Biased Penguins

ANGUS MAUDE MP

Letter to a Teacher The School of Barbiana (Penguin Education Special 8s) I hope I am not alone in being thoroughly alarmed by the editorial policies of Penguin

Books in the field of education. I am not suggesting that all their publications are bad and biased (though some are), or that none

of them is sound and useful. What is so horri- fying is that a large and influential sector of educational publishing should have become a propaganda vehicle for the partisan views not of its authors but of its editors.

Let me prove this assertion at the outset. Here are typical extracts from the publishers' blurbs of seven Penguin books on education, all of which came to my eye quite fortuit- ously in the last few days: 'School is a war against the poor' say eight young Italian boys in this angry account of the way education favours the rich—in Italy and everywhere . . . their anger is the anger of every worker and peasant who sees middle-class children absorbed effortlessly into the schools as teacher's favourites.

The time for a radical manifesto on British education is long overdue. For over twenty-five years the struggle to democra- tise our system has been held back by those who see the proper function of education as the production of an elite and, as the most efficient means of effecting this, the labelling of children -as A's or D's at the earliest possible opportunity. Those chil- dren who do not meet the requirements of the current elite have had some reason to be disconsolate about their fate.

Here at last—appropriately at a time when the 'backlash' is receiving all the attention, if not actually gaining the upper hand—is a bold definition of the nature and purpose of 'education for democracy'.

The discrimination that has made second-class citizens of one generation of coloured adults will as surely disinherit their children, future British citizens now in our classrooms, unless ...

Challenged from below by an increasing tide of student unrest, harassed from above by economic pressures, the universi- ties—amongst the last strongholds of elitist education—seem unlikely to survive in their present form for very much longer.

Provision for higher education is now recognised as a major social and educa- tional need. In the United Kingdom alone, a million students by 1980 is no longer a wild statistic, but a realistic basis for forward planning.

When he became headmaster of a sec- ondary modern school in the Scottish coal- fields, R. F. Mackenzie found himself in charge of children whose lives promised to become as derelict as their surroundings— unhappy, delinquent, their futures blocked by a joyless and, to them, impossible tradi- tion of academic education ... a long and bitter struggle with an officialdom which prized narrow restrictions more than such dreams . . . staff who betrayed his ideal of a school free with authoritarian modes of discipline ...

We publish a selection of the entries here. They constitute a passionate and sus- tained attack upon our present educational order. Their intelligence and originality are only rivalled by their unanimity . . . No one will read this selection without feeling some shame at what we have done to these children. Who will answer them? Who will explain to them why they should not have what they demand?

Amid all these challenging tides and upper- handed backlashes, it is easy to miss the important point: the assertions in these ex- tracts—wild, biased and emotional as some of them are—do not purport to summarise the opinions of the authors of the books. They are propounded as factual statements by the Penguin editors. These lamentably influential educational censors clearly do not believe that there can be any respectable alternative viewpoint to the one—'progressive', egalitarian, permis- sive, anti-academic and occasionally straight Marxist—which they themselves so glibly and consistently propound. This kind of blinkered partiality has not, surely, anything in common with the ideals that once inspired Penguin and made it an important and re- spected institution? Perhaps I am doing the editors themselves an injustice: perhaps they simply never read their hacks' blurbs: but it looks remarkably like a deliberate and con- sistent policy to me.

Letter to a Teacher is a vintage specimen of the cult. It is guaranteed to bring a senti- mental tear to the eye of every progressive egalitarian and to make almost everyone else feel faintly sick. It has been highly praised by progressive critics, and includes an enthusias- tic 'afterword' by Lord (formerly Sir Ed- ward) Boyle, one of the rulers of the Pen- guin empire.

It proves pretty conclusively that the edu- cation system in Italy is deplorable, but it does not—as the editors allege—prove any- thing at all about the merits of our system or of selection in general. It is pretentious and tendentious, full of the most outrageous assertions masquerading disingenuously as flashes of childish insight. It is also written in a style which the translators describe as 'unique s direct, plain, refreshing

clear and biting', but which seems to me that of a demented telegraphist with hiccups. Finally, the authors' constructive proposals for educational reform would, if carried out in the United Kingdom, produce a next generation of half-educated peasants.

Letter to a Teacher is a tiresome and rather nauseating little book, quite unimpor- tant in itself. What is important is that it is so obviously Penguin's pride and joy. Which brings me back to where I started—and pretty depressed about it, too.