All Must Have Prizes

Book by Melanie Phillips
(Little, Brown and Company, 1996)
Reviewed by Cameron Watt on 18 April 2002

KEY POINTS

·    British education is in crisis after several decades of decline. This is manifested in falling academic attainment, the collapse of authority in the classroom and more widely in a breakdown in the relationship between adults and children. The failures of British education in recent decades have harmed the poor most.

·    There are a number of reasons for this crisis. At a societal level, immense damage has been done by the fragmentation of the family and the proliferation of irregular relationships. Within education, the ascendancy of progressive, 'child-centred' approaches has resulted in vastly increased levels of illiteracy and innumeracy.

·    There has been a wilful refusal by many educational authorities to recognise the extent of the crisis.

·    The Conservative governments during the Thatcher and Major years made a mess of educational reform, especially the National Curriculum. This attempt at reform by imposing central control was doomed to fail, not least because it was inevitably going to be hi-jacked by the educational establishment to further entrench failed theories and practices.

·    Fundamental changes are needed to restore the damaged social fabric before it is too late. Central to this is re-investing authority in the institutions of national life, particularly the family.

Crisis, what crisis?

Perhaps a time when there was not a crisis in teaching cannot be imagined. In the five years since Phillips published this book, there has been increasing evidence of (1) poor levels of educational attainment by many, and (2) increased classroom disruption and a flight from teaching into other professions.

At the start of the book, Phillips documents the slide in educational standards that prompted her to write this book?

She describes how children, like all human beings, need structure in which to thrive. These include a proper grasp of one's own language, including, of course, spelling and grammar. Structure is imposed by the need for exactness in maths and science. There is structure in a well-ordered classroom in which the teacher leads pupils in imparting authoritative knowledge and has effective sanctions at his or her disposal to prevent disruptive pupils sabotaging the learning process for others. However all the vital structures of education are now being abolished:

At some point in the last few decades, the educational world came to agree that its overriding priority was to make children feel good about themselves: none of them should feel inferior to anyone else or a failure. At the same time, such people came to believe that children from relatively impoverished backgrounds, who unarguably started at a clear disadvantage, were somehow incapable of learning what other, more forward, children could learn. There was, of course, not a shred of evidence for such a belief. What disadvantaged children needed above all was more structured teaching, greater attention paid to those elementary rules of language or of arithmetic and a heavier emphasis on order. These were all features which were second nature to those children from more favoured homes but which tended to be lacking in their own.

So the educational establishment decided that disadvantaged children could not learn 'difficult' things, yet these children could not be allowed to perform worse than any other, so no child would learn these things. Thus an education system - the GCSE - was established so that many more children would be able to pass it. "Nothing was to be difficult, everything in the education garden was to be fun. The uncomfortable truth that little of value is achieved without effort, was decried as a form of child abuse."

The effect of all of this is that there was a concerted, ideologically motivated, process of 'dumbing-down' British education. Phillips suggests that the subject that has suffered most from the collapse of the authority of rules is mathematics. "A fundamental shift in emphasis from knowledge transmitted by the teacher to skills and process 'discovered' by the child has undermined the fundamental premises of mathematics itself. The absolutes of exactness and proof on which the subject is based have been replaced by approximation, guesswork and context." For Phillips, mathematics is indicative of a system in which the concepts of accuracy and correctness are consciously discouraged as elitist. To egalitarian educators, rules are unacceptable because some people will break them, thus creating unequal outcomes. However Phillips contends that it is those at the margins of society who are most failed by this shift because when they leave school without basic literacy and numeracy they are unable to hold down jobs, further exacerbating their exclusion.

Much vocational training is very poor. Phillips cites Alan Smithers, of Liverpool University, who described vocational training as "a disaster of epic proportions" which has resulted in the failure of Britain to produce decent skilled workers. In 1993, Smithers described the new courses as "lightweight, ridden with ideology and weak on general education." For example plumbers, ignorant of elementary trigonometry, could not calculate the slope for a drain.

Whatever the problems with our education system, the British have always comforted themselves by remembering their world-class universities. Yet even at Oxford, one of the most prestigious universities in the world, a German tutor despaired that his undergraduate students could now only speak pidgin German, and gaps in their knowledge that would previously been covered at 'O' Level. At tutor at another university suggests that in modern languages, the standard of linguistic proficiency in an average 2:1 first degree now is often no more than that of an A-level-plus of 20 years ago.

Conservative Failure

Margaret Thatcher was the most successful British politician in recent times to take on and defeat entrenched vested interests. She was well aware of the damaging trends in the educational world and her government resolved to do something about it. So why did they fail so miserably? For a start, the educational establishment saw her coming. Phillips describes how the National Curriculum, the key initiative through which basic educational concepts and minimum standards would be re-introduced into the nation's schools, was subverted by the groups it was intended to counter. "Whitehall civil servants [at the Department of Education] forged an astonishing alliance with educationists to frustrate or dilute ministers' aims and to substitute their own agenda wherever possible. Political will squared up to an entrenched culture and lost." Phillips believes that foremost among the reasons for this failure was the indifference of Conservative politicians to the fate of state-educated children. "The result was that, despite bringing about some improvements, the National Curriculum actually made matters worse in some important ways, by institutionalising some of the worst attitudes and giving them the force of law." Ministers found themselves up against not just a few hard-left officials in Labour-controlled authorities, but an entire establishment. "The doctrines of cultural relativism and child-centred, progressive teaching methods had been absorbed into the professional bloodstream. To argue against them was to encounter not merely incomprehension or repudiation but a moral rage." Educationalists would not be persuaded that their theories were incorrect; they could not bring themselves to contemplate that they might actually be harming children. Where there was evidence of problems, this would be blamed on structural factors. Phillips convincingly describes the rigorous and ruthless thought police operating at every level of the education system. Teachers with traditional teaching methods found themselves forced to obscure these when visited by local authority inspectors. Not to do so jeopardised promotion and even re-employment prospects. Phillips documents examples of the horrendous victimisation of teachers brave enough to swim against the tide.

The Unravelling of Education

Phillips progresses from discussing the self-destructive education establishment to charting the 'unravelling of the culture'. She makes the point that the cultural trends wreaking such havoc in the British education system cannot be understood in isolation. Rather they must be seen as part of a much broader failure by parents who are increasingly abdicating their responsibilities to protect, nurture and socialise their offspring. The collapse of external authority that has caused the disintegration of the education system is also responsible for the erosion of discipline and social bonds between the generations.

Phillips considers the Enlightenment to have initiated the collapse of external authority. She highlights some of its paradoxes: it "It gave us freedom and liberal values; but it also gave us the French Revolutionary Terror and the Holocaust. It gave us a reverence for reason and scholarship; but it also paved the way for the flight from knowledge. It gave us individual aspirations, egalitarianism and human rights; but it also undermined the traditional family." Enlightenment thinkers sought to rid themselves of medieval superstition and error. Until that point, most Christians had considered the purpose of education to be the transmission of truths necessary for salvation. With the Enlightenment, however, individual experience became of more importance than past authority. This of course, led to the questioning of all received authority and the revelation of Scripture in particular.

Phillips charts the influence of various Enlightenment thinkers on education. Through her discussion of the Victorian era, Phillips offers a convincing account of how so-called 1960s 'progressive' thinking in education did not appear out of nowhere. The ideas of John Dewey and other 'child-centred' thinkers had been gaining ground since the start of the century.

Phillips believes that Dewey's ideas had an especially destructive impact. His blueprint for education combined the extremes of relativism and pragmatism. Children should be taught to disregard their culture and history as the purpose of education was to solve practical problems by practical means. Thus skills were valued over knowledge. Virtues such as industry and honesty did not have any intrinsic value. Education became reduced to problem solving, with the teacher not an authority with knowledge to impart, but merely a facilitator to the children: "In the last analysis, all the educator can do is modify stimuli," Dewey wrote.

His philosophy was explicitly linked to an egalitarian and socialist agenda. Dewey could not allow any distinctions between students, leading directly to the destruction of learning and culture as well as any conception of moral authority, the appreciation that there are timeless values that need to be transmitted through culture. Meritocracy was bad; striving for high achievement was to be actively discouraged. Dewey successfully duped the American and British educational establishments with the false equation of democracy with an egalitarianism in which all individuals must be the same.

Phillips goes on to discuss the destruction of morality through the tide of individualism. Individualism is the only thing that can be handed down in a society that no longer believes in the validity of handing down any tradition. Morality has been abolished and commitments mostly replaced by choice. In the 'me-society', children suffer as parenthood is re-defined so that stable permanent relationships between parents are no longer considered necessary or even the most desirable context within which to raise offspring. As the family is the most important educator of all, its decline has had massive negative consequences on the educational attainment and socialisation of the next generation. The explosion of family breakdown in Britain, tacitly encouraged by dominant theories, is causing catastrophic damage to society:

The child-centred philosophy is an explicit attempt to democratise and equalise children's relationship with adults. Yet, despite the rhetoric in which it has been clothed, the outcome is the very opposite of child-centred. Democratic rights belong properly to adults. Children do not have adult 'rights' to freedom because they are still life's apprentices. They have needs, not rights. Freedom for them is another word for neglect. They are primarily the recipients of duties because their principal need is to be parented, which means being looked after with love, commitment and discipline. Letting them roam freely with 'rights' and 'choice' and with no fixed boundaries effectively abandons them to ignorance, error and often harm. And it has also produced a dramatic reversal of roles. Adults, who have licensed themselves to behave as if their actions have no consequences, have become infantilised. Their children, by contrast, have been saddled with a burden of adult responsibilities well beyond their years. What child-centred theories have done is to destroy the very concept of childhood itself.

In her chapter on youth crime, Phillips discusses the increasingly violent and random nature of crime among young people. This rise in crime is not so much prompted by opportunism as nihilism:

"It is too simplistic to speak of a disappearance of the notion of right and wrong. Most of these young offenders know perfectly well that burglary or violent assault is wrong. But they know it as part of an abstract code that has no relevance to their own lives or to the effect on other people. Indeed, the most chilling aspect of many of these crimes is that they appear to be committed with a complete absence of empathy, insight or understanding of what it means to be another person. These young criminals cannot make the link between acts and their consequences. There is nothing in their own lives to enable them to realise that anti-social acts cause other people pain and grief. There is no other. The only thing that has meaning now is the self. Is that so surprising? That is, after all, precisely what they have been taught by the adult world."

A Programme for Survival

In concluding, Phillips calls for a new 'politics of attachment' to restore the damaged social fabric before it is too late. This involves re-investing authority in the institutions of national life, including the family and education systems. The people-sized institutions of civil society need to be strengthened. However certain large charities need to have their state funding cut because they are doing more harm than good, for example in championing the 'rights culture' for children. Rather it is vital to shift the emphasis from rights to reciprocal duties. In education, all should not be encouraged to aspire to university. Instead we must concentrate on providing first-class vocational training, to train the technicians and craftsmen needed to remain competitive. Phillips argues that the national curriculum should be re-shaped to concentrate solely on English, maths and history; these are the essentials without which the individual cannot function in society. The curriculum in these subjects should be made far more rigorous, focusing on teaching a body of knowledge and away from experiment and relativist values.

Whole communities must confront their juvenile offenders about their unacceptable behaviour. These youths should be made to make reparations to their victims whilst getting back on track. Phillips suggests that the 're-integrative shaming' approach pioneered in New Zealand could be usefully applied here.

Lessons for the Conservatives

What lessons can Conservatives learn from this book?

·    We must be committed to state education and recognised as such. The overwhelming majority of the population are dependent on state schools. During the Thatcher and Major years, most senior Conservatives used the independent sector, possibly contributing to the neglect of the state system. The view that we do not care about normal schools because we do not have to use them is probably still strong.

·    Libertarian thinking will not produce just outcomes in education or any other area. As Phillips reminds us, "Licence [is] not synonymous with the authentic liberal values of a free society. The unfettered market cannot produce a civilised culture because it sets citizens against each other for personal gain instead of working together for the common good. It is not underpinned by virtues such as trust, integrity or altruism but is a savage, unprincipled structure in which the weak are junked as trash."

·    The educational elite's power bases, in central and local government and universities, should be gradually dismantled, for the elite often does more harm than good. The Thatcher government attempted top-down reforms were subverted, only succeeding in creating further bureaucracy for schools and government. Teacher-training colleges should be abolished, allowing high-calibre teachers to fulfil this function within the schools. Lasting change for good in British education will only come from the bottom up.

·    Conservative social policy should be centred around the organising principle of contributing to the common good. We should openly renunciate thinking which is more committed to ideological purity than protecting the most vulnerable.

·    In the context of education, central to the common good is the unfashionable but vital task of encouraging and strengthening marriage. A first step would be to remove the tax and benefits penalties facing married couples versus cohabiting couples.

Criticisms

All Must Have Prizes is an excellent critique of trends in British education and social policy in recent decades. However it is important to note two specific deficiencies:

·    Melanie Phillips' tone is overly shrill and sarcastic. This harshness is compelling and entertaining, but it is unlikely to win hearts as well as minds.

·    The scope of the book is overly ambitious. It is appropriate and very helpful to trace the intellectual movements that have produced the current education system. However Phillips devotes too space to her general critique of society, examining youth crime and family breakdown, for example, rather than more fully discussing the malignant trends she sees in schools. The 'programme for survival' in the final chapter includes a discussion on constitutional reform that is irrelevant to sorting out the problems in our schools. Little effort appears to have been made to identify excellence in British education. The educational world needs to be shown a better way. For example Phillips could have discussed the exceptionally successful city technology colleges that were established by the Conservatives.