Blair's legacy of dead kids

[fpb]

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.

Comments

[patchworkmind.livejournal.com]

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.

Ah, so the U.S. did manage to import that finally, after 30+ years. That's too bad, truly.

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...

I'd wager your experiences were similar to mine. Reading on with your post, I believe I'm correct.

...the truth is that the ship is leaking every year, and doing almost the opposite work than what it was intended to do.

Alas. Quite. In this country as well.

... a sense that there are no such things as obligations and duties, but only personal choices.

To me, this mindset is the doom of our civilization.

[dirigibletrance.livejournal.com]

Truly, as you've said, as a civilization we're erring more and more to the polar extreme of individual rights, at the expense of collective duty and societal obligations and civic virtue. And each generation is teaching the next to err in the same fashion, but even moreso.

I only hope that there is some sort of wakeup call, some sort of pro-duty backlash that can arrest this. I don't know if Gordon Brown is the man to do this for Britain (mostly because I don't know anything about him at all), and I certainly don't think any of the current US contenders for President are the ones to do it for America.

[un-crayon-rouge.livejournal.com]

How would you propose the government should have tackled this problem?

I do think that a reasonable sense of responsability and duty should be instilled into children, and that they should learn that not everything in life will be an easy, colorful, happy game designed to entertain them. But I see this as a much wider and deeper problem. It's in the media, who want people to be consumers from the cradle to the grave; it's at home, where parents sometime cannot and sometimes will not bother; it's everywhere.

School can only do so much. The core values have to be not only taught but lived, at home. If the parents and the closer circle of the child provide no valid model of self-reliance, self-respect, respect for others, work etc., it will be hard for schools or the government to do anything about.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Quite. But if there is one thing I have learned in life, it is that you do not solve a problem by taking in all the various things that are wrong with it and obsessing about how impossible they all are to solve at once. One problem I had to deal with recently was to have to clean a whole house that has been allowed to go to rot. The amount of different jobs that needed doing was scary, and each depended on the others. But if you start by being scared of the whole, and just looking around you helplessly, you will never get anything done. You have to start from one point - say, the kitchen. And what is more, you will find that as you are cleaning, for a while the mess will grow worse, not better. As you go behind the furniture to get rid of the caked filth and spray for mice and cockroaches, the dirt will go back on the areas you have already worked in. But in the long run, you are cleaning the whole area.

The same goes for the catastrophic situation I described. Where can government start from? Not from the media; there is such a thing as freedom of speech, and government is not dictate to the press. Not from the interiors of people's houses - the thing in the world most resistant to government interference. Government has an influence on schools, and it is in schools that it must act. Give teachers real authority; crack down on violent parents; allow punishments that children feel; face down threats from lawyers and the media. My complaint against the Blair government is that it has spent a monstrous amount of energy on fiddling around with externals without once addressing the serious problem of a rising class of the untaught and unteachable, and when the situation has become dramatic, its reaction has not been to work constructively to deal with, but to blackmail the universities into pretending that there was no problem. One indicative sign is that the already overburdened, overtaxed and over-mortgaged English middle class is spending ever more money on private education: in one decade, the proportion of privately educated children has risen from six to nine per cent - one Hell of a vote of no-confidence in state schooling from the people best able to judge.

whoops....

[fpb.livejournal.com]

..."Government is not meant to to dictate to the press."

[un-crayon-rouge.livejournal.com]

I agree that the government should focus on this issues and radically change its policies in education and schools (I'm talking about Spain now, but I don't think the situation is all that different), and above all, stop catering to the media and "general opinion". Schools should stop being afraid of parents and lawyers and be given the proper tools to implement good learning atmosphere for kids.

I don't think I'm the type of person that just whines about everything that's wrong in the world without taking any action, but I must confess that I am pessimistic about this. My mother is a schoolteacher in a rather good school (german state school in Madrid) and she always repeats that the problem is not the kids, or even the school system, with those she could work. The problem are the parents, who undermine every effort she makes. Parents send their kids to all kinds of after-school activities or to stay with their grandparents or sit them in front of a video console, and think it is perfectly ok if they don't their homework. They have no rules, no discipline at home, and when the kids become too difficult, they tell the teachers they expect the school to "educate" them. They have no books at all at home, never go to museums, concert or even have a conversation as a family at home. There's not much a teacher can do in view of those odds, everything she tries to do in school is immediately undone when the kids come home, so after a while she just gives up and tries to at least get them to learn to write, to read, and to count (she teaches primary school).

The problem with the house-analogy is that, even if it's a big task that might seem impossible at first, cleaning it up still depends only on you. You can choose how and when to do it, take your own time, and you can be sure that any layer of paint you apply, any nook you clean, will stay that way. There is no way to control what society and families are doing to the kids when they are not in school, and I seriously doubt the ability of school, even in ideal conditions, to educate children so well that they'll be able to withstand the barrage of negative influence that awaits them in the world outside.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

We have been there before. Or rather, our fathers have. When, one after the other, Prussia, France, Britain, Italy and the USA imposed universal elementary education on their population, they started from human material at least as unpromising as today's. One Frenchman from the period described his own country as "a nation of barbarians civilized by conscription" - and conscription, which was the end of the educational cycle for most male citizens, was no bed of roses. The State, having a clear idea in mind of the citizen it wanted and needed to produce, used all its powers to produce it. The problem today begins with the State having no confidence in its own values, not enough to face down refractary and anti-social citizens. Of course, this does not apply only to schools.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Above all, you have to remember what I was writing. My point was not that the work to be done is difficult or impossible; the point is that the Tory Blur has wasted an incredible amount of effort - mostly other people's effort - essentially in an escapistic direction, positively refusing to notice, let alone deal with, the one gigantically serious issue that underlay all others. When I think of all the extra work that has been placed on the shoulders of teachers, let alone the way they have been made to feel at fault, my blood boils. And when I think that the final result of this process, which I had seen at work years ago (and I have the essays to prove it), is children of fifteen stabbing each other to death because the only social reality they know is their street gang, and that these things were not happening even five years ago, that they are the end result of ten years of wasted effort, I could strangle the man.

[redcoast.livejournal.com]

Well, being a member of that generation, the generation with only Spongebob to comfort it, what should I say? That for the truly trouble children, education may not be the thing they most need?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I do not see you in a gang, stabbing a member of an opposing gang for no reason than that he belongs to that gang. Sorry, my dear, I just cannot imagine you in that role. And the point is: if we are not educating children for an adult life in a complex society, why are we dragging them to school at all?

[redcoast.livejournal.com]

I do not see you in a gang, stabbing a member of an opposing gang for no reason than that he belongs to that gang.

Finally!

[notebuyer.livejournal.com]

So you're saying that you taught only Achilles? (check out particularly next to last stnanza).

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Pretty much. I have not seen the worst, because my involvement was a few years ago already, but I had seen where it was tending - to street gangs, violence, and frightful ignorance. "That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,/ Were axioms to him, who'd never heard/ Of any world where promises were kept,/ Or one could weep because another wept" - I will not say that this forms the perfect picture of the mind of children I have met, but it is clearly the direction in which the way they were being socialized led (the words "educated" and "brought up" do not apply here). Frightful ignorance, for one thing: I have stood in a school library, surrounded by books, and heard a boy being surprised and protest because I had told him that his name - Isaac - was of Jewish origin. Who on Earth has never heard of Abraham and Isaac; and why did his parents waste that name on him, if they could not even tell him what it stood for?

[notebuyer.livejournal.com]

You seem to be describing a children's warehouse, rather than a school: the point is off the street and out of the home, rather than positive education, even to the point of encouraging curiousity and the idea that questions might have findable answers. Which is an appallingly bad use of society's resources, and an even worse use of children's time than leaving them on the street, where at least they might notice that adults seemed to know more about some things.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

My point exactly.

[bufo-viridis.livejournal.com]

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.
Ernest Gellner argued - pretty convincingly - that it was capitalism, which imposed it, to create a floating workers population :) The nationalism followed. But that's beside the point, one of my favourite theories just popped into my mind.

On the whole, this is one of the reasons I like university level education and abhore the thought of working "below". Here I can always say: "It's not compulsory, y'know, there's no rule which says you must pass this exam."

[lazy-neutrino.livejournal.com]

"It's not compulsory, y'know, there's no rule which says you must pass this exam."

In England, of course, that is no longer true. One of the key factors determining 'league table position' is the % of first class degrees, which the university has - almost - complete control over. There exists an external verification system but it lacks teeth. So there is considerable pressure on faculties to increase the number of top degrees.

I can't 100% generalise - someone may be along shortly with the opposite view - but many of my family are lecturers or higher, at a range of universities, so I am speaking from real data.

Fabio, this is an interesting post and I shall come back to it. I teach in a grammar school as you know, but I have taught in one of the tougher comprehensives, in an area designated as 'extreme social need'. Even in such a school, good teachers cope better than others, and I know I made a difference to children that would not otherwise have passed their exams. Whether the exams are what they used to be is another matter: they are what they are (teachers have long been excluded from those decisions!) and passing them gives the children choices they would not otherwise have. I'm 100% with you on the purpose of education - a democracy should raise citizens who can take responsibility, ask hard questions, and help those weaker than themselves.

I will say though, having taught in a range of schools, that when there is a consistent discipline policy, which is supported by every member of the staff, the school is very likely to succeed with almost all of its pupils, regardless of their background, ability, attitude, etc. I've seen it done in the toughest schools, and I've left one of the top state schools in the country because it did not do that and the school was failing its pupils as a result. (Exam results were extremely good. They should have been better. That's failure.) When the discipline is inconsistent, or senior staff don't support staff in the front line, the school is very likely to fail many of its pupils, again regardless of their background etc. At the moment I work at a school with a very successful discipline policy. Sanctions are feared by the pupils, because they know, and we know, that if we give them a detention, in the end they will do a detention. They may wriggle a bit, or apply delaying tactics, but I am able to sit down with a child and predict exactly on what day he will do the detention if he applies every delaying tactic in his power, because our discipline policy works. There is a Deputy Head in charge of the 'final' detention, and if they truant that, all hell breaks loose - a letter goes home the next morning and if the parent doesn't give a satisfactory answer, they come in. If they don't come in, we may ask the to keep the child at home until the issue has been resolved. (They come in very quickly then!)

The 'tough' school I referred to earlier had a good OFSTED, then a new Head came. Within twelve months (!) a third of the staff left, recruitment into the new year 7 nosedived and the inspectors came back. We failed that inpsection. In that year I was threatened with knives and lighters by pupils (in my classroom), threatened with 'If you fill in that form, I'll get you done for hitting me', threatened with a brick through my window, followed home (unsuccessfully - they weren't very clever) and sat through a detention where I was literally under siege as a thirteen-year-old-girl kicked the door, threw things at it, shouted abuse at me, for an hour, all because I had kept her friend in detention. The new Head eventually left and , I presume, went to ruin another school. I don't know - I was one of the third who walked. Six of us took a pay cut and jumped, six left teaching altogether, the NQT got a pay rise and a promotion. What a waste of talent!

And now I'm somewhere where I have control in my class, and I teach.

This is all - necessarily - personal and anecdotal; I just thought you might be interested in it. One other thing - usually behind a 'bad child' there's a 'bad parent'. I think the malaise goes a lot further back than the last ten years and I'd be interested in your thoughts on that.

[lazy-neutrino.livejournal.com]

Reading this through, my litany of woes in the third last para makes me come across perhaps as a weak teacher. I'm not :)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The collapse of marriage in the UK and the abundance of one-parent families are certainly part of the problem, although the pressure of economics are slowly forcing a reversal on the population in general - people are staying together longer because housing is so frighteningly expensive. A single parent of exceptional character and strength can bring up decent children even while working full-time; I have seen it happen. But that is the problem: it has to be an exceptional person - and most people aren't exceptional. One person living alone with a couple of children will always have problems imposing her or his will upon them - even two people may not be enough; as someone said, it takes a village to raise a child.
These things tend to cooperate, I would say, with the sentimental notion that parents are to be "loving and supportive" - which, in the minds of distracted, weak or unthinking parents, means giving their children everything they ask for and supporting them even when they are wrong. Given that parents, in my view, are the source of basic moral attitudes, this inevitably spoils the children.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I do not accept Gellner's argument; it does not deal with the facts. Historically, universal education was a by-product of universal conscription, and began in countries such as France and Prussia where the army was a dominant social institution and a major avenue of socialization. And universal conscription, in turn, was a by-product of the French Revolution and its famous "levees en masse". Before the Revolution, conscript army units were regarded with contempt - "militias" were the object of educated hilarity in Shakespeare's historical plays, Dryden's poetry and so on. Frederic II of Prussia positively forbade the bourgeois class of his kingdom from enlisting. It was the frightful, unexpected efficacy of revolutionary and napoleonic conscript armies that changed the minds of European leaderships; and the introduction of conscription in Continental countries, though not in Britain and the USA, was a major part of their process of liberalization and democratization. No wonder that Russia did everything in its power to avoid conscription! Certainly, the elementary education I received in the sixties still bore some marks of its original military nature - we learned to march in PE class, we sang patriotic songs in music class, and I don't want to tell you what some of the history textbooks were like.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I am sure you are not. But this is exactly the problem: you have a system that CAN be made to work - by a team of exceptionally good teachers with first-rate leadership. For universal education, we need a system that will work at some level of efficiency, and not break down, with mediocre personnel and leadership. We cannot treat all children as if they were ready and willing to learn, nor all teachers as though they were capable of inspiring and enhancing the lives of whole classes. It is good if it happens, but what we need from universal education is results, not heroic efforts.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

You indeed had said it all. May I send people here?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You are welcome/ And thanks.