The enemy within British education

In my book All Must Have Prizes, first published in 1996, in which I charted the disintegration of education and deconstruction of knowledge in Britain, I noted that this onslaught had resulted from the hijack of education by left-wing ideologues hell-bent on destroying British society. These people were entrenched in university departments of education. So when the government tried to address education decline by imposing a national curriculum and turned to the ‘experts’ to help them do so, the people who wrote that curriculum and sat on the curriculum boards and other education quangos were the very people who were doing the damage in the first place.

Twelve years on, Britain’s education system has disintegrated yet further and exactly the same kind of people are doing the same damage. Today’s Daily Mail reports that Professor John White, who specialises in ‘the philosophy of education’ and a government adviser on curriculum reform, says that children should no longer be taught traditional subjects at school because they are ‘middle-class’ creations  and ‘mere stepping stones to wealth’ and that lessons should teach ‘personal skills’ instead.

The professor believes the origins of our subject-based education system can be traced back to 19th century middle-class values. While public schools focused largely on the classics, and elementary schools for the working class concentrated on the three Rs, middle-class schools taught a range of academic subjects.

These included English, maths, history, geography, science and Latin or a modern language. They ‘fed into the idea of academic learning as the mark of a well-heeled middle- class’, he said last night. The Tories then attempted to impose these middle-class values by introducing a traditional subject-based curriculum in 1988. But this ‘alienated many youngsters, especially from disadvantaged backgrounds’, he claimed.

This government has already shifted education in White’s direction by further devaluing knowledge and replacing education by skills – as we can see indeed from the very names of the relevant ministries which no longer even contain the word ‘education’. So it’s no surprise that, as the Times reports, Imperial College London has been forced to start setting its own entrance exam because it says A levels have become so devalued since so many candidates now present three or four A-grades that they are now totally useless.

It is only when politicians realise that the problem with Britain’s education system is a fundamental attack on the very concept of knowledge itself as a revolutionary means of destroying British society, and removes altogether the power of such ideologues over the system, that there is the faintest chance of rescuing British education from the pit into which it has fallen.