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Cast your mind back – or in any direction, come to that: can you
recall the last occasion on which you heard somebody defend with
fervour the splitting up of the primary curriculum into chunks of
unrelated ‘subjects’; anyone speak from the heart on the desirability
of depositing children into ability groups from which they may rarely
escape; defend with genuine feeling the practice of league tables?
Ever listened to someone justify such practices with passion on
the grounds that they might make for a fairer society in which all
children are given an equal chance to develop their own capabilities,
and which will eventually bring about a more comprehensive, to say
nothing of more comprehensible education?
The nearest to an emotional response that could be deemed passionate
in relation to such initiatives might just be the extra gleam in
the metallic eye of bureaucrats or politicians who have sensed opportunities
for even further control; people who dismiss anything spoken about
with feeling as a tiresome and juvenile element in debates that
should be governed by what appears to be reason and rationality
– in other words they take the view that one cannot credibly defend
a position on any other grounds.
How fortunate then that we can point to those who have combined
both passion and logic all their lives and been able to prove that
not only can these be exemplified at a personal level but were able
to use them to great effect in those arguments they defended so
vigorously. Caroline Benn, whose life is celebrated in this issue
by Clyde Chittty and Brian Simon, was one such outstanding example.
Ironically, many of these self-same bureaucrats and politicians
owe much, as indeed we all do, to those whose reasoned arguments
and passion to overcome what they saw as injustices, led to many
of the great social and public-health improvements we now take for
granted. These pioneers were also dismissed in their time, the passion
they attached to their campaigns being dismissed as equally tiresome
by their contemporaries in high office.
Interestingly, the present day bureaucratisation of education itself
depends on a very particular, but by its bureaucrats, a largely
unacknowledged emotion, if not for its defence then for its very
perpetuation. This emotion was recently recognised and publicly
named by Martin McGuinness, the Northern Ireland Minister for Education,
who has stated why his country will no longer be using league tables
and spelled out why: an education system that is built on a foundation
of fear, as indeed league tables undoubtedly are, and which themselves
generate even more fear, cannot belong to a country that wishes
to call itself civilised.
Annabelle Dixon
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