Centrepiece

Rising damp of subversion

Colin Welch

One young teacher justified her being on strike by declaring that she deserved more money because, after all, she'd undergone four years' training. Fourteen years or 40, and her deserts would presumably increase in proportion. Yet what is teacher training worth? As veteran headmasters will recall, the best intake into teaching within living memory was pro- bably after the second world war, and its members had for the most part received lit- tle or no training as teachers, though most had had experience of discipline. They had adequate academic qualification in the sub- jects they were going to teach. About education all they knew was how to get one; about education as a separate autonomous discipline they knew next to nothing, unless they had read a few books on their own. They learnt to teach by the hardest and best way, being deposited in front of a class and told to get on with it. One senior teacher would look after four or five of them, ad- vising and checking, always on call if chaos broke out. If this late Forties intake has formed theories about education, they must be predominantly of the soundest sort, product rather than precursor of experience.

Most of them must be heartily glad they escaped modern teacher training, which tends to teach theory before practice and, in some cases and places, worse than theory. Only three purely teacher training colleges are now left. Most young teachers get their education degrees at polytechnics or insti- tutes of higher education, a quarter at universities. This sounds like an improve- ment, till you reflect what many universities and polys are now like. Parents are expect- ed to entrust their children to some young teachers whose own education has been completed amidst systematised disorder and oppugnancy, under professors and lecturers whose own views and methods may seem extreme and fanciful.

At the North London Poly, according to Baroness (Caroline) Cox, there has been a disruption or occupation on average every three or four months, including one lasting eight weeks — a record? 'Alternative education' has been imposed, libraries clos- ed, exams disrupted, thousands of pounds' worth of damage done, academic standards in some departments polluted. The autho- rities have disciplined no one for these outrages, neither students responsible nor staff acquiescent or worse, and have tried with some success to cover them up. I don't know whether the education department has been prominently involved in the distur- bances — evidence is conflicting — but I can't see how it can remain unaffected by them, any more than children can easily get a good upbringing in districts dominated by gang warfare.

Through such suspect creeks and inlets a rising tide of trendy social worker-teachers enters the profession, many with far-left views, like those I mentioned last week. Most teachers, to be sure, still don't vote Labour, and most, perhaps, don't now vote Tory, though they used to: the majority are not extremists. Yet canvass younger teachers, the senior teachers of tomorrow, and a far less reassuring picture emerges. Like the stain of slopped tea rising in a sugar lump, the damp of subversion spreads upwards through the teaching profession.

How far has it got? We should watch carefully two indicators: the rise among teachers of commitment to CND and 'peace studies', and the tireless campaign against exams, exemplified in a recent Sunday Times supplement headline, 'EXAMS the needless nightmare'. In 1982 the National Union of Teachers nearly affiliated to CND, as related by Baroness Cox and Roger Scruton in their illuminating critical survey Peace Studies (Institute for Euro- pean Defence and Strategic Studies, L2.50). The NUT president prudently warned his conference not to 'demonstrate our bias', though he did not deny its exis- tence, and the affiliation proposal was ac- cordingly voted down by a measly 114,000 votes to 108,000.

CND teachers have claimed to be engag- ed 'in a battle for the minds of 14- to 16-year-olds', though even six-year-olds have come home from primary schools repeating CND slogans parrotwise (v. Baroness Cox in the Daily Mail). Indoc- trination does not spurn the dirtiest intellec- tual tricks. Children are asked, for instance, 'Which do you prefer ... Swords or ploughshares? Destruction or develop- ment? Atom bombs or charity?' William the Outlaw might choose swords: but could any questions be more loaded? Nor does in- doctrination avoid manifest absurdities like this, perpetrated in a favourable and com- mended report on peace studies by Avon's director of education: children are to be 'encouraged to be aware of their respon- sibility for world disarmament' (perhaps by lecturing that old warmonger Daddy?). 'Teachers for Peace' deplore the fostering of 'fear and hatred for the Soviet Union and her allies', which is about as fair as talking about Nazi-occupied Europe as 'Herr Hitler and his allies'. In one com- prehensive school one pupil alone had the temerity to reply to three veteran CND ear- bashers who had been wheeled in to lecture senior pupils, and to suffer their retaliation. Another school devoted a whole week to peace studies. The Centre for Peace Studies disseminates among teachers such irinare' matory stuff as this, written by Berkshire s adviser on 'multicultural education': 'There are objective conflicts between white and black, North and South, ruler and worker, male and female, oppressor and opPressed ,

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You cannot avoid taking sides. MY , tempt to be neutral, even-handed, objec- five, will promote the interests of the stronger, the oppressor . . . There is onlY unending struggle. Your commitmetn should be to justice, not to truth' ---- ni,Y italics. Could any advice to teachers, aPa" from its militant tone, be more wicked,' assuming as it does that justice and trio are incompatible?

Teachers thus shaped and shaping, thus

untrue to their calling, obviously need to be watched and if possible weeded ent' Examination results provide an invaluable check on what they are up to, or at least ou what else they are up to apart from intl,°c„. trmation (for which they surely should° be paid: should they not rather `bnY,, time'?). This is doubtless one reason WhY the exam system is under furious attack. In so far as reform is sought, designed to Make exams more precise and objective and the results more intelligible and revealing, we should not object, except in so far as everY change makes it more difficult for Paten. ts to compare their children's progress gat" their own (or older children's) at a like age.s. But wherever we hear academic standar°, and values denigrated, the absorption ,°` facts (usually by 'stuffing' or'cramnung the writing of 'too many essays' and t4 " 'grappling with too many dimly underst°°ci theories' deplored, we should be on en,' guard. Other warning words are narrowd drudgery' and 'over-specialised'. wherever, as in a recent article by Wilby, Sunday Times educational c°.ra respondent, 'swotting up on the HaPshun' dynasty or the laws of mechanics' Is favourably contrasted with learning how wci use a washing machine correctly, we rir threat. Behindconcept of education :

Behind all proposals to substitute `eeri,,,

tinuous assessment' for exams we shTi discern the trendy teacher struggling greater personal power, freedom and fulfilment. He prefers 'helping' to teachUt! (Jacques Barzun's contrast), conditinnin:t to education, commitment to thought, wh is subjective and cannot be measured to, what is objective and can be; and he bitteitY, resents the tyranny of exams, which thwarIc' him. A world in which objective acadern" exams, and the need to prepare for thelf' have been abolished is one in which the academically gifted child will receive nsu proper education, in which teachers Pet,,; the mediocre, docile and suggestible,. w:1,1; prosper, in which the clever but diffq child (i.e., conceivably, the anti-CND '

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will have no appeal against the prejtudtee,e thhistkeachers. This world is nearer than

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