TheParagon-Education

Let’s go back to the moment when Tony Blair, as Prime Minister, announced the end of educational ideology – that educational aims and procedures were a given, and that all remained were the technical, non-sectarian challenge of implementing educational policy. Since that time we have lived under a single educational ideology, that of the authoritarian Right. People often talk of this as a ‘neo-liberal’ approach to the management of the education system – I don’t think that is right. Tony Blair was a Progressive, and Progressives historically have, in many ways, been conservative. But in this series of Blogs I’ll make that transparent, and show what one alternative might be – a left-wing approach to education. I do this to ‘multiply the narrative’ about education.

If you think you know schools – sit tight!

In 1968 Philip Jackson published a game-changing book on schools. It was called Life in Classrooms. This was the first time a Sociologist had entered a school to understand what it is, not for what we claim it to be. He did not assume that schools were places for teaching and learning, for example, but he was prepared, as any good Sociologist, to learn to see afresh. He found, in fact, that schools revolved around three key purposes: crowds, praise and power.

Crowds: In no other area of social life do we spend large amounts of our lives in confined spaces with crowds of other people. The demand this creates for discipline and order are great and dominate the life and culture of a school. “There is a social intimacy in schools that is unmatched anywhere else in our society.” This becomes the leading purpose of schooling: to create and sustain order for the management of crowds.

Praise: Again, in no other area of social life are people constantly under scrutiny, and subject to highly consequential judgement. Almost every minute of every day, students (and, more recently, teachers) are being judged for their performance – seeking praise, avoiding condemnation.

Power: Jackson reminds us that only prisons and mental institutions – and schools – coerce people to be confined. In school, “the divisions between the weak and the powerful are clearly drawn”. The authority of the teacher determines much of the wellbeing and the conditions of life of the confined students. Most relationships are defined by power.

In sum, there is nothing natural about a classroom. It is fashioned around these three key and unusual characteristics, pulled this way and that as students and teachers negotiate their way and manage the persistent, underlying tensions. Each and every student must “come to grips with the inevitability of [their] experience”. Jackson called this the hidden curriculum of schooling – the underlying and underpinning reality of what is being taught and learned in school. Whatever the geography, the maths, the biology and the history, students are learning above all how to manage in controlled, institutional environments. They are learning who they can and cannot be.

You may imagine, and you may be right, that this leaves little time for teaching and learning to assert themselves as the key reality of schooling. In fact, Jackson, as others since, points out the obvious – that learning is a process that is so demanding in itself that it has to be reduced to two possibilities: one, that it becomes a repetitive routine, humdrum and unremarkable; the other, that it is reduced to rare moments when energies can be intensified and burned up like the phosphorous in a match. This is why schooling celebrates the mean, aims for mediocrity. Anything else is too disruptive, too expensive of calories and control. Possibly the most surprising of examples is the music conservatoire which is, against many people’s expectations, designed to produce the next generation of compliant orchestral players, the average music worker, not the soloist, the creative improviser, the free expressionist. These latter are too expensive in both calories and control. You cannot have both order and self-expression.
Nothing since has modified Jackson’s insights. Of course, government educational policy is relentless in refuting it, insistent that schools and classrooms revolve around teaching and learning, and that all the paraphernalia Jackson describes as the real substance of schooling are merely supportive or interrupting of the pedagogical effort.

In fact, its insistence reveals another area of perilous mythology around the institution of schooling. That teaching is a determinant of learning.