Education

Citizensmithx meets the State: Re-education for All

We hear so much about indoctrination in, say, China, North Korea and the old USSR, but fail to reflect upon our own political system. Does state indoctrination exist beyond the ramparts of totalitarian regimes and the pages of history? And if it exists within a Western democracy would we recognise it? These are questions we should strive to answer, as our supercharged socialisation into a techno-consumerist culture increasingly anaesthetises our ability to critically understand the world in which we live – and the ratchets of managerialist conformism click ever closer around our thoughts and freedoms.

Of course, even if we could find the time and inclination to stop and think, the main obstacle to identifying state indoctrination is being indoctrinated. The process is usually gradual and so, being adaptive creatures, we tend to sleepwalk step-by-step into accepting new ways of thinking, of feeling, of being. Charles Handy, a management theorist, talks of the ‘boiled frog effect’, where frogs don’t recognise incremental changes in temperature, so they will sit in a pan of lukewarm water and be slowly boiled alive as the temperature is gradually increased; whereas, of course, if thrown into a pan of boiling water the frog would scream “yikes” – or its frog-throat equivalent – and characteristically hop out. Well, state indoctrination is something like this heating process, and we are the frog, usually raised in the pedagogical pan: I only became aware of this heating process by leaving this pedagogical pan at 16 and returning later when the water was boiling. This was when I started teacher-training.

You see, there’s nothing quite like the shock of the new to stimulate one’s inclination to critical reflection. I’d left school before the advent of the National Curriculum; I’d taken ‘A’ levels before their modularisation (read ‘fragmentation’); and I’d completed my own, self-directed, BA degree (see My Journey) before the modularisation of degree couses too. So, almost a decade after graduating, and twenty years on from my secondary school days, I experienced ‘first-contact’ with the new state system as a PGCE student. And I was stunned. I found myself in a pedagogical purgatory of tick-box-training, of endless lists: learning objectives and outcomes; competencies and performance criteria; behavioural taxonomies and state-controlled student-centredness. Like Dorothy, I knew I was no longer in Kansas, but where had I landed? What on earth had happened to education in the intervening years? I decided to find out and, in so doing, fulfil the prescribed learning outcomes of Module DFF501: Teaching a Specialist Subject (especially outcomes 18.1, 18.2 and 18.3, apparently).

As far as I can recollect, two starting points soon came into view – landmarks by which I could begin to orientate myself: Firstly, there was rise of so-called competency-based education/training in the US; and secondly, there was the re-evaluation of the aims of state education solely in terms of the UK economy (business/industry/science). In 1968, the US government funded ten colleges and universities to develop competence-based training programmes for elementary school teachers. And what were their essential features? None other than our (un)familiar PGCE friends: the explicit, itemised specification of competences/behaviours to be acquired and demonstrated; the modularisation of instruction, assessment and feedback; the personalisation of instruction; and field experience. Seeing these characteristics of the early US model of teacher-training mirrored in my own course helped me understand its nature. Yet I needed to grasp how British education had been transformed into a business/industrial process of mass producing quality-controlled ‘output’ for the economy. So I began to explore historical events closer to home.

James Callahan got the education-as training ball rolling in his famous Ruskin speech of 1977. Here, he complained that state education seemed to be failing industry, not the individual, since the best-trained graduates preferred a career in academia or the Civil Service to one in industry. He helpfully suggested realigning state education to favour the needs of industry over those of the individual by giving science teaching a technological bias to surreptitiously lead students towards its practical applications, and away from its (non-productive) intellectual consideration. But nothing really happened until the Year Zero revolutionary period of Thatcher’s government, which had much grander ideas about satisfying the needs of industry/business. Their 1981 paper, New Training Initiative (NTI), sought to take skills-training beyond the apprenticeship model by introducing a new, embryonic concept of ‘standards’, which led to National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) in the mid-80s. The National Curriculum was to be modelled on these NVQs: where Callahan had suggested simply giving science teaching a technological bias to surreptitiously lead students towards the practical applications of science, this competency-based National Curriculum gives all teaching a technocratic bias – via new ‘pedagogical’ standards of utility, efficiency, effectiveness, measurability, and quality assurance/control – to lead students towards the practical application of intelligence itself.

But we’re jumping ahead. First, what are these NVQs? Well, the National Council for Vocational Qualifications defines an NVQ as “a statement of competence clearly related to work and intended to facilitate entry into, or progression in, employment and further learning,” which “should incorporate specified standards in the ability to perform in a range of work-related activities and the underpinning skills, knowledge and understanding required for performance in employment”. So you can have, eg, statements of competence in accounting, brick-laying, hairdressing, plumbing etc; they are the certificate titles defining the vocational area of competence. Then each statement is composed of a number of units of competence, based on a subdivision (or functional analysis) of the different skills which general competence entails. So for instance, a statement of competence in hairdressing is composed of several units, such as Salon Support Duties, Stock Control, and Hairdressing Theory. Each of these units is in turn composed of several elements of competence, which set out, as the NCVQ explains, “what can be done; an action, behaviour or outcome which a person should be able to demonstrate”. They specify both what a person should be able to do if they have acquired the skill and the performance criteria by which they can be judged to be successful – that is, by standards which are “based on the needs of employment and embody the skills, knowledge and level of performance relevant to work activity”. This NVQ structure sets out a positivist process of behaviour modification premised upon observable and measurable outcomes as the only things that really matter.

Now, if I were of a conspiracy-theory frame of mind I’d probably say something like “this new empiricist methodology of behaviour modification was recognised by government as a novel solution to the problem of how a state can educate a hi-tech society’s citizens without also developing their critical intelligence and, hence, their ability to resist political (and commercial) means of manipulation”. Luckily I’m not. I, like everyone else with a child-like faith in our superiors, understand that the absence of a satisfactory explanation for the confluence of certain events indicates the operation of co-incidence; not cunning. So, the revolutionary Conservative Government imposed the National Curriculum on all state schools via the Education Reform Act 1998 (ERA): Its content was taken from curricula commonly taught in grammar schools around 1904; its method of delivery and assessment was taken from the NVQ structure.

All subjects are subdivided into ‘attainment targets’ (ATs). For instance, English has three attainment targets – speaking and listening (AT1), reading (AT2), and writing (AT3). These correspond to NVQ ‘units of competence’ – identifying the specific areas of competence. Each attainment target consists of up to ten levels of achievement, called ‘statements of attainment’. These statements of attainment correspond to the NVQ ‘elements of competence’ – identifying the specific tasks which the ‘trainee’ is competent to perform. Finally, the NVQ performance criteria have a National Curriculum parallel in its Standard Assessment Tasks (SATs) which implicitly set the standards required for successful demonstration of each statement of attainment for the ‘important’ core subjects of English, Science and Maths) and Key Stage tests for the others. Like NVQs, the National Curriculum mechanises and operationalises the process of learning – as if Frederick Taylor, the time-and-motions father of scientific managerialism, had been let loose in our schools as well as our factories.

If your eyebrows are not raised, raise them now. Teaching school subjects as if they were NVQs is designed to do two things. Firstly, it seeks to efficiently mass-produce workers with quality-controlled vocational competencies, where product ‘quality’ is guaranteed by the application of minimum standards (the performance criteria implicit in SATs). Secondly, in linking the exercise of intelligence with utility, it shapes the development of thought itself into a specific form – instrumental reasoning – the exercise of intelligence only to consider the best means to achieve pre-specified ends/goals; not the value, or ethics, of the ends themselves. This is not education. Education, I contend, is the process of both nurturing a child’s full potential in all fields of creative human endeavour, and facilitating his/her intellectual autonomy; these are the educational prerequisites of genuine citizenship within a democracy. Admittedly, this is a now-derided liberal concept of education concerned with the individual’s personal growth. Yet this need not be in opposition to socio-economic needs: An education system genuinely geared to letting people more fully develop their intellect and interests would undoubtedly nurture very talented and creative individuals, who would go on to make significant social, cultural, and economic contributions to society.

Of course, giving everyone this humanistic freedom to grow (in unpredictable, and uncontrolled, directions) is too risky for the technocratic managerialists overseeing the education system. So they insist on control, or ‘domination’ – as Herbert Marcuse defined the term in 1970: “Domination is in effect whenever the individual’s goals and purposes and the means of striving for and attaining them are prescribed to him and performed by him as something prescribed. Domination can be exercised by men, by nature, by things – it can also be internal, exercised by the individual on himself and appear in the form of autonomy”. I mean, you have to laugh! Here was as perfect a description of this competency-based, managerialist pedagogy of behaviour modification as you could wish for, showing up the absurdity of such Government jargon as ‘student-centred learning’, and ‘autonomous/lifelong learning’. Yet here I found myself wanting to help students to become autonomous thinkers, but undergoing my own ‘behaviour modification’ programme, which employed the same competency-based model aimed at making me treat ‘education’ as, well, behaviour modification. No cause for laughter there; only resistance.

By now I was extremely puzzled about the lack of any discussion on these fundamental issues – the philosophical assumptions or psychological consequences of the National Curriculum/A and AS/ PGCE methodology, or any study of Educational Theory as part of our teacher-training. Surely we should understand the socio-cultural context of our role as teachers/lecturers in a democracy? Weren’t these precisely the issues surrounding our new vocation we should be discussing if we were indeed to be professionals, and not technicians slavishly carrying out State instructions? Then I wandered into the Education School’s library, and found row upon row of books on the history, philosophy, sociology, and psychology of education – all being flogged off for £1 each. And the cloud of unknowing lifted: study of these foundation disciplines of Educational Theory was no longer necessary in a teacher-training course; we were only meant to acquire the technical and organisational competencies of teaching – not the contextual understanding of the social role and responsibilities our profession ordinarily entails in a democracy. That’s because the role and its responsibilities had been radically distorted by the previous government and intensified by its successor. This revelation hit me with the force of page one of the unwritten masterpiece, Janet and John Do State Indoctrination, on which it would say, in large print, ‘Do not include conceptual tools within your programme of indoctrination which trainees can use to identify such indoctrination’. No doubt it would continue, ‘If burning pre-indoctrinal texts in public would be viewed unfavourably, simply sell them off to people with longer memories, and little influence, for a nominal fee’.

So what fills the void created by hollowing out ‘teacher-education’ courses in this way? The main substitute for professional understanding is teaching practice – 100 hours of it, squeezed into a short period. The Educational Theory void is also filled with classes discussing the character and necessity of learning objectives/outcomes, along with detailed plans of timed, bite-sized ‘learning experiences’ for every lesson – and the competencies involved in their execution. Theory and practice are brought together by ‘critically reflecting’ on our teaching experiences in a Record of Learning and Achievement (or RoLA) accompanying every module. Here is where we develop our ‘professionalism’ by internalising the ideology of behaviour modification and its managerialist methodology in (re)interpreting our pedagogical experiences. We are to regularly reflect on how we can continually improve the efficiency of the means to achieve these competency-based ends of behaviour-change – without of course reflecting on the value, or ethics, of such ends as constituting ‘education’ (as well as ‘training’). That’s the point of indoctrination, as the dictionary says, “to teach people to accept (esp. partisan or tendentious) ideas uncritically”. So ‘critical reflection’ becomes ‘instrumental reflection’; just as ‘intelligence’ becomes ‘instrumental intelligence’.

Being a diligent student, I recorded my reflections on what we were being taught to think and do in the name of education. For instance, six weeks into the course, on 30th October 2000, my RoLA entry for Module DFA 512: Planning and Design for Learning (blatantly entitled ‘An Episode of Reflective Thought’) reads: “Have realised that the PGCE course is a mix of mutually incompatible educational methodologies. The emphasis placed on the role of the teacher as “facilitator” to help students learn to learn, and the insistence on reflective learning, are grounded in a humanistic approach to education; the emphasis placed on learning outcomes and objectives is grounded in a behaviouristic approach to education; and the emphasis placed on “competence” and “evidencing” in the classroom is grounded in a managerialist approach to education. As such, the well-intentioned humanistic aims will be steamrollered by the operational atomisation of student learning demanded by this new managerialist methodology…the sense of confusion experienced by teachers trying to internalise such a contradictory educational approach can only be passed on to their students’ learning – if, of course, they are also to be truly encouraged to develop their powers of critical reflective thought, and not actively discouraged by the above positivist pedagogy”. Its incoherence is a symptom of its indoctrinatory nature: the instructional language is rigorously behaviourist and managerialist, specifying to trainees what they must do as teachers (to condition children’s thoughts and deeds in certain ways) – yet the justificatory language employs the positive, life-enhancing terminology of progressive, humanistic education (such as ‘student-centred’). This doublespeak is meant to mask the mismatch between the mechanical methodology’s dehumanising effect upon children and its purported aim of personal growth.

Looking back, the most ironic feature of my teacher-training was that all my lecturers were pleased to read, and broadly agreed with, my attempts to discover the philosophical and socio-political underpinnings of the PGCE pedagogy we were meant to accept at face value, uncritically: I was praised for finding out what they should have been teaching us. Naturally, this raises the question ‘well, in that case, why don’t they teach it?’ And that brings us back to the beginning, because the State doesn’t allow them. Indoctrination? QED.