Three Educational Dilemmas

Gerald Grant and Christine Murray, in their fascinating account of the history of teaching in the USA over the past century, conclude that all teachers – in whatever sector, from university to nursery – face three absolutely inescapable dilemmas. Are they there for their expertise or to provide nurture? Is their role to transmit existing culture or to transform it? And is their effectiveness due to their own individual charisma or to the collegiate strength of their school? We deal with each of these in turn, but the point to bear in mind throughout is that these are irresolvable. Grant and Murray are not saying that these are choices teachers have to make once and for all; they are tensions that can never be avoided permanently without self-deception. They are the reasons why teaching is so rich and rewarding, but also why it is such a source of frustration and even despair.

Expertise or nurture?

We live in a supremely student-centered age. Gradually from the 1920s, insistently from the 1960s, and overwhelmingly in a time when students are thought of as consumers, teachers are expected to teach in a student-centered way. It is true that the jargon changes, even to the extent that the slogan of ‘child-centredness’ that was popular among theorists and eventually policymakers from the 1920s to the 1960s has now acquired an aura of the quaintly na•ve or of the lunatically progressive. But, in this debate, there is really not a great deal that separates it from such modish ideas as that each student’s unique learning style ought to be respected, and that each learner has a unique combination of multiple intelligences (such as the mathematical, the linguistic, the aesthetic, the emotional, and so on). The aim of teaching, we are told by policymakers and inspectors now, is to cultivate autonomous learners, and – in Scotland especially – this often goes along with a belief that children lack self-confidence and need to be inspired to take control of their own lives. This kind of student-centredness is then both a means and an end: by instilling confidence, it can inspire the motivation for learning without which we cannot create a more confident, entrepreneurial nation.

Now, in one sense, this is simply what effective teaching has always had to do. No teaching worth anything at all can afford to ignore where its students start from, what their preferred learning styles are, what their several personal aspirations are and might, with encouragement, be. But notice that even the most enthusiastic of nurturers in this sense expect the teacher to do the nurturing, to have the wisdom – the expertise – to know what lies beyond the horizon of the learner. If we are to believe the recommendations of the currently very fashionable thinker Vygotsky, the key skill in teaching is to know about the learner’s ‘zone of proximal development’ – what is just visible on their horizon, so that, with imagination and hard work, they can feasibly reach it. By the very definition of this, the learner does not yet know (although may instinctively be on the point of grasping) what is to be reached for: only a teacher can see that.

People can learn how to think only if they have something worthwhile to think about, and knowing what that might require the teacher’s wisdom. The same might be said of the skills of citizenship. Without knowledge, they are useless, even meaningless in a truly citizenship-like way: there is little point in having the capacity to engage with the structures of power in a society if you don’t know what these are and what they signify.

More generally, we also have philosophers’ well-developed – and ancient, in the sense of Aristotelian – view that teachers are a source of authority, that teaching is an intrinsically ethical activity because it models the good life, the educated existence, as well as enunciating it. This is sometimes expressed colloquially as ‘Do what I do, not what I tell you to do’. It is something that was a common expectation of teachers by people contributing to Scotland’s national debate on education in 2002-3. In the focus groups run as part of the parallel inquiry into the purposes of education by the Scottish Parliament’s education committee, lone parents in one part of Glasgow put this rather well. Their children were faced with all sorts of invidious pressures – pressures to take drugs, pressures from violent threats, commercial pressures to put pressure on their parents to buy things for them that they could not afford. In that ethical jungle, one of the few sources of moral authority was the children’s teacher.

So we simply cannot escape the importance of teachers, however, nurturing they aspire to be. To be able to nurture effectively, the teacher has to have expertise; not to have that role of leading students is to abdicate responsibility, to subvert education by anarchy in the worst sense, and – in the actual world in which we teach – to do a disservice to those students who cannot draw on the examples and guidance of other people, of parents, of peers. In that obligation to be wise in the service of liberation lies the essence of this first dilemma.

Transmitting culture or challenging it?

Debating any cultural questions in education can sound rather odd these days when all non-economic purposes are officially ignored by politicians, policy documents, the media, senior managers, and so on. Yet cultural selection is actually unavoidable because even an economistic rationale is a form of it. And any debate in this area inevitably gets us back, at some point, to Matthew Arnold’s view that the purpose of education is to pass on ‘the best that has been thought and said. In our context here, it ought always to be remembered, as a preliminary, what it was that provoked him into writing that. It was his experience as a school inspector in England in the middle of the nineteenth century, and his conclusion that, unless the schools of England paid attention to questions of culture, then the nation was condemned to spiritual decay and, because of that, to economic disaster as well. As a tentative democrat, he distrusted the philistinism of the middle class. If he had doubts about the democracy that he perceptively saw as inevitable, it was that he feared that such a bourgeoisie would never provide the working class with the cultural understandings that are needed to rule wisely; but he never doubted that such wide diffusion of culture ought to happen, and could do so. He did not share Thomas Carlyle’s pessimism in this regard, and hence – despite his doubts – did not share his antipathy to democratic rule. In that respect, the ethical English liberalism of Arnold survives better into the communitarianism of post-Calvinist Scotland than does Carlyle’s rather more historically Scottish skepticism. I suspect also that Arnold’s anticipation of communitarian democracy resonates rather better with the values that tend to pervade Scottish public debate today than they do with the more aggressive liberalism of Blairite debate in England.

So a curriculum is always a cultural selection, whether we have done it ourselves or not; the interesting question is then what criteria are used to do the selecting – to determine what counts as ‘the best for us, now. This is perhaps most obvious in universities or in the senior years of secondary education, and so some examples from the primary stages might illustrate the point more pertinently. On the whole, in Scotland, to children aged about 10 upwards, we choose to teach French or German rather than, say, Gaelic, Spanish, or Urdu. That is a selection that is not a mere technicality. It says something about the kind of people we are, and what are our internal and external understandings of ourselves. To roughly the same age group we teach about Mary Queen of Scots or about Victorian cities nowadays, rather than about the Covenanters or the Clearances. Either of these latter choices would shape our self-understanding in different ways from our current practice. Slightly later, around age 12, we are unanimous in teaching algebraic manipulation rather than Euclidean geometry as the starting point of mathematics proper. Again, that is a cultural not merely a technical choice, not only in the sense that it relates us in different ways to a certain idea of the origins of European civilization (although rather obscuring the Arabic foundation of algebra), but also in the kinds of ways in which we understand mathematics itself, for example as a computational activity rather than as a practice that relates intimately to social spaces and to the aesthetic of those which we create ourselves through our architecture. And – a final example – we teach now that the natural world is something to be respected, conserved, and held in trust, an unprecedented sentiment in the history of education, where it has mostly been seen as a resource or even as a threat to human survival.

So education selects. But there are two meanings of tradition at work here, consideration of which indicates the inescapability of the second dilemma – a tradition as what is received (‘what has been thought and said’) and tradition as a refinement of that (‘the best É’). The process of creating a curriculum inevitably involves us in judging what we have received, even if we do that only implicitly, or merely follow tacitly the judgments that others have made. And so a proper engagement with the curriculum by students must include an engagement with these judgments. Can a child really understand the significance of Mary Queen of Scots or of the Covenanters without understanding the other (or, more strictly, the strand in tradition represented by the other)? Can a proper education then really avoid an engagement with the task of selecting, which must always also be a task of evaluating and hence of critically engaging with received ideas at any one moment? It remains true, as Raymond Williams reminds us, that the second part of Arnold’s dictum is often ignored. The purpose of becoming acquainted with ‘the best that has been thought and said’ is action: ‘through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly and mechanically’.

In educational circles – which tend these days, as they probably always have done, to the romantically radical – this point about critical engagement might be rather more congenial than the earlier point about the importance of what is engaged with, the importance of ‘what has been thought and said before deciding what is ‘the best in our judgment, now. So to avoid this point about critical judgment becoming too congenial, let me mention an example that is rather more awkward to a liberal understanding. What should our orientation be, as teachers, to the legacy of European culture? If multiculturalism means developing a proper appreciation of all (or at least a feasible assortment) of cultures, then ought not that to include the Christian legacies of a continent that is rather too easily caricatured as merely the source of imperialism, xenophobia, and a sort of mechanical rationalism? Can a student really be said even to have appreciated, say, the significance of Islam in the last 500 years without understanding its interaction with Christianity? Is that not even more true of Judaism? And are not the values which lead us to espouse multiculturalism not also in part a legacy of ideas of democracy and equal rights, which, whatever other debts they owe, undoubtedly in part depend on Christianity?

The point, again, is that the dilemma is inescapable. The necessity of culture – both logically, in the sense that it is ubiquitous, and ethically, in Arnold’s sense – has to be asserted when education seems dominated by philistinism to an even more thorough extent than Arnold feared when he wrote. But then the equal necessity of critical engagement with culture is of the very essence of education, not to overthrow it but to understand truly what the best is.

Inspiration or collegiality?

This last dilemma is perhaps rather more evident to anyone involved in teaching, or at least school teaching because we have been living recently through an important change in official attitudes to it. The process symbolized by the McCrone agreement on teachers’ conditions represents an assertion of collegiality, and so a sharp departure from the move away from it that had been growing since the 1980s. To some extent, this movie is based on good evidence that dispersed leadership is more effective than more concentrated styles, summarised, for example, by John MacBeath. Effective leaders learn, from their colleagues but also, in an educational institution, from their students. Effective leaders, therefore, encourage all the members of an institution to lead, because all are potential teachers of lessons about what the institution should be doing. And schools, where leadership is collective, are more likely to engage in genuine self-evaluation, and self-evaluation is more effective at bringing about sustained change than imposed evaluation. These principles are embodied in the important Scottish Executive discussion paper on leadership, a document that is rather more eloquently argued than most.

Yet, despite all the reservations about charismatic, individual leadership which this recent shift embodies, is that any more the final word than child-centredness was the end of the debate about student motivation? Is it not true that some people can command loyalty, trust, and respect, and can make people do things; and that other people cannot? It may be that different people in an organization can do this at different times, and in relation to different activities and purposes; but if the headteacher is fallible, then so is everyone else, and it is not obvious that the only way around this is to share our fallibility rather than temporarily efface it in deference to someone who does things better.

Moreover, even if that argument for some role for charisma is not accepted, is there not a contradiction between student-centredness and collegiality (even though these tend to be ideological soul-mates, as do their opposites)? If good teaching requires teachers to respond personally to each pupils’ abilities and problems, then an organization that is student-centered when looked at from below, as it were, needs to be teacher-centered when seen from above: collegiality can be suffocating to that inspiration which allows a teacher genuinely to respond to a child’s needs and capacities.

Collectives can be suffocating, but isolation is lonely and demoralizing. In this, as in the other two of Grant and Murray’s dilemmas, it is the unavoidability of each pole that is the point.

Three Democratic Dilemmas

I’ve been drawing some implications for the nature of democracy throughout, but let us look now at this more explicitly, again in terms of the three dilemmas.

Expertise or nurture?

You could argue that democracy is a radical experiment in learner-centredness, not only in the sense that Arnold might have agreed with – that democracy requires its voters to be educated – but also in the sense that taking part in the exercise of power is itself educative. Historically, the link between democracy and child-centered education tended to be the other way round – the belief that the only form of school organization that was consistent with democracy was one in which the rights and individualities of its students were respected. There has probably, in fact, been more agreement over that than over the precise organizational means by which it may be achieved, for example over whether various kinds of selection based on prior attainment do or do not better contribute to that end; both sides in these debates tend to share an over-riding focus on the needs of the learner.

Since democracy as a system of social organization (as opposed to the particular institutional forms that claim to embody it in any particular era) is even less in question than the principles of learner-centredness as I outlined them earlier, the difficult question then is how democracy copes with the need for expertise. We had a good instance of this in Scottish educational debates a few years ago, following the crisis that accompanied the first year of the Higher Still program of reform to the curriculum and assessment arrangements for the senior years of secondary school. The initial response as the crisis erupted in early autumn 2000 was sometimes to blame the very fact that the examination system was overseen by a quango, only indirectly responsible to the democratic process. But the debate which was subsequently sponsored by the Parliament’s Education Committee reached a more subtle conclusion – that expertise is needed, not only because we would not want direct political involvement in decisions about examinations, but also because assessment is an intrinsically complex matter that has to be overseen by people with appropriate expertise. The Committee thus performed a valuable service to Scottish democracy, and this was one of the earliest instances of the new Parliament thinking through in practice what the principles of democracy that are embodied in its founding ideals actually meant. Accountability does not mean popular control; transparency is actually better achieved if consultation is about principles rather than technical details that are properly preserved by specialists.

The role of professionals and therefore of expertise in a democracy can be asserted more generally. The campaign for a Scottish parliament was often cast as a populist skepticism about the professional rule, and many other political movements across the world have expressed similar sentiments in the last four or five decades, ever since the welfare state has seemed to be growing so big that it subverts the democratic impulses that led to its set up. These movements have been as often of the political right (Margaret Thatcher’s suspicion of public-sector professionals in their conspiracies against the laity) as of the left (the 1960s New Left, or the more recent New Labour). But, looking back now on the development of the state and of democracy over the past century, we can more reasonably say that professionals have been amongst the most powerful founders, defenders, and ethical models of the very idea of public welfare. Professionals, by the very fact of their professional commitment to their students, patients, and clients, have had a suspicion of the unfettered power of the market, but also a suspicion of the overweening power of bureaucracies. They have defended the rights of minorities even against populist threats: it was, for example, a committee of teachers and other educational interests that maintained the relative liberality of Scotland’s guidance on sex education at the time of the public acrimony over ‘Section 28’. Teachers and schools are where refugee children have found a haven in recent years, their languages and religions relatively more respected than in the wider society, their experience of racism understood and, on the whole, acted upon fairly.

So professionals have been sometimes the guardians of democracy, their expertise necessary not only to its efficient functioning but also to the survival of its principles. Having found Matthew Arnold more congenial than Thomas Carlyle, we might nevertheless now find ourselves wanting to qualify that: the people, despite Thomas Jefferson’s enlightenment faith, are not always the best guardians of their own liberty, and properly ethical professionalism sometimes is more democratic than the popular rule.

Transmitting culture or challenging it?

The question of cultural transmission and renewal is as important for the nation as a whole – or indeed for the whole global polity – as it is for education. How does a nation deal with its own cultural legacy, and with the issues embodied in the multiplicity of cultures within its borders? It might even be argued that this is the biggest issue facing democracy following the international political events in recent decades, too neatly referred to as the legacy of the bombings in New York and Washington in September 2001 but actually gaining force for much longer. What degree of homogeneity is needed for democracy to function? How can the liberal freedom of critical dissent be encompassed within a common culture?

As with the question of selecting elements of a culture into a curriculum, that is a genuine dilemma. Neither pole is attractive ethically, because they entail offending minorities or offending the majority, and reconciling these is impossibly difficult. The dilemma cannot be solved merely by the superficially democratic assertion of the importance of the tradition that the majority embodies, because that, in practice, is too often actually demagogic. Nor can it be solved by the easy assertion of radical multiculturalism that leaves little room for more than superficial dialogue. The poles of the dilemma are also untenable logically: you can’t question a culture without having an intimate acquaintance with it, and so some cultural maintenance is essential even for encouraging dissent; but a culture atrophies if not renewed by questioning, and so some dissent is needed, from within and outside, if the transmission is to be of anything lastingly worthwhile.

Scottish democracy has rather too easily assumed that the nation does have a shared set of values, and it may be that our homogeneity is greater than in some places, including England and the USA. But that does not absolve Scottish democracy from responsibility for thinking about the wider question, for example as it affects the UK or Europe as a whole. The example sketched earlier about what we mean by Europe and the European cultural legacy is enjoined on anyone who asserts the value of any one part of European culture, such as the homogeneously Scottish instance.

It is then not surprising that these democratic dilemmas about what to do about culture have often appeared most controversially in schooling, precisely because this general cultural dilemma for a democratic society as a whole is indeed so closely analogous to the curricular dilemma in which teachers face all the time. It is also, though, a dilemma that affects later stages of education too. When universities were small places giving a grounding in general education to a small elite who would become professionals of various specialized kinds in due course, there was a fair amount of tacit agreement as to what the dominant values of our society were. Universities now educate far more people at a time when that agreement has withered. So what is the social purpose of all this massive new amount of education? What role should universities be preparing their students to take in society? Is it really enough to say that higher education is primarily, and in an undifferentiated way, about supplying the advanced skills needed by the economy? These are first of all educational questions, but – as in the dominant Scottish university tradition that the new mass system has superseded – they raise profoundly social and political ones too. Have the graduates of our universities and colleges for the most part acquired any advanced understanding of such questions, as opposed to carrying into adulthood the more introductory knowledge of the culture they acquired at school?

Inspiration or collegiality?

The final dilemma also has close analogs with the educational one: what is the nature of democratic leadership? Over many centuries, Scotland has had a somewhat ambivalent attitude to charismatic leadership. For every John Knox, John MacLean, Wendy Alexander, or Tommy Sheridan there are far more boring but worthy clerks, getting things done by unspectacular, cautious, incremental but certain change. Scottish charisma tends to be a minority cult except sometimes in nostalgic retrospect. The media at the moment has a tendency to worship charisma and transformation, and its alleged weakness in the Parliament is sometimes felt to be a national failing. But democracy itself is essentially based on low-key, consensual, cautious change, and that is certainly the aspiration embodied in the principles that the Scottish Parliament chose to govern its working. How do we resolve this? How do we hold in balance the tension between the wisdom of the desire for dialogue and caution but also the need, sometimes, for charismatic leadership?

There might be a direct lesson for democracy here from the educational dilemmas. If a proper capacity for student-centered education needs a teacher who has the autonomy and capacity to lead students to the knowledge they did not know they didn’t have, then the same might be true of democracy. What we need in our politicians is a capacity for educational dialogue. That is certainly leadership, in the way that good teaching is actually crucial to student-centredness. But it is also about a pedagogic relationship between political leaders and citizens. When a difficult political issue arises – say, the question of refugees – then the politically wise course is neither to impose a course of action, however liberal nor to surrender to popular prejudice. It is, rather, to see the problems raised as opportunities for educating citizens into change. This kind of political leadership does not abdicate responsibility or surrender principles expediently. But neither does it see the opposition of the majority as inevitable; it teaches, and so changes. It is true leadership, but it is as slow and consultative as the Scottish Parliament’s founding principles require.

Conclusion

This short essay has done no more than sketch some analogies, starting by working through in a current Scottish context the implications of the three dilemmas identified by Grant and Murray as characterizing any kind of teaching, and then suggesting that there are some surprisingly close analogs in the dilemmas facing democracy itself. So close is the connection that we might be inclined not to describe it as one of analogy at all: perhaps the dilemmas of education simply are the dilemmas of democracy, translated into the institutions which we have chosen to use for the very maintenance of the principles by which we organize our life together.

If that is the case, then the significance of the educational debates is all the greater. None of the solutions commonly put forward for the problems of education seem adequate to the task posed by coping with such dilemmas. Even to put the problems like that is to be too optimistic because little of our public discussion of education recognizes such deep dilemmas at all. For teachers, the question of what they do, as citizens or as educators, is no easier. They should insist that the problems of education are at least as complex and at least as deep as I have indicated here, and they should also insist that the problems are inescapable, and are not the pathological condition of Scotland alone.

Teachers should also, however, accept their claim to democratic leadership itself. Educational leadership in a democracy cannot any longer fall back on the old belief that professionals know best, a tradition that is particularly potent in Scotland. But neither can it simply abdicate responsibility to the majority vote, or to the market. The real challenge for teachers is to find a form of professionalism that is at the service of democracy while also not betraying its own necessary cultural authority and legitimate expertise.

The post The Dilemmas of Education and of Democracy appeared first on Institute-of-Governance.

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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