I was brought up to believe that education, social capital and democracy were all part of the same piece. Democracy cannot flourish unless each generation is well nurtured in the affairs of the mind, and appropriately inducted into the responsibility of adulthood and the maintenance of the common good. Here the Conservatives in particular have to be extremely careful as they struggle to balance their political belief in competition with what I am sure is their personal experience of the need for collaboration.
Conservatives argue for decentralisation, but too often seem to be resurrecting, as their pet bogeyman, local authority officials and elected members to blame for everything they see as wrong. That might have been a reality twenty-five years ago yet to those of us out in the provinces today it seems that it has been Westminster’s grab for power that has so emasculated local authorities that the sense of democratic responsibility for local affairs, which should be the keystone of vital community, has simply disintegrated. That is a vastly serious matter. Every time a school or college opts to become an Academy another part of the local landscape moves out of the public domain and into the control of non-elected people.
I am probably more of an internationalist than many in the Conservative Party but I would re-echo the opinion of Per Thulberg (8/2/10 BBC) from Sweden that you cannot simply lift an idea from one country and drop it into another. The English soil was made by the likes of Milton, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, Dr Arnold and Winston Churchill. That already rich ‘soil’ can benefit, as always, by fertilisation from other lands but it is fertilisation, not transplantation – be it from Sweden, France or from America. At a time when there are such fundamental issues to be resolved by careful and intelligent thought Michael Gove is in grave danger of losing that gravitas which will need to be the hallmark of the next Minister of Education if he spends his time seeking a further meeting with Goldie Hawn or making further arrangements for a Swedish company (why is he forever talking about Sweden rather than Finland?) to be ready to move into England as a hit squad to deal with under-performing schools?
All future change will be, as ever, dependent on the supply of the highest quality of new teachers. One political adviser questioned me if it is good enough for a new teacher to serve a three-year apprenticeship to a current experienced teacher. I have to make the point that few people are natural – made-in-heaven – kinds of teachers. Most are not, and do need considerable support (and that is not meant in any way to be derogative). Of the ‘good’ teachers today who could be mentors in the future, their expertise lies largely in working within current patterns of schooling, and within the current assumptions, i.e. a good secondary teacher is, as of now, unlikely to be competent with younger pupils, or vice versa.
Here is the crux of the problem. If the training of today’s teachers means that they don’t know how to make the transition from one sector to another when every one of their pupils has to leap that gap then in future they need vastly enhanced teacher education courses, and ones which are as rigorous as they are broad. Just remember this – there are probably as many ‘made-in-heaven’ teachers in England as there are in Finland; the reason Finland is so much better than Britain is that their teachers have a better idea of what they are doing, and how to do it. That comes from their deep and reflective training.
More than most people I really believe that much of the present system is broken, and I do not think it can be fixed in a conventional way. Schools, teachers or administrators are seen by too many politicians as an easy scapegoat for current problems. Which is not right. It is the post-modern era that is rapidly rendering the western education system obsolete. Whilst acknowledging that the incessant waves of reform that have plagued Western education for 40 or more years, have served only to aggravate the problem, no solution that does not recognise the need for a complete fundamental reinvention of the entire way in which society brings up its children, has any chance of success. To see this primarily as a party political issue is to miss the point for too many mistakes have been made in the past 25 years as politicians have trivialised or misrepresented each other’s positions. There is no time left for such flippancy. We are faced with a question of national survival. Until politicians of all sides see it like this then an ambiguous and ambivalent education policy is going to continue to dumb our children down, and weaken our society.
If the education system were to be still further privatised and taken away from local control, England would have lost what should be an essential component of our free, democratic society. In solving one problem our soon-to-be-elected parliamentarians might well end up by making things much worse for the country in the future. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, born an Englishman and a founding Father of America intensely proud of his English intellectual inheritance “If you think the people not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.”
That, Mr Balls, Mr Gove and Mr Laws, is the issue you have to grapple with – a national system of education that is appropriate to the maintenance and nurture of a just, skilful and magnanimous society.
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