De-schooling Australia

According to the progressives the fabric of society is already in crisis and current practices in education are a crucial component in the social dilemmas. Education has to change.

The world has never been as we have imagined it. It is an important time in education. Teachers and parents will play a central role in re-shaping the post-modern world using different approaches to schooling . These changes include large numbers of people leaving the school system altogether and finding alternatives such as home schooling and the Internet.

British schools in the 1960s

I was born and educated in England at a time when there was no “talk” in the classroom, only listening and indoctrination. It was called the “injection” method of teaching. “Spare the rod and you will spoil the child” was the maxim.

My first recollections of an English class at a Modern Secondary (Comprehensive) School are of a monumentally, austere old man standing in front of a blackboard towering over the class. He was very scary. In retrospect, he signified the overall purpose of post-war schooling - “control”.

Above the blackboard there was a picture of Queen Elizabeth II wearing her white ermine trimmed robe and a heavily jewelled crown. The eyes of the Queen stared down at us to insinuate the same authoritarian message: that learning was a privilege not a right and it was equated with exemplary behaviour and duty. Most of us came to regard the teacher as a replicate of the Queen in drag, or some sort of psychopomp.

School was a dismal affair that took place in a dingy brick building that had been built to house the children of London’s East End exodus.

A pre-fabricated dwelling had been tacked onto the original structure of the school and this was the English Room. The teacher stood out among the rest because he spoke a form of English that was quite different to that of his pupils. He spoke eloquently, with a precise grammar, a nasal tone and a distinctive upper-class accent.

The school mirrored the British class distinctions. It executed a distinctly top-down moral development that clashed with the working class way of life. English was meant to be about learning - reading, writing and comprehension - literacy. We didn’t read much at all. We wrote compositions but we were always careful how we described our lives. The threat of welfare was constantly present in our thoughts. The “welfare” had powers to remove us from our families if we did anything wrong. Those who obeyed the rules did so because they were scared. Those who flouted the rules had nothing to lose anyway.

The lessons

When children first enter school they are immersed into a world of words and images, which become absorbed gradually into their minds and lives. They have no idea of sexism, racism, class relations or institutionalised power. They are not aware of the discursive ideologies that pass as grammar and literacy. The child works slowly to learn the traditions and values. They become embedded in the divisions within society and they accept them as normal.

The lessons were contained in the texts, Dick and Dora; Jane and John. In these stories the girls are hapless maidens who learn to indulge the whims of would-be breadwinners. The outcomes are pre-determined. They called it “literacy” but reading and writing took place so we could learn the rules of socialisation.

By the time I reached High School I was well imbued with the requirements of a working class patriarchal system. There was a brief respite with the 1970s feminism.

Pluralism did not exist in my time at school. The most important principle of the British Comprehensive School system was that it served the cultural and economic needs of the district. Hence, the working class were schooled to fulfil their role as industrial workers. Schooling and capitalism were always already deeply entwined. School oriented people via their social contexts into accepting values that were not necessarily in their interest but which could be perceived as natural and inevitable. Modernism provided a wage and wider opportunities for young people but these opportunities were differentiated by class.