Don’t listen to me
By: Andrew Macdonald Powney
Tags: Schools, Political Philosophy, Education, Economics, Politics

I woke up recently from a terrible dream. In the nightmare world, Karl Marx had said something particularly apposite about A levels and Highers.

He said that schools had become a sort of comedy of manners atop a tragedy-turned-farce. Teachers of an ‘old school’ disposition are about as much use in the modern education industry, he said, as frugal teetotallers in the nightclub sector. Frugal teetotallers save, when they should be borrowing against mortgages so that they can spend beyond their means; they are irritating, to the people who most benefit — the people with money to lend. They should just do it; they should get out more. Old-school teachers — modern schooling’s frugal abstainers — make a deliberate decision not to optimise production. They are the ca-canny, go-slow shop-steward awkward squad, with their sonnets and philosophy. That is what it means to teach instead of doing the child’s homework for her; that is what it means deliberately to create the risk of the grade not ‘adding value’ by refusing to tell the child what to say. How irresponsible is that? These people are not good employees. They insist on getting people to think, instead of popping the answer pill and doing the exam dance; it just slows up the process.

I like these new teachers, he said, who are just like the kids: they are accelerating the collapse. We became used to hearing that schools were exam factories and schemes of work were a sausage machine, but Karl really got into all that stuff. He took it seriously. Just as people with lots of capital piled up, he said, are looking eagerly now for investment opportunities in the post-COVID wreckage after decades of low interest, so governments must be considering what to do with the frozen New-Labour ‘schools’ arrangement. How can they make ‘schools’ into a massive debt-for-equity swap (they are wondering)? All that borrowed money has to get turned into something. Medi-tech … Remote working … Teacher assessment … Something with surplus value squeezed so much that the students didn’t even go to school and still got results …

‘Exaggeration! Hyperbole! This is but a fevered reverie!’ &c., I heard you say, shaking my shoulder. Yet … The time constraints of modern schooling mean that giving the child time to think and get things wrong becomes identical with not telling them the answers to the questions in the exam; given the time and curriculum pressure, teachers cut to the chase of key facts and model answers. They create a production line that masquerades as ‘personalised education’ and ‘differentiation for all’ but of course it is the opposite. In the grade-commodity, we might say, the alienation of teacher and student is concealed just as real social relations are. We still think of learning as a relationship between teacher and child, when it is a transaction that uses those people as appendages to its machine. Value added, for whom? Paolo Freire, preparing his centenary, flitted through a corner door to make a deposit saying something about ‘sublimation’. At this point in the dream, Karl Marx was, yet was not David Harvey, and looked a bit like Marley’s Ghost.

It is a grade-commodity, the Bearded One opined, because its optimised function is to ease passage to the next educational pay-point. It simply is not about reaching finer and better-supported judgments, or wider learning. It is about packaging the unchanged mind. Modern education is a production process; the product is grades and not character, nor minds. Modern schools should have as their motto, stercus non polliendum; or perhaps, solvit, intrat. Karl Marx talked like that. These old-school teachers lack dialectic, he said: we’d be better off with the enemy. These are the chains I made in life, he said, and it is the task of criticism to pluck the flowers from them. Have a tulip.

The old-school teacher is an artisan worker marooned in a mass production process, said Harvey-Marx (turning into Dave Spart) … Learned and scholarly types have been deskilled by the modern ‘industry’ and its ‘schools’ value ‘thinking outside the box’ as corporations may: in a crossword-puzzle sense; not a life-changing sense. It is a question of who owns the process. The capital behind education does not belong to its pseudo-participants …

A lot of people have been getting vivid dreams in Britain’s Christmas lockdown. I cannot be held responsible for my dreams.