My education at a public school in the 1950s was supposed to make me a recruit for the Labour party. I had read progressive tracts urging the abolition of public schools, abolition—though I wanted to do it by agreement. I also wrote approvingly of A.S. Neill, founder of Summerhill, who insisted on children’s right to choose whether to go to class, but insisted that, once there, they should be taught properly.
As I grew older and turned to other things, my interest in education languished. I hardly noticed the comprehensive revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. I do remember, however, thinking that “mixing” was crazy.
It was my experience as a parent which caused me to revise my earlier views about schools. In the early 1980s we were living in Islington. Alarmed at the poor quality of the state schools in the area, we decided to send our eldest son, Edward, to the City of London School. I remember a fierce argument at dinner with my friend Phillip Whitehead, a former Labour MP. He said that middle-class parents should keep their children in state schools to improve them. I said that in practice parents would simply manipulate the system to get their children into the good schools. The government would then be driven to bussing and finally to abolishing private education. I could not go down that road.
In 1986 we moved to East Sussex and Edward, then 13, started at our local comprehensive school, Lewes Priory. Keith Joseph, the Secretary of State for Education, had just decreed a new school-leaving examination, GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education), for which all pupils would be prepared. This was to replace both O-levels and CSEs. One of the best-qualified history teachers in the school, Geoff McGovern, refused to teach the “integrated” history syllabus the new exam required. In his resignation from Lewes he compared East Sussex to East Germany.
These events had a dramatic effect on me. I felt an overwhelming sense of injustice. Why were these excellent teachers being forced to teach “bad” history? Why was my son being forced to study it? How could this degree of centralisation be justified—for in education there is little hard science, certainly no best practice; the needs and aptitudes of children vary enormously; values are often in sharp conflict.
I also learnt an important lesson about community action. True enough, a few of us, by dint of hard work, had won the schoolmasters a reprieve. But bureaucracy is hard to believe, and why not, since the masters of state education seemed to be Tory education ministers, who aimed to provide parents with greater “choice and variety,” but were in practice committed to the centralisation of the Department for Education.
In 1993, the teachers refused to implement the incoherent tests developed by the government's advisers. My sympathies were divided, and I resigned from SEAC (School Examinations and Assessment Council).
I am now a convinced Hayekian. Every attempt to fit education to a single plan geared to the “needs of the nation” has ended in disaster. No central authority knows enough about education—or the so-called national needs—to do the job properly. Local education authorities can be greater tyrants than central government. In a society as plural as ours, agreement on practices and values can be achieved only by coercion.
Genuine variety requires the right and power to choose: it cannot be manufactured by government. The logic of the argument is to get the state out of education as early as possible, leaving it with limited regulatory and funding functions. Perhaps I have not travelled as far from A.S. Neill as I thought.
