The failure of ideology

When I was ten years old my junior school decamped from its old site and moved to a brand new building which, surprisingly for us, had no classrooms. I remember a bunch of us talking to the headmaster about it.

“Where do we have lessons?” “Ah, you won’t be having ‘lessons’, as such.” “What!” “No, it’s all open-plan, there will be no more lessons. If you want to learn some maths, you’ll wander over to the maths area. If you want to learn English, exactly the same.”

We thought about this for a second or two.

“What if we never want to do any maths or English? What if we just want to play football for a year?” “Well, that’s up to you. But I think you will want to learn, you know”

That’s how I got in my county football team, briefly. Not a single lesson of anything in an entire year, just football, endlessly.

I mention this because a recent Horizon programme showed an old clip of itself reporting when these ludicrous new schools were introduced, back in 1971, and the clip compared it to a traditional do-as-you’re-bloody-well-told kinda school. The old programme excerpt also made the point that a university had monitored achievement at the various new progressive schools versus the old traditionalist schools and had been “shocked” to find that the old style got much, much better results, by a huge margin. What it didn’t say was why, after such a study, we were left with more state junior schools like mine and almost no traditional schools. It’s clear now that they knew open plan and no lessons didn’t work, but rolled it out anyway for ideological reasons….