Class war

Pupils are being turned into "a seething mass of bored, frustrated, alienated children" by today's education system James Tooley, a professor of education policy at Newcastle University will say . Modern state schools are built on a "factory model" he explains . "One of the most startling deficiencies of schooling today is that the majority of it is still carried out with 20 to 30 children of the same age in a classroom with one teacher. It is the factory model that was there when I was a child and my father and grandfather before me."

SOYMB can sympathise with that view . Schools under capitalism resembles a factory in which materials are tested, classified and put through processes which will mould them into finished products for the market ranging from the cheap, mass-produced to the costlier high-grade article. In practice it cannot fortunately, be as mechanistic as that because the material is human, but the view is not far removed from the capitalist one. All people going to work for wages are selling their labour-power; the price of this depends, as does the price of every other commodity, on the labour that went into its making. Thus, a professional person or a skilled technician's labour-power commands a relatively high price because it embodies other people's skilled labour in education and training; an unskilled workman's labour-power, on the other hand, has only a: low price because it is essentially a cheap product.The continual creaming-off process which goes on at every stage of the educational system is capitalism's necessary search for officers and N.C.O.s in the wage-earning army. Indeed, the grading of schoolchildren is almost an assignation of them to their future stations in life. Schools and universities must reflect the needs of the division of labour within capitalist society.

While Professor Tooley successfully identifies the problem with today's education system , his solution proves less then enlightening. Tooley advocates the dismantling of the current system and says private providers should be encouraged to set up their own schools.The academic says the advantage of a "competitive market" system of education is that it automatically sets up accountability "between sellers and buyers". .

The market-place frustrates rather than promotes self-improvement for the vast majority of people. The market is incompatible with any equitable sharing of society's wealth of knowledge and culture. As it stands, what is called education merely reflects the society in which it exists, divisive, demanding, pressurising, merely an alienating system, a vast factory, for turning out workers tuned to our masters' requirements.

True education, the developing of each individual towards his own well-being and that of society, has not yet been attempted and Tooley's model will meet with little success. What is necessary for it is the re-organization not of schools, but of society.What can we say about education in socialist society? It is easier to foresee what will no longer take place than what will positively develop. With no employment, schooling will lose its function as preparation for employment. No more McDonaldisation of education. The knowledge and skills needed to run a society which inherits the best from the past and rejects the worst will be circulated and developed and the ability to think creatively and critically transmitted from generation to generation. No hierarchical and autocratic teacher-pupil relationships that concentrate power in the hands of teachers and lead children to acquire attitudes of docility and submission to authority.