The State, Parents and Education

The character of its education is one of the things that defines a nation. Education is both shaped by and does much to shape national character. The mess to which the so-called mainstream parties have reduced British education over the last fifty years is a natural outcome of that loss of belief in the nation that took us into the EU and kept us there for so long.

Education is always induction into a language and, with it, a national culture. At school the child is introduced to the elements of the culture that cannot be expected to be fully inculcated in the home; and in school this introduction should be unashamedly Euro- or even Anglo-centric. All children should be introduced to the best of our own culture. English literature should be read, and British history; and for all children there should be a sketch of European history from Greece and Rome to the present. No child should leave school ignorant of the Bible. (The Koran, the Some Other Party thinks, can look after itself); all should have some acquaintance with Western classical music. (‘Pop’ can also look after itself.)

This does presuppose a culture. There are of course sectarian schools of various sorts which aim to lead children into particular subcultures, but the national standards of examination try to ensure that all schools share in the same community. Whatever quite is meant by a “multicultural” Britain, no one understands by it a Britain that is a mere geographical location of any number of different-sized separate cultures. The term “subculture” itself implies the existence of a culture which the subculture is subordinate to and which is not itself a subculture. Education is one of the means through which different subordinate communities make up a coherent whole. If education is treated as important only economically all this is implicitly denied.

Education is, therefore one of the duties of the state, as well as of parents. This is why it is proper for taxes for education to be levied on the whole community, including people with no children and no possibility of having children. To the extent that we are a community all adults are in loco parentis. But the state’s duty to educate children doesn’t supersede or take over from that of parents. The paramount consideration is what is best for children and for the community as a whole—from which it follows that in carrying out their respective duties, state and parents shouldn’t ordinarily be in conflict with one another. The state rightly claims a say in how children are educated and so, equally rightly, do parents. The political problem here is how to reconcile these two potentially competing claims, something which becomes especially difficult if—as there seemed to be in that Birmingham ‘Trojan Horse Conspiracy’—a subculture aggressively asserting its own claims against those of the state. If there is, it cannot be allowed to succeed.

The history of education “reform” over the past fifty years conclusively demonstrates, we believe, that a better balance is needed between the respective powers—or influences—of governments, parents and schools, and more patience in the search for “results”. All that boastful talk, from a succession of governments, about “levering up” standards and “delivering” improvements and the like has not just been stupid in expression, it has done immense harm. The state’s rightful responsibility for education has been injured by it having a monopoly of power over it—most obviously by its debauching of the examination system, degrading the universities and meddling in ‘sex education’. The state rightly exercises power over the national education system but the power it exercises needs checking and balancing by the power of parents and of schools.

The state’s power ought to be limited to (1) specifying a core curriculum to be followed by all schools receiving state funding: a national curriculum but not one so elaborate or so detailed as to prevent schools differing from one another in ways teachers and parents find important (2) running a body of HMIs and (3) licensing examination boards.

The influence of schools ought to be increased by (1) getting their funding directly (partly from government, partly from parental vouchers—see below) and (2) being left free to decide for themselves everything not already expressly decided by the state: e.g., to select their pupils or not, to base classes on attainment not age, to specialise outside the core curriculum and the time allocated to it, to set or stream or not, to decide on teaching methods, length of holidays, hours of attendance, conditions of work and pay, etc. etc. As long as schools followed the core national curriculum, they would be free in the time not devoted to it, to specialise in whatever subjects they chose: sciences, arts, languages, fine art, music, drama, religion (Islam or any other) or even by giving more time to the core curriculum. What was done outside the core curriculum would, though, be subject to inspection in the ordinary way. Within the constraints of the core curriculum and the law, schools of all religions or none could receive state funding.

The influence of parents ought to be increased by the simple means of giving them education vouchers and leaving them free to “spend” their vouchers wherever they choose in or out of the state system. Thus would be extended to all parents the choice presently enjoyed by the very well off alone. This would, in effect, abolish the distinction between private and state schools which so many on the left object to—and, in doing so, would remove any argument for putting vat on any school.

Education and training

Under the Con-Lab-LibDem Party

1. Education and training for jobs are thought to be the same thing; so the purpose of education is to train people for jobs, and any training for any job is an education

2. spending on education is thought to be not a cost but an investment that will make us richer

3, therefore the more of it the better.

This has led that Party to distort the relation between arts and science subjects by overemphasising the importance of the so-called STEM subjects; to make education until 18 compulsory; and to so expand the university system that half of 18-to-21 year-olds now feel compelled to spend three years in it, for fear that if they don’t they won’t get decent jobs. The predictable consequence for them is that at 21 or more, with a degree and a massive debt, they can now get the sort of job they could have got some decades ago at 16, with 5 O-levels and no debt at all. The equally predictable consequence for the state has been not only the direct cost of establishing this system but the indirect cost of all those years of potentially productive labour lost to it. As with other forms of inflation, the benefits are illusory.

Under the Some-Other Party

Education will be treated as having its own, not an economic, importance. The first of two essential requirements for any sane education policy is a better understanding of what education is. This will lead, secondly, to a great deal less formal and compulsory education and a reduction of the demands education makes on the taxes.

The Some-Other Party policy will be based on five major principles, which will be applied to the different levels of education.

1. State control of the national education system to be less absolute. Individual state schools to have more freedom to determine their own character. The parents of children at state schools to have more of the freedom to choose between schools that the parents of children at private schools have. The influence of parents to be increased by the simple means of giving them education vouchers and leaving them free to “spend” their vouchers wherever they choose in or out of the state system.

2. Because education is valuable to all, the education of the more and less academically able must receive equally serious an attention; and this means:

(1) while schools shouldn’t confine the less academically able to the practical and utilitarian they should be free to develop forms of education that reward more than just the ability to pass academic exams

(ii) pupils should be free to leave full time education at 16 if either (a) they have reached a certain standard in reading, writing and arithmetic or (b) pupil, parents and school agree that, even if they haven’t, it is in the pupil’s best interest

(iii) because there is no upper limit or “cut off point” at which education loses its value, the formation of an “élite” or “élites” must be treated as a natural and desirable end of education.

3. Education and training are often close together in our early experience but diverge more and more the higher in education we go and must not be confused.

4. Education—like the armed forces and old age pensions—is a legitimate public cost not an investment. It is not, therefore, the case that, economically (or in any other way), the more we have of it the better.

5. Training, on the other hand, is an investment and in general should be paid for by those who expect dividends from it, that is, the employers of the trained and the trained themselves—as it used to be under apprenticeships.

Sixth Form and University

We consider these two together because the one is a preparation for the other. The Some Other Party will do the unheard of: turn the clock back by making sixth forms and universities more like they were prior to the Great Expansion. Both will become much smaller and more coherent. Entry to the sixth form will be restricted to the minority with some potential for going on to three years’ study of a genuine subject on a genuine course at a genuine university.

The presence in universities of so many students who, though incapable of university-level work, have to be found something to do, has meant that useless non-subjects have proliferated and genuine ones been diluted. This means that most of the academics at present employed in higher education and the ‘cohorts’ of graduates they ‘produce’ are wasting their time, with the further consequence that, often, genuine university work is made impossible for any minority still capable of undertaking it. The situation brings learning into contempt, wastes national resources and has a demoralising effect on both staff and students. If the supervening boredom makes students want to dress up as masked Palestinians and/or Eddie Izzard, who can be surprised? Not the least benefit to the country of the great majority being at work not play, would be the stop it would put to pretend-refugee camps and perfectly normal young people masquerading as various sorts of ‘queer’. Who can doubt that the hostility to free speech that has overtaken our universities is connected with the presence in them of lots of young people who shouldn’t be there?

The Some Other Party will change things for the better with four principal measures.

1. University subjects that are neither use nor ornament will be phased out and any institution that wants to call itself a university will have to award degrees in the traditional core of liberal arts as well as ‘STEM’ subjects. Genuine training courses will be transferred to other institutions. Foreign language departments that teach no literature will be classed as suppliers of training. A lot of universities will consequently be closed or revert to their former status, for which the name Polytechnic will be re-introduced. The new polytechnics, unlike the old, will not run liberal arts courses paralleling those in the universities. This reform will reduce the number both of universities and university students by more than three-quarters and will encourage a return to real university standards (and a respect for free speech). 
2. The reformed universities will be adequately funded. British students’ fees will normally be paid by the state, and maintenance grants will be restored. The cost will be more than covered by the savings we propose (as will redundancy payments). And, although foreign students (and their money) will continue to be welcome at British universities, British students must be preferred to higher paying foreign ones. (Something like a third of the students presently at UCL, for instance, are Chinese and, consequently, so important to the university’s finances that anything like criticism of China is discouraged. This is corrupt.)

3. Once the universities have been rescued and funded on a more realistic scale, they will be left strictly alone. If they really are, what they are supposed to be, the topmost branch of the tree of knowledge, it makes no sense to suppose they can be overlooked. If they are without superiors, they cannot be inspected. The reformed university will return to the system of external examining by peers not ‘appraisal’ and ‘audit’ by pseudo-superiors.

4. Vocational training will be subject to market discipline. Its cost, in whole or part, will be borne by those who expect to profit from it, the trained and those who use their services commercially. The national interest may possibly require some specialist training beyond what the market will support but, in general, if a business cannot do without trained staff the greater part of the costs must come from the business and the trained. The present loan system will be used to enable trainees to undertake courses they would not otherwise be able to afford.

If it is really necessary to have a qualification in Leisure Studies to run a Leisure Centre and if the owners of the Centre have to share the cost, that may well influence the qualification-granting body to make its courses severely realistic. Those running the ‘tourist industry’ might come to think that they don’t need to employ people with ‘qualifications’ at all. It is possible that MBA schools will collapse but that will be for the market to decide by way of finance directors. And students who face the prospect of paying for their professional qualifications will similarly be readier to treat their training as a genuine investment and ask whether their time and money is being well spent. This can only be good for genuine wealth creation.

Although, in the present educational fog, this proposal might look new, it is little more than an adaptation to the modern world of the old idea of apprenticeships, in which youths were trained partly at their own expense (by way of low pay in  the years of apprenticeship) and partly at the expense of their masters who stood to gain skilled workers. The principle continues to be sound and usable.

A caveat

There are borderline cases. Teacher training should continue to be supported by the state, as should colleges of nursing and midwifery—though it is to be expected that in both cases the wider reform of education will lead to a greater emphasis on experience and less on theorising. The medical schools fall halfway between true academic study and useful training, and since also their courses are longer than for other first degrees, the state should continue to support them substantially—though with some considerable contribution from doctors and dentists. Although Law, as an academic subject should continue to be subsidised, there is no reason why the supply of solicitors, so many of whom end up in the House of Commons, should make any charge upon the exchequer. And thus the number of universities, number and variety of courses taught at them and number of students will be reduced until all those that remain can be regarded as genuine.

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This article (The State, Parents and Education) was created and published by Free Speech Backlash and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Duke Maskell