Education for wage-slavery (1991)

From the August 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

In recent months the sensationalist press has been full of horror stories about child abuse. These stories prompt a question. How would we react to parents who repeatedly threatened to burn their children alive, injuring and killing them with the aid of the most fearsome technology conceivable? What would we say to parents who sat back while their children went hungry, leaving some of them under-nourished and others starving to death while there was plenty of food in the house? What would we think of parents who contaminated the air that their children breathed, adulterated with chemicals the cheap food that their children ate, and allowed their children to dwell in wretched homes? What would we say about parents who denied their children the best possible health care when they were sick? What would we, as human beings with a consciousness that enables us to care for the weak and the innocent, think of such barbarous parental policies? Would we for one minute entrust the the safety of little children to such beasts?

The harsh reality is that the systematic abuse of children which has been described is exactly what happens every day as a normal and inherent feature of the capitalist profit system. Capitalism threatens to burn children alive. This policy is not called child murder, but military defence. War is not about Kate Adie dressing up in an Action Man outfit on the BBC or "Storming Norman" doing his impression of John Wayne: war is the legalised threat to frighten and injure and maim those who stand in the way of the onward march of profit. The babies who were killed in Baghdad were victims of child abuse.

Capitalism allows children to starve. Not just one child in a headline-making case who is mercilessly underfed, but millions of children are malnourished because of poverty. According to the United Nations Food anti Agricultural Organisation, 15 million children under the age of five die of starvation each year. But you do not need to be a child in Africa to go hungry. A report published last month by the National Children’s Home suggested that one in ten under-five-year-olds from British families on low incomes (and there are 2.5 million families on income support) go without enough to eat at least once a month because their parents could not afford to buy food:

Time and time again, families in the survey told us that they would go into debt in order to provide food for their children. yet despite this, many often did not have the money to buy enough, the fact that parents and children are going hungry every week, because the cupboard is quite literally bare, is a damning indictment of Britain in the 90s. (Quote from the Report, Guardian, 4 June)

The profit system, in its relentless drive for profits, ruins the environment for the next generation who are growing up into a polluted, unhealthy world. Capitalism regards it as economically rational to let kids sleep on the streets or in hopelessly unacceptable hostels for the homeless. The system denies decent health care to vast numbers of children who are in need, but too poor to push to the front of the health queue. In short, this worldwide profit-mad system under which we live looks upon children with all the compassion of a bank manager and all the support of a casino owner offering life membership to those who can never win because they were born with the cards stacked against them.

The record of the capitalist system in relation to the care of children is one of grotesque neglect. The corpses and wasted lives, which are proof of that record, are constantly available for inspection by those who doubt the inhumanity of the profit system. So, how does our society respond to this persistent and systematic child abuse? It says. “Thanks very much, Mr. Capitalist, here are our children for you to look after. Please take them into your schools and do with them what you will and teach them to become the right sort of people: adults created in the image of the profit system”. The system which persistently offends against the needs of children is given the task of telling them how and what to think. What could be more staggeringly perverse and offensive?

The capitalist view of kids

Capitalism needs children. It does not need them because they are playful and impulsive and innocent and full of creative potentialities. In fact, it needs to knock those childish inclinations out of them. How often do we hear children being chastised for acting childishly? They are told to “grow up" and stop behaving "like kids". It is like telling a ninety-year-old man to become youthful and stop pretending to be worn out. The Victorian age, the values of which are so revered by our rulers, was one which despised childhood and forced kids to repress their natural enthusiasm and zest for life. But, for all that, capitalists are pleased to see children being bor.

The principal and overriding objective of the capitalist is to accumulate profit. Labour power is the source of all profit. And children are the source of tomorrow's labour power. They are growing labour power. To the capitalists, children are what the fields of opium are to the drugs baron: the basis of future riches, profits in the making. So, just as the drug barons take care to look after their precious crops, treating them with the finest fertilisers, so do the capitalists in general take care to ensure the proper cultivation of children They too are treated with the best educational manure available, as a scrutiny of the crap taught in most schools will reveal.

It is no accident that the one item of expenditure on which the British capitalists spend more than the military-murder industry is education. If you want profit-churning wage slaves you have to train them. The function of schools is to train children to become skilled enough and socially passive enough and politically ignorant enough to take on the jobs of running capitalism from top to bottom whilst leaving the ownership and control of wealth production in the hands of a parasitical, capitalist minority.

What are schools for?

The earliest schools in Britain, in the 6th century, were set up to train priests. In a Church-run, totalitarian theocracy the only people who needed to be trained in special skills were the religious men. The agricultural peasants learned their useful skills as they grew up. They did not need schools to know what was useful. By the time of the Reformation in the 16th century the schools were under attack by the Church hierarchy because they were straying from pure religious dogma and teaching other subjects, including grammar which enabled children to read from other sources than the Bible. (These were the first grammar schools). As early, mercantile, capitalism emerged the schools started to teach new subjects, such as law and medicine. Oxford and Cambridge Universities, set up in the 11th and 12th centuries respectively, were originally monastic colleges for the study of Biblical nonsense, but as the range of skills demanded by the economy increased so were the tasks of Oxbridge teaching. From the start education reflected the needs of the economy.

The industrial revolution of the 18th century saw the emergence of a large, untrained working class with nothing to sell but their labour power. Many of them objected to the harsh exploitation and regimentation of factory existence and rebelled. morally if not politically, against the commercial age of which they were victims. It was quite clear to the bosses that these workers needed to be properly schooled for wage slavery. Bell, the inventor of a method for teaching the poor, called education "the steam engine of the moral world”. The task of organising education for wage slavery was given to the Church, both Anglican and dissenting. Who better to drive ideas of freedom out of the minds of workers, and train them for obedience to the market, than the Church which had spent the last thousand years frightening peasants into fearing their masters and upholding the deferential feudal hierarchy?

The Church went to work with eagerness: as Southey testifies, the Methodists were in no doubt what they were going to do to the children:

Break their wills betimes. Begin this work before they can run alone, before they can speak plain, perhaps before they can speak at all. Whatever pain it costs, break the will if you would not damn the child. Let a child from a year old be taught to fear the rod and to cry softly; from that age make him do as he is bid. if you whip him ten times running to effect it . . . (R Southey. Life of Wesley and Rise and Progress of Methodism, London. 1890. p.561).

The Methodists even brought out special hymn books for children containing such verses as:

There's not a sin that we commit.

Nor wicked word we say.

But in thy dreadful book 'tis writ.

Against the judgement day.

At the same time there were text-books written for teachers on how to “bring up" children:

Just as soon as children develop awareness, it is essential to demonstrate to them by word and deed that they must submit to the will of their parents. Obedience requires children to 1) willingly do as they are told. 2) willingly refrain from doing what is forbidden, and 3) accept the rules made for their sake. (J Suizer. 1791)

Note the totalitarian aims of this cruel attitude to schooling. Not only must children submit, but they must learn to do so "willingly”; not only must they follow the rules of property society, but they must accept that such rules are "made for their sake". The principal objective of teaching working-class children to read was moral: as one Justice of the Peace put it in 1807:

It is doubtless desirable that the poor should be instructed in reading, if it were only for the best of purposes—that they may read the Scriptures.

Teaching in the early elementary schools, where the average working-class child would spend at most two years, was limited to preparing the children for the tasks of wage slavery. The educational methods were cruel in the extreme: indoctrination through fear. As one pupil recalled:

I never remember seeing my headmaster in school when he had not a cane hanging by the crook over his left wrist. Every assistant master had a cane and so had the pupil teachers . . . There were no backs to the desks and back of boys were straightened by means of a stroke of the cane. (G.A.N. Lowndes, The Silent Social Revolution, London. 1937. pp.16-17)

In the 19th century the state began to recognise the importance of education for the protection of the capitalist class. In fact, they regarded it as being too important to be left to the Churches. So began the long process by which control of education was taken over by the state. It is interesting to note that parliament's first entry into the field of educational control was a committee set up in 1816, under the chairmanship of Henry Brougham, called the Parliamentary Committee on the Education of the Lower Orders. They knew very well that education was a class matter. There were several attempts to set up a system of state education—which the advanced rulers of Prussia had already established—but there were early doubts as to whether state-run education would be seen as a means of government-controlled indoctrination. Brougham (by then the Lord Chancellor! told the 1834 parliamentary committee on education:

Suppose the people of England were taught to accept (state education), and were forced to educate their children by penalties, education would be made absolutely hateful in their eyes, and would speedily cease to be endured. They who have argued in favour of such a scheme . . . have betrayed . , , great ignorance of the nature of Englishmen . . . I do not well perceive how such a system can be established without placing in the hands of the Government, that is of the Ministers of the day. the means of dictating opinions and principles to the people.

Such dictating is precisely what the capitalists wanted, and still do, as the government manipulation of the newly-enforced National Curriculum has shown. In 1839 the Prime Minister. Russell, outlined the objectives of state education if it was to come:

In any Normal or Model School to be established by the Board, four principal objects should be kept in view: 1. Religious Instruction. 2. General Instruction. 3. Moral Training. 4. Habits of Industry.

Apart from the vaguely worded “General Instruction", by which was meant those basic skills required to keep wage slaves literate and numerate enough to work the machinery of production, this was a menu for moral control of the workers. That has always been the chief aim of state schooling. This was put clearly by Sir James Graham who was Home Secretary in 1843. Graham moved a Factory Bill (which became law) which included a provision for compulsory' elementary education for working-class children (which parliament threw out). Graham moved the Bill in response to the rise of the Chartist movement (workers demanding the vote) which he saw as a dangerous drift towards rebellious immorality on the part of wage slaves. Said Graham as he commended the Bill to parliament:

The police and the soldiers have done their duty, the time has arrived when moral and religious instructors must go forth and reclaim the people from the error of their ways.

This notion of the teacher as state trooper is at the heart of the capitalist view of education. When compulsory state education was introduced in the 1870s it was because workers had been given the vote by the 1867 Reform Act and it was considered politically necessary to educate them into acting as responsible citizens, i.e. passive slaves who would hand power to their bosses.

The phoney education debate

Ever since schooling has been compulsory a heated debate has gone on about how best to run it. Liberal reformers have made various proposals for making schools more effective. What none of them have asked themselves is what it is that schools are supposed to be effective at doing. The fact is that the liberal-humanitarian concern of producing well-rounded, creative, critical, thoughtful adults is almost entirely at odds with the capitalist concern to produce well-trained, unquestioning wage and salary slaves.

The liberal reformers have argued against the public schools where rich people send their children to learn how to be superior. What this misses is that under capitalism the children of the rich are superior: they will end up in the top social positions; they will inherit great fortunes. Public schools are an effect of class privilege, not its cause. The public schools provided 92 percent of the current top company directors, 89 percent of the Law Lords, 83 percent of the high court Judges, 69 percent of ambassadors and still over 50 percent of current MPs. Of course these institutions of class arrogance must go, but not unless the class which they serve is removed from power will this make any difference.

Again, the liberal reformers sought to end educational segregation on the basis of state-defined intelligence and to put all children into comprehensive schools. This reform came about, but children are still put into higher and lower streams on the basis of what sort of future jobs they are likely to be suitable for. and in 1991, after the “success” of the Comprehensive Schools reform, there is now more testing of children going on than ever, including the notorious seven-plus tests whereby children are being classified as successes or failures four years earlier than they were in the pre-comprehensive days.

Liberal reformers have attempted to abolish corporal punishment, which has always been one of the main means by which socially ignorant adults have been able to bully vulnerable children. Even though beating children is now illegal (which certainly does not mean it that does not go on, with children too scared to report it), new forms of punishment have been brought in: teacher sarcasm, detentions, suspensions, sin bins, statementing—not to mention the worst excesses of the liberal school. the friendly educational psychologists who see every happy child as a potential mind disease.

In the years after the Second World war the liberal educationalists saw scope for changing society by reforming schools.The idea was that the harsh ethos of the capitalist market could be countered by the benign principles of welfare-based education. Some well-intentioned teachers worked hard to bring about this utopian transcendence of the law of the capitalist jungle within the confines of the school gates. It was, of course, a rather authoritarian concept of reform: it was to come about from the top, with enlightened educationalists as the social improvers and children as the inactive beneficiaries.

By the mid-1960s this new model of schooling was dominant in most of Europe and the USA. Children were allowed to organise their own repression via Summerhill-based school councils; instead of fear of the cane there was a new moral orthodoxy whereby wage slaves were not beaten but talked into co-operation by trendy headmasters—who were still the masters. Rioting became unnecessary: everyone could talk about anything—even masturbation, if not revolution. Long-haired art teachers let the students call them Bob and in school assemblies folk songs were sung about peace and sermons were given about respect for Hindu traditions. The Victorian gaol had given way to the “progressive" open prison. All you need was love. O-leveIs and a job at the end of it all.

The problem was that the capitalists were paying for all this through taxation and they were not happy with a schooling system which was not delivering obedient enough wage slaves. Out of all the multicultural dance and “free debates” about The Bomb were coming students who were thinking too much, not deferential enough, inordinately critical, articulate enough to cause trouble. By the late Seventies capitalism was in an economic crisis and the government was getting worried. Callaghan, the Labour Prime Minister who was later to be given a peerage in return for his cringing support for the ruling class, announced that what was needed was a “Great Education Debate". The schooling of the working class was to be re-assessed. This was a preparation for the tighter state control of young workers’ minds. After all, the early Eighties were witnessing some important acts of resistance (usually futile) by the workers: there were strikes, anti-racist demonstrations and then riots in such places as Brixton and Toxteth. As one Department of Education official has been reported as saying:

We are in a period of considerable social change. There may be social unrest but we can cope with the Toxteths. But if we have a highly educated and idle population we may possibly anticipate more serious social conflict. People must be educated once more to know their place.

Once again the teachers were being brought in to finish the job of the cops. The case for what is ridiculously called "good old-fashioned schooling" was trumpeted by well-funded advocates. Capitalism has taken a bite at the idea of freer education and found it non-cost-effective. So we have seen the backward-looking education reforms of recent years. This is not a new phenomenon, but capitalism returning to its normal service.

Schools in crisis

British schools are currently in a state of crisis. Teacher morale is low after years of relatively low pay and being treated as the cause of educational failure. A recent report from the Association for Science Education stated that one in four science teachers do not feel qualified to teach the subject they are teaching: they are forced to do so because properly qualified teachers are not being appointed. The bogus anti-statists of the Tory right have shown just how pro-state they really are by introducing all kinds of centralised educational policies which place the curriculum in the hands of government-appointed ideologues rather than teachers, and less still students.

The National Curriculum is a detested method of forcing teachers to follow the state's line—and more importantly, to exclude from the timetable those aspects of free expression which are contrary to the capitalists interest. The Labour Party has no brighter ambition than to turn schools into industrial training centres churning out masses of well-oiled robotic wealth-creators. Labour admires the German model for producing well-trained victims for industry. Pity the budding poet or critical historian in the educational future being mapped out by John Smith and his utilitarian mob.

The new emphasis throughout education is upon facts (come back Gradgrind, all is forgiven and there is a job waiting for you in the Ministry of Education). Even the universities, once the homes of critical learning and research, are being turned into factories for facts: academics for the study of increasing the profit accumulation of the parasite class. Teachers are fed up; school students are less interested and more regimented than they have been for years; and a poll in The Independent (3 June) showed that a majority of parents think that their children are getting a bad deal from school.

In fact, the bad deal in question is the capitalist system. Under the profit system it would be crazy to hope for education for a creative and free life. Children of the working class will not be leading creative or free lives. Children are not polled in the womb as to whether they will be born rich or poor: threatened with nuclear extinction or destined to live in a peaceful world; free to be exploited or free to have access to all of the abundant goods and services of this rich planet. Children do not elect the impotence of childhood; it is a cultural role which is imposed upon the young. In a society where workers will only be respected if they are producing profit (and the respect given to the wage slave is nothing to write home about) those who are too old or too sick or too young to work will be treated like dirt. This is the position of children under capitalism.

A secure, non-repressed or non-repressive society could learn a lot from children. Their lives are spontaneous and unawkward as ours should be. They have the capacity to be individualistic and also to co-operate. They do not think of money; they are far to childishly wise for that. The social order which reveres City thieves will never properly comprehend the mysteries of the adventure playground. The school sirens sound the start of a new term of confinement and those to be taught will be schooled more than educated. But the rulers have a problem: the raw material of tomorrow’s profit have minds of their own which they might just use for their own interests.

Steve Coleman

A Day in School (1995)

From the January 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The telephone rings. It’s eight o’clock in the morning. I am already up, dressed and have taken the dog for a walk.

I take the call. It’s the Head of a local primary' school.

“Can you come in to do a day’s supply work?” he asks.

“Yes, of course,” I answer, trying to sound as enthusiastic as I can while my heart sinks in dismay for, although I like being with children and “interacting with them in an educational manner", I don’t like schools - for moral, pedagogical and political reasons which I hope will soon become clear.

I arrive just in time and make for the office. As I walk through the grounds and enter the building, I am immediately assaulted by the sights, sounds and smells of the institution of school — where adults cease being “normal” human beings and become bossy teachers and where children cease being independent, free-thinking, individuals and become managed pupils — and instinctively react against its authoritarian ethos. But I keep these thoughts and feelings to myself.

After the usual pleasantries I am taken by the well-meaning but misguided and officious Deputy Head along tired, impersonal corridors to “my" classroom. I enter the room and quickly take stock of the situation: a collection of battered, old desks with lift-up lids surrounded by the usual uninspiring paraphernalia of secondhand learning. This will be mine and the children’s cell for most of the rest of the day.

After warning me that this is a “difficult” class, he leaves the room.

Regimentation begins

The first thing I do is find some chalk and write my name on the blackboard. While I am doing this, the bell goes. The regimentation has begun! The children, thirty-five boys and girls, aged between 8 and 9, start to wander in, depressingly dressed in their homogenising and boring school uniform.

I greet them with a warm smile, as they enter, but, when I see that they are not settling down very well —I am the second replacement they have had this term — but are in fact making "too much noise", I tell them in a firm but friendly voice to stop talking and sit down quietly, while I take the register. Thus, I start acting like a Teacher — a role that is forced upon me and all my colleagues in similar classrooms throughout the land — by the demands of the situation, where large numbers of poorly-motivated pupils are confined by law within an unsuitable space for long periods of the day.

Having completed this task, I then send them off to their maths groups — to be labelled, some inaccurately, “Good”, “Average”, and “Poor” (for the rest of their lives?). I will be having the “top set” in this room.

I manage the class reasonably well during the course of the next fifty minutes in as pleasant a manner as possible and they do, I suppose, learn something but, once again, I am left with the opinion at the end of this period that these are not the best conditions in which to encourage logical thought and numerical ability (or, indeed, any other aspect of all-round, personal growth and development). For, apart from all the various distractions, uninvited interruptions and lack of adequate resources and facilities, there are far too many children to give them all the appropriate help and attention they require as and when it is needed.

But do not imagine for one moment that the way to solve this problem is simply to reduce the number of pupils per teacher in a classroom. For such a liberal reform could never get rid of one of the main faults of our present, school-based system: the need/desire for the adult to be authoritarian. Only a radically different environment in which a healthier, more natural, i.e.. “libertarian”, approach on the part of the adult is made possible will achieve that goal.

Learning to respect Authority

The bell goes again. Everybody goes back to where they came from. (More time-wasting and disturbance.) The children in “my” class line up for assembly — alphabetically! I get them all quiet and facing the right way and, when I am sure they will not show me up in public by any displays of "inappropriate” behaviour — a powerful weapon in the armoury of the institution for ensuring that all teachers behave towards the children in the same, disciplinarian manner — we move off to the hall in silent crocodile lines for this daily dose of learning how to "respect” authority, be a “better person" and become part of “the crowd”.

At the door they are each given a hymn book. They then proceed to sit down in their customary places on the hard, bare floor while a piece of classical music is being played. When all the children in the school are assembled, the Head begins by saying"Good Morning" to everyone. “The masses” — for this is what they are now practising to become members of — chant back their reply, as if they were one. He then announces the number of the hymn and everybody starts singing. He follows this with a story from the bible and a prayer. (I start to squirm on my seat.)

When this is over, he gives out several notices, puts down one or two children who — surprise, surprise — are not paying attention, then finally reveals the number of points wInch each house has scored (for good work and behaviour) during the previous week and the winning captain comes out to receive the cup which he may keep for the week in his classroom. ("Get me out of here!" a voice is now screaming inside my head, as phrases like “No Gods, No Masters” come to mind and I begin to wonder if people like Godwin, Tolstoy, Ferrer and Goodman all lived in vain.)

Fortunately the music starts to play again and I begin to relax a little as this offensive and immoral occasion for religious indoctrination, further imposed control and forced "cultural" improvement at last draws to a close. The children file out of the hail, again in silence, and go straight out into the playground — for a welcome but limited moment of "freedom” and an opportunity to let off some steam — while I go off to the staffroom for a well-earned cup of tea.

Ten not very stimulating minutes later, I return to “my” classroom. On the way I pass children who have been told to stand in the corridor and face the wall as punishment for some “terrible” crime they have committed, while others are seated in the dining area carrying on with their work because they have not done “enough” during lesson time. (More fear, coercion and repression which will adversely affect their future development.) Then, as I walk through the building, I hear the clamour and uproar that is coming from the playground where all that pent-up energy — and, for some, hate and aggression, the origin of much bullying — is now being expelled.

“We can do better than this" I think to myself as I re-enter “my” area of this kiddie-farm and hear the bell signify the end of playtime.

Sticks and carrots

The children start coming back in, some in a fairly high state of excitement. I settle them all down again, and, when I am sure they are all paying attention, “entertain” them with an English lesson on expressions, e.g. feeling “sad”, “happy”, “cross” etc. In order to make the exercise more real and interesting, I get them to make faces demonstrating various emotions and, after we have “discussed" these — but how can there be a proper discussion amongst so many children? — they draw on A4 paper folded into quarters and then write why the person whose face they have drawn is looking that way.

Ten to fifteen minutes later those who have finished start to bring out their work. One whose drawings and reasons are very good asks if she can have a house point.

“No, I don’t believe in them.” The words are out of my mouth before I realise what I have said.

“Why?” she asks.

“Because I believe you should only do things because you want to — not because you have been bribed.” (Or frightened, I could have added.)

She accepts this answer, a bit disappointed but without too much complaint, and sits down, repeating what I have just said to her friend, while I think about how well school with its methods of behaviour modification based on a sticks-and-carrots, threats-and-artificial-incentives approach corrupts the emotions and provides an excellent training ground for life after school in a capitalist society.

“What shall I do next?” another one asks who has successfully completed this first ask.

Once again, as in all the schools I have taught in during my long and varied acquaintance with life in the classroom, I am confronted by the appalling lack of initiative and independence that is the result of an education system which is based on continual direction and imposed control, but a good thing for a society which requires a constant flow of uncritical producers and consumers who are ready to accept everything they are told by those in authority, i.e. "the boss, the priest and the politician”, as soon as they have left school.

Forced, therefore, into spoon-feeding those who have finished this first exercise with further, suitable activities (instead of being able in this authoritarian environment to encourage them to think and act for themselves), I keep the class "constructively occupied" until lunchtime and, when the bell goes at mid-day, I send the children out to play and/or dinner.

I immediately leave the building and go to a local park where I eat my sandwiches, walk around in its open spaces and breathe in some fresh air — away from all that compulsory attendance, repressed energy and unnatural growth, all that imposed discipline, open/hidden indoctrination and lack of freedom.

Built-in level of failure

I return to the classroom with just enough time to get ready for the afternoon session and look at their writing which they did in the morning. As with their maths, I find many mistakes and errors. This leaves me once again with the feeling that this system has deliberately built into it a certain level of failure, especially for those who come from a “working-class” background. (And for good reason. For who else would fill the lower echelons of its hierarchies, if everyone was educated to the same “high standard of performance”?)

The bell goes and the children start coming back in after the long lunch-time break but, before I can start the afternoon session, I have to settle a number of arguments which have spilled over into the classroom from the playground (where, in its bleak and barren spaces, the “law of the jungle” often seems to prevail.)

After resolving most of these problems (or, at least, sweeping them under the carpet), I ask for and obtain the necessary peace and quiet in which to take the register, following which I tell them all to read a book in silence for the next twenty to thirty minutes, as is required of them every day at this time by that wretched timetable.

I follow this calming-down period with a Science lesson on Water, a topic prescribed for these children at this stage in their schooling — whether they like it or not — by that strait-jacket of free thought and human development, the National Curriculum.

Thus, instead of invoking the children in a topic in which both I and they are interested — if ever that were possible with such large numbers — I embark upon a lesson which has something to do with Water and fits in with their previous work. I choose “the inhabitants of the seas".

Competitive individualism

To begin with I keep the lesson fairly formal but after a while I decide to make the exercise more creative by getting everyone to draw, decorate and cut out their own underwater creatures. These they are then encouraged to stick, without too much direction from me, onto a large piece of blue paper which I have fixed to one of the classroom walls and a reasonable underwater collage begins to emerge. But it is obvious from the result that they require much more practice at this kind of art-work. For their efforts are not very inventive and their choice of materials limited Also their behaviour while this activity is in progress and the arrangement of their creatures on the paper reflect exactly what their experiences both in and outside school are leading them to become, i.e.. unimaginative, disconnected, competitive individuals who know very little of self-control and social cooperation.

Soon the afternoon session is drawing to a close, so, after clearing up, I read them a story. I have brought with me The Twits by Roald Dahl. I like reading this book to children because not only does its “weird and wonderful" contents immediately grab their attention but its title, I feel, is particularly apt in these very unsuitable surroundings (for, surely, such a label must apply to those who are responsible for providing — and delivering? — this adult-imposed, keep-me-occupied-and-under- control education.)

I am half-way through a chapter when the bell goes for the end of school. I find a convenient point at which to stop, get the children to put their chairs on their desks and then release them gradually and gently from their chains. 

Colin Millen

Lessons for teachers (1988)

Book Review from the July 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why don't teachers teach like they used to? by Rachel Pinder. (Hilary Shipman. 1987. paperback £6.95)

I hear and I forget
I see and I remember
I do and I understand

This old Chinese proverb forms the opening lines of Rachel Pinder s informative, sometimes amusing and always very readable book. Having spent her working life in teaching and the last ten years before retirement as headteacher in Inner London, she relates the history of teaching by both "progressive'' and ' traditional" methods over many centuries up to the present. In the process she exposes confusion, if not total ignorance, as what constitutes "traditional" methods; what has. and has not. been tried; and the results achieved by the different methods.

In 1510. Dean Colet. founder of St Paul's School, criticised "traditional teaching by rule and formal methods". Richard Mulcaster. High Master of St Paul's in Tudor times, complained about teachers who "think it the best that boys should fruitlessly run through all the rules learned by heart but not understand." Elizabeth Lawrence in The Origins and Growth of Modern Education goes even further back, quoting Plato: "Enforced learning will not stay in the mind. So avoid compulsion and led your child's lessons take the form of play". It appears therefore that "progressive" methods have been advocated and used for 2.000 years. Does that make them "traditional"?

Professor Jean Piaget, an eminent Swiss psychologist, refers thus to John Amos Comenius (1592-1670): "Comenius may undoubtedly be considered as the founder of a system of progressive instruction adjusted to the stage of development the pupil has reached." Comenius said that learning should be in four stages: examine; question; investigate; determine. In 1641 he was invited by Members of Parliament to visit England and set up a school system based on his principles; unfortunately the Civil War intervened.

Although the beginnings of "progressive" education are often credited to Rousseau, it is obviously much older than that. In a review it is neither possible nor desirable to quote every example but the following extract from Richard Edgworth's (1744-1817) Essays on Professional Education perhaps gives a key to Mrs Thatcher's obsession with "returning to basics"

  The first object should not be to teach them reading or grammer. or Latin or arithmetic . . but gradually to give them the desire to learn and the power to attend . . . they must be taught to think (our italics)

Politicians' exhortations since 1976 that schools should "get back to basics" shows an alarming degree of ignorance and apparent unawareness of school inspectors' reports over the past 100 years. The latest of these, in 1981. bears great similarity to one within over a hundred years ago:

 There is no evidence that a narrow curriculum, concentrating only on the basic skills, enables children to do better in these skills: HM Inspectors' surveys suggest that competence in reading, writing and mathematics may be improved where pupils are involved in a wider programme of work and if their skills in language and mathematics are applied in a variety of contexts.

In 1858 the Newcastle Commission was appointed to investigate education and make proposals. One of these was that children should be examined annually by an inspector and schools paid "by results". This was introduced in 1862 and Robert Lowe. Vice President of the Privy Council for Education said in the House of Commons:

  I cannot promise the House that this system will be an economical one and I cannot promise that it will be an efficient one. but I can promise that it shall be one or the other. It it is not cheap, it shall be efficient; if it is not efficient, it shall be cheap.

Examinations were based on a centrally controlled curriculum and although teachers were not forbidden to teach other subjects, there was great pressure to ensure that children would pass the examination rather than that they should learn anything worthwhile. The system worked as far as government expenditure was concerned; this dropped from £813,441 in 1861 to £636,806 in 1865. In Curriculum Change in the 19th and 20*h Century Gordon & Lawton quote from the 1871 school log-book of a Welsh headmaster:

  Believing that one-fourth of the school time that was devoted to subjects not recognised by the government and consequently not paid for by grants, had the effect of keeping a well-informed school but causing the percentage results to be lower than those of schools that are mechanical in their working and unintelligible in their tone. I have been compelled against my inclination to arrange that less time be devoted to them in future and more time to those that pay best.

However this teaching by rote did not produce workers adequately fitted for their role and the system was gradually eroded, being finally eradicated in 1890. How long will it take this century for realisation to dawn that "traditional' teaching, according to official definitions, not only stunts the mind but will produce a generation ill-equipped to provide adequately the labour required by modern capitalism?

Towards the end of the book Rachel Pinder talks of education which is not based only on lessons but also on the involvement of parents, family and friends in widening children's experience and therefore knowledge. This is a concept with which socialists would not disagree.

Eva Goodman

The nationalist curriculum (1989)

From the November 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Remember school history lessons? Long streams of dates and names. Dates of battles; names of great leaders; “our” army against them, the enemy; stories of Popes and Princes and other collections of pimps and ponces. History tests consisted of learning all of this seemingly meaningless stuff. Glorious Revolution 1688; the two Jacobite rebellions. 1715 and 1745; Great Reform Act 1832; Indian Mutiny—when the hell was the Indian Mutiny? Refer to the textbook and commit the date to memory. As long as you know that it happened and when it happened, let's not get ourselves bogged down in why it happened. For most of us, school history did not concern itself much with the question Why—the question which is at the root of all historical understanding.

History is a vital aspect of knowledge for those who want to comprehend and change the world. If we know where we have been (not just ourselves, but countless generations before us), then we can determine where we want to go. History is the key to the future. Once we become conscious of the fact that humans have not always lived as we live now, that history is a long story of contending classes oppressing and fighting oppression, and that our class is the class that will end all oppression, we can have confidence to play an intelligent part in the making of our own history. History is pointless if it is simply the study of dead men. When Thomas Carlyle asserted that "the History of the World is but the biography of great men” he could not have been more wrong. Great men do not make history; what happens in society is not the product of Bad King Johns and Good Queen Elizabeths, but is a reflection of the interaction of material forces of which individuals are only ever a part, not independent controllers. The only useful history is that which, however indirectly, can help us become conscious of what we can do to change the history of which we are now a part.

As Orwell warned, those who control the past can control the present. In Nineteen Eighty Four he depicted a fearful society in which the state manipulates the collective memory. If an event in the past is no longer regarded as useful to the authorities all reference to it is destroyed. A people who cannot remember where they used to be are in no position to challenge where they are now. Historically controlled, the present is something that workers come to accept as an unquestionable normality. Orwell was not merely inventing nightmares. In Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia the deletion from the record of history of disruptive facts was a carefully organised campaign.

Now that the crimes of the Stalinist historians are beginning to be rectified by modern East European historians, who are trying to recover at least some of the truth of the state-distorted past, here in Britain the government has embarked on a campaign to control the teaching of history which would have brought a sparkle to Stalin’s eye. The Tories, with their new national curriculum by which they want the state to determine what children in schools shall be taught, are seeking to reform the history syllabus. In recent years history teaching has improved. There have tended to be less dates, less big names, less propaganda on behalf of national pride and our masters' morals, the traditional emphases of history in schools.

In its documents relating to history in the new national curriculum, the state has called for a return to greater emphasis upon the teaching of hard facts. They have also called for much more concentration on the importance of Britain in history. One of the main sins of the more recent, enlightened history teachers has been to stress the significance of history as a global investigation. We are citizens of the world and this makes it of limited value to learn only, or mainly, about the story of one little island where we happen to have been born. The flag-waving nationalists who control education are not happy about this. A return to more nationally-centred history teaching is being required from now on. Or else.

Telling Lies Last Century

Like most of their authoritarian attempts to pull the workers into line by curtailing freedom, there is nothing new about the ideas of modern Tories. What they are now calling for was the educational norm in schools during the last century. In her lucid and comprehensive study of school history textbooks between 1800 and 1914 History For Their Masters (New York. 1970). Valerie Chancellor cites numerous illustrations of how history teaching was used as a means of pro-capitalist indoctrination. History textbooks were used in those times (as they are still, but less blatantly) to demonstrate three ideas: that England was the greatest nation on earth; that all other countries were inferior or racially unsound; that working-class movements and revolutionary movements are by definition harmful and to be avoided.

Textbook nationalism in the last century knew no bounds. Writing of the importance of using history for patriotic purposes, one reviewer wrote that ‘‘it is no light matter to animate the rising youth of England with a spirit of dignified pride in the great traditions of a glorious past and a noble future which is ours”. Explaining the rise of the British Empire, one textbook writer explains that:

We have seen England and Great Britain growing larger and larger, stronger and stronger, more and more free, more and more intelligent, until our Empire has grown to be the greatest, most powerful and most respected on the face of the globe . . .

It is odd to think that some of the children forced to read such nonsense would not have even had a pair of boots to wear as they did so. As with the Empire, so with the history of the British constitution, children were taught to celebrate this undemocratic system:

This is the best of all forms of government and it continues in England to this day. By this form of government, the good of all ranks is consulted, and, if either the king or the lords or the people attempt to exceed the limits of the power assigned to them, the others are ready to see that all things are properly balanced.

How handy it is for the people—the majority—to be kept in check by lords and kings, an unelected minority! In war. the victory of the British—it is mainly the victories that were talked about, then as now—was regarded as an act of god and a reflection of the wickedness of any national group that dared to take on our rulers. For example, one textbook, writing about Henry V's gang winning at Agin- court. pointed out that

The French people had at that period of their history arrived at a dreadful pitch of wickedness and nothing . . . appears more clear than that Henry was an especial instrument of Providence to humiliate and chastise them.

If the British were always right, foreigners were usually in the wrong, often due to no fault of their own—it was the high price paid for being mere foreigners. Writing rather petulantly about the Chinese resistence against British opium trading in the 1840s, one textbook writer noted that "the Chinese are a very cold kind of people and do not like strangers to go among them". Other groups of people did not escape from such crude racist stereotyping. One history book, co-written by Kipling, explains that freed West Indian slaves were

lazy, vicious and incapable of serious improvement or of work except under compulsion. In such a climate a few bananas will sustain the life of a negro quite sufficiently; why should he work to get more than this? He is quite happy and quite useless and spends any extra wages which he may earn upon finery.

Another textbook describes how under the “able guidance" of a strong British Viceroy in India "the natives soon learned to recognise the justice and sound sense of their conquerors and gradually settled down to peaceful work in the rice-fields". As for the Irish, one textbook described them of “incapable of ruling themselves and impatient of rule by others”. In a quite obscene historical comment on the Irish famine, published in a textbook of 1848. children were told that

The hand of charity was willingly stretched forth in England for their relief: government and the nation united in aiding that unhappy people; and but for the timely aid afforded, the whole country would have been one vast scene of death and destruction. Would that the pen of the historian could record that this aid was followed by a nation's gratitude! But this was not so.

Textbook descriptions of working-class movements were carefully put in such a way as to depict the majority as a mindless mob. The Chartists, who were simply asking for the right to vote, were described in one textbook as "mechanics, labourers, and others of the lower classes who were led by demagogues to desire a People's Charter"’. Another textbook, written by one Lady Calcott, stated that the Chartists

thought this would be a good time to try and frighten the Queen and government into granting their foolish and dangerous wishes . . . But the people of England loved the Queen too well, and were too well satisfied with the government of their country to let the Chartists do any mischief.

History writers for children tended to take the same approach to all workers' efforts to change their social position. In Kipling's textbook Peterloo is dismissed in one sentence; “At one riot in Manchester in 1819 the soldiers had to be called and several people were shot”. Apart from the factual error—the workers murdered at Peterloo were not shot—this description turns history on its head; the truth is that the middle-class militia rioted against the workers, fearing that the right to free speech might lead on to more dangerous changes in society. The Peasants' Revolt (against the poll tax, let the present government note) of 1381 was dismissed as another dangerous move by people who should play no part in history: "When the common people have got arms in their hands, and feel themselves masters, they are apt to run into the most dangerous excesses”.

As one textbook writer noted, in the course of a description of the English revolution (by the capitalists against the aristocracy) in the 17th century.

It is ever so with revolutions. A few violent men take the lead; their voice and their activity seem to multiply their numbers; the great body of the people either indolent or pusillanimous are led in triumph at the chariot wheels of paltry faction.

It is interesting to note that Mrs Thatcher wishes to see a return to Victorian values. We can only assume, from the authoritarian nature of her government's new efforts towards statist centralisation in history teaching, that it is her aim to see school history returning to the absurdities and crass indoctrination of that age.

In Stalin’s Footsteps

As we have shown, Thatcher is trying to go down the path previously travelled by Stalin. In the name of uniting the Russian Empire, the most atrocious distortions of political and cultural history were imposed on the republics of the USSR. Also, in order to defend his dictatorship over the Communist Party, Stalin had to destroy all recollection in the public consciousness of earlier Bolshevik traditions. Bukharin is just now being rehabilitated by Russian historians. It will be interesting to see whether they start to discuss his ABC of Communism, in which Bukharin and Preobrazhensky argued that communism entailed the abolition of money. Trotsky (the butcher of Krondstadt. who deserves no kindly memories from socialists) is still a virtual non-person in Russian history books.

In Zimbabwe, which calls itself a "socialist state", textbook writers are now doing their best to distort what socialism really means. This is very useful for the Mugabe government: if children learn from history that “socialism" has always been the kind of state-capitalist scenario presided over by Mugabe, then they will be less likely to resist against such rule. Consider this description of Stalin’s rule in Russia, as published in a contemporary Zimbabwean history book for schoolchildren called People Making History:

Stalin called for greater sacrifices from the workers. He also introduced a system of higher pay for skilled workers. In spite of hardships, the USSR was able to develop its own heavy industries. Slowly the government also started building other factories to produce consumer goods. By the end of the second Five-Year Plan the Soviet Union's industrial production was the third highest in the world. Life slowly began to improve for the workers . . . Stalin's economic revolution was a great achievement.

That several million workers and peasants were killed for the sake of this development of Russian state capitalism is passed over in one sentence.

Whose History?

The past does not belong to the state. It is not the property of a class. In a quite awful pamphlet put out by the quite awful Centre for Policy Studies History in Peril—May Parents Preserve It (1987), Alan Beattie proposes the effective privatisation of history. In his view history should be put into the marketplace and that which buyers want to learn about should be promoted. Presumably, unprofitable history, like that concerning the lives and struggles of the poor and the weak, would ended up like disused coalmines—rich with resources, but untouched.

To some extent history is already privatised: if you want to publish a book about a theme which is not considered by the publishing elite to be "historically relevant” (relevance is a concept usually determined by book sales managers), then the book will not see publication or major distribution. Privatised history is bad. but nationalised history is no better. The state is making sure that it has a tight control over what subjects scholars are given to research in British universities. These controls are inevitably political, often quite transparently so. University history lecturers are having to watch their backs these days. In a period of harsh job-cutting it only takes a few rumours that you are putting unacceptable interpretations to students to make employment difficult. Students are also under threat: they need to fight hard for the better jobs, and that requires them to conform to what their paymasters want them to think. If it is true that ten or twenty years ago universities, polytechnics and sixth-form colleges were places where young workers could take time to open their minds to new ideas, these days they do so at their economic peril, and tend to feel unable to do so at all. Thee tyranny of the market strikes again.

As workers we can have no greater weapon in our struggle against the bosses than knowledge. Understanding history is to us as powerful as all the filthy weapons that our class enemies can muster to defend their minority power. Once we see that history is about people—people who are just like us—making changes to their material environment, we can make the most conscious change of all: that of bringing society under social control. That is the greatest and noblest task which history places before us. and no amount of distortion or persecution by our class enemies will stop socialists from pursuing that task, inspired by the history of class-conscious workers who have struggled before we were born.

Steve Coleman

What is History? (2014)

From the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism, Historians and the New History Syllabus in the National Curriculum

In February 2013 the National Curriculum Consultation Document was published and capitalist ideologue and Tory Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove made a statement to the House of Commons about the new history syllabus: 'in history there is a clear narrative of British progress with a proper emphasis on heroes and heroines from our past' (Daily Telegraph 7 February).

Earlier at the 2008 and 2010 Tory Party Conferences Gove had complained that 'our children are either taught to put Britain in the dock or they remain in ignorance of our island story, education has been undermined by left wing ideologues, the under-appreciated tragedy of our time has been the sundering of our society from its past and the current approach we have to history denies children the opportunity to hear our island story. This trashing of our past has to stop' (Guardian 30 September 2008, Daily Telegraph 5 October 2010).

When the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government came to power in May 2010, Gove invited historian Niall Ferguson to advise on the development of a new history syllabus for the National Curriculum, 'history as a connected narrative' (Daily Telegraph 30 December 2012). Later in 2010 at the Tory Party Conference Gove announced historian Simon Schama as the new 'History Czar' to ensure pupils learn Britain's 'Island Story', and review the curriculum. Schama responded 'without this renewed sense of our common story, we will be a poorer and weaker Britain' (Guardian 5 October 2010).

Conservative historians

Schama is well known for his 1989 book Citizens; A Chronicle of the French Revolution where he defines the 'Revolution' by the Reign of Terror. Historian Eric Hobsbawm described the book as a political denunciation of the revolution, a continuation of a traditional conservative view of the revolution started by Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, and continued in Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities. Gove called Edmund Burke 'the greatest Conservative ever' at the 2008 Tory Conference (Daily Telegraph 30 September 2008).

Niall Ferguson is a conservative historian who cites as influences Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. His 2011 six-part Channel Four TV series Civilization: Is the West History? is a hymn to Western capitalism, global free trade and bourgeois liberalism. Ferguson identifies the 'six killer apps' of competition, science, rule of law, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic as keys to the dominance of western capitalism. Hobsbawm has called Ferguson an excellent historian but a 'nostalgist for Empire'. He is also a historian of financial capitalism having written The House of Rothschild and a biography of a merchant banker High Financier: The Lives and Times of Siegmund Warburg. His magnum opus on finance must be the publication in November 2008 of The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World which unfortunately for Ferguson was overtaken by the events of September 2008 when Lehman Brothers collapsed and the resulting global financial crisis. In this book Ferguson penned a hymn to global financial capitalism whereas we agree with Marx that 'money is the universal whore, the universal pimp of men and peoples'.

The Department of Education stated that 'our approach to the history curriculum has been supported by some of the country's most eminent historians' (Guardian 13 May). But the new history syllabus was immediately criticised by the President of the Royal Historical Society, the Historical Association, the Higher Education group History UK, and senior members of the British Academy.

The overall aim of the new history syllabus is 'a knowledge of Britain's past, and our place in the world helps us to understand the challenges of our time' with supporting aims to be to 'know and understand the story of these islands; how the British people shaped this nation and how Britain influenced the world'. The syllabus will attempt to cover the Palaeolithic era to the fall of the Berlin Wall in seven years. Even at Key Stage 1, ages 5 to 7 years, children are expected to understand terms such as 'civilisation', 'parliament', 'monarchy', 'democracy', and the 'concept of nation and of a nation's history' (Department for Education: National Curriculum Consultation 7 February).

At Key Stage 2, ages 7 to 11 years children will be taught 'the essential chronology of British history sequentially' from the Stone Age to the 1688 bourgeois 'Glorious Revolution'. This is history as a story, chronology, narrative, dates, events which makes Henry Ford comment 'history is bunk and just one damn thing after another' quite apt. Professor Jackie Eales, President of the Historical Society said 'intellectually, it is exactly what 1066 and All That was designed to lampoon. It is a trawl through history, one damn thing after another, in a very superficial way. It's a very old fashioned curriculum' (Guardian 16 February).

One of the recommendations of the 1999 Macpherson Report was a 'National Curriculum aimed at valuing cultural diversity and preventing racism' but in April 2013 History teacher Katherine Edwards pointed out that 'the new curriculum is very likely to alienate and disengage children and young people, especially those of black and Asian origin. Black and Asian people are excluded completely from the primary history curriculum and, apart from the token inclusions of Equiano and Seacole they only feature as slaves in the secondary curriculum until the arrival of the Windrush generation' (Guardian 19 April). Later in June children's laureate Malorie Blackman added 'if children are not taught about black historical figures along with heroes such as Lord Nelson, they might be turned off school altogether' (Guardian 4 June). In fact Olaudah Equiano, freed African slave who campaigned for abolition of the slave trade and Mary Seacole, Creole nurse in the Crimean War, were only introduced into the National Curriculum in 2007 but it was announced in 2012 they were to be dropped in the new syllabus. This prompted Operation Black Vote to gather 35,000 signatures on a petition to Gove, and American Democrat Reverend Jesse Jackson to write a letter to the Times. Gove conceded and Equiano and Seacole stayed in the new syllabus. But Martin Luther King and the US Civil Rights movement have been dropped from the curriculum.

As for the role of women in history there are no women at all mentioned in the Key Stage 2 syllabus except for two Tudor queens. In Key Stage 3, ages 11 to 14 years, Mary Seacole, George Eliot and Annie Besant are grouped under the heading 'The Changing Role of Women'.

China is not included in the curriculum but is only mentioned as a loser to Britain as a result of gunboat diplomacy, although the OECD stated in March 2013: 'from a long-range perspective, China has now overtaken the Euro area and is on course to become the world’s largest economy around 2016, after allowing for price differences' (forbes.com 23 March).

‘Great Man’ Theory

The syllabus focuses on kings, queens, and the lives of great men which is part of the bourgeois 'Great Man Theory of History' which has its origin in Thomas Carlyle's 1840 book On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1840) where he writes that 'the history of the world is but the biography of great men'.

Do 'Great Men' impose themselves on history? Marx wrote in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: 'Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past'. It appears that Napoleon Bonaparte perceived this truth when he wrote in exile 'I found all the elements ready at hand to found an empire. If I had not come probably someone would have done like me. A man is but a man, but often he can do much; often he is a tinderbox in the midst of inflammable matter, his power is nothing if circumstances and public sentiment do not favour him' (The Mind of Napoleon: A Selection from His Written and Spoken Words edited and translated by J. Christopher Herold. Columbia University Press: New York. 1955).

Peter Mandler, Cambridge professor of Modern Cultural History said of the new syllabus 'we need to know the history of family life, economic development, class formation, not just a list of prime ministers, admirals and treaties. And when the curriculum talks about the rise and fall of Empires it still only means the Roman Empire' (Guardian 16 February 2013).

History from below

The antidote to bourgeois 'Great Men' history is 'History from below' (the term coined by historian George Lefebvre) which is people's history, the history of the working class, everyday history or even micro-history. A good example of 'history from below' is The Crowd in the French Revolution by George Rudé where he points out that 'those who took to the streets were ordinary, sober citizens, not half-crazed animals, not criminals' in contrast to Carlyle, Dickens and Schama.

E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class is a sweeping people's history of the English proletariat but his book Whigs and hunters: The origin of the Black Act is a great example of micro-history. Following the collapse of the 'South Sea bubble' in 1720 there was an economic downturn and groups of poachers appeared in forests in Berkshire and Hampshire stealing deer from the aristocracy. The Whig government responded with an Act in 1723 which introduced the death penalty for over fifty offences. The Act would not be repealed until 1823. The Act can be seen as an example of 'bloody legislation' against the working class. In 1688 there were fifty capital offences on the statute book but by 1800 there were 220 capital offences mainly concerned with the defence of property. Between 1770 and 1830 35,000 death sentences were handed out with 7,000 executed.

At present capitalist ideologists are engaging in a type of 'historical revisionism' in relation to the First World War. In The Great War was a Just War published in History Today in August 2013, Gary Sheffield writes 'Britain’s First World War was a war of national survival, a defensive conflict fought at huge cost against an aggressive enemy bent on achieving hegemony in Europe. If the allies had lost, it would have meant the end of liberal democracy on mainland Europe'.

Prime Minister David Cameron's speech in October 2012 at the Imperial War Museum announced that there would be commemorative events to mark the First World War. These would include the outbreak of war, the naval battle of Jutland, Churchill's disastrous Gallipoli campaign, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the Battle of Passchendaele, and the Armistice.

The Socialist Standard of November 1914 pointed out that the Sunday Chronicle of 30 August 1914 had identified that it was a capitalist war when they wrote 'the men in the trenches are fighting on behalf of the manufacturer, the mill owner, and the shopkeeper'. In August 1919 the Socialist Standard concluded that 'while competition between capitalist groups for routes, markets, and control of raw materials exists, the cause of war remains'.

In capitalist society the working class are educated to identify their interest with the interests of the capitalist class and identify with the nation state not with our interests as a class. As socialists we believe 'the working class have no fatherland'.

As well as commemorating the First World War, the capitalist state  has also allocated £1 million to restore the battlefield of Waterloo in Belgium ready for the 200th  anniversary in June 2015. There is even talk of commemorating the 600th  anniversary of the battle of Agincourt. All this is done to bolster nationalism and ensure that the working class identify with capitalist history.

The new History Syllabus in the National Curriculum demonstrates the truth of what Marx and Engels wrote in The German Ideology: 'The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force'.

Steve Clayton