Education for what? (1977)

From the September 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Tory MP for Wokingham, William Van Straubenzee, addressing his constituency advisory committee recently, must have sorely disappointed some of his less-discerning friends when he claimed that it would be quite unrealistic—“pie-in-the-sky” was one phrase he used—for Conservatives to think of unscrambling the comprehensive schools and turning back to the grammar-secondary-modern system. (Times Educational Supplement, 8th July.)

His words, however, will have reassured his more realistic industrial and commercial masters, for whom the comprehensive system had become essential if they were to compete successfully with their capitalist rivals elsewhere in the world.

For this reason, if for no other, one may be confident that Straubenzee’s views broadly coincide with those of his party bosses, Mrs. Thatcher and Norman St. John-Stevas, whatever they may feel obliged to say publicly. It is obvious that neither of them will be particularly anxious to restore the educational privileges of the self-styled middle class if, as they clearly do here, they happen to conflict with the interests of the capitalist class they represent. (No doubt they would also privately argue that it is not, after all, the continued existence of the public school system that is at risk.)

Of course, the introduction of comprehensive schools has made no significant difference to the principle of selection enshrined in the 1944 Education Act. Only the manner in which the selection is engineered has changed.

Neither has the overall condition of the end-products been altered in any way. Those school-leavers who can find jobs are obliged to sell their labour- power in the form of a commodity to capitalist employers. The remainder help to swell the ranks of what Karl Marx accurately described as the “reserve army of capitalism”—the unemployed.

And in the end, a major imperative of capitalism— that its education service should, as nearly and as effectively as possible, match up to that system’s requirements—will have been consolidated.

Richard Cooper