Anarchy No. 18

Contents of No. 18 August 1962 225 A correspondent Comprehensive schools 225 in The Observer a short time ago concluded his letter thus: 'The Fairy Tale Education Educating the non-scholastic H. Raymond King 233 of runs as follows: Once upon a time God made three types of children. The Nor- Bombed site and comprehensive school Winifred Hindley 238 wood Report discovered what they were. The Ministry put A last look round Sixth-Former 242 them neatly in different schools. And they all lived unhappily ever Some were ail right Early Leaver 243 after.' We in the comprehensive school believe that there are as First impression First-Former 245 many different types of child as there are children, and that it is comprehensive Parent 246 Eleven-plus and the not our job in education to iron out the differences and produce concert of the high school of music and art Paul Goodman 248 one standard A senior product or three standard products fust because it Down there with Isherwood Dachine Rainer 251 is administratively convenient and suits the haphazard historical The anarchists from outside Nicholas Barman 256 development of our educational system. of Hurlingham Cover: from a drawing by Kenneth Browne School ~G. A. Rogers, Headmaster of Walworth School, London. Partners). Fulham (Architects : Richard Sheppard and Other issues of ANARCHY Acknowledgements 1. Sex-and-VioIence; Galbraith; We are grateful to Mr. King and the New Wave, Education, Mrs. Hindley, and the the editors of Opportunity, Equality. Forum: for the discussion of new trends in education and of Athene, 2. Workers' Control. Comprehensive School Society for Education 3. What does anarchism mean today?; journal of the Africa; the Long Revolution; Through Art, respectively, for per- Exceptional Children. mission to use their articles. (See 4. De-institutionalisation; Conflicting inside back cover). strains in anarchism. We are grateful to Carter Tiles THK OVERWHELMING MAJORITY OF CHILDREN IN THIS COUNTRY attend 5. 1936: the Spanish Revolution. Ltd. for permission to use Kenneth (compulsorily between the ages of five 6. Anarchy and the Cinema. Browne's drawing. and fifteen, voluntarily after that age) schools 7. Adventure Playgrounds. Apologies maintained at the public expense, under the control of 8. Anarchists and Fabians; Action local We were expecting several articles authorities (county councils or county borough councils). To call Anthropology; Eroding Capitalism; from teachers in comprehensive them public schools as is done in America, would be misleading since Orwell. schools, who in the end couldn't get that term is used here for those schools of high social 9. Prison. them done because of the end of term prestige (usually residential 10. Sillitoe's Key to the Door; rush. Will readers in Secondary and fee-paying) which have traditionally provided this country Crime; Augustus with Maclnnes on Modern schools please note that we a governing elite. To call them state schools is also a misnomer, John's Utopia; Committee of 100 would welcome their contributions since although the state, via the Ministry of Education, supplies local Industry. to the October Anarchy by the first education authorities with more than half their funds, it 1 Goodman; Neill on Education; week of September? does not run Character-Builders, the schools itself, nor employ teachers itself, nor lay down a curriculum. Subscribe to ANARCHY o are the anarchists? la many important respects the local Single copies by post Is. 9d. (30c.) education authorities are autono- psychological and mous, 12 issues 20s. ($3). though they maintain schools by virtue of a series of Acts iolqgical enquiry. of and to FREEDOM Parliament, from the Act of IrectoVction. 1870 which set up the old school boards the anarchist weekly, which readers of [sobwience. (which lasted until 1902) to provide universal compulsory elementary ANARCHY will find indispensable. A ie wgrk of David Wills education, to the Act of 1944 with year's subscription to both journals is the promise of "secondary education icsSf anarchism; Africa; offered at 32s. for all". thr§ology; Poetry of Dissent, ($5). Cheques, POs and Money Orders warns a lumpenproletariat: The 1944 Education Act has been should be made out to implemented by different local [ucation vs. the working class; authorities FREEDOM PRESS in many different ways, which have been the centre of social, eedom of access; Benevolent 17a Maxwell Road London SW6 England educational and political controversy ever since. reaucracy; and CND. As Professor Ben CD Tel: RENown 3736 Morris, then Secretary of the National Foundation for Educational Research put it a few years after the Act came into force: brew Printers, London. E.l. "In Britain, we have only recently replied to the question, 'Who is to be educated?' with the answer, 'All the children of all the people'. i 226 227 We are now forced to ask ourselves, 'What kind of education have we schools," writes the headmaster of one comprehensive school, "cannot in mind?' Some suppose that, after the English Education Act of 1944, be manipulated into a pattern that conflicts with social realities . the era of equality of educational opportunity has already arrived. But Conscious social purpose is apt to produce contrary results from those it seems to me that the educational system now finds itself the victim intended, and social engineering to defeat itself. Nevertheless, the of its own two major traditions, the one of a liberal culture originally si routes! cliallcnu>c to the educational assumptions of our hierarchical intended for a professional and governing class, the other of an essen- society in the last ten years has come from the experience of the com- tially utilitarian training designed for the masses engaged in the pro- prehensive school. duction and distribution of goods and services. The official solution of course is to stress the need for what is called 'diversity of educational provision' and for 'parity of esteem' as between different types of school. The urbanity of such phrases, however, serves only to conceal a social I 'or a definition of what a comprehensive school is, we may turn conflict; it does nothing to solve it. Such a conflict exists. It is to a Parliamentary answer by a Minister of Education a few years revealed in the bitter struggle to obtain entry to the grammar school, ii^o, who explained that "secondary schools are classified as comprehen- which is regarded primarily as the road to the most desirable occupa- sive where l hey are intended to provide all the secondary education tions. Indeed, the demand for equality of educational opportunity facilities needed by the children of a given area, but without being organ- seems to have produced a widespread phantasy that professional jobs ised in clearly-defined sides." A closer general description than that can be found for all. But between these catchwords, 'equality', diver- cannot he given, since no two comprehensive schools are alike. "There sity', 'parity', lurks a genuine problem, for which the English secondary is no typical comprehensive school!" declares Mr. A. E. Howard of school system will have to provide a solution. How? My own view Forest Hill School, in his chapter in the symposium Inside the Compre- is that we shall have to create alternatives to the present forms of hensive School, and another contributor, Mr. Raymond King of Wands- grammar schools . The most dangerous solution to my mind appears worth School (who also contributes to this issue of Anarchy), observes to be the one at present in greatest favour, the tripartite system of that grammar, technical, and modern schools—the latter a euphemism for a fn the decentralised English educational system, in which there is rela- school designed for the pupils of average and sub-average intelligence. tively little direction and still less specific prescription from the Ministry of litlucation, trends in educational organisation have tended to reflect Such a policy favours the increase of social segregation. It separates unformulated social and educational pressures and have often adapted their from each other in early puberty, and more or less permanently, those provision to local needs or shown local initiative in meeting changed condi- who will later become administrators, technicians, and skilled and semi- tions and trying out new ideas. skilled and unskilled workers. This solution seems to me to misr Comprehensive schools are in fact operated by little more than a conceive the needs of the type of society we are at present building up dozen of the 146 local education authorities in England and Wales. by other means, and it appears to be based on a grossly over-simplified Thus in the County of London 36 per cent of 13-year-old children psychological theory of development." attend them, while in Essex none do. In the City of Coventry 35 He was writing more than a decade ago, and we can see that he per cent of 19-year-olds are in comprehensive schools, but in the City was over-sanguine about the "type of society we are at present building of Bradford none are. In the Isle of Anglesey in Wales, all secondary up". We are building up exactly the kind of society which the tripar- education is comprehensive. tite system of secondary education is designed to perpetuate. (It is The case for the comprehensive school briefly thus: actually a dual, not a tripartite system, since less than 4 per cent of may be put It is absurd to imagine that there are three types of child to English children attend technical schools). Fee for instance the ariicle match the three different systems of secondary education. The attempt to Education, Equality, Opportunity in Anarchy 1, or Towards a Lumpen- sort them out (which means in practice the selection of children to proletariat in Anarchy 17, where it was pointed out that "The educa- (ill an arbitrarily limited number of grammar school places) at the age tional system subserves the concept of a society based upon differential of 10 or II, has been shown to be unscientific and inaccurate.

Load more