Various journals—the Times Educational Supplement and The Guardian among them—have affected some surprise at findings recently published by National Opinion Polls following their enquiry into teachers’ opinions and practices concerning such matters as “pupil power”, corporal punishment, school prayers, housing, private interests, and so on.
It is clear from the results that teachers, by and large, continue to take a very conventional view of these and other related matters.
Quite apart from the chimera of “pupil” or “parent power” (what exactly does this mean within the context of capitalist society?) and ignoring the sheer irrelevance of badminton as a game much favoured by teachers, one may well ask what is so surprising about this “discovery”?
So 75 per cent. of teachers want school prayers. Well, so (almost certainly) do most parents. A majority of teachers wish to retain the grammar schools. Again, so did (and still do) many of the British public: always provided, of course, that their children were enabled to attend them. 72 per cent. of teachers wish to retain the power to cane. Well, go and ask “the man in the street”. If you pursue the matter with him you may well be informed that he believes in bringing back the birch, too, to say nothing of capital punishment.
An so the list goes on. The publicity given to such noisy leftist minority groupings as “Rank and File” (the black sheep of the National Union of Teachers), the nonsense talked about “pupil governors”, and the emergence of pupils’ unions, have had the dual effect of deluding the innocent and giving the more astute of capitalism’s apologists the excuse to strangle at birth any signs of independent thinking among teachers, pupils or parents. By way of justification, all they have to do is to point to “dangerous revolutionaries in the classroom”—great stuff for the gutter press, needless to add.
To a socialist, particularly if he happens to be inside the education system, it must come as no surprise at all to learn that in these as in most other matters the teachers are, in reality, no different from other members of the working class. After all, they are just as much a part of the capitalist system as any other section. Which means, of course, that they are just as vulnerable to an uncritical acceptance of capitalism’s mores together with its repressions and its coercive discipline.
NOP’s horse never really ran. The most that can be claimed for the whole exercise is that it may have helped some to understand how capitalism first creates and then exploits its Aunt Sallys.
R.W.C.
Blogger's Note:
One can never be 100% sure about these things but I believe that 'R.W.C.' was the regular Socialist Standard writer, Richard Cooper, Why he opted for just using his initials for this particular article, I do not know but he would regularly write on the subject of education — he was a teacher — in the pages of the Socialist Standard.
For more background on Cooper, he wrote an entertaining article in the August 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard on 'Becoming a socialist'.
