Last night (Thursday July 11th) I attended a lecture organised by the Adam Smith Institute (note that their website now has no “uk” at the end – it’s just “www.adamsmith.org”), and given by former Chief Schools Inspector Chris Woodhead. It was a strange occasion, in some ways extremely encouraging and in others somewhat frustrating.
Woodhead patiently explained why, in his very well informed opinion, state education, academic improvements are because the exams are getting easier. The national curriculum, which he said he used to support, has allowed real subjects to be replaced by nonsense subjects, and he now thinks it should be scrapped.
Nor, said Woodhead, will the present government’s various “initiatives” make any difference. Lowering class sizes has had little impact in the USA. Parents don’t want specialist schools, they just want good schools which are good at everything that matters. Bringing in “private sector management” won’t help if the managers aren’t allowed to sack any of the existing teachers.
So, having spent most of his career working for the “top down” (his own oft-repeated phrase) state education system, he now wants the freely choosing citizenry rather than state hirelings and bureaucrats to make the key decisions about education.
Well, good. And good on the Adam Smith Institute for fixing it for Woodhead to say such things. But I felt about it rather as I did about high-level (and hence well paid) “critics” of the Soviet empire, at the time when that was also falling apart. Could you not have arrived at some of these conclusions a little sooner? And some of Woodhead’s proposed reforms were decidedly naïve. Education vouchers? He said that the entire state education machine, and especially the unions (“the blob”), is unanimously against vouchers. Indeed. So might not something a little more cunning, if only because more cunningly worded, be preferable? There was also the suspicion that Woodhead’s own inability to get his own way from his former position of supposed power, and the general unpleasantness he suffered from the many and various enemies he accumulated within the system, had a lot to do with his conversion. Sour grapes in other words. But one shouldn’t carp too much. It will certainly make a difference that a major ed-celeb has come out in favour of moving education in a much more free market direction. And besides, what better way could there be to learn about the horrors of the politicised and state-centralised provision of education than by experiencing and observing these horrors at first hand and face to face? Better late than never.
Another reservation that many libertarians would have felt (and which one questioner stated out loud during the Q&A session) concerned the fact that Woodhead’s proposals were all about parental choice, and about the reestablishment of old-fashioned education and old-fashioned academic standards. The Woodhead plan was simply that the children should be told to do different things by different people. But what of the children’s own wishes? What of their freedom?
This bothers me less (although Brian’s Education Blog may change my mind about this!). First, Woodhead has a point about the value of basic skills, especially of the simple three Rs variety. Learning to read and write and add up is a far better basis for individual freedom than being kidnapped and made to muck about with plasticene, or to be taught literacy and numeracy very badly.
And second, it seems to me that in practice children can have a huge influence over the choices that parents supposedly make on their behalf, far more than they could ever hope to influence the state. Eagerness to follow Alternative Plan B and severe temper tantrums and adolescent bolshiness directed at Parental Plan A means that Plan A in practice stands little chance of being followed, no matter how certain parents may feel about its superiority. That so many children get bossed by their parents is because most children are either unthinkingly obedient, or else only bolshy. Children lack freedom, that is to say, not because they are in a prison, but because they themselves give insufficient thought to alternatives.
