Against the Current

Three ways to torture your students

It’s 2.30pm on Friday - just half an hour before the end of a tiring week - and Year Ten are predictably restive. You need to move the lesson on but all attempts to settle the class have failed. Detentions are issued, individuals spoken to and you even attempt the trick of starting to explain from the board in the hope that they’ll all realise what you want them to do. Nothing works. You’ve got one last trick up your sleeve (literally): the ‘Hand Signal TM’. You stand with palm held aloft (in the manner favoured by one or two 20th Century fascist dictators) and wait – the idea being that the class will automatically fall silent. A couple of students glance at you with a distinct air of embarrassment whilst the rest carry on as before. One … two … three minutes pass as the class continues to resist your Pavlovian idiocy. It’s now 2.50pm (just ten minutes left) and you realise that the ‘plenary’ needs to be organised. The hand is lowered and you give out the ‘Weekly Reflection Sheet TM’. Going from table to table you realise that although they’ve been a bit noisy most of your students are actually working. All that time spent in ridiculous gesticulation at the front of the class was even more futile than you first thought. Now you’re supposed to stop them working to ‘reflect’ on the week at school. You fill in a form yourself: “This week I learnt how futile and humiliating most of these new behaviour ‘strategies’ really are and now know that the £200,000 spent by the school in consultancy fees would have been better spent on something else … like more teachers.”

“I’m a Tiger” shouts the bearded, middle-aged man at the front of hall. “Gggrrrrrrrrrrr” responds the audience of teachers. “Are you a Tiger?” the man asks one woman. “I’m … I’m a tiger” she stutters and her face flushes. “She’s one of our group! She belongs here! She loves this place!” he responds. “I’m a donkey” exclaims the head of sport – the hall bursts into laughter. Tiger-man is not amused. “It’s that sort of thinking that drags everyone else down. Yes you are a donkey, you’re just like Eeyore”. “This is a load of old Pooh!” responds our sports teacher. The assembled teachers are then told that there are different types of people, different types of learners. What a revelation. Some are indeed like Eeyore, others like Tigger and some like Pooh himself. What teachers have to do is encourage our students to be like Tigger – not as ditzy as the bouncing feline but as enthusiastic about life and school – and to feel part of ‘the group’. To move them into Tigger-type enthusiasm we must first know their learning styles: auditory, kinaesthetic, visual … the list goes on. Tiger-man quickly scrawls a picture of the human brain on a flip-chart and starts circling the different ‘active-centres’ corresponding to different types of learner. We’re informed that to get the most out of our students we must take into account their ‘learning style’, position on the ‘Pooh Bear’ mood spectrum and craft individual lessons to suit. After about twenty minutes of this pseudo-science someone asks what evidence exists to back up his claims. “This is all cutting edge thinking based on the latest findings from ‘brain-science’ … there isn’t actually any published research … but this is what makes it so exciting” Tiger-man enthuses. How exciting!

Three weeks to go until Year 9 take their maths SAT. They’ve gone through the KS3 curriculum, done the ‘Booster Sessions’, been subjected to motivational sessions from the LEA numeracy consultant and now all that’s left is to coach them on the most important skill of all: how to answer a SAT question. You’ve been informed that the biggest barrier to success at KS3 is the inability of many students to satisfactorily answer exam questions! They can do the work in class – teachers have evidence to prove this – but fail to understand what the questions mean. As exam questions tend to get recycled with only minor modification from year to year, all that’s required to overcome this ‘major problem’ is to coach students on a fairly narrow array of problems. So you go about preparing three weeks worth of lessons, sort out the exam questions you’ve been told to concentrate on and think to yourself: “can I really distil three years worth of teaching into three weeks? If this works, why not just give kids SATs three weeks into Year 7 and be done? Why can’t my students answer exam questions … is it a problem with children or with the exam? Can SATs really measure learning?”

The three scenarios above are based on real events in real schools. If they don’t yet sound familiar, they soon will. ‘Behaviour Management’ (dressed up pop-psych mumbo-jumbo) is an idea that is being sold to schools at an increasing rate. Profit making companies (some linked to universities, most not) are queuing up to sell their version of ‘cooperation’, ‘community’ and ‘classroom management’. In most cases the training amounts to little more than stating the obvious (“students like to feel safe”, “if you’re not consistent then students won’t know what to expect” …) and learning a few ‘strategies’ like the ‘Hand Signal TM’ (these are all trade marked … seriously). The outcomes of these new strategies are measured by a few self-serving surveys that, not surprisingly, tend to show continual improvement. Private companies are hardly going to conclude that what they’re selling is a load of old $%$^%$*£. Some students just find the whole thing hilarious but the principle that we can train young people to behave like a hungry animal is abhorrent. Such an explicit system of triggers, rewards and punishment reduces human relationships to a mechanical set of procedures. Skilled teachers don’t need a check-list approach to relating to students. We establish mutual respect and trust based on our skills as thinking people. If a school does have discipline problems then it’s no good just blaming unruly kids or ‘bad teachers’ – how about looking at the curriculum, social conditions, resources and class-size?

Personalised learning based around the ideas of learning styles and personality types is hokum written in the name of a basic truth. Yes, all students are different but when was this ever not the case? Any good teacher uses a variety of learning techniques in every lesson. Group work, kinaesthetic activities, writing and speaking happen in every single lesson. To insist that particular students can only work and learn in one particular way is an ideological crutch for the return to more vocational courses and the creation of a two-tier system. The ideas are largely without a theoretical base and are presented in such an outlandish way that most teachers find them laughable.

Testing, testing, testing … Students have always sat public examinations but the introduction of SATs, continual testing and assessment continues to have a destructive impact on how we teach. To pretend that all of these tests have some intrinsic significance is just one more fantasy indulged in by successive governments. When you come to realise – or are told outright – that students must be coached to pass specific types of exam then the whole testing regime becomes an even more cynical exercise.

The issue of SATs and over-testing has been with us for some time now (introduced when this teacher started secondary school) and we must continue to expose the idiocy of subjecting young people to the extreme pressures of tyrannical testing. The other ‘initiatives’ represent new ways to regulate both learners and teachers and involve whole new layers of paperwork, useless preparation and monitoring. If government thinks it can distil the essence of quality education into these sorts of framework then they’re either mistaken or plain stupid. The introduction of behaviour management schemes and ‘personalised learning’ into our classrooms should be vehemently fought by all teachers, parents, carers and students. We need a national campaign to expose the dangers of these ideas and to continue the fight against over-testing. If rank-and-file members of the NUT won’t start such a campaign, then I’m not sure who will.

‘War and Revolution’ is the fifth volume of Hal Draper’s mammoth project to organise the political ideas developed by Marx and Engels – ‘Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution’ – on a coherent, closely argued and contextualised basis. This is something Marx managed for himself in his economic writing but never with the diffuse array of journalism, essays and correspondence that constitutes his directly political writing. For Draper, this project wasn’t a mere academic exercise – though his lack of political activity during the period of writing leads some to level this accusation – but was part of a decades long battle against those who used Marx’s name in association with “counter-revolutionary tyranny”. He was determined to expose this “biggest Big Lie” with the aim of organising a genuine socialist movement. Draper was a founding member of the Workers Party and played a leading role in successor organisations up to the 1970s. His political career coincided with socialists such as Max Shactman and CLR James who developed a critique of Stalinist society and attempted to orientate Trotsky’s Fourth International towards working class emancipation. Volume Four of KMTR on the ‘Critique of other Socialisms’ was published in the midst of the collapse of Stalinism and in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square. Now fifteen years after Draper’s death and at a time when socialists are faced with pressing questions on the issue of war, Ernest Haberkern has completed Volume Five at a similarly relevant time.

The concern of this volume is not to develop the ‘Marxist line’ on war, but to account for the many complex and often forgotten episodes to which Marx and Engels were forced to react. The issue for Marx was not just to explain why wars happened but to determine what impact war would have on the working class movement and any prospects for revolution. This motivating spirit has often been obscured by down-right misinterpretation by such august figures as Lenin, Kautsky and Luxemburg. By claiming that Marx was a Russophobe, by invoking ‘Marxist’ assertions that were never made or by making excuses for Marx and Engels’ supposed ‘aberrations’ on certain questions, the common picture of their stand on the issue of war and revolution is terribly muddied. Draper and Haberkern attempt to set the record straight. The book shows that up until their deaths, both Marx and Engles changed their specific views on war time and time again whilst never loosing sight of the overall perspective of revolution. This should be no surprise given the tumultuous events and rapid developments they both lived through – and given the fact they were both very human. ‘War and Revolution’ is a very thorough account of a great many arguments, so a detailed exposition is not possible in a book review. What is possible is to explain some of the dominant issues and to give a quick glimpse at one important argument.

Three key themes are identified in the introduction: Marx’s alleged ‘lesser-evilism’ on the question of Russia, his supposed predilection for choosing ‘one bourgeoisie over another’ and the case of what Engels did and didn’t say. You could be forgiven for thinking that what we have here is more akin to a detective story than a work of politics and Draper’s forensic method in some ways bares this out. August 14, 1914 is a date in the history of the socialist movement whose resonance will be felt for some time. On that day the avowedly socialist German Social-Democratic Party joined forces with the German ruling class and backed the issue of war credits. This move came as some surprise to members of the Second International who’d seen the SDP press expose again and again the dubious activity of German diplomats. Surely this move represented a massive break with the Marxist tradition? Apparently not! You see Marx and Engels were outspoken Russophobes who supported any prospect of war on Tsarist totalitarianism. The pro-war SDP appeared to have a precedent for their abandonment of socialist politics and Lenin and Luxemburg – though opposing the war – seemed to agree with them. Marx had been a Russophobe but he was wrong went the official view. The fact that neither the SDP, Lenin or Luxemburg produced written evidence for Marx’s pro-war position didn’t stop this becoming a Marxist ‘Fact’. Marx did despise the Tsarist regime and often seemed to be cheerleading the prospect of war but on a very clear basis. The basis that ‘democracy’ – the newly democratic or potentially revolutionary states – would be the liberating force.

It seems that the pro-war Marx didn’t limit himself to just Russia – he appears to have a habitual tendency to choose one bourgeoisie over another and again this is invoked in all kinds of ‘Marxist lines’. Where Marx and Engles did support one side over another – in some instances over Russia, the Crimea and the US civil war – they did so on the assumption that success for one side would further the prospect of revolution. As European capitalism developed and the much-hoped-for revolutions failed to develop as Marx had predicted, Engels went about developing what became a socialist anti-war perspective – one that recognised the fact that wars between rival powers would be to the detriment of the working classes involved.

It should be clear that in the final analysis it was the dynamic of the European working class that most effected Marx and Engles’ judgments on war. They were active participants in the creation of a working class movement ready to take on the bourgeoisie to end all war and exploitation. This meant that at times the content of their work was addressed to very specific sections of society in very specific conditions. This context is rigorously argued through by Draper and Haberkern in an effort to show that no other concern occupied their political positions than moving towards socialist revolution. At a time when the dominant ‘anti-war’ stance of the Left seems at pains to ignore the dynamic of the Iranian and Iraqi working classes, this book provides powerful reading for those of us determined to forge a socialist anti-war movement.

The publication of the Education White Paper last year commenced months of wrangling, negotiations and campaigning that went to the very heart of the Labour Party. MPs and party members lined up with education unions to denounce proposals to unleash rampant market-driven measures upon schools. Up and down the country local associations of the NUT held protest meetings, Constituency Labour Party’s debated the issue and internal groupings like ‘Compass’ issued pamphlets denouncing the plans. With good reason some in the NUT have taken this as signalling a deep crisis for the Blair Government – a crisis that could result in defeat for what has become the Education Bill. For now it remains unclear what the outcome of a vote on the Bill will be but the campaign so far, the collective weight of would-be parliamentary rebels and the meagre efforts from the leadership of the NUT have done little to ameliorate the substance of the proposals.

Since 1997 Blair and a succession of education ministers have pursued and extended a policy of school diversification introduced by the Tories in the early 90’s. The test-beds for this process were the unpopular Grant Maintained (GM) schools and City Technology College’s (CTC’s). GM schools were an attempt to assess the viability of allowing schools independence from local government control. Individual heads and governing bodies were encouraged to hive themselves off from the ‘interference’ of LEAs and make themselves directly responsible to central government. GM schools – perhaps unsurprisingly – proved an unappealing prospect for most heads. CTC’s were a different kettle of fish. These were brand-new, built for purpose schools that actively sought private sponsorship, employed teachers and adjusted the curriculum on an independent basis, which selected a spectrum of abilities (albeit significantly skewed to the top end) and which received appreciably more funding than your average secondary school. The former steel producing town of Corby in Northamptonshire clearly illustrates the ‘benefits’ of this type of school. When steel production stopped in the early 1980s Corby was left an empty shell with high unemployment, poor housing and health and extremely low educational achievement. The solution to the last of these problems was to open a CTC. The result? Close to 100% A*-C at GCSE for those lucky enough to be selected for the new school but a continued downward spiral for the rest. At the time Labour came out fighting against the CTCs but New Labour have pushed through these sorts of ‘reforms’ for the past eight years. The Education Bill and City Academy scheme should be seen as the logical conclusion of this Tory policy.

Comprehensive education – like the NHS – is one of the last remaining symbols of Labour’s reforming past. Some Labour members who weathered the removal of Clause IV, the continuation of Tory social policy and a string of unpopular military escapades have baulked at the prospect of this legacy being destroyed. Veteran Blairites like Fiona Miller have transformed themselves into vehement class-warriors at the prospect of the abolishment of comprehensive schools. In ‘A Comprehensive Future – Quality and Equality for all our Children’ (co-authored with the more consistent Melissa Benn) we hear the following assessment of our schools: “One of the biggest problems facing British schools is the gap between rich and poor”. That’s a situation Blair has failed to do anything about since coming to office - but what about his future plans? “If the government continues in the direction it is currently heading, we risk creating a multipartite system, a pyramid of provision, with high-achieving state schools at the top, largely drawing from better off families, down to a hard core of low achieving schools and colleges, largely in the inner cities, serving the poorer children”. Even those who otherwise support the Blair agenda can see what awaits us and to their credit they’ve done a lot of work to make this a national issue.

The White Paper contained proposals on issues from school meals to a new inspection regime. Of all the proposals, selection and the idea of ‘Trust Schools’ – an amalgam of GM, CTCs and Faith School ‘values’ – have caused most concern. The main thrust of Labour Party opposition has been focused on selection. This particular cat was let out of the bag some years ago but proposals in the White Paper put down in ink complete school-based control. To many this signalled a concrete return to a Grammar/Secondary Modern system and spurred them into active opposition. The main weakness of the internal party opposition – and importantly any likely rebellion – has been this focus on selection because by expunging these proposals from the Education Bill, Blair has potentially defused a large element of the rebel block. The main thrust of the Bill – marketisation through the creation of Trusts – remains intact.

In spite of the forced concession over selection, the Education Bill remains a major threat to the idea of inclusive, community comprehensive education. Any wheeler-dealer, religious fanatic or ‘educationalist’ on a mission can set up a charitable body, form a ‘Trust’ and take over a school. The motivation to do so is greater now than in the past because elements of the market – in the form of Academies and other specialist schools – are already in place to act as a lever for other schools. To effectively oppose the Education Bill we must engage forces like those around ‘Compass’, MPs who opposed the White Paper and the wider labour movement in a grass-roots led campaign against the Bill. Specifically we should campaign for individual teachers, Governors, and trade unionists to sign up to a pledge of non-compliance with the proposals in the Bill – to pledge that under no circumstances will they take part in the privatisation of our schools.