Tenured failure and self-indulgent pedagogy

[erudito]

If one judges matters by intentions (such as by presuming that effects flow from intentions), one lives in a very congenial world. You are always right, because your intentions are always good. Those who disagree with you must, therefore, have “wrong” intentions and so always be wrong

Comments

Yes, your post contained quite a lot of Hysteria (part I)

[catsidhe]

The reason religious schools are the main competitor to state schools is because the Church was already doing it by the time the state started. And the religious schools really have had socialisation into Right Thinking as their stated purpose since the beginning. But they provided widespread education as a result of the humanist response to the crushing poverty of the mid 18C. Those same humanists who gained power and influence in Parliament pushed to follow the Church's lead, and they justified it to the Tories as that it would educate the poor benighted undeserving urchins into being good servants, the middle classes into virtuous shopkeepers, and the upper classes into masterful leaders, and all of them into good worshipful Christians. But the Christian emphasis dropped out relatively early (as low as background level, anyway), and the emphasis was put onto the minimum levels of knowledge required for someone to have options other than crime and subsistence farming. Educational theorists moved onto theories of how to identify children needing extra help, and how best to provide that help, and gradually away from the idea that the purpose of education was to brainwash children. General socialisation and education about the society in which they live is not the same thing as the ‘specific socialisation’ you're talking about. The Christian schools have had to pay lip service to this idea over the last couple of decades, but mainly as a response to the universal guidelines of what an education should, and should not involve, guidelines written by the very people you're castigating: the government educational bureaucracy. And even then, the religious schools are pulling back: Howard himself said that the reason to send children to Christian schools was the “Moral education”, or in other words, the aim of specific socialisation, in the exact sense you're complaining about.

When there is an effort at specific ideological and political ‘socialisation’ in modern schools, and it certainly does happen - the subject of ‘Australian Studies’ in the first few years of the VCE was a blatant hagiography of unions and unionism so egregious that I made a deliberate, and successful, attempt to fail that subject - but these are not done by the bureaucracy itself, but as the result of explicit government interference, and in this case it was enforced over all schools (or, in other words, you won't stop that sort of bullshit by privatising all schools), and was so widely hated that the bureaucracy managed to wind it back relatively quickly.

And as far as it goes, education has had, does have, and always will have “specific socialisation aims”: they aim to inculcate that obeying the law and cooperating with people are good things, and fighting and breaking the law are bad things. They also try to inculcate, with varying degrees of success, how to think for oneself and continue learning without a teacher forcefeeding you. As far as outcomes go, for the most part if students come out the other end of the education system literate, socialised (as in able to fit in to society), and ready to work, that's a success. Anything further is gravy. (That's from a policy overview POV, of course, where the aspirations of individuals are less important than the overall outcome.)

Re: Yes, your post contained quite a lot of Hysteria (part I)

[erudito]

The reason why the Churches are the main competitor is the reason why they were already doing it.

That there was going to be a push to increase education levels is a given. The interesting question is why get the state to provide schooling itself. Which is some version of "because we do not trust others to do it". Having the regulator also be the provider means you can also give yourself necessary free passes.

As for literacy, etc, government provision has not exactly been covering itself in glory on that one. Not that it is easy to find out exactly how well, or not, they are doing. Perhaps someone should prod the regulator on that. Oh, wait ...

Re: Yes, your post contained quite a lot of Hysteria (part I)

[catsidhe]

“The interesting question is why get the state to provide schooling itself.”

Because at the time, there were the religious schools, and there were the (few) private schools, and there were... Oh, right, there was nothing else, and it wasn't seen as cost effective, let alone profitable, to give education to poor people. And yet it was a common good, which enhanced all people. And so, as a common good, the government took up its provision.

I imagine that a Thatcherite might find this incomprehensible, yet still it makes sense.

Re: Yes, your post contained quite a lot of Hysteria (part I)

[erudito]

Actually, there were quite a lot of private schools and it was obviously possible to expand provision. Fund it, and they will come, so to speak. There was quite a debate at the time over the notion of the government providing schools. The notion that private provision was as lacking as you imply is a bit of a myth: indeed, pushing out private provision was clearly (for some) the point of getting the government to do it.