The Struggle in Education

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THE STRUGGLE IN EDUCATION by A.E.JENNING

I.M.G. PUBLICATIONS 10p.

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This is the Second Eaition of “The St-ugge in Education — A Contribution to the Discussion in Rank & Frie” — the first edition of which appeared, although with a limited circulation, in November 1972. Rank and File is, as its name suggests, a rank and file organisation in the National Union of Teachers. The pamphlet is primarily addressed to militants in Rank & File, but many of the issues it raises have a much wider relevance. Nevertheless, it does not by any means present a worked-out analysis of the education system.

A.E, Jenning

Contents

Chapter 1: Fresh Forces, Fresh Debates...........ccccccececcseesceceseees 3

Chapter 2: Political Currents in Rank & File ......eccccesscesersceees 12

Chapter 3: “Democracy” .........cccccccesccessssscecscecesseccsserecessceesns 19

Chapter 4: The International Socialism Group v...cceeeeeeseeeees 33

Chapter 5: | Which Way? Capitalist State or Working Class......40

Printed by F.1. Litho (T.U.) Ltd., {82 Pentonville Road, London N.1.

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in the Fifties and Sixties, the British labour movement was more or less permanently active on the question of liquidating the grammar school in favour of the comprehensive. This is not to say of course that there was universal opposition in the labour movement to the grammar schools, Clearly, the working class intake to grammar and technical schools as well as universities, increased during this period and this was reflected in working class opinion, Nonetheless, this broad movement of opposition to the grammar schools took place. The postwar economic stabilisation and the absence of mass unemploy.ment, created a situation in which the working class was able to make steady gains in its standard of tiving through the trade unions. There arose therefore, a mood of cautious opitmism which spilt over into the educational question, on which the working class movement had suffered an earlier defeat in the !920’s. As a result of this optimism, the working class, through a struggle in the unions, and more especialy in the constituency Labour Party organisations, strived to create an educational structure through which their sons and daughters could have greater individual occupational mobility than they themselves had experienced in the past. This tactic was expressed under the slogan of ‘equality of opprtunity’ in education. On the other side, the more farsighted members of the ruling class were not unsympathetic to organisational changes in secondary education to allow access to higher education for larger numbers of working class pupils. The technical schools, which were intended to meet the demand for skilled engineers, technicians and so forth, never accounted for more than 5% of the secondary school population at any time since they were created by the 1944 Education Act. The grammar schools had conspicuously failed to create the number of science and other entrants required for the univessity expansion of the Sixties. To some members of the industrial bourgeoisie, the grammar schools were anachronisms, hangovers from the period in which British capitalism, top-heavy with financial operations, required thousands of clerkly employees. Several Government Reports discovered pools of ‘wasted ability’’ languishing in the secondary moderns and urged reform. The tripartite system :tself had always been subject to a certain degree of erosion — in the late Forties for example, despite Ministry prohibition, many secondary maderns were training their pupils for O Levels; in areas of expanding population or which had suffered heavy wartime damage, the building of segregated schools implied high cost and unnecessary duplication

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But the needs of the post-war economic boom rapidly c2~= °°: conflict with the tripartite system, and a more flexible syste~ 27-2" "< greater upward mobility, became increasingly necessary. Tode.. o7:5ibly half of the schoo! population experience secondary educat. <7 which is non-selective at ll years of age. By a iong process therefore, the ruling class, which in the Thirties hac maintained a system of secondary education premised on the exclusion of the children of the broad masses from white collar, managerial and technical posts, had come to the view that precisely this type of mobility was essential for British capitalism. For its part, the working class believed that by way of organisational! change in education, it had increased its occupational mobility, even if only to a small degree. The Wilson era symbolised this apparent agreement between the classes on the question of education. The ‘white heat of technological revolution’ and ‘equality of opportunity’ seemed to coincide in Wilson’s rhetorical package. But the picture has changed since then. Technological change is a double-edged sword. It places demands on education for new types of skills but is also associated with redundancy and the growth of a permanent pool of unemployed. At the present time therefore, British capital is content to slow down the rate at which selection in secondary education is abolished. The rate of university expansion is falling off, and rationalisation of higher education (e.g. James Report) is under way. Finally of course, the electoral strength of the present Conservative Government has to be maintained if it is to do the job the ruling class expects it to do on the trade unions, and this makes necessary certain concessions to the social base of the Tory Party, a rump which is a vigorous defender of the grammar school. From the point of view of the working class also, conditions now look rather different to those of the mid-Sixties. The idea that equality of educational opportunity leads to better occupational opportunities for individual members of their class, is only credible when conditions on the general economic front appear favourable to social advance. When significant unemployment re-appears in areas like Coventry for the first time since the War, optimism declines. It is also increasingly clear that this is something more than the result of a certain political party being in power, but reflects a deeper crisis in the economy. The constituency Labour organisations no longer hum with debate about comprehensive reform, although the trade unions are now passing resolutions protesting the cuts in school provisions. The chief concern of the working class at the present time is with the independence of the unions from the state, wage battles, prices, redundancies and the effects of the EEC. Reflecting this turn, the Labour Party no longer makes persistant noises on the question, although the completion of the comprehensive reform remains in its programme. What remains of the comprehensive debate within the Labour Party is the property of certain white-collar groups who form the backbone of many of the constituency organisations, and holds little attraction for the broad masses. This qeneralisation remains true despite periodic local battles on a part- 4

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icular Ministry prohibition or on cuts in schoo! expenditure. British secondary education is chaotically uneven. In some areas, the debate is about the horrific practices of sex-educationalists, the significance of common-course studies, the effect of new teaching methods on the standard of literarcy etc., while in others. it is still about the ‘inborn character of intelligence’, ‘protecting standards’ and so on, while in yet other areas attention is concentrated on the physical conditions in slum schools. With some exceptions, these debates do not have a deep at ee coll ee impact on the organisations in which the mass of the workers are at present struggling — by and large the trade unions. Yet with this decline in working class activism on the question of education, teachers themselves are becoming more and more preocoupied with all these various issues. This is clear from both the agendas of the National Union of Teachers conferences, and the rapid growth of Rank & File itself over the last few years. Many more teachers are now prepared to struggle, often in one school or in one borough, on a whole range of issues from expenditure, physical conditions, reorganisation, and victimisation of radical teachers. An expression of this changed relationship is the fact that occassionally in these intense local battles, the forces most easily mobilsed in support of the teachers are the pupi/s, rather than the organisations of the working class.

This is very important. In the Fifties teachers seldom stuck their necks out in this way. Seldom were struggles conducted in the schools themselves, although no doubt cases of this can be found. The most politically conscious teachers were more active in the constituency organisations, where the issue was how to bring about comprehensive reform. To do this it did not appear necessary to struggle in the schools, but to mobilise support via the constituencies and the trade unions for the educational aspects of Labour’s electoral programme. Among the best representatives of this generation were the many Communist Party and Labour Party members who entered the teaching profession via the Emergency Training Scheme during the Forties, and who today occupy leading positions in the NUT. As an organisation, the NUT played a supporting role in this struggle to change the government.

But in regard to teachers as emp/oyees, and therefore to the great mass of teachers, the NUT was a weak trade union and was unable to carry out the economic struggle with much vigour. Only recently, following a severe defeat on the economic front in the early Sixties, has the NUT waged a big fight on wages which involved the great mass of teachers in activity. The strike of 1970, subsequent affiliation to the TUC and the growth in NUT membership, are signs of a new economic militancy.

The previous passivity of the mass of teachers flowed from a number of factors. Along with other white-collar state employees, they had enjoyed relative security in income during the years of massainemployment in the Thirties. But despite the fact that millions of manual workers have since overtaken teachers in their earnings, the great mass of teachers have been unable to drive up their wages to the same extent.

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Partly this flows from their lack of any economic power. The fact that large numbers of teachers are women also plays a role. Women workers suffer from the twin pressures of the family and the indifference of the trade union movement towards them. Strike action by teachers however inevitably disrupts the educational process, and therefore their willingness to engage in strike action is related to their attitudes on this question, The idea! of public service, which is common to many white-collar state employees, implies an underlying identity of interests between the state (in so far as it plays a role in education) and the teachers. This has been reinforced by the extension of the welfare state after the War, a development of key importance in the consciousness and organisations of the working class as a whole. Teachers’ reluctance to fight for improvements in their standard of living is therefore bound up with whether or not they believe that the capitalist state is making a good job of organising the education of the population, and also to what extent the working class itself shares this view. But the present rate of inflation brings the accumulated grievances of teachers to the surface, in spite of these deeper inhibitions. They are forced in practice to break fram the notion that their own interests should be sacrificed to those of the state. Furthermore, this occurs at a time in which there is a deep:crisis of social expenditure. The state is actually dismantling parts of the social services, and allowing decay and impoverishment to go unremedied in the education system. The very conditions in which teachers work are at stake. Other workers in the service of the state are suffering a similar ideological crisis. Local government workers for example, find themselves enforcing an end to state subsidised housing for many working class families by being forced to implement ‘fair’ rents rather than serving the ‘public’ by increasing this subsidisation in line with the promises of welfare capitalism.

A new and important catalyst in this situation has been provided by the many young teachers coming into the profession over the last few years. Coming into the schools from the colleges and the universities, their political formation has taken place, not in the organisations of the labour movement, but in the student movement. They are not therefore so deeply influenced by the old slogans, and they are not so burdened down by the ideological debts of the past. They have not suffered generations of defeat, and the ideology of welfare capitalism is Not so strongly rooted in their consciousness. They are much more impatient of bureaucracy in the trade unions, of the authoritarian ritual of the schools, and much more skeptical of the value of sacrificing direct action in the hope of some future government granting reforms. For these younger teachers, there is no question that teachers suffer from low pay and that welfare capitalism is in essence, a hypocrisy. But with the younger teachers, it is not simply a question of more militancy. A new debate has been created about education itself. This debate has been stimulated by the fact that we are now at the end of a period of structural reform ir primary and secondary education. This 6

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hE RNR has given rise to re-appraisal of the past by the older generation of militants, and the consequences of the reorganisation have provided new problems for the new generation of militants. The old guard see that the coming of comprehensives has not necessarily increased the social and economic prospects of the working class. Of course, many of them will continue to campaign for comprehensives, and the return of the Labour Party to government is seen as the next step along the road.

But at the same time, it has become obvious that ‘equality of opportunity’ has not been achieved by reorganisation and the partial ending of selection at Il years of age. This explains the popularity of writers like Bernstein, whose theories have been used to provide other explanations as to why equality of opportunity is not a reality. Many among the old guard have moved on from fighting for organisational changes to taking up the question of new teaching techniques and ‘humanising’ the teacher-pupil relationship. Politically, this often represents a shift to the right, even though it remains within the old problematic of ‘equality of opportunity’ i.e. how can we end discrimination against children of the working class so that they can all have an equal chance of getting into higher education and from there into white-collar jobs, But many of the best elements among the new generation of militants have broken from this old problematic. They have a different concept of their role in education. They see the reforms in teaching technique made possible by the reorganisation in secondary education (of which more in a moment) as a means of launching an assault on the ‘values’ of society. They wish to see an end to the ‘rat race’. They wish to sever, as ore far as possible, the link between education and occupation rather than reinforce it. This new current is the result of a combination between a general anti-authoritarian and anti-bureaucratic ideology inherited from the student field, and the various material changes in the schools flowing from the comprehensive reorganisation. It is this which has given Rank & File its dynamic. What are these material changes?

The transition from the tripartite system of secondary education to the comprehensive, has very important effects on the schools. The threetier system tried to create a broad one-to-one correspondence between type of school, type of curriculum, and type of occupation. But the comprehensive school breaks down this correspondence in its quest for greater flexibility and upward mobility. Yet the concentration of many social destinies, several curriculums and several layers of teachers, under the one roof creates an immediate pedagogic (not to say administrative) crisis. This pedagogical crisis is important, for it lays part of the material foundation for the type of ideas expressed in Rank & File. To take an example of this crisis. lf the selection at 11 years of age is abolished in a certain area, the type of teaching methods and curriculum, the grading and streaming practices etc, relative to the 9-11 age group of the primary school, are made redundant. The solution adopted is to concentrate grading, streaming and even course differentation further up the age range of the school. In some areas therefore, we discover all-through comprehensives which stream, grade and differentiate their pupils only in the last three years or so of their schooling. The distinction between

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primary and secondary itself breaks down. A plethora of experiments at the level of teaching technique have arisen as a result. One of the most significant developments has been the initiation of common-courses and the break-up of the traditional curriculum in many regions of the school. Of course, the break-up of traditional curricula does not flow so/ely from the crisis of reorganisation. The rapidly changing body of knowledge in capitalist society makes flexibility and adaptability among certain layers of workers, of key importance, since investment in too narrowly specialised categories of labour can be a liability. There has also.-been the need for specific types of labour which involve complex decision making (social workers for example). Finally, within the secondary moderns, experimentation along precisely the same lines has been motivated by other considerations: how to keep the proverbial ‘‘D’’ streams preoccupied with activities which, although having no value on the fabour market, at least prevent the pupils from tearing the school apart. The need for this sort of ‘social engineering’ by no means disappears in the comprehensive, where the ex-patriates from grammar and secondary modern sit side by side under the one roof. But for those teachers most concerned with extending this type of reform, a material contradiction opens up. While it is clearly possible to eliminate grading, streaming and course differentiation from certain regions of the school as a result of reorganisation, it is equally apparent that these things cannot be removed altogether. Indeed, they are only displaced to a point further up the school. The relationship between education and occupation therefore comes into question for these teachers in a way not experienced by the older political elements in the profession. On the one hand, it appears as though it would be possible to sever the link between education and occupation in this or that region of the school, while on the other hand this link is simultaneously strengthened. Those areas of teaching practice immediately ‘liberated’ from occupational considerations become a ‘symbol’ for a new educational principle, one which is opposed to the “rat race’ of the competitive education system. Education, it is said should be a “‘value in itself’, not a functional requirement of occupation. Between ‘exploratory learning’ and ‘expository teaching’, a new debate about educational technique which has political overtones, has arisen. It iszinteresting to note another side to this. One of the cardinal features of the education system in Britain has been the exclusion of politics and contemporary social life from the school curriculum. In those countries where bourgeois political parties need to do everything possible to broaden their social and political base, party-political rituals are often introduced into the schools. In Britain this has not been the case, although big battles were once fought by the labour movement over the principle of church-control of education. Neither political ritual, nor contemporary social life in the schools: this has been a silent social pact between the classes in Britain. But the new ‘‘exploratory learning’ techniques and a topic-orientated curriculum, have resulted

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in a big intrusion of the contemporary world into the schools. All manner of social, sexual, racial and political questions now form the subject-matter of topics and projects in many schools. For traditional liberalism, the world is simply material on which the teeth of ‘reason’ are cut and over which reason arbitrates in non-partisan fashion. But this neutrality is impossible to sustain in the school. The fact that many young teachers are forced in practice to take up partisan positions ona ; whole range of social questions, is a sign of a very dangerous process for the ruling class, especially in the present period of intensified class struggle in British society. On the other side the ruling class is not itself i forced to break the old rules—as shown by the recent Tory Party ‘Forums’ for sixth-form in marginal constituencies.

Of course, these processes drive only a small minority to take radical positions, and this minority is by and large drawn from the new members of the profession, Vast masses of teachers however do not show any dramatic political signs of having been affected by these changes, although many older teachers experience insecurities of status as a result of them. Coupled with the administrative problems of large compresensives, this creates a situation in which there is often no consensus in the school staff room on any issue whatsoever, and a breakdown of administration is common in many schools.

The effects of reorganisation on the pupils is equally important. Although there was some change in the Twenties and Thirties, the structure of secondary education was essentially simple in this period. The feepaying grammar schools taught what was then called ‘secondary’ education (refer to a type of education rather than an age group) to children of many ages from those social backgrounds which enabled parents to finance them privately. On the other hand, the state provided universal ‘elementary’ education for the children of the broad masses up to 13 or 14 years of age. The classical curriculum as well as the internal regime of the grammar school, were related to the requirements of state and company administration, bureaucratic posts of one kind or ariother, The ‘elementary’ schools on the other hand taught an elementary curriculum of literacy, numeracy and sometimes simple technical skills, and the regime in these schools was extremely severe. This arose from both the general conditions of mass education carried out with low expenditure, and the fact that in the last quarter of the nineteenth century the board school teacher was paid on the basis of how many half-starved pupils attended school and were passed as literate and numerate by the travelling Inspectors.

The socialist movement before the First World War had fought for the ‘common school’ in which al! pupils would have equal education regardless of social background, and for the extension of technical education in the board schools and freelance institutes which sprang up in areas such as the Midlands. The depression years put an end to the first of these hopes, and the b/-‘partite system remained intact. Nonetheless, the bourgeoisie at the same time decided to allow a small number of working class pupils into the grammar schools while technical education more or less stagnated. If the working class wanted ‘secondary’ education let )

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them fight among themselves for a few miserable scholarship places in the grammar schools. Administrative measures (the scholarship system) were installed for this purpose. The economic growth which began once again in the later Thirties and continued to the tate Sixties, brought about the introduction of selection at 11, the birth of a new school known as ‘technical’, and brought the grammar schools into the overall state system. The need for new categories of skilled labour in this period finally lead to the installation of a formidable system of mobility channels both between schools and within each category of school. The comprehensive school represents a further rationalisation and consolidation of the entire education system into one integrated competitive ladder. From a historical and theoretical point of view there is little difference in principle between an education system organised around the idea of physical segregation and one organised around the idea of segregation through competition. But there is a difference as far as the consciousness of the pupils is concerned. For the pupils of the old elementary school, the schoo! was simply a prison and one’s experience in school seemed to alter social destiny very little. But the appearance of the single ascending competitive ladder, making it seem possible for all pupils to travel from one type of school to another (and to different levels within the one school )--this process creates an important feature of the pupils’ consciousness. On the one hand, the state system announces to the pupils the possibility of all pupils acquiring a full and rounded education and therefore an ‘open’ social destiny; yet on the other hand, the competitive system has been designed to ensure precisely the opposite effect—a division between intellectual and manual training and success-failure differentiation both between these categories and within these categories as well. This contradiction has come to increasingly govern the way in which pupils relate to their educational circumstances and indeed through them to the world in general. From the point of view of the ruling class, who are responsible for financing education, grading, streaming and examinations provide amore or less efficient complex of selection mechanisms through which it is possible to achieve the correct ‘spread’ of social expenditure. After all, the creation of a scientist and the creation of a manual worker require different magnitudes of capital expenditure from the ruling class. They are prepared to invest no more and no less than is strietly necessary for the reproduction of these different labour powers, and therefore the right number of pupils have to be nominated to receive these different levels of expenditure. Competition within the entire school population is the best means of achieving this, given that it is impossible today for the ruling class to provide sufficient numbers of intellectual workers from its own ranks (of course this competition will never be perfect competition for a whole variety of reasons). It is this contradiction between what the education system announces and proclaims and what its material reality insists, which generates the tremendous anger and frustration of the working class youth in the 10

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schools. Post-war working class youth has not been able to find an expression for this by joining the traditional organisations of the working class—either the social-democracy or ¢he bureaucratised trade unions. The gang culture of urban youth has to be seen against this background (although not reduced to it). But alt the more recent changes going on in the schools which we have just noted, provide a new framework in which this revolt can more easily find an organised ae CTI expression within the schools themselves. The breakdown in administration, the rise of new pedagogic principles which are incompatible with rigid authority, and the lack of any clearly defined ethos within the comprehensive, all create a framework in which organisation and expression can take place more easily. The beginnings of organisation among school pupils have been made by the SAU and the NUS.

Struggles against discipline, political repression, school uniform and so on, have emerged.

This development takes place, it should be remembered, against a background of big social battles going on between the unions and government, in which the parents of many pupils are obviously involved. The recent pupil strikes, in which pupils from grammar, secondary modern and comprehensive schools, participated, iNustrate the influence of the student movemeiit on the one hand (transmitted via the sixth forms) and the imprint of the workers movement on the other. Just asimportant are those scattered struggles undertaken by pupils in support of victimised teachers. These movements have laid the material foundations for future struggles by both teachers anceps and pupils against the authorities, and even solidarity between the school population and workers. This becomes even more likely when it is remembered that the high rate of youth unemployment has its effects within the schools. The impossibility of school-| eavers finding work further undermines the claims of the schools. The raising of the school leaving age by the present government in order to evade the problem of youth unemployment financially, is a cynically obvious move, which at the same time ensures that this explosive material explodes in the school and not the labour exchange.

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There are very favourable circumstances at present for the growth of Rank & File in the NUT. On the wages front the NUT has been through a period of weakness, while the most conscious and politicised elements conducted the bulk of their activity in the constituency parties. These twin factors created a low level of rank and file activity in the union. The present turn in the situation—the decline of constituency organisation as the centre of political activity for the working class, the growth of economic militancy among state employees, and the changing social composition of the membership—all this has meant a rebirth of rank and file activity. Rank & File therefore expresses the spontaneous needs of the most active teachers in the union and creates preconditions for struggle against a leadership which has been free from rank and file pressure for a whole period. Many of the best elements in the profession today are organised in Rank & File. Like all movements among teachers, R.&.F. expresses the dual character of teachers both as emp/oyees and educators. \t takes up positions, like NUT itself, on issues relating to wages and conditions as well as general educational issues. The rationale for Rank & File’s existence must be to change the policies and leadership of the NUT in both these respects. The question is however what sort of programme and policies should the NUT have? This can only be answered by asking ourselves another question: What role can teachers play in the struggle for socialism in the present political and economic circumstances? The present perspectives of R.&.F. actually give several different answers to this question, answers which tend to tug and pull in different directions. Each of them represent different social forces and different political ideologies, and each of them aspire to give the NUT a dominant strategic line. But in our view none of them provide a correct answer to the question or seriously deal with the problems involved in doing so. Each of them seizes on some partial aspect of the relationship between teachers and society as a whole and present this in a confused and distorted form. What are these answers and political ideologies underlying them? The first answer to the question is provided by the ‘trade unionist’ wing. The working class is organised in trade unions, teachers are organised in trade unions. Therefore, more militant trade unionism among teachers on wages and conditions will win teachers to the working class movement by creating a sense of solidarity in parallel struggle. Of course, even were 12

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this view definitively correct (after all, the trade union struggle of the manual workers can just as well be experienced by teachers as a threat because they are unable to keep up with manual workers and the inflation they appear to cause), this is hardly an adequate answer to a political question, since it reduces the working class to one of its organisations of struggle. ‘“‘Working class struggle’’ comes to denote ‘’trade union struggle’’.

This line is inadequate as an answer to the question. !t simply leaves out of account the dual character of teachers as both educators and employees. com It forgets that teachers relate to the working class movement just as much through their struggles on educational issues and their ideological and political outlook on these matters, as they do when struggling on the sort of things which the working class happens to be preoccupied with at the present time. This tendency thinks of an ‘alliance’ between teachers and the working class in terms of physical masses marching side by side, and not in political terms. The fact is that there is a/ready a political alliance between the most active section of teachers and the working class. But it is based on social-democratic ideas, objectives and methods of struggle.

The problem therefore is to change the political character of this alliance.

Of course, additional links with the trade unions, mutual solidarity and parallel economic struggle are extremely important, perhaps even the dominant element at the present time given the pay freeze, the Industrial Relations Act, etc. But this in no way constitutes a strategy for Rank & File. This line also has certain dangers for R.&.F. because some individuals in the ‘trade unionist’ wing clearly experience a certain hostility to the debate about educational questions going on in R.&.F., seeing this as a ‘diversion’ from the main business of getting on with the ‘struggle’ (in the Ss BR union}, On the other extreme, there is the libertarian answer to our central problem. The libertarian element situates itself very firmly within the debate about the educational issues. For them, the conditioning factor if not the actual cause of problems in education, are the relations of authority within the schools, specifically the relationship between the Headmaster and the staff, and the staff and pupils. An authoritarian relationship between pupil and teacher, a ‘dictatorial’ Head, schoo! discipline, regimentation of pupils, repression of spontaneity—this complex of observations about the schools serves as an explanation of the educational malaise under capitalism. This can be observed for example in the pamphlet Democracy in Schools, published by R.&.F., where the educational problem is seen as a product of the relations of authority within the school. Hence the popularity of the idea that if these relations of authority could be changed (the administrations of the school ‘democratised’), education itself would ‘improve’ because the conditions under which education takes place under capitalism are understood merely in terms of the relations of authority. These ideas aresthe product of a spontaneous world view which has its origins in the historical development of twentieth century society: the ideological impasse of the *Footnote: As such these ideas are not specific to teachers, but are a general ; characteristic of a world wide radicalisation among the youth since the mid-sixties. 13

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workers movement, trapped between monopoly capitalism and imperialism on the one hand and the stalinist degeneration of the workers states on the other.” Both of these societies have superficially similar features: bureaucracy, authoritarianism etc. Hence, individuals within this new layer feel they are to struggle not for socialism but for ‘democracy in society’ (see opening pages of Democracy in Schools). The struggle to introduce ‘democracy’ in the schools is seen within this strategic perspective of making society more ‘democratic’, and the new pedagogical principles are seen as equally instrumental in changing the ‘values’ and ‘attitudes’ of society in this direction. Fighting for more democracy in society’ is not at all the same thing as the socialist revolution of course. Although not hardened out as yet into a predominant strategy, the tendency of R.&.F. is in the direction of fighting for ‘more democracy’ within the framework of capitalist society and organising its struggle on this perspective rather than the class struggle for socialism.

This wing does not draw any ‘explicit relationship between itself and the struggle of the working class. Nonetheless, various answers to our questians have been given which attempt to paper over this problem. This has been done by members of the International Socialism group who have considerable influence in R.&.F. These answers are very curious, and this is bound to be the case given the way in which |S have adapted themselves to this political current—but more of this later on. In the pamphlet, Democracy in Schools, a number of remarks are made for example to the effect that if schools could be turned into ‘democratic communities’, this would give the future generation of workers a more anti-bureaucratic consciousness. This would conflict with the realities of capitalist society and generate a revolutionary struggle. This view is put forward in the context of a discussion in the pamphlet of a speech of Mr. Short which sounded remarkably like the sort of things which the authors of the pamphlet were saying about having a more democratic society; the authors protest that ‘real’ democracy in schools would result in the parliamentary system, to which Mr. Short is so attached, being swept away! Underlying this there is a certain analysis of the character of education, The various features of the school are explained in terms of an alleged ‘need’ of the capitalists to have ‘docile’ workers who don’t cause much trouble to the bosses. The schools are therefore institutions which discipline the workers before they go into the factories. A variant of the argument is that the content of education itself is something called ‘bourgeois ideology’, and the education system little more than a means by which ‘middle-class ideas’ are pushed down the throats of ‘working class’ pupils. The general idea underlying this whole mode of arugmentation is that the working class can be made more militant, even revolutionary, as a result of changes in the relations of authority within the schools.

We will have to deal with these ideas in more detail later on because although they represent a refreshing break from social-democratic sterilities about occupation, they are incorrect. As a strategic line for R.&.F. they treat only one side of the picture—teachers’ role as educators. But as far as their economic struggle is concerned, it says very 14

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little. Indeed, the scheme for our democratic community in the school put forward in the pamphlet actually compromises these struggles as we will show. But even in relation to the educational questions which it considers to be its property, the libertarian current often takes up a position of childish leftism. In so far as it takés on an overtly political colouration, the only ideas readily available are those which regard education as ‘really’ ‘middle-class’ or ‘really ‘ideology’. This leads it to reject the historical gains made by the labour movement in education, and can even lead to the attitude that teachers are ‘really’ ‘agents of the ruling class’ (this is actually put forward in an IS document written by Chanie Rosenberg for the Birmingham R.&.F. conference in the Spring of 1972).

These ideas simply reinforce the prejudices of the ‘free’—schoolers and induce a guilty paralysis in those teachers remaining in the state system.

Of course, the NUT should defend those free schools which exist in so far as they are subject to repression by the state, but it should not put forward the idea of ‘free’ schools, since this amounts in practice to an evasion of the problems facing the vast majority of the school population. es NEN gi ae sncrintnnie es = ‘Free’ schools do not constitute a strategic line for the NUT, much less give an answer to the problems we have posed.

The debate about ‘free’ schools illustrates the weaknesses of libertarian methodology. Its central flaw lies in reducing the entire system of social relationships in the education system to one of its aspects: the relations of authority between Head, teachers and pupils. The ideal conditions under which generous educational ideals can be put into practice can therefore only be created by destroying these relations of authority. From this position several paths of development are possible.

The one which is dominant in R.&.F. at the moment is the view that by ‘democratising’ the authority relationships some sort of improvement in education will take place. The flip side of this coin is the view that this is not possible and ‘humanised’ conditions for educational activity can only be created outside the state system—the ‘free’ schools. Both of these views are incorrect. We shall examine the first in detail in a moment.

As far as ‘free’ schools are concerned however, it must surely be clear that the general social conditions under which education takes place outside the state system are not radically different from those within the state system; The significance of the educational process for the pupils is Not governed by whether it occurs under ‘humanised’ conditions or not, but the fact that it is bound up with social destiny. Clearly the social destiny of those educated within the free schools is just as much the key factor determining their wortd outlook (and therefore the way they relate to their education) as it is in the state school. In other words pupils and teachers cannot escape the generalised social relations of capitalism, even though they may escape some of their authoritarian features.

In addition to these two currents in R.&.F., it is possible to find a sprinkling of those who believe in the need to reform education but who protest that this has nothing to do with politics at all. They see increases in expenditure, end of selection at !I years of age, new teaching techniques and so on, as simply ‘good things’ in themselves. Having no 15

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conscious relation to politics, educational liberals do not propose any strategy for implementing these thing s other than changing (bourgeois) ‘public opinion’—the opinions of teachers, Heads, politicians, psychologists etc. Many of the new ideas they propose and advocate are of course extremely valuable in themselves. The ‘new mathematics’ for example offers a much easier way of teaching mathematics, by relying on physical sense of relationships between objects rather than the memorisation of formulae. However it is impossible to teach the entire school population equally and effectively for reasons which are precisely to do with politics. Finally, there is a distinct social-democratic current in Rank & File which represents the scrt of political alliance between teachers and the working class which has been dominant in the past. The social-democratic tactic of reforming education in order to increase the occupational prospects of individual members of the working class, has ‘a contradictory political meaning. It comes to the surface among teachers because it corresponds to the actual practice of the working class movement in relation to education during those historical periods when it has been strongly organised—from the late 1890's to the early 1920’s and from the end of World War Two to. the late Sixties. The struggle of the great mass of the working class for a unified system of free comprehensive education (the common school as it was once called), was in one sense, an extension of the principles governing struggle on the economic front. This struggle has been conducted sector by sector, trade by trade and region by region. The mass of workers saw the fight in education in similar terms, particularly since the War: in order that their individual offspring could get into those trades, sectors or regions which had better conditions for the sale of labour power than their own. Equality of educational opportunity meant the opportunity for individuals to travel up the occupational scale. The social-democratic vanguard of the working class was therefore fighting for something which was a contradiction in terms from a formal point of view. Nonetheless, these struggles are contradictory because the implicit corollary of a unified education system is the abolition of those privileged and private sectors of education which were (and are) the exclusive preserve of the ruling classes. This fight therefore took on the character of an overt struggle against some of the rights which the ruling class reserved for itself, such as the right to educate its children in the lavish way it does without reference to the state or to society in general. This fight in education therefore took on a very overt class meaning and to this extent a unifying agent on the working class. This struggle has in the past taken on even revolutionary overtones, for it represents an attack on the privileges of the ruling class and therefore its structural position in society in a way that the trade union struggle seldom does. This overall conflict between the classes on the educational terrain provides the material basis for the millenarian vision of education under socialism which the intellectuals of the labour movement (prior to the First World War especiatly) have held: in so far as teachers have allied themselves with the working class movement in the past therefore, they have retained these visions (in a more shadowy form) despite the ups and downs 16

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ermine ayanmpppemnmanlart:’ iT in the involvement and interest of the working class in the educational question.

At the present time however, the socia!-democratic current is suffering a crisis of forces for the reasons dutlined in Chapter One. The old objectives remain: ‘a vast increase in educational expenditure’, abolition of all priveleged sectors and the creation of compulsory comprehensive education for all’ (from the ‘immediate aims’ of the present programme of R.&.F.) It has no social forces of sufficient weight to achieve this vision, once the working class, who adopted these aims for their own reasons, diverts its attention to other fronts. This current can therefore propose no strategy for realising these ‘immediate aims’. Their millenarian content has been inherited by the libertarian wing of the teaching profession. The shell of the social-democratic forces among teachers can propose little more at the present time than the return of a labour adgninistration pledged to fulfil the old dreams. in so far as thse elements exist, and in so far as they are replensihed by the Tory bashing campaigns of organisations like International Socialism, the spontaneous strategy which they adopt hoids considerable dangers for R.&.F. For example, the return of a Labour administration may well make it easier to push forward a few more steps in the direction of completing the comprehensive revolution, improving school buildings etc. On the other hand, one of the first moves of a new Labour administration will be to try to get a voluntary incomes policy with the trade unions. Since this social-democratic current has no mass base for its struggle in education, it inevitably ties itself to the labour bureaucracies.

The return of Labour may mean a temporary paralysis of the militants in the unions, cowed by the argument that to push forward with wage claims and defy the voluntary policy would bring down the government and result in the return of the dreaded Tories. In the NUT, this debate could take a specific form: to push ahead with salary increases when the new Labour government is being kind enough to throw a few sops of educational reform, would be treache the right wing will argue. Of course from the point of . view of the class struggle there is no necessary contradiction between these things. The confusion might arise however from the fact that for socialdemocratic ideology, the key precondition for social advance of any Kind is to change the government because power lies in parliament and not the working class. Having changed the government, the superiority of the ‘political’ struggle (for comprehensives) over the ‘economic’ struggle (in the unions) turns into an argument for tying the organisations of the working class more closely to the government and therefore to the bourgeois state. One of the tasks of R.&.F. in the coming period must be to recase its arguments in favour of comprehensives and educational reform on a non-social-democratic basis: that is on grounds relating to the c/ass struggle not on the grounds that this will lead to changes in occupational opportunity for the working class. We can return to resolve this question in the final chapters of the pamphlet.

The absence of any correct overall framework in which all the various struggles of teachers (and pupils) can be placed, leaves R.&.F. victim to the constant struggle between these various currents. At the present time, the 17

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libertarian wing is dominant, and the existing programme of R.&.F. shows a marked tendency to motivate all its various demands for education rereform in educational terms rather than from an overall conception of the class struggle. As a consequence, the number one demand is for ‘control of the schooi to be in the hands of staff, pupils, parents, local community organisations and the local Education Authority’. We must now see where this would lead R.&.F.

18

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The fibertarian current defines itself very clearly in the opening lines of Democracy in Schools.

True democracy means the real involvement of all the members of a community in all the decisions that affect the community. And by real involvement we do not simply mean the right to vote but the right to participate in an informed way during all stages of discussion and to have the absolute certainty that once a decision is made it will be carried out promptly and efficiently by those entrusted by the community with this responsibility.

This pamphiet is concerned with precisely this alternative in one area of society—in our schools. Although we are aware that such a change cannot be considered in isolation from changes in society as a whole, we believe that our demands and changes in attitude that will arise from the struggle to implement them, will form a part of the struggle for democracy in society........ This current is fighting for ‘democracy in society’, and proposing precise means for implementing it in our schools as part of their struggle. Well let us see where this takes us.

The pamphlet locates the immediate if not the main enemy in the education system as the Headmaster in the school. The pamphlet notes, correctly, that he has very extensive powers over teachers, pupils and other workers in the school: powers to fire teachers, exclude pupils from the school, determine curriculum,carry out punishment, dictate this or that teaching method and so on. These powers are described as ‘dictatorial’ and the Head the ‘last vestiges of the idea of absolute monarchy’. The pamphlet then goes on to suggest he be deposed. But this immediately raises the problem of what we are going to put into his place. The authors propose that the vacuum be filled by a new reformed governing body, to which the Head will be electorally responsible. True to their promise to make ‘detailed organisational proposals for our schools’, the authors construct the following scheme. In broad outline, it seems that parents, pupils, teachers and the Local Education Authorities are each to have their own representatives {in the first three cases elected from Councils) on the governing body. The Governing Body is to be renovated so that each of the three councils, ‘basic electoral bodies of the school’, are represented alongside the LEA. In order to make this four-party government ‘democratic’:

We recommend therefore that the three associations and represen- 19

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tatives of the LEA shall have numerically equal representation (our emphasis) on the Governing Body. 25% representation on the Governing Body, and therefore (presumably) 25% of the vote. The Headmaster has been deprived of all legislative rights which are passed to the reformed Governing Body:

There can be no half-way house on policy-making; either it is the responsibility of the Head, as at present, or it is transferred to Constituent Associations of the Governing Body, of which the Staff Council is one. The job of the various Councils is to make ‘recommendations’ to the Governing Body whose representatives then collectively make the final decisions. Neither the Head nor the LEA can be the legislative body in the schools any longer since the Head has no power at ali and the LEA have only 25% of the power in each of the schools in their area. But then a curious thing happens in the argument:

The essential ingredient for democratic control is that the major recommendations of staff concerning organisation, curriculum and finance should be taken by the staff as a whole, within the frame- ‘work laid down by the Governing Body, the LEA and national educational policy. (p.11) Now this is a bit puzzling. On the one hand, the LEA have 25% of the votes, yettheyretain the right to Jay down the ‘framework’ within which al! decisions and recommendations must be made! Furthermore, a fifth party has entered in to the picture unobtrusively, and this party does not seem to have any representatives at all on the democratic Governing Body: ‘national educational policy’. But who determines this? Why, the Government. What is actually being proposed, therefore, is that parents, teachers and pupils should elect representatives who will collectively implement the national educational policy laid down by the Government and the LEA, a policy over which teachers have no ‘democratic control’ at all. Well, couldn‘t we change the Governfment every five years by voting it out? But the authors don’t see this as ‘democracy’ at all, As they say, they want ‘not simply the right to vote, but the right to participate in an informed way during all stages of discussion’. Could this describe the relationship between the DES and the Cabinet in bourgeois society? Clearly, there is something phoney about this scheme. The authors have made a big mistake here. Possibly their error flows from laying so much stress on the Head's activities being arbitary. Of course if one makes facetious, though colourful, parallels between Heads and Monarchs, this notion could easily result. But in fact the Head is no more than an extension of the state bureaucracy. He is directly responsible to it. He may appear to be arbitary in his actions, but this is perhaps because detailed policy is not laid down for every aspect of school life by the DES, or because the administrative chaos of the school is so intense. But he is no less an extension of the state bureaucracy for that. Eliminating the Head in no way alters the functions which the Head previously discharged. Any new body which took his place would carry out the same functions and have the same responsibilities. Any new body would in fact be re- 20

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sponsible to the same state bureaucracy. Our authors implictly admit this when they talk about recommendations being within national educational policy. The collective which is to replace the Head would therefore differ in no essential way from the Head themself, since they would occupy the same social relationship to the state.

The notion that the LEA could ever consent to having a mere 25% of the power by sitting on our reformed Governing Body is in curious contradiction with what our authors say about the LEAs:

As we have said, schools are a reflection(?) of society. The LEA is the agency which translates this reflection into policies. As selection and examination are necessary in our present society, to sift out those few who will ‘make it’ this is reflected through the policies of the LEA. As society's priorities are so distorted as to place defence on a par with education, and profit above need, this too must be reflected, and is, in the shoestring budgeting forced on LEAs. As society is hierarchical, the LEA will almost always uphold the hierarchy in schools, in siding with the Head teacher against those who fight for democracy.

Behind the tortured prose, the authors have hit a snag. It is easy to eliminate Headmasters, in theory at least, and replace him with a clique of representatives. But this new body is still faced with the problem of its relationship to the LEA. Initially the authors tried to reassure us on this by implying the LEA only had 25% of the votes. But when the authors take a closer look at it, it is perfectly clear to them that the LEA is an agent of ‘society's priorities’, and it is within these priorities that our recommendations must be made. This is a bit disappointing since we have been led to believe that we were going to get some power by reforming the Governing Body, Not only is the Head an instrument of the LEA, the LEA itself is the instrument of further and further removed levels of the state bureaucracy. In this light, the Head’s decisions are no more arbitary than those of the LEA, and the LEA no more ‘dictatorial’ than the Head.

Rather, their decisions flow from national policy which is based on the priorities of bourgeois society, which these reforms do nothing to change.

This is all very disappointing so our authors try to reassure us in another way: EWA LO AMIE Eo ay A more democratic society would have LEAs, that reflected very different policies. In our fight for democracy we must therefore understand the limitations imposed on us by the system and work to change that as well.

Ah! lf we fight for more democracy in society, i.e. struggle elsewhere, then the po/icy priorities of the state bureaucracy will change. Presumably once LEAs have had their policies changed by the ‘democratic’ renewal of society, all will be well. This is a very convenient arguiment. Because then you see, it wouldn't matter if the LEA had more power than everybody else on the Governing Body, because their policies and ours will correspond anyway! With logic like this we must look a bit more carefully at what our authors are offering us with their ‘democracy’, While the authors are busy in the ‘elsewhere’ introducing more democracy in 21

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society, and thereby through some unexplained process changing the policies of the LEA, let us see what happens in the meantime to our teachers sitting on the new Governing Body. Our friends are proposing that we take coporate legal responsibility (it must be all or nothing) for the schools, but nevertheless within the framework laid down by the Government and the LEA’ We are now to administer the prevailing poticies of the government. But what happens if we disagree with any given policy? We could ‘recommend’ of course that this or that policy not be implemented. But this would be out of order, having accepted, as a condition of our democratic scheme, to make recommendations within the national policy. !t would then be our very own representatives who implement national policy. It is we who would have to implement the cuts in school milk, justify the Government’s decisions on local reorganisation schemes, etc. recommending on which heads a given burden should fall. Of course, looked at in this way, it is perfectly clear under what conditions the LEA wou/d agree to have 25% of the votes: That teachers had been stupid enough to fall for all this talk about democracy and agreed to help the LEA implement unpopular policies, thus shifting the onus of responsibility away from the LEA to the teachers themselves. There would be no great risk in this for the LEA since 25% of the votes would not represent their real power in any case, as they |aydown the ‘framework’. Now, except for Labour MPs and union bureaucrats, it is logically impossible both to ‘mp/ement and oppose a policy. This means that our democratic power structure could only survive when we were obeying state policy, but we would have to abandon it altogether when we wanted to oppose that policy. Or to put it another way, we can only have our democratic school, ad defined by our authors, on condition that we agree to state policies. Put more bluntly still, this means we can only have our scheme if we agree to be the lackeys of the state and government. The minute we are asked to take responsibility for controversial, i.e. significant, decisions, we would have to abandon the whole business and organise seperately, possibly building alliances of teachers, pupils, parents and workers against the LEA, Ministry of Education and the Government.

In practice this scheme would mean that if we wanted to oppose national policy we could only do this outside the.schools themselves. It would be entirely undemocratic to calla strike in the school for example in opposition to the Government or the LEA. Having fought to introduce more ‘democracy’ into the schools, we now find that we can only exercise our ‘democratic right’ to oppose the new government outside the school, and the more forces, such as pupils, parents and others whose representatives became legally and corporately responsible alongside us, the fewer and fewer forces would there be to mobilise for struggle. This is the logic of any participation scheme under capitalism, whether in factory or school. It a/ways result in a situation where the representatives of the masses implement and window dress the policies of the 22

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employers and the state under the hypocritical mask of ‘democracy’, the common interests of the community and so on.

Not satisfied with having eliminated our right to fight the state in the aemae schools, the authors then go on to emasculate the trade unions. On page 2l:

We do not see in our proposals any suggestion of a diminution of the roie of the NUT within schools. There will be a continuing and increasing need for struggle to defend and improve the working conditions of teachers and children.

Nor do we see the Union abdicating its role in determining national and local conditions of employment—indeed we believe this role should be extended. It must also be prepared to support members in schools where Staff Councils take decisions contrary to union policy (e.g. compulsory dinner duty).

The authors seem to be saying that if the Staff Council takes decisions about working conditions with which we don’t agree we must take it to the Union. But who is ‘we’ in this context? If ‘we’ are the minority on a certain issue—an issue already decided by the majority of the Staff Council —then the only role the Union plays fere is in fighting on behalf of minorities against the majority wishes of its membership, which have already been expressed on the democratic staff council. The union is therefore fighting against the decisions its own members take. Union members on the Staff Council! are also to make recommendations about which of their members are to be fired. What a tangle! And how could it be otherwise once you sacrifice the principle of the independence of workers organisations from the state upon which an effective trade union practice is based? To take it to its final absurd conclusion, to whom does the Union appeal on behalf of its minority? Why, to the LEA!

The union would then have to call on the LEA to reverse decisions which the majority of its own members were asking the LEA to help implement! Maybe this is not unlike the present situation. But to move on.

The disastrous character of this scheme could be endlessly documented.

For example, if it is national educational policy to sack militants, sex educationalists and communists from the schools, and if—horror —local parents decided this was the correct policy, the ‘democratic’ Governing Body would have to endorse this policy. Little further comment is necessary at this point. But an even more pernicious idea is put forward by the writers. In the section on the Staff Council we are told that nonteaching workers in the schools should have their own ‘sub-committees’ of the Staff Council, ‘because their work situation is vitally affected by educational and organisational decisions of the staff council’. The hours ar:d conditions of non-teaching workers are not to be decided any longer by. management ( we are now 25% our own managers) but by the decisions of the Staff Council taken in accordance with educational criteria. In other words teachers are now going to dictate to nonteaching workers in accordance with their own, educational and professional, conveniences. This is not the best way to make R.&.F. popular in the trade union movement. The concept of class struggle and class 23

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solidarity has disappeared altogether. Finally, the scheme is not at al! unfavourable to the Government, specially at the present time. Teachers could be made to appear responsible for the worsening conditions of the schools: they could save the government money by administering the schools for tittle or no extra cost; and deprive us of the right to struggle in the schools, leaving only the lobbies of Parliament open to us, where of course all politics is supposed to occur in bourgeois society. One of the great dangers of the democracy scheme in the present circumstances is that with the return of Labour, there will be an extension of this type of collaboration, and R.&.F. will find itself proclaiming it ‘progressive’. What reasons do the authors give for advocating the scheme? What analysis of education underlies their proposals? This is not spelt out in the pamphlet. Indeed there is little serious analysis of anything at all, but the authors do hint at various gri@Yances they think their scheme might resolve and they couch these grievances in terms which suggest an implicit analysis. For example:

Many teachers arrive at school accepting that they will not be expected topjay a part in the running of the school; they feel no involvement and eventually do not even (apparentiy) wish to take part, especially if they feel that anything they have to say will have no impact anyway.

In an educational community where the emphasis should be on positive co-operation, such a situation is disastrous...... veveee and the heavy weight of authority which daily cramps our educational ideals and violates our sensibilities, encourage rebellion against our undemocratic environment. This may be a good descrption of the subjective experience of a certain layer of teachers. But the implicit assumptions in these passages are totally inadequate to the task of developing a strategy. For example, is it the ‘authority’ of the Head which cramps the educational ideals of teachers? This might appear to be the case, but is it really true? Furthermore, the character of these ‘ideals’ is simply taken for granted without any analysis of the premises on which these ideals are based. The massive reorganisation of secondary education over the last few years does of course create a crisis of the level of teaching technique which we have already sketched. For many teachers the task of changing these techniques is seen as a means of fulfilling their (often ill-defined) ideals. From another point of view, this struggle amounts to little more than clearing up the anomolies and resolving the irregularities left behind by bourgeois reorganisation. The material practice of resolving these anomolies does of course give rise to the notion that it is possible to remove grading, streaming, and traditional curricula altogether from the schools. But it is simultaneously apparent that this does not take place, rather the same essentials reappear in a more concentrated form in other regions of the schoo!. Who is reponsible? As a result of this contradiction, various spontaneous confusions are made in order to find a way out. The most readily available confusion 24

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is that made between the entire complex of social relationships of the school and the few individuals in authority who are their agents. It is the ‘dictatorial’ Head who is responsible for the evils of the education system, the failure to eliminate grading, streaming and so forth from the school. Only by destroying these relations of authority will it be possible to put into effect an educational technique freed from occupational considerations. Such are the conclusions flowing from this line of thought. But of course, this view flatly contradicts experience. In some schools, Heads are the most progressive figures in matters relating to educational methods, and they may often have to conduct a fight against ‘backward’ teachers. This is implicitly recognised by our authors:

In spheres peripheral to the power structure and unlikely by themselves to rock it, such as teaching method, occasionally curriculim content, or (powerless) school councils, a progressive Head might endeavour to practice ideals he held as a teacher and will consult with the staff. But in matters directly affecting the power structure, heads almost without exception approach any murmur of discontent from below with fear and extreme caution. In this passage the authors inadvertently make a distinction between the position of the Head as an extension of the state bureaucracy, (the guardian of the ‘power structure’) and his relationship to the debate about education, to which it seems his attitude can vary. Once this distinction is made, the previous argument of the authors falls apart. For it seems that it is not necessary at all to change ‘the power structure’ in order for the ‘progressive’ teachers to win the debate about how teaching should be carried out. It also follows from this that It is not at all necessary to change the ‘legal position of the Head’ and introduce ‘democracy’ in order to win a battle which has general social dimensions. After all even a successful fight over the ‘power structure’ would still leave the task of implementing new teaching techniques unresolved. Teachers would still have to convince LEAs, parents, government departments etc. of their ideas. The relationships of authority are therefore not the key to this problem of new teaching technique. Furthermore, even the application of ‘progressive ideas’ is no guarantee that the ‘educational ideals’ of teachers will be fulfilled. The ‘educational apathy’ of the pupiis, upon which our authors touch in the pamphlet, is not primarily the result of . ‘bad’ teaching methods. Such an explanation leaves out of account the way in which the pupils re/ate to the educational process. This sort of explanation is an answer to a question the teacher asks of his activity, a question which has an ideological basis: ‘Why is it that despite my efforts, these pupils will not learn, or not learn equally?’ For some, the answer is ready-made: sore pupils are ‘naturally’ more competent than others. For other teachers (the ‘progressive’ wing of this particualr debate) the answer lies in humanising the teacher-pupil relationship or in evolving mutual-learning techniques. Although this is preferable to 25

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the reactionary explanations, it is not adequate. It forgets that for the pupils, educational activity has a social meaning. Their individual social destinies are refracted through it. This relationship is made explicit for the pupils via a highly structured system of grades, streams, exams etc. For the ruling class, these are administrative measures through which the necessarily unequal amounts of capital are distributed in the correct proportions, just sufficient to produce the various labour-pewers which they require. For the pupils, however, the competitive process to which they are subjected as a result, manifests the contradictory (hypocritical) character of the education system, as we described in the first chapter. Hence, while it is not impossible to limit the impact of this on the pupils experience, it /s impossible to remove it because it constitutes the bedrock of their experience and structures the way in which they relate to the schools. How could it be otherwise? Under capitalism, !abour is a commodity. The labourers wage represents his value, the cost of reproducing his labour power. So it is with the capital spent on creating his skills. The general and specific characteristics of labour power are therefore reproduced under the constraints of the /aw of value* The law of value is the governing principle of social development undercapitalism and can only be destroyed on the basis of a workers state. How should R.&.F. deal with this problem? Formally speaking, R.&.F. is committed to socialism. But this commitment will remain purely formal, if R.&.F. is led by forces who believe that it is possible to alter the fundamental character of education under capitalism—to tring about a change ‘in the nature of our schools’ as the pamphlet has it. Of course, if the nature of the schools continues to be interpreted in terms of the authority relations within them, then a strategy for changing the nature of education under capitalism /s possible. But a strategy based on this confusion does not necessarily and automatically lead in the direction of socialism. On the contrary, it reinforces de-schooling on the one hand and leads R.&.F. in the direction of collaboration with the capitalist state on the other. At the present, this is only an incipient tendency. The final destiny of R.&.F. in the class struggle is by no means decided. But strategies based on this particular confusion can hardly be said to lead to an increase in the class conscious forces in society, but instead swell the ranks of those forces of ‘radical’, but nonethless, bourgeois professionalists and Guardian readers. Of course, every member of Rank & File should seize every opportunity to struggle against grading, streaming, competitive exams etc. But this is not the real point. The dividing line is drawn between those who argue for these things on the basis that they bring about some fundamental change or ‘improvement’ and those who see the value of these struggles in the fact that they are potentially capable of strengthening the consciousness and organisation of those involved. In an organisation like R.&.F. this dividing line can never be drawn absolutely, But the question remains: can R.&.F. carry out a political education of those forces thrown up by all the changes we have described? Can it carry out the crystallisation of a class-conscious vanguard force for the NUT, or will its general tendency be in the direction of bourgeois professionalism and reformism? It is this to which we must return later on. 26

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To return once again to the pamphlet. There are a couple of other reasons the authors give for justifying an assault on ‘the power structure’ in the name of democracy. The first is that the ‘present authoritarian system” ts responsible for the Wastage’ of pupils and teachers aspirations. This is simply the argument already implicit in the first motivation. When they talk about the present system being ‘wasteful’ and ‘inefficient’, they use the same language as many a government report on the ‘pools of wasted ability’ in the secondary moderns. This is simply an argument in favour of liberalising the schools to create more upward mobility. This view takes us into the camp of the ruling class, the only problem being perhaps that the bourgeoisie are no longer so interested in upward mobility as they were in the sixties. Indeed, a general feature of the pamphlet is the failure to situate arguments within the framework of any class analysis—we are always referred to the ‘community’ or to ‘everybody’ or to ‘parents’ etc. Another argument is that the question of salaries is closely linked to the ‘structure of authority inside the school’. This is a reference to the salary scales which teachers have to endure. The nature of this tink is not made explicit: ‘side by side with our demands for democracy in schoold, we must demand a salary structure which reflects this democratic control’. [In what does this ‘side by side’ consist? The implication is that we can resolve the problem of the salary more easily if we Wemocratise’the structure of authority. Over the years, governments have persuaded teachers to accept positions of administrative responsibility in the schools by offering bonuses, in the form of scales, over and above their basic, and then abolishing the basic rate altogether. The NUT has been wrong here. It has allowed the the government to undermine union solidarity by creating a conservative stratum of teachers who identify their interests with those of the administration. It has allowed management to tie arguments in favour of higher wages to the amount of work done, and not based then on the imperatives of the standard of living. This has allowed a considerable problem of low-pay among teachers to arise. But to argue that we can get round ail this by telling a// teachers to become part of the administration (the new ‘democratic administration’) is extremely dangerous. This is supposed to disarm the government in its attempts to extend the scales, but in reality it falls into the government's hands. The authors should be clarifying this question for R.&.F., not confusing it further. The only principled way to deal with the salary issue is to argue from the point of view of a struggle which tackles the real problem while preserving the unity of the NUT in struggle. Arguing for a single salary scale now does not produce unity because the higher paid are being asked to struggle alongside others without any benefit accruing to themselves. The real problem is one of low pay. Across the board increases should be the principle gowerning salary policy for NUT in future Increases of this sort would reduce rea/ differentials without impairing the unity of the membership in struggle. This would not exclude the possibility of fighting against . the scales in the long term, but this is dependent on the level of class consciousness among the m embership, and the best way of raising this is to fight against the political problem of low pay. But to link opposition to the scales with the idea of turning all teachers into 27

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administrators is suicidal since it completely accepts the government’s frame of reference. It also cuts across the task of linking up the struggle in the NUT with the pay struggle of other sectors of workers because it is arguing on a purely sectoral basis. it is important to clear up a couple of objections here. Are we in favour of the Head having so much power? No, obviously not. But what is the form and content of struggles involving opposition to the Head? We should be opposed to the Head making changes in teaching methods, curriculim or the genera! division of labour among the teaching staff without consultation. \f we disagree with his policies then we should also stress the need to organise in the school—possibly some form of cross-union staff association in the school—to fight for specific demands. Such a development may or may not revise his legal position. His structural position of course will remain as it is. Success in achieving specific demands is not achieved by eliminating him and much less by stepping into his shoes. In so far as the Head takes decisions to ban pupils or teachers from the school, we should oppose such decisions not because the Head is ‘dictatorial’ or because we are opposed to the ‘vestiges of monarchy’, but because we object to any part of the state bureaucracy victimising either teacher or pupil as a result of the conflicts arising from the social relations of capitalism. These positions are simple and obvious and have a class-consciousness justification. In practice therefore, our authors scheme fails to solve anybody’s problems, and at worst actually emasculates the very instruments which we are still able at present to use in fighting for our demands. Our authors are blind to this. Even more dangerously, they seem unaware of the fact that their ideas are not unacceptable to some local administrators. Some members of LEAs for example, are in favour of softening the powers of Headmasters, if not removing them altogether, either because he is incapable of resolving the many problems arising in large urban schools or because he actually makes them worse by provoking unnecessary strife. Even some Tory MPs see the need for this, as our authors actually adm/t. This emerges in a section of the pamphlet where it js explained that the present (autoritarian) system is breaking down and generating conflicts in the schools. For this reason they are certain that nobody will raise any objections to the practicability or desireability of their scheme. The only opposition, we are told, is likely to come from ‘groups within society whose opposition to the idea goes far beyond doubts as the practicability of such demands...... (they)are implacably opposed to any form of democracy’. Yet on the very same page, it is the representatives of these reactionary elements, like Timothy Raison MP, who are proposing to eliminate our Headmaster and implement a ‘managerial revolution’ in our schools! This is no more than a ‘clever and subtle scheme’ an example of ‘pseudo-democratic reform’ intended to divert us from our ‘true aim’. Timothy Raison no doubt must be one of those really right-wing reactionaries who are opposed to any form of democracy (even parliamentary democracy?) Yet, here he is embracing the ultimate in modernism-—the ‘ma nagerial revolution’. But, needless to say, modernism is only the new clothes of the same old reaction. The way we

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Many of the problems in the pamphlet flow from a false political analysis of capitalist society. Returning to the quotation at the beginning of the chapter and adding a third, we can see that what, at first sight, could be dismissed as loose formulation, adds up to a theoretical model of society:

This is not the way our society is run (a participatory democracy) at best ours is a partial democracy. Economic and therefore political power is still effectively in the hands of a small elite.

So, in spite of some measure of democratic control over the purely legislative institutions, the majority of the people have little opportunity to participate in vital decisions which affect their everyday lives. This is most true in our places of work. As Bertrand Russell wrote in ‘Political Ideals’: ‘Our administration is still purely bureaucratic and our economic organisations are monarchial or oligarchic’. These words were written in 1917 but they remain an accurate description of the social order.

Russell went on to suggest an alternative ‘There can be no real freedom or democracy until the men who do the work ina business also control its management’. (our emphasis. It is from this theoretical model of society that the confusions over the meaning of the world ‘democracy’ flow. This passage sounds very radical, like much of the printed material distributed in the name of R.&.F., but it is very difficult indeed to resist pointing out the context in which the loudly acclaimed words of Bertrand Russell were written. Far from being an accurate description of the social order, Russell's conceptions of 1917 were a response to the threat to capitalist society which was posed by the effect that the Russian Revolution of that year had on the European working class. Russell was saying that after sending millions of workers to slaughter one another in the trenches of Europe, the European bourgeoisie had better watch out and make the social order more responsive to their demands if socialist revolution was to be averted. In line with this, many participation schemes were put forward in industry, side by side of course with counter-revolutionary repression, so that the labour movement (more accurately its bureaucracy) could ‘participate in vital decisions which affect their everyday lives’. Mondism in England was an example of this movement by the ruling class. It served to confuse the labour movement. Instead of ‘workers control’ retaining the original meaning given it by Lenin for example, that is the control by one class over another class in matters relating to the production, distribution and accounting of goods, it acquired the opposite implication: workers participating with mamagement in their own exploitation. The view of society presented in the quotation was in fact a systematic falsification of Marxism while employing radical sounding phrases, the better to confuse Marxism in the workers movement at the time.

The secret of the technique lies in eliminating from the analysis the concept of a specific mode of production, e.g. capitalism, by seeming to take it for granted in the descriptive rhetoric. But the existence of a mode 29

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of production automatically implies the socia/ dictatorship of a certain class. in this case the capitalist class. By forgetting this, by leaving it out of the analysis, it becomes possible to talk about the ‘decision making process’ of society, that is the character of the state, in isolation from the question of which class possesses and exercises the social dictatorship, by means of the state. Concepts related to the problem of political power, such as ‘democracy’, are them emptied of all class meaning, and given a purely administrative meaning. Our authors even define it as a ‘set of rules’ at one point in their text. But for the workers movement there is no such thing as pure democracy. It is a/ways a question of democracy for which class. On the basis of their social dictatorship, the bourgeoisie frequently deal with the important questions concerning their class interests in a parliamentary arena, an arena open to those forces in the workers movement who accept the capitalist order and who wish to form parties (e.g. the Labour Party) which operate within this framework and explicitly accept the legitmacy of the state’s monopoly of violence. The evolution of parliamentary democracy in no way threatens the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie; on the contrary it strengthens it. This in no way means that the masses haveany’democratic control’ over the ruling class by means of its state—on the contrary as Lenin expresses it, there is a diaphragm between the masses and politics. When we refer to the bourgeois parliamentary state we must therefore refer to it not as ‘democracy’, but as bourgeois democracy. If, on the other hand, it becomes necessary to violently increase the rate of economic exploitation of the working class, as in the case of Germany in the early Thirties for example, then the bourgeoisie have to dispense with these trappings, conduct all their business in private as it were, deny all right of political organisation to the working class, and thereby bring about a change in the form of the state—e.g. fascism. Of course, from the point of view of revolutionary strategy, the difference between a bourgeois democratic state and a fascist state is of some importance. But both these forms of bourgeois state nonetheless express the social dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Both express this dictatorship by preventing the class antagonisms in society from fulfilling their tendency to destroy the social order. To talk about ‘decision making processes’ in isolation from these facts is to finish up in the trap of social democracy. Having eliminated the notion of a mode of production, and the accompanyin idea of the social dictatorship of a class, from the analysis, it then becomes possible to collapse one’s theoretical model of society into a number of institutions or ‘areas’ which can then be tined up side by side for a comparative analysis to see whether they contain any of our pure ‘democracy’, that is equitable ‘sets of rules’. On the basis of this sociological method, the authors conclude that partiament is subject to a ‘measure of democratic control’ (how much a measure!), but the administration (i.e. the state apparatus) and ‘our economic organisations, are not. These various institutions are aescribed as being in the hands, not of a class, but of ‘elites’. Control of the population through these institutions is no longer understood as being exercised in a more or less co-ordinated fashion by a cfass, but appears as the entirely fortuitous activities of seperate 30

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elites within each of these institutions. From this position it then becomes (logically) possible to subject these various elites to the control of a new set of rules within each institution, one after another, until ‘authoritarianism’ disappears altogether from society. Everything is much more civilised and gentlemanly once we change the ‘rules’. For the authors, history has been kind enough to give us a ‘democratic’ parliament—that venerable institution. So the most lucid possible description of British Imperialism and all its totems that our authors can make is that it is still only ‘a partial democracy’. If only we give another turn to the wheel of good fortune, surely we can get a ‘full participatory democracy’. All that is necessary is to pour the democratic wine into each of the bottles. It is precisely on this basis that the authors give us our democratic alternative for the schools. This is part of their historic struggle for ‘democracy in society’ ; we cannot say we-wish them god speed but, lets hope that when all the bottles are finally full, some of the good cheer will spill over onto the Irish people or our ‘under-developed brothers’ in the colonial and semi-colonial enclaves of British imperialism. Are we in favour of democracy in the schools? Democracy is not a set of rules, but a form of the state. We should be opposed to.a clique of ‘representatives’ running the schools on behalf of the existing state apparatus, because we should be opposed to the entire bureaucractic apparatus of the bourgeois state. We are in favour of direct democracy, but this must be understood as a form of state. In other words another, different state, running the schools. Direct democracy can only mean the majority class organised as the state establishing its own dictatorship over the remnants of the minority class, the bourgeoisie in society. Such a thing involves the destruction and break up of the bourgeois state apparatus, which is necessarily bureaucratic in tts essential character because it expresses the dictatorship of a minority class. The demand for ‘democracy in schools’ is therefore highly ambiguous. |t can mean at least three quite distinct things. [t can mean that pupils and ‘t.eachers wish to fight to place /imits on the rule of bourgeois right in the schools through their struggles. It can mean a clique of representatives heiping the bourgeois state to run the schools more effectively and exercise its rights more efficiently Or it can mean placing the school! under the control of a state which is truly democratic in form—the proletarian state. te term ‘democracy’ as applied to the scheme our authors propose is systematically misleading. What they are actually putting forward is a participation scheme under cover of the term ‘democracy’. Therefore nothing we say here should be taken to imply that we are against teachers, pupils and workers taking over the schools. This may come about, even for long periods, before a proletarian state is established, in fact at some stage during the revolutionary process the schools will undoubtedly be seized by the population. But this is very different from what our authors propose, since here the link between the schools and the capitalist state, far from being strengthened by participation, is actually severed. Examples of this would be the occupation of the scho 9Is that took place in France during 1968 or which could take place in Britain today in solidarity with the 31

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struggles of the working class for example. In such conditions, teacher, pupils and workers could well try to reorganise the schools entirely, but these gains could only be defended by the successful emergence of a workers state itself. The fight to place limits on bourgeois right in the schools can form a part of the struggle of the proletariat. Under specific conditions, which cannot always be predicted, the struggle of the pupils, teachers and students to limit the rights of the bourgeois state over them, preventing the state carrying out victimisations and so on, can even become an important contributory factor in bringing about the possibility of a proletarian state emerging eg. in France ‘68. The general strike opened up the possibility of this coming into being, this in turn had important effects on the content of the struggle to limit bourgeois right in the schools. Our authors’ scheme has nothing in common with this of course, but since they try to use May ‘68 and its prestige to give credibility to their own scheme, we must look at this briefly:

Here pupils and progressive teachers formed a living alliance, pupils took the initiative in starting the sit-in of schools, were backed by left-wing teachers in large numbers, and together they discussed everything that affected their lives: curriculum content, teaching methods, discipline, school institutions for democratic pupil and teacher expressions, down to the dinner menus and broader issues such as vandalism and delinquency. Exactly so. But in sc far as they did this before May 68, they did it in order to formulate things to demand from the education authorties. The authorities in turn were busy suppressing such discussions and alliances. In so far as this occurred on a mass scale, it was possible because a general strike had temporarily paralysed the state machine. The discussions then began to take on different meanings for different forces involved. For some, the general strike provided the opportunity to thrash out a fuller programme of demands which they conceived as being implemented once capitalism returned to ‘normal’. Possibly, there was even a strand tn this which considered it possible to participate in the administration of the schools with the return of the government. But for another current, the frame of reference was different. A general strike implicitly places the question of socialism or capitalism on the agenda. The content was not how to have better schools within capitalism, but how to reconstruct education in a workers state. The material logic of the general strike situation gave rise to this question. Throughout this entire period, the population in the schools was exercising pro/etarian democracy —indeed to such a level that the possibility of proletarian democracy growing over into a proletarian state arose. But all this has absolutely nothing in common with what the authors of the pamphlet propose.

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Participation with the bourgeois state in running the schools has been the central strategic line which Rank & File has been putting forward in the past period. Teachers are not alone in gravitating towards this position. The same participatory trend—under the cover of ‘democracy’ —is found among many professional strata, who although prepared to struggle on the issues whch affect them in their particular sector of the social services, are ambivalent over the question of which social forces to use. Should they use the state, or the working class? Which social forces should they form an alliance with? More often than not the state appears as the strongest force available if only it would be persuaded to all us more participation. R.&.F. needs to reverse its present position on participation and reorient itself to making practical alliances with pupils and workers rather than the state. However, this will require a fight inside R.&.F. and this will cause considerable upheaval. The polarisation which this struggle will cause will then pose the new problem of what programmatic formuta to use for the organisation, one which makes it possil-is for this polarisation and clarification to take place without destroyviig the unity of R.&.F.’s forces in action. This question has not emerged sharply in the past because R.&.F. tias had its gaze fixed on the state rather than the class struggle and this has partially paralysed the organisation and prevented it from taking up all kinds of issues in an energetic way. But it is also because the more conscious political forces in R.&.F. who have carried a significant weight in the past, have so far papered over the differences between the different currents in R.&F.: the International Socialism group (1S). The 1S group has not remained silent on the “democracy” issue. On the contrary it has advocated participation with the capitatist state. This is the product of a reluctance on its part put forward ‘Its . own independent political positions inside R.&.F. Instead it has adapted to the spontaneous ideas thrown up by the membership of R.&.F. Since it is vitally necessary for R.&.F. to break with its old line, we must analyse the different political forces in R.&.F. and what their various interests are. We have already done this in Chapter Two, with the exception of the IS group. Now we must look at their positions. The IS group have not carried out their own independent revolutionary znalysis and revolutionary line in R.&.F. Instead of this, they cover up zn2 differences between their own professed revolutionary objectives 33

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27g 7+2 Dositions of those around them. This is most obvious on the remocrac, issue. But it is also done by pretending that the various structural changes in education won in struggle are really, in themselves, revolutionary. They are blows against the system, they undermine the structure of capitalist society. The following extract is taken from a paper produced by Chanie Rosenberg produced for Birmingham Conference of R.&.F. in the Spring of 1972, entitled ‘‘Education and Capitalist Society”. “It isa really massive input (of funds)—the present expenditure multiplied a few times—that alone can make any change, sufficient to deal not only with a great improvement in school standards, but also with nurseries for the under-5s, adult education for the parents and university education for all—i.e. raising the 10 year working class schooling to the 20 year middle class schooling.

Without this, discrimination will continue, and the class structure reproduce itself.”’ Now it is quite clear that no amount of change in education wil] stop “the class structure from reproducing itself’’ for the simple reason thax the class structure is formed as a result of property relations, not educational experience. This point is forgotten by comrade Rosenberg when she talks about ‘‘the way classes reproduce themselves in the labour market’. This is a nonsense. Those who have to sell their labour power in the labour market are by definition the proletariat, and those who own means of production, distribution or exchange, are by definition the bourgeoisie, and they don’t encounter the tabour market at all. There are other curiosities in the text like “the occupational class structure’ and so on. What she might really be talking about in her paper is not class at all—but occupation. But if she had said’ ’‘Unless x,y, and z are achieved, the occupational structure of the working class will reproduce itself’, this would amount to nothing more than reformism. it wouldn't even be true: university expansion has not produced more jobs for graduates, rather more jobs for graduates has produced university expansion, and a fall in their rate of increase has produced more graduate bus-conductors. Rosenberg is simply confusing occupation and class. This functions in the following way: instead of trying to change the the way people understand the struggle for tet us say comprehensives or increases in expenditure, it is much easier to tell them that when they think they are increasing the occupational prospects of the working class they are rea//y undermining the class structure, i.e. changing the mode of production. Their demands are really revolutionary after all. Rosenberg is here giving a ‘left’ gloss to the social-democratic consciousness of these around her rather than establishing a critical distance from them. The notion that even occupationa! prospects can be changed, let alone class, by educational change, is quite simply incorrect. Marxists must say this openly and clearly. The question then becomes thow Marxists relate to these struggles. Certainly, revolutionaries fight for these reforms but they cannot see the structural reforms which 34

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struggle might yield as the key thing, The important thing is the possibility , indeed necessity, in the course of these struggles of altering the way various social forces both see the world and relate to it. But Rosenberg does the opposite: the structural reforms are not only the key thing for her, they make it unnecessary to operate openly as a revolutionary because these changes automatically undermine the class structure, i.e. disentegrate capitalism as a social system. A similar adaptation, is also made in the same paper, this time to the overtly libertarian wing of R.&.F. This second theoretical adaptation dovetails neatly with the first. If it is possible to change education so radically that it results in a change in the occpuational and class structures, then the various mechanisms for distributing expenditure— grading, streaming, competitive examinations—must be interpreted as purely extraneous or strictly unnecessary to the education system. Because of Rosenberg’s first theoretical error, she must logically assume the conditions under which education takes place are rot strictly determined by capitalist production, but flow from some other source, some other ‘‘need” of the bourgeoisie. For Rosenberg the structure of education has a ‘‘second aim” over, and this is the intimidation and partial indoctrination of the future work force. This aim is achieved through the grading and streaming mechanisms. Exams and selection are explained as ‘‘insidious methods for instilling the required class attitudes’. After this “the ground is now fertile for instilling attitudes of submissiveness and obedience to oppressive authority, and belief that their inferiority is due to a lack in themselves which justifies their subordination and exploitation.” Therefore, these various organisational features of the system are deliberately installed to subject the population to capitalism and make them accept it as a legitimate social system. The assumption underlying this type of argument is that the working class are born with an understanding of their historical mission to overthrow capitalism, but are somehow deprived of this consciousness by an ideological overlay introduced into their minds by the bourgeoisie. But this is a totally invalid assumption. The working class does not have a spontaneously revolutionary consciousness. |ts consciousness is determined, in the first instance, by the conditions under which it lives and by the relationship it has to production. ls it necessary for instance for the capitalists to fool people into believing that capitalism is not a social system based on exploitation as Rosenberg says’ Let us look at this briefly to prove our point. Marx spends a great deal of time explaining in Capita/ for example, how the wage form obscures the character of exploitation of labour under capitalism. He explains that the worker is paid let us say for 8 hours of “is Jabour time, and therefore it appears (the term belongs to Marx) as though he is remunerated for the full value of the product he produces during that 8 hour period, Marx then explains that this is not so, and that only a proportion of his labour time is necessary to produce

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the value represented by his wage. Exploitation is thereby concealed. Profit appears as an addition made by the capitalist to the price of the product, the resulting marginal difference being his reward. For the working class, the exploitative nature of capitalism, as a social system based on the extraction of surplus value, is not at all obviaus. The word ‘exploitation’ itself dontes for the worker ‘excessive’ additions to the price of the product or ‘excessively’ low wages etc. On the basis of the way the world appears, the working class can conclude that it is those individual capitalists who deviate from the ‘norm’ who are the exploiters. On the basis of this, the desire of the working class to increases its standard of living can take the form of asking how the gross social product can be increased, thereby increasing the absolute volume of goods which is represented by its share of the national income. For Rosenberg however the working class is spontaneously aware that it is exploited, but is convinced otherwise by the education system. Teachers are therefore described as ‘‘agents of the ruling class’. In passing, we must say that as a result of this general line of argument, we get some really backward arguments in the Birmingham paper. Rosenberg describes in detail some very cruel attacks by certain pupils on teachers. These anecdotes are then acclaimed by Rosenberg as examples of the class struggle. She finds them analogous to the struggle of workers against the boss in the factory, and announces with some profundity that both ‘push the struggle against the system forward and bring nearer the day of its downfall’. This flows from her analysis: “‘in the schools we are used as the agents of the ruling class for the transmission of their aims’’. As a result she fails to see the point that the conflicts taking place between pupils and teachers are not a struggle between classes but conflicts within the forces of the proletariat as a whole. These conflicts are the expressions of the way in which teachers and pupils attempt to solve their mutual problems at each others’ expense, and this is premised on their failure to conduct a struggle against the real enemy, the ruling class. It does not bring down the system. cw it is perfectly possible and desirable to conduct a struggle against bourgeois ideology in schools, whether at the level of the ideas in the course coritent, or at the level of ideas concerning education itself and its relationship to society as a whole. This struggle has to take place in all areas of seciety. Nor would anybody deny that the way education is organised nas definite effects on the consciousness of those who pass through it. Grading, streaming and competitive examinations do demoralise the scnool population. However thesé phenomena have their objective necessity in the economic arrangements of society, not in their ideo:cgical ones. It is these economic arrangements themselves which give rise to certain ideological deceptions such as the one we Nave just discussed around the wage form: the exchange between capital zrid Isocur has the appearnce of an equal exchange, but is in fact an exchange of qualitatively different commodities — labour-power having tre peculiar characteristic of being able to produce value. But the decepuun flowing from the totality of capitalist social relations of production is fundamental, and it lies at the root of the misconceptions 36

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which Rosenberg repeats — e.g. that the occupational! structure can change as a result of educational change under capitalism. Marx explains in Cap/ta/ for exarnple, that ina social system in which men exchange the products of their labour on the market, thereby giving their products the character of commodities, the secial division of labour, and therefore the concrete coritent of each producers’ activity, ceases to be determined by the concious p/an of society, but is determined by a law which operates ‘behind their backs”: the law cf value. This is the law that commodities exchange on the basis of the quantified labour time required for their production. Capitalism, as a fully developed mode of production, reduces labour power itself to a commodity. The distribution of society’s total labour time between the several branches of production, the amount of this or that commodity produced, the growth and decline of one branch over another, are then determined by this invisible law. Men’s “own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them” (Capital |, 75). As a consequence, ‘‘a definite social relation between men...assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things” (1,72) The operation of the law of value (despite being partly abrogated by the development of monopoly capitalism) creates a spontaneously self-regulating economy (which is however subject to crises) and thereby distributes the individuals into their various production, consumption and distribution roles. However, precisely because it is an ‘invisble’ law, the acquired characteristics of the individual labourer, as well as the acquired wealth of the individual capitalist, appear to be attributes of nature, or good fortune. Tre man who accumulates capital and directs an enterprise seems to have so because of good fortune or superior adrninistrative canabilities bestowed by nature. The ma nor women who acquires a high number of ‘0’ Levels, does not attribute this to a process of secia/ determination, through which he/she has received a definite amount of society's labour time expended upon him/her in accordance with the needs of production, but rather to superior capabilities bestowed by nature itself. The worker who fights for equality of opportunity is saying, among other things, that he believes his own son or daughter to have superior natura! atfts, but wants overt discrimination removed so that with everybody on the same starting line, his omen individual offspring will then win the race (this doesn’t mean to say of course that he doesn’t generalise beyond this and see the need to fight the inequalities as a social question). But Rosenberg is saying the same type of thing and therefore reducing the mechanism through which this social determination takes place to something purely extraneous imposed on the pupil population to lead them away from what would otherwise be obvious: that their relative places in the education system are the product of social decisionrather than natural differences in intelligence. On the contrary, this is not obvious at all. Only when means of production, distribution and exchange are collectively owned and run according to conscious plan, and when the dist-

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ribution of society’s resources on education are also collectively and consciously planned by the producers themselves, will these notions disappear. Only then will educational activity, its objective necessity, its shape and form, be governed by the purposeful productive activties of a working class which has re-appropriated the means of society’s livelihood. Its purpose will then cease to be the production of individuals who have to se// their individual labour power and who are nothing without capital, whose accumulation drives society forward under capitatism. The way Rosenberg relates to the libertarian wing of Rank & File, who believe that everything hinges on changing the relations of authority or abolishing selection mechanisms wherever possible in the school, is similar to the way she relates to struggle against inequalities: telling these militants that their struggle is sufficient in itself because if they succeed in some small degree, they will have struck a blow against the system. The elimination of authority, or certain selection mechanisms in the schools, will of /tse/f make the future work-force less submissive to the capitalists, or the various ideas they are said to spread about. This flows from a reluctance on the part of the IS to distinguish themselves ideologically and politically from those around them. The reason for this lies in their theory of the nature of the revolutionary party, which cannot be analysed in detail here.:-.All that is necessary is to increase the level of struggle, regardless of the political basis on which it is conducted. This will bring the masses face to face with the ‘realities’ of capitalism. As a result, they will by themselves draw the conclusion that capitalism must be destroyed as a social system. But history has shown that this is.not necessarily the case. In practice, when the masses find that capital will not grant their demands, they draw the conclusion that they are simply not strong enough to win their demands for the present. Or else capital grants some of their demands, thus dissipating their revolutionary potentia/. But the IS notion of the revolutionary process, justifies the idea that the revolutionary party can abandon its tasks of making revolutionary propaganda and agitation, helping the most conscious sections of the masses draw conclusions from their various struggles and the struggles of other sections of the working masses in this country or abroad. The result of this idea, is that the party sacrifices its own independent ideology and its own independent tasks, telling us that it will reveal itself in its true colours only Jater on once the masses have reached ‘maturity’ by themselves. In the meantime, however, by stepping into other peopile’s clothes on the grounds that this eases acceptance by the mass movement, all that results is confusion within the party itself, and those masses who are directly influenced by it coming to regard it with distrust. This harsh criticism of the 1S needs to be qualified. What we are pointing to here is a tendency. But this tendency — of simply amplifying existing demands or grievances, and explaining socialism as merely the logical culmination or outcome of these existing struggles — has had certain consequences in Rank & File. it has concentrated the attention of mili- 38

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tants solely on their immediate problems in the school or the union. Consequently, if it has seemed possible to these militants to use the state to soive their problems, IS, constantly stressing the immediate issues, has encouraged them to seek this alliance with the state on the grounds that certain practical gains might be made. This is not only untrue, it is not the point. To make such an alliance divorces these militants from the very forces they need if they are to struggle for socialism — the working class. Revolutionaries, while supporting all these struggles, and fighting alongside the militants, must nonethless, present the question of socialism as a pressing practical need and not just some ultimate goal in the distant future. Revolutionaries can do this by bringing all the questions facing the masses, nationally and internationally, to bear on those militants they are able to speak to, e.g. through Rank & File. After all, for revolutionaries, what is at stake in education is not just the inequalities, but also its purpose. — its purpose in a world in which the producers are expropriated and oppressed by the power they have created by their labour: capital. Without constantly seeking to connect the struggles in education with the struggles of the masses as a whole, they will never be abde to bring other militants to see the question of education in this way. These militants will then never rise above the level of their immediate struggle or will generalise from their struggle incorrectly. Furthermore, the militants will never acquire the tools necessary to solve the political problems involved even in these immediate struggles. Successful struggle itself requires correct political analysis.

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But if the revolutionaries were to operate openly in Rank & File, if they were to retain their ideological independence, would this not cause a split in the organisation? This rests on two false assumptions. First!y, political and ideological differences do not necessarily have to cause a split. They simply mean that the different forces have to agree to unity in action against the enemy without sacrificing their political independence. Without this, of course, the purpose of having political parties in the first place would disappear, since the whole point of a political party is to win other forces to its own overall view in the course of the struggle. This cannot be done by blurring differences, rather by sharpening them. Of course, the party then has to show in practice to these other forces that its own analysis leads to much more eifective struggle. But there is a deeper objection which arises here. Many militants see Rank and File as an ever-growing and permanent organisation. But Rank and File is a peculiar type of organisation. Traditionally, in the organisations of the working class, united fronts of different political forces are made in order to fight for this or that short-term objective. Different political parties as well as non-aligned militants, come together to fight on a given issue. There are good reass:ns for this. In so far as the non-aligned militants acquire a political education from the struggie, they gravitate towards a pciitical party which expresses the world-view they have acquired. It may be tine Communist Party, Labour Party, International Socialism, or IMG., etc. When the particular struggle is aver, these fronts therefore tend to dissolve. These fronts may be formed in a particular sector, or else by all the organisations of the working class to fight, let us say, a particular Government. But even when these fronts encompass the entire population (with the exception of course of the bourgeoisie and its functionaries) thereby acquiring the character of soviets, the same thing applies. Of course, in this context, the stakes are so high — a workers’ state or fascist reaction — that the masses as a whole will put the different parties to the decisive, and final, test. Among sections.of the population who are outside the trades unions, the Communist Party or the Social Democracy, however, a different style of organisation has emerged in the recent past. Women, blacks, strudents, and so on, have given rise to movements. These movements take up a// the issues affecting this sector of the population, tending 40

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to project a wide ranging programme of demands, and remaining organisationally autonomous, despite the participation of political parties in them. They are hot formed on the basis of single issues. But even so, although these movements may last for several years, they inevitably lose this autonomous character — firstly because different forces within them feel the need to make alliances with other sectors of the population who are more powerful, secondly because there are different ideological currents within these movements, and thirdly because the political parties participating in these movements also operate as a pole of attraction. Rank and File is a hybrid. The militants in Rank and File were politically and ideologically formed in the student movement and therefore tend to organise movements. On the other hand, because Rank and File is part of the trade union movement these militants will increasingly gravitate towards political parties. This process is inevitable, even though this process may take a long period of time. Therefore we should not regard differences as a bad thing. The appearance of differences in Rank and File is inevitable, since the various forces are destined to go in different political directions. Differences will in turn hasten this process, but this is unavoidabie, and in any case represents a process of political maturity and clarification taking place among the different forces in the organisation.. The main task facing Rank and File at present is to reorientate away from making alliances with the state. The ‘democracy in schools’ phase of Rank and File was an expression of the immaturity of the forces involved, coupled with the failure of the revolutionary elements in 1S to make a critique of this spontaneous tendency which they adepted to and reinforced. Now that this whole debate has taken place a new period of the organisation can begin. The forces in Rank and File should assimilate the lessons of past experience. But this poses two new problems. First, what is involved in making an alliance with the working class and its other allies? And secondly, what programmatic formula can we use for the organisation which will preserve the ideological differences while ensuring unity in action, along this new strategic axis. The programme of an organisation — even one which is not a political party — cannot be just a set of ‘demands’ or ‘immediate aims’, preceded by a list of grievances. On the other hand, of course, precisely because Rank and File is not a political party, it cannot contain a full analysis of the education system, matters upon which different political and ideological currents would disagree. Nonetheless, the programme of the organisation, must also,to some extent, define the ro/e of that organisation in society, or to put it another way, its tasks, We have to know not just what we want, but the way other social forces can be expected to react and what our attitude to them should be. Without doing this, it is near to impossible to even indicate how and with whom we are going to fight for what we want., All the 41

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concrete issues must be placed within a clear framework which enables us to cope with the various problems we will face in struggling against or allying with, other social forces, and therefore what our tasks in relation to them should be. In other words the programme must place our problem within a class framework. The existing programme fails to do this. The opening paragraphs of the existing programme (“Rank and File: What We Stand For’’) describes various grievances expressed by teachers in relation to expenditure, victimisation, bad conditions, examinations, grading, streaming and so on. Then, without defining precisely what other social forces have a stake in these questions also, and which among these forces are friends and which are enemies, it goes on to put forward a series of reforms, improvements, ‘immediate aims’. These include ‘a vast increase in educational expenditure’, ‘immediate implementation of a programme of new buildings’, ‘the abolition of all priviledged sectors of education’, etc. These things appear in the programme as steps in the direction of socialism. But their relationship to socialism, and indeed what other forces might be interested in socialism too is not spelt out. If these demands are achieved, then do we put forward a further set of demands? I{nthat case ‘socialism’ has no practical implications for what we do now because it recedes ever further into the distance. On the other hand, if these demands cannot be achieved under capitalism, we must say so, because then the tasks of making the transition to a workers state and all that implies, are a bit more immediate then one might have thought. If we reorientate to the working class as our strategic line, then this problem of the living relationship between the struggle in education and socialism becomes more immediate than has been the case so far. It is not that we disagree with any of the demands (except these relating to participation). It is simply that its failure to concentrate on the central political problems involved in the struggle around education, leaves Rank and File without any clear orientation. To take the simplest problem imaginable. Let us say that the Labour Party makes all kinds of proposals for educational reforms. Good. But what can we expect it to demand in return? No doubt, that the NUT agrees to a voluntary incomes policy in return for some improvements in education. In order to complicate the problem for us, it also proposes to make some ‘special case’ of teachers in respect of pay rises. Do we agree to this deal? Well, we can only answer that wyuestion if we have already some idea of what the relationship is between our series of demands and the ‘socialism’ which is mentioned in the programme as the ultimate goal. If educational reform is a step in itself towards socialism, then - yes, by all means we must accept this deal. Isn’t something wrong here? The programme simply repeats that the struggle to change education ‘must be seen as a small part of the struggle to change society’. It is precisely this word ‘part’ which is such a problem. If a changed educational structure in itself is ‘part’ of changing society from capitalism to socialism, then we

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must jumpat the deal. But in fact, to agree to an incomes policy just weakens the very forces — the working class and its allies — who are able to bring about the transition to a workers’ state and therefore carry out the tasks of socialism. If we accepted the deal, we would also implicitly be saying that the ruling class /s capable of developing the education system further, in some way which was not in their own interest. [n that case, ‘socialism’, need not become an immediate problem at all. In other words, we must be clear: on the basis of which c/ass power is a way forward possible. We have to be clear that we have no confidence in the bourgeoisie either to give us meaningful educational reform in return for our accepting incomes policy, or in its ability to allow free bargaining should we drop educational reform. We have to say that we cannot get what we want by using the power of the ruling class. We have to base ourselves on the class power of the labour movement (rather than on the capitalist state). This is not an abstract position. It has concrete implications for every question. Take salaries for example. Clearly, if members of the NUT believe that the ruling class in capable of developing the education system further in any way other than in its own class interests (thereby reproducing all the fundamental problems), then it is that much harder to get a salary struggle off the ground. If members of the NUT have confidence in the ruling class in this matter, then a strike for higher wages is to damage the education of the pupils. The ruling class relies on the fact that large numbers of workers share this prejudice (as a result of the post-war deal). This is what makes it possible for them to convince large numbers of people that teachers are behaving like irresponsible wreckers. This includes the NUT executive. You cannot counter this situation except by making it clear to others that education under capitalism is an abortion anyway. Secondly, in so far as strikes damage the education of the pulils, who does the most damage? the teachers, or that state which is prepared to let teachers stay out for weeks because it puts finance above the piety it is proclaiming? In order to fight successfully in education we have to change the way the working class — which relates to the issue of education in an individual fashion and not at all with a class political consciousness — sees the question of education. In fact this is vital if we want socialism, because we must win the working class to understand its historical tasks in relation to education. The future of education hinges on them. In this concrete example, we can see concretely the kind of link between educational struggles and socialism which is completely missing from the programme because the working class does not appear in it as a social and political force. Let us take another example. The working class is jealous of its previous gains in education. But is is not organised in such a way that it becomes immediately aware that its previous social gains in education are being eroded. Of course th’s does become apparent to the mass of workers when there are cuts in provisions, But what is going 07 in education is more complex than that. The methods by which edu- 43

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cation is impoverished are many (e.g. closing down schools instead of reducing the staff-pupi! ratio). But when teachers (and often pupils) decide to struggle in the schools, whether it be against an expenditure cut which is not so obvious to the outside world, or whether it be on an educational issue, then how do the workers know that these struggles do not a/so undermine and erode its previous gains? This problem arises because a) they have some faith in the bourgeoisie to develop education b) because the attitude of the mass of workers towards education is an individualist one and not a classconscious one; and c) because they don’t see teachers, and much less the pupils as their immediate allies in struggle. These are not psychological problems among the workers (authoritarian attitudes to children, etc.) but reflect the fact that they believe there are no fundamental problems in this area of society. The ruling class are aware of this. At the moment it wants to carry out rationalisation and expenditure cuts as quietly as possible, avoiding the responsibility if anybody complains. When teachers and pupils are the first to complain, it tries to blame the ills of capitalism on to them: on to deviant teachers, violent pupils, experimental teaching methods (resulting in a ‘decline’ in literacy, etc.) Capital, in taking back previous gains in order to resolve its own problems, looks for scapegoats. And it knows who to scapegoat because it feels that the working class itself is sti// tied politically to the capitalists as far as the question of education is concerned. In the light of this concrete situation, Rank and File, if its is to lead effective struggles, must see as one of its tasks as helping to win the workers to the side of teachers and pupils in fighting against the policies of the ruling class in education. From the same imperatives flow other tasks: defending pupils organisation to the workers organisation, on the grounds that pupils are allies (not to mention a new cadre force for the working class movement); struggling against corporal punishment since this divides teachers and pupils, who should be allies against the Authorities, but who are busy solving their problems at each others’ expense, and so forth. These are the politics of building an alliance taetween the teachers workers and pupils — an alliance which can change the consciousness of workers and by this same token make the struggle of teachers more effective. The central task for Rank and File at the present time therefore is to work out a clear c/ass position on the problems confronting it. Without this, no practical steps forward in the struggle, either for socialism or anything else, is possible. Once we know who are friends and who are enemies, we can decide on what basis we can build an alliance among ourselves, and therefore resolve this question of programme. We have to decide, among all the different political forces in Rank and File, whether organised in political parties or not, what the possible terms on which we can have agreement are. So long as these terms fall within the correct class framework, then Rank and File will be a principled united front. Once having got that, then we will be able to go forward to a much clearer understanding of our 44

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practical tasks as an organisation of militants in the NUT. And Rank and File should organise all those militants who consider themselves socialists and who are prepared to fight on all the various issues confronting them as part of the working class. But here it is a question of whether it is principled or unprincipled. It is quite possible, and desirable, to have a front between revolutionaries and libertarians for example, in so far as we agree broadly who we define as the enemy, what issues we need to take up in the struggle, etc. It is not necessary for Marxists to abandon their own analysis of education, or for libertarians to do so, in order to have such a unity. For example, our analysis as to why schools have exams, grading, streaming, etc., may be different. Nevertheless, we can agree that these things have a demoralising effect on the working class, whether intentional or otherwise, and therefore we can agree on the need to fight against them. We therefore produce a model of how sucha principled united front can by organised in terms of its programme — taking into account the level of political development of the forces in Rank and File (which of course we hopeto change in the future).

NOTES FOR A PROGRAMME

An Alliance of Teachers, Pupils and Workers.

The capitalists have developed the education system under conditions which objectively have the effect of causing ideological disunity in the working class, and which serve to demoralise it as to its own practical and historical capabilities. We are opposed to the capitalists training skilled workers at the expense of the education of the mass of the pupils. For this reason, Rank and File will participate in all struggles taking place against such practices as segregation of pupils into different types of schools, streaming, grading ‘intelligence’ testing, sex discrimination and competitive examinations, whether undertaken by pupils, teachers or workers organisations.

Secondly, in order to revive the competitiveness of British capital at the present time at the expense of the working class movement, the 45

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current policies of state in education are arganised around the idea of carrying out rationalisation and reorganisation in order to further minimise its expenditure. This results in outright cuts in many schools. This policy is being carried out regardless of the existing gains of the labour movement and the conditions under which teachers work. We are opposed to capitalism solving its problems at the expense of any section of the population. Therefore Rank and File, will fight against cuts in expenditure and any of the effects of rationalisation which teachers, pupils or workers organisations consider to be counter to their interests.

In view of the fact that the tuling class is no longer prepared to carry through to any significant degree, the de-segregation of secondary education and other changes which had egalitarian features; since on the contrary it is much more concerned with dismantling parts of the social service, there can no longer be any doubt that teachers or workers can place confidence — in the ruling class, its state or its governments, to carry through the changes we wish to see. Therefore Rank and File resolves to fight on these questions, which can be resolved by working class power on the following basis: a) There are two areas in which members of NUT must fight in the schoold: against cuts in expenditure, whether direct or indirect, and secondly against all the manifestations of segregation. The NUT must use its full trade union strength to prevent the consequences of the capitalist organisation of education being carried out at the expense of pupils, teachers, or workers. b) Use these and all other opportunities to strengthen an alliance between teachers, pupils and the working class. To strengthen the organisation of teachers in the schools (e.g. multi-union staff associations); to defend and encourage the organisation of school pupils; to conduct joint struggles on things which divide pupils and teachers, e.g. discipline and corporal punishment; to make every attempt to involve other organisations of the labour movement in the fight against the policies of the state in the schools. Since the working class does not see teachers, or even pupils, as immediate allies in struggle, Rank and File must iead the way in building organisational and political links in struggle, and carry out a programme of explanation to the labour movement on the significance of these struggles. Unity of Teachers in Struggle. The state has two objectives in relation to teachers pay. First, to cut the cost of administration in the schools by persuading teachers to accept administrative duties as a condition for increases in pay, thereby introducing broad differentials and weakening union solidarity. Secondly, to take advantage of their lack of economic power to hold down their pay. In order to maintain the unity of teachers in struggle against these policies Rank and File should therefore fight for the Union to:

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a) refuse to accept administrative posts if they are a substitute for a fight to increase wages. No extension of the existing grades or scales. b) Straight across the board increases for all grades. No more percentage increases, which increase real differentials. c) No discrimination against women teachers in salary or promotion. d) All claims to include cost of living increases; the cost of living index to be decided by the trade union movement. e) Full wage for all unemployed teachers. No cuts in salary through reorganisation, Independence of the Union from the State. a) An end to the Teachers Remuneration Act. No compulsory arbitration. b) Opposition to any form of Incomes Policy, whether statutory or voluntary, Labour or Tory. c) An end to the Industrial Relations Act. Industrial action is necessary to defeat the act and therefore Rank and File should organise solidarity action with any group of workers fighting against it. d) Solidarity action with any member of the unions who defies any pay freeze, incomes policy or the NIRC. Immediate strike action in support of any worker threatened with imprisonment. Union Democracy. In order that the influence of the state and the employers on NUT representatives should not impair the fighting power of the union, the representatives must be under democratic control. a) No secret negotiations. Union officials to consult at every turn in any negotiations with the elected representatives for their decision on actions necessary to pursue the demands of the membership. Where possible, mass meetings should be held in school time. EC members must be bound by this discipline. b) All paid officials to be subject to election and both officials and representatives to be subject to immediate recall. c) No official to be paid more than the average teaching salary. Solidarity with All Struggles against the ruling class, nationally and internationally. The struggle for workers power is ultimately determined by the balance of forces on a world scale. Therefore, as well as seeking to take all possible action with the workers and their allies in this country, R&F actively supports all movements in solidarity with anti-imperialist struggles, e.g. in Ireland and Vietnam.

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