EDUCATION FOR THE GOOD SOCIETY - Support

and contradictions around their ideas, whichhave to be taken into account. Tawney’s visionof ‘secondary education for all’, for example, hadto contend with entrenched prejudices aboutthe lack of ability of the mass of the population.A.S. Neill’s ideas about freedom were rehearsedmainly for the benefit of fee-paying parentsoutside the state system of schooling. Yet the ideasthemselves were indispensable for further growthof educational idealism in the twentieth century.History and education policyThe loss of historical perspective in recenteducation policies has meant both a forgetting ofthe deeper problems of schooling and a foreclosingof vision. As Raffe and Spours have pointed out,there has been a failure of policy learning, whichhas led to a failure to inform policy developmentby drawing lessons from available evidence andexperience. 6 For example, taking the EducationReform Act 1988 as Year Zero, as many do,signally fails to illuminate the enduring patternsand preoccupations of provision in England. Aneffective and strong alternative to the policies ofthe past 30 years must give priority to fostering agreater awareness of our own history. History hasthe potential to contribute fundamentally to themaking of education for the Good Society, throughits documentation and analysis of the political andpolicy context, the ‘voices’ of educational workersand some of the major ‘actors’ in the system.Teachers as an occupational grouping have playeda vital role in uncovering problems and remediesbesides acting as resources for social movementsof various kinds including the early labourmovement. To illustrate these points, we willstep into the spirit and nature of the Left’s radicaltradition in education as a way of envisaging andrealising possibilities and providing an alternativeview of the world of mass education. There is ahistorical amnesia about left educational politics,and left radicalism is in danger of forgetting itsrecent past.The Left’s radical tradition in educationOur starting point is a quote from William Morriswriter, designer, artist and socialist. Writing inthe 1880s, Morris said: ‘I do not want art for a fewany more than education for a few or freedomfor a few.’ 7 These words decorated studentbanners heading the anti-fees demonstration thatmarched from London’s Bloomsbury district on9 December 2010. We quote them because theytraverse and connect past with present. Whereastoday’s protestors quoted Morris to highlighttheir desire to defend access to education, inMorris’s lifetime the struggle was to secure accessto education for working people.In Assessing Radical Education, Nigel Wrightsays ‘the history of education may be viewed asthe history of policies which failed to achievetheir aims’. 8 He also identifies the 1890s,1920s and 1960s as favourable decades for lefteducational radicals because their views werelistened to. We offer some brief pieces fromthese periods because they are of interest tothose who wish to ‘rediscover’ previous examplesof attempts at education reform and usingthem. To avoid repeating the struggles of thepast we need an understanding of the ways inwhich those patterns (such as a central–localbalance of power, equality and elitism, hierarchyand differentiation) permeate the workings ofpolicy in the current context. Collective policymemory is a starting point from which to addresslegacies and make continuities, enabling a crossgenerationalsolidarity to produce a reading ofthe past, from the present, for the future in thetradition of critical writing on social reform, andthe quest for the common good.‘The Socialist movement is teaching, and themost important people in the world from theSocialist’s point of view are those who teach.’ 9These stirring words come from New Worldsfor Old, the last of H.G. Wells’ quartet of bookson the socialist future, first published in 1908.They give expression to the political traditionrepresented by Fabian gradualism convertedto the enthusiasms of the Independent LabourParty, calling on fellow citizens to act as changeagents. Others drew on the arguments of Idealistphilosophers such as T.H. Green, whose ideasformed a dominant idiom at the beginning of thetwentieth century, where the emphasis was on awhole philosophy of education, of its purposes,directed towards active citizenship and reform.This was a call to action viewed as a means tothe end of attaining perfect justice and creating5 F. Armstrong, ‘Disability,education and social change inEngland’, History of Education,36(2–3), 2007, pp.551–68.6 D. Raffe and K. Spours (eds),Policy-making and Policy-Learningin 14–19 Education, Institute ofEducation, 2007.7 See www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1882/hopes/hopes.htm.8 N. Wright, Assessing RadicalEducation, Open University Press,1989, p.182.9 H.G. Wells, New Worlds for Old,George Allen and Unwin, 1909,p.265.Education for the good society | 15