Scottish education is in a state of half-fulfilled radical promise. The revolution that is commonly supposed to have been started in the 1960s – notably with comprehensive secondary schools, with the beginnings of the massive expansion of higher education, and with various sorts of child-centred learning – in fact, had its origins much further back, in the great liberal and social democratic modernisations of Scottish traditions that took place in the first half of the century. But despite this longevity, the programme of reform turned defensive under the Conservatives in the 1980s, as supporters of the changes tried to preserve what had been gained against a hostile ideology, and mostly stopped thinking seriously about how the renovated Scottish traditions could be taken further forward in the same radical manner.
So this chapter has as its main purpose the rediscovery of the radical programme to which Scottish education was, by the 1970s, irrevocably but incompletely committed. But simple resurrection can’t be all, not only because so much has changed in the meantime, but also because there are now several other claims to radical thought which have gained significant influence. So a subsidiary purpose here is to analyse what Scotland might mean by radicalism: what kinds of reform would be consistent with Scottish traditions?
Achievements
As with most developed national systems of education, the starting point is astonishing expansion. In the 1920s, only one-third of young people embarked on secondary courses, and less than one in twenty completed them. By the 1970s, almost all pupils had a chance to benefit from proper secondary schooling, and by the end of the century over two-thirds were doing so for a full five years. That expansion is the main reason why we now have an equally remarkable growth of participation in higher education, from one in eight young people half a century ago (and under one in thirty in the 1920s) to one-half today. The meaning of the educational experiences which people have in these transformed institutions may be in dispute – as we will see – but no one seriously denies that whatever the problems, this expansion has increased real opportunity massively.
As the century progressed, moreover, Scotland came increasingly to define education for all as requiring education in the same kind of institution for all. There is much less differentiation of types of school now than at any time in the past century and a half, most of the apparent variation being in details rather than fundamentals. Thus the existence of Catholic schools in the public sector may seem controversial in Scotland, but their scope for being different is actually rather small, in that their curriculum is in most respects the same as in other schools, their students sit the same external examinations as everyone else, their teachers are educated in the same universities and trained to mostly the same guidelines as any others, and their programmes of staff development are broadly the same as those on offer to other teachers. Most of the independent schools (proportionately small in any case by international standards) compete with the public sector to do the same things better, not to be fundamentally different; only in a tiny number, such as the Steiner schools, is there a systematically distinct educational philosophy. Scottish secondary schooling provides a common experience also in the sense that it is less socially segregated than the systems in most developed countries.
The same standardisation of institutional type has been operating in higher education as it, too, has expanded. The distinction between older universities and former colleges and central institutions is being eroded by the common funding and policy contexts that have been in place since 1993. Pressure to go further is likely to follow from the merger of the funding councils for further and higher education: it is then likely that there will be slow convergence between higher education institutions and further education colleges.
To critics on the political Right, this standardisation is a denial of choice, but in fact, Scottish reform over the past century has been based on the belief that only common institutions can offer true choice to the majority of students. For that majority, there is in fact much more differentiation of learning now than there ever was before the 1960s. Although there were good examples of junior-secondary courses, most of the approximately two-thirds of pupils who were on them were condemned to a stultifying programme aimed at inculcating basic skills, vocational competence, and social obedience. Indeed, only for the best students even in the senior-secondary courses was a truly liberating opportunity for intellectual stimulation on offer. These structural constraints in the curriculum were a far more serious denial of choice than any impediments now: the curriculum today is flexible and varied for a far greater proportion of students.
The choice was also restricted because the constraints affected some categories of people more than others – girls more than boys, Catholics more than others, working-class people more than the children of people who themselves had benefited from this system. Inequalities on all these dimensions (and on some new ones, such as in relation to ethnic groups) have declined significantly since the 1970s. The wisdom of previous radical thinkers is perhaps best shown here. Structural differentiation that mapped onto constraining social structures was, these radicals believed, bound to reinforce inequalities.
We can also now say that this educational democratisation has become the property of the nation as a whole. All the evidence from repeated social surveys is that a structurally undifferentiated system of schooling is popular, that people believe it to be of acceptable quality and to have brought increasing attention to the needs and wishes of individual students, and that they welcome the resulting expansion of higher education. There is also much evidence that teachers are trusted and respected.
What has gone wrong?
And yet there is dissatisfaction. That might in part be the inevitable discontent that any partially successful revolution engenders, as people’s aspirations are encouraged to rise beyond the vision of the first reformers. There is also discontent that is not intrinsically educational, but rather a projection onto education of radical ideas about other areas of social policy. The most notable example would be in relation to social class. Although class differences in educational outcomes have fallen, they have not done so to nearly the extent of other inequalities. The reason is probably that education can’t solve the problems resulting from poverty on its own: the only places where class inequalities in education have fallen significantly are countries such as Sweden where there have been much wider and more sustained programmes of state action to eradicate poverty.
But some of the dissatisfaction relates to the character of previous reforms themselves. One is the sense that, in creating opportunity for all, we have ended up imposing impossible amounts of external assessment on all. The objection here is not to the intellectual challenge of examinations, but rather to the educationally harmful effects of too intrusive assessment, and also to the trivialising effects of assessment that is about competence and performance rather than understanding and knowledge.
Even deeper than that is a sense that the expansion has forgotten what it is all for. In this lies the greatest danger of ignoring the motives of previous reformers. The extension of Scottish educational democracy was based on a delicate balance between radicalism as to structures, and caution, even conservatism, as to content. The anger of radical campaigners against a divided secondary education was because it denied working-class people access to general education, to the best that has been thought and said. The democratic intellect was to be at least as much about the intellect as about the access to it, and yet policy since the 1980s has rather neglected the importance of enabling students to engage properly with intellectual difficulty and intellectual worth. Instead, the policy has approached the problem of motivation by diluting seriousness, by fragmenting difficult programmes of study into modularised segments, and by trying to divert students into intellectually undemanding courses of ostensibly vocational relevance. ‘Difficulty’, in public debate, is synonymous with ‘the basics’, as if developing the capacity to read, write and count were the main criteria by which the intellectual seriousness of an education system should be judged.
These tendencies are not overwhelming yet, and are trends in policy more than in practice: many teachers and lecturers, fortunately, do their best to maintain the dignity of their work against such philistinism. But the trivialising tendency sustained for a couple of decades becomes a potent influence, in school policy on the curriculum and assessment, in policy on teacher education and professional development, in the crass utilitarianism of policy on higher education, and in the erosion since the mid-1990s of Scotland’s twenty-year attempt to create a community education that would underpin democracy.
The problem here is partly that radical educational thought internationally has come, since the 1960s, to be dominated by the strand of analysis that derives from the French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu and from the highly influential English socio-linguist Basil Bernstein. According to their views (or, more strictly, to the views of their numerous simplifying followers), academic culture is middle class, conveyed in a language that is literally incomprehensible to working-class children. The general education to which previous radicals sought to widen access (in Scotland perhaps more insistently than in most places) was thus itself part of the problem. Add to that the claims that academic culture was inevitably also sexist, racist, exclusively Christian, and (in a Scottish context) anglo-centric, and we have had the conditions over the past couple of decades for a strange convergence between thinking on the Left and the belief on the Right that vocational relevance and economic regeneration were the most important (or even the sole) criteria by which education systems should be judged.
A sort of post-modernist version of multiculturalism then gave spurious intellectual legitimacy to these accounts. If all cultural values are relative and equally legitimate, then why not let students choose anything they want to? The change in radical thought internationally can be summed up by one illustration. Faced with the evidence that working-class students tend to choose vocationally relevant options, the current generation of radicals would conclude that this is wise, ought to be what all students should do, and – as a matter of convenient political fact – allows an alliance to be forged with politicians on the Right who believe that schools and universities foster hostility to entrepreneurialism. Old radicals, by contrast, would have interpreted working-class choices of this sort as opting for predictability of employment, and as showing that only middle-class students, economically secure, could afford the luxury of general, liberal, non-vocational learning. The solution would then be not the rejection of such programmes, but an attempt to create conditions under which much larger numbers of students felt able to risk taking them.
Elements of a renovated radicalism
If that analysis is correct, then the discontent that Scottish education now faces is due not only to the incompleteness of an earlier revolution but also to our having stopped thinking about ultimate purposes. At least until the 1950s, Scottish radicals believed in the importance of general, liberal education. Scottish educational democratisation was motivated by a faith that widening access to that kind of learning would create a more humane, civilised, respectful, and outward-looking nation. Many radicals in other countries held similar views, and such views survived and continued to be advanced, although mostly in a minority on the educational Left precisely because of the belief that academic learning was intrinsically middle class. The specifically Scottish tradition of radical thought has tended not to survive in this way, perhaps because it has been too easy here to claim that Scottish culture itself is one of the traditions that was allegedly suppressed by previous programmes.
So, however important the questions of widening access to school and university undoubtedly are, I would suggest that the main problem facing Scottish radicals now is the purpose of educational expansion. I would suggest also that, to understand the expansion which we have inherited, we cannot ignore the motives of previous reformers. If we have a secondary system that is very academic, then that has not arisen by mistake or accident. It is precisely what was deliberately created in order to widen access to worthwhile learning. Our challenge is then not to dilute or abolish that inheritance, but to find ways of enabling effective engagement with it of the multitudes of students now passing through secondary schools and universities.
It would be premature to lay out a programme of educational reform, but what might help a vision of Scottish education in 2020 to evolve is an outline of the principles on which it should be based. The first premise is to insist on the emancipatory potential of intellectual, serious, theoretical and difficult learning. If secondary schools and universities are not about that, then they are barely worth having. ‘Relevance’ is something we learn with experience, and experience can only be experienced, not taught; we cannot judge relevance unless we have already grasped the principles of a system of understanding. In particular, therefore, vocational courses are not what initial education should be about. They are about training for specific jobs. Where they are not best done on the job itself, learning from the accumulated wisdom of more experienced colleagues (whatever the line of work), they presuppose a body of theoretical knowledge and understanding that ought to be engaged with first. Practice without theory is blind.
If in the short term, vocational courses might seem attractive as ways of giving some young people employable skills, that should be acceptable to educational radicals only on two grounds. One is that the provision of such programmes is not a substitute for continuing to try to find ways of widening access to general education. The other is that the attractiveness to employers of vocational courses is likely to be temporary, and in any case tenuous in a society where academic credentials continue to be valued by employers for the flexibility of mind that they indicate. Castigating that preference as revealing a bias in recruitment has been another of the common assumptions of Left and Right in recent decades, but perhaps the employers are right to prefer general capacities to specific skills.
Second, since an efficient economic system ought never to be an end in itself, but only the means to such goals as building a fair, democratic and culturally enriching society, an equally important premise has to be that programmes of general liberal education are better at preparing people for life as decent citizens than any other kind of learning. That was something that old radicals understood well. You could make citizens for the new era of mass democracy by equipping them with the cultural capacities which the aristocratic or bourgeois ruling classes had acquired through their schooling. Citizenship was not something to be segregated into discrete programmes but should permeate many types of study – literature, history, geography, political science, religion. The student who learns how to debate the meaning of a poem by Liz Lochhead, or a novel by Alasdair Gray, or a film by Paul Lavery, or to weigh the evidence for and against wind farms or genetic modification, or to understand the reasons why Islam and Christianity have sometimes been in conflict is in fact well prepared for life as a citizen of Scotland.
Third, we need therefore a debate about cultural purposes. This is where new radical thinking is urgently needed. Although I have been arguing that we should recover the old idea that democratising access to general, liberal education is the only programme that is truly radical, it would not be radical simply to adopt uncritically the content or pedagogical methods that would have constituted such a programme in earlier eras. For example, the culture to which students should now be exposed is certainly not the unitary one that most radicals would have assumed even half a century ago. In Scotland, we inherit ideas from Islam as well as from Christianity, literature by women as well as by men, working-class political ideas as well as middle-class ones, Scottish philosophical thought as well as anglo-Saxon. That is easy to assert and is no more than is common in any serious multiculturalism. The difficulty arises when we have to make selections from a potentially enormous set of curricular options. The guiding principles might be partly the intellectual capacities that we want to be the outcome for students. But it can’t be only that, because otherwise there would be little reason not to confine our attention to a fairly conventional canon. There have to be moral, aesthetic and other judgements about the value of particular knowledge, unfashionable though that is at a time when values are supposed to be inherently relative and the curriculum is supposed to be only about developing competencies. Only after a thorough public debate could Scotland decide, for example, what the proper place of Islamic theology should be in the curriculum, and what purpose such studies would serve.
None of this prescribes a particular method of teaching or learning. Projects, or cross-curricular themes, or experiential learning, or any of the other ideas that are often associated with learner-centred pedagogy are in fact probably rather more effective at engaging students with truly difficult ideas than less varied kinds of teaching. Radicals must not allow the Right to caricature radical thought as an undifferentiated package. We can agree with conservatives on the importance of cultural knowledge and intellectual difficulty while disagreeing with them about the adequacy of certain styles of teaching. It could be added also that such broad cultural understanding engages much more than the intellect, and so, at its best, has always sought to develop what is now called multiple intelligences. The best teachers of literature, for example, have always understood that there is an emotional aspect to understanding and debating a text.
Fourth, having such cultural enlightenment (however defined) as a goal at some level for potentially everyone requires that nothing is done to undermine the common institutional structures that we have created. These structures are not sufficient for creating a common culture, which is why further reform is needed, but they are necessary. If the Right then raises the question of curricular choice, then we can agree that this is important without abandoning the project. Choice of the programme can only be made on the basis of understanding what is rejected as well as what is selected. Students have to have a basis in a broad culture before they are in any position to make properly informed choices. Paradoxical though it may seem, compulsion is in fact the only way to underpin proper freedom. That, further, might be as true at the level of university education as earlier. What should we reasonably expect our graduates to know and be able to do, at an advanced level? Is it sufficient to say that their broad cultural and intellectual preparation has finished at school, or should we expect something more? At the moment, to be frank, we don’t even know whether and to what extent existing programmes of higher education are any kind of common basis for citizenship at all.
Conclusions
This essay has obviously been polemical, which is the purpose of this book, and it is not offered as anything more than a preliminary collection of thoughts on these matters. It has been based on the beliefs that Scottish education, for all its strengths, has rather lost its way, but also that the manner in which it has drifted is not at all the one that is frequently asserted in public debate. The problems of over-assessment, or of inadequate educating of the whole child, or of ‘standards’ are not unreal, but they are symptoms. Underlying them is a lack of serious attention to purpose.
Two generations ago we created common structures of secondary schooling that have democratised access to real learning. But we then stopped thinking about what real learning is. We did that partly because we wanted to reach an accommodation with a Conservative government, and we managed to save the common structures by implicitly agreeing with them to abandon any serious attempt to develop a coherent programme of general, liberal education that would truly match a more democratic age. We also abandoned that aspiration because we accepted the tendentious Leftist claims that such programmes are inevitably culturally biased. There is no reason any longer for the Left to be cowed by the Right, and there is every reason for radicals in a Scottish cultural tradition to accept that broad education can be made available to all. But we have a rather large task ahead in defining what that means in practice.
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