The education policies of our political parties
1 Introduction
Say all the various culture wars at home and abroad ended in a victory for the Right so complete that the woke Left confessed itself to have been wrong all along: lefties crushed, the state shrunk, gender abolished, sex reinstated, net zero abandoned, oil, gas and coal revived, immigration under control, the deportable deported, Islam constrained, the EU dissolved, the ECHR left, Davos emptied, the BBC turned so inside-out, upside-down and back-to-front that it reverted to the British Broadcasting Company; say, speech made free again, all cancellations cancelled, the Guardian bankrupt and the MSM so free of elite bias that it no longer needed to be called the MSM; say, even, devolution forsaken by the devolved, and the Untied Kingdom re-United; say, the Regime and the Blob so hollowed out and collapsed in on themselves that there seemed nothing left to do but plodge in the puddle …
Say whatever you like … Say, 1950 again but with mobile phones. What then? as Plato’s ghost sang in Yeats’s poem. Would England and the English have been saved? Would “the social malady” have been, as Carlyle puts it in Past and Present, “fairly fronted, conquered, put an end to; so that, with your remedial measure in your pocket, you could then go on triumphant, and be troubled no farther”? Would there be nothing left to do?
Something would have been saved undoubtedly but isn’t it conceivable that it prove itself not to have been worth saving? Wholesomely Trumpist politically, but still pop-trash? England saved from woke leftism but as a reality tv show? Isn’t that possible? Isn’t it, even, probable? If you read what our political parties have to say about education, isn’t it absolutely certain? The parties are, collectively, immensely rich and able to command the intellects of the best educated and most intelligent people in the country. What they have to say about education must surely show us what mind the English have and whether it is worth saving.
The education policies of our political parties make strange reading. It wouldn’t be fair to say their idea or ideas of education were uneducated, for they can scarcely be said to have an idea of education at all. A reader can certainly infer – that is, guess – what their writers think of as education, but that is something for which he gets the credit not them. These documents (or bundles of symptoms – syndromes?) are supposed to be about education but, for the most part, the people who have written them not only have no idea what education might be, they have no idea they have no idea and, for the most part, can’t imagine why anyone would want one. They all claim to know how to make the thing better but what the thing that they want to make better is they are strangely silent about. None of them feels any need to say what it is or is for or how the part of it they term ‘education’ might differ from the part they term ‘training’ or why it’s worth spending so much money on (unless to make more ) or why we should all be kept at it from 4 to 18 and half of us until 21 and many until later still. They are like churchmen who want you to come to church (Want you to come? Make you come) without letting on what you are to believe when you get there. Or – as there is a great deal of money involved – perhaps what they are like is someone selling you the pig that lives in the poke. (Selling? This is a salesman whose goods you aren’t free not to buy.)
But as well as being alike, each of these documents has its own particular stamp and points of interest: e pluribus unum or (strong) family resemblances. I shall begin with the LibDems and, as I go on, hope not to repeat myself too much.
2 The LibDems’
The LibDems might not say (or be able to say) what education is but they do know what it is all the same (and thus bear out the truth of that wise saying of Michael Polanyi’s. “We know more than we can tell”): education is what is supplied by schools and universities but not just what is supplied by them, it is whatever is supplied by them. What else could it be? Education is what is bought and sold as it. And whatever else it is, it must include at least the 50,453 courses UCAS recognises (UCAS, the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service, at the heart of connecting people to higher education). Bread is what you get at the baker’s; education is what you get in schools and in colleges, at present 50,453 loaves of it. What else? Bread is what we treat as bread, especially when buying and selling it. Ditto education. What else, Stupid?
And, you must admit, it is sensible of the LibDems to take this line. It relieves them of any need so much as to hint at what they, themselves, understand by the word. After all such questions as what education is and is not, what it might be and on no account ever could ever be, how being educated might or might not differ from being trained or instructed or schooled or upskilled are knotty ones. What political party wants to risk getting itself into knots by trying to undo them?
Imagine the difficulty, for example, of trying to distinguish (discriminate) between the edible and inedible amongst those 50,453 loaves UCAS lays before us. (Are both the CIM Marketing Leadership Programme at Cambridge Marketing College and Missiology at Cliff College edible or is either or neither? Decide that, and there’s only another 50,541 for you to make up your mind about.)
Accept that education is whatever, today, is for sale as it (or may become so tomorrow) – be it what it may – and all that's left to say is how much more you promise to spend on it than anyone else. “See you. And raise you” (as, evidently, poker players don’t say).
Of course, the Lib Dems don’t call it ‘spending’ and they never mention the word ‘money’, which would be like calling the ‘loo’ the ‘lav’. When they don’t call it ‘investment’ they call it ‘funding’ – though sometimes, for the sake of what, in The King’s English, the Fowlers called ‘elegant variation’, they also call it, for example, ‘introducing’. ‘giving’, ‘creating’ and ‘guaranteeing’.
Quite what words they couldn’t or wouldn’t call it isn’t clear but certainly not fewer than those that might be but aren’t – by nice people – used for ‘the toilet’. Their overall, big idea about education is: “it is the best investment we can make in our children’s potential and our country’s future.” That’s English, of course, and it’s grammatical, of course, and all the words are used in the senses dictionaries give them. It makes, in fact, a sort of ideal sentence, a model for third formers to parse. But still — I wonder — does it quite make sense? It looks as if it’s telling us what education is good for. But does it? Isn’t it rather the point about potential that it isn’t here and now, for us to know and judge? It might turn out one thing, and it might turn out another, for good or ill. The infant Harold Shipman had a potential, made real by, amongst other things, his medical education. And future must be even less knowable than potential. In 1930, 1945 was Germany’s future but who would want to have brought it about? And the part the education of Germany’s children played in bringing it about is wonderfully caught in a scene in the film Cabaret in which a Hitler youth, joined by (almost) all his audience, sings Tomorrow Belongs to Me. There is an example of education as an investment in children’s potential and a country’s future. The best investment for realising the worst potential and the worst future is, of course, the worst investment, as, by 1945, the Germans and the Japanese had learned but, by 2024, our LibDems hadn’t. (Or is it, perhaps, that ‘potential’. ‘future’, ‘investment’, ‘our’ and even ‘education’ itself are just buzz-words for them, vaguely positive (like the word ‘positive’ itself) but not to be taken seriously? It couldn’t be that, surely?)
Investing in education in order to bring about an unspecified potential and an unspecified future is an investment in no-one knows what. It’s investment in a bubble. For the sentence to convey anything about education, the potential and the future it is to bring about would have to be known. Otherwise, the sentence remains a structure without a content, just a bundle of (to use a phrase of Jane Austen’s) “nothing-meaning terms”. Empty, void, blank, vacant: the mind of the LibDems on the subject of education.
And they elaborate their vacancy: because education is the best investment, they will,…
● invest in it for everyone, from a bit after the cradle to a bit before the grave;
● make giant (American) tech companies pay for every (English) school to have in it a dedicated, professional who is qualified to keep childrens’ minds healthy;
● increase funding all round in real terms and invest in new building and repairs to old;
● guarantee extra support for every disadvantaged pupil who needs it;
● invest in (high quality) early years education, give disadvantaged three and four year olds an extra five free hours a week and triple the Early Years Pupil Premium;
● give maintenance grants to disadvantaged students;
● give all adults £5000 to spend on education (rising maybe to £10,000);
And, in addition, in case anyone should think that all they can do is spend his money, they supply another 18 bulleted points, with 13 sub-points, tackling, creating, ensuring, establishing, strengthening, supporting, improving, expanding, reforming, implementing — often urgently — all sorts of things, including crises, strategies, commissions, consensuses, provisions and “SEND functions”. Not hard to grasp that a vote for a LibDem is a vote for someone who’s going to be really, really busy on your behalf (making bullet points if nothing else).
These 31 points, which have no particular connection with one another (e pluribus pluribum? Or is it plura?) aren’t worth working through but there was one which I thought particularly telling – as in ‘a giveaway’. By “urgently establishing a standing commission to build a long-term consensus across parties and teachers to broaden the curriculum and make qualifications at 16 and 18 fit for the 21st century”, they will “ensure children learn core skills such as critical thinking, verbal reasoning and creativity.” Of course, people who want to govern other people would have confidence in the power of standing commissions and long-term consensuses to ensure good things come to pass — and I do like it — but what I like even more about this sentence is its self-reflexivity. It invites its reader to test whether or not he has learned the core skill of critical thinking by challenging him to think critically of the sentence itself.
And how could one decently shirk the challenge? ‘Critical thinking’ sounds like a particular sort of thinking but is there another sort? Can there be uncritical thinking? Can you be said to be thinking at all if you are doing it uncritically? Isn’t uncritical thinking just bad-thinking or not-thinking? And if the writer of the LibDem education manifesto were himself thinking critically (that is, thinking) wouldn’t he have hesitated to speak of ‘critical thinking’? Wouldn’t he (especially when it's something he’s recommending as “core”) have suspected it of being a pleonasm? So, mustn’t we think that in the very sentence in which he says we must ensure that children learn this skill, he demonstrates that he hasn’t learned it himself?
And then, to strengthen that judgement: Is thinking, whether critical or not, a ‘skill’ at all? A skill is something I acquire through practice. I repeat it, again and again, as a routine, even a drill, until I have mastered it. And when I have mastered it, I can choose to exercise it or not, like playing a forward defensive stroke or, like Dickens’s Sleary, “throwing seventy-five hundred-weight in rapid succession backhanded over his head, thus forming a fountain of solid iron in mid-air”.
To say that I acquire the skill through practice is to say that the actions, mental or physical, that constitute the skill are repeatable, which must mean that the circumstances in which I am called on to exercise them are limited and predictable. If I am a batsman learning to play a particular stroke, I have, of course, to practise playing it in a variety of conditions: against both fast and spin bowling, on pitches both fast and slow, green and dusty, with the ball pitching here and there, early and late and in light that is both good and not so good but, crucially, these various conditions make a range with clear and known limits. I never have to play the stroke except in a specifiable set of distinct circumstances known in advance, ones which may be summed up, of course, as ‘when batting in a game of cricket’.
But thinking is no more like this than, say, loving is or behaving well. The circumstances in which I may be called on to think, like those in which I may be called on to love or behave well, can’t be known in advance, don’t make a range, with knowable limits. As a general rule, I think we can say, they are infinite and always capable of taking us by surprise, of presenting us with challenges to our capacity to think or love or behave well that we could never have anticipated.
As T.S. Eliot says in “East Coker”:
... Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate …
Thinking, no more than loving or behaving well, is a skill. Perhaps ‘verbal reasoning’, as something narrower, might have more of ‘skill’ about it, as something that can be practised by doing quasi-logical exercises, but then it falls short of thinking and can hardly be placed on a level with it as ‘core’. And, as for ‘creativity’, in the abstract, how can that possibly be a skill?
There is a straightforward misuse of language. Surely the whole point of what is ‘creative’ (even in advertising agencies) is that it is just what can’t be produced to order, something there can be no systematic training for? Whatever is creative, even though it may entail the use of skills, is more like the opposite of the skilful than a form of it.
Tying clichés neatly and tidily together in appropriate and acceptable bundles for election manifestoes can’t be called thinking but, as it has things in common with batting and circus performances (as well as being the opposite of using words creatively), perhaps we ought to grant that there is a certain skill to it.
What can be concluded but that the LibDems are themselves so uneducated as to be the last set of people imaginable to be trusted with educating the rest of us (unless, of course, it’s another political party)?
Duke Maskell