Bricking it

David Cameron is to sweep away the last vestiges of the old Local Education Authorities as he plans to turn every school into an ‘academy’. Brilliant. Let’s change the name again; after all it works for tired old companies doesn’t it? Doesn’t it? When they swapped GCEs for GCSEs it was better all round because you got the extra C, see? Now if we can have the kids gaining baccalaureates or, better yet, high school diplomas (there’s a slender chance they’ll actually be able to spell that) it will look brilliant on the several hundred identical CVs they will be mailing out to indifferent employees who couldn’t give a shit.

Who wants the output of British schools these days? Yes, they’re diverse; yes they have been culturally ‘enriched’; yes they have all passed ‘History of the Holocaust’ and unwittingly converted to islam on a school trip to a mosque; yes they have a list of ‘achievements’ as long as your arm... But, seriously, have they got a clue? For too many years we have allowed academic theory to get in the way of education, churning out identikit model citizens with cultural awareness, gender sensitivity and a total blindness to arse/elbow differentials.

The left, of course, in the form of the NUT and other usual suspects are claiming that there is no evidence this will improve anything, oblivious to the reality that fifty years of progressive education has hardly proved the theorists fit to fiddle with anything, let alone kids. I choose my words carefully, for piss-poor education is tantamount to child abuse. Spare the rod, they used to say, and spoil the child.

Those employers I mentioned? All they want is work-ready youngsters with solid basic skills and the ability to learn without being coddled. Maybe – if the NUT’s conspiracy about preparation for privatisation holds true – some of those companies could end up running their own academies. Some already do, at graduate level, but imagine what might be achieved if, instead of tinkering around the edges with ephemeral, government-term headline ‘fixes’, companies could inject education with enthusiasm and vitality and – I hardly dare say this – the prospect of real jobs at the end of school?

But of course it won’t work like that because mass education belongs to the statists and the state will simply be unable to prevent itself from interfering. And they’ll start measuring and testing and re-testing and altering; experimenting with real live subjects all over again, the only constant being change. And once again the smart parents will see what is happening and use whatever influence they can bring to bear to keep their own kids from becoming just another brick in the walls of the national house that Jack built.

Another wall to tear down?

So, whatever Cameron proposes, the course of state education seems determined to steer forever towards a dodgy, dumbed-down horizon. Those with private means will turn to genuinely independent, private schools thus bringing about the NUT’s feared privatisation prophecy. Every time a government intervenes in education (anything, for that matter) it seems to only get worse; the three Rs now stand for Reading, Rights and Rioting. Have they learned nothing?

Hey, teacher! Leave them kids alone!

As technology gets smarter, humans get dumber; at least they seem to. Education used to be about preparing young people to go out into the world capable of surviving, ideally without a step-by step instruction manual. Last weekend, admittedly showing off, I got out my 1970s slide rule (mandatory for A-Level Maths) and out-performed my class in a number of calculations which, while rudimentary to a child of the sixties, were as rocket science to generations who have learned to rely on machines. I was denounced as a wizard and sentenced to be burned at the stake.

The thing is, my generation is as capable of using the machines as are the youngsters of today, when useful outcomes are required; we just don’t trust them because experience has taught us that you don’t always have a calculator when you need to compute. Likewise, through normal interaction with others we learned friendship and compromise and when to stand our ground and who to respect. We just didn’t have social media to tell us what to think, we just had to do that for ourselves. For the same reason, although I have a smartphone (and very handy it can be) it’s usually the last port of call when I’m searching for a solution, not the first.

Of course younger people are going to be slicker and some are going to make real money on the back of technologically enabled connections we greybeards will simply not comprehend but guess what, those kids are the ones who would succeed anyway. They could get rich, hit it big, bestride the world in any time period you cared to drop them into. Leonardo today might out-Apple Apple. Michelangelo might out-Pixar Disney. But edu-tech as engagement for disenfranchised pupils who can barely string a sentence together or look another human in the eye is the equivalent of sweeping the dirt under the carpet. And even the OECD are now saying so.

The lazy adherence to the educationalists’ experiments in the dumbed-down, conveyor-belt, certificate production line that much education has become focuses on ‘achievement’ as a euphemism, rather than actual, you know, achievement. The learning of principles comes secondary to following a recipe for success and the sound of boxes being ticked overwhelms and drowns out those lightbulb moments when real learning takes place. This has genuine consequences, not least the several generations now with progressively poorer critical thought processes.

One of the reasons Labour fell from grace in the seventies was the direct experience of its disastrous outcomes on people who cared about this country and its place in the world. Now, however, with all that as ancient history, the glorious stories of revolutions that were never won are being dusted off, rewritten and presented as fact to new voters who will happily accept without cynicism, the lies that sound the nicest. Anti-competition, anti-adversarial combat, anti-non-conformity, anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-anti-anti... if you, with a good career are for it, they are against it.

But I need Bluetooth!

I can’t wait to see how Jeremy Corbyn’s new model army of bright young drones will fare when their costly demands meet the empty coffers of state. Or when we hoary old geezers with free minds and a healthy disdain for technology fail to fall in line with the barrage of new conformity laws they would usher in. (Pretty soon I’m expecting even being born white to be deemed racist; it’s certainly headed that way.) But worry not, there is a solution and a rather neat and apposite one at that. Once the energy fails and the power cuts become the norm and the great silence falls on the land,  the batteries powering their iPhones will run out and then none of them will know what to think at all.