Sunday, April 21, 2013

Why Gove's got it wrong on (almost) everything

Education secretary Michael Gove has announced that he wants to shorten holidays and lengthen school days so that the UK education can compete more effectively against the Chinese and other east Asian economies.  He also wants pupil feedback to influence performance-related teachers' pay, believes students should study more British history and learn lists of important facts by heart, is set to mandate compulsory language learning (from a list of seven languages including Chinese but not Japanese, Italian but not Portugese, Spanish but not Arabic, and Latin and Greek but not Hebrew or Sanskrit) in primary schools and, while imposing these and a host of other new government directives, simultaneously wants to give schools more independence by encouraging them to convert to academies, opting out of local authority control and becoming directly accountable to central government.

I've already said what I think about Gove's proposals for language teaching and the negative impact this will have on Hebrew and Jewish education - ironically, seeing that Gove himself studies Hebrew and never misses an opportunity to profess his love and respect for the Jewish community.  See my piece here.  I also need to declare and interest (and perhaps a total lack of consistency): I'm a founding governor of a new school being set up under the goverment's Free Schools policy.

Gove's policies seem increasingly confused.  But running through them, I believe, are two entirely coherent and consistently applied principles.  One is a lack of respect for experts - and in the case of education, this means teachers.  The education secretary believes that government, not teachers, should dictate education policy and is endeavoring to drive through politically determined reforms at a breakneck pace.  Plans to lengthen the school day imply that teachers don't work hard enough.  He has been criticised for failing to consult over the new national curriculum.  And where he seeks to decentralise, his partners of choice are not teachers but parents, universities and business.  The Guardian recently reported as follows:

'Gove made an offer to unions who complain about his reforms: "Many of [the teaching unions] have very passionate criticisms of the model of education that I've outlined and there's an open invitation to the unions which is: prove me wrong, set up a free school.
"If the NUT were to set up a free school, we would find them a building, we would fund it. And I would love to see an NUT or another union free school." Turning down Gove's offer, a union spokesperson said: "The NUT is in a lot of places already. They're called schools."'


The second principle is a tacit but extremely powerful belief that the only important goal of education is economic success.  This idea, widespread to the point of ubiquity in education policy across the industrialised world, is apparent in Gove's policies but even more so in his language.  The education system needs reforming so students can acquire skills to better compete in a global marketplace.

But if so, why the emphasis on English culture, English history, the rote learning of poetry, Latin and Greek on the list of mandated languages for primary school children, and the gift of a King James Bible to every school in the country?  On the surface it appears that alongside the desire for economic efficiency Gove wants to resurrect a more old-fashioned, classical education, grounded in the arts and humanities.   But this impression is misleading.  This kind of liberal arts education is about reading, thinking and understanding.  It values above all the richness of the tradition and its role in shaping good citizens, where citizenship means participating in public life for the sake of the common good.  But in Gove's vision, the ultimate authority is not pupils or teachers but government, and the aim of education is not cultural or political but economic.  Not only that, but the government's supposedly cultural educational rhetoric is actually tinged with racism.  An official commented on the latest plans to lengthen the school day: "We can either start working as hard as the Chinese, or we'll all soon be working for the Chinese."

This is what the government's educational vision seems to boil down to.  Children need to spend as much time possible studying at school so they learn the skills needed to spend as many hours possible working once they leave school.  They need to be immersed in a narrative of Britishness so they don't notice that they live in a global economy where the national identity of their employers matters less than the fact that profits keep rising even as average wages stagnate.  And they need to learn by rote and devote themselves to facts and skills rather than critical thinking, creativity and understanding in order to prepare themselves for lives as pliant employees and uncritical consumers.  Charles Dickens' Mr Gradgrind couldn't have wished for more.

4 comments:

  1. Great piece. The depressing thing is that almost everyone serious I've come across in education - serious intellectually, there are a few naked careerists bobbing along the waters - has been opposing the reduction of education to an economic rationale for years. It's genuinely shocking to be exposed to the debates of the sixties with all the sophistication and rigour they entailed, those taking place between the progressives and the liberal educationalists (those exponents of a classical education you refer to). The banality of the vision that has been imposed on us in recent years is shameful. It seems to me that Gove is promoting the worst aspects of contemporary and old-fashioned practice: instrumentalism on the one hand, dominated by economics, and authoritarianism, evident in rote learning and a narrowly-conceived, dogmatic and elitist view of tradition. It is perhaps unsurprising that conservatives should revert to the latter but it is genuinely startling that so many Tories were happy to go along with a form of educational utilitarianism in the first place, and now think that tossing a few symbols of old-fashioned practice into the mix will obscure this in a haze of sentiment. Such would seem to be another noteworthy part of Thatcher's legacy - not the least part of which is exposing many Tories as utterly unprincipled.

    As you note, advocates of a classical liberal education - and such conservative philosophers as Michael Oakshott - for all that they upheld the worth of the traditional academic disciplines can be distinguished from the parochialism of Gove et all by the value they put on critical thinking and creative engagement with a knowledge base that cannot be reduced to sterile chunks of information (or poetry to be committed to memory). ND

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  2. As for "lack of respect for experts", this is a long-established trend as well. Teachers, at least in the public sector, have long experienced the erosion of their autonomy to the point where they are often little more than skilled technicians implementing (often in highly creative and varied ways) goals set by their managers (who in turn are responding to directives set by others), rather than expert practitioners able to make judgments about means and ends. Part of the way this has transpired, according to Paul Standish, is in the reframing of educational obligations, which should be open-ended, infinite - he invokes Levinas here - as contractual obligations, which can be fulfilled (see: (2005) ‘Towards an Economy of Higher Education’, Critical Quarterly, 47. 1-2, 53-71). It is also interesting thinking about the ideas of David Graeber in this regard, in terms of the reframing of moral obligations as debts (see his book "Debt").

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    1. Thanks for your comment. I'll look up Paul Standish (who I know from the Institute of Education). I'd also recommend an amazing book by Joseph Dunne - Back to the Rough Ground - an analysis of the behavioural objectives of education in light of Aristotle's concepts of techne and phronesis as developed by a number of modern philosophers.

      It also seems to me that the Tories cannot be held solely to account on this issue: New Labour showed more concern for an egalitarian vision of social justice in education and avoided the Conservative tendency to a little England cultural agenda, but on the whole they subscribed to the same neo-liberal, technicist educational agenda as everyone else, and have shown no sign in opposition of opposing this on ideological grounds.

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  3. That book sounds great - I'm very interested in Aristotle, so will definitely look it up. Thanks. I've a feeling I've quoted him - Joseph Dunne - in an essay at some point......ah yes, he has a good chapter in the Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education on "Practical Reason".

    As for New Labour - yes, I completely agree. And, on the flipside, it seems to me that there is plenty of scope for a cross-party consensus on restoring the autonomy of the teacher in educational matters, and on a more sophisticated approach to assessment. Best wishes - N.

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