全国英语等级考试教材第五级

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The Revolution That Turned Education
Sentimental

At some point in the mid-1960s the picture of the classroom in the national
imagination changed. Before, it consisted of ranks of traditional, slope-surfaced
wooden desks at which sat uniformed children, their heads bowed, before an
authoritarian and perhaps eccentric teacher. After, there were tables organized into
groups, no uniforms and a nice, friendly teacher who probably liked the same pop
music as his pupils.

This is a cartoon view, but it depicts a real change. It was an educational
revolution that was well- meant, benignly inspired by concern for our children and
apparently, endorsed by some of the greatest minds of our age. Its ideal was to
help children grow and its politics were egalitarian. With Shirley Williams’
abolition of most grammar schools and the introduction of comprehensives, the
plan was in place.

It was, as we and the Prince of Wales now know, an unmitigated disaster.
Understanding why we did it and why it fails is a gloomy but necessary business.

Perhaps it was simply because it seems like a nice thing to do. Of course teachers
should help children to grow up; of course comprehensives should break down
class divisions; of course grim authority should give way to happy enthusiasm.
These were simple ideals, but they were created by a thought process and it is this
that now has to be dismantled.

The first point is not to be confused by the politics. Today’s teachers are not the
raging extremists of Tory and tabloid mythology. Indeed, more than 50% of them,

according to one estimate, vote Conservative.

This real root of the problem is inadequately understood and misapplied theory.
Take, for example, the specific issue raised by the prince-why Shakespeare was
not being widely and enthusiastically taught. The immediate reason is that
educationists and teachers have colluded on a view that contemporary and
multicultural work is more relevant and that Shakespeare, indeed all pre-1990
literature, is left to be inaccessible to less able pupils.

At one level this is a result of the “child-centered” philosophy defined by the
Plowden report in the 1960s. Lady Plowden’s committee led us all into
unstructured classrooms and the accompanying glorification of childish ignorance.
It effectively wrote the script for the liberal education establishment that has
dominated our schools ever since.
Keeping the Plowden faith alive now is the wildly misguided figure of Frank
Smith, preacher of the “real books” approach to reading. This is the liberal theory
in its most decadent phase: children are expected to read almost solely by being in
the presence of books. Some benign osmosis is supposed to function. What Smith
and his followers cannot see is that reading is an artificial activity, an arbitrary
code demanded by our culture.

Emerging from ill-digested Freud, which, in turn, was modified Nietzsche, and a
corrupted version of Rousseau, the beliefs of these people aspired to turn
education into a process whereby the child dictated the pace. The whole
educational emphasis swung from transmitting a culture to nurturing individual
development. It encouraged sentimentality, the primary emotional evil of our day,
and a sort of caring blandness. More alarmingly, it offered teachers the chance to
be social engineers.

In practical terms, it undermined the authority of what was being taught. It is not
necessary, indeed it is impossible, for a primary school child to understand the
principle behind the eight times table. Numbers of theorists over the world would
dearly like to know that principle for themselves. But child-centeredness demands
understanding rather than learning, so tables are not taught properly and children
are severed from a culture which depends for its coherence on the simple,
authoritative certainty that seven times eight is 56.

Literature in schools was specifically compromised by other cased of remote
high- intellectual theories trickling down into the classrooms. In the late 1960s and
the early 1970s, structuralism swept through British universities to be followed
later by post- structuralism, a whole generation of French thinkers appeared to
have discovered that literature was dead.
All that was left was “the text”. Great authors and their intentions were exposed
as elaborate delusions. Meaning was unconsciously embodied in the text, and text.
Hamlet, from this perspective, has no greater intrinsic worth than the list of
ingredients on a can of beans.
Barthes and Derrida were brilliant and Rousseau and Freud, the cultural
grandfathers of the 1960s revolution, were geniuses. The average teacher has
probably never read any of them, but without knowing, he has absorbed and
intellectual tradition that had distorted their thought into cheap sentimentality.
Handing such tradition to a low-grade educational establishment is like giving a
Kalashnikov to a four-year-old.

There is one final layer of intellectual corruption that needs to be exposed-cultural
relativism. This is the most deeply hidden of all because it is the most pervasive.
In essence, it is the deadening conviction that all cultures are equal and that,
therefore, ours is of no special value. It can even be glimpsed in the current
moronic Nationwide Building Society television advertisement in which dancing
natives carrying spears are unquestioningly characterized as springing from an

“older, wiser” culture. Hamlet and the eight-times table are cast aside. Anything
can be taught.

Why do we feel the need to believe this? Why have we lost the power to celebrate
what we are?

Yet cultural relativism is the instinctive belief of our entire educational
establishment and, consequently, of their pupils. It explains all the supposedly
“relevant” material that makes its ways into classrooms as will as the abject
“multiculturalism” that destroys our ability to assert that Hamlet is better than
either a baked bean can or the latest rap star.

Prince Charles began to see the point when he read of a speech delivered by
George Walden, the Tory MP, in June 1990. Walden is the Jonathan Swift of our
age hurling dangerously literate abuse at the tat and trash of our culture.

The speech, ostensibly on the subject of diplomacy, veered into a withering
evocation of a culturally depraved nation-whose economic recovery is as recent as
it is likely to change, whose educational and cultural levels remain lamentably
low, and whose main conurbations-which already include some of the most
desolating cityscapes in Europe-are becoming environmentally suffocated. He
spoke of “a trashed society, trashy broadcasting, trashy newspapers, trashy values,
a national past trashed by a trashy education system”. We were “the thick man of
Europe”.

It is difficult to imagine anybody wishing to be King of such a place. So Walden,
who is very clever, met Charles, who is not, and helped to steer him in the
direction of education as the root of the malaise.

As with architecture, it was a potentially explosive populist issue. People seemed
unable to get what they wanted from a band of haughty professionals. And, as
with architecture, throwing the prince into this morass was to play a highly risky
wild card.

The key to what the prince, and therefore Walden, is saying is bewilderment.
After 12 years of radical Tory rule and in a climate of popular conviction that the

state education system has been a disastrous failure, why are our schools still so
bad? And why do they still seem so vulnerable to the kinds of ideas that have
proved so disastrous for so long?

The political problem was that schools never made Margaret Thatcher angry in
the same way as unions or nationalized industries. She felt that people ought to
look after themselves and bad schools became, in this context, a kind of bracing,
self-improving hazard of life.

It was a terrible, tragic mistake. Of all the failed establishments of post- war
Britain, education was the one most urgently in need of a Thatcher revolution. But
her ministers, with their children at private schools, never did enough to force her
to re- examine her prejudices.

So the bewilderment of the prince is inspired both by a political failure and by
deeply-embedded intellectual corruption. The hope must be that his intervention
will focus the popular conviction that something is badly wrong and force the
issue out of the wilderness to which Thatcher consigned it.

Unfortunately taking on the liberal educational establishment is like trying to
disperse a fog with hand grenades. To discuss the issue with them is to run into a
damp barrier of terrifying complacency. They will focus on “resources”, on the
specialist expertise of teachers or on the availability of Shakespeare on video.
What they will not do is to accept the bad and violent failure of the education
system to transmit the most glorious cultural heritage in the world. This is, of
course, because they themselves are substantially ignorant of that culture.

The prince is aspiring to exalted company. Apart from Walden, is this country the
historian, Correlli Barnett, has damned the education system for producing “a
segregated, subliterate, unskilled, unhealthy and institutionalized proletariat
hanging on the nipple of state maternalism”. And in America, Allan Bloom with
his book, The Closing of the American Mind, has indicted liberal educationists for
the almost total destruction of the nation’s culture.

But the truth is that, both in the United States and Britain, there prophets are
surveying a defeat. The damage has been done. As a result, both countries have

resigned themselves, to living with a swelling, disaffected, subliterate underclass.

Teaching Shakespeare or tables has nothing to do with such vast social problems,
the liberals will say. The horror is that they still believe it.