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Extremists In Charge
Why does the British government appoint those who take extreme positions to head policy committees? It is perfectly possible to find moderate constitutional experts to lead enquiries into future legislative and social needs: New Labour, however, has a habit of choosing those who can be guaranteed to come up with proposals designed to shake the foundations of the state.
In law, there's Solicitor General Vera Baird QC, who dismisses much of the UK's constitution as "anachronism", over-ripe to be shoved aside by a shiny new Constitutional arrangement. Its medical ethics advisers have called for the body to become state property upon death, allowing organs to be harvested whether the individual and his family agree or not. Other bio-ethics spokesmen take positions at the more extreme end of the debate on human-animal hybrids and genetic research.
And now, the focus turns to education once again. According to the Daily Mail, the government's chief schools adviser Dr John White believes that the school curriculum should be changed to move away from traditional separate subjects and towards projects linked by common themes.
Subject-based education, based on the study of separate classes like English, maths, history, geography, science and Latin are, he says, the product of an education system rooted in 19th century middle class values (how these values are inferior to 21st century New Labour value is not addressed in his paper). They were, he said, "mere stepping stones to wealth."
He argues that older subjects are "too often prisoners of their past, ill-fitted to look beyond their own confines at how they might contribute to the pupil’s wellbeing and civic engagement." Instead, he praises new subjects such as citizenship and personal, social and health education (PSHE).
"Pupils would no longer study history, geography and science but learn skills such as energy- saving and civic responsibility through projects and themes," reports the Mail. The aim of such education, the newspaper reports, is to create a model pupil who "values personal relationships, is a responsible and caring citizen, is entrepreneurial, able to manage risk and committed to sustainable development".
Prof White does not deny that "some understanding" of science, history and geography is "an essential part of schooling," but argues that outside a context, these subjects are more likely to "generate boredom" than intellectual pleasure in pupils.
The opposition, in a hopeful sign of life, have at least noticed this trend of appointing extremist advisers: "I just find it astonishing that someone with his extreme views has been allowed to advise the Government on education policy," said Tory schools spokesman Nick Gibb; perhaps the first instance of a Conservative spokesman taking note of Labour's strategy.
One can't help but believe that for certain Labour advisers, being the subject of an attack in the Daily Mail is a pleasurable rite of passage: We can imagine Prof White cutting out today's story and framing it on his bog wall. Unfortunately, while the Mail does good work in bringing some of these characters to attention, the newspaper's shrill tone ensures it is never taken seriously in public debate on the subjects it hopes to inspire debate on. And few subjects are more important than public education.
Education was one of the first parts of the establishment to fall to the Gramsci-inspired efforts of "reformers" in the sixties: One shudders to think what fresh horrors sixties radicals can further inflict on Britain's schools system - and just where the end game is leading.
You can read Professor White's report here.
Melanie Phillips has also reported on this story. Read her report on the Spectator Blog.
She writes,
"In my book All Must Have Prizes, first published in 1996, in which I charted the disintegration of education and deconstruction of knowledge in Britain, I noted that this onslaught had resulted from the hijack of education by left-wing ideologues hell-bent on destroying British society. These people were entrenched in university departments of education. So when the government tried to address education decline by imposing a national curriculum and turned to the ‘experts’ to help them do so, the people who wrote that curriculum and sat on the curriculum boards and other education quangos were the very people who were doing the damage in the first place.
"Twelve years on, Britain’s education system has disintegrated yet further and exactly the same kind of people are doing the same damage."
