De-schooling Australia

The Ford Motor Works was just down the road from the housing estate where I lived and this is where most of the pupils from my school were expected to go to earn their livelihood, often following in their parent’s footsteps. They would work there, day in and day out and be given a watch when they retired; if they lived to retire. There was total loyalty and devotion to the company because the system had taught people to be passive and to accept their “station in life”.

School as a filtering system

Within the English Comprehensive School system class was mediated by an examination called the Eleven Plus. It acted as a filtering system; it set the curriculum and put the Wigs and the workers in their rightful place. Parents who could not afford to keep their children at school beyond the age of 15 never allowed them to take the examination. Many bright young people were doomed to a life of factory service and second class citizenship. The situation was exacerbated for girls whose future was dependent on marriage and reproduction.

As technology advanced everyone expected the system to change but it didn’t change. In a small volume called Deschooling Society [1939] Ivan Illich argued that in advanced industrialised societies the dominant institutionalised structures of schooling would not give way to any social liberty via the developing technologies.

Illich described the divide between technological possibilities and the social reality as one of using education to engage in and direct a commodity fetishism; that is a passive, addictive consumerism that filters through institutional delivery systems as a coercive regime of institutionalised values. This system remains intact.

Political attempts at change

Harold Wilson’s Socialist Labour Government won office in Britain in 1964. Wilson attempted to get rid of the tripartite system regulated by the Eleven Plus and wanted to engage fully in a Comprehensive system. Prime Minister Wilson, having come from a working class area himself, was keen to open up opportunities for working class boys and girls in line with the recommendations of the Robbins Report.

Wilson’s aspirations never reached fruition although he can be credited with introducing the concept of an Open University. After the Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Reforms in the 1980s the Grammar schools were given a reprieve and the Comprehensive schools became a blend of the original “Modern” model and the new “Comprehensive” system where schools were required to take students from catchment areas regardless of ability.

Those who could afford to move house to a good catchment area were guaranteed a good school; those who couldn’t afford to move were at the bottom of the social ladder despite student performance.

Old models for new settings

Class remains a salient force throughout Australian society and it is inextricably linked to a two-tiered neo-liberal system of education now being further enforced by a new wave of authoritarianism, not just from the neo-liberal and/or conservative ranks but from New Labor who see themselves as having graduated to the middle ground and in some cases are more conservative than the original conservatives.

The move now should be towards an intellectually empowering practice that includes trans-cultural, democratic and pluralistic models of teaching but this doesn’t sit well with a labour market looking for a lower skilled population willing to work longer hours for fewer rewards.

The neo-conservatives are moving to control education through “media beat-ups” and accusations of a “literacy crisis”. The conservatives argue that school is failing because: “Within schools the impact of the ‘postmodern’ has been significant in subjects like English” (Doecke B Howie M and Sawyer W [2006] [Eds.] The Present Moment  in Only Connect,  Wakefield Press).

Postmodernism challenges the boundaries between high and low culture; art and artisan. Postmodernism undermines the ideology contained in grammar and traditional literacy and replaces it with a free floating meaning. It provides a freedom of expression and a voice for the oppressed. It offers more hope for inclusiveness.

With more and more people turning away from the current school system Kevin Rudd’s heavy hand of authority could see his “education revolution” become the de-schooling of Australia.