Anarchy 94/Education in 1980: open or closed?

Education in 1980:
open or closed?

DAVID DOWNES

The most pessimistic view of education in 1980 is that it will be much the same as now, only more so, and more of it; there is a danger that pessimism is automatically granted a keener realism than optimism, and therefore that the prophecy becomes self-fulfilling. This is a view to be rejected at the outset.

  The best clue to the possibilities of the next twelve years is what has happened over the last twelve. To quote Alec Clegg, they have been the “most remarkable so far in the history of our education”. In terms of school building, teacher training, university expansion, there has been a fantastic acceleration. There has been the “primary revolution”, the new maths, a spurt in technological education from the abyss it was in in 1956. But most remarkable of all there has been an unprecedented awakening to educational possibilities: “unstreaming” is a concept to be taken seriously, rather than dismissed as the preserve of cranks; the economic potential of education is a fact to which we are all alerted; the “comprehensive” case has been carried intellectually if not administratively; the idea that higher education can take place only in Oxbridge, Redbrick or White Tile has been savagely eroded by the “binary” system.

  Precedents for all these trends were there before 1956: in a few progressive private schools; in academic journals; in a handful of LEA’s; in the polytechnics and Keele, etc. But over the last 12 years the documentation and dissemination of these concepts has established them irreversibly on the educational scene. More and more schools are adopting them or being influenced by them. And they have raised a whole new crop of expectations and problems that have to be solved.

  How can we “integrate” what remains of the privileged sector of education to make a truly “comprehensive” system? In such a system, how can we avoid “consensus education”, which distrusts men like Duane and McKenzie who break with convention and experiment with their pupils? How can we gain the advantages of size, and scale, but avoid the dehumanisation and anonymity of over-organisation and administration? And—the biggest educational dilemma—how can we ensure, or approach, “equality” of opportunity and provision, without imposing utter uniformity and absence of choice?

  In one part of the school system these problems are either solved, soluble, or at any rate much more clearly perceived than throughout the rest of the system. In the primary schools, what remains of the privileged sector is already visible behind the best third of the state sector: and where parents still resort to fee-paying schools, one suspects that in most cases they would desist if the rest of the state primaries could be brought up to the standard of the top third. (Other reasons enter the picture after the age of 11.) Moreover, in the primary schools more than elsewhere, “unstreaming” is gaining ground. Secondly, experiment is more notable in the primary field than elsewhere: the new maths is by now a by-word, but experimental schools like the ILEA’s Evelyn Lowe and Vittoria Road primaries have successfully tried out new architectural forms at no increase in cost, timetabling has lost its rigidity, and already there have meen momentous improvements in the responsiveness of the children to the discovery of learning. Thirdly, as far as size is concerned, while the norm is still around 300 pupils, greater ranges are now acceptable. Fourthly, in the concept of the Educational Priority Area (and the Community Development Area), we have a rationale for achieving greater equality of opportunity, an equality which would be enhanced by the adoption of the age-range 3 to 11 as the range appropriate for primary education. The evidence from the American project “Operation Headstart” is conclusive on this point. It is often forgotten that not only lower working class children need the stimulus and close attention to play that nursery education would provide. Harassed and “inadequate” parents also exist among the middle class.

  Why have these gains been made in the primary schools and not elsewhere? The reason is plain. With the abolition of the 11+, the pressure to sift and label children from the age of 5 or 6 was taken off the primaries. The newfound freedom to experiment without the fear that one should really be training the child to pass exams has already proved itself beyond dispute. In the primaries, we have moved closest towards what Professor Basil Bernstein, of the Institute of Education at London University, has termed the “open” school. Can we not achieve something of the same revolution in the years after 11?

  Despite “going comprehensive”, the secondary schools are much the same as they were 10 or even 20 years ago, for the simple reason that the selection and sifting that used to begin at 5 is now concentrated and intensified in the years 11–15: again because the secondary system is still dominated by the function of sorting out the gifted minority who will enter the universities (which, despite expansion, have failed to keep pace with rising numbers of qualified applicants, and rising expectations of higher education. Last year only 59% of those with two “A” levels gained university entrance).

  In his concept of the “open” school Professor Bernstein has provided a realistic framework within which to formulate answers to this question. For what we have now at secondary level and beyond is still a “closed” school system. Despite all the flurry of experiment and innovation in a few schools and LEA’s, and in the primaries, the secondary school is still a world of hierarchy, selection, labelling, academicism in depth, rote-learning, deference, the “pupil”.

  But the world outside is changing: full employment, enough affluence to buy adolescent independence, the emergence of the “teenager” as a contra role to that of “pupil”, youth culture, the increasing tendency of the young to question the relevance of “the syllabus” to their personal and social development. Jollied along by the Schools Council, faced by more articulate children, conscious of report after orthodox teachers in secondary schools are at least aware that there is no going back to the “closed” system proper, that the impetus is towards the “open” system.

  What constitutes the “open” school? The two systems can be set out (see below) as “polar” systems, admittedly vastly over-simplified:

  

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