A battle is raging about what our schools are for. Ideas about ‘white privilege’ and the inbuilt racism of all ‘white’ societies are being embedded in pupils’ minds in more and more English schools. The outcry following the death of a man killed by the police 4,000 miles away in the U.S. mid-West prompted heads in English public schools simultaneously to feel they must announce reviews of their curriculum. The everyday language of some schools is undergoing radical change, with activists advising them to use only gender neutral terms, abandoning traditional expressions like ‘boys and girls’ and ‘mums and dads’. A London school’s geography lessons abandon geographical knowledge for discussions about pupils’ own identities. The names of Elizabethan heroes Drake and Raleigh are excised from the buildings of a Devon school for the sake of ‘inclusivity’.
These examples are just the tip of the iceberg.
Where does the pressure for these extraordinary developments come from? It is not from our current Government, though it has done precious little to stem the tide and even at times indirectly helped to accelerate it. It is certainly not from parents or the vast majority of the population. It is from school leaders themselves, ‘education experts’, teacher educators, universities and from a wider elite dominant across our major cultural institutions convinced of its own rightness and virtue. Its origins are in what the French call a pensée unique, a single way of looking at things that sees the world as divided between oppressors and oppressed, distrusts the nation state, seeks the overthrow of ‘Western hegemony’, redefines ‘anti-racism’ to mean a never-ending assault on ‘white privilege’, puts equity before liberty and believes in the subjectivity of all knowledge and values. It is a hydra-headed ideology and is threatening to corrode what schools should really be for.
A recent international ‘Education Summit’ in Budapest organised by the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), Hungary’s largest private educational institution, discussed how best to counter these threats also being experienced by some other countries represented at the conference. It was clear that the ideological divide in education is no longer just whether one is for or against the kind of progressive teaching methods that derive from Rousseau and Dewey, but of where one draws the line between indoctrination and education The focus of the conference was on how to uphold an education based on the transmission of what Matthew Arnold, 19th-century poet and school inspector, described as “the best that has been thought and said”, not on using schools as a means to shape young minds into taking the party line on whatever social causes – gender ideology, anti-racism, Net Zero – are in vogue at any one time.
The names ‘classical’ and ‘conservative’ were used at the conference to describe the kind of education that is under threat. Traditionally it has been called a ‘liberal education’, from the Latin liber meaning free, an education that enables pupils to free themselves from the constraints of their time and place, not tie them to it, and to use the knowledge they have acquired to make judgements about the world and their own lives. It is ‘liberal’ in a sense completely different from the radical progressive (and often very illiberal) ’liberalism’ of many on the Left.
Matthew Arnold is sometimes thought to have been advocating an education that was little more than learning lots of facts. Nothing can have been further from his mind, the purpose of a good education for him being to enable people, through acquiring access to their heritage, to turn “a stream of fresh and free thoughts upon our stock notions and habits”. A liberal education therefore exists for its own sake, as something of value in itself, not for utilitarian purposes such as promoting social justice, reducing our carbon emissions or preparing pupils for the 21st century economy. It may, by producing knowledgeable and thoughtful young people, help achieve all sorts of desirable social aims, but that is not its purpose.
It involves helping pupils acquire knowledge and understanding of the Platonic triad of ‘the true, the beautiful and the good’ and the habits of mind and sensibility that will enable them to grow into the inheritance of their civilisation and of their country’s common culture. It has a curriculum centred on the main academic disciplines and on physical and artistic activities. It provides pupils with the core knowledge needed to hold their own in public discourse within their society. The U.S. educationist E.D. Hirsch calls this “cultural literacy”. It also gives them what Hirsch calls “national literacy”, the knowledge needed as part of that induction into membership of the nation state that schools ought to provide.
In the humanities a liberal education focuses mainly, if not exclusively, on the dominant influences shaping one’s country, in this country on the Judaeo-Christian, Greco-Roman and Enlightenment roots of European and Western civilisation. It promotes Aristotle’s intellectual virtues – love of truth, acceptance of refutation, care in judgement – and does its best to inculcate the habits of behaving morally, focusing on duties more than rights. It aims to leave pupils with the habits of learning and a thirst for further learning throughout life.
What a liberal education does not involve is the constructivist notion that most things can be learned through discovery. It does not take advantage of the fact that pupils are a captive audience to indoctrinate them with beliefs and attitudes to which adults are proving resistant. Liberal education draws the line at being told to ‘decolonise’ its curriculum if the purpose is to root out ‘white knowledge’, make pupils take an excessively negative view of their history and to study works chosen because of the race, sex, gender or sexuality of their creators rather than for their intrinsic cultural value. A school following a liberal education also does not see a main purpose as offering a therapeutic programme to meet pupils’ emotional needs. It provides an environment in which it hopes pupils learn to behave well to each other, accept that sometimes one must agree respectfully to disagree, can talk to staff about their problems, and are (for most of the time) happy at school. It does not offer ‘happiness education’ or sessions about ‘wellbeing’ or take over responsibilities that belong to parents.
We are fortunately far removed in England (Scotland may be a different matter) from the current practice of some U.S. schools – private ones in the lead – where the curriculum appears to have been taken over by CRT (Critical Race Theory), anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism. We have a national curriculum which ought to provide an overall framework within which a liberal education can be developed, as well as GCSE and A level syllabuses in the main subjects which in some cases are a major improvement on earlier ones.
What we lack is a shared overall vision for the liberal education that I have outlined and, in the absence of this, the ability to interpret and add to the prescribed curriculum in ways that support the deeper objectives of that vision rather than undermining them. We also lack in many cases in schools the will to do this and indeed frequently a will to do something antithetical. A Daily Telegraph survey of 300 teachers in 2008 found that three-quarters agreed with the statement that it was their responsibility to warn pupils not to feel good about their country. Sixteen years later it is difficult to imagine that the situation has got any better. What we do not lack are the schools, some private, some state-funded, where, despite the pressures, the unquenchable Delphic flame of a liberal education is still burning. It is these we need to celebrate and from whom we need to learn.
Dr. Nicholas Tate was Chief Executive of the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority (1994-7) and the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (1997-2000). In that capacity he was chief adviser on the school curriculum, assessment and qualifications to both Conservative and Labour Secretaries of State for Education. He is the author of What is education for? and The conservative case for education.
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