THE FUNCTION OF THE SCHOOL IN A TIME OF CRISIS
BY DaN McKee
Downloadable PDF available here
Noam Chomsky has a standard joke with which he starts many of his lectures. When booked ahead of time to give a talk there are two evergreen titles he offers organisers. The Current Crisis in the Middle East is the first one. History has shown us that as long as it remains a location of strategic interest to Western powers there will always be a crisis in the Middle East. The other, The Function of the University in a Time of Crisis, likewise suggests inevitable crisis as the hallmark of the current capitalist order, and that the university, and intellectuals, will play a familiar role whatever new crisis arises: that of legitimising and propping up, rather than challenging, the ideology of the status quo.
This second title was also the name of an essay of Chomsky first published in 1969, and one he attributes to the American social critic, Randolph Bourne, who, over fifty years before, writing in 1917, remarked of his “bitter experience” during World War One at seeing “the unanimity with which the American intellectuals have thrown their support to the use of war-technique in the crisis.” (Bourne, 1917). Bourne argued these intellectuals forgot that “the real enemy is War rather than imperial Germany” and that at a time of crisis the thinking of the intellectual class “becomes little more than a description and justification of what is going on” rather than the critical tool it should have been. “They might have turned their intellectual energy not to the problem of jockeying the nation into war,” Bourne suggests, “but to the problem of using our vast neutral power to attain democratic ends for the rest of the world and ourselves without the use of the malevolent technique of war. They might have failed”, he admits, but “the point is that they scarcely tried.”
Chomsky, writing half a decade later, the crisis now the American invasion of Vietnam rather than the First World War, had noted previously that “intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyse actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions” which no “citizen who does not undertake a research project” can hope to uncover. “Given the unique privileges that intellectuals enjoy”, Chomsky argued, it is “the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies”. (Chomsky, 2002). In The Function of the University in a Time of Crisis, he extends his analysis. “The university”, Chomsky tells us, “will be able to make its contribution to free society only to the extent that it overcomes the temptation to conform unthinkingly to the prevailing ideology and to the existing patterns of power and privilege.”(Chomsky, 2003).[1] However, his perennial use of the same lecture title decade after decade indicates the extent to which he believes this ideal has yet to be achieved.
I was reminded of Chomsky’s essay in June 2021 as, over fifty years since its first publication, he gave his latest lecture with that name at an online conference on the subject of academic freedom, organised by the Scholars at Risk Network and ALLEA.[2] Preceded by a powerful speech by Irish President, Michael D. Higgins, lamenting the way that “academic courses are now viewed as economic units” and reminding us that an intellectual’s freedom to “question and test received wisdom” was enshrined in Irish law because the “manifest failure of the orthodox paradigm” requires “nothing short of a paradigm shift”, Chomsky reminded us that both he, and Bourne before him, had written their essays precisely because universities were failing, and continued to fail, in their responsibilities. In the original essay, with the war in Vietnam raging (largely supported by the intellectual classes) Chomsky suggested that “the problems of the universities have become a more urgent concern” because “on an unprecedented scale” they have “come to be the centre of intellectual life.” As Chomsky continued his talk on contemporary crises and the structural and institutional incentives intellectuals continue to face to conform to “respectable” status quo groupthink, I began to wonder whether analysis of the university is leaving things a little too late? As a secondary school teacher in the UK, teaching during the time of the global crisis of COVID-19, I started to consider the similar, and intellectually prior, function the school plays in a time of crisis. After all, before they reach the alleged “centre of intellectual life”, our intellectual classes – and their teachers – are first inducted into what it means to be “intellectual” at school.
Chomsky himself touches briefly on the idea in the 1969 essay. Remarking on the glib description of Native American genocide in a US history book that “a child who acquires such attitudes in schools will become the man” who grows up to bomb Vietnamese villages, the role that school has in shaping the mental life of those who will become our future intellectuals is acknowledged but largely ignored in his analysis. As I re-read Chomsky’s essay, therefore, I decided to see if the same issues he raised half a century ago not only still resonated today, but if they could equally be seen in that earlier stage in education.
Chomsky begins his essay in agreement with Wilhelm von Humboldt’s claim that human beings are “moved by external leisure or internal pressures toward learning and research”, concluding that “the extent to which existing institutional forms permit these human needs to be satisfied provides one measure of the level of civilization that a society has achieved.”(in Chomsky, 2003) Do the “institutional forms” of education within our society, then, encourage those natural inclinations, or inhibit and corrupt them? The question is familiar to any who have looked into the idea of unschooling or deschooling as an alternative to the classroom. Akilah S. Richards describes unschooling as “a curiosity-led approach to learning without testing and predefined curricula. Unschoolers see learning as an organic by-product of living and being a child and, therefore, reject the premise of passing information from adults and books to children based on what is believed (by adults) to be necessary learning…Unschooling is a way of life that is based on freedom, respect, and autonomy.” (Richards, 2020). The reason it is believed such learning can’t happen in the school, as explained by Ivan Illich, is that through schooling, students are taught “to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new”. Schools, the argument goes, “form their world view, and define for them what is legitimate and what is not” with “the right to learn” actually “curtailed by the obligation to attend school” (Illich, 2011) and its perversion of education into only that which can be formally examined. In the words of home-schooling proponent, John Holt, “only a few children in school ever become good at learning in the way we try to make them learn. Most of them get humiliated, frightened, and discouraged. They use their minds, not to learn, but to get out of doing the things we tell them to do”. (Holt, 2017).
This tension between organic and intrinsically motivated education and the “institutional forms” of schooling are also present in Chomsky’s essay when he asks us to “consider, for example, the competitiveness fostered in the university, in fact, in the school system as a whole”, claiming that “it is difficult to convince oneself that this serves an educational purpose.” Chomsky illustrates how “even at the most advanced level of graduate education, the student is discouraged by university regulations from working as any reasonable person would certainly choose to do: individually, where his interests lead him; collectively, when he can learn from and aid his fellows.” He notes the arbitrary requirements and restrictions on doctoral dissertations, course projects and examinations which oblige the student to “set himself a limited goal, and to avoid adventuresome, speculative investigation that may challenge the conventional framework of scholarship”. Avoiding anything which “runs a high risk of failure…the institutional forms of the university encourage mediocrity” rather than the “ideal” of “collective effort with sharing of discovery and mutual assistance.” As I write this, the coronavirus pandemic has highlighted such practices to be the cornerstone of English schooling too. Examinations – those standardised formal assessments secondary students in England take at the age of 16 and 18 and which are very useful as a competitive mechanism for arbitrarily ranking and sorting students but are arguably far less useful at telling us anything meaningful about a student’s deeper understanding (Robinson, 2016; Sahlberg, 2015; Christodoulou, 2016; Robinson, 2018; Astle, 2018; and Stephens, 2021) – were, according to Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, “cancelled” in January (Coughlan, 2021). Health risks now came from cramming hundreds of students closely together in poorly ventilated examination halls and sending off thousands of potentially contaminated exam scripts all around the country. Alongside the logistical nightmare of trying to run a coherent and secure examination-timetable given the likely possibility of many students being forced to self-isolate for weeks at a time, there was also the problem of widespread disruption to schooling caused by a series of nation-wide lockdowns. With no guarantee every student across the country had been taught the same pieces of assessable information detailed on the exam specifications in a fair and comparable way, the decision was made, instead, for teachers to be the judge this year and award each child a final grade based on their own assessments of the student’s abilities.
Except that isn’t what actually happened. Instead of being “cancelled”, exams were simply outsourced from external exam-boards directly to schools as strict “accountability measures” and “quality assurances” were put in place to ensure the final set of results submitted by the schools met the “rigour” and “robustness” of conventional exams. (DfE, 2021a; Ofqual, 2021; JCQ, 2021). Materials – old examination questions and mark schemes – were supplied by the exam-boards and schools were expected to use them. Grades awarded needed to be backed up by data and evidence, essentially ensuring that instead of rethinking or innovating methods of final assessment, schools simply replicated the traditional end of year exams by setting their own versions of the same old familiar format. In this time of crisis, schools across England worked tirelessly to perpetuate and legitimate a fundamentally flawed examination system instead of grasping the opportunity of providing a principled alternative to it.
In my own school this depressing truth was illustrated starkly. At a time when the bulk of the country was still in lockdown, in early March 2021, students were allowed to return to the classroom. For those in examination years who, like all students during Covid 19, had missed months of in-school teaching, the return to school was not a return to in-person education. Instead, they would spend the next two and a half months learning nothing new, only taking exam after exam on what they had already learned so that we could “gather data” by which to determine their final grade. Similar scenarios were taking place at schools all over the country. (Ferguson, 2020; Lough, 2021). As Chomsky notes, “in general, there is little if any educational function to the requirement that the university be concerned with certification as well as education and research. On the contrary, this requirement interferes with its proper function. It is a demand imposed by a society that ensures, in many ways, the preservation of certain forms of privilege.”
The image of hundreds of sixteen and eighteen-year-olds being asked to put their families and communities at risk of spreading COVID-19 by returning to schools and mixing with each other not to be educated, but simply so that they could sit for weeks in spaces where we could monitor and test them, might be all we really need to know about the true function of the school. Standardised GCSE and A-level exams are, after all, evidence only of memorisation and regurgitation of closely prescribed and repeatedly drilled content rather than any true indication of meaningful ability in the examined subject. The recent emphasis in “research-led” and “evidence-based” pedagogy on “retrieval practice” as the key to examination success within UK education highlights this. (Sumeracki and Weinstein, 2018; Coe, 2019). To practice retrieval, from memory alone, only has value when the end goal is success in a scenario which unnecessarily refuses you access to crucial resources and demands that you write sensibly on a subject within a strict time-limit, entirely from memory. The expectation of examination has never been for all our students to pass – when exam results become too good, exams get more difficult or charges of cheating arise (Coughlan, 2013; Clark, 2017) – but rather it is, by design, for only some students to pass and for others to fail. It is not an assessment of learning with any meaningful, future-looking, potential for improvement. Students never see these papers again. They do not get feedback on their errors, or advice for filling any gaps in their knowledge. They simply get a number. A grade. Then are sorted tidily for the job market.
Television competitions such as The Great British Bake Off rely on this same conceit, placing arbitrary restrictions on contestants, such as high-pressure time-limits, surprise tasks and reduced resources precisely so that a state of panic and confusion will cause several capable and competent bakers each week to slip up and fail. It makes entertaining television. A show where good bakers bake perfectly adequate cakes every time would fail to provide the necessary spectacle of competition. If you ever wondered why supposedly brilliant young business-minds routinely fail miserably on The Apprentice, seasoned drag queens stumble as soon as they reach the mainstage of Ru Paul’s Drag Race, or professional tattoo artists make rookie mistakes on Ink Masters, it is because the structure of each show is intentionally designed to put pressure on contestants in unreasonable ways so that the ante is upped, the drama is elevated and the chances of disaster are amplified. The same is true of our system of examination. We are not giving pupils optimal conditions for universal success, nor are we looking to assess whether they have achieved a good level of understanding in key ideas and skills across a wide range of disciplines. We are looking merely for a means to rate and rank them for an unfair and unequal society. We are looking for some to go on to higher education and others to be denied that access. We are looking for ways of determining who gets one of the limited jobs available, and who doesn’t. We are participating in placing barriers to some students’ future earning-potential in a dog-eat-dog capitalist system and rewarding others with special advantage. Not because they are objectively better mathematicians, computer scientists, historians, chemists, philosophers, or geographers, but because they happen to be better at memorising certain pre-specified chunks of knowledge and exam technique than others. The school’s function, as an “institutional form” built entirely around such questionable examinations, cannot be simply to educate (for this could be done without such examination) but rather to filter an ostensible commitment to education through the more prevailing commitment of maintaining an unequal society.
This function, to preserve the current order when it is in crisis, perpetuating status quo ideas and facilitating the continuation of existing norms, was made momentarily difficult by the specific crisis of COVID-19. The enforced disruption of national lockdowns became a space which gave potential glimpses of alternative arrangements of how different the world could be, both for education and society as a whole. Such spaces are dangerous to the existing way of doing things and need to be shut down before new and radical ideas might take hold. As Chomsky noted of intellectuals, “the social critic who seeks to formulate a vision of a more just and humane social order, and is concerned with the discrepancy – more often the chasm – that separates this vision from the reality that confronts him, is a frightening figure who must ‘overcome his alienation’ and become ‘responsible,’ ‘realistic,’ and ‘pragmatic.’ To decode these expressions: he must stop questioning our values and threatening our privilege…he must not try to design a radically different alternative and involve himself in an attempt to bring about social change.” For the few who do make such attempts and find themselves “challenging the conventional wisdom”, they tend to be “a lonely figure”, and Chomsky argues that “the degree of protection and support” such lonely figures are granted in their inquiries is a hallmark of a truly “free society”.
Echoing Mill’s ideas about the critical value of freedom of speech, he suggests that such a society should not only be willing “to submit its ideology and structure to critical analysis and evaluation”, but also be willing to “overcome inequities and defects that will be revealed by such a critique.” Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s promise after the 2020 school closures that any future lockdown would see schools “last to close, first to re-open”, although publicly justified on both the idea of “lost learning” away from the classroom and the economic benefits of freeing parents from the onerous task of home-schooling and looking after their own children so they could go back to the far more profitable toil of going to work, was more likely motivated to avoid such critique than to overcome any legitimate social injustice. The very concept of “lost learning” is a fiction predicated on the idea that education taking place outside of the classroom, without the oversight and administration of professional teachers, and away from the measurement of exams, is no education at all. It is a concept based on projected exam attainment and forecasts of future income and lost earnings (Sibieta, 2021; Hanushek and Woessmann, 2020) which ignored both the existence of any learning done throughout the period of school closures that wasn’t part of a pre-defined school curriculum (of which an undeniable, yet unquantifiable and ungraded, amount was done) and the potential efficacy of remote-teaching for those able to access it (in theory, a student had every opportunity online to learn all that they would have learnt in the classroom, though delivered in a different way, losing no learning at all despite the alternative arrangements). Schools were physically closed to all but the children of key workers throughout each lockdown, but teachers continued to teach online for the duration of the pandemic. Their success or failure in this regard was impeded not by any inherent conceptual deficit in remote learning, but by the self-fulfilling prophecy of those (governments, school leaders, unions, parents, etc.) who repeatedly stated for a range of self-serving purposes that remote-learning was, by definition, inferior to classroom learning, as well as by the pre-existing structures of inequality which made such beliefs true by default for those students – and teachers – technologically excluded from the online classroom. Those who were already economically disadvantaged were less likely to have high-speed internet or computing devices that enabled them to engage in, or deliver, the online provision than their more economically advantaged peers, and the government did little to remedy this technological inequity despite repeated claims of distributing laptops and increasing internet provision. (Burgess and Holmes, 2020; Belger, 2021a).
A return to school was essential to quell any potential destabilisation that might arise in its prolonged absence. To re-open schools as soon as possible could therefore be seen, in Chomsky’s words from half a century ago, as “a political decision, namely, to ratify the existing distribution of power, authority, and privilege in the society at large, and to take on a commitment to reinforce it” rather than allow the possibility of any radical challenge to existing social arrangements to erupt beyond its control. As well as highlighting a technological divide between online learning haves and have-nots, and failings both motivational and ontological with defining education solely in terms of final examination, the school closures reminded us after ten years of austerity that for many children across the country their missing free-school-meal might have been the only food they got to eat each day. (Westwater, 2021). For others, school was an essential escape from harmful domestic situations and abuse, or a mechanism for monitoring the whereabouts of children who, if not in school, might be falling into organised crime. (Garstang et al, 2020; Brewster et al, 2021). The pause in normality afforded by the pandemic was a space not only to reassess what education could be, but also the way we use the physical spaces of schools as a rug under which many deeper social problems had previously been swept. With more and more social services defunded across consecutive budgets, without this easy avenue for offloading a range of growing social issues we were confronted with the true extent of many unpleasant inequalities baked into our current lifestyles which the school’s existence had hitherto hidden.
School sites, however, had obvious difficulties in terms of re-opening safely. Old, crowded buildings where classrooms crammed thirty or more children closely together were impossible reconfigure to allow for the required two-metres of social distance. Newer buildings, likewise, had been designed to facilitate as much activity for as little cost as possible, not to safely space out thousands of students to avoid transmission of a potentially deadly virus. This key logistical issue (plus lack of good ventilation and airflow in many learning spaces) meant that even before the tricky issue of maturity – would younger students even understand the need to follow all the new safety protocols? – and the unpleasantness of constant hand sanitizing and all-day wearing of masks, the idea of reinstating daily mass social gatherings of hundreds of different households through a return to physical schooling at a time when there was no vaccine remained a pressing concern. The science on epidemiology was clear: a lot needed to be done if schools were to open safely. (King et al, 2020a; King et al, 2020b). But the government’s dilemma was also clear: either reopen the schools quickly or continue to keep the parents and carers at home, away from their jobs.
The school’s function in a time of crisis being to perpetuate and support the status quo, a solution was found: simply ignore the science and re-open schools anyway. (DfE, 2020a). Wish away the need for social distancing, or even for wearing a face covering, by simply declaring, without supporting evidence, that they were not needed in educational settings. Emphasise that young people suffered the effects of COVID-19 less than adults and ignore all the adults teaching them, working in the schools around them, and in the families they would come home to every night. Create so-called “bubbles” so that self-isolation, when needed, could be localised to a smaller year-group (even though each year-group would be constantly in contact with others on public transport to-and-from schools, with their older and younger siblings, and with their teachers who, in the secondary school, would have to move from bubble to bubble to teach different groups of students their specialist subject each period). Get parents back to work.
To see supposed places of learning willingly go along with such an anti-scientific approach to viral transmission and sell these so-called “safety measures” to children and their families, even when it was clear they were not working and cases across the country began to rise in a second wave of infections that eventually led to another lockdown, is further illustration of the true commitment to meaningful education in the “institutional form” of the school. “Consider the often-voiced demand that the university serve the needs of the outside society,” asks Chomsky. “That its activities be ‘relevant’ to general social concerns. Put in a very general way, this demand is justifiable. Translated into practice, however, it usually means that the universities provide a service to existing social institutions, those institutions that are in a position to articulate their needs and subsidize the effort to meet them.” While Chomsky is talking about the influence of funding on the areas of research undertaken within the academy, we can see how getting parents back to work served existing institutions very well and was a key motivational drive behind the unsafe, and scientifically illiterate, reopening of schools. Yet, paradoxically, considering the denial of science involved in their re-opening, it is in the elevated treatment of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) subjects in a secondary school that we see something similar to what Chomsky had identified in the university all those years ago. Across the country, arts and humanities subjects have suffered across successive governments as a range of accountability measures and incentives have put the focus on those academic subjects demanded by business and economic needs rather than ensuring the well-rounded education of every child (Heywood et al, 2015; Last, 2017; Ruebain, 2019). In his original essay, Chomsky asks us to reflect on “the assumptions that would lead one to describe work in ghettos or among migrant workers as …necessarily inappropriate to a college program – as distinct from, say, work on biological warfare or counterinsurgency, which is not described in these terms” noting that “access to funds, power, and influence is open to those who undertake this work, but not, say, to those who prefer to study ways in which poorly armed guerrillas might combat an enemy with overwhelming technological superiority. Were the university truly ‘neutral’ and ‘value-free,’” he cautions, “one kind of work would…be as well supported as the other.” We know from the mere lip-service to a “broad and balanced curriculum” (Richards, 2019) even as certain subjects have continued to lose their space in the UK classroom that the secondary school is not “value-free”. But these values extend beyond the academic curriculum. In the years before the pandemic, as well as during, schools have played a key role in promoting a very specific set of so-called “British values” as part of the government’s controversial “Prevent” agenda. Schools, under the name of “safeguarding” have long had a duty to “protect” young minds from any ideas deemed radical by the State, as they did so shamefully in the years of Section 28 (1988 – 2003) when any positive mention of LGBTQI+ sexualities was barred from the classroom. Through Prevent they continue to do so today, defining “extremism” in a way that has intentionally targeted Muslim students and made Islamophobic connections between the practice of their faith and suspected terrorism (Ferguson, 2020), or in the explicit ban on the use of any anti-capitalist critiques of the current economic order to be used as lesson resources (DfE, 2020c). British schools, we must also remember, were a key component of former Prime Minister, Theresa May’s, creation of a “hostile environment” for immigrants and their children (Usborne, 2018), and only stopped providing the government with intrusive data about their students’ immigration status after campaigns from parents forced a change in policy (Whittaker, 2018). Since Brexit, however, some schools are now being asked once again to border-check European students (Belger, 2021b). In each of these outsourced tasks of ideological policing, teachers – even those who might have been personally hesitant to comply – have found themselves with a legal duty to conform to regulating the parameters of what is and isn’t deemed acceptable in the minds of the young people in their care: a key function of the school when those values are in crisis.
In Chomsky’s original article, however, he remained sceptical of what he called the “simply false” claims that “the university exists only to provide manpower for the corporate system, or that the university (and the society) permit no meaningful work, or that the university merely serves to coerce and ‘channel’ the student into a socially accepted lifestyle and ideology” because although “it is true that the temptation to make choices that will lead in these directions is very great” we can see evidence that many students and staff still resist those temptations and work against the structural push in a particular direction to go, themselves, in the other. Chomsky himself was writing, after all, as an intellectual working at a university, just as I am writing now as a teacher working at a school. In particular, Chomsky points to the student movements of the time as a “stimulus to critical thinking and social action, perhaps of a quite radical nature” which he describes as “a necessity in a society as troubled as ours” and “among the few hopeful developments” of recent years. Indeed, he remarks, “that many escape these limitations” of scholarship encouraged by the university “is a tribute to the human ability to resist pressures that tend to restrict the variety and creativity of life and thought.”
Yet, even as Chomsky derides those “totally lacking in judgement” who may find themselves “offended by ‘student extremism’ and not, to an immensely greater extent, by the events and situations that motivate it”, he almost paradoxically concedes that the “features of university life that rightly are offensive to many concerned students” ultimately come “from the relatively free choices” of those students themselves, as much as from their teachers. Indeed, in his conclusion to the essay, Chomsky allows that “the real problem” of the university is a “much deeper one” than can be addressed by mere institutional reform. To “change the choices and personal commitment of the individuals who make up the university”, he says, “is much harder than modification of formal structures, and is not likely to be effected by such restructuring in any serious way.” Instead we must change the individuals – including the students – if we want a disruption to the status quo. For the “primary barrier” to change will be “the unwillingness of students to do the difficult and serious work required, and the fear of the faculty that its security and authority, its guild structure, will be threatened.”
In this confession we see the ideological importance of the prior function of the school. While some faculty and students – those “lonely figures”, swimming against the tide – do attempt such disruption, after fourteen years of compulsory schooling it is difficult for the majority, be they student or professor, to shake off the lessons of the classroom. Schools teach questionable curricula built around the superficial accountability of problematic examinations designed to induct students into a myth of meritocracy (Sandel, 2020) and a contentious job market which takes institutional priority to any wider goal of education, and as they do so teachers’ “wider professional responsibilities” frequently involve participating in what can only be described as propaganda and ideological grooming. Student protests, for example, have frequently been squashed before the participants even reach university age. In 2019, inspired by the actions of Greta Thunberg, several days of action across the UK took place with “school strikers” staging national walk-outs to address the climate crisis.[3] While many individual teachers supported the demonstrations, many school leaders and government Ministers took a different view (Barton, 2019; Anon, 2019; NEU, 2019). Truancy, after all, is against the law, as some schools were quick to remind the climate strikers and their parents. Meanwhile, in 2020, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter protests erupted around the world. In the UK, many school-aged students stuck in lockdowns watched from home as police killed another black man and, with all the extra free-time on their hands, began to organise. Away from the control of the classroom, not only did students take to the streets in protest, but they turned their analysis of structural racism and policing onto the school itself, and calls soon came to decolonize the curriculum as systemic bias against people of colour in education began to be exposed (Moncrieffe, 2020). Disproportionate exclusion rates, lack of representation, unconscious bias and blind-spots were openly shared and discussed by young people – as well as the original issue of police violence – and change was in the air. Many schools returned in September recognising the need to address these undeniable issues or face significant opposition from their students. However, with constantly changing guidance from the Department for Education on the requirements for safe re-opening of schools, it had been hard for already overworked school-leaders to focus on anything beyond COVID-19. Then, in the wake of a second lockdown in January, the cancellation of exams provided a further workload distraction. With every secondary school in the country suddenly lumbered with the last-minute task of creating and administering a robust assessment-process to determine “teacher assessed grades” and more constantly changing guidance from Ofqual and the DfE, the long-term good-intentions of the new academic year were understandably buried beneath the now more pressing task of generating students’ final grades. (Barton, 2021; Tidd, 2020; Riches, 2020; DfE, 2020b). The Heads of Departments who might have spent the previous summer considering changes they might make to their curriculum to expand equality, diversity and inclusion (the sanitised rebranding of Black Lives Matter in the educational profession) within their subject-areas now had more urgent things to focus on, in an incredibly short time, and few schools could afford to prioritise decolonizing their curriculums or transforming inclusion over their new pressing requirement to make sure every exam-aged student was properly tiered and classified (Williams, 2021). In some schools, such as London’s Pimlico Academy, where student uprisings continued in the wake of seeming inaction and provocation from school leaders, student protestors were disciplined and threatened with permanent exclusion for their continued social conscience (Mukhtar, 2021). More recently, as Israel once again bombed the people of Gaza in May of 2021, killing hundreds, student protests in support of Palestinian freedom rose up in schools across the country only to be routinely shut down by their teachers and local councils for being allegedly inappropriate for the classroom (Parveen, 2021).
Alongside the academic curriculum on offer in the school there has always been a “hidden curriculum” of discipline and punishment to manage student behaviour. Students learn not only what is needed to pass exams, but how to follow rules – no matter how arbitrary – and fear the sanctions in place for breaking them. This includes wider social rules. “In its relation to society,” Chomsky suggests “a free university should be expected to be, in a sense, ‘subversive’”. In the classroom students are expected to be anything but, and the teachers who enforce these systems of discipline must also buy into the notion of conformity and compliance they induce if they want meet their professional standards (DfE, 2011). In the words of Tom Bennett, former “Behaviour Guru” for the Times Educational Supplement and current lead behaviour advisor to the Department for Education: “behaviour management is fundamental to good teaching. If you can’t control them you can’t teach them”. In a book written in 2010, which was endorsed by the National Education Union (then called the NUT), Bennett tells the reader “controlling other people” is “a skill – a doing activity, an active verb” and “if you’re not comfortable with controlling others, then leave the room…because you made the stupid decision to come into teaching” (Bennett, 2010). With a key message of the classroom being the establishment of hierarchical deference to authority in order to coerce unwilling students into learning what is required for their terminal examinations, is it so surprising that so many first indoctrinated there go on to university and make “relatively free choices” that err towards deference and socially acceptable success within only the pre-existing parameters of an enforced status quo? Ideology works precisely in its insidiousness (Porter, 2006). Just as Chomsky and Bourne’s intelligentsia are products of the school system, so too are the leaders and professionals in charge of contemporary schooling. They are not necessarily consciously aware of their role in maintaining the same structural powers into which they too were indoctrinated, but such unconscious enforcement of these structures is a sure sign of their own education having previously fulfilled its proper function rather than evidence against the claim. As Miranda Fricker reminds us, “there are operations of power that are purely structural and, so to speak, subjectless” but “though the power has no subject, it always has an object whose actions are being controlled…for purely structural operations of power are always such as to create or preserve a given social order” (Fricker, 2007). In the words of Iris Marion Young: “part of the difficulty of seeing structures…is that we do not experience particular institutions, particular material facts, or particular rules as themselves the source of constraint; the constraint occurs through the joint action of individuals within institutions and given physical conditions as they affect our possibilities.” However, Young continues, “all those who contribute by their actions to structural processes with some unjust outcomes share responsibility for the injustice” (Young, 2013). The goal of ensuring our pupils success in the current unjust system by working hard to get them the necessary grades and opportunities available within it is an arguably righteous task if we accept there is no alternative. At least we are doing our best to leave fewer young people condemned to a poorer quality of life. But to do so is to forget that the assumption that there is no alternative only becomes reality through our continued perpetuation of norms which could be resisted. This convenient and widely manifested forgetfulness is further suggestion that our current “institutional forms” of education do not encourage that “human need” to “discover and create, to explore and evaluate and come to understand…to analyse and criticise and transform this culture and the social structure to which it is rooted” which was imagined by both Chomsky and von Humboldt, long before we ever get to university. Nor do they “compensate for the distorting factors introduced by external demands, which necessarily reflect the distribution of power” in wider society.
“The university”, Chomsky concluded in his original essay, “should be a centre for radical social inquiry, as it is already a centre for what might be called ‘radical inquiry’ in the pure sciences. It should loosen its ‘institutional forms’ even further, to permit a richer variety of work and study and experimentation, and should provide a home for the free intellectual, for the social critic, for the irreverent and radical thinking that is desperately needed if we are to escape from the dismal reality that threatens to overwhelm us.” Unfortunately, the function of the school in a time of crisis is to sow the seeds from which all future intellectual endeavours will grow, ensuring each new shoot of thought that might sprout is cultivated and tamed in only those directions deemed acceptable and unlikely to offend existing hierarchies. As the educational crucible from which all later intellectual institutions are wrought, so long as the school continues to fulfil this prior ideological function and shape the parameters of acceptable thought, then the prospects for establishing any more liberating “institutional forms” of education appear as bleak now as they were fifty years ago when Chomsky first wrote his article. Until schools change, it is unlikely that universities ever will.
References
Articles and Books
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- Astle, J. (2018) ‘Schools Unleashed’ in RSA Journal. Volume 164. No. 3. p. 38-41
- Barton, G. (2019) ‘The Climate Strikes Threaten the Safety of our Pupils.’ TES. February 15th. https://www.tes.com/news/climate-strikes-threaten-safety-our-pupils (accessed: 19/6/21)
- Barton, G. (2021) ‘Covid and Workload: Teachers Have Worked 12 Months Solid’. TES. March 26th. https://www.tes.com/news/teachers-have-worked-12-months-solid-we-need-break (accessed 17/6/21);
- Belger, T. (2021a) ‘DfE Still Short of 1.3 Million Laptop Target Despite Gibb Promise’. Schools Week. 13th April. https://schoolsweek.co.uk/dfe-misses-free-laptop-tablets-devices-target-for-schools/(accessed 22/6/21)
- Belger, T. (2021b) ‘Campaigners Fear Another ‘Hostile Environment’ over EU Pupils’ Status’. Schools Week. June 11th. https://schoolsweek.co.uk/campaigners-fear-another-hostile-environment-over-eu-pupils-status/ (accessed: 21/6/21)
- Bennett, T. (2010) The Behaviour Guru: Behaviour Management Solutions for Teachers. Continuum.
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- Burgess, G and Holmes, H. (2020) ‘Pay for the wi-fi or feed the children’: Coronavirus has intensified the UK’s digital divide. Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research. University of Cambridge. https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/digitaldivide (accessed: 22/6/21)
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- Ferguson, R. (2020) ‘Challenging Prevent: Building Resistance to Institutional Islamophobia and the Attack on Civil Liberties.’ In Hart, E et al. Resist the Punitive State. pp.232-254. Pluto Press
- Fricker, M. (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press.
- Garstang J, Debelle G, Anand I, et al. (2020) ‘Effect of COVID-19 Lockdown on Child Protection Medical Assessments: a Retrospective Observational Study in Birmingham, UK’. BMJ Open. Volume 10. Issue 9. https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/10/9/e042867 (accessed: 22/6/21)
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- Holt, J. (2017) How Children Learn. Da Capo Press.
- Illich, I. (2011) Deschooling Society. Marion Boyars.
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- King, D et al. (2020b) An Urgent Plan for Safer Schools. November 27th. The Independent Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies. https://www.independentsage.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Safe-schools-v4b1.pdf (accessed: 21/6/21)
- Last, J. (2017) A Crisis in the Creative Arts in the UK? Higher Education Policy Institute. September.https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/A-crisis-in-the-creative-arts-in-the-UK-EMBARGOED-UNTIL-7th-SEPTEMBER-2017.pdf (accessed: 22/6/21)
- Lough, C. (2021) ‘GCSEs 2021: Most Teachers Lose At Least A Week Grading’. In TES. June 11TH. https://www.tes.com/news/gcses-a-levels-teacher-assessed-grades-2021-23-teachers-lose-week-or-more-grading (accessed 20/6/21)
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- Mukhtar, A. (2021) ‘Students at Pimlico Academy are Rising up Because They Know Protests Work’. Gal-Dem. May 19th. https://gal-dem.com/students-at-pimlico-academy-are-rising-up-because-they-know-protests-work/ (accessed: 22/6/21)
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- Sahlberg, P. (2015) Finnish Lessons 2.0. Teachers College Press
- Sandel, M. (2020) The Tyranny of Merit. Allen Lane.
- Sibieta, L. (2021) ‘The crisis in lost learning calls for a massive national policy response’. Institute for Fiscal Studies. February 1st. https://ifs.org.uk/publications/15291 (accessed 21/6/21)
- Stephens, H. (2021) ‘An Alternative to GCSEs: Reuniting Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment’ in Impact: Journal of the Chartered College of Teaching. Issue 12. Summer. pp 70-71.
- Sumeracki, M and Weinstein, Y. (2018) ‘Optimising Learning Using Retrieval Practice’. In Impact: Journal of the Chartered College of Teaching. Issue 2. Spring. pp.13-16
- Tidd, M. (2020) ‘Coronavirus Lockdown: Is the DfE Gaslighting Teachers?’ TES. November 9th. https://www.tes.com/news/coronavirus-schools-government-gaslighting-teachers (accessed 17/6/21)
- Usborne, S. (2018) ‘How the hostile environment crept into UK schools, hospitals and homes’. The Guardian. August 1st. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/aug/01/hostile-environment-immigrants-crept-into-schools-hospitals-homes-border-guards (accessed: 21/6/21)
- Westwater, H. (2021) ‘Free School Meals: Everything You Need to Know’. The Big Issue. June 7th. https://www.bigissue.com/latest/free-school-meals-everything-you-need-to-know/ (accessed 22/6/21)
- Whittaker, F. (2018) ‘DfE Ends Divisive Pupil Nationality Data Collection’. Schools Week. April 9th. https://schoolsweek.co.uk/dfe-ends-divisive-pupil-nationality-data-collection/ (accessed: 19/6/21)
- Williams, Y. (2021) ‘Covid and Schools: Middle Leaders Deserve Our Appreciation’. TES. June 10th. https://www.tes.com/news/covid-schools-why-middle-leaders-deserve-our-appreciation (accessed 17/6/21)
- Young, I. (2013) Responsibility for Justice. Oxford University Press.
Policies
- DfE (2020a) Actions for Schools During the Coronavirus Outbreak. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/actions-for-schools-during-the-coronavirus-outbreak#history (accessed 27/6/21)
- DfE (2020b) Guidance for Schools: Coronavirus (COVID-19) https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/guidance-for-schools-coronavirus-covid-19 (accessed 20/6/21)
- DfE (2020c) Plan your Relationships, Sex and Health Curriculum. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/plan-your-relationships-sex-and-health-curriculum (accessed 27/6/21)
- DfE (2011) Teachers’ Standards. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/teachers-standards(accessed: 27/6/21)
- DfE (2021a) Awarding Qualifications in Summer 2021. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/awarding-qualifications-in-summer-2021/awarding-qualifications-in-summer-2021 (accessed 20/6/21)
- JCQ (2021) JCQ Guidance on the Determination of Grades for A/AS Levels and GCSEs for Summer 2021. https://www.jcq.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/JCQ-Guidance-on-the-Determination-of-Grades-for-A-AS-Levels-and-GCSEs-Summer-2021.pdf (accessed 20/6/21)
- NEU (2019) Conference Report. https://neu.org.uk/media/11996/view (accessed: 21/6/21)
- Ofqual (2021) Quality Assurance for GCSE, AS and A Level: Information for Schools and Colleges. https://ofqual.blog.gov.uk/2021/04/22/quality-assurance-for-gcse-as-and-a-level-information-for-schools-and-colleges/ (accessed 20/6/21)
[1] All Chomsky quotes are from this reference unless otherwise stated.
[2] Academic Freedom and Intellectual Dissent. Online Conference. June 8th. 2021. Video available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tX62RTl6qY (accessed: 16/06/21)
[3] See https://ukscn.org for campaign details (accessed: 21/6/21)