New Left Review I/192, March-April 1992

James Donald

Dewey-eyed Optimism: The Possibility of Democratic Education

In 1983, I ended an article about education after four years of Thatcherism by quoting Raymond Williams from The Long Revolution. The old privileges and barriers had gone, he had argued in 1961. The question was now ‘whether we replace them by the free play of the market, or by a public education designed to express and create the values of an educated democracy and a common culture.’ [1] James Donald and Jim Grealy, ‘The Unpleasant Fact of Inequality’, in AnnMarie Wolpe and James Donald, Is There Anyone Here from Education?, London 1983, p. 101. Although I worried at the time that this might be too melodramatic, I was probably underestimating the radicalism of Mrs Thatcher’s aspirations—or, as it turns out, of Mr Major’s great simplicities. The Education Reform Act (1988), the National Curriculum, the scrapping of the Inner London Education Authority, the privatization of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate, and the other measures associated with them constituted a deliberate attempt to destroy the post-Beveridge consensus embodied in the 1944 Butler Act. The new settlement was designed to ‘modernize’ education by displacing local-authority provision in favour of a more market-like system of regulation. To balance this gestural devolution, the degree of autonomy that schools and teachers had in formulating the curriculum was significantly diminished. Instead, the content of schooling was to be prescribed ‘from above’. The National Curriculum, as first conceived, had promised exactly that: a standard language, a narrative history of national destiny, and so a normative, monocultural definition of community claiming the legitimacy of familiar values and an eternal identity.

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