Violence at School: Contradictions in the classroom (2003)

From the September 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Every ruling class has a two-faced attitude to violence. When the members of a ruling class think their interests require it, they will use violence of a most extreme kind, dealing out death and injuries to “enemy” soldiers and civilians, and destruction to “enemy” cities. The American and British invasion of Iraq is a recent example. In its own territory, however, a ruling class will often aim at preventing physical violence. The more non-violent its own home society is, the fewer interruptions there will be to the steady production of surplus value for the ruling class – the more peaceful will be the labours of the waged and salaried workers for the benefit of the owning class.

Children, of course, learn much more from example (when they see how adults behave) than precept (when adults tell children how to behave). So they will probably grow up to be more docile workers in capitalism’s factories and offices if they are not beaten at home or school. That, at any rate, is how the British ruling class sees it, and thus there has been a “statutory ban on the infliction of corporal punishment in schools” (Times, 18 December 2002).

Shortly afterwards the same Government which had kindly stopped teachers hitting children joined with America to attack Iraq, with the result that some thousands of adults, and children, were killed or badly injured: like Ali Abbas, the boy whose family was killed, while he was left with many burns and no arms. It is also the same Government that locks up families who have come here without official permission – such as the Kurdish Ay family, a mother and four children, who were kept imprisoned for over a year before being forcibly sent out of the country (Independent on Sunday, 22 June, Times 15 August). (The father of the family, sent back to Turkey despite Turkey’s repression of the Kurds, has not been heard of since.)

 

The banning of corporal punishment didn’t please everybody. Some devout Christians felt that the Act took away their religious freedom. A number of “independent schools providing a Christian education based on biblical observance” (Times, 18 December 2002), supported by parents of children at the schools, went to court to establish their right to continue beating their pupils. They argued that the law took away their religious liberty to hit children, and so broke the European Convention on Human Rights, which established that “everyone has the right to freedom of . . . religion”. (Why shouldn’t children claim to belong to a religion that outlaws physical violence? And shouldn’t their right not to be hit take precedence over adults’ “rights” to hit them?) The schools asserted that “physical discipline” was “an integral part of the teaching and education of their children, whether in school or in the home”, and “citations from the Book of Proverbs were provided in support of the claimants’ beliefs, those being regarded as biblical precepts”. The Court of Appeal rejected these arguments, so the Christian schoolteachers will sadly not be able to thump their scholars. They won’t be able to bring back the days the present writer can recall – when the Scripture teacher lost his temper with a boy who could not remember the next verse in the Bible passage the class was supposed to memorize, and attempted to knock it into his pupil physically – “The next verse, you blockhead, is ‘God is love’!”, whack! “God is love!” whack! – and so on.

But of course teachers are in many ways the first line of capitalism’s propaganda army: at least they are the first organized part of that army that many of us come across. So they cannot avoid the many inconsistencies and contradictions which are inherent in capitalist propaganda. I remember standing in the school playground in the thirties, in the rain, facing the flag on Empire Day, while the headteacher explained to us how lucky the other countries in the British Empire were that Britain was ruling over them. Then, when the war broke out in 1939, the head explained that we had to go to war to prevent one country ruling over other countries. What was very good when “we” did it was all wrong when others did it.

At the same time the teachers (although they would have indignantly refused to accept that they were part of “the working class”), were – as workers – under the constant strain of having to produce results in order to justify their salaries. One “Assembly”, at the beginning of morning school, when we had a religious service, as required by law, ended with the headmaster praying piously “And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us . . . Amen”. Then his face became red with anger, and he shouted – “I saw some boys out of my window yesterday playing round my car, and they deliberately scratched it! Who was it? Who was it? I’ll get them!” When the miserable miscreants had been terrorized into owning up, they were sent to the head’s study to be caned immediately after Assembly, and the head clearly had no idea that there was any discrepancy between praying “as we forgive them that trespass against us”, in theory, and his rampant desire for revenge, in practice.

It is strange that it is only the more vulnerable members of the human race, children, who are supposed to gain from being beaten. Why did not these Christian schools claim that the headmaster could beat the house-masters, and the house-masters beat the ordinary teachers? Or why shouldn’t all the teachers beat the parents who haven’t paid their bills on time? It is quite true that texts from the Book of Proverbs advocate the beating of children, but there is no reason to stop there. If these Christian schools insist on following biblical instructions, why don’t they insist on their right to execute from time to time some unfortunate eccentric old woman, on the ground that the Bible (Book of Exodus, chapter 22, verse 18) says “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”? Not to mention another half-dozen denunciations of witches and witchcraft in the Bible. And don’t say there aren’t any witches: how could the Bible mention witches, and lay down what ought to happen to them, if there weren’t any?

Alwyn Edgar

Right of assembly? (1990)

A Short Story from the August 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

My old schools, like most of their kind, indulged in daily, compulsory religious indoctrination. This went by the harmless sounding name of assembly.

All children know that adults are capable of mistaken ideas and most children learn at an early age how adults use “little white lies" to manipulate and deceive, but the experience of assembly soon revealed to me their capacity for downright malicious brain-washing.

Through junior school and the early years of “comprehensive" silent, questioning submission seemed the only possible course.

Let us pray—What's in a few meaningless words?

Let us sing—What's in a song? 

Let us believe—I can lie with the best of them.

Adolescence made me restless. The pedagogues had been exposed: their lies wouldn't wash anymore.

The fourth year meant elevation to the Upper school. Assembly remained the same except in one respect. Protest was introduced in the form of a tall sixth form student with a huge mop of fair hair that made him stand out in any crowd.

Let us pray—We all bowed—The mop straightened his back and stared straight ahead.

Let us sing—We all hid behind our hymn books—The mop' stared straight ahead.

Let us believe—We are pretended— The mop seemed to say "just you try and make me".

Inevitably, I soon adopted this blatant, but silent protest: perhaps because it seemed to best fit in with my sentiments: perhaps because its honesty appealed to me: perhaps because the mop was my brother.

By the fifth fom this protest had become a matter of daily routine. Besides I enjoyed the disapproval on the teachers' faces. However in that year a pupil we called Spud developed a protest that put my own to shame.

His protest was simple, but brilliant. The idea was to take raucous sarcasm to the limit that the teachers would accept.

Let us pray—Spud shouted out those meaningless words.

Let us sing—Spud sang out of tune for all to hear.

Let us believe—Spud seemed to say "I can be just as ridiculous as you".

Spud's subtle protest was effective. By provoking laughter (in pupils and teachers alike) he demonstrated the absurdity of school assemblies to many more people than silent defiance ever could.

JN

Letters: Education? Education? Education? (2006)

Letters to the Editors from the February 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Education? Education? Education?

Dear Editors,

Rarely does a newscast pass without mention of education. New initiatives are released like frantic hounds hunting down a headline. Examinations are or are not more stringent than ever they were. Primary school leavers enter secondary functionally illiterate and/or innumerate. Eight years on from being elected promising to solve all educational conundrums, the Labour government flounders on. Recently its education ministers turned on their own enforcers OFSTED for giving good reports on schools that subsequently appeared in the relegation zone of the league tables. If ever there was a paradigm of capitalism it is education.

 

When state education was established towards the end of the 19th century rote learning, lots of copying and well marshalled callisthenics was the rule. This reflected industrial processes for which those children were being prepared. Today the direct influence of capitalism is to be seen in the managerial approach; the setting and measuring of targets, a tightly controlled and prescriptive national curriculum, all inspected by the pedagogic commissars of OFSTED.

What is not considered, despite much rhetoric to the contrary, is that each child is an individual, ironic for a system that lauds individualism. In truth there is a continuum of ability in any area, not some crass equality that can be state imposed. Socialists have no difficulty with the concept of from each according to ability, an obvious recognition of difference, to each according to need, a guarantee no one can suffer or prosper due to congenital factors. Of course capitalism cannot act on this basis. The absolute need to produce for profit requires a trained workforce, why else make school attendance a legal requirement, pupils being the only members of our society forced by law into an institution without being convicted in court. Education becomes associated with a punitive regime rather than a wide variety of ways everyone, whatever their innate abilities, could enhance their lives.

At the end of the 19th century school boards were concerned about levels of truancy and poor achievement. Their answer? Industrial schools where a more vocational approach could appeal to those who were not so academic. Little changes really and cannot, until people accept that education will only be transformed along with society in general. Abolish capitalism and promote the co-operative, moneyless and worldwide common ownership that is socialism. And only then will the economic and social deprivation that is such a negative influence on so many children’s lives be done away with. Only then will education be determined by those who want to be educated, instead of it being subjected to the pet nostrums and egos of politicians.

Dave Alton, 

Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

Defeatist?

Dear Editors,

I agree with most of what Adam Buick writes in “Capitalism and the quality of life” (January Socialist Standard). Just a couple of supplementary points. He mentions Lefebvre’s A Critique of Everyday Life and Debord’s Society of the Spectacle as good on criticising commodity culture. I think socialists will find any of Andre Gorz’s books better value on that subject.

The other point is what, if anything, we can do about the spread of money-commodity relations into all aspects of life. The article says “There’s nothing that can be done to stop this within the context of capitalism …” Unduly pessimistic and defeatist, I think. We can protest at every manifestation of capitalist culture we come across.

 

I remember about 30 years ago being invited to a teachers’ union meeting in California. Just before the interval the chairperson introduced a guy who promptly started to sell insurance. I was amazed and voiced my displeasure. They all looked sheepish, but nobody said anything. I’m not saying the revolution took a step forward that day. But if a few hundred, then a few thousand, then a million of us publicly declare our opposition to capitalism…

Stan Parker (by-email)

Totalitarian

Dear Editors,

In assessing Bukharin (December Socialist Standard) we must be aware he belonged to the totalitarian Bolshevik Party. He supported the Bolsheviks’ forcible dissolution of the Constituent Assembly when electors placed them in a minority. Bukharin supported the erosion of workers’ rights and use of terror against political opponents, whether right or left, including the bloody suppression by Trotsky of the Kronstadt Rebellion which was not led by right wing people, but by Socialists. The workers in Russia enjoyed less rights and freedom than the capitalist West. Bukharin was in this so-called Marxist government. The SPGB rightly calls it state capitalist. The Socialist Party existed in Britain whereas in Russia people of similar views were in labour camps or executed.

Andrew Harvey,

 Carlisle

Russia and capitalism

Dear Editors,

In the article on the First Russian Revolution of 1905 (Socialist Standard, December) you conclude that one of the many lessons to be learnt from that event is that “any worthwhile progress in human society must come, and can only come, from the working class”, and “relying on our rulers to initiate worthwhile change is as useless as the Russian peasants’ reliance on the Tsar.”

This is an unusual argument for a Marxist to make because all Russian (and other) Marxists regarded capitalism as a progressive force notwithstanding the fact that capitalism was introduced into Russia as a direct result of state policy, on the initiative of rulers – from Alexander II’s reforms in the 1860s, to Witte’s industrialisation program in the 1890s and Stolypin’s agrarian reform of 1906.

More surprising is the fact that you fail to mention the one institution in 1905 which was wholly and spontaneously a creation of the Russian working class.  This was the soviet or workers’ council.  Despite its relatively brief life, the Petersburg Soviet in 1905 assumed the character of an organised revolutionary authority and a rival power of government.  From that experience Lenin drew the conclusion that the dynamic power of the soviets, under the direction of a group of professional revolutionaries, could be harnessed to bring about a revolution which would change society from top to bottom and ultimately lead to socialism (subject to the victory of socialist revolutions elsewhere in Europe). 

In October 1917 Lenin’s political tactics succeeded when he wrested power from the Provisional Government and, ultimately, from the soviets themselves.  The voluntaristic strain in Marxism represented by Lenin and the Bolsheviks triumphed over the deterministic (and orthodox) strain represented by Martov and the Mensheviks.

Yet you suggest that the main lesson of 1905 is that “no force can cut short the natural development of society until it is ready for change”.  Do you believe that the Bolsheviks were not such a force?  And if not, what sort of “natural development” are you talking about?

Peter Bryant, 

Sydney, Australia

Reply: 

We were alluding to the development of capitalism in Russia, which the Bolsheviks were unable to avoid. In fact, they became its agents – Editors.

Questioning everything

Dear Editors,

Your reaction to my letter in the December issue when I said that I restrict my buying to essentials, was very guarded. That was a correct view to take for as I point out in my booklet Question Everything, (available without charge from me at 51 Newton Road, Bath BA2 1RW), one should accept nothing without asking what are its implications and whose interests are involved.

You point out that if it caught on employers would be able to pay us less, but they always do so anyway in order to cut costs. What they never see is that if workers have less they can only buy less. Employers see things from their own short term point of view, condemning the unemployed as layabouts and a drain on public funds until they want government support, when one reason they give for having it is to alleviate the suffering of those same unemployed.

The simple fact remains that capitalism needs that we keep buying and when I heard that  the economy was slowing I thought that socialists would want to help it to do so further so that capitalism can give way to one that was more efficient.

No system based on the competitive greed, selfishness, aggression and conflicting interests of money can be more than marginally efficient, and in this scientific and technological age in which we can produce anything that we want and send it anywhere in the world without being impeded, distracted and negated by increasing multitudes of financial complexities, the money system has become superfluous, an impediment to everything that we try to do.

Only a moneyless society could be fully efficient .

We need to differentiate between people and societies, between capitalists and capitalism,  to stop defeating our objectives by making enemies. We all are humans conditioned by and conforming to our genetic and environmental inheritance so that no one, whether fat cat or beggar can be criticised or blamed for what they are or do. We can advance that inheritance only by developing intellect and reason.

Melvin Chapman, 

Bath

Letter: Turkish nationalists? (2021)

Letter to the Editors from the February 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

I have to say that I am absolutely shocked to have come across a piece that subtly spouts Turkish ultra-nationalism in the magazine. I have always thought highly about this magazine but cannot comprehend how the piece ‘Candle in the Wind’ made it to the January edition? Really, how did that happen?

The author, of whom I have no prior knowledge, calls the founding father of the Turkish nation-state republic Ataturk a ‘democrat’, while Ataturk is held responsible for ethnic cleansing by millions of Kurds and other non-Turks in Turkey!

The history he has tried to ‘shed light on’ from a candle, and through which he makes his subtle dark propaganda is also inaccurate. There is no mention of brainwashing of the peasantry to the state’s imposed notions of ‘one nation, one flag and one language’, which led to massacres, we are talking massacre of civilian Kurds, Alevis and others. It was also the preparation of the new generation for massacres at the orders of the military generals in charge of a state, which outright denied the existence of tens of millions of other ethnic and religious communities in the country.

The author shamelessly declares that ‘the dream of Ataturk, Ismail Hakki Tonguc, Mahmut Nakal and many others of a secular education, based on the foundations of inquiry, science and rationality that is free and democratic …’ Any socialist with a slightest understanding of modern Turkey’s treatment of its workers and peasantry, and the tens of millions of non-Turks, would vomit after reading such lines of subjective propaganda beating the drums of Turkish republican nationalism, which seem to come from a Kemalist fascist apologist rather than ignorance.

Also, what the hell is with the Turkish flag printed with this piece in the magazine, why the hell is that there when the first line clearly states Turkey, Turkish, and Ataturk the father of the nation. And don’t sell me any insight into journalistic techniques of illustration which rejects displaying of flags even by its basic liberal standards.

The piece written under the guise of ‘enlightenment’ is an insult added to the injury of millions of non-Turkish workers and peasants, those whose memories of childhood haunts them to this day for they were forced to stand in line at school yards each day to shout out Ataturk’s slogan: ‘Happy is he who says I am a Turk’. That motto is to this day imposed at schools on Kurdish children across the country whose right to education in their mother tongue is suppressed with the Turkish state’s barrels of guns, drones and other weaponry.

I really did not expect this garbage, I am still shocked. Still can’t believe that the Trojan horse of racist Turkish ultra-nationalism has reached this party too. Unbelievable! I hope to see a report in the magazine to make it clear that the party does not share the view that Ataturk and other butchers in his circle were Turkish ‘democrats’ as the author of that piece had declared.

Aram Chya

The Writer Replies:

Reading this ‘critique’ of my article both surprised and shocked me. That anyone could find the story of an attempt to raise a population out of ignorance with a secular, rational, science-based education to be so contentious and nationalistic is puzzling. Being cast as a ‘subtle, dark propagandist’ for Turkish nationalism is lost on me, I’m afraid.

Kemal Ataturk

The use of certain words, in this case ‘Turk’, Turkish’, ‘Ataturk’, etc are always going to trigger an angry, out-of-context response from some corner or other. It is, perhaps, to be expected on social media but here, amongst the thoughtful readers of the Socialist Standard, less so. The context of the Village Institutes is a brief period of approx. 10-12 years in the history of the Turkish Republic.

This is indeed a story of a ‘Candle In The Wind’ – a system of education so radical, so egalitarian, so anti-elitist that the nationalists, the religious conservatives and privileged elites, joined together to destroy this model and those visionaries behind it before it destroyed them. Many of the educationalist visionaries along with many students were persecuted, imprisoned, exiled or fled – their reputations and lives in tatters.

Three minor points: (1) the flag is something that the editorial team should address [The Turkish flag was indeed just an illustration with no intended political significance; as far as we are concerned, all national flags are just rags on the end of a pole – Editors]; (2) the article was not addressing the current state of education or politics in Turkey; (3) nowhere did the article claim that Ataturk was a democrat.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain does not need to make any apologist statement – its position on nationalism has been clearly stated and is freely available. Socialism is about people and how they collectively choose to manage their affairs and the resources of the planet. No nation states, no money – from each according to ability, to each according to need.

I respectfully ask our correspondent to reread the article, if necessary substitute other names or another country and try to see it for what it is. In a world filled with bigotry, racism, nationalism, war and suffering we need ‘candles’ and we need candleholders – people who embrace other people and cultures.

Alan Fenn

Candles In The Wind (2021)

From the January 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the book about my village here in Turkey, ‘Okçular Village – a Guide’ that I wrote a few years ago, there is a section where our Yaşlı Çınarlar, literally ‘Old Plane Trees’ (a local term of affection for our more senior villagers), tell their stories. As one, Şevket Akgün, related his tale he recalled the following: ‘The local education manager then was İzzet Akgül and he said to me, “Şevket, you’re a hardworking student, I’m going to send you to the village institute’’ and I went in 1941 to Kızılçullu for 5 years, winter and summer to study. In the winters we studied, in the summers we learned trades like carpentry, construction, blacksmithing. I graduated in 1946 and in September at 15 years old, I started teaching at Okçular. However, there was no school then’.

The term ‘village institutes’ was intriguing – what were they? Over the years I have slowly and not very diligently gathered photographs, together with a little background and history. It is a fascinating and compelling story of vision, social engineering, personal achievement and commitment to an ideal that, within two decades, would have so ruffled the feathers of the establishment that they felt compelled to snuff out the very concept and to discredit the visionary, guiding lights of the movement.

Right from the foundation of the Turkish Republic, Atatürk recognised that to build a modern, secular society those he described as the ‘true owners’, the villagers, could become the nation’s greatest asset but only if the ‘light of education’ could be passed to them.

By 1935 the process of ‘enlightenment’ was at a standstill with just 5,400 out of 40,000 villages having primary schools. So it was that Atatürk gave his blessing to a scheme that would take the best and brightest of village children, boys and girls, give them the benefits of an additional, broadly based education (initially for six months but expanded in 1940) for a further five years and then have them return to the villages as teachers. The project was passed to İsmail Hakkı Tonguç, an educational visionary, and the Köy Enstitütleri – Village Institutes were born into a world that most of us reading this can scarcely imagine!

The Anatolia of this time had progressed little away from urban centres – electricity, roads and sanitation were virtually unknown. Within the villages literacy was of little value as newspapers were few and far between and radios unheard of. Medical services were unknown or scorned in favour of local folk remedies. In years of drought or semi-drought, when combined with the bitterly cold, harsh winters of Anatolia infant mortality could run at 30-50 percent of those under 1 year old. The lack of education spawned generation after generation of fatalistic, religiously myopic, compliant villagers who were open to exploitation by corrupt bureaucrats and rogues. Village life was unchanged and unchanging with those showing any spark of intellect discouraged and suppressed under the yoke of drudgery and the fight to survive from one year to the next.

Out of this darkness the Village Institutes gathered together the best and brightest and began an educational process that would transform the perceptions of these students in a way that is difficult to imagine. In addition to the 3Rs the curriculum included history, geography, science, philosophy, practical engineering, welding, sewing skills, tailoring/dressmaking, dance, drama, carpentry, hygiene, animal husbandry, agricultural science, forestry and music. Sport was also encouraged and practised – the list goes on. Not only was the curriculum wide-ranging it was also avowedly secular and directed towards the awakening of social awareness to the injustices and inequalities that comprised the lot of most villagers because of their ignorance and dire circumstances.

The compassion and desire for change of those who supported and directed the village institutes can be read into every line of this letter sent by Hayri Çakaloz, director of the Ortaklar Village Institute to all newly accepted students:

‘My dear son/daughter,

You have successfully passed the admission examination and so have qualified to become a student at our Institute. As I congratulate you for this honourable achievement, I am happy to inform you that our Institute family of more than 400 students awaits you with open arms. I kiss you on your eyes.

After receiving this letter, please make the following preparations: Get a closely cropped haircut. Wash your hands, feet and entire body as best you can. If your clothes are dirty, please have your mother wash and mend them.’

I can’t speak for you, but these kindly and practical words leave me deeply moved. Other directors recall newly admitted students arriving in torn and patched clothing or rags; many came barefoot; some with bellies swollen from malnutrition; most with tooth cavities and few had ever seen a toilet. What did arrive with them was a narrow, village mind-set: ‘For these children, life was all about cultivating the field, owning a pair of oxen, getting married, worshipping God and preparing for Paradise. Their recruitment into the Institute shook this vision to its very core’.

Each of the eventual 21 Institutes were expected to become self-sufficient; to this end, as new establishments were authorised, the students and staff would be involved in the building process. As time went on they became the ‘sole contractors’ and did it all themselves.

One day, director of Kızılçullu Institute (where Şevket Akgün studied), Hamdi Akman, asked his newly graduated students if they were willing to help construct a new institute at Ortaklar before taking up their teaching posts. Their response was unanimous and next day 200 male and 45 female graduates set off for the railway station with blankets over their shoulders.

These young men and women had been taught that they were to act not merely as school teachers but as general missionaries of scientific enlightenment and progress – a task that the Institutes had inadequately prepared them for and the social problems they faced would often lead to disillusionment. The spartan regime and relatively remote positioning of the Village Institutes was to prevent the young students from losing all connection with their previous existence and thus becoming unwilling or unable to settle back in the villages. But the result of this system was to teach them about a way of life very different from their own village upbringing, without giving them any first-hand experience of it. They were aware of ideals and values which made some of them despise or despair of the collective ignorance of the villagers, and yet, at the same time, they could have few realistic notions about urban life or about the possibilities of village reform – still less about Western society.

Young teachers were still members of the village and yet they had lost intimate contact through five years of almost continuous schooling. Their new ways and ideas created tensions and a social barrier between them and the village, they came to symbolise the hostile, ‘outside’. They were of the village and yet not of it. (When Şevket Akgün arrived back in our village, assigned as its first teacher, he was 15 years old.)

These teachers faced a dilemma. Either they took their modernising mission seriously, caused offence and faced isolation, or they tried to lead a normal social life, yielding to the conservative pressures of the village community, and living as much like a traditional villager as the job of actually teaching the children allowed. Their difficulties are graphically portrayed by one of them, Mahmut Makal, who wrote a series of books, the first of which, Bizim Köy (published in 1950 and translated as ‘A Village In Anatolia’ when he was just 19 years old) remains Turkey’s best-selling book ever. It is a testament to the abject poverty suffered by many Anatolian villagers in the middle of the 20th century. It is also a testament to the subversive power of education; for once people realise that they are being exploited by others, that poverty and destitution are not the ‘will of Allah/God’, and that there is no reward in the next life, then they are very likely to turn and bite the hand or arse of their exploiters. Mahmut Makal was part of a group that became known as the Village Institute Authors who shocked and dismayed the elite establishment and the conservatively religious alike. Radicalised by educational enlightenment and the desperate poverty of village life, it was not surprising that progressive political ideas caught on.

Alarm bells rang within the establishment and an unlikely alliance between the religious conservatives who hated the secular co-educational teaching and the political and business elite who hated the idea of educated peasants capable of answering back and defending their rights joined to become a formidable reactionary force. The Institutes and those who advocated them were branded as communists in the age of virulent anti-communism, their reputations were smeared and they faced harassment, suspension and imprisonment. Even that great visionary, İsmail Hakkı Tonguç, was hounded out in 1953 and in 1954 the Village Institutes, one of the greatest experiments in modern education and social engineering, were no more.

The dream of Atatürk, İsmail Hakkı Tonguç, Mahmut Makal and many others of a secular education, based on the foundations of inquiry, science and rationality that is free and democratic has not been totally suppressed. There now exists Çağdaş Eğitim Vakfı (Contemporary Education Foundation) established in 1994 that promotes many of the same values from which the Village Institutes evolved.

Marx understood clearly that real revolution (as opposed to bloody revolution) takes place in the minds of men and women when they become truly educated and truly understand the state of the world in which we all live. Men and women struggling to feed their bellies are in no condition to feed their minds, much less struggle to improve the condition of their lives. The threat that an educated population represents to the ruling elite has clearly been recognised by the powers-that-be. Throughout the ‘developed’ Western world governments are in the process of dumbing down the general population, restricting access to quality education by under investment in the state system and a pricing policy that divides the ‘haves’ from the ‘have nots’.

When we compare the potential contribution of an uneducated Mahmut Makal, and countless others like him around the world, with his concrete achievements after his ‘enlightenment’, we could argue that denial of education is a crime of such enormity that is almost on a par with genocide. Condemning human beings, every one of whom has potential beyond their imagination, to life imprisonment in a cell of ignorance for the misfortune of being born on the ‘wrong’ side of the tracks is a crime against humanity.

Like the proverbial ‘Candles In The Wind’ young minds need to be nurtured and nourished – the symbol of education is a blazing beacon of enlightenment and in the winds of change presently blowing through the world it is beginning to gutter – it needs protecting.

Alan Fenn

Greasy Pole: Caning the teachers (2000)

The Greasy Pole column from the April 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

David Blunkett is Secretary of State for Education and the author of a crushingly boring autobiography (On A Clear Day). Unless, of course, you like long, trivial stories about his dog upsetting the dignity of some eminent person (“We all enjoyed a good laugh . . .”). Or dollops of self-admiration garnished in mock modesty (“I believe that, at the time, Neil Kinnock thought I had let him down . . . whereas, as he later generously ackowledged . . .”). And the poetry—too embarrassing to repeat in a journal meant for a placid socialist readership. Any teacher who addressed their class as Blunkett does his readers would very soon lose control of the kids.

This is not to say that Blunkett does not sometimes let slip some arousing comment. A recent example was his statement that poverty is not an excuse for a school failing to meet the GCSE pass targets set by the government. “Cynics out there” was how he described anyone who accepts what seem to many people a self-evident fact, namely that “. . . school performance is all about socio-economics and the areas that these schools are located in”. That is another way of saying that only cynics would question whether a school in, say, a run-down part of Hackney should be expected to produce the same level of achievement as Eton or Harrow. It is another way of saying that if a school does fail to meet its targets that must be due to the teachers, who in Hackney are lazy and stodgy while at Eton and Harrow they are industrious and charismatic.

Jack Straw 

We have heard this kind of criticism of workers before. We hear it when companies go broke, or when governments are swamped by an economic crisis. Then we are told that all the problems are due to greedy, short-sighted workers. When the crime statistics are published we are informed that offending is not the blindly despairing act of people who are trapped in the dirt and decay of inner cities or rural slumdom but the behaviour of people who are intrinsically anti-social. When pensioners die of hypothermia they are chided because they have not learned how to keep warm in an unheated home.

Blunkett should have a word with his fellow minister Jack Straw, who was once Labour’s Shadow for Education. In those days Straw did not seem to have any doubts about the cause of struggling schools. At the 1987 Labour conference he told the delegates that ” . . . there is only one culprit responsible for falling standards (in education)—the government which has been in power since 1979″. Two years later he returned to the theme, denouncing “a government that blames teachers for the ills of Thatcherite society” and promising that, far from harrassing them, Labour would “…train teachers better, support them better and, yes, reward teachers better”.

Of course in those days it was safe to make that kind of a speech. Like Straw’s 1987 complaint that “. . . the weakness of the Cabinet’s commitment to public education is shown by the fact that all its ministers have sent their children to private schools” and that as a result of the Tory government’s cuts in spending on education “the morale of the teaching profession has been destroyed”. Well this government’s persistent attacks on teachers have not exactly resuscitated their morale and one reason is that so many Labour leaders, like the Tories before them, have placed their children in private schools.

Results Culture 

For his part, Blunkett has never been been among the wilder animals in the swamps of left-wingery. In July 1987, for example, in an article in the Independent, he claimed that the Thatcher government were stealing Labour policies when they declared war on the “dependency culture”—which did not mean the system which allows the ruling class to live off the exploitation of the workers but the few people whose means were so reduced they relied on state hand outs to survive. The repressive attitudes implied in that article have been all too evident in Blunkett since he was put in charge of the schools, for he has been pre-occupied with the results culture, the obsession with exam results which has millions of neurotic parents scanning the league tables to see how their childrens’ school has done—knowing that head master Blunkett will wreak a terrible revenge if the results are not good enough. There have been other Blunkett policies which have given offence—for example his sturdy championing of the odious Chris Woodhead, the boss of the dreaded OFSTED, when it was revealed that Woodhead’s, er, private life did not live up to the standards his inspectors demand of teachers and pupils.

So it is hardly surprising that Blunkett should feel the need to attack the notion that bad social conditions have an effect on schools just as they do on health, crime, families . . . His evidence for saying that poverty is not an excuse for a failing school is, not surprisingly, supplied by his own Department, who say that schools with low exam results exist in areas other than run down inner cities. So what? The results may be due to a number of factors which are conveniently left unilluminated but Blunkett, in an exercise in logic which would be unacceptable coming from a ten year old pupil, chooses to draw the conclusion which suits his already formed opinion—that teachers are to blame and must be punished, sacked, driven out in revenge.

Watch My Lips . . . 

In any case nobody, least of all the teachers, would argue that the skill and sensitivity with which a subject is taught does not make a difference. The skills of teachers vary, just like the skills of people in other jobs—for example politicians, who can be very clever in the lies they tell and the manner in which they cover up their failures. And then again they can be embarrassingly clumsy. As was Blunkett, when he was on the spot about his policy on schools selection, which is now in such sharp contrast to the statement he made to the Labour Party conference in 1995: “Watch my lips, no selection, either by examination or interview, under a Labour government”. When he was faced with this, Blunkett chose to defend himself with the feeble protest that his 1995 statement was a joke. This may have been more convincing if, as he was receiving the delegates’ rapturous applause, he had said something like “Well wait a second. You know me, always ready for a laugh. That was a joke. When I get into office there will be selection because we’ll be a government which is too scared of the Daily Mail to do otherwise”. This shabby episode brings up the question of what sort of a role model Blunkett is to the teachers he so persistently harasses about their professional standards.

The evidence that conditions outside the schools have a more powerful, eventually decisive, influence is overwhelming. The Guardian of 6 March described a school in Brighton where 45 percent of the pupils conform to the generally accepted measurement of poverty—they have free school meals. Many of them come from families struggling to survive under the stress of long term unemployment, on an estate where life has always been that bit harder. What kind of material do the teachers there have to work with? Unsurprisingly, some of the pupils are on drugs—the police suspect they are working for a drugs syndicate from Scotland. One boy was a male prostitute on the sea-front. A former pupil, 17 years old, was murdered on a rubbish tip next to the school. A pupil was accused of helping in the murder of another pupil’s brother.

The Real World

Of course exceptionally brave, talented teachers might hope to have some effect in that kind of situation. What actually happened , as is to be expected in the real world away from Blunkett’s cruel fantasies, was that the teachers simply collapsed under the strain—like politicians often do, when their failure to control capitalism becomes too obvious. One teacher died, it was thought through a stress related illness; another disappeared. Several developed serious illnesses including two cancers. Others had nervous breakdowns. Because that is how poverty deals with people who are trying to make sense of this society—in their homes, their jobs, their schools. Peter Mortimore, director of London University Institute of Education, put it that “All the work of school improvement professionals shows that schools can make a difference, but they cannot completely overcome the effects of disadvantage.”

And what if we applied the standards which Blunkett imposes on the teachers to people like him—to the political leaders? What if they were to be judged on their failures, their impotence and the deceptions they use to conceal this reality? Should we punish them? Or wouldn’t it be better to close down their organs of power and make them redundant?

Ivan

Capitalism and the Internet (2): The Internet and Ideology (2000)

From the February 2000 of the Socialist Standard

Link 1

  The Internet is being hailed as a saviour by both capitalists and anti-capitalists alike. Rarely has any technology been so universally viewed as a holy grail by sworn mutual enemies. Who is right? Will it destroy capitalism or rejuvenate it?

At the Christopher Columbus school in Union City, New Jersey, a dustbin school with a dropout rate as high as its pass rate was low, an experiment was conducted in 1993. Each student was given a home PC and taught online, with both teacher and parent training to assist. The dropout rate fell to near zero, the daytime attendance rate rose to near perfect, and test scores rose 10 points higher than the NJ state average, in every subject. (http://www.gip.com).

Though schooling is unlikely ever to be entirely online, for social reasons, the possibilities of education in general via the Internet are nevertheless enormous. Traditional education—in real time—relies on too many ingredients being present in the right order, amount and quality. Virtual schools can tailor classes to individuals to a far higher degree of precision. Night school does not have to be at night, or local, or regular, or in one place, or reliant on one teacher. Educators have literally a world of resources to draw upon, while self-educators have the best access to knowledge of any generation that has existed. The establishment of the global knowledge network which we are now seeing has been aptly described by Douglas Rushkoff as “the hard-wiring of the global brain” (Cyberia 1994). Education, once the province of the rich and jealously guarded by them, is being democratised at an unprecedented rate. And ideology cannot change without a change in education.

Education is also about debate, and the lack of a public domain or sphere in which to discuss ideas has been held to be a key factor in late 20th Century ideological stagnation (Habermas, Schneider, Rheingold, quoted in Alinta Thornton’s Masters thesis, University of Sydney, (Link). Now, however, Usenet, the global network of mailing lists and newsgroups, is becoming an organic encyclopaedia and coffee house which permits debate on every issue 24 hours a day. As the Romans had the Forum, so we have Usenet. It is the new theatre in the war of ideologies now heating up. Good ideas will spread there. Bad ones will die there. Usenet is where theorists become activists, and where activists learn their theory. Capitalist ideologues are going to have to work harder in future, for educated populations cannot be fobbed off with fairy tales. They start to expect things their forebears didn’t even imagine. They start to make demands.

The DD Digerati

The first demand is more democracy. Capitalism in its advanced form relies on a model of liberal democracy to get the best out of workers, but it has to take a chance on them asking for too much. Now, governments from Britain to Malaysia to Costa Rica are “enthusiastically” experimenting with virtual council meetings and online voting in an effort to keep abreast of the public expectation of more open government. That this enthusiasm is ambivalent is shown by the fact that many of these same governments are also trying to legislate controls into the Internet—unsuccessfully as it happens. The cybergeek contingent—the “digerati”—are excitedly lyricising about running society with Direct Democracy instead of representative government, which they somewhat naively imagine was a democratic expedient imposed by geographical and other practical limitations.

Astonishing technical advance

Nobody who comprehends the class struggle will believe for an instant that the rich will allow Direct Democracy—except where it can’t do any harm and where it might bore us stupid with trivial decision-making. However, the expectation of more democracy is an important and empowering development nonetheless, for it represents a line of convergence with socialist thinking and away from the leadership mentality which plagues radical thinking. When it becomes loud enough, it will be a sign that the working class is gaining a little self-respect at last.

The second demand is a new agenda. As the organisational ability of “wired” protesters is now increasingly on a par with that of governments, as we saw with J18 and N30 and may see again with Mayday 2000, a new sense of potency seems to be sweeping through the radical mind. We don’t have to take it lying down. Corporations are not invulnerable. Individuals can be held to account. Even an entire social system can be challenged, as disparate and sometimes frankly deluded single-issue activists coalesce under the gravitational pull of common experience into what may yet become an embryonic anti-capitalism movement. Instead of being a passive consumerist mass, we can learn to think of ourselves as a proactive team of individuals. The Internet is creating a climate of new possibilities that cuts away at the dead growth of apathy and spawns a new idea: the network consciousness, a concept of interactive, interlinked human nodes in a vast, decentralised and co-operative process, a foretaste of working class consciousness.

Custodes custodiamus

Schooled however in the old thinking, we might conclude that the state will take over the Internet and use it as a new and terrible weapon of control over the working class. Accepting that they have always won in the past, we can only imagine that they will always win in the future. Is there not now a CCTV camera on every street corner? Do they not have their satellites, listening stations and Cray computers monitoring every move, purchase and phone call we make? Well, they may do, and those dedicated to underground criminal or insurrectionary activities may indeed worry about this, but there is something here for the monitors to worry about too—we can also watch them.

The near-level playing field of the cybersociety means that whatever they can do to us, we can do right back to them. This mutual integrated surveillance is already taking place, as US state governors now find themselves and their domestic affairs interrogated by an international brigade, and the government of Mexico finds its attempts to quietly crush the Zapatistas constantly harried and hamstrung by the unwelcome attention of the global online community. Amateur video of Rodney King helping police with their enquiries started the LA riots, and protesters now typically tool up with camcorders, laptops and mobile phones. Anything one protester discovers, all soon know. Governments, like the burglars they are, hate to work in the spotlight, and now it isn’t only the news media which are directing the beams. This is a game we can all play. Quis custodes custodiat? Answer: we do.

Bomb damage

Much is made of government censorship, and governments can certainly close down any website they don’t like. But only temporarily. Just as the forerunner of the Internet, ARPANET, was devised by the military to route around bomb damage to any node, so the Internet can equally route around censorship damage. Besides, the Net is global, whereas governments are local, and what one government dislikes another will frequently allow or ignore. China, so keen to imprison radical Internet users, is nevertheless in a minority of one where censorship is concerned, and its control of internal information flows is haemorrhaging at a thousand different points.

Monitoring of users worldwide is easily countered by the rapid growth of “anonymiser” sites (e.g. www.anonymiser.com), which strip out your personal details and let you roam without fear of identification. Autocensorship software is notoriously unreliable and it is easily outmanoeuvred. Besides, the rich themselves are not keen on government control. A book called Friendly Spies quotes the IBM office in Paris as having done a set of experiments to demonstrate the fact that the code keys they were required to share with the French government were being used for industrial espionage purposes (quoted in GIP).

It may not be states we have to worry about. The omniscient state may be an obsolescent dinosaur in any case, as capitalism militantly embraces the ‘free’ market and multinationals grow so powerful that “an estimated one quarter of all world trade now consists of sales between subsidiaries of the same firm” (Alvin & Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War, 1993).

  “The flow of information into or out of a nation can no longer be effectively controlled by the state; information is everywhere and accessible. To participate in the burgeoning economic benefits of world commerce means adopting practices that undermine state control . . .” (Carl Builder, Strategy analyst, RAND Corporation).

Riccardo Petrella, a former science and technology director at the European Commission, predicts the collapse of the nation state and the rise of a ‘hi-tech archipelago’ of city-states in conjunction with multinational companies, while Warren Christopher, former US Secretary of State, predicts “5000 countries rather than the hundred-plus we have now” and George Yao, Singapore deputy PM, foresees the disintegration of China into hundreds of city-states. (Quoted in Toffler).

Today, cutting edge; tomorrow, garbage

Were this to occur, it must be a disaster for fascist ideology, since it gives the nationalists just what they think they want, and lets them choke on it. People might fight for the right to be called Basques, Latvians or Chechens, but it is hard to imagine them fighting over Coke or Pepsi in the same way. In any case, war is likely to become increasingly hard to justify when the global working class is just that, global. Much of the hate propaganda necessary to stoke public sympathy for a war will be impossible to foist on an internationalised class which works together, online, every day of the week.

The String Vest of Secrecy

Even secrecy is on the wane in the future, if one believes the former science adviser to President Reagan, G. A. Keyworth. Pointing to the fact that traditional intelligence gathering has been on the monumental scale (the US Government produced 6.3 million classified documents in 1992 alone) and involves a huge industry of chaff sorting and “analysis paralysis”, he says: “The price of protecting information is so high that classification becomes a handicap”. Meanwhile Robert Steele of US Intelligence, a critic of the secrecy industry, says: “The hidden costs of secrecy are so immense they often outweigh the benefits by a wide margin.”

Steele and others argue for an open system, with very little secrecy. It is surprising what is already in the public domain. Larry Seaquist of US Naval Intelligence reports that they get more useful information from one Internet PC than all their private and highly secret SPARC workstations put together. There are already few things which are really secret, even if we might wish they were. An underground nuclear cookbook called Basement Nukes prompts Michael Golay, professor of nuclear engineering at MIT, to say: “What’s classified today is how to build a good weapon, not how to build a weapon.” In a wider sense, the Internet will by its nature militate against the holding of secrets, for risk-free disclosure is a button-press away for any individual and information sharing has long been the accepted mode of transaction online. The global brain, one might say, will steadily illuminate its own dark areas. Capitalist ideology, insofar as it depends on secrecy, is due for a hammering.

Paddy Shannon

(Next month: we continue the discussion of the impact of the Internet on capitalist ideology.)

Link to part 3

GLITCH 

As if to prove that computer technology is not infallible, in Part I of this series the first two paragraphs on page 9 of the January Socialist Standard , were garbled as a result of the unexplained introduction of material from another article. The garbled passage should have read:

Yet talk of “boxes” is itself an obsolescent concept, as Xerox have perfected “e-paper” (Observer, 22 August) and research continues towards wristwatch computers and even brain implants, giving rise to talk of “synthetic telepathy” in the more distant future. And as science revolutionises the Internet, so the Internet is revolutionising science. With the spatial decoupling of the scientist from the task, the so-called “collaboratory” is born, enabling multiple users to share a singe physical resource, enhanced productivity with no travel time, and participation by experimenters in multiple, geographically-distributed projects.

Our apologies to readers and the writers—Editors. 

The poverty of education in Ghana (2000)

From the April 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is a close affinity in Ghana between post-independence politics and the pre-independence era when the political and intellectual African elite were mobilising support from the African masses to overthrow the colonial establishment. Both have been full of promises and rosy dreams of what the future ought to be like.

Elections in Ghana these days, for example, remind one of the politics of agitation by the Nkrumah’s, J. B. Danquah’s and the Houphuet-Boigny’s in the colonial days. Equality, freedom and freedom from poverty and oppression are sonorously proclaimed these days too; and every available propaganda tool is used by parties to discredit other political parties in the bid to win the support of the voting public. But the results of these bitter campaigns have always ended in the same way. As soon as any political party assumes the mantle of office, the ideas that it used to politicise the masses to propel it to power becomes a fetter on the purpose of the leadership of the party. The demands for equality and freedom from poverty, and the vitriolic criticisms launched against the oppressive economic policies of previous governments, are inevitably forgotten and equally inevitably people come to direct them at the party that has taken over the reins of power. The difficulty of the political leadership is that it wants to inherit the privileged positions of previous governments, that it has unseated either in an election or a coup d’état, without implementing the progressive and radical sounding ideas which had helped it to come into power. It knows too well that its interest as the representative of the ruling class and international capital are diametrically opposed to the interest of the majority. And it cannot fundamentally transform the existing relations of production in the interest of the masses, without limiting its own access to economic surplus. The interests of the Ghanaian ruling class since independence is just the same as those of the old colonial regime; and it works with the forces of neo-colonialism and international capital to negate the consciousness of the masses, using its unlimited access to the economic surplus to attain this objective.

Ruling class and ruling ideas 

The national bourgeoisie and international capital have succeeded in foisting their ideas on the majority of the people largely because of their control over material production. Marx and Engels’s claim that “the class which has the material means of production at its disposal has control at the same time over the mental means of production, so that generally speaking those who lack the mental means of production are subject to it” seems to describe the Ghanaian situation aptly. In no other field have the techniques of mental control been employed with such efficiency as in the educational system. Apart from being inaccessible to a majority of Ghanaians it seeks to create the myth that the current neo-colonial and capitalist direction of development are sacrosanct and inviolable. The school curriculum, especially in the social sciences, is replete with all kinds of bogus assertions seeking to justify the unjustifiable. The educational system has thus evolved essentially into a positive instrument serving neo-colonialism and the ruling class in Ghana; whilst at the same time making it difficult for the propertyless classes to understand the true nature and causes of their wretched conditions.

This is evident in the economics syllabus in educational institutions and the thinking of prominent intellectuals on the subject. They all reflect the ideas of bourgeois academicians in America and Britain. Consequently the ideas they propagate manifest the interest of capital. Books written by Harvey, Adam Smith, Caincross and Hansen are not only important textbooks for students but reference books for teachers. The ability to regurgitate the ideas in these books in examinations qualifies one to be a graduate of economics and enhances the chances of an individual to aspire to lucrative jobs. These books are devoid of class analysis in their presentation of current economic problems, ignore imperialistic influences as factors in the underdevelopment of a country, and propagate the myth that without foreign investment economic growth and development would be hampered. The exploitative aspects of foreign and Ghanaian enterprises are either completely ignored or little discussed. The worship and devotion to free enterprise is therefore total. The impression that private investment of capital is essential for economic growth relegates labour to a secondary position in industry and prepares the minds of the people to accept the dominance of capital over labour in the process both of production and distribution. It also seeks to imprint in the minds of the recipients of education the idea that the profit motive is both essential and intrinsic to increased productivity; and the belief that free-for-all competition at the market place is the only way to realise the overall interest of society.

The alternative to the free market policy is normally presented as the state ownership of the means of production. What is not discussed or is not known is that the state ownership of the means of production prescribed and fixed in law does not preclude the exploitation of labour by capital. Capitalism is not only characterised by the legal form that class possession of the means of production takes. That is the superficial aspect of it. The essential aspect is the social fact that those who “possess” the means of production exploit wage labour and accumulate surplus value thus obtained as capital. The immediate post-independent West African economics would suffice to illustrate this point. Workers sold their labour power to various state enterprises; and the products of their labour were sold in the market place with a view to profit. The difference between the wages of the producers and the value of what they produced was used for capital accumulation and the consumption of the privileged classes. Under the guise of socialism that state was employed by the ruling classes to appropriate economic surpluses from the masses. State ownership sought to hide the monstrosity of capitalist exploitation by confusing socialism with state property and presenting it to the producers of wealth as the best.

With the failure of the economic recovery programme staring them in the face, the ruling class has become louder in their call for “indigenisation” in recent times. Suddenly the ghost of economic nationalism is being resurrected after it had been banished from economic planning. Conspicuously absent are those aspects and activities of enterprises that have made their operations inimical to the interest of a majority of Ghanaians, irrespective of their origin.

Imprinting minds

The ethos, symbols, values, lifestyles, relations of production and modes of operations are not of primary concern to the new converts of indigenisation. What matters is the encouragement of Ghanaian manufacturers to produce more to capture the local market from “foreigners”. But such factors as mentioned constitute strong inbuilt pressures on local entrepreneurs to cave in to the wishes of foreign capital. Instead of enterprises becoming more and more national in the use of local resources and in satisfying of the needs of the vast majority of Ghanaians it is in fact the Ghanaian entrepreneurs who are going to become less and less national. The ultimate beneficiaries will be the privileged classes whose share of the surplus in the exploitation of Ghanaian labour would increase. Indigenisation would therefore essentially become a weapon of the haves in the country to realise their dreams of increasing their wealth which was somewhat crushed during the heydays of liberalisation.

Ethnic chauvinism 

In sociology and anthropology one encounters the bogus assertion that Ghana has ethnic and not class relations. This argument is nurtured by bourgeois politicians and their mentors in sociology departments who want power based on communal hegemony. Normally the place occupied by individuals in a historically determined system of social production is not made the basis of analysis. While it is not denied that ethnic consciousness exists in Ghana, the phenomenon has to be recognised as part of the ideological rationalisation that reinforces and in turn reflects the existing relations of production. Classes in Ghana may be embryonic but they exist. Thus while ambitious petty bourgeois politicians preach and fan the deadly parochialism of ethnic chauvinism they actively form alliances with petty bourgeois elements in the various other ethnic groups to consolidate their repressive domination of the masses. Ethno-centrism as presented by bourgeois sociology is essentially a weapon of the dominating classes to dissipate the energies of the working class, divide them, and strangle potentially progressive organisations.

Another fraudulent intellectual claim obviously calculated to instil false consciousness in the recipients of education is that Ghana’s present underdevelopment is a direct inheritance from the pre-colonial times. The history departments and historians of repute in universities have made no attempt to prove or disprove this assertion. They just reproduce it for students to swallow and regurgitate during examinations. The impression this propaganda pap seeks to create is implicit: that pre-colonial conditions continue to be reproduced. But three questions immediately come to mind when issues of this nature are discussed. Is this claim correct? If it is correct why is it that these conditions have persisted in spite of years of colonialism and neo-colonialism? What forces are reproducing them and why?

It should be understood that societies are not static and Ghanaian societies were not an exception to this law of development. They also went through the processes of change that characterised societies elsewhere. These changes were to be found in the revolutionary transformation of the social structures, relations of production and techniques of production of social groups. What impacted negatively on these processes of change were two things—the slave trade and the subsequent integration of Ghanaian societies into the world capitalist system in a subordinate position. One cannot deny the infrastructural changes that contact with Europe brought in its wake; but the subsequent material benefits benefited the metropolitan bourgeoisie and the sham bourgeoisie in the colonial country. It condemned the majority to perpetual poverty.

Some contemporary African writings used as literature books in universities and secondary schools in Ghana also do not adequately address the phenomenon of exploitation. Mongo Betis’s Poor Christ of Bomba; Rene Maran’s Batouala; Oyono’s The House Boy; Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God; and Camera Laye’s African Child tend to emphasise the superstructural aspects of colonialism. The imposition of colonialism through brute military force and the subsequent destruction of African socio-cultural and political institutions are given prominence in these writings. What is not normally clearly established or is often ignored is the link between the superstructural aspects of colonial rule and its economic base—production relations. The colonial production relations were the foundation upon which the political, juridical, ethical and religious aspects of colonialism were founded. But in these works the cultural and political aspects of colonialism are artificially severed from the production relations which provided it with its life-force and dynamism.

However, available evidence proves that the real reason for colonialism was to ensure the haemorrhage of capital from the fringes of the capitalist system to its core. The cultural and political domination which were made very much part of the colonial system were therefore a means to an end.

Adongo Aidan Avugma

Bottom class (1979)

From the September 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Of all subjects which are of any significance when coming to grips with a proper understanding of life under capitalism, education is one of the most vulnerable to confusion and misrepresentation. Even many so-called experts pretend to difficulty when called upon merely to define it. (W.O. Lester-Smith, for example, opens his Penguin book Education with the observation: ‘Defining Education has been likened to a parlour game, an innocent but useless way of passing the time'). And although we have all — in this country, at least — been exposed to a greater or lesser degree of formal schooling we seem to have emerged from the experience blind to its true aims and purposes.

The irony of the situation is absolute. The very process which, if we are to believe the hypocritical rubbish we hear and read on the subject, should have endowed us with the knowledge and the confidence to ask challenging and searching questions, and the automatic right to receive truthful and objective answers, has instead made more or less unquestioning conformists of us; at least over fundamentals.

This is no accident; it is the first duty of those responsible for running popular education systems under capitalism to produce, not independent-minded rational human beings, but docile and potentially exploitable units in a capitalist-owned, wealth-producing machine.

Primary Connection

In an article on education contributed to the 11th (1910) edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica a Professor Welton, formerly of Leeds University, had this to say about the apprenticeship laws of Henry VIII which, he observed, ‘contained the earliest germ of state interference’ in education. (It may here be remarked that this assertion applies, presumably, to the British Isles only: the classical Greek state understood and exercised such interference thousands of years earlier).

 These laws obliged children between five and thirteen years of age who were found begging or idle to be bound apprentice to some handicraft. If the immediate object was the prevention of crime rather than education as such, this early legislation is at least significant of the primary and intimate connection that exists between popular education and industrial and economic needs.

Professor Welton, were he alive today, would have no reason to modify this viewpoint.

Of course, capitalism as we understand it did not exist in Henry VIII’s time; neither did the working class, (at least, not in the form in which it has developed under capitalism). The difference today is that an enormous propertyless working class possessed only of its labour-power in the form of a saleable commodity must be made to serve the interest of the property-owning capitalists. Furthermore, that working class must be conditioned to accept that this state of affairs is both natural and inevitable.

Short shrift

Under capitalism the education system is controlled by the state, which in turn forms the executive arm of the capitalist ruling class. In order to ensure that the needs of this class are met, Acts of Parliament are passed which set out what is expected of educational administrators and educators. The 1944 Education Act, for example, which (and I again quote Lester-Smith) ‘in its very first clause gives us a Minister whose duty it is to direct and control local authorities in carrying out national policy’ also instituted (selective) secondary education for all in place of the elementary/grammar school system, thus hoping to meet the need of the capitalists for a more educated labour force. Other provisions included those having to do with the government of schools; aspects of the curriculum; the compulsory practice and teaching of the Christian religion; registration and hours of attendance and their enforcement (the normal school week relates closely to the working week which children will later experience in adult life); and many other considerations. All of these provisions are subject to the attentions of an inspectorate and an advisory service.

It seems almost superfluous to add that anyone employed as an educator or an administrator who steps out of line can expect short shrift. Those who doubt the validity of this assumption should remember what happened to Michael Duane and Risinghill Comprehensive School, of which he was the unorthodox headmaster. Or they may recall the summary treatment accorded some of the staff of the William Tyndale School who were even more unconventional in their interpretation of their duties. But we have yet to hear of cases where those teachers who enthuse over God, Queen and the capitalist system have been disciplined for expressing their views.

Smoke screen

One of the problems of trying to explain the true nature and purpose of education under capitalism is that of the sheer density of the smoke-screen which surrounds the subject. Even the most ‘progressive’ of observers seem reluctant to face up to the —for them— unpalatable truth. Our education system is no less a matter of massive and universal indoctrination because it happens to be hedged about with half-truths (or, indeed, downright lies!) about ‘child centred learning’, or ‘pastoral care’, or ‘free expression’, or ‘equal opportunity’ or ‘community schooling’ or whatever. And as for the teachers: are they not also indoctrinated products of the very system we attack; ready and willing to ‘correctly’ interpret whatever educational jargon happens to be currently in fashion?

What about the more objectionable procedures? All those vicious devices for separating the sheep from the goats: intelligence tests (based partly on the statistics—now known to be phoney — of Dr. Cyril Burt); eleven-plus examinations; bi-lateralism; Leicestershire Schemes; streaming and setting; internal and external examinations, and so on; all carefully calculated to provide the capitalists with the latest breakdown on society’s winners and losers.

Naturally, it cannot be allowed to stop at the classroom door. The sports field, the gymnasium and the swimming pool have their part to play too. Children must never be allowed to dream of a world in which there is no competition; so the omnipresent struggle to ‘prove’ oneself is as important here as it is in the examination- room. The house-point and the tin trophy reign supreme; with the added bonus, for the capitalist, that their future employees will also be physically fit enough to ensure the maximisation of their profits together with the minimisation of absenteeism through illness.

‘Middle class’ snobbery

A great deal of nonsense has been written and spoken about the so-called comprehensive schools. Many people are still determined to believe, despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary, that these institutions provide the key to an egalitarian — or ‘socialist’ — future. Unless these people are also prepared to believe that the capitalists have at last taken leave of their senses, such optimism reveals itself for what it really is: empty clap-trap, unsupported by a shadow of proof. These confused idealists seem undisturbed by the fact that successive governments, of whatever stripe, have pursued the same goal: the more efficient means of selection provided by the comprehensive system.

It is not difficult to sec why these governments have behaved in this manner. A regime which, hitherto, had given a ‘privileged’ 20 per cent or so of the nation's children an anachronistic education in the grammar schools while allowing the remainder to drop through the sieve into the under-equipped secondary moderns was proving no match for the less-exclusive and more efficient systems obtaining in, for example, the USA and the USSR. The snobbery of those workers in the self-styled ‘middle classes’ could no longer be allowed to obstruct the desperately-needed industrial and economic advance which had become imperative if British capitalism was to survive the arctic winds of world competition. Something had to happen. That something proved to be the comprehensive school.

It follows from this that the bone tossed by Thatcher to her own Stray dogs—the repeal of legislation to compel Local Education Authorities to complete re-organisation along comprehensive lines—will not be allowed to interfere with so fundamental a reappraisal of capitalism’s real interests. The large majority of schoolchildren will continue to attend comprehensive schools where they can the more effectively be graded and conditioned for their future role as wage-earners; or, in reserve, as the unemployed.

At the beginning of this article reference was made to the misrepresentation, not to say downright obfuscation, to which education is subject; also to the fact that a definition of it proved too elusive even for many ‘experts’. It should now be possible to conclude with one:

  Education under capitalism is the primary means whereby the ruling class enables itself to obtain the services of a more or less conditioned, unrebellious and conformist working class, willing to sell its labour power in exchange for wages. It is also the means whereby the working class is prepared to fulfil all those functions — military and civil — necessary to maintain the capitalists in their privileged position as sole owners of wealth and the means of wealth-production.

Richard Cooper

Notes by the Way: Making Strikes Illegal (1955)

The Notes by the Way Column from the July 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

Making Strikes Illegal

The increase in the number and extent of strikes has started discussion in Government circles of possible new trade union legislation. The Economist (18 June) warns of difficulties and has an interesting comment on the part played by strikes in Capitalism.

  “One idea that needs to be consigned firmly to the scrapheap from the start is the proposal that strikes as a whole should be declared illegal, and that all trade unions should be constrained by law to accept impartial arbitration upon their disputes. This proposal is unfair, undesirable and impracticable. It is unfair because the threat of a strike is a trade union’s last weapon for securing an increase in wages to which it feels that its members are entitled; and, in an imperfect world, arbitration in a country where strikes were theoretically debarred would always be less favourable to the workers than arbitration in a country where strikes are still legal The proposal is undesirable because the pressure towards higher wages exerted by trade unions is a dynamic as well as an inflationary force in any economy; it helps to draw resources into the trades that are most profitable, and it forces employers into the most labour-saving, and therefore the most forward-looking, forms of production. Last, but not least, the proposal is impracticable because the trade unions simply would not wear it, and would always find ways to flout any such dictatorial decree; if 70,000 engine drivers decided that they all felt too ill to work on a certain day, no government could put all the 70,000 in prison.”

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The Election Results

Naturally political commentators have been busy since the election trying to interpret the heavy fall of votes that reduced the Labour Party M.P.s to 277 in an enlarged House of Commons of 630 members. (At the 1951 election Labour won 295 in a House of 625).

The Economist's analysis (4/6/55) produced the following summary:—

  “It was not the swung, but the stay-at-homes, who decided the election. The total poll was 76.8 per cent., compared with 82.6 per cent in 1951. Within those totals (1) Labour polled 12.4'million votes compared with 13.9 million in 1951. One-and-a-half million people—or more than one out of every ten of those who voted Labour last time—did not this time feel excited enough to turn out. (2) The Conservatives polled 13.3 million votes compared with 13.7 million in 1951. As they piled up some 165,000 votes in four Ulster constituencies where they were unopposed last time, it seems that over half a million people who voted Tory last time did not vote this time (3) The Liberals polled 722,000 votes, about 8,000 less then in 1951. In the constituencies with unchanged boundaries in which they fought in both 1951 and 1955, however, their votes went up by an average of about 450 per constituency. More than the whole of their increase in the share of the votes in these constituencies was at the expense of Labour.”

The Labour vote was 46.4 per cent, of the total vote compared with the Tories’ 49.7 per cent, and the 3.9 per cent that went to Liberals and others. In 1951 Labour got 48.8 per cent, and the Tories 48 per cent.

The Communist Party ran 17 candidates and lost 15 deposits through getting less than one-eighth of the votes— total cost of lost deposits £2,250. But comparing their votes at this election with the vote obtained in the same constituencies in 1951 (or in 1950 if no candidate stood in 1951) it would seem that on balance the Communists somewhat improved their position. The total vote of their 17 candidates was 33,144. In 1951 their ten candidates obtained 21,640.

Of the Bevanites the Economist says:—

  “It is not necessarily true to say that Bevanite sitting members did badly in this election. Mr. and Mrs. Bevan, the Coventry duet, and Mrs. Barbara Castle, did do rather badly; but they were in the sort of areas where the general trend was towards a low Labour turn-out. On the other hand Mr. Mikardo, Mr. Greenwood, Mr. Harold Wilson and Mr. Harold Davies all did rather well.”

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Remarkable Admission by Mr. Attlee

In a speech to a Labour Women’s Gala at Durham on 4 June Mr. Attlee spoke about the need for the Labour Party to carry on after their defeat in the General Election. Having mentioned the struggles “the blood, sweat and tears” of the present generation of Labour Party members and of their forerunners, he dealt with what remains to be done. And this is what he said :—

“We are nowhere near the kind of society we want We have an infinitely long way to go.” (Manchester Guardian, 6/6/55.)

Mr. Attlee meant by this that we are nowhere near Socialism.

Yet in 1949 in a speech at Walthamstow he said:— 

  "In these three and a half years you have had a new pattern set up in this country. The social reforms which we introduced nave not been patchy; they have represented a new social order. . . . We have had a great experience in democratic Socialism.” (Manchester Guardian, 22/1/49.)

In his Durham speech in June of this year Mr. Attlee claimed that the work of the Labour Party has endured despite their electoral defeat, because it has influenced the Tories:—

  “They have had to accept what we have done: in fact they claim to have done the same things only they say they have done them better. They have had to accept many things which 20, 30 or 40 years ago they would have denounced as heresies, impossibilities and silly Socialism.” (S. Times, 5/6/55.)

It is difficult to discover from Mr. Attlee’s various statements what conception he now has of the way in which what he regards as Socialism is to be achieved.

If in 1955 it is an infinitely long way off, what has happened to the “ new social order ” of 1949?

And if the "new social order” of 1949 was not to be taken literally but was Mr. Attlee’s fanciful way of describing some modest social reforms which the Tories also accept, how does Mr. Attlee think his Socialism ever will be achieved? For the Labour Party never envisaged the possibility of the Tories beating them at their own game of catching workers' votes with reforms, They never thought to see the day when a majority of the workers, having had Labour Government for six years, would prefer to see Capitalism run by Tories. Though, as it happens, this ought to have been no surprise at all to Mr. Attlee for in 1937 in his “Labour Party in Perspective” (p. 123) he wrote:—

  “The plain fact is that a Socialist Party cannot hope to make a success of administering the capitalist system because it does not believe in it”

Mr. Attlee’s dilemma is complete. For if he does not think the Labour' Party in office can make a success of the job of administering Capitalism how can he hope to win elections by showing that it is a success?

The Labour Party used to dismiss the S.P.G.B. case for concentrating on winning straight support for Socialism, with the argument that the workers did not want Socialism “an infinitely long way” off, but wanted a Labour Government to give them practical benefits now by removing the worst causes of discontent.

But now we have Mr. Emanuel Shinwell, Minister of Defence in the Labour Government, telling the Staffordshire miners that the reason Labour lost the election was that “most people were satisfied with things as they are. But they were dissatisfied with the disgraceful brawling in the Labour Party and by what seemed to be a scramble for power.” (Reynolds News, 12/6/55).

So the workers, after 50 years of Labour propaganda, do not want a Labour Government to give them practical benefits now but want a Tory Government to do the job.

Where does Mr. Attlee go from here?

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Is it Foolish?

The following appeared in the Stratford Express (3 June, 1955):—

“How Foolish

  “It seems so simple to put a cross against the name of a chosen candidate—so simple that it is almost impossible to go wrong. Yet in these local divisions scores of people wasted their votes by spoiling papers in one of a variety of ways. In one of the West Ham divisions, for instance, there were 40 spoilt papers. Some people had added their name and address; some had scrawled the letters S.P.G.B. (Socialist Party of Great Britain) on the paper, while others had voted for each of the candidates and a few had put the paper in the ballot box completely blank. An indication of their state of mind, perhaps!"

It is, of course, the reference to the S.P.G.B. that concerns us, and it has to be taken in conjunction with the statement that it is “so simple to put a cross against the name of a chosen candidate.” But suppose you don’t choose either candidate. Suppose you are one of the million and a half former Labour voters who could discern so little difference between the parties that it wasn’t worth while voting.

Or, again, suppose you are a Socialist and do not want Capitalism at all, not Labour-administered Capitalism or Tory-administered Capitalism? What should you do then? Is it foolish to show on the ballot paper what you do want? It has at any rate had the merit that it caught the attention of the Stratford Express.

Of course Socialists would prefer to have their own Socialist candidates to vote for, but the Labour, Tory and Liberal parties, by agreement on the £150 deposit, made it very difficult for a small organisation to enter the field.

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Peaceful uses of Atomic Power

All the people who are clamouring for “wars without H-Bombs” instead of working for a social system that won’t engender war, think they are being ever so humane and practical when they plead that atomic energy should be put to “peaceful uses for the good of mankind.” What they really show is that they haven’t learned the first thing about the cause of war.

Alongside the clamour about bombs, but attracting less attention, powerful groups of firms in all the leading countries are preparing for the struggle to gain the market for atomic equipment. One group of seven British engineering and electrical companies has formed the Nuclear Power Plant Co., which, according to the Evening Standard (19/5/55), has a capital of £1,000,000, but has behind it the £75 million of the sponsoring companies.

An Atomic Trade Fair is to be held in Geneva in August. A Financial Times correspondent reports:

  “The exhibition is to be attended by representatives from 84 countries and companies from the U.S., France, Germany, Canada, Switzerland, Holland and Norway will be exhibiting their designs for atomic power plants and for nuclear energy equipment of all sorts in an effort to gain future business in competition with the U.K. from countries less experienced in atomic power development.
  “Russia will be exhibiting atomic energy designs and equipment of many types, and her exhibit may rival those of Britain, the U.S. and France—the largest exhibitors.”

(Financial Times, 8/6/55.)

A Financial Times editorial (11/6/55) pressed the importance of these early stages “for competition will grow increasingly fierce and what is done now will determine the success of Britain in the future.”

The simple fact is that Capitalism's fierce conflicts for markets and raw materials, are not and cannot be "peaceful," whether the commodity on sale is atomic plant, coal, petrol, steel, textiles, or anything else. Here is the breeding ground of war.

This is very unpleasant reading for well-meaning Pacifists, but these are the facts of Capitalist life.

The rivalry in obtaining sources of uranium and other materials for atomic power, and in capturing markets for atomic equipment, will be just as fruitful of international conflict as were past struggles to acquire iron ore, petrol, coal, etc., and markets in which to sell the products.

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The Millionaires’ Welfare State

According to the Daily Express City Editor (25/5/55) Mr. Harold Samuel has done very well for himself under the “Welfare State.”

  “They tell you that it is impossible to make a million in these days of super-high taxation. Well, young man, do not be daunted in your endeavours by such talk.
  “For here is West End property man Harold Samuel to prove that it can be done. And proving it three times over.
  “For under a share plan which comes this morning from Land Securities Investment Trust—key company in Mr. Samuel's property network—he lets drop that his personal stake is 692,000 Ordinary shares.
   “And in markets each of those 10s. shares command a price just Is: short of a fiver at 99s. In all £3,426.000.
   “Lush indeed has been the money-making of anyone who backed the Samuel's star when he took over Land Securities eleven years ago.
   “Then its shares were priced at 8s. a go in markets. Allowing for free issues each of those shares would now command a dizzy £66 apiece.
   “For the Samuel policy has been to build the group up big in property at a time when property values were rising even faster than his shares.
    “A policy which pays off handsomely—for Mr. Samuel.” 

Note the dates. The foundations of the “Welfare .State” were being laid in 1944 when various schemes were prepared under the Coalition Government and put into operation after the Labour victory in 1945. And it is in this period that Mr. Samuel has built up his three and a half millions. And what predominantly helped to push up property values was the Labour Government’s inflationary policy, faithfully continued by the Tories.

The Welfare State ought to have at least one very enthusiastic backer.

There are many others, too.

The rise in property values that helped Mr. Samuel has "been paralleled by the rise in share values on the Stock Exchange and for the same general reason. And Mr. Gaitskell, in the House of Commons on 16 June, 1955, estimated that holders of ordinary shares have gained £5,000 million through the share rise of the past 15 months.

And all the time, including the years of Labour Government, small savers who put money into the Savings Bank or Savings Certificates were having the real value of their savings whittled away by the same price rise.

This must be what the Labour Party means by a more equal distribution of wealth and what the Tories mean by a property-owning democracy.

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Calling up Striking Seamen

The Daily Mirror (17/6/55) published the following:—

  “One hundred seamen involved in the unofficial strike of Cunard liner crews received preliminary notices of call-up at Liverpool yesterday.
  “They are men aged between eighteen and twenty-six. whose call-up was deferred when they joined the Merchant Navy.
  “Now they are unofficially unemployed and liable to be called-up. The notices they received by post yesterday asked them to say which service they preferred.
  “Many of them rushed to the Shipping Federation in Liverpool to ask what to do.
  “Strike leaders said: ‘They were told at the Federation that if they signed a form promising not to break any more contracts with the Maritime Board the call-up would be deferred again.
   “ ‘This is a form of intimidation.’
  “Normally if men under twenty-six leave a ship several weeks elapse before they are assumed to have left the sea and to be liable for call-up.'”

We need hardly be surprised at the action by the authorities but how do Liberals, who profess to be the protectors of individual rights against Tory reaction and Labour Regimentation, view the editorial in the Liberal Star (16/6/55) which urged the new Tory Government to take this step?

  “Surely Parliament must take a hand without delay. After all, the Minister of Labour and National Service have power to serve the strikers with their call-up papers.”

It is only fair to add that the Liberal Manchester Guardian protested at the Government’s action.

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Co-operative Strike Beating

The Cooperative movement long ago forgot its origins and is just another Capitalist trading organization. But it does not so regard itself. It claims to be a movement to help the workers and is in direct association with the Labour Party and T.U.C. The following heading and extract is from an article in Cooperative News (11/6/55). They show that the trading operations of the Cooperative movement, conducted according to normal Capitalist rules within the framework of Capitalism, create precisely the same outlook as is to be found in any other trading concern. ‘

“Beat-the-Strike measures are in full swing 

  "By using their own transport and in some cases working late into the night, co-operative societies throughout the country are beating the rail strike. Coal supplies, which are the hardest hit, are being carried by societies' own lorries from the pitheads.
  “At Derby Society, coal department employees worked throughout last week-end restocking the coal yards. With the society’s own vehicles and tipper lorries borrowed from the building department, the society built up a sufficient stock to satisfy present demands.”

Of course those responsible for this will indignantly retort that they could not do anything else in the circumstances. Too true. Those who think they can "beat the Capitalists at their own game” have no choice but to strive to preserve the great illusion they have created.

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Educational Progress?

At the annual conference of the National Association of Head Teachers the President, Mr. Frank Barton had something to say about the educational system. After mentioning that the hopes roused by the Butler Education Act had still not been fully realised, he said:—

  "Is this really surprising? Popular education has always had a parsimonious existence. It was conceived in poverty, born in penury, cradled in privation, and nurtured in frugality.
   “Unfortunately the niggardly attitude which characterised its introduction still persists. In this respect some local administrators are as much to blame as the central Government. Taking into account the increased numbers of pupils and the inflationary value of the pound, we are spending less to-day on educating the children of this country than we spent before the war. This can hardly be called progress.
   “Too many of our children are still being educated in overcrowded, under-heated, unhygienic, and badly lighted conditions. It is regrettable that one solution to the shortage of classrooms has been the utilisation of ugly nineteenth-century buildings with dark, dungeon-like passages." (Manchester Guardian, 30/5/55.)

Edgar Hardcastle