The Education Debate

A guest post by Edward Spalton

After reading this article in the Spectator I was motivated to write this supplementary note.

In the late Eighties/early Nineties I was co-opted to a board of school governors as a representative of local business. It was the infants' school which my own children had attended. The long-serving head teacher was nearing retirement. She was rather old-fashioned, as were the school buildings. She confided to me that reading standards were falling although that information and the test results were then, if anything, more secret than the atomic bomb. 

As quite a high proportion of the children were entitled to free school meals, she got some extra money from the Local Education Authority  (LEA) to “enrich the curriculum”. When she had worked out what she wanted to do, she then had to get approval from the area office of the LEA. She had made a most imaginative use of the money – some real poetry books of a sort which could be appreciated by children, some classical music of an easily understood story-telling kind, some prints of suitable famous pictures with historical scenes and so on.  The official threw this back at her with contempt. “It is not your business to impose your culture on these children” she was told. She was still very upset when she told me this. 

When she asked what she was supposed to do, she was told that she should teach through the medium of situations with which the children were familiar. “Going to the fish and chip shop or taking out a video are cultural experiences” she was told. The children, I should add, were nearly all native-born British. I think there were two Chinese children in the school.

She retired with relief and a new head teacher had the job of introducing “Local Management of Schools” which actually involved very close control by the LEA.

We were supposed to produce our own “Curriculum Development Statement”. Suddenly a document of this name turned up amongst the voluminous papers which were written in a style and language quite alien to normal English, sometimes called “edu-jargon”. 

I asked who had produced the statement, as it certainly was not the board of governors. I was told that the LEA had provided it “to help us”. Amongst a great deal of meaningless verbiage was this remarkable statement:

“It is the policy of the school to make students responsible for their own learning”

I protested at this and said “The children are just too little to do your job”. They were 5  to 7 years old, for heaven's sake! Nobody even smiled and this solemn nonsense was voted through. I then discovered that nearly every school of every sort and age group in the county had voted for the same thing – and this was a new system, supposed to give the individual schools more control of their own affairs!

The children were asked to produce paintings of people at their work with short captions to explain each picture. Many of them were very good. One boy had painted a dramatic picture of a fireman putting out a fire. His caption had been corrected. “Fireman” was crossed out and the politically correct, non sexist term “Fire Fighter” replaced it but the mistakes in spelling and punctuation in the rest of the caption were uncorrected. When I pointed this out, I was told it would be “too discouraging” for the children to do this. “But how can they learn to do things right, if you don't tell them?” I asked.

Needless to say, I was not invited to remain on the board when the term of my co-option ended. 

I think that the cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School have secured a near monopoly in much of state education. That is one reason why some teachers' unions are now going on strike when schools opt for the new government scheme which will make them independent of the Local Education Authorities. 

I was fortunately able to afford to take my children out of this atmosphere and place them in private education.

Edward Spalton
Editor's note: Although Edward writes from an English perspective I think it is of interest to those of us in Scotland.

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