A Tory curriculum for education
BRITAIN build a large, effective left movement if deals are being cobbled together in back rooms, as has been the practice in the past. No left will build lasting roots in the rank and file it it functions by exclusion and lack of democracy. If the left is to overcome its isolation, if the left is to rebuild and grow again, if the right wing course of Kinnock and the leadership is to be rolled back, then
BRITISH EDUCATION has always remained peculiar when more than a good, anti-capitalist procompared to Europe or North America. It retains many gramme is needed — we also need demoarchaic institutions. Nevertheless, it has usually changed in cratic organization.
accordance with the needs of British capitalism. The post-war era saw expansion and many radical changes, not least the
Lines of divide already changing of secondary education (11 to 19 years) into a being drawn supposedly "classless" comprehensive system replacing,
Labour Briefing's leaflet for the conferamong other things, the old selective grammar schools.
ence proposed six points as the political ba-
With the deepening economic and social crisis affecting sis for left organization, six points that
British society at all levels, Margaret Thatcher's Tory coincide with the objective situation and where the lines of divide are already being government, and in particular the Education Secretary drawn:
Kenneth Baker, have decided on a clear reactionary course
• Fight against the massive cuts in local that means taking on the educational interests of the working government, education and the health service, and against the proposed poll tax;
class and teacher's trade unions.
• fight against the Alton Bill, and for the rights of women, Black people, lesbian women and gay men;
• solidarity with trade unionists in
• fight for an anti-capitalist programme in the Labour Party and the trade unions;
• fight any moves towards coalitionism;
• fight to build anti-imperialist solidarity with the struggles in Ireland and South
Africa. Against NATO and for unilateral disarmament.
The conference agreed to organize a series of mini-Chesterfields in the regions; to set up policy working groups which will continue to work on the three main areas of policy — the economy, international relations and disarmament, and democratic rights; to draw up a socialist register; and to organize a recall conference next May.
Labour Briefing supported the proposal to organize regional conferences around the country (in some areas this is already underway), and also the idea of a recall
There is little doubt that the economic and political situation opened up by the crash will lead to further big struggles in
Britain, and it is out of these struggles that the left will be reinvigorated and built.
The crisis of leadership of social democracy, both in the Labour Party and the trade unions, is posed very starkly for the working class. How far and how effectively the left seen in embryo at Chesterfield, will be capable of challenging that leadership is yet to be seen.
What is clear is that the Bennite current active from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s is recomposing once more. With Benn himself playing an increasingly back-seat role, the question of who succeeds him is posed. Livingstone clearly wants that mantle. Whether he manages it is only part-
12 lested in the battles to political will as he is tested in the battles to come.*
International Viewpoint • December 7, 1987
PATRICK FIELD
W HEN THE TORIES sought
re-election for a third term in June this year, they chose to make education a major issue. Tragically, the general response of the Labour Party (LP) and the broad labour movement was inadequate. In the mid1970s, Labour prime minister James Callaghan set the tone of future national debates by giving credence to reactionary ideas about "standards" in education.
During the recent pay dispute (see IV 122), there was a certain amount of challenge to these assumptions, but as the fundamental issue of the teacher's struggle was pay, it was easy for the Tories to dominate the issues once the National Union of Teachers (NUT) leadership and the other unions involved abandoned any challenge to Baker.
Baker's proposals are wide-ranging, including curriculum and school reorganization. During the last three decades a lot has changed both in teaching content and the methods used. Out went traditional selection, learning by rote, In some more advanced areas, especially where there was a left wing-led local education authority (LEA), curricula were designed to challenge racism and sexism. Schools could take a liberal attitude to course content. For example, sex education could now include a positive attitude to sexuality.
Throughout this period, the right wing of the Conservative Party found these trends unacceptable. On almost every issue — be it discipline, the banning of corporal punishment (caning), anti-racist education, mixed ability teaching or morals and the family - this right wing have been at the forefront of an ideological offensive.
The centre of Baker's present proposals is for a national curriculum. This would result in at least 60 per cent of school timetables being devoted to mathematics, English, science technology and modern languages. A similar core programme has been outlined for primary schools (5-11 years). Subjects such as history and art would be marginalized, and subjects the Tories associate with left wing views, such as sociology, would be outlawed. Until now, basic subjects have been taught in all schools, with the schools themselves deciding on their own emphasis with guidance from the LEA. Now the existence and role of the LEAs are also under threat.
"Opting out" of the state system
Another central plank of Baker's pro. gramme is the notion of "opting out" parents voting to run a school themselves. The rationale behind this is the free market, or what has been termed "open enrollment". It has been the LEAs that until now have apportioned places in any given school, attempting to ensure a balance of abilities and other factors. Baker aims to change this. These opting out proposals will cause chaos, with "popular" schools being oversubscribed and overcrowded while others are forced to close. They will also foster racism, witnessed recently in Yorkshire in the north of England, where a group of racist parents campaigned against their children going to a predominantly Asian school.
The financial implications of all this are still not clear, including how much parents
who choose to run their own schools will have to contribute. Baker intends to introduce regressive tax measures for such parents and provide money directly to these schools.
This method of enforcing selection in areas where the Tories haven't a hope of gaining popular support is also applied where several boroughs combine, notably Inner London where the largest education authority of all exists - the ILEA. Partly because the ILEA has been notorious for initiating progressive educational ideas in the past, the Tories have singled it out for particular attack. Their new legislation will allow boroughs to withdraw from ILEA, thus breaking it up. Apart from the loss of economies of scale, the withdrawal of the Cities of Westminster and London, the two richest boroughs, would remove a major proportion of ILEA's budget.
In essence, the Tories are trying to change education from being a public service, nominally freely available to all, into a commodity that can be purchased. To enforce selection, blanket national testing will be introduced for youngsters at the ages of 7, 11 and 14 years. Results will be announced publicly. Education will be geared to commodity production, and arbitrary "standards" set by the Tories will be pursued to the exclusion of innovative teaching techniques and collective working.
Labour leader supports selection
But what of the Labour Party and the NUT? Unfortunately, leading Labour spokespeople have not been exactly helpful. The most disgraceful example to date has been Neil Fletcher, Labour leader of ILEA, who made a speech to the Socialist Education Association supporting "excellence" (in other words, selection) in response to Baker's proposals. He was so
FRUIT wrapped up in Baker's framework that he actually referred to "education authorities treating parents as customers and the people who pay teachers' salaries". (The Guardian, October 13).
On the other hand, the NUT leadership - still recovering from Baker clubbing them over pay and conditions — are unable to muster an alliance to oppose the Tories that can organize serious action. Instead of building support throughout the labour movement on the basis of an attack on the rights of the working class, they have in essence prepared a popular front approach aimed at the Liberal Party and Tory "wets". Another traditional approach of the union leaderships is a retreat into "professionalism": teachers are experts, they know best,
But this approach is no way to mobilize the sort of forces needed to fight the Tories. In reality, the left in the NUT — particularly the Socialist Teachers Alliance (STA) - are not able at the moment to force the union leadership to lead a genuine mass campaign in defence of education rights, although STA supporters are clearly making this an objective. The fact that the NUT is not affiliated to the Labour Party as a union is a barrier to the development of a class-wide response.
However, the Tories can expect tremendous problems in carrying through these changes. Whereas they are well-equipped ideologically, economically they can expect big difficulties. Coventry LEA, for exproposed national curriculum would require 12 extra laboratories, 18 technology rooms, 25 science staff, 30 modern language teachers and 35 technology teachers - at a cost of an extra £1 million per year. (The Guardian, October 10.)
National spending on books is thought to be £120 million below minimum requirements. (Independent, October 22) Baker's own department, the Department of Educa-
BRITAIN tion and Science, has stated that £2,000 million is needed to bring schools up to an acceptable state of repair as laid down by government building regulations. Baker is only prepared to allow for half of that. (The Teacher, NUT paper, November 9.)
Extent of proposals not yet widely appreciated
Even some Tories have their doubts. Leaders of Tory-run LEAs, such as Solihull in Warwickshire, do not see "opting out" as a viable proposition, given the demands made on running educational institutions. They recognize that the volatility of the free market — particularly at present — may not provide the bedrock from which young Tories of the future may sprout.
But the Tories will not worry too much about these difficulties as long as there is no serious response that challenges their assumptions. The labour movement has yet to understand the extent of the proposals and may respond as their effects become more evident. Unrest will occur due to the contradiction between ideology and economics underlying many of the proposals. For example, bringing technology education into the latter part of the twentieth century may be desirable, but it isn't as cheap as sociology, art or drama.
Of course, throughout this process there will be moves to considerably trim down the workforce — driving teachers out, dismissing so-called "poor" teachers and so on. In effect this means rationalizing school economies along business principles. School managements will be transformed from being educators to being bosses of small enterprises. Thatcher's monetarism knows no bounds! Where LEAs remain in control of schools, the funding will be severely reduced by central government.
The Tories are being allowed to make all the running. At present, there are local conferences discussing strategy involving wider forces than just teachers. As yet there is no serious mass national response. The class-wide character of this assault demands that the Labour Party and the TUC mount the sort of challenge necessary to defeat the Tories on a key part of their strategy. The NUT leadership must demand that the Labour Party and TUC organize the necessary response, winning support from the organized labour movement, parents' groups, students, the oppressed and others who would suffer from Baker's proposals.
The labour movement will also have to deal with the Fletchers of this world who are a major obstacle to a fightback. Baker is intent on turning the clock back 50 years on the working class's rights to education and the working conditions of teachers. The Tories, despite some obvious local opposition, are also intent on education becoming a highly centralized institution, removing most of the rights of local government. Whether the opposition en this will prove 13 adequate remains to be seen. * December 7, 1987 • International Viewpoint
YUGOSLAVIA
T HE YEAR 1987 will be remem-
bered in Yugoslavia as the year in which the systemic character of the crisis was made so evident that any hope of a partial solution to the country's troubles has been buried for good.
The debates over the distribution of power among the republics and provinces that have been taking place during the past year, in preparation for possible changes to the 1974 Constitution, have been unable to conceal the true problem: the gravely eroded legitimacy of the party/state apparatus in the eyes of the population at large -and above all in the eyes of the working class.!
Yugoslavia's press highlighted this problem in its detailed coverage of last April's strike by miners at Labin in north-west Croatia, the longest strike in Yugoslavia's post-war history. The miners stayed out for two months, braving a concerted barrage of hostility from managerial, trade-union and party/state functionaries at the regional level, struggling to provide their families with the bare necessities of life (attempts by Slovenian miners to collect aid were blocked). Deserted by their own Workers' Council, the Labin miners showed that self-organization, discipline and solidarity could prevent the imposition of a quick solution at the workers' expense.
The very length of the strike and unanimity of officialdom's attitude to it produced a new awareness of how inadequate the existing system of self-management is in representing and defending the interests of the self-managers. (In spite of the official attitude, the strike did enjoy a largely sympathetic press coverage, with reporters clearly shock by the conditions in which the miners were supposed to live and work and by the gulf between the miners and local functionaries.)
Self-management used to exploit workers
The system was challenged at all levels: the power of workers to decide on their own living and working conditions; investment policy; control by managers, officials and party or trade-union bodies. Always presented as expressing the socialist essence of the Yugoslav state, in the light of this strike self-management was shown to its opposite: an instrument for exploiting the workers. This is not, of course, to say that self-management could not be given a different content. But in an overall situation in which emphasis is increasingly laid on the right of the market to determine the mode of operation — and indeed viability — of an enterprise, the question is automatically posed as to whether the workers too should not be free to determine the price of their labour power in the market place, by their self-organization and using all the traditional means of working-class 14 struggle?
Srdja Vrcan, a sociologist of national reInternational Viewpoint • December 7, 1987 pute, has expressed this plainly: "I must admit I have always been suspicious of the idea that true self-management, which ought to mean more than complete autonomy of economic management, can be harmonized with the treatment of workers as wage labour, as a commodity. It seems to me now [after the strike] that refusal to recognize the status of workers as labour power is only too easily translated into denial of their right to influence independently the price of their labour."
The Labin miners' strike
The Labin miners' grievances were not just the abysmal level of their wages or the arduous conditions in which they lived and worked, they were also the fact that recent unprofitable investment by the republican government in two new pits had had to be paid for largely out of their own pockets. The unequal distribution of this burden was registered graphically by the media, which contrasted the comfortable life-style of the local functionaries with the dire poverty of the workers, one of whom told a reporter: "I work in a pit and live in a hovel." Many of the pit workers in fact come from Bosnia-Hersegovina and remain totally unintegrated into the local community. This latter is based on tourism, where life is geared to making a quick buck out of this particular exchange with the wealthier West.
The workers had no difficulty in calculating the difference between their wages and the price that coal fetches on the market. But no republic politician came to explain to them how the surplus was being used. Energy prices are a matter of increasingly heated dispute between producers and consumers, and the final settlement is left to the powerful chamber of republics and provinces within the Federal assembly. The remoteness of the republican government from the men who actually dig the coal was pointed up sharply by the strike. Indeed, the miners asked for a member of the Federal government to visit Labin, to see how they lived.
In 1986, in fact, all Yugoslav wages had actually been allowed to rise, after a fouryear decline. This was due to the thirteenth party congress which took place that year. In 1987, however, the rise of inflation to a new high of 120 per cent was used as a pretext to claw back some of this gain (a reduction in the value of their work norms provided the immediate motive for the Labin miners to come out on strike), and the Federal government imposed an all-round wage cut excepting only administrative workers. Throughout the country, industrial workers responded by taking strike action, in the most extensive wage of strike since the war.
The republican and Federal governments chose to treat the strikes as problems of local self-management. What was particularly conspicuous was the total abstention of