We must break down the Berlin Wall in schools

Michael Gove

20 December 2008

Michael Gove says that the gulf between the state and independent sectors can only be closed by giving poorer parents the same freedoms as their wealthy counterparts

He who controls the past, George Orwell argued, controls the future. Orwell’s warning resonates all the more powerfully as the government considers the erasure of history from the primary curriculum. A sense of the past is a precious thing. And not to know history, as Cicero argued, is to remain a child for ever.

Orwell, as a student and satirist of the Soviet system, would have appreciated the special value of knowing what passed for progress in the communist world. And a knowledge of Soviet history is particularly precious when it comes to examining what’s happening in our education system at present.

One of the grim everyday realities of life before the Berlin Wall came down was the grossly unjust way in which two parallel economies operated within one political system. For the masses, the state ran a rouble economy in which there were queues for the best goods, massive shortages of quality produce and widespread dissatisfaction. But for the elite of the nomenklatura there was always guaranteed access to hard currency, closed shops stuffed with exotic international goodies and an assured path to the best jobs for their children.

In the British education system today a similar gulf exists between the opportunities a privileged elite enjoy and the options open to the rest of us. In particular, there is an increasing divergence between the advantages the wealthy can buy for their children through the independent system, and the constrained opportunities the state system currently provides.

We saw that divide widen earlier this week when the government published its plans for the primary curriculum. Geography, history and hard subject disciplines were going to be ditched in favour of the sort of ‘topic’-based learning that became discredited in the Seventies. Knowledge and facts were going to be further sidelined to make way for the sort of free-form learning that leaves weaker students fending for themselves. The new curriculum report mentions play 39 times, more than twice as often as it refers to science.

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Demetrius Poliorcetes

December 16th, 2008 3:36pm Report this comment

I applaud your words, Mr Gove. Will you also pledge to take away the superficial and pernicious link that governments seek between league tables and quality? It is a gross and disastrous fallacy that education can be measured only by exam results, something which I believe has been most at the heart of the devaluing of the education system in this country.

Anthony Price

December 18th, 2008 10:58am Report this comment

It's not just schools. I recently retired from an FE college where I taught (or tried to) fro five years.
There was constant interference in the delivery of courses (I even had to accept a plainly unsuitable student on a course because his Social Worker said that 'it would be good for his morale').
Most 'course work' results were inflated by organized cheating - and that's organized by the college, not just the students.

'Management' was a sick joke - failed teachers promoted beyond their abilities, 'wimmin' hired for their 'gender' in spite of manifest incompetence, and so on. To cap it all the Principal of this shambles is weak, incompetent and corrupt.

Complaints to regulators are subject to endless buck passing and there are always reasons why they 'are outside of our terms of reference.

In effect the FE sector are handed millions of pounds of taxpayer money are are accountable to no-one.

The college of which I write had 'Beacon' status - I would not like to see a full blown cess pit of corruption, incompetence and waste.

Surely, something MUST be done. Failing to educate the young is no better than burning books before they are written.

Frances Huggett

March 13th, 2009 9:16pm Report this comment

let's hope tories get in so mg's ideas can be implemented - but it will be at least 10 years before positive effects start to stop the rot. Meanwhile, 2 changes wd bridge the gap ie. immediately(1) restore assisted places scheme (2) allow one school in each of the most deprived metropolitan areas to practice academic selection.
55 years ago I (one of 7 children) was awarded one of the county of Middlesex's 2 assisted places at a highly academic girls public school; now my pension income is only £17K pa because I've shelled out nearly £200k after tax to give my equally intelligent daughter the same rigorous standard of education (moving to a "good" catchment area wasn't an option) - which Tony's Blair's elder children got for free, because one of their parents was a Roman Catholic.
PS my brief experience in a senior position at an FE College matched that of Anthony Price; the security of tenure for incompetent staff made it impossible to aspire to - let alone maintain - any objective standards of education.

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