Reorganisation of the schools
The Socialist Party of Great Britain has always emphasised the class division within capitalist society. Evidence of this can be demonstrated by the ownership of wealth, in the U.K. approximately 90 per cent of the wealth is owned by 10 per cent of the population; and by the class structure of education. Education is organised to meet the needs of capitalist society. Hence the Public Schools, which are not open to the public, charging fees between £350 and £500 per annum per pupil, provide the education for the children of the capitalist class. The state schools provide the education for working-class children, and to which attendance is compulsory unless the parent can show that the child is receiving adequate education.
Statistics of Education 1963 (HMSO) gives the total school population as 7,618,515 out of which 609,331 or eight per cent were attending fee-paying schools. This is clear evidence that ownership of wealth and privileged education go together.
We say privileged education for the purpose of public school education is to prepare the children of the capitalist class for a privileged position, the future dominant class, the whole curriculum being geared to leadership and responsibility through the fag and prefect system. Or as Katherine Whitehorn, the Observer, 8/8/65, writing on boys’ public schools, stated, “They have no doubt of their identity as British, upper-class, and male.” A good statistical example of this privileged position is the ratio of pupils to teachers, in state schools it is 23.8:1, in fee-paying it varies from 13 to 16.3:1.
When education makes the political limelight it is not on public schools that discussion centres. For at these, for an additional fee, a pupil can obtain extra education in a wide variety of subjects. Class and wealth means that a capitalist’s child can receive the education that its parents think best.
Not so the working-class child. He must attend the state school, for working-class parents have neither the time nor the wealth with which to educate their own children. The child receives the education that capitalist needs determine, the education that enables him to fulfil his class function within capitalist society. In other words, he is trained to work at a particular job. As the Secretary of State for Education, Mr. Crosland, has written in the Times Review of Industry, April, 1965, “It is vital that the work of the schools should link up with that of the technical colleges, where education can be more vocationally orientated.” (Our emphasis).
The present discussion over education arises because the state system is not providing the workers that capitalist society requires. Competition with capitalists in other countries for markets means that commodities must be produced more cheaply, and consequently workers must be made more efficient. The Robbins Committee on Higher Education were “impressed by the fact that plans for expansion (of education abroad) often far surpassed present British plans.” Times Educational Supplement (25/10/1963) and the Newsom Report pointed out that secondary modern school children’s talents were not being fully developed.
The problem confronting the capitalist class is how to produce more efficient workers at the cheapest cost. Hence new plans to tap the underdeveloped talents.
The present system within state education came about after the Education Act, 1944. It provided for the selection of children for different schools as demonstrated by various intelligence and application tests—the Eleven Plus. The infallibility of these tests has long been questioned. This selective system, and streaming on ability within schools it is said adversely affects the pupil’s ability to learn—if not at the top he has a sense of failure and gives up. So once again schools are to be reorganised, and the division of secondary schools into modern, technical and grammar is to give way to the comprehensive school. The reason is quite clear, nothing must hinder the production of pliable efficient workers. As the present system results in the better workers being produced in grammar and technical schools, children who would in the past have gone to the secondary modern schools are to be given the same opportunities. But this will raise the cost of education as Education in 1964 (HMSO) recorded—Costs per pupil 1964-5: Primary £71. Under 16 years £121, Over 16 years £242. Children rarely stay at modern schools beyond the age of 16, the majority, in fact, leave at 15. Technical and grammar schools consequently have better equipment, better teachers and better pupil to staff ratios because they have more money to spend. Schools are to become comprehensive because this will raise the level of basic training in the cheapest way, for children of all ages (11-18 years), of all abilities and of both sexes.
But workers have to be convinced that comprehensive schools are desirable. As some 64 per cent of secondary children attend modern schools, if it can be argued that comprehensive schools are an improvement on modern schools the Labour Government will get much support. At the same time they must convince parents of the 24 per cent of pupils in selective schools that their education will not suffer.
The first claim for the comprehensive school gives them their title—”All children should go to the same type of school,” Observer, 18/7/1965 (Our emphasis). The second is that it removes the need for the Eleven Plus, and by enlarging the schools it allows the employment of a greater variety of specialist teachers, which it is argued will improve the education of the less able.
It is evident that the Public Schools are not to be abolished and ALL children will not go to the same school. Different education for the different social classes will remain.
Many education authorities have already dispensed with the Eleven Plus, and the real argument for comprehensive schools can be demonstrated by the extension of the argument for comprehensive schools in rural areas. “The rural comprehensive school has developed in an area where more than one secondary school would have been expensive or extravagant, considering the small number of children living in an extensive area.” The Comprehensive School (National Association of Schoolmasters). Costs of education on the present scale are rising, on an improved scale they will be even greater. Schools of the present typical size would not make full use of specialist teachers, rooms and equipment. Hence schools must be made larger, and if the present distinctions in secondary education were to be kept children from a wider geographical area would attend such schools with problems of long distance travel. Further, by abandoning the Eleven Plu%1md bringing all workers’ children into the same school, by a system of sets, as distinct from streams, a child who has varying abilities in differing subjects can be placed in a group of similar ability, whereas under the stream system he would have to stay with the same group even if he were more capable in that subject. In this way comprehensive schools will enable children to progress quickly in those subjects in which they are most capable, and obtain specialist help in subjects at which they are backward. Such schools also, because of the equipment and staff available, will in the later years direct the pupils towards vocationally based courses—Commerce, Science, Technology, leading, as Mr. Crosland has suggested, to the technical colleges where courses “will be more vocationally orientated.”
It can be seen that comprehensive schools will be more efficient in producing workers as capitalist society requires. The technical and grammar intake will have the same opportunities as before, and for the old modern intake they will be improved. There is no doubt that they will be gradually introduced for “70 out of 166 Education Authorities are implementing proposals for comprehensive education. (Daily Telegraph, 14/7/65); and all Education Authorities must submit their plans for comprehensive education, to the Department of Education in one year, to commence September, 1967 (Guardian, 14/7/1965).
But what will this education be like?
Critics of comprehensive schools point out that because of their size they lack cohesion and identification (Daily Telegraph, 14/7/1965). That is they are like vast factories in which the children never meet many of the staff, and likewise the staff never know many of the children—the sense of community has been removed. Further because the typical school building holds about 450 pupils and comprehensive schools require about 1,000 (some have 2,000) pupils, the present buildings are unsuitable. It appears that what will happen will be either “to group two or three existing schools together and call them comprehensive, or to carve up the 11-18 age bracket into two stages” (Observer, 18/7/1965).
The Newsom Report has given good indications of the conditions in secondary modern buildings, conditions which the comprehensives will inherit.
“Forty per cent of modern schools in the sample tested had seriously inadequate buildings; the corresponding figure for the slums was 79 per cent. Only a quarter had an adequate library . . . more than a quarter had no library at all. A third of the schools had no proper science laboratories. Half had no special room for teaching music, and these included many schools in which the single hall had to serve for assembly, gymnasium and dining (Times Educational Supplement, 18/10/1963).
Not only will the buildings be unsuitable for the scheme but there is also a considerable teacher shortage. Mr. T. A. Casey, General Secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters in The New Schoolmaster, June/July, 1965, asserts that unless a further 13,000 teachers are trained each year “Britain will not be able to meet the educational needs of her ten million young citizens” in 1970.
With this reorganisation working-class children will be exhorted to work harder, under far from desirable conditions, to improve their efficiency under the guise of improv¬ing their status by gaining qualifications which will pro¬nounce them fit for capitalist consumption. They will remain members of the working class and the educational system will not assist them in the understanding of the basis of the organisation of capitalist society—the class division; consciousness of which socialists recognise as being educated.
Education under capitalism is geared to the division of labour within a commercial system of production. Education or Training! is towards economic requirements rather than the unique requirements of the individual.
For the purposes of social efficiency under Socialism there is no necessary division of labour that impinges itself on the individual in such a way that compromises of personal interest must be permanently made.
Capitalism educates workers towards the acceptance of wage slavery, Socialist education will permit men and women to develop their abilities and personalities to the full, with no division on the basis of class.