Schools need freeing from the right as well as the left

Knowledge can be successfully transmitted and received only by those who recognise its value. If our governments have regarded education as valuable, however, it is usually as a means to some political goal unconnected with knowledge. As a result, our school system, once the best in the world, is now no better than the average developed country for numeracy and literacy.

Many on the left see schooling as a form of social engineering, the purpose of which is to produce a classless society. Equality is the real value, and when knowledge gets in the way (as it often does) it must be downgraded or set aside. Many on the right look to education for the skills that the country needs in order to maintain our economic position in a competitive world. On this view, those children who show no aptitude in hard subjects, or who take up too much classroom time to achieve too little, should not be allowed to hold back the ones whose skills and energies we all supposedly depend upon.

Those two visions have fought each other in the world of politics, and descended from there into the classroom. Teachers meanwhile have been forced to take a back seat, spectators of a quarrel that can only damage the thing that is most important to them, which is the future of the children in their care.

The abolition of the 11-plus examination and the destruction of state grammar schools, the amalgamation of the CSE and O-level examinations, the flight from hard subjects at both GCSE and A-level, and the expansion of the curriculum into areas where opinion rather than knowledge sets the standard: all those changes were motivated by the commitment to equality. Until recently very few reforms stemmed from the desire to support the high-fliers, or to improve the country’s standing in the hard sciences.