Blair's legacy of dead kids
There is a direct connection between the ten years in power of Anthony Blair - who came pledging that his priorities were "education, education and education" - and the dreadful news from London, where children of fifteen slaughter each other in the streets. That would, in any case, be intuitive: these children have spent most of their lives in his government, and if any politician at all has had any influence over their wasted lives, he must have been it. And he did claim that education would be his priority. Yet I do not think any newspaper or TV station has drawn attention to the fact; and that is because to do so would sabotage far too many unthinkingly accepted shibboleths.
Certainly this government has paid enough attention to education; most educators would have been glad for rather less. Almost daily new initiatives, curricula extended and shortened, inspections and examinations, endless legislation, made most teachers feel as if they were standing on a slow but constant earthquake, where nothing could be certain or solid. The government even sank as low as to blackmail universities to force them to accept less able and successful students over more able and successful ones, merely so that it could fill in the ticks of its score-sheet dedicated to the promotion of disadvantaged students.
The moral and intellectual bankruptcy of that measure does not need to be underlined. It destroys at once the purpose of universities - to select and train the elites of tomorrow - and of ordinary school - to encourage achievement and root all students in a common culture. And while Blair and his accomplices (the only word that fits) masturbate with increasingly clumsy and even criminal measures of social engineering, the children they were supposed to educate out of poverty and violence kill each other in the streets. Something is very, very wrong here.
And I feel pretty sure that I know what it is. It is something that began to go to Hell long before Blair was able to do anything for or against it; that the conservative heroine Thatcher did nothing to alter; that is still at work poisoning Britain in places where nobody watches it at work.
I have tried a couple of times to become a schoolteacher, and that opportunity, though brief, allowed me a couple of invaluable glimpses into the realities of high school education in the United Kingdom - glimpses that I suspect no journalist or "expert", let alone politician, has ever had; or else they would not waste their time with footling corrections of course and curriculum, more or less examinations, more or less children per class, more or less computers in the classroom - when the truth is that the ship is leaking every year, and doing almost the opposite work than what it was intended to do.
Let us start by asking ourselves: what is the purpose of universal compulsory education? One, and one alone: to fit the children for their future lives as citizens in a democracy - that is, as people each of whom shares the responsibility for the functioning of state and society. For this purpose, we assume that they must be able to read, write and count; interpret sets of figures; manage a home or a small business; and share a certain amount of culture that means that they can communicate with each other, understand each other even where they disagree, and recognize common values. This common culture can also serve, if they so wish, as the starting point for further intellectual adventures in their adult lives. This is the heart of the matter; and if it was not so important to a democracy to have genuine, competent citizens, nobody could possibly excuse, let alone encourage, the dreadful cruelty of taking children from their family by compulsion for a considerable part of their childhood.
My experience in high schools had a number of positive features. I came out with an increased respect for schoolteachers, most of whom seemed to me to be wasting - or else hopefully placing at the disposal of the institution - considerable intellectual assets and the characters of saints, on impossible pursuits. If there ever was an army of lions led by donkeys, it is the class of schoolteachers in Britain. The worst that can be said of them is that they are heavily infected with the poison of Political Correctness, but in my experience this does rather less harm than conservative columnists like to think. On the other hand, the amount of the work and effort they do is constantly and perversely underestimated. There are a number of idiots and unpleasant people among them, but, on the whole, I would say rather less than among most other professions. I have a lot of time for senior-common-room companionship.
But not to mention all the other dreadful aspects of modern schooling (such as computers in the classroom, which I would positively forbid - Blair, of course, has done everything in his power to extend their use), one thing stood out in every school I experienced: that in every classroom, there was a minority of students - about four to six out of about twenty-four, shall we say - on whom the teachers, however heroic, had simply given up. There was an unspoken agreement that they might do whatever they wanted, so long as they did not bother those of their fellow-students who actually wanted to work.
This arises from the fact that the teachers have absolutely no instrument at all to force any student to do any work. Punishment of any kind is impossible. Detention is a legend - only readers of Harry Potter novels still believe that it amounts to anything. Even expulsion is extremely difficult to inflict, and a boy must have positively been burning buildings down before he is thrown out as he deserves. Indeed, any use of force is received even by ordinary students, let alone by the thug minority, with incomprehension and disbelief quickly rising into rage. A teacher who had the bad idea of forcing out of his classroom an already suspended student would find him or herself with a violent classroom revolt on his hand - and would immediately be sacked, because the headmaster fears students and parents far more than they fear teachers.
Deprived of the stick, teachers must make do with an endless succession of carrots. Teacher training in Britain has a lot to do with show business. Teachers must be aware of the limits on the average student's attention span, pay constant attention to their audience, and, as far as possible, involve everybody. Lessons become more like games than anything else. The overriding requirement is, at all costs, keep the children listening and talking back.
It is easy to see how the rise of the unschooled minority is an inevitable feature of this kind of schooling. Paying attention to the children, trying to keep their attention, is all very well, and indeed is a major instinct of any truly gifted teacher; but it simply does not happen that all the members of a class are interested, well-meaning, or even simply capable of paying attention. Without effective ways of making children work, a minority will inevitably peel off. And at that point, the only possible course of action for the unfortunate teacher is what I described - let the unteachable minority do what it will so long as they let the rest do their work.
I have only experienced schools in working class districts with considerable percentages of immigrant children; and perhaps it may be the case that state schools in more middle-class areas have a bit less of this kind of systemic disruption. But I cannot imagine that they are wholly free of it, because, as I must insist, there is no way for a teacher to force an obstinate or bored child to desist from any activity other than studying in class. (I also must stress that ethnic or class origin is fairly irrelevant in determining which students will do badly; I have met illiterate recent immigrants from Somalia and Vietnam with no English but an absolute greed to learn, and natives from comfortable homes who were no better than thugs. I imagine that, reckoning in big numbers, some regularities might emerge, but they are irrelevant to the teacher at the chalkface, having to deal with individuals.)
Now let us look at numbers. Imagine that only two students in each class, on average, become part of the untaught and unteachable. Every year, that means that one good twelfth of the total of students - that is to say, of future citizens - will leave school largely illiterate, unfit for a modern society, uncultured, separate in every important way from their fellow-citizens. They will have been socialized - only not by the school, or at least not by their teachers. One twelfth, minimum, of the rising years of the citizenry, made wholly unfit to live in a modern society. And as these people, in turn, have never learned to communicate as the rest of the citizenry, well or badly, do, they are virtually invisible. They do not read newspapers, let alone write letters to them; they are not apt to be employed in skilled or long-term capacities; they have no knowledge and little interest in the matters that interest the rest of us, from pop music to philosophy. The only time they become visible to an astonished nation is when they appear on TV - their only cultural link with the rest of the world, and the inevitable goal of any of them who has kept an instinct of ambition. Then we have the shock of seeing the Jade Goodys. Or else we notice them when their one true channel of socialization - the street gang - also claims their lives.
The evil that this does is not restricted to the class of the rejected. It also poisons the attitude of the rest. Where learning is not a duty but a choice, where the children who do the study are actually distinguished from the rest, an unwholesome attitude is bound to creep in: a certain underlying vanity for simply doing what was expected of them (whereas the Gospel says, "When you have done your duty, you should lament and say: 'We are unprofitable servants, we have only done what was expected of us'") and, even worse, a sense that there are no such things as obligations and duties, but only personal choices. Yet the notion of duty should be at the absolute heart of anything that any school teaches.
This is what any sensible government, any government in touch with what really was going on in schools, should have tackled. This should have been the number one priority.
IT WAS RIGOROUSLY IGNORED. Not a single one of the dozens of government initiatives, reforms, plans, memoranda and yakkity-yakk of any sort ever even seemed to realize that an untaught and apparently unteachable minority existed. And so, while Blair despicably tried to force universities to accept poor students in the place of good ones, this is the final end of his reforms and initiatives: children of fifteen stabbing each other to death. This is the fruit of his efforts. It never happened before in recent English history - minors murdering each other in large numbers; it is a genuinely new thing. In this at least, Blair has been the herald of the New.
Certainly this government has paid enough attention to education; most educators would have been glad for rather less. Almost daily new initiatives, curricula extended and shortened, inspections and examinations, endless legislation, made most teachers feel as if they were standing on a slow but constant earthquake, where nothing could be certain or solid. The government even sank as low as to blackmail universities to force them to accept less able and successful students over more able and successful ones, merely so that it could fill in the ticks of its score-sheet dedicated to the promotion of disadvantaged students.
The moral and intellectual bankruptcy of that measure does not need to be underlined. It destroys at once the purpose of universities - to select and train the elites of tomorrow - and of ordinary school - to encourage achievement and root all students in a common culture. And while Blair and his accomplices (the only word that fits) masturbate with increasingly clumsy and even criminal measures of social engineering, the children they were supposed to educate out of poverty and violence kill each other in the streets. Something is very, very wrong here.
And I feel pretty sure that I know what it is. It is something that began to go to Hell long before Blair was able to do anything for or against it; that the conservative heroine Thatcher did nothing to alter; that is still at work poisoning Britain in places where nobody watches it at work.
I have tried a couple of times to become a schoolteacher, and that opportunity, though brief, allowed me a couple of invaluable glimpses into the realities of high school education in the United Kingdom - glimpses that I suspect no journalist or "expert", let alone politician, has ever had; or else they would not waste their time with footling corrections of course and curriculum, more or less examinations, more or less children per class, more or less computers in the classroom - when the truth is that the ship is leaking every year, and doing almost the opposite work than what it was intended to do.
Let us start by asking ourselves: what is the purpose of universal compulsory education? One, and one alone: to fit the children for their future lives as citizens in a democracy - that is, as people each of whom shares the responsibility for the functioning of state and society. For this purpose, we assume that they must be able to read, write and count; interpret sets of figures; manage a home or a small business; and share a certain amount of culture that means that they can communicate with each other, understand each other even where they disagree, and recognize common values. This common culture can also serve, if they so wish, as the starting point for further intellectual adventures in their adult lives. This is the heart of the matter; and if it was not so important to a democracy to have genuine, competent citizens, nobody could possibly excuse, let alone encourage, the dreadful cruelty of taking children from their family by compulsion for a considerable part of their childhood.
My experience in high schools had a number of positive features. I came out with an increased respect for schoolteachers, most of whom seemed to me to be wasting - or else hopefully placing at the disposal of the institution - considerable intellectual assets and the characters of saints, on impossible pursuits. If there ever was an army of lions led by donkeys, it is the class of schoolteachers in Britain. The worst that can be said of them is that they are heavily infected with the poison of Political Correctness, but in my experience this does rather less harm than conservative columnists like to think. On the other hand, the amount of the work and effort they do is constantly and perversely underestimated. There are a number of idiots and unpleasant people among them, but, on the whole, I would say rather less than among most other professions. I have a lot of time for senior-common-room companionship.
But not to mention all the other dreadful aspects of modern schooling (such as computers in the classroom, which I would positively forbid - Blair, of course, has done everything in his power to extend their use), one thing stood out in every school I experienced: that in every classroom, there was a minority of students - about four to six out of about twenty-four, shall we say - on whom the teachers, however heroic, had simply given up. There was an unspoken agreement that they might do whatever they wanted, so long as they did not bother those of their fellow-students who actually wanted to work.
This arises from the fact that the teachers have absolutely no instrument at all to force any student to do any work. Punishment of any kind is impossible. Detention is a legend - only readers of Harry Potter novels still believe that it amounts to anything. Even expulsion is extremely difficult to inflict, and a boy must have positively been burning buildings down before he is thrown out as he deserves. Indeed, any use of force is received even by ordinary students, let alone by the thug minority, with incomprehension and disbelief quickly rising into rage. A teacher who had the bad idea of forcing out of his classroom an already suspended student would find him or herself with a violent classroom revolt on his hand - and would immediately be sacked, because the headmaster fears students and parents far more than they fear teachers.
Deprived of the stick, teachers must make do with an endless succession of carrots. Teacher training in Britain has a lot to do with show business. Teachers must be aware of the limits on the average student's attention span, pay constant attention to their audience, and, as far as possible, involve everybody. Lessons become more like games than anything else. The overriding requirement is, at all costs, keep the children listening and talking back.
It is easy to see how the rise of the unschooled minority is an inevitable feature of this kind of schooling. Paying attention to the children, trying to keep their attention, is all very well, and indeed is a major instinct of any truly gifted teacher; but it simply does not happen that all the members of a class are interested, well-meaning, or even simply capable of paying attention. Without effective ways of making children work, a minority will inevitably peel off. And at that point, the only possible course of action for the unfortunate teacher is what I described - let the unteachable minority do what it will so long as they let the rest do their work.
I have only experienced schools in working class districts with considerable percentages of immigrant children; and perhaps it may be the case that state schools in more middle-class areas have a bit less of this kind of systemic disruption. But I cannot imagine that they are wholly free of it, because, as I must insist, there is no way for a teacher to force an obstinate or bored child to desist from any activity other than studying in class. (I also must stress that ethnic or class origin is fairly irrelevant in determining which students will do badly; I have met illiterate recent immigrants from Somalia and Vietnam with no English but an absolute greed to learn, and natives from comfortable homes who were no better than thugs. I imagine that, reckoning in big numbers, some regularities might emerge, but they are irrelevant to the teacher at the chalkface, having to deal with individuals.)
Now let us look at numbers. Imagine that only two students in each class, on average, become part of the untaught and unteachable. Every year, that means that one good twelfth of the total of students - that is to say, of future citizens - will leave school largely illiterate, unfit for a modern society, uncultured, separate in every important way from their fellow-citizens. They will have been socialized - only not by the school, or at least not by their teachers. One twelfth, minimum, of the rising years of the citizenry, made wholly unfit to live in a modern society. And as these people, in turn, have never learned to communicate as the rest of the citizenry, well or badly, do, they are virtually invisible. They do not read newspapers, let alone write letters to them; they are not apt to be employed in skilled or long-term capacities; they have no knowledge and little interest in the matters that interest the rest of us, from pop music to philosophy. The only time they become visible to an astonished nation is when they appear on TV - their only cultural link with the rest of the world, and the inevitable goal of any of them who has kept an instinct of ambition. Then we have the shock of seeing the Jade Goodys. Or else we notice them when their one true channel of socialization - the street gang - also claims their lives.
The evil that this does is not restricted to the class of the rejected. It also poisons the attitude of the rest. Where learning is not a duty but a choice, where the children who do the study are actually distinguished from the rest, an unwholesome attitude is bound to creep in: a certain underlying vanity for simply doing what was expected of them (whereas the Gospel says, "When you have done your duty, you should lament and say: 'We are unprofitable servants, we have only done what was expected of us'") and, even worse, a sense that there are no such things as obligations and duties, but only personal choices. Yet the notion of duty should be at the absolute heart of anything that any school teaches.
This is what any sensible government, any government in touch with what really was going on in schools, should have tackled. This should have been the number one priority.
IT WAS RIGOROUSLY IGNORED. Not a single one of the dozens of government initiatives, reforms, plans, memoranda and yakkity-yakk of any sort ever even seemed to realize that an untaught and apparently unteachable minority existed. And so, while Blair despicably tried to force universities to accept poor students in the place of good ones, this is the final end of his reforms and initiatives: children of fifteen stabbing each other to death. This is the fruit of his efforts. It never happened before in recent English history - minors murdering each other in large numbers; it is a genuinely new thing. In this at least, Blair has been the herald of the New.