What are schools for? (1977)

From the November 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following essay was submitted by a member of the SPGB to a competition, open to people between 16 and 19, organized as part of the so-called “National Debate on Education”. The winning essay was published on 4th October in The Guardian. This contribution was short-listed but not chosen for publication. It shows the fundamental difference of approach of a Socialist to the subject.

The usual answer to the question “What are schools for?” is to reply that they are for education. That is true but unsatisfactory, for it begs at least two other questions—what shall be provided as education, and, more important, education for what?

Schools tend to be reflections of the society in which they exist. Today, therefore, schools are created in the image of capitalism. As in capitalist society the majority of the population are members of the working class (i.e. dependent upon the sale of their labour-power to an employer for a wage or salary) the education provided by schools for that majority must, however vaguely, be influenced by that fact.

Schools mainly teach the young, whom they have to enable to take their places in society. At the moment, therefore, education for the majority must be largely training them for future employment. Capitalism needs “clerks”, "engineers”, “doctors”, “postmen” and “policemen”, etc. and so these are some of the qualities of labour-power that schools must produce. Additionally, as capitalism requires a disciplined workforce some form of discipline and moral education must be central to schools.

Today, therefore, “education” must be for enabling people to take their place in capitalist society. This “end” of education determines which of the available “means” shall be employed, i.e what shall be provided as education.

Exam System

The most obvious link between school and employment is the exam system. It is this system which presents schools with the clearest expression of capitalism's labour-power needs. It is at the clear target of getting their pupils to attain satisfactory exam qualifications that schools must aim. The government and their examination boards must keep the exams responsive to capitalism’s needs, while schools must alter their subjects and methods in response to changes in exam requirements.

Employers increasingly depend upon exam qualifications when hiring labour-power. Their aim is to employ only the most productive (in the sense of profitable) workers in order to survive in competition with their rivals. Similarly, “the nation” requires an efficient and sufficiently qualified (i.e. educated) workforce in order to out-pace foreign competitors. Thus, the exam system and the relative merits of each qualification must continuously alter in response to capitalism’s increasing demands, while schools can only follow this lead by adjusting their courses and placing different emphases on the importance of various subjects.

To the pupil, the exam seems (correctly or otherwise) to be the main point of the dozen or so years spent at school. The exam may well appear to be the key to “higher” education and more exams, or ultimately, for the majority, the qualification for a job. Just as prostitutes are forced to advertize their wares, so too wage-workers increasingly have to exhibit their exam qualifications; to many, school may appear little more than a training centre for the brothel of life.

While capitalism needs workers to be qualified to perform certain types of work, it also requires a working class which is disciplined and which accepts the moral values of capitalist society. With this task schools must also be concerned. The school day is modelled upon capitalism’s working day. The school must discipline the pupil to attend school at certain times and to accept the authority of those in charge. Although alternatives to this have been attempted, “experts” and “public opinion” have been against their general application (probably correctly from their position), as they fear that it would produce an undisciplined working class (the majority).

Similarly, the exam system, it has been argued, instils discipline into the pupil by forcing him or her to recognize that the only way to "get on” in life is to work hard. In this is based a contradiction, for if the exam is a competition then only a selection can succeed and this will remain so even if every pupil works very hard—the only winner in such a situation being the employers who would gain a better-quality work-force while the majority of pupils would, as ever, have lost. Further, this argument is promoted into a myth of meritocracy in society; for by extension it is erroneously inferred that those on top of society have got there either by hard work or by “merit” and intellect.

Examinations today therefore mean selection, and selection means rejection. The rejecting system means that many pupils, who have been taught to have aspirations of reaching “the top”, must be disappointed. Their impotence to achieve their aims leads them to frustration. Schools must cope with these frustrations both by teaching their pupils useless alternative “leisure” pursuits and also by preaching “safe” moral values, e.g. respect for private property and authority.

Examinations and teaching are based upon the prevailing orthodoxy and both aim to reinforce and perpetuate that orthodoxy. For the majority this must remain so (even in “denominational” and private schools), as long as the “end” for schools is life in capitalism.

If, however, society was changed to Socialism, then the aim of education would be for life in Socialist society. That would mean that schools wouldn’t be for producing “clerks” or “postmen” (i.e. qualities of labour-power) but rather for developing human beings in the widest and most varied sense. As all work shall be voluntary, there will be little restriction on what and when work shall be done. In one day a person may choose to deliver post, cook meals, type letters, work in a factory or do any other variety and number of works.

Thus schools shall provide the broadest possible education to enable people to develop and extend their individuality to the fullest, not being confined by class and rigid division of labour. Production shall be to satisfy society’s needs, for useful and necessary items, not for profit. Education shall provide people with some of the abilities needed for such production, but not in any narrow sense of producing people to do only certain confined types of work.

Schools without walls

In Socialism, where everyone in the world shall own the means of living, there will be no need for exchange and money, which are the products of private-property society. Thus education would not be limited by cost and property factors. Socialism will be a “school without walls” where students could receive experience working in factories and offices etc. (which at present would be opposed by vested interests such as trades unions and employers, against the exploitation of child-labour); where, if the desire was to learn a new language, the student could travel to an area where that language was the vernacular not confined by cost; where, as private property would no longer exist there would be no copyrights, censorship or need for false theories or moral values so all information would be freely available for education; where lessons will not be merely passing sets of notes from teacher to pupil without going through the head of either, but rather the critical refinement and propagation of theories to support practice. 

Schools in Socialism shall be freely accessible to all those (of whatever age) who wish to learn. In capitalism schools are for survival-training for the capitalist jungle. In Socialism education shall be for the fullest extension of human beings, both individually and socially.

Brian Philips

Learning, earning and yearning (1987)

From the November 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard 

"I never let my schooling interfere with my education." Mark Twain

You might have left formal education years ago. You might be involved in it now as a student or a teacher. What, though, is your opinion about the way education is organised? Is it a pleasurable, inspiring, challenging experience? Well, if you stop a group of young people making a swift exit from school at the end of their classes or a tired troupe of teachers and ask them about their day, "pleasurable" and "inspiring" are probably not the sort of words they will use to describe their routines.

Acquiring useful knowledge and developing new skills are pursuits that people can, in the right circumstances, greatly enjoy. Why, then, do millions of people involved in formal education find it such a boring and uncomfortable business? For an answer to this question it is worth considering what is contained in the text books and what is imparted in the classrooms and lecture halls. For a clearer understanding of what education is all about, however, it is reasonable to look out of the classroom window to consider the type of society which education is designed to prepare us for. What sort of person does the education system want to make? In order to understand the instruction manual you need to look at a picture of an ideal version of the finished product.

What is Education?

The word “education" derives from the Latin word educere meaning "to lead out”. It is seen as the process whereby young people are led out from states of inability and ignorance into the workings of the world beyond — their idea being that the older and more experienced generations will equip the members of the new generation with the knowledge and abilities required in order to cope with social life. In order for society to survive it needs to produce goods and services like food, clothes, accommodation and transportation. Human history has developed through different social systems, like slavery and later feudalism, and consequently the way in which young people have been prepared for the life ahead of them has varied according to the sort of society they are to inhabit.

The commercial society we live in today is a stage in history. There is no evidence to suggest that after thousands of years of change and development human history has ground to a halt and that the style of society we have now is something that will never change. The main characteristics of today's society are quite simple and they are the same all over the world. Society is divided between the wealth producers (the great majority) and the wealth owners (a small minority). Most people have to sell themselves to an employer like a company or the state in order to get a livelihood. A price is put on everyone as they flog their lives away in order to make someone else rich. How much are you worth? £3.25 an hour? £506.78 a month? £10,000 for one year of your life? Meanwhile a few men and women live in luxury with gigantic wealth which has been legitimately robbed from the people whose energies and skills have produced it. It is a society in which a man or a woman in a pinstripe suit can take a decision which will devastate a local community, ruining hundreds of lives, by deciding to "withdraw investments" from some local industry. A couple of days later the person who took the decision could be in drunken revelry at a chic nightclub, celebrating a successful £10,000 share deal made in ten minutes while mothers from the wrecked community are weeping over the new wasteland in which their children will be growing up.

We are living in a world where conscripts to the Argentinian military forces and economic conscripts to the British forces were ordered to massacre each other in the name of civilisation. What is reasonably described as an act of insane savagery when it is committed in Hungerford is called noble heroism when it is committed in Goose Green. In the same way, Russian soldiers in Afghanistan and American soldiers in Nicaragua are being ordered to murder people in "defence" of a "good" cause. How good is an argument or a cause that requires you to shoot someone with an exploding bullet in order to persuade them?

Above all, the economic principle which governs the way we live is that of profit. Although the world can easily produce more than enough food and drink for everyone, millions of people die of starvation while farmers are paid to burn wheat in order to keep its price high. Coffee is dumped in the oceans, mountains of beef and butter beshadow lakes of wine and milk while, according to the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF), a child dies from poverty every two seconds. A network of well-intentioned campaigns like Live Aid and Sport Aid struggle to alleviate the plight of those on the borderline of survival but the problems remain. Workers in relative poverty, thinking twice about how they are going to pay the electricity bill, shelling out a few quid to the destitute will not solve any problems. Charity may prolong the agonies, though, by lulling people into the mistaken belief that the profit system can be humanised if people were simply to be a little more thoughtful to others. The profit system has to operate according to what is profitable, not according to what is in the best interests of the majority. Think about the priorities of the profit system. In 1986 Cancer Research in the UK tried to collect £1 million by begging from people. The research here is reasonably important because one in four people in industrial areas of the world die of cancer-related disease. During the same period the United States government spent $45,000,000,000 on military research and development and a similar sum was spent by the Russian government.

Learning Compliance

What role does formal education play in all this? Primarily it is a dull and restricting process by which people are gently indoctrinated to accept a highly undesirable, difficult, dangerous and insecure way of life. The indoctrination today is not always delivered in a stark, crude way (although it was at one time) but the net result of someone going through ten years of schooling is. generally, the acquiring of a frame of mind and a set of prejudices that make for a willing wage-slave, a follower of leaders and in many cases a military recruit. "Education", according to one writer, "is what remains when we have forgotten all that we have been taught" (George Halifax). Certainly, judging by the dreary content of most formal education courses there is every reason for young people to quickly forget most of what has been taught. The hang-over effect though is the production of people who, give or take a complaint or a wish to reform something, are generally compliant to the type of society we have. In David Copperfield, Charles Dickens introduced the character of Uriah Heep who refers to his education as a young boy.

They taught us a deal of 'umbleness . . . not much else that I know of, from morning to night we was to be 'umble to this person, 'umble to that; and to pull off our caps here and make our bows there; and always to know our places and abase ourselves before our betters.

Local and national employers recently attended the college where I work to organise lectures and workshops for the students as prospective employees and the message was subtle but clear: the people who taught Uriah Heep had the right idea. Today's bosses have a wide vocabulary of terms to avoid being openly offensive. "Be obedient" becomes "Could you co-operate?" but the relationship of "master" and servant has not changed even if it is labelled as that between employer and employee. An official at the Department of Education and Science recently said.

We have to ration . . . educational opportunities so that society can cope with the output of education . . . People must be educated once more to know their place.

[The Listener 4 September 1986] 

In Britain today the children of the owning class attend costly private schools where they are trained in the techniques of pomposity, arrogance and the social hierarchy. Only 6 per cent of young people attend such schools while the other 94 per cent are learning how to know their place. It should not be forgotten, though, that the minority who own and control the society we live in (the owners of the factories, offices, newspapers and so forth) do not occupy their positions of power because they had expensive and élitist educations. On the contrary. They have expensive and élitist educations because their parents occupy positions of power. A person's class position pre-dates their education and continues regardless of whether they performed well or badly in school. You do not get to own landed estates or a string of factories or oilfields because you worked hard at school or college. The Duke of Westminster owns 138,000 acres including some of the most lucrative sites in London like Oxford Street, Belgravia and parts of Westminster. He owns estates in America. Australia. Wales and England including a 14-bedroom house set in 19,000 acres in Lancashire. That house alone is worth over £5 million. The Duke has one O' Level. It is interesting to note the disgust and indignation that the news media have today regarding acts of organised thuggery, plunder and looting because it was precisely by those methods that the early aristocrats acquired their estates, including the ancestors of the Duke of Westminster.

Finding Out the Hard Way

Many people who believe that you can get rich by working hard discover the real nature of class-divided society the hard way. Some may get jobs as £30,000 a year executives or become successful yuppies. Nevertheless, unlike the fully-fledged social parasites who live extravagantly from the unearned incomes of rent, interest or dividends, the upstarts with the company BMWs rely on a salary or commission for their dosh. Consequently. if the company they work for closes or goes insolvent (the closure of the London Daily News is a good recent example) they land with a bump on the floor of the economic class they have never really left. This fall will necessitate a rapid change of lifestyle and. ironically, one of the expenses which may no longer be possible in this situation is often the cost of sending their children to fee-paying schools.

Social problems like poverty and disorder are endemic to the profit system which puts the minority's acquisition of wealth above all other considerations. An economic recession aggravates these problems and it is in this social context that the government has decided to introduce a national school curriculum. Governments of whatever political complexion have to act as executive committees for the owning class. A national curriculum. whereby the same courses sanctioned by the government are taught uniformly across the country, is seen as a way of brain-washing tomorrow's wage-slaves and dole-queuers in a more efficient fashion than is achieved by today's methods. Bear in mind, though, that governments (not just in the UK) are opting for more thorough and systematic methods of "educating" young people into acquiescence but not necessarily because the ideology of the profit system is blossoming. Consider the instances from the past where centralised powers have used programmes of education to bolster their ethics and principles. At the time of the ancient Greek empire with the conquests of Alexander, the Greek curriculum was established all over the Hellenic colonies to explain and promote the culture of that empire which involved institutional slavery as an integral part of its so-called civilisation. Centuries later the Roman Catholic church was organising in a similar way. The Jesuit schools were originally intended for members of a special religious order but the schooling system was extended to cover the lay élites of medieval Europe. This extension and the social circumstances which caused it are similar to those which caused the expansion of early Greek schools. It was the insecurity, not the dominance, of the Greek colonies of Alexandrian times which prompted them to build and depend on schools to produce support for their social hierarchy. Similarly it was the insecurity of the Roman church in the time of Ignatius which accounts for the formation and rapid growth of the Jesuit schools. In both examples the school was regarded as a way of preserving a set of social values which were losing their dominance.

Today, many young people are deeply dissatisfied with what society has to offer them. Not just those who are rioting on the streets of places like Belfast. England and Sweden but also the classrooms full of people whose potential skill and creativity is being deliberately under developed because there are either no vacancies for them after school or work of a very limited kind. Some at least are healthily less reverential to authority today than they were in previous generations. It is harder than it used to be for the profit system to con young people into believing that it works in their interests, especially during a recession. So, one thing for Kenneth Baker to ponder is how long a system of indoctrination can succeed when its message runs against people's experience — you cannot make castor oil taste nice by teaching someone to call it syrup.

It was the development of the education systems in the emerging nation states of Europe last century which produced the earliest models of the school system of today. A national education system with schools teaching common subjects and with teachers produced by uniformly organised training colleges was first established in nineteenth century Prussia. The aim was to produce multitudes of workers tailored to meet the specifications of the architects of the German state. With the industrial revolution came the need for the new owners of industry to get a workforce which was equipped with rudimentary skills, the habit of obedience. servility to the bosses and there was also the need for many workers who had competence in elementary literacy and numeracy. The education system was developed accordingly to manufacture factory workers and clerks.

Education Today

Today most people who work are employed in commercial or service industries. The latest available figures show that whereas there are 6,368,000 people working in the manufacturing and construction industries there are 8,221,000 people engaged in service areas like distribution, transport and finance. (An Economic Profile of Britain 1986 — Lloyds Bank.) So schools and colleges need to prepare a workforce for these areas and to condition young people to accept the social scenery by referring to it in terms which make it seem sensible and unchangeable although it is neither. Maths and Statistics syllabuses are riddled with questions about companies, profits, redundancies and productivity where the desirability of a class-divided society is assumed as a self-evident truth. Accounting, commerce and Business Management courses ask sober questions about the economic laws which cause such misery. History courses focus on the affairs of monarchs and politicians and encourage people to grow up with a narrow, nationalistic and ethnocentric viewpoint. Some economics courses are entirely founded on the quite false assumption that there is an unavoidable scarcity of goods for the people of the world to consume. Education could be organised so very differently. It could be what it should be: stimulating and imaginative. Anyone, though, who sought to achieve those aims by simply reforming the methods or content of the current system would be faced with a frustrating and ultimately impossible task. From primary to postgraduate levels, education is geared to the economic system of which it is a part. What is the point in devoting time and energy to obtaining a few more scant resources for education when its entire stocks are overwhelmingly outstripped in scale and sophistication by those of the murder industry (the official one)? Time and energy spent on quickening the end of the social system which creates the perverse priorities is a much sounder investment.

The only way to achieve a real change in education is to change the social environment for which education prepares people. A society which converts the means of producing and distributing wealth from the private ownership of companies and state machines into the common property of the whole community would be able to direct production to one aim and one aim alone — the satisfaction of human needs. A society which abandons the division between a few who own and control and a majority who do not will be able to operate on the basis of the principle — from each according to her/his abilities, to each according to her/his self-defined needs. There is no problem with people behaving co-operatively, even on a huge scale, as was demonstrated by the millions of people who organised the monumental Live Aid across the world. No one working in any of the thousands of different tasks which needed to be done for this project worked for money. The 80,000,000 people who participated in Sport Aid with exemplary organisation testify to the same point.

Education in Socialism

Education in a classless society would not have to regiment, discipline and inculcate young people with rubbish the way it does now. Teachers are often authoritarian today as a result of the disagreeable disciplinary work the system demands they perform. In a social setting which does not create the need for people to be authoritarian, education will not need to be the flow from a "teacher" to a "learner" that it so often is now. People will be much less inhibited about venturing to teach someone who is teaching them or learning from someone they are teaching. More importantly, though, no-one would have to become "a teacher" and be lumbered with performing that function to the exclusion of other, more creative occupations. Today it makes sense to the profit system to make you into a mechanic or a nurse or a carpenter or a computer programmer and that's you done. There is no need, however, for anyone's creativity and usefulness to be restricted in this way in a society that puts human satisfaction as its top priority and profitability nowhere. Instead of being a series of unpleasant experiences foisted on people between the ages of six and sixteen education should become an exhilarating project continuing throughout life for everyone who wishes to maintain the mental vitality they enjoyed as a child.

Ignorant people are easy to fool and manipulate just as knowledge is strength. Don't let your schooling interfere with your education.

Gary Jay

Best years of your life? (1987)

From the November 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard 

"On your first blow of the whistle, they have to freeze. Then, on the second, they must go back inside." Such was the advice given to me on starting a short spell of work as a teacher in a primary school recently. I was beginning to wonder whether my job application had been mixed up with that of a would-be prison screw. I could certainly understand the young child who says after her first day at school that she doesn't have to go the next day because "I've been there once already". The first lesson then, on entering a school is that it is compulsory.

The second lesson was that it is no coincidence that the daily routine of a school is closely modelled on that of a factory or office. Bells or sirens usher the uniform mass in at 9, out at 12, in at 1, out at 4 . . . One of the main functions of schools is to prepare the children of workers to fit into the kind of life-long routines that their parents have suffered before them. They are taught not to respect themselves and their own needs. They are taught to accept poverty and to fight for “the nation" and its owners.

The school is an artificial and hostile environment in which large numbers of children are herded together, grouped according to age and without the resources to cater for the subtleties of individual needs. In later life it would be absurd if you were only to be on friendly terms with those who were born within twelve months of you. and yet throughout the school years this is the kind of arbitrary association that is thrust on children. Then, in groups often over 30. they are expected to "learn".

The current proposals for a national curriculum and for testing at 7, 11, 14 and 16 will simply make an intimidating environment even worse. The Rutter Report (15,000 Hours) has reassured us that "prize givings are neither detrimental, divisive, nor elitist". Maybe not for the minority who get the prizes. But the capitalist approach to dealing with differing needs means being concerned with the differing needs of various employers, and therefore carefully grading and labelling the products of their mind factories for later use (or non-use).

At the same time, the capitalist attitude towards the young has always been ambiguous. Childhood is itself an artificial construction, a social concept which has emerged and changed very much in its definition over the centuries. And in the present, youth is seen as both charming and yet potentially dangerous. Creative or imaginative dreams have to be moulded so that they are accommodated to the needs of the present system, or else scorned and smashed. And this is another role of the so-called education system in present-day society.

The Intentions Behind State Education

All of these purposes of schools were present from the earliest days of state education. Before 1830 the British state spent nothing on education, and fifty years later the groundwork had been laid for the system we have today. Employers wanted well-trained workers: "The superiority of workmen of some education over those who have none must be sensibly felt by all the great manufacturers in the country" (Earl Stanhope, 1807). They wanted to be able directly to control the young, to hold back change. As the manufacturer, Andrew Ure, put it in 1861:

The uneducated state of the lower orders is a dark den of incendiaries among misrule which, if not cleared out will give birth to disastrous eruptions in every other province. A limited education might be a most effective bulwark against revolution.

And it was seen as necessary to condition workers into the role and life-style of steady and submissive wage-slaves:

We do not profess to give these children an education that will raise them above their station of business in life: that is not our object. but to give them an education that may fit them for that business.

[Robert Lowe, Final Report of the Cross Commission, 1888]

Such intentions are just as much in evidence today, with for example the recent White Paper on Education and Training, which states that the aim of current educational changes is to make "learning in schools more relevant to the needs of the modern world and. in particular, the needs of employers".

Before taking a glance at what is actually taught in schools, let us consider briefly some of the supposed "alternatives" on offer. After immense effort and campaigning, comprehensive schooling was established in Britain. And yet even some of those most vigorous campaigners will now acknowledge that many of the old frustrations and indignities still remain in the newer system of "indoctrination without discrimination". Furthermore, it has recently been argued that the current proposed reforms will effectively restore many aspects of the grammar school system anyway. Then there was the famous old Labour policy of getting rid of the public schools, not that they ever did anything about it. In fact, is it such a bad thing that we are saved the unpleasant experience of rubbing shoulders at school with the Hooray Henrys and Henriettas who will later be exploiting us? It is quite logical that in a two-class society there will be two classes of school preparing people for two different lifestyles or roles: the employers and the (sometimes) employed.

The whole nature and purpose of "education" cannot be fundamentally changed without a transformation of society as a whole. With the establishment of socialism, as a system of production for use, the idea of being dragged through a compulsory institution will have no place. Such prisons can only jokingly be called "places of learning". Education then will become a life-long and voluntary process, based firmly in everyday experience. Already, modern educational methods are recognising the value of the "problem-solving" or investigational approaches to learning. But this is still taking place in the artificial confines of schools. Socialism will not need to produce people as profit-generating commodities. So learning then can be completely voluntary. life-long and rooted in experience, as we start to refine the satisfaction of our needs.

Training Future Workers

What, in contrast, is taught in schools at present? The tone is perhaps set by a recent headline. "Business seeks a broader role with schools" (Times Educational Supplement, 21 August 1987).

From an early age. schools are teaching children to accept the curiosities of capitalism as if they were natural. And the message, once swallowed at this vulnerable age, sticks hard many years later. Take for example this self-confessed indoctrinator, describing how she introduced some 8-year-olds to the idea of "profit". She says there was

incredulity as we would have 10p every time we sold a spider, also confusion at hearing the word "profit". It was previously a concept outside their experience and I spent much teaching time after this trying to reinforce the idea of profit and how it is essential for the survival of a business.

[Child Education, February 1987] 

No doubt if a teacher was to show, more accurately, how profit is essential only for the survival and prosperity of the owners of a business, this would be slammed in the gutter press as bringing "politics" into the classroom!

Last year, in fact, Norman Tebbit accused ILEA of driving children to truancy by teaching "anti-sexist, anti-racist, gay, lesbian, CND rubbish" in schools. In fact the kind of thing that drives many of the more sensible victims to truancy" is, for example, the absurd humiliation of the weekly dose of physical jerks, or the regimentation of enforced sessions of "Country Dancing", and the arrogant sarcasm of teachers who cannot earn respect and therefore demand it as a right.

In Statistics A-level, students are expected to calculate how to set minimum standards for the proportion of faulty items off a production line, in such a way as to allow a stated set of results to pass those standards! (This reflects a common practice in industry, in which both profits and good PR are maintained by setting the standards to match the results rather than the more honest way around). And in history, an acceptance of nationalism runs quietly throughout all of the courses, as in 20th Century British History (Heinemann. 1987) which says of the 1931 National Government that "they wanted to work together to help Britain. Britain had to get out of the Depression".

Then there is religion. Under the 1944 Education Act. all pupils have to meet every day for a collective act of worship. Again, this is of course neither spontaneous nor voluntary but enforced. "Religious instruction" is also the only compulsory school "subject" on the curriculum in Britain.

Teaching Law and Order

A piece of historical crudity almost as stupid as the Heinemann variety was served up earlier this year by a policeman addressing the children of a Newcastle school I was working in: "Before the forming of the police force in 1829," he explained, "there was no law and order. There was crime everywhere". So different now, isn’t it? There is currently a fairly widespread policy in inner London of teachers refusing the police access to schools. This policy has been attacked by the NUT, as well as the government and the tabloids. Recently a surprisingly honest headteacher from St. Paul's. Bristol acknowledged that police make regular guest appearances in schools because "teachers are in alliance with power and authority. We cannot opt out in school" (Libertarian Education, summer 1987).

The 1986 Education Act requires any headteacher to have regard "to any such representations which are made to him by the chief officer of police" and the annual school governors' report should describe "what steps have been taken to develop the school's links with the community (including links with the police)". Apart from the obvious chance offered to the police to impress a vulnerable and captive audience with the wonderful way they work to ensure that ten per cent of the population remain in control of most of the real wealth, they also even supplement this PR job with "intelligence gathering" activities. A certain PC Currant recently boasts in The Job (Metropolitan Police paper) that “a lot of youngsters began talking to us, giving us descriptions and nicknames of burglars".

In recent years, this extra subject on the curriculum, known as Submission Studies (is a "Law and Order” GCSE on the way?) has become even more prominent. The 1981 Scarman Report advised:

Police assistance in the education of children in the fundamentals of an ordered society can. . . be of great value . . .  as the pressures on our society grow in intensity, the need for programmes of instruction for all children in the way government works, in the law and in the duties, as well as the rights, of citizenship increases.

The American Radical, Henry Adams, had more sense when he pointed out that "chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit". And this was followed up in 1983 by an HMI Report, Police Liaison with the Education Service, which again showed an obsession with the need to artificially implant in young minds an unhealthy awe for something called authority:

Nor can schools, because of the work they do, and the responsibilities it entails, give the impression to pupils that civilised society could function without authority and a general respect for it among the populace.

The traditional idea of "beating sense" into young children who have the real sense to question and resist the myths and tedium they are fed, has in modem times increasingly been replaced by the more "enlightened" (and ultimately more persuasive) idea of smooth-talking this "sense" into them. John Locke, writing nearly three hundreds years ago. was a capitalist theoretician well ahead of his time:

Beating is the worst, and therefore the last means to be used in the correction of children . . . if you can once get into children a love of credit and an apprehension of shame and disgrace, you have put into them the true principle.

[Educational Writings] 

He sums up here perfectly the modern orthodoxy, in which morality is instilled into children by self-righteous "liberal" and trendy teachers, through the use of guilt, shame and pride. Why pay for a policeman on every street comer when you can put one on 24-hour patrol inside every head?

Examples of mental, as opposed to physical punishment were everywhere to be seen during my recent experience of working in a primary school. The sarcasm so often used by teachers shows a fundamental lack of respect. Some of the more exuberant children are frequently and studiously informed that they are "deaf', that is, not listening to the boring teacher. One fairly typical tirade from a PE teacher was transcribed as follows: 

Who made that noise? Did I ask anyone to make a noise? My instructions were to spring up . . . Anyone who wants to talk come out here.. . Don't all do the same: you're individuals! Adam, do you find this hard to do. because I can give you a lot more practice if you do. . .

and so on ad nauseam.

One boy had been swearing at teachers and going home; the headteacher methodically visited every class to ensure that no respect built up for this individual’s actions. "He's been babyish, hasn't he?" she whined at each confused class. Another boy, at a school in Newcastle where I was "trained", had severe problems at home. His resulting "tantrums" during the day at school were systematically punished (not "in anger") by a teacher who then told both me and this boy that he doubted very much whether the planned punishments would make any difference at all to his future behaviour-, then proceeded to implement them in any case. One was left seriously wondering for whose benefit this ritual was being so tenaciously pursued.

One young child keenly offering to help another was slapped down with the statement: "Sit down at once; I'm the teacher here!" An 8-year-old girl who grew bored with a story about a speaking cat and commented that "cats don’t speak. anywaY" was rudely told to "shut up and stop being silly". It seemed an earnest discussion between teacher and pupil on the relative merits of realism and fantasy in children's fiction was not on the cards that afternoon. One class were being spurred on by the offer of a £2 prize for the best work, and an 8-year-old boy who. when asked to pass a book which was "second from the top" in a pile of three jovially pointed that "it's second from the bottom!" was told not to be cheeky. Examples such as these bear out the statement made long ago by Helvetius that "Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education".

Society Without Schools

Fortunately, even the stultifying experience of school does not always succeed in killing off completely the imaginative and creative "dreams" of children. On one occasion. I invited a class of children to describe their ’ideal world". The response to this included: No Maggie Thatcher, No wars, No schools, "schoolchildren paid instead of teachers", "in shops, they give you the money, and and the product", "everybody equal, plenty of money for all people every day", "everything free in shops". Several children said "everything would be free".

The idea of society without schools was laid out in William Morris' portrait of a liberated society, News From Nowhere, in which the "visitor" to that society, on mentioning schools, is confronted with a bewildered reaction:

"What do you mean by that word? I don't see how it can have anything to do with children. We talk, indeed, of a school of herring, and a school of painting, and in the former sense we might talk of a school of children - but otherwise" said he. laughing. "I must own myself beaten".

On the suggestion made by several of these children that everything should be available free, a debate was set up in which they made statements as to whether they were for or against this idea, and why. Some of the resulting statements volunteered by children on the issue showed just how much their thinking is in advance of that of their so-called teachers:

I am for the idea because people won't have to worry about debts and bills/ I don't think people will take it all . . . they might be a bit greedy, but not that much/ There would be no poor people and no posh and rich people, and even though you will still be ill sometimes, if you are you can just take the medicine and it would be free; you would not have to share things, but I still would/ Not equal shares of money, just each take what you want/ Don't knock down banks, just burn the money; use the mints for something else, anyway, the banks wouldn't exist by then, probably/ The poor would be rich as well . . . taking too much? Who would bother?/ Money would not be invented and we would be rich in our own way. Because the poor wouldn't die of hunger. I wish they could open up an orange and find enough money to look after themselves.

If these young people's imaginative efforts to solve the insane contradictions of capitalism are to flourish, and to grow into a practical solution to those contradictions, it will be in spite of and in opposition to their experience at school:

Let's get off children's backs and let them learn what they want, how they want, when they want. Learning grows where it will, where the soil and climate are right. We can no more ordain learning by order, coercion and commandment than we can produce love by rape or threat.

[Education Otherwise Newsletter. 34]

 Clifford Slapper

Class Divisions (2026)

Book Review from the November 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Underdogs: the Truth About Britain’s White Working Class. By Joel Budd. Picador £10.99.

By working class here is meant those who fall into the census groups of lower supervisory and technical occupations, semi-routine and routine occupations and long-term unemployed (this covers 40 percent of adults, and includes jobs such as baristas, gardeners, bricklayers, chefs and shop assistants). People count as white if that is how they see themselves or how most people would see them. But ethnicity, it is said, is not a stable characteristic, and people born in Ireland or with recent Irish ancestors, can be described as Britons.

Budd investigates white workers by means of statistical studies and his own visits and interviews, which were overwhelmingly done in England and Wales. Three main kinds of area are distinguished. Heartlands, such as Rhymney in south Wales, have very high proportions of white workers who are mostly quite old. Wythenshawe is an enclave, a large council estate on the edge of Manchester and ‘an example of deep poverty in a pleasant setting’. Thetford in Norfolk is a colony, settled by white working class people from elsewhere (mainly London). The three types are not mutually exclusive, and Edlington near Doncaster is a mixture of a heartland and a colony, mainly white but with people who have come from all over England and Ireland.

The book contains a number of interesting points. For instance, poorer white British children generally do very badly at school, while better-off kids do fine. Poorer children can have high aspirations in terms of education and career, but lack high expectations. Few people expect to move for a new job, and young people from poor places usually stick around, so Britain is now ‘a nation of stayers-at-home’. Moving to a new city or town can be expensive and the rewards are not obvious.

Attitudes to immigration are determined not so much by class as by age, as ‘young white working-class Britons … are largely unbothered by immigration and ethnic diversity’, seeing diversity as ‘a fact of life’. Class (in the sense used here) does not indicate how a person will vote but whether they will vote at all, with poor people less likely to vote. White Britons have largely ceased voting Labour, but this change applies less to black and Asian Britons.

One informative section deals with the Lithuanian community in Boston in Lincolnshire. Agricultural work in Fenland is badly paid, and much of it is now done by immigrants from Eastern Europe. A community organisation teaches English to migrants and Lithuanian to their British-born children. The children have an accent that is ‘part Lincolnshire, part Multicultural London English’. More generally, language skills can vary by gender, with Polish women speaking decent English if they work in industries such as care and hospitality, while men often work on building sites with other Polish speakers and so their English is much less good.

An informative look at part of the British population, but without placing it within the general social structure of the UK.

Paul Bennett

Are the Workers Getting Worse Off? (1937)

From the September 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

A correspondent from U.S,.A. writes: “In discussion, many workers maintain that the condition of the working class is getting worse all the time. They say the ratio which the workers receive in values contrasted with what the capitalists receive in values becomes less and less as capitalism develops, i.e., the workers’ share of new value always grows less. This contention meets with a difficulty. Let us assume that 75 years ago the workers received half of what they produced, and that to-day they receive one-fifth. It is obvious that they are more intensely exploited. On the other hand, it is undeniable that to-day the workers receive more actual goods than they did 75 years ago, i.e., their real wages have gone up. In short, as capitalism develops, the workers are more intensely exploited at the same time that their real wages are increasing. In view of this fact, how can we say that the condition of the working class is getting worse all the time? By saying this, we imply that the workers are getting less and less material benefits, whereas in actuality the reverse is true."

The first point which emerges is that it is not good enough simply to say that the workers are “worse off" or “better off." It depends what you are comparing. As our comrade points out, the workers might be better off in the sense that they have a higher standard of living than formerly, but worse off in the sense that they get a smaller proportion of the wealth produced. We get a smaller fraction of the loaf, but a bigger piece of bread, because the loaf is much bigger.

There is no contradiction in this. The worker must have a rather larger slice of bread if he is to go on producing a much bigger loaf. Intensified exploitation not only takes more energy out of the worker but also requires more skill and knowledge. It is true that mechanisation, rationalisation, and so on, often tend to reduce the skilled craftsman to a machine minder or repetition worker. But machines which abolish skill require skill to produce; rationalisation requires brains to think the schemes out and operate them; large-scale production, keener competition, urbanisation, trustification and trade unionism, government and local government legislation—acting and reacting upon one another—progressively increase the complexity of the whole social organisation of which this large-scale production is the heart. Education Acts, Public Health Acts, Insurance Acts, are required to prevent deterioration and to produce a cleverer and fitter worker to run a mightier and more intricate system.

There is no doubt that at least the lower grades of the workers are fitter than they were 75 years ago. The incidence of the more outrageous diseases of gross malnutrition, such as infantile rickets, has been halved and halved again. Dairy products, fresh fruit and vegetables, the rare week-end “extravagances" of the harassed housewife, become more commonplace on the kitchen table. Maternal mortality has been greatly reduced. The death rate of young children in Great Britain during the summer months is one-eighth of the corresponding rate 40 years ago. The working class are taller, heavier, and live longer. The continued outcry from medical officers of health that much preventive sickness damages industry and robs children of the benefits of the education available, is well justified, but it does not follow that the worker's health is worse or no better. It means, rather, that the authorities' conception of physical well-being improves along with the needs of the capitalists for a fitter worker to do the work required of him. Similarly, the prevailing notion of what constitutes destitution, or the bare level of subsistence, has changed. As an example, comparison may be made between the diet scales in 1826 and to-day for inmates of Chelsea Institution: —

1826.

Breakfast: Gruel or broth, 1 pint.

Dinner: Meat (three days weekly), 8 ozs.; potatoes, 12 ozs.; bread, 3£ ozs.; beer,

1 pint.

Supper: Bread, 3½ ozs.; cheese, l½ ozs.; beer, 1 pint.

1937.

Breakfast: Tea, coffee or cocoa, 1 pint; Bread, 7 ozs., or porridge, ½ pint; jam or marmalade or syrup, 1½ ozs., or corned beef or sausage or brawn, 2 ozs.

Dinner: Bread, 2 ozs.; meat (various), 4 ozs., of fish, 8 ozs.; potatoes, 6 ozs.; other vegetables (including pickles), 3 ozs.; pudding (various), 8 ozs., or raw fruit; tea, ½ pint.

Tea: Tea, 1 pint; bread, 7 ozs.; margarine, ½ oz.; jam or cheese or cake.

Supper: Tea, coffee or cocoa, ½ pint; bread and margarine, 2 ozs.; cheese or buns or biscuits.

The destitute to-day “enjoy” a standard of dining higher than that of a considerable section of regularly employed workers 75 years ago. And the workers are better off, not only in regard to basic food, clothing and shelter, but also in respect of sanitation, recreation, social amenities, “humanisation" of State relief, public manners and private decency.

There is equally no doubt that the worker is better educated. Public education, popular Press, cinema and radio, though inevitably propagandist, at least provide the bricks and mortar of critical thinking. Churches get emptier. News theatres flash world news across the screen. Even the electoral appeals of our capitalist masters have now become more refined, more factual and more sophisticated. The cynic, the soppy, the shyster, the high-waisted “tough-guy,” are insignificant elements in a working class who are mentally equal to the task of operating efficiently a social system far more complex than Socialism need be.

This rise in the standard of living, physical and mental, is necessitated by the technical requirements of capitalism itself, and in turn it helps those mental changes which will make Socialists of the workers. Capitalism gives the workers a higher standard of living—and a higher standard of indignation. They get a sniff of the good things that might be, in the same breath that the gulf between riches and poverty gets wider, industrial depressions more long-drawn out, war more fantastically ferocious, speeding up more hysterical, insecurity more widespread. The very violence of these contrasts brings them to the attention of the workers: they begin to recognise them as problems. And the same ingenuity which the capitalist requires to solve his problems of profit-making can solve the worker's own problem in the midst of plenty, and economic insecurity in the face of colossal power over nature. Whether the workers are better or worse off is a matter of definition: it is a source of inspiration for the Socialist movement that the workers are better equipped to grasp the Socialist solution to their poverty—common ownership of the means of life.

Frank Evans

Reorganisation of the schools (1965)

From the September 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

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 Plus and 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 improving their status by gaining qualifications which will pronounce 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.

Education for Living? (1965)

A Short Story from the September 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

“What’s this got to do with engineering?” Instead of waiting for an answer, he is staring sullenly out of the window near the back of the classroom. It would be possible to ignore it and carry on with the talk on The Cause of Two World Wars, which you have just started. Not all of them are paying attention yet; but even among those who are, some are smirking at the question. You are conscious of the fact that the employers of this eighteen-year-old apprentice would be pleased to hear him talking like this. They release him for one day a week to attend school; and they begrudge any time which is not spent in learning his trade.

Some of those who are smirking are dressed in leather jackets and bright blue jeans. They couldn’t care less whether they are wasting their time or not. At least, school is a skive from work. But his question threatens to side-track the subject of the lesson: and that appeals to them. This youngster, Wilkins, on the other hand, has a conventional haircut and wears sports jacket and flannels. He is bright too, so that any attempt you might make to explain the relevance of the subject, or the importance of their Liberal Studies period in general, will be seized upon and turned into an argument. On balance, you decide that it would be better to keep him silent, and hope that the subject will engage his interest eventually.

While you have been weighing up the pros and cons, there has been a pause of almost five seconds, so that even the youth in the far corner who has been reading the Daily Mirror more or less covertly is now listening for your answer.

“Nothing at all”, you say, with a smile that signifies total confidence in what you are doing,

Wilkins snorts contemptuously out at the view.

“If you look at these maps, you can see that Germany did not even become a nation until the end of the last century, whereas Britain and France . . . “

“I mean—what do we want to know about History for?”

“Yeah! That’s in the past.”

Even a quiet fat lad at the front is muttering something similar, so that you can sense that it is going to be a waste of time while they are in this mood. They are not usually as bad as this. Perhaps it would be better if you let them get it out of their systems. “All right. Let’s put the lesson on one side for a minute. You think you should come here just to learn engineering and nothing else, Wilkins, is that it?”

“Well, that’s what we’re going to be, isn’t it?”

“Yeah! What good’s this stuff to us? Last week it was art, or something. And we heard all about the stars, and biology and that. How’s all that gonna help us to get a good job?”

It would be taking an unfair advantage to press this small, pimply-faced boy to explain what he imagined as a good job. The youth in the corner has gone back to his newspaper; but you can afford to ignore that too for the moment. “I’m well aware that you are going to spend the best part of your lives working—whether you want to or not. But is that all life is—eat, work and sleep? By the time you are forty, and you’ve got whatever job you’re going to get—what then? You’ve got to have some other interests.” There is a dirty laugh from the middle of the room; it is taken up with gusto by the rest. You smile faintly, waiting for them to subside, and then say, “Yes—but even that wears a bit thin over the next twenty years, you know. If you’ve got no interest in the world around you, no knowledge of what’s going on, life’s a pretty dreary business. Look at Robinson”, you say with mock enthusiasm, pointing to the youth with the newspaper. “He’s keeping up with world affairs, you see—reading his newspaper.”

Robinson goes red, folds up the paper and says, “I was reading the cartoons”, anxious to disclaim any suggestion that he was doing anything intellectual.

“We don’t want none of the egg-head stuff. It’s a load o’ junk”, says pimple-face.

“How do you know?”

“I don’t wanna know”, he says, getting angry. “If that lot at the top go for it, then it’s crap as far as I’m concerned.”

“What are you trying to make us all”, Wilkins sneers, “—good citizens?”

If you weren’t a socialist, this one would be a gift. You could talk with all the reformer’s enthusiasm about better opportunities for everybody, steady social improvement, increased and enriched leisure for all, and the responsibility of every citizen in forming this brave new world just round the corner.

As it is, you know what Wilkins only feels in his bones, that life in this system of society never works like that, because capitalism needs more restrictions and more repression and more waste the more surely freedom and abundance become possibilities. This is the root cause of Wilkins’ sceptical and truculent attitude. He can’t see why, but already, at eighteen, he has sensed that there is no way out. Some of the others despise it all, and try to live for kicks, as far as apprentices’ wages will let them. He has tried to use his intelligence by putting his faith in the only positive value he can see—work.

“I’m not trying to make you anything, Wilkins. I’m not even trying to make you into an engineer instead of a human being, which is what you seem set on becoming. If you want to be nothing else but an appendage to a machine, that’s up to you; but don’t try to kid me that it’s a full life.”

Wilkins is silenced; and the others partly take their cue from him. Instead of attacking now, they ask questions and listen to the answers. But as you go on, showing them bit by bit that the realms of the arts and sciences and world affairs are not simply for the capitalist class (without naming it), a sense of uneasiness grows in inverse proportion to your success. You know that, to them, you represent Authority, one of Them, and that the more reasonable you are, the more they like you and take your judgements on trust, the more you are reconciling them to authority, to the status quo, to the idea that a decent life is possible inside capitalism. What can you do to open up their minds to the influence of knowledge and ideas, without dissipating the sceptical and critical attitude which is their only safeguard against the prevailing climate of hypocrisy and deceit?

“What you say doesn’t add up, though, does it?” Wilkins says, putting both hands flat on his desk. “Why do they keep getting steamed up about ‘We must export more’ and ‘We must protect British interests abroad’ if that’s what caused the last two wars, in the end. If they know that, why do they keep on with it?”

“All right—why do they? It’s a good question.”

S. Stafford

Blogger's Note:

The late Ron Cook writing under his occasional pen-name of 'S. Stafford'. One of my favourite short stories to ever appear in the Socialist Standard. It was reprinted as a classic reprint in the September 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard.

A world of waste. (1917)

From the September 1917 issue of the Socialist Standard

Perhaps the chief characteristic of the present regime is the production of colossal wealth by the workers of the world. In no period has the earth been so ransacked for its potential riches; in no age have the forces of nature, and scientific knowledge, been so utilised to extract wealth as during the last fifty years. In the domain of earth, sea, and air, man exerts wonderful power. Ultimately he may even prevent earthquakes from being a menace, make plagues impossible, and turn the uncontrolled force in the lightning stroke, and the energies of the sea and the sunlight, to the common good.

Man, alas ! has assisted in his own enslavement. The wealth he has shaped has diverted him from the destiny that should be his. With all his great heritage, wielding untold potency through science, he should be happier far than those of ages gone. Health and real happiness, knowledge and power, should be his in excelsis were he but the real possessor of his own productions, the disposer of his own powers.

But a blight has settled over Society—the blight of capitalism ! That which blossoms and promises abundance for all is turned to foulness, and the fruit it bears is bitter.

And so we see the saddest spectacle of the ages—the vast masses of the people, who are the wealth producers, surrounded by gigantic wealth yet themselves in stint and wretchedness.

Poverty, ceaseless toil, disease, and misery are theirs. Slaves without knowing it are most of them, contented with their chains. Without hope and bereft of ideals, their lives sunless and shorn of imagination by this system that exploits and finally “scaps” them, they exist only as beasts of burden. The epitaph of millions might justly be : “In the grip of the capitalist system they were compelled to waste their very lives.” For capitalism, with all its Midas-like power, produces, from its very nature, the most terrible waste imaginable. It is, indeed, in the final and real sense, the essence of wastefulness and misdirected energy.

Let us consider now some aspects in which this is presented.

The children of the workers suffer from malnutrition—due to the inability of their exploited parents to supply them with the necessary food. Often they come into the world the offspring of ill-nourished parents, thus being handicapped from the start. They grow up puny, and continue to be ill-fed, and the most important fundamental is missing from Society : healthy, strong children. The wastage of potential citizens and wealth producers through capitalism is enormous.

Then they are educated. And what an education it is ! What efforts are made to develop them physically, to make them sturdy, robust, so that existence becomes enjoyable ? Their own innate tendencies are but rarely encouraged ; their talents are rarely discovered and developed. Individuality is crushed out of them by the system of education, and the imaginative faculty is looked upon as something to be eradicated ! A smattering of this and that is given them, and many of the most valuable kinds of knowledge are denied them altogether.

Thus they are turned out of the schools, half-baked products of capitalistic instruction, with minds impaired by narrow national prejudices, designated “patriotism.” They are given only enough “education” to make them docile and industrious wage-slaves. All knowledge that would be dangerous to the present system, and all history of the struggles of the workers in the past to gain freedom, are glossed over, lied about, or hidden from them.

Now consider the hap-hazard employment of children under the system, and their development into full-grown wage-slaves.

Few of the workers can exercise a choice worth calling such in the profession or trade of their children. They take what presents itself. The medical, legal, and scientific professions are excluded by lack of opportunities. Money paves the way. The one idea is to so place them that they may “make a living.” The consequence is that the potential artist, scientist, author or architect becomes a mere drudge.

The world will never know what a wealth of intellect and power is thus dissipated and lost.

Socialism, with its utilisation of human ability for the world’s Commonwealth, alone is the remedy. It alone presents the opportunities.

The youthful workers become inured to the system, and generally everything that is is taken as a matter of course. The workers’ lives are spent in creating wealth. Their very lives are not their own. They become mere drudges. A fatalism is engendered that makes many end their slave existence as they began it—by blindly accepting it. Others may understand their trade interests and become trade unionists, yet never possess the key to emancipation—class-consciousness.

One final word on the gigantic waste manifesting itself in a thousand ways. Through their hellish system the masters are compelled to maintain huge fighting forces to conserve their interests. Intetests of rival groups of capitalists clash and war is precipitated, and air, sea and land become the scenes of hideous waste—waste of life and wealth.

Millions have been slaughtered, millions maimed for life. Desolation, ruin, and famine cover the earth. War has created a wilderness of untold waste.

Workers, the one remedy that lies in your hands is Socialism. Organise for the establishment of that system in order that human energy and ability shall no longer be run to waste, in order, instead, that you may reap the fruits of your labours and peace and prosperity be yours. So shall you become masters of your own destiny ; so shall man come into his own and realise his infinite capacity to make this globe worth living on ; so shall be established, as never before, happiness and liberty for the multitudes of all nations, founded upon the wealth that flows like water from their concerted efforts.

“Isn’t this worth fighting for” think you?

G.

The changing world of children (1977)

From the December 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Thirteen million of the population of Britain are under 15 years old. When Socialism is established, that quarter of the population will cease to be financial dependants and will be owners of the means of living like everyone else. Questions about education and upbringing in Socialism frequently assume that children are still to be at the disposal of adults and will have arrangements made for them. It may not be like that.

The idea of childhood itself has altered repeatedly in different social phases. “Infancy”, which now refers to very young children, formerly meant the entire pre-adult period of life; the word is still used with this meaning in law. Adolescence was a legal division in ancient Rome, covering the period from puberty (14 for males, 12 for females) to the male majority at 25. Only in the 20th century, however, has it come to mean a physical and psychological development between childhood and adulthood. In the Middle Ages and the early capitalist era such a stage was virtually unrecognized: they were children, then they were adults.

Thus, in Tudor times upper-class boys matriculated and were sent away to universities at thirteen or fourteen. The law permitted the marriage of boys at fourteen and girls at twelve. Shakespeare’s Juliet was thirteen, and a character says early in the play: “Younger than she are happy mothers made.” Children of what are now called tender years were flogged; the Verney Memoirs has a letter expressing concern for a delicate three-year-old—“Let me beg of you and his mother that nobody whip him but Mr. Parrye”. In the working class, Defoe noted with approval in the early 18th century that children of four and five all over Britain earned their livings.

Childhood is a physiological condition, but its duration and what is expected of it are social decisions. The question “What is man?” needs a rider: “What is child?”

Work and School

The first moves to control child labour in factories, and thereby create a new conception of childhood, were made by “enlightened” members of the capitalist class during the Napoleonic Wars. One of them was Sir Robert Peel, the father of the Tory Prime Minister. G. M. Trevelyan in his English Social History indicates the nature of this enlightenment: “No doubt the good Sir Robert, who himself employed 15,000 hands, was in part anxious to restrain the unfair competition of his more unscrupulous rivals.”

At the same time, economists argued the need to withhold children from work and send them to school. Adam Smith put forward a scheme for parish schools which would provide the basis of economic activity and progress. Ricardo and Malthus both favoured education as a means of inculcating habits which would lead to family limitation, and therefore an increase in economic well-being. An anonymous pamphlet of 1856 called The Education of the Masses, Can it be Accomplished? talked more specifically of making labour-power “a much better and more trustworthy article than has hitherto been furnished”. In introducing the Elementary Education Act of 1870 W. E. Forster said: “Upon the speedy provision of elementary education depends our national prosperity.”

Childhood was defined by developed capitalism as from birth to twelve, then fourteen and after; during this time the value of labour-power would be formed and the child purposefully conditioned. Adolescence appeared as the period between that childhood and marriage, which was now delayed several years. Alongside these changes, the spread of scientific ideas and of modern popular culture installed fresh images of childhood. The decline of the social importance of the family in this century has weakened former prejudices and sanctions; in general, children today are better cared for and less restricted than ever before. Yet, as with the majority of society, the result is frustration because means and conditions are absent.

Moulding

The often-quoted claim of a Jesuit that a child raised by him up to seven years old would be his for life has been responsible for a lot of muddled thinking about upbringing and its effects. Much of what small children learn is the acquiring by imitation of social techniques. Getting food, conversation, movement, etc., are absorbed almost unwittingly from the circles in which they live. “They are very often ignorant of the possibilities of any other sort of behaviour; and the process of learning is probably as nearly effortless as any which can be studied.” (C. M. Fleming, The Social Psychology of Education.)

Responses are also learned this way: how to win admiration and to get one’s own way. This leads to the identification of learning in children with “socialization”, or conditioning them to perform as those in charge desire—the modern version of the Jesuit theory. Fortunately, it does not work. To connect the upbringing of children with the class struggle may seem far-fetched, but this is the operative factor. While their “nature” as children is laid down by and to suit the needs of capitalism, it conflicts with the notions of self- and group-interest formed in a working-class environment. The size of the gap is shown by the numerous attempts at supplementary conditioning made through youth organizations—which in turn fail, for the same reason.

Earnest radicals have often tried to oppose the “socialization” of capitalism with alternative theories of upbringing and youth organizations which try to impose a different point of view. In the nineteen- twenties and -thirties a “Left Scout Movement” was attempted called first Kibbo Kift and then the Woodcraft Folk. The founder of the latter organization, Leslie Paul, wrote later: “Despite the socialist dressing we gave to everything, and believed we believed in, every kind of future reform or revolution paled beside our concern for the content of the actual life we were living at that moment.” (Angry Young Man, 1951.) That is precisely it. For children, the proposed indoctrination is a disposable surface item; the activity, learning by doing, is what adds to the development of reasoning powers.

Games people play

Children learn rôles. Childhood itself is a rôle; if it is deemed to continue to, say, fourteen or fifteen a boy or girl will act younger at that age than if he or she is named an adolescent or an adult. The rôles are what society expects and therefore makes known to children, and their carrying-out is part of social technique.

In the last thirty years the male and female rdles practised and accepted throughout capitalism have altered. The long hair inaugurated by pop groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stone., at the beginning of the nineteen-sixties was a sign of rejection of established masculine looks, while girls took to male trousers. Established ideas of distinct characteristic behaviour of the sexes have blurred; women make sexual demands on men, instead of the opposite. When co-education in state schools was spreading in the ’fifties it was often said to have the effect of making boys womanish, but that is no longer heard.

Previously there was no problem. Boys were conditioned from their earliest consciousness to be virile (“Be a big boy, now’’) and girls feminine. The classic toy for girls, held to be a demonstration in itself that the differences in behaviour were inborn, was a doll. However, in the last ten years one of the most popular boys’ toys has been the “action man’’, which is simply a male doll with changeable clothes. Insofar as children learn male and female rôles from what they see round them—mother doing housework and cooking, father going out to his job—the difference remains. But it is also clear that this is not destiny but a social arrangement; and the old version of it cannot be inculcated in the future.

Besides observation and instruction, children learn by play. This fact was taken up by educationalists a generation ago in "the play way”, trying to adapt play to be a means of conditioning. On the other side, before the 1914-18 war an American named Stanley Hall produced the “recapitulation” theory of play; it argued that children re-enacted the stages of man’s development—gathering, hunting, tribal wars, even (in “swapping”) the growth of commerce. Play ranges from simple imitation to the acting of fantasies, and the need for it is not confined to children. Social convention and the work-ethic say that it should be, with the result that adult occupations such as acting and professional sports are commonly regarded as evading work. Living in capitalism, we see man estranged from himself.

Something new

Again in common with adults, children need stability and affection. In memoirs of the Oneida Community (My Father's House, published in 1937) Pierrepont Noyes related how the elders of the community censured the showing of affection on the grounds that it denoted possessiveness; and the stress this put on the persons he knew. Individuals who are handicapped in this way can and do have problems ot relationships with the rest of society, which often emerge as delinquency.

However, underlying individual relationships is the structure of society as a whole. The parent-child relationship expresses material circumstances, laws and social concepts that arise from or are linked with wage-labour and capital. The protectiveness of parents is a mixture of affection with the knowledge that in the capitalist world the pursuit of a natural impulse, or a misjudgement, can be punished in the all-important material sense. This in itself makes the child a subject instead of an individual; the parent says "Do as you’re told, or it will be the worse for you” because that is how a class society operates.

Certainly, in any society children must learn. Rather than ask how it will be arranged in Socialism, it can be pointed out that capitalism prevents them learning now. Children will learn through their own activity, play and curiosity; the “problem” of literacy in capitalist society is for governments to try to instil it while keeping the social factors which obstruct it. The best-known of “progressive” educationists, A. S. Neill, insisted that children learn when and because they want to, but Neill was unable to operate his principles within the general education system of capitalism.

We look forward to the emergence of socialist man, the fulfilment of the capacities which are stifled and distorted in capitalist society. Socialist child should not be overlooked; equally, he and she will be an altogether different creature.

Robert Barltrop