organised through the community as parents and through its trade unions and political organisations having a voice in the determination of the policy of schools. Of course, this will cause us many difficulties today (as the Tyndale teachers are well aware), but we are trying to define a long term strategy in the medium term context of rises in working class struggle moving towards global confrontations with the ruling class and its state machine.
The education system can never be a socialist system, nor can it ever serve the needs of both classes. We want the education system to reflect the balance of class forces in society. We must be quite clear that we are trying to subvert the capitalist education system, just as we are trying to subvert every other institution of capitalist society. We fight at every level against the idea that the working class and ruling class have interests in common, so too in the education system. We should support and seek to extend proposals which bring greater community involvement in the school and determination of the school's policy. There is no pat formula to cover the various different contexts and forms of external influence over the school, but we should seek to involve in as many ways as possible working class representatives in areas of control and influence within the school.
The corollary of this is the need for socialist teachers to explain their conceptions of education (see ideas below) to parents, to bodies like trades councils, through the Council for Educational Advance, within the union, and so on. Developments in education are a function of developments in the class struggle, and at this stage we are laying the beginnings of a long term strategy.
Now we can make some concrete points about curriculum and teaching methods, having set the long term framework. Without this long term framework, and without this fundamental confidence in the working class as a whole, anything that is done in the classroom is essentially individual whim, and doomed to failure. This is not to underestimate the significance of the work of, say, Chris Searle, who was able for a period to make education a really vital and worthwhile experience, not only because he got through to working class children, but also because he was able through that poetry to bring out a working class vision of school and society. But it is no surprise that he was victimised. Activity with kids in the classroom is not dependent on the existence of prior political support before anything can be done, but without a conscious conception of future goals, it is difficult to break through the twin traps of individual (or in some cases collective) activities which have only a short lifespan, or rationalising one's acceptance of the authoritarian and hierarchical structure.
Our overall conception should be: (a) the right of the working class to the best education available, (b) within that, and with the intensification of the class struggle, for socialist teachers to fight for the education which is in the historic interests of the working class. Obviously this latter goal is only fractionally realisable at this stage, but every political development in the working class is an opportunity for socialist teachers, organised within the trade union movement, to get across long term educational goals.
On curriculum: already there are many ways in which teachers in departments and individually can begin to introduce elements of working class history and culture into lessons. The fight for non-racist and non-sexist materials has already begun, and is fertile ground for further development: 'multi-racial and multi-cultural education' is an accepted aim in some schools already. These are only beginnings, but surely they can be raised to a higher level. Teachers (even if they are isolated in their own schools) can get together in a town or district (and ultimately nationally) and begin to prepare alternative curricula, at least in particular fields. These can then be explained and fought for in the schools and teaching unions, and on a wider scale (utilising trades councils, links with other unions, parents' meetings, etc.). Tactics like this have to be given serious consideration as part of the process (a) of the working class beginning to define conscious educational goals which go beyond the reformist utopia of 'real' equality of opportunity, and (b) of socialist teachers overcoming their isolation from the concerns of working class parents.
For example: a project for the study of the history of a town or region from the standpoint of the working class (not taught to the exclusion of standard courses on British history) would, firstly, have all the academic merits of any other history course; secondly, be of long term value to the children concerned; and thirdly, be a positive vehicle for the involvement of trade union and parents' organisations in the education of children.
Essentially there are three models of education and knowledge. First there is the mainstream capitalist approach — children should be taught what they need to know and not much else. Secondly there is the liberal approach, which [illegible] education and knowledge as a sort of Aristotelean ideal, where the privileged few are educated and knowledge is an absolute, valued in itself and for itself. To these approaches, revolutionaries counterpose a third: knowledge (and therefore education) should be geared (a) to understanding the world and (b) thereby to helping the working class in changing the world.
Programmes of 'work experience' have a two-edged character. Their tendency today is to reinforce the industrialisation of education. But at the same time we should not accept the ivory tower separation of education and society: as long as work experience schemes are carefully monitored by the relevant trade unions and not used to provide cheap labour, they are also an opportunity to examine and discuss the class nature of society, to reinforce ideas of trade unionism and so on.
Community schools have a similar character [illegible]. Seeing the community as an educational resource can be a valuable opportunity for a socialist teacher.
More generally on progressive methods: we should support positive discrimination in favour of the most exploited kids both institutionally and within the schools — e.g. maintenance of remedial departments, defence of unstreamed teaching (at least in the first two years), special language units for immigrant children to enable their integration into other schools, provision by the LEA of units to deal with truancy and other behavioural problems without denying the right of these kids to an education, option systems which are useful to non-examination children. We should seek to promote non-authoritarian teaching situations, even if in secondary schools this will be the exception rather than the rule. We should fight for the abolition of petty discipline [illegible] schools. The 'Charter' below is a first attempt at an overall programme of demands relating to education.
The situation facing, and amongst, socialist teachers is a promising one. There is a growing awareness that our fight within the union cannot be limited to questions of economic militancy. To reach the mass of teachers, we have to be able to take up all their concerns. The effect of comprehensivisation, the question of discipline, educational objectives: these are matters and debates which socialists have to enter into.
A DRAFT CHARTER
1. For the full equality of educational opportunity: — total abolition of the private sector; — comprehensivisation [illegible] and an end to religious [selection]; — extra resources in economically deprived areas; — a stop to cuts, modernisation of all buildings, full provision of resources (for sports, crafts, libraries, etc.); — reduction in class sizes (we have to specify goals based on the assessment of the birth rate and for an expansion of teacher employment); — free access to further education for all who want it; — proper staffing of remedial departments, special facilities for teaching English as a second language, etc.; — full state resources and specialist teachers for adult literacy courses; — the provision of day and block-release courses.
2. Social organisation: — the democratic selection of representatives of pupils, academic and non-academic staff, parents, trade unions to governing bodies (inevitably even where this is achieved today they will be in a minority, but we are engaged in a long term struggle, and the precise proposals will depend on the local situation); — for governing bodies to have control over curriculum; — support for, and extension of the principles of, community schools.
3. Recognition of the rights of children [illegible]: abolition of corporal punishment; abolition of school uniform.
4. Curriculum: — adequate resources to maintain basic standards of literacy and numeracy; — abolition of compulsory witchcraft (assemblies, hymns, etc.) in schools; 'religious instruction' courses to cover all organised superstitions and secular ideologies, including [illegible]; — elimination of sexist and racist materials from schools [illegible]; — for the inclusion of the history, literature and culture of the working class in all courses.
5. Organisation and methods: — for the abolition of all exams and the maximum [illegible]; for the defence and extension of 'mixed ability' teaching; — for the pupils and teachers to organise the classroom [illegible].
Some points must be underlined:
(a) These demands leave out the whole range of demands relating to salaries, conditions, and the cuts. This is because the revolutionary left has already taken these questions up and, whilst there is always room for clarification and development, they are not the subject of this article.
(b) This list of demands has (particularly if each demand is treated separately) a democratic/reformist slant. That is, they concern primarily issues which (in theory anyway) could be granted under a capitalist system. This may trouble some comrades, but the substantial point is that we have tried to examine the relationship between the present debate in education and the long term goal of revolutionaries, setting that in the context of an overall rise in working class struggle. The Fourth International has always stressed that the key strategic concerns of revolutionaries are: firstly, the promotion of the independent, democratic self-organisation [of the working class], and its challenge to the rule of the ruling class; the fight for these goals will be a part of, and will be linked with, a challenge to the present hegemony of the ruling class. If comrades can develop the analysis presented here, and raise demands which exploit more acutely the contradictions within bourgeois education, then that is excellent.
(c) A big political weakness of the two previous articles in International was their neglect of some of the basic democratic issues (e.g. abolition of the private sector, end to compulsory religion in schools); the 'Charter' as a whole concentrates on those questions.
(d) At the same time, it is necessary for Leninists to question some of the assumptions of the libertarian forces which have, so far, dominated the debate about educational goals on the left.
(e) The demands raised by Ken Jones at the end of his article attempt to take up in an abstract way the relationship between the state and education, by looking at what bodies may be described as part of the state apparatus and saying we want nothing to do with them. Demands about the Inspectorate are very pertinent to the Tyndale case but they are not the generalised basis for a line on education.
Today the opportunities are limited. Hopefully we have been able to explain why those limitations exist, but at the same time those limitations are partly self-imposed. Socialist teachers have been governed by an economistic bent, and have under-estimated the possibility of organisation to achieve educational goals in the schools. In the long run, of course, education will be changed through revolutionary change in society and not vice versa. But to abandon all these positions to the enemy without a fight would be criminal. These are matters which have to be pushed onto the agenda in all gatherings of the left in the NUT. A fight has to be made to get their long term importance recognised. The Green Paper and Tyndale sackings are just a beginning, much more is to come.
The fundamental basis for any success on this front is the ability of socialist teachers and the revolutionary movement as a whole to explain and win support for concrete educational objectives. And this goes hand in hand with the overall struggle of revolutionaries in the working class.
1. Ken Jones: 'William Tyndale and the Crisis in Education', International, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 7-12. Clara Mulhern: 'The Crisis in Education: A Reply to Ken Jones', Vol. 3, No. 4, pp. 3-5.
2. Clara Mulhern, p. 3.
3. Education has this definition in all societies, that it is a long arm investment of a portion of the social surplus product for the reproduction of the knowledge, technology and cadre of society. Although it will have an entirely different direction under socialism, [illegible] fundamentally, and all its other [features flow from this].
4. 'hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the afternoon, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic' (Marx and Engels, German Ideology, in Selected Works, Progress Publishers, Vol 1, p. 36). There are a number of areas of discussion which flow out of this question of the specialisation of occupations under socialism, [illegible] socialism seeks to use the advance of technology not to eliminate human labour, but to de-alienate human labour. Similarly, the advances in technology which have already occurred, let alone those that occur in the future, dictate a considerable level of occupational specialisation; resolution of the potential antagonisms and divisions emerging from this will be a major problem.
5. This is a considerable over-simplification of the role of the trade union movement in the fight for educational reform. Ideally this question should be the subject of research and material in its own right. Quite apart from its obvious historical interest, (a) there was a very important link between the rise of the early socialist movement and the campaign for the education of the working [classes], particularly in the context of child labour, (b) in later years it casts interesting light on the non-political character of British Trade Unionism, and historical research might indicate the importance of such a study, which some comrades might be encouraged to undertake. [illegible]
6. Clara Mulhern (p. 4) makes a similar separation. Ken Jones's use of a 'democratic/humanist' tradition seems to me misleading. [illegible]
9. No-one should assume that being a consistent fighter for equality of educational opportunity is equivalent to being a revolutionary. The development of community schools is another [illegible] to be subjected to detailed analysis by socialist teachers.
10. As examples of what industry regards as mathematically [necessary] [illegible] figures without tables. These examples are not essential for anything, the general point is that the mathematical standards appropriate to highly skilled engineering or tool-making apprenticeships are being taken as typical of industrial requirements.
11. There has not been time to assess the character and significance of the Taylor Report and its recommendations on governing bodies.
13. This is another arena in which the fight for united action of the left in the NUT, not just the Socialist Teachers Alliance and Rank & File, but also with teachers in and around the Communist Party, is [important] [illegible].
14. The question of discipline and disciplinary measures is not taken up here in detail, as it is already the subject of considerable debate. The NUT survey, although it is doubtless put out by some of the reactionary-elitist positions of that union, does show the extent of concern amongst the mass of teachers.
15. These proposals have a certain similarity to proposals from extremely reactionary elements, but the point is that we base ourselves on the working class and its radicalisation, even if, in [the short term these forces] [illegible]. Those who might have something to lose by fighting for greater involvement of the working class in the control of education (alongside explaining their ideas) are either outright elitists or [fail to understand] that changes in education are a product of changes in society (a qualitative change in education is a product of qualitative change in society). The educational system will always be a fundamentally conservative force, socialists will only make small chinks in it.