De-schooling Australia

Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd promised an “education revolution” we are now starting to learn what this means.

The latest proposal is parents will be punished if their children truant from school. Worse, those parents who will be punished are those who can least afford it. People on welfare will have their welfare cheques removed for up to three months if their children avoid school.

This is another move towards making it more difficult for families to stay on welfare. It is not just about education it is an extension of the previous government’s proposal to push a Welfare to Work regime that sees seven-year-old children left at home alone.

Why wouldn’t we expect so many children and young people to truant from school? Who is there to watch over them? Moreover, schools are not happy, safe environments. Few people seem to have any idea of the social and psychological circumstances that sit beneath the disenchanted, absconding student. It is always the student or the family that is blamed. It is the victims who are labelled “dysfunctional” not the policy or the system.

In a society that can now claim one in five people suffering from depression families do not need punitive measures they need incentives and they need help. Schools are violent, abusive, stressful places. Schools are a microcosm of the culture in which they are situated. All aims to make schools safe and welcoming have basically failed.

Truanting students are not the fault of parents. Rather, it is the result of a system that has been unable to keep these students engaged and motivated towards a successful future.

Conservatism and the struggle for a progressive education

There are currently two forces at work in the education debate: the conservatives who want to bring back an authoritarian system that includes corporal punishment and learning to the text and the progressives who seek a more democratic climate. The progressives prefer to use a system based upon narrative and the exchange of ideas.

One of the key achievements of post war socio-political theory and discourse has been the use of narrative and/or personal testimony. Marx laid the groundwork with his focus on the impacts of early capitalism. In the 1960s talk was a politics of “love” not “war”. The 1970s second wave feminism showed us how the personal is also the political and how “talk” can be democratically empowering.

This notion was also given credence by the internationally renowned social and political theorist Jurgen Habermas [1987] in his Theory of Communicative Action.

Today, progressive Australian educators attempt to continue this tradition in schools but it doesn’t go uncontested. From the conservative perspective the public are constantly told that education is failing our youth due to a shortage of teachers. The media tacitly depict teachers leaving the profession in droves. They tell us teachers are complaining they have lost control of the classroom. The students have all the rights and they are misbehaving. Added to this fewer students can expect to go on to university.

Competition is tough, education is not free and there are more financial constraints for families. The progressives claim to offer freedom from the oppression of authoritarian regimes; freedom from the shackles of the “Grand Narratives”.

The conservatives argue that without the modernist structures there will be a breakdown in the fabric of our society.

According to the progressives the fabric of society is already in crisis and current practices in education are a crucial component in the social dilemmas. Education has to change.

The world has never been as we have imagined it. It is an important time in education. Teachers and parents will play a central role in re-shaping the post-modern world using different approaches to schooling . These changes include large numbers of people leaving the school system altogether and finding alternatives such as home schooling and the Internet.

British schools in the 1960s

I was born and educated in England at a time when there was no “talk” in the classroom, only listening and indoctrination. It was called the “injection” method of teaching. “Spare the rod and you will spoil the child” was the maxim.

My first recollections of an English class at a Modern Secondary (Comprehensive) School are of a monumentally, austere old man standing in front of a blackboard towering over the class. He was very scary. In retrospect, he signified the overall purpose of post-war schooling - “control”.

Above the blackboard there was a picture of Queen Elizabeth II wearing her white ermine trimmed robe and a heavily jewelled crown. The eyes of the Queen stared down at us to insinuate the same authoritarian message: that learning was a privilege not a right and it was equated with exemplary behaviour and duty. Most of us came to regard the teacher as a replicate of the Queen in drag, or some sort of psychopomp.

School was a dismal affair that took place in a dingy brick building that had been built to house the children of London’s East End exodus.

A pre-fabricated dwelling had been tacked onto the original structure of the school and this was the English Room. The teacher stood out among the rest because he spoke a form of English that was quite different to that of his pupils. He spoke eloquently, with a precise grammar, a nasal tone and a distinctive upper-class accent.

The school mirrored the British class distinctions. It executed a distinctly top-down moral development that clashed with the working class way of life. English was meant to be about learning - reading, writing and comprehension - literacy. We didn’t read much at all. We wrote compositions but we were always careful how we described our lives. The threat of welfare was constantly present in our thoughts. The “welfare” had powers to remove us from our families if we did anything wrong. Those who obeyed the rules did so because they were scared. Those who flouted the rules had nothing to lose anyway.

The lessons

When children first enter school they are immersed into a world of words and images, which become absorbed gradually into their minds and lives. They have no idea of sexism, racism, class relations or institutionalised power. They are not aware of the discursive ideologies that pass as grammar and literacy. The child works slowly to learn the traditions and values. They become embedded in the divisions within society and they accept them as normal.

The lessons were contained in the texts, Dick and Dora; Jane and John. In these stories the girls are hapless maidens who learn to indulge the whims of would-be breadwinners. The outcomes are pre-determined. They called it “literacy” but reading and writing took place so we could learn the rules of socialisation.

By the time I reached High School I was well imbued with the requirements of a working class patriarchal system. There was a brief respite with the 1970s feminism.

Pluralism did not exist in my time at school. The most important principle of the British Comprehensive School system was that it served the cultural and economic needs of the district. Hence, the working class were schooled to fulfil their role as industrial workers. Schooling and capitalism were always already deeply entwined. School oriented people via their social contexts into accepting values that were not necessarily in their interest but which could be perceived as natural and inevitable. Modernism provided a wage and wider opportunities for young people but these opportunities were differentiated by class.

The Ford Motor Works was just down the road from the housing estate where I lived and this is where most of the pupils from my school were expected to go to earn their livelihood, often following in their parent’s footsteps. They would work there, day in and day out and be given a watch when they retired; if they lived to retire. There was total loyalty and devotion to the company because the system had taught people to be passive and to accept their “station in life”.

School as a filtering system

Within the English Comprehensive School system class was mediated by an examination called the Eleven Plus. It acted as a filtering system; it set the curriculum and put the Wigs and the workers in their rightful place. Parents who could not afford to keep their children at school beyond the age of 15 never allowed them to take the examination. Many bright young people were doomed to a life of factory service and second class citizenship. The situation was exacerbated for girls whose future was dependent on marriage and reproduction.

As technology advanced everyone expected the system to change but it didn’t change. In a small volume called Deschooling Society [1939] Ivan Illich argued that in advanced industrialised societies the dominant institutionalised structures of schooling would not give way to any social liberty via the developing technologies.

Illich described the divide between technological possibilities and the social reality as one of using education to engage in and direct a commodity fetishism; that is a passive, addictive consumerism that filters through institutional delivery systems as a coercive regime of institutionalised values. This system remains intact.

Political attempts at change

Harold Wilson’s Socialist Labour Government won office in Britain in 1964. Wilson attempted to get rid of the tripartite system regulated by the Eleven Plus and wanted to engage fully in a Comprehensive system. Prime Minister Wilson, having come from a working class area himself, was keen to open up opportunities for working class boys and girls in line with the recommendations of the Robbins Report.

Wilson’s aspirations never reached fruition although he can be credited with introducing the concept of an Open University. After the Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Reforms in the 1980s the Grammar schools were given a reprieve and the Comprehensive schools became a blend of the original “Modern” model and the new “Comprehensive” system where schools were required to take students from catchment areas regardless of ability.

Those who could afford to move house to a good catchment area were guaranteed a good school; those who couldn’t afford to move were at the bottom of the social ladder despite student performance.

Old models for new settings

Class remains a salient force throughout Australian society and it is inextricably linked to a two-tiered neo-liberal system of education now being further enforced by a new wave of authoritarianism, not just from the neo-liberal and/or conservative ranks but from New Labor who see themselves as having graduated to the middle ground and in some cases are more conservative than the original conservatives.

The move now should be towards an intellectually empowering practice that includes trans-cultural, democratic and pluralistic models of teaching but this doesn’t sit well with a labour market looking for a lower skilled population willing to work longer hours for fewer rewards.

The neo-conservatives are moving to control education through “media beat-ups” and accusations of a “literacy crisis”. The conservatives argue that school is failing because: “Within schools the impact of the ‘postmodern’ has been significant in subjects like English” (Doecke B Howie M and Sawyer W [2006] [Eds.] The Present Moment  in Only Connect,  Wakefield Press).

Postmodernism challenges the boundaries between high and low culture; art and artisan. Postmodernism undermines the ideology contained in grammar and traditional literacy and replaces it with a free floating meaning. It provides a freedom of expression and a voice for the oppressed. It offers more hope for inclusiveness.

With more and more people turning away from the current school system Kevin Rudd’s heavy hand of authority could see his “education revolution” become the de-schooling of Australia.