Ignorance

By Sally Tomlinson

As a universal experience school provokes strongly-held opinions. The views of teachers, parents, pupils compete with those of educational theorists, social engineers and ideologues. Although undoubtedly much improved since the time of Beveridge, the provision of education remains beset with challenges. Sally Tomlinson’s engaging, and at times personal, journey through Britain’s postwar experience of schooling and education reform draws on her many years of working in the sector. She explains how legacies of different systems and countless policy initiatives have led to the persistence of social inequalities, entrenching them in society and perpetuated by the power dynamics that they create between class, race and gender. Furthermore, she shows how the increasing mania for testing, targets, choice and competition, which has made schools into a marketplace and young people into consumers, threatens to undermine schools as a place where citizens can share learning and the democratic values that are needed as much today as they were in Beveridge’s time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Agenda Publishing
• Release date: Oct 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781788213967

Sally Tomlinson

Sally Tomlinson is Emeritus Professor at Goldsmiths University and an Honorary Fellow in the Education Department at Oxford University. She has held professorial chairs at the universities of Lancaster and Swansea. Her most recent books are Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire (with Danny Dorling) (2019) and Education and Race from Empire to Brexit (2019).

Book preview

IGNORANCE

The provision of maintained – ‘state’ – education has improved dramatically since the 1942 Beveridge Report. But it remains a policy landscape riven with strong opinion, prejudice and ideology. Some of those nostrums seem to stem from the personal but universal experience of school (and can consequently manifest sweet or sour nostalgia), some of them indicate a complete absence of reality or recognition of changing needs, some are really useful. The competing views of educational theorists, teachers, parents, along with the wider societal and political concerns (or lack of them) about meaningful quality, equity or equality of opportunity are difficult to navigate. It’s perhaps no surprise, therefore, that successive governments, despite countless Education Acts, have yet to slay and banish the Giant of Ignorance. Sally Tomlinson is a passionate defender and upholder of educational and teaching standards and her journey through Britain’s chequered postwar history of education provision draws on her long, broad and unrivalled experience of the sector. She throws into stark relief the challenges which teachers continue to face as they are confronted by the giddying sets of policy initiatives and frameworks. Too often, the ‘changers’ deny the resources necessary to implement the changes. Even more frequently, they put what should be diagnostic tools of testing, targets and reporting in place of infant and adolescent well-being and motivation as well as the learning and application of knowledge and experience. ‘Knowledge is power’ we are told, but regrettably, ignorance is not without influence either. That’s why Professor Tomlinson’s assault on the Giant should be made mandatory reading for all policymakers who truly want to topple the tyrant.

LORD KINNOCK, former Leader of the Labour Party

This book, by our internationally leading sociologist of educational diversity, could not be more timely. The urgent need for radical educational reform to prevent the widespread return of ignorance is clearly stated in this admirable book.

STEWART RANSON, Emeritus Professor of Education, University of Warwick

FIVE GIANTS: A NEW BEVERIDGE REPORT

Consultant editor: Danny Dorling, University of Oxford

In November 1942, William Beveridge published Social Insurance and Allied Services, the result of a survey work commissioned the year before by the wartime coalition government. In what soon became known as simply The Beveridge Report, five impediments to social progress were identified: the giants of Want, Disease, Squalor, Ignorance and Idleness. Tackling these giants was to be at the heart of postwar reconstruction. The welfare state, including national insurance, child allowances and the National Health Service, was a direct result of Beveridge’s recommendations.

To mark the eightieth anniversary of the Report’s publication, the authors in this series consider the progress made against Beveridge’s giants, and whether they have diminished or risen up to again stalk the land. They also reflect on how the fight against poverty, unfit housing, ill-health, unemployment and poor education could be renewed as the countries of the UK emerge from a series of deeply damaging, divisive and impoverishing crises.

As an establishment figure, a Liberal and a eugenicist, Beveridge was an unlikely coordinator of the radical changes that improved so many peoples’ lives. However, the banking crisis at the end of the 1920s, the mass unemployment and impoverishment of the 1930s, and the economic shock of the Second World War changed what was possible to what became essential. Old certainties were swept aside as much from within the existing order as from outside it.

The books explore the topic without constraint and the results are informative, entertaining and concerning. They aim to ignite a broader debate about the future of our society and encourage the vision and aspiration that previous generations held for us.

Want by Helen Barnard

Disease by Frances Darlington-Pollock

Squalor by Daniel Renwick and Robbie Shilliam

Ignorance by Sally Tomlinson

Idleness by Katy Jones and Ashwin Kumar

To my cousins Genifer and John Riley who both worked postwar for the Labour government to create a socially just welfare state.

© Sally Tomlinson 2022

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

No reproduction without permission.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2022 by Agenda Publishing

Agenda Publishing Limited

The Core

Bath Lane

Newcastle Helix

Newcastle upon Tyne

NE4 5TF

www.agendapub.com

ISBN 978-1-78821-394-3

ISBN 978-1-78821-395-0 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-1-78821-396-7 (ePUB)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset in Nocturne by Patty Rennie

Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd,

Croydon, CR0 4YY

Contents

Preface

1. Introduction: ignorance evolves

2. Breaking out of ignorance, 1945–80

3. Market forces and ignorance in the 1980s

4. Redistributing ignorance in the 1990s

5. Bog-standard schools and academies, 2000–10

6. Weirdos and misfits, 2010–20

7. Ignorance in Covid/post-Covid schooling, 2020–21

8. Conclusion

References

Index

Preface

This book was suggested to me by Alison Howson at Agenda Publishing, who had the excellent idea of asking five people to consider how far William Beveridge’s assertion that five giants needed to be overcome in postwar Britain had actually happened and whether these giants had now been banished. These were Want (poverty), Disease (health), Idleness (unemployment), Squalor (housing) and Ignorance (education). I have lived through the post-Beveridge changing and expanding school system, and then worked in education at various levels and together with many valued colleagues and friends have researched and written about the education system in Britain and other countries. Together with many others I am sad that the education system in England, which slowly and with errors was beginning to serve all children and young people and help develop some measure of social and racial justice in our society, has been turned into a competitive, semi-privatized, profit-seeking and unjust system. Ronald Reagan, the former US president, had much admiring right-wing press coverage for his claim that the most terrifying nine words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’. In my view the five most terrifying words over the past 40 years have been Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, as they were the principal architects of what became neoliberalism, a free-market ideology which has dominated much of the world since the 1980s and produced, in England especially, pointlessly competitive and corrupted schooling. Other postwar European countries managed to banish much ignorance in their populations through more equitable and just education, and without the often vicious denigration of a state-maintained system and its teachers, which is still in full flow in this country. It has become more difficult to find out what is actually happening in many of our schools, as they have been turned into business-oriented institutions with all the claims for confidentiality that characterize businesses. Research that might be critical of policy and practice is discouraged and much research funded by government avoids searching questions. Current claims that governments are interested in what works in schooling avoid the question works for whom?

Some intrepid writers, along with committed journalists, have managed to study and write from critical perspectives, and a number of books, articles and blogs now question what is going on. Stephen J. Ball has been a careful analyst and critic of the education system, charting a path through the welter of education policy, Acts, initiatives and guidance which have turned children and parents into competitive consumers of centrally controlled learning (see Ball 2021). Pat Thompson’s School Scandals: Blowing the Whistle on the Corruption of Our Education System (2020) exposes some of the corruption, greed and cronyism in England’s neoliberal education system and Terry Edwards and Carl Parsons’ How to Dismantle the English State Education System in 10 Easy Steps pulls no punches in describing a miasmic sewer of government social policy which disregards social responsibility while making rich friends richer (2020: 1). Nigel Gann in The Great Education Robbery (2021) used the experience of the forced academization of one school to show the ethically indefensible and near criminal behaviour involved as the academy model of schooling was pushed. Warwick Mansell, an author and journalist, along with journalists from Schools Week have worked tirelessly to take our understanding beyond the policies and projects that sustain our unfair and unjust system, as has Melissa Benn, a journalist and campaigner for an equitable school system (Benn 2018). Ruth Lupton and Debra Hayes have shown that Great Mistakes in Education Policy (2021) are made in other countries embracing competitive and unjust neoliberal policies.

This book goes over familiar ground, commenting on the education system in the decades between 1945 and 2021, when the consequences of a global pandemic have made an unjust, inequitable class-based education system worse and increased many kinds of ignorance. I have started each chapter with some information on what I was doing during those decades, starting with my own disappointment as a four year old that I could not start school that early. There have been many advances in education over the years, especially up to the 1970s, but the determination of many politicians and policy-makers to retain a class-based system, extolling academic schooling and denigrating the vocational, and allowing the obscene levels of child poverty that now characterizes our post-pandemic society, is disgraceful in a supposedly modern democratic society. To show how, over the years, most of the people in charge of the state-maintained education system have been educated in a separate private system, with an astonishing number attending the University of Oxford, I have added the schools and universities they went to. All this is beyond Beveridge’s simpler notion of ignorance that he had in mind, which was concerned to give more literacy and information to the working classes. Like many upper-class people of his time, he was a supporter of the eugenics movement, which spread the notion that some people from the lower classes had heritable defects that education could not overcome. Eugenic theory is itself a theory of ignorance. There is another theory of ignorance – agnotology – which describes the deliberate production of ignorance by people with the power to govern the rest of us. Eugenic theory has never gone away and agnotology is a favoured agent used by governments to deny knowledge and information. But the positive side of Beveridge’s beliefs remain, more people are schooled in his terms and beyond, and the fight against ignorance of all kinds goes on.

1

Introduction: ignorance evolves

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

Car sticker from the mid-1980s after cuts to education spending

Never forget the past, you may need it again in the future.

Malcolm Bradbury, Dr Criminale, 133

I am four years old and sitting on the steps outside a school and crying to be let in. My brother, older than me, is inside the two-room school in the village to which we were evacuated in the Second World War as the bombs began to fall on Manchester. I don’t know it yet, but I want many different kinds of knowledge. I want to know about the letters and words on the bright posters around the schoolroom walls. I want to be able to paint and crayon and sing with the other children. I want to run around the small playground and play new games. In short, I want the cultural, mental and physical development that the national curriculum of 1988 announced would provide me with a broad and balanced education, along with spiritual and moral development. As it was a Church of England school, I would have got those anyway once the church and state had been reconciled in the 1944 Education Act, and later on in the Catholic convent school I was sent to, where we had a lesson on manners and morals every Friday.

But I would also be introduced to various kinds of ignorance. I wouldn’t learn until much later that letters and words could be in other languages. I wouldn’t realize that some of the truths I learned about Britain, its history and geography, even stories and poetry, would be lies or misinformation. I wouldn’t learn that there were other religions or ethnicities until my teenage years. I didn’t know I was being introduced to the acceptance of a social class hierarchy when we sang a hymn, All things bright and beautiful, which included the verse, The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate. I was yet to learn that being a girl would limit my future. I didn’t know that my excited need to know about the world around me would soon be narrowed into joyless rote learning and practising for something called tests, and a thing we learned to dread called the 11-plus examination.

Sally and brother Peter in the 1940s.

VARIOUS IGNORANCES

This book considers the ways in which various sorts of ignorance were incorporated into educational policies and practices in the years following the 1942 report by Sir William Beveridge (Charterhouse and Balliol College, Oxford).¹ Beveridge was instructed by Arthur Greenwood (elementary school and Yorkshire College), a Labour minister in the wartime Coalition government, to make recommendations on Social Insurance and Allied Services for the Committee on Post-War Reconstruction (Beveridge 1942). His report, which he noted firmly as an attack on Want – actually poverty – also noted that Want was only one of five giants to be defeated in the postwar society. The others were Disease, Idleness, Squalor and Ignorance. The report did not discuss education or ways of abolishing ignorance much, apart from a comment that [i]t is striking how recent is the idea that all citizens should be educated (ibid.: 302). Beveridge’s view that all children should be educated was limited to the belief that they should all become basically literate and numerate and progress to a divided secondary education with the majority being schooled for work. Like most politicians of his time, he was an eugenicist, supporting the notion that genetically children were born with different and unequal capabilities. But the extension and reorganization of schooling had been the subject of much debate, reports and often vitriolic argument throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The idea that all children should be entitled to a secondary education was unacceptable to many of the upper and middle classes, although during the war politicians and the middle class recognized the need for a more educated working class. Sadly for them, when this did take place a major grievance was the disappearance of a servant class.²

The Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress argued for postwar change and the expansion of schooling. A Green Book on Education after the War appeared in 1941 and the National Union of Teachers and National Association of Schoolmasters, among others, argued for a raised school leaving age. Richard Austen (Rab) Butler, appointed by Prime Minister Churchill as president of the Board of Education in 1941, appointed a committee chaired by Cyril Norwood that resulted in the White Paper on Educational Reconstruction (Board of Education 1943). The paper famously recommended three types of secondary school and was followed by the 1944 Education Act. This Act, alongside the other Beveridge reforms, dominated educational structures and policies until another great reform Act in 1988. Although all women over 21 finally achieved the electoral vote in 1928, parliament, encouraged by Winston Churchill, voted in 1942 against equal pay for women teachers, an outrage not righted until 1960. Rab Butler was born in an imperial country – India – where his father was a senior civil servant, before returning to England for prep schooling, then Marlborough College and Pembroke College, Cambridge. Others in the political elite, including Beveridge himself (born in West Bengal, now Bangladesh), were born in countries under imperial rule. The influences of class, gender and imperialist beliefs have underpinned much of the ignorance perpetuated in mass schooling ever since.

Although, by the 1950s, Beveridge was disappointed that the hopes for curing the five evils was still a dream (Beveridge 1953), some kinds of ignorance have been reduced over the past 70 years. By the second decade of the twenty-first century it was possible to say that in the three nations and province that make up the United Kingdom there is a schooled and basically literate population, although around 5 per cent of the population would still be classed as illiterate. But it was certainly not an educated population if education is defined as being able to think rationally, reason, make judgements based on evidence and distinguish truth from falsehood. In the twenty-first century, widespread beliefs in conspiracy theories, in proven lies, in false presentations of history and in misinformation and distorted values indicate that alongside old ignorance, new kinds of ignorance have developed nationally and globally. Much of it is disseminated by governments and politicians who are deliberately misleading or lying to their citizens. Lies and misinformation are historically not new attributes of government but are now amplified by both old and new forms of social media and the increased willingness of those with power to deploy them unapologetically. A survey of Donald Trump’s presidency in the USA from 2016 to 2020 concluded that a defining feature of Trump is the bombardment of lies – 2,700 false claims in one year alone (Dale 2019). In March 2021, when Boris Johnson had been prime minister for 18 months, journalist John Crace wrote that previous Ministers have at least been on nodding terms with the truth, but Boris Johnson is completely without shame. Without conscience. A sociopath for whom no lie is off limits (Crace 2021). Johnson (2013) is also on record as believing in the eugenic inevitability of different members of our species, as he put it, having different intellectual capacities. Beliefs in the inferior mental abilities of poor people, of racial and ethnic minorities and even of women continue to be presented as truths by some politicians, academics and in the general public. Lies and misinformation, especially when upheld by those in power, influence what is taught in schools and help perpetuate ignorance.

There is actually a field of study, agnotology, which concerns itself with the deliberate production of ignorance. The term was first described by Stanford professor Robert N. Proctor in 1995. He noted the ways in which there could be a deliberate cultivation of ignorance or doubt, especially in the scientific, technological and political worlds. The classic cultivation of ignorance was by the tobacco industry, which for years denied the links between smoking and cancer (Proctor and Schiebinger 2008). A further example, developed in this book, is the attempt to persuade the country that comprehensive schooling was a failure, producing failing schools, whereas comprehensive schooling has worked towards producing a more equal and better-educated society. Governments of all parties can and do use a strategic maintenance of ignorance (Archer 1988: 190) to control who gets what kind of knowledge and information. School systems and their features do not evolve spontaneously or out of humanitarian motives. They develop because of the interests of particular groups. Thus governments, in producing their school policies, have a vested interest in concealing who the policies and practices are intended to benefit, who will gain from funding, what the curriculum of schools will be, who will train the staff and in what ways, and whether parents and carers will be able to understand and be involved in schooling. A democracy needs some truths to be shared and some facts to be acknowledged. Ignorance triumphs when truths are manipulated and alternative facts are accepted.

GIANTS OF IGNORANCE

The book repeats what should be a familiar story: the expansion of schooling