There’s a resonant cartoon about the modern workplace doing the rounds. Androids are shut in cubicles drudging away at computers. They’re on task, on Sisyphean task, in a vast, Orwellian, open-plan hell. There’s nowhere to hide. They can’t go off message or off task – off trolley seems the only option. The serfs embrace their servitude.
“If you liked school,” goes the caption, “you’ll love work.” Has it really come to this? Is education now merely about getting a job? Nothing else? Is the classroom no more than a simulacrum of the modern workplace? It would seem so.
My generation was lucky. Education was exciting, questioning and free. They paid me to go university. There were many jobs afterwards. I did all kinds, before buckling down to the genteel poverty of English teaching. We were trusted to do whatever we wanted in our classrooms. It was exhilarating.
No more. Few seem to question this modern regime. Educational big wigs seem to see nothing wrong with it. Ministers slaver over the slavery, heads deliver it, managements manage it, and exams validate it. The values of the PISA tables seem to be the only way to measure education.
Singapore, Indonesia, North Korea seem the role models. And China’s all the go. Ministers are suddenly fans of the surely oxymoronic Chinese Communist Capitalism, where the powerful are mostly male like Xi Jiping, who last week promoted himself democratically to rule forever.
The Chinese politburo resembles a Management Briefing in many schools, where mostly men point their tight, bright suits at you and smile beatifically and human rights are a bit thin on the ground.
Maybe it isn’t such a bad thing that English pupils come out so badly on these wretched PISA tables. At least they’re still thinking, still in the ring and have not quite acquiesced into tiny estate agent robots with the happy, vapid smiles of zealous fundamentalisms – even in the most corrupt and often bankrupt of our “zombie” academies.
Look, there will be fewer jobs than in my day. However hard they drudge, exam success will not always lead to work in a vertiginously changing world. It is depressing and frightening but also perhaps liberating and thrilling. It could free us up to teach what we want. Education could even make a come back.
Surely many parents would want this? They might stop neurosing. Surely many teachers would welcome it? They might not go so crazy. Surely many children would relish it. They might enjoy school.
I’m afraid it’s not going to happen. There’ll be more panic, more anxiety and more serfs for the System. More of those little cubicles. Still, if you like school...
- Ian Whitwham is a former inner city London teacher.