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| Book review CLASS WAR: The state of British education by Chris Woodhead Does the former chief inspector
of schools have the correct credentials to lecture us about educational standards?
Fred Inglis examines his achievements This is a book that belongs to
the history of publicity, not of educational thought. It puts me keenly in mind of a
paragraph in the novelist Storm Jameson's autobiography: "I watched with amazement
and misgiving the hand-over-fist climb of an ambitious young man... a clever
office-soldier with a great deal of charm... capable in good faith of arranging to advance
himself at the expense of less adroit colleagues by any means except violent
ones. He was not vain, not unscrupulous in anything except the
turning-points of his career." Chris Woodhead so advanced
himself that he became the first of Her Majesty's chief
inspectors to attain the doubtful reward of
national celebrity. It would be hard to find a post for which the curious
mixture of his qualities – his deliberate, sometimes endearing
recklessness, his powerful charm, his brutality and insolence, his executive incisiveness
– were less suited. This is the
senior figure in local authorities who made
clear his opinion of colleagues by
attending their meetings with his feet up on the
committee table; whose contract with the Associated Examining Board as a coursework
moderator was not renewed after he had failed to notify the Board when
he moved address and, as a result, important correspondence had been neglected; who
boasted to a colleague, after getting a job training teachers at the University of
Oxford, that he "never marked kids' work". This is the national
custodian of the intellectual virtues who, while deputy to Duncan
Graham at the National Curriculum Council at
York, sloped off to London to press his suit
with the Baroness Blatch and her specialist aide, the head of Dixons, so that together
they duly appointed the honest go-getter to his grand office. Tim Brighouse,
Birmingham's famously progressive (and New
Labour) chief education officer, tells the tale of how –
once in that office – Woodhead radically adjusted an otherwise-benign
report on his authority. When Woodhead's staff, leaking
like a urinal, ensured that Brighouse saw an
early draft as well as the published report, the Chief Inspector swore
detailed vengeance on his colleagues – without ever catching the culprits. Tom Wylie, a
senior HMI who left the inspectorate while the going was good,
remarked of Woodhead that "he holds no opinions that would be out
of place in the bar of the Wokingham Golf Club". The work in hand bears this richly
out. It is commended by the publishers as "the book every parent should
read", but there is nothing here they have not already
heard Woodhead say in the columns of the Tory-favouring press so briefly
hospitable to him. Woodhead boasted to a
colleague, at the change of government in 1997, "They daren't
sack me. If they did, it would show they were soft on standards. " But
his opening chapter on "Standards" disgraces the
standards we should expect from such a voice: those of
careful argument, due authority,
detailed evidence, deliberative judgement and decent prose. He calls for standards,
but provides no index. He quotes (and misnames)
the respected American commentator E D Hirsch on
cultural literacy, but is himself unlettered. His notes (there
is no bibliography) contain 44 mostly unpaginated references,
almost all newspaper articles. Mine is not
a crabbed, scholastic objection. There is absolutely no sense, in
this boring yet outrageous book, of any interest in the life of the mind that
Woodhead was paid £115,000 a year to uphold. When he quotes a serious
intelligence in order to defend his idea of a university, he turns, as one should, to John
Henry Newman. One has to
conclude either that he can't think and doesn't know it, or that he has lost
interest in the whole business but realises
he had to publish some kind of self-vindication. There is nothing
here of that disinterested grapple with political expedience that
would give his writing edge and vitality;
his abstractions are contrived from ready-made triteness and stock responses.
They even lack the raw slavering of the demagogue-journalist. Thus we are again asked to
condemn the robotic leftists and sentimental egalitarians of what
Woodhead (borrowing from the not-very-intellectual lips of President
Reagan's Education Secretary) calls
"the Blob"– meaning " the
educational Establishment". But he nowhere addresses in detail the
arguments of this creature. Instead, we meet unnamed
slack-jawed professors, incompetent local authorities, daffy primary-school
teachers encouraging children to misspell and write
rubbish, and "the great and the good with whose names I could fill
the page". It is an agreeable irony that, after his resignation, he has
accepted a post as part-time research professor at the University of Buckingham –
not itself noted for the distinction of its research record. When Woodhead is
right, he has given us no standards for judging his rightness. The
unspeakable gibberish of "learning initiatives", "higher order learning
skills" and the repellent neologism "learnacy" are all as
mind-putrefying and heart-desiccating as he says. But when
he progresses to his "way forward", he
returns to the mad-eyed jargonists of American managerialism who devised this
grisly stuff in the first place. It is
in this last section that we really
see how Chris Woodhead's zealous self-advancement and
sudden recklessness twirled rapidly together to spin him
into inaudible outer space. With casual contempt, he waves away the state as
the vehicle of oppression and unfreedom, disregarding
its long, painful history as a moral agent in defence of citizens against the
arbitrary cruelty of power. And, with only the most cursory review of a few
examples, he wants to commit all education to a universal voucher system. He doesn't understand the
economics, or even justify them. He cites a few figures and saunters on. When in
trouble with difficult sums ("Numbers," he once said to a colleague, "I
don't do"), he turns to the last resort of the lazy populist and
blames "the politicians". No one can doubt that some
large hiatus – as wide, perhaps, as the Reformation or Enlightenment
– has opened up in the cultural and educational continuities
of our somnambulist society. The idea that, in the seven years of his tenure, a
raucous controversialist could do anything about it is one measure of how deep our
slumbers are. |
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