RICHARD self-activity. HATCHER The problem for us in education is that while there is explains how a quite a lot of militant activity radical policy for by teachers, there is little by education is the people outside education. key to mobilising Even the most significant WELFARE STATE popular campaigns, such as more active those against schools opting working class out are limited to defensive support. demands, with no alternative programme beyond that for a WE KNOW - more or less well-funded comprehensive - what we are against in school system. education: against opting Equality out, against cuts, against national tests and league ta- Even the campaign around bles. racial and gender equality, the And we have some idea of most important gain in educawhat we are for. But how do tion that the left has registered we get from one to the other? over the past iwenty years There is a danger of a split failed to resolve the problem between immediate demands of the relationship to the state, in education. however mili- and ended being swallowed tantly fought for, and more up in municipal socialism or general longer-term goals. educational managerialism. We tend to bridge the gap with So how can working class a reflex implanted by half a and popular activity around century of the welfare state: education be developed? "let the state find the solu- The truth is that we have no tion". blueprint for what an educaBut Karl Marx insisted that tion in the interests of the the workers' movement working class would look should place no confidence in like. We have some ideas. but the state's administration of they need to be tested and supeducation or any other social plemented by teachers workfunction. He argued for a dif- ing with local communities. ferent strategic orientation This vision of democratic lofrom the one we tend to adopt, cal experiment puts into quesone based on working class tion a central tenet of the left in education: the principle of common universal provision.
Democratic self-activity means choice and diversity. Once parents, school students and local communities start developing their own ideas around education rather than relying on or deferring to the state, they won't all come up with the same answers, whether it concerns the curriculum or teaching methods or the way schools should be organised.
This is to be welcomed. It is quite utopian to believe that. the massive failure and disaffection among working class students in secondary schools can be transformed without radical experiments in new forms of learning and teaching.
The danger that diversity and choice can be utilised for reactionary purposes is a very real one. But we can minimise this danger by a number of conditions.
• Firstly, market relationships must be replaced by new opportunities at school, LEA and national levels to strengthen popular influence (school forums, city-wide forums, rights for school students, and so on);
• Secondly, the state must be pressured to play a role in setting a policy framework that would promote progressive developments and prohibit reactionary ones. This would include positive action against racial and gender discrimination, against selection, and so forth. These would set a framework of universal entitlements within which local variation would take place.
• Finally, and crucially, the bottom line is reliance on class struggle action, rather than the state, as the guarantor of educational progress.
As an example of local democracy and choice, a local partnership of schools could offer a range of specialisms as centres of expertise in media studies, or modern languages or science or sport, or whatever the community wanted.
Options
These would be available as options, for a proportion of the school week or term, to any students in the area. Each student would attend their "base' school for part of the time for the common core of the curriculum and the specialist school for the rest.
If demand for one specialism outstripped supply, it would signal the need to expand a particular area of provision. If selection were necessary, it would be on a basis that did not increase social inequalities.
Three more developments would help radically to transform education through self-activity.
• The first is the explosive potential of information technology for self-managed learning, which allows the student much greater choice and undermines the role of the teacher as the gate-keeper of knowledge.
• The second is the status of the school student to increase self-management by school students, appropriate to their age, covering both their own learning and their rights as "citizens' of the school.
If this is not achieved, there is a danger of reinforcing a disastrously damaging antischool culture among many students, who feel that at least at work they won't be treated like children.
• The third development is breaking down the isolation of the school from the rest of society. The more a school opens itself up to society, the more it motivates students.
Only a radical vision of this sort can begin to change the relationship of working class school students to their families and communities, to knowledge, which is the core of the problem, and creating a new popular culture about education in the working class, within which more specifically socialist demands can take root.
(This article is adapted from a longer feature in Socialist Teacher no 57, published by the Socialist Teachers Alliancel
our hospitals St Thomas' Guys and must stay! squeeze out the costly and inefficient private sector. hospital consultants should be ended, promoting junior doctors to take the place of any who resign in protest. Medical training should be expanded to draw in new layers of younger doctors to work as Part-time contracts for A swift injection of cash -These sums of money are SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 81, April 8 1995, Page 7.
OFICIAL Blast from the past? Students marching for grants