The Tragedy of British Education

Alan Johnson has recently announced plans to increase the school leaving age to 18. The announcement has been widely trailed, and is being backed up by research that has suggested half of school leavers at 16 later regret their decision to drop out. The decision is not just significant for the change in lifestyle that it will bring about for many; nor for the added cost that having more young adults in full-time education will bring to the government budget. If the transition to education until 18 is handled correctly, it may well sort out the problem that has hampered the British education system for over 100 years.

The 1902 Education Act set the tone for the way Britain has thought of education throughout the 20th century. Balfour conceived of the Act as a means of giving state funding to prop up church schools; politically it was a disaster, as many believe that it led Joe Chamberlain to launch his tariff reform campaign that split the Tory Party. More significantly, though, it failed to take the rising fields of technical education seriously, and entrenched in the British psyche that the only kind of education that was of real value was a classical, academic education. That led to the failure of the grammar school system; it is the reason behind the devaluing of A-Levels to a ridiculous extent today. Yet the 1900s had a great opportunity to expand and formalise a system of technical education that would have rivalled any in the world.

Local authorities in the 1900s were only allowed to provide an elementary education for all students; thereafter they were expected to go to work or, if exceptional, could get to grammar school (assuming, of course, that parents could afford fees and uniform). It quickly became obvious, however, that children’s capacity for learning – even if not good enough for entry to grammar school – did not end when government decreed it should, and many local authorities developed junior technical schools (JTSs) that provided training in the sciences after the basic elementary education had finished – and some of these were strikingly successful in the education they provided.

Nevertheless, the policy of successive governments was to close these operations down. They were using money that was given for one express purpose, and anything beyond that was illegal. These actions were backed up by the attitude of Morant, the Permanent Secretary to the Board of Education, who believed in a classical education, and that the entire education policy should be geared towards encouraging grammar schools, which in turn should train their pupils to read Classics at university.

The British view of a scientist, too, remained hopelessly out of date – the enthusiastic amateur working alone in academic endeavour, waiting for his big breakthrough. No wonder that the big German and American universities quickly started outstripping us in emerging fields like Chemistry. They invested in them heavily; there were huge numbers of students studying sciences, especially in comparison with Britain where, as ever, they trained their classicists in huge numbers.

This had a knock-on effect on the Butler Education Act of 1944, in that although the grammar school system was always intended to be tri-partite, the prevailing attitude meant that the 11-plus became a mere pass/fail exam. The third option – the development of technical schools for greater vocational education – never really came to pass. Why? Because there was only one kind of education worth investing in. And it didn’t involve equipping those who weren’t the most academically able with the skills to go out and make a trade.

The mindset still continues today. There’s a recognition that Britain hasn’t done enough to encourage the development of vocational education. But rather than building up a genuinely high-quality vocational system, every step taken has to compare vocational qualifications to academic ones – hence the notion that a GNVQ is worth 4 GCSE passes at grade C, or the absolutely stark raving bonkers idea that Vocational A-Levels are appropriate training for university, counting as ‘double A-Levels’ under the UCAS system. The attempt to frame vocational qualifications in academic concerns only undermines both – no-one seriously thinks the vocational qualifications live up to their billing, yet in attempting to make the skills examined more analogous, academic qualifications lose much of their rigour.

So how might increasing the school-leaving age to 18 help solve this problem? Well, it would be a catastrophic mistake to try and force those who don’t want to be at school to stay in formal, classroom education full-time. That’s a recipe for problems in the classroom, and increasingly stressed-out sixth form teachers who will have to deal with people who actively resent still being at school.

Moreover, many leave school because they found GCSEs or equivalents hard to deal with – so it makes no sense to try and cram them in to the next level of education. No, if the move to raise the school leaving age is to work, then it will need to be modelled on something like the German system. Rather than spending all school hours in the classroom, students are free to start apprenticeships or other technical schemes of education, returning to the classroom only for a day or two a week. In Britain, that would allow a focus on the key skills such as English and Maths, while allowing most of the student’s time to be spent on practical tasks.

The government needs to reverse the policies that have failed Britain for over a hundred years, and take vocational and technical education outside of the academic classroom. And in demanding the school leaving age be raised to 18, they may just have found the formula that can help them.

State Interference

Thelondonpaper ran a centre-page spread earlier this week about Bollywood’s leading actresses. Not being a film buff by any stretch of the imagination, the subject matter failed to grab my interest. Yet my gaze was averted long enough to note that in informing us about each of the leading stars, they made a comparison with a leading Hollywood lady. Shilpa Shetty was Sandra Bullock – rich and famous, without doubt, but last made a big film in the 90s. Another was compared to Renee Zellweger – not a traditional beauty, but my goodness, can she act. When trying to explore a new subject, there’s an undeniable tendency for us to relate knowledge to things of which we have a far better understanding. And that is where the most interesting story to come from this week’s Big Brother racism row lies.

Within the past 12 months, there have been three major news stories that have two main features in common: that they are primarily cultural in nature, and that they involve Westerners making negative portrayals of non-Western countries. I refer, of course, to the ‘cartoon wars’, to Borat, and to Big Brother. There’s a third thing that unites these stories, too – in every single case, the government of the denigrated country (or countries, in the case of the cartoon wars) has appealed to the Western governments to take action against the companies responsible for the cultural slight.

There’s a certain irony in seeing our political leaders being forced to comment on TV programmes which they almost certainly have no interest in. In particular, there’s an irony in Gordon Brown travelling to India to present himself as a statesman, and instead finding himself harangued at every turn by angry Bollywood fans, and having to find soundbites on Big Brother. But there’s also something unfamiliar about it. Politicians like to show they have the common touch by commenting on popular culture – although if this has any effect at all, it is normally to come back and haunt them.

Yet we would never, ever expect politicians to take an active role intervening in these matters. Denmark’s Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, earned a great deal of respect when he refused to bow to international pressure and take action against the editor of Jyllands-Posten over the printed cartoons, saying that as long as the newspaper stayed within libel laws, what it printed was a matter of editorial policy, and so it should remain. Nor did we ever expect George Bush or Tony Blair to take the Kazakhstani authorities seriously when they asked for Borat to be banned for the negative portrayal of their own country.

Perhaps we could understand the sensitivity of Kazakhstan in these matters, though. After all, its democracy is in its earliest stages; it has never experienced a transfer of presidential power since independence, and it had years of existing as one of the poorest relations of the USSR. This week, however, India’s government felt compelled to speak out on the supposed racist treatment of one of its national icons, making official representations from Cabinet Ministers to Gordon Brown in relation to the Big Brother affair. India, despite having a thriving cultural industry, despite having a stable democracy, still saw matters of broadcasting as something that should be subject to governmental interference.

This raises broader issues about the specific features of Western democracy and the legacies of colonialism. Here in the West, we’re more than used to the existence of repositories of power and culture existing outside of directly political structures. Indeed, it is the notions of an independent press, of the rights of people to have the freedom of speech, of very specific limits being placed upon the operation of political power, that define the Western notion of democracy.

How different is that outside of the Western world? As noted above, the traditions of democracy, and the traditions that inform the content of Western democracy, have far weaker roots. The legacy of colonialism, too, is one where an outside power exerted considerable authority. Military strength alone was not sufficient to perpetuate such control – there was a need to co-opt local elites and power groups into the ruling classes as well, so that colonial rule had a local power structure on which to lean on (for example, it is notable that when Saddam was emasculated militarily after the Gulf War, he increased the role that religious leaders played in Iraq).

The knock-on effect of all of this is a different conception of power relations. Where local control of the political system has arrived only recently, there’s an understandable desire for total control of the apparatus of the state. Whether this proves feasible in practice or not is a somewhat moot point – the fact is, by appealing on a government-to-government level, they reveal the attitude that they believe that cultural matters are an appropriate area for that sort of intervention. In the West, while I’d expect politicians in Britain to comment on, say, the racist taunts endured by England players in football matches abroad, I’d be very surprised if they were to appeal to the Spanish government to take action.

Of course, there is a model through which government can make a positive intervention on these cultural affairs. What it involves is an understanding of the way politics operates in the West – that is, that it keeps its nose out of trying to run the press. Instead, it plays along with the media game, exploiting opportunities for favourable write-ups. One government of the three I mention realised the error of its ways, and managed to win considerable support and publicity by playing the media exposure for all it was worth.

Kazakhstan’s government quickly realised that it was making no headway with its complaints against Borat – and worse still, it was committing the heinous crime of being unable to take a joke. So it turned away from railing against Western authorities for not listening to their concerns, and instead took the opportunity to send their ambassadors on goodwill missions, writing editorials and giving interviews in which they extolled the virtues of their country. Which, by and large, had the effect of making Borat appear the boor. Ultimately, their decision to fight a media war, not a diplomatic one, paid off handsomely.

India’s government could learn a lot from the approach. Rather than haranguing Gordon Brown as he attempts to establish strong links with an emerging economy, they would do much better by approaching Channel 4 for a right of reply, at the same time as launching a cultural mission to bring greater awareness of India’s heritage. Maybe they could even invite Jade Goody to spend some time travelling the country and opening her eyes to a culture that is more than just poppadoms. If they really want to influence coverage of the media row around Big Brother, they’ve got to understand the political culture in which they operate. Britain will respond far better to an information campaign than they will to any diktat from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.

Tim Ireland, Guido Fawkes, and the Public Sphere

So… what are the rules?

But this is a fist fight! There are no rules!

Tim Ireland and Guido Fawkes are currently embroiled in a fairly unpleasant flame war that has enlivened large swathes of the British blogosphere. Guido, as you probably already know, has risen to fame on the back of his blog, in which he airs the dirty linen of politicians up and down the country for all to see – whilst simultaneously chickening out of being legally liable for anything he prints by hosting his blog off-shore. His shit-stirring and tittle-tattle has, unsurprisingly perhaps, attracted the attention of the mainstream media. He is thus able to, with some justification, claim to be Britain’s most widely-read blogger.

Tim Ireland, understandably, has serious misgivings about Guido. In particular, he despises Guido’s attitude towards using blogs as a platform for debate. As with most bloggers, Mr Fawkes reserves the right to delete comments he deems unsuitable. Unfortunately, however, as Ireland points out, this includes comments that try and respond to the broader political points made by Guido. If you’re not prepared to make poo jokes or gay jibes, it seems, you’re not welcome. Worse still, according to Ireland, Guido deliberately changes the ordering of comments and inserts his own responses after the event, so that all debates on his blog are skewed towards Guido’s viewpoints.

Up till now, the defining point of the British blogosphere, in opposition to its American counterpart, is that it has focused largely on discussing issues and trying to broaden out media discussion, rather than engaging in muck-raking, slander, and the worst forms of hackery. Tim Worstall, when writing in The Times to promote his anthology of 2005’s blogging, made the comparison between blogs and 18th-century coffee houses – allowing a wider community of the politically interested to form, discuss issues among themselves, and thus widen the range of discussion and possible solutions from those that are normally parroted among opinion-formers.

It’s a model that’s very similar to Jurgen Habermas’s concept of the structural transformation of the public sphere. Habermas saw the democratizing forces of the 18th century – as seen in the American and French Revolutions, and the growth of Parliamentary supremacy in England – as springing out of a newly created “public sphere”. New institutions like the coffeehouses and printing presses that spawned popular newspapers allowed a wider participation in public affairs, allowing affairs of state to be discussed by private (ie non-governmental) persons. A greater scrutiny of public affairs was therefore allowed, and the nature of political affairs was changed forever, heralding a new wave of popular political participation.

So far, so good, you might think. After all, the British blogosphere has managed to develop with remarkably strong sociability, and a surprising infrequency of flame wars. One of the main reasons for this has been the conventions that have developed among British bloggers. Allowing comments on posts – and thus allowing your arguments to be challenged – is virtually de rigueur; trackbacks, too, enable readers to follow arguments that have been taken up by other bloggers elsewhere. The mere fact of the steady proliferation of blogs, and the increasing awareness thereof, demonstrates a widening popular involvement in national political discussion. Never mind that bloggers are largely drawn from a specific stratum of the population – people up and down the country are developing their political thoughts in writing, and engaging with others across the country as they do so. That has to have an effect on politics, right?

Not so fast. A crucial part of Habermas’s theory rested on the public sphere as a remarkably unmediated realm of discussion. The public sphere was successful insofar as it allowed ideas to be judged on their merits, rather than their supporters – the public sphere was a democratic institution freed from early modern hindrances such as deference. This ideal was never seen in reality. Indeed, two decades of work by historians has gone a long way to debunking Habermas’s myths.

The coffeehouses and salons quickly became partisan institutions – Whigs did not mix with Tories; they drank among their own friends. To be taken seriously by either side, you first had to prove your worth as a person, rather than being able to bound in with a wonderful idea that would be readily accepted by all. Even in newspapers, where the use of pseudonyms was widespread (and, so, the depersonalisation of discussion should have been complete), names were chosen largely to tell readers the political background of the author. Nor were all the democratizing influences alike. Discussion in newspapers was filtered through editors; the printed word was considerably different in scope to an argument over a warm cup of tea. Historians have come up with the concept, therefore, of “competing public spheres” – accurate enough, but only if the public sphere is seen as somewhere where debate takes place. The concept of intelligent, rational debate coming to the fore only occurred within small sub-debates; for an idea to be of truly big importance, then you still had to have powerful champions.

And that is, more or less, the situation the blogosphere finds itself in today. For all that Time magazine declared YOU to be the person of the year 2006, the problem the blogosphere has, politically speaking, is that there is no mechanism within it that makes sure it is the top ideas that rise and influence public debate. As much as Tim Ireland may like the idea, not everyone blogs by the same rules. And while ad hominem attacks inform bloggers’ opinions as much as the content of posts, that won’t change. We shouldn’t really think of the ‘blogosphere’, rather several ‘competing blogospheres’ – all of which have their own conventions for debate, their own political biases, and, ultimately, their own audiences. All clamouring for attention, but not trying to shape debate in the same way.

The problem is that blogging isn’t boxing. We haven’t all signed up to the Queensbury rules; there isn’t a smartly bedecked referee ready to step in and give someone a standing 8 count if things aren’t quite going to plan. The beauty and the beast of blogging are tied up in the freedom of the medium. Ireland’s desire for rational discourse through blogs is laudable – and they certainly have a great potential to shape the way that we think about the world and the issues that affect us. But the blog is little more than a medium, and as with all mediums, they are value neutral. Electricity gave us the lightbulb, but it gave us the electric chair, too. The car increases our ability to visit far-flung relatives, but it allows criminals their speedy getaway. Blogs are part of the same theme – it’s what we do with them that counts.

Of course, there’s a lot we can try to ensure that our own blogosphere punches above its weight. There’s much that Ireland recommends that will help make British blogs politically relevant. But even if most of the blogosphere adopts codes of best practice, it’s not going to change the fact that it’s not what is done internally that counts, but how able the blogosphere is to convince the public. And it’s certainly not going to do much to stop the existence of sites like Guido’s. We might want a nice clean fight, but we have to guard ourselves against a punch to the balls.

Mission Statement

There’s one theme that unites most of the stories in the news over the past few months or so. That is, with rare exceptions, they’ve been unbelievably boring. In Britain in particular, there’s a good reason for that – no-one wants to make a brave or bold move when they know that Tony Blair will be stepping down in the next few months. Why waste time publicising new policies when Gordon Brown can assimilate them into his programme the minute he gets the keys to Number 10? But it’s a similar story in America, too, where the Presidential candidates are jockeying for media attention without wanting to give the bloodthirsty hounds any meat to tear into.

The key reason for all of this is that our political thinking is heavily conditioned by the electoral cycle. The voice of the people is heard only periodically – so election days become moments of seizmic shifts. Anyone connected with politics knows that direct, tangible results are only ever seen at the ballot box, and so all their efforts go into making sure that everything goes right on one given day. And when so much work is focused on such a specific aim, the reporting of politics is necessarily skewed towards election day. Besides, without a focus on elections, how could you manage personality-driven news so easily?

Yet when historians come back to write their version of the Noughties, elections will only figure loosely in such a narrative. Of course election data is important – but it is important only insofar as it helps mark the passing of far broader trends. When historians will look at opinion polls, it will not be the headline “who will you vote for” figure they concentrate on most; it will be their attitudes to different rafts of legislation. I suspect that the debate about ID Cards will fit into a broader narrative of civil liberties that stretches back to Michael Howard’s tenure as Home Secretary at the very least, and will be increasingly divorced from Blair and Bush’s political fate.

My aim as I start this blog is to think about the issues defining the political landscape today in wider perspective. Sometimes this will take the form of historical parallels; sometimes it will mean a consideration of other occasions an issue has been raised; sometimes the discussion will be firmly rooted in the present, but developing strategies over a longer period of time. History, after all, is primarily an approach, a way of thinking about the world and about the influences of change over time. And it is an approach that can allow us to take a more detached view of problems – to avoid short-term thinking and reacting to minutiae that in the long run are of little significance.

For those of you who have followed me here from my blogging at Militant Moderate, thank you for joining me, and I hope that the more specific focus of this blog allows me to entertain and inform you even more!