One does not like to disagree with one’s editor, but while the image of Rome salting the earth of its bitter rival Carthage is a striking way of describing Labour’s plan to wreck our current system of education, Rome was not in the habit of destroying the advantages that its conquests produced. The salting story is a 19th-century invention, endorsed by no less an authority than the Cambridge Ancient History (1930), but now rescinded.
As Mr Gove made clear in last week’s magazine, the universal imposition of a national curriculum, among other measures, will remove the freedom and choice – the two words you will find nowhere in discussion of Labour education policy – which played such a crucial part in improving educational attainment.
Alas, ancient philosophers also had the Bridget Phillipson tendency. In his Republic, Plato (through the mouth of Socrates) describes an education system which will train the people and direct them into three predetermined categories: guardians who will rule, auxiliaries who will make up the army, and the workers, i.e. all the rest. To persuade the community that this is the right approach, Socrates will tell them a ‘noble lie’: that, in the process of making humans, the god has fixed their destiny by including gold in those destined to be rulers, silver in the auxiliaries and iron and copper in the farmers and other workers. At least Aristotle, though he too detailed precisely what children must learn, offered a more humane vision: an education aimed at the means by which to hit the target of human wellbeing and develop good men, more interested in peace than war, with the ability to spend their time on something intellectual of personal and public value, undistracted by e.g. lust for money.
Consider Labour’s vision, grinding pupils, whatever their interests, through an imposed curriculum, over which there will be no debate because, as the professor of creative literature Sunny Singh intoned: ‘Debate is an imperialist capitalist white supremacist cis heteropatriarchal technique that transforms a potential exchange of knowledge into a tool of exclusion and oppression.’ Attagirl! Got it in 24! What good ever came from debate?
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