Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction by Ward Colin

Author:Ward, Colin [Ward, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Anarchism, Anarchy
ISBN: 9780192804778
Publisher: Oxford
Published: 2007-09-06T18:25:34+00:00

12. Mealtime at a Ferrer school in Catalonia. After the revolution of 1936, at least 60,000 children attended Ferrer schools.

rich in their own experience, they will teach in turn many things to the professors who shall bring them knowledge which they lack.

This then will be a mutual instruction, an act of intellectual fraternity.

He was writing in 1870, and if his argument is familiar this is precisely because identical aspirations were expressed a century later by people like Ivan Illich and Paul Goodman in America, or in Britain by Michael Young, and by Professor Harry Rée. In 1972

Rée told an audience of young teachers that

I think we are going to see in your lifetime the end of schools as we know them. Instead there will be a community centre with the doors open twelve hours a day, seven days a week, where anybody can wander in and out of the library, workshops, sports centre, self-F

service store and bar. In a hundred years time the compulsory reedom in education

attendance laws for children to go to school may have gone the same way as the compulsory laws for attendance at church.

His prophecy is unlikely to be fulfilled, for within ten years of his address, an incoming government was blaming the collapse of the British manufacturing industry on, of all unlikely scapegoats, the schools. There followed a new regime of unprecedented intervention by central government in the management and curriculum of primary and secondary schools, which in Britain are provided by local authorities. These included the imposition, for the first time, of a National Curriculum by the central government, a continuous programme of testing children at particular ages, and an avalanche of form-filling for teachers. (This endless assessment proved beyond doubt that schools in affluent districts achieve higher marks than schools in poor areas with a majority of children whose native language is not English. These are social facts that most people already knew.)

By 1995, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools was declaring that the real impediment to the development of a better educational 57

system in Britain was ‘a commitment to particular beliefs about the purposes and conduct of education’, and that what was needed was

‘less learning by doing and more teaching by telling’. He was repudiating a hundred years of progressive influence on the official, compulsory education system, fitfully moving up the age-range from the nursery to the secondary school. One irony about the rejection of ‘progressive’ education by politicians of the political Right is that the educational aims of many anarchists would be completely acceptable to them. Michael Smith, the historian of The Libertarians and Education, remarks that Proudhon was always conscious of the fact that the children he was talking about were the children of workers. Work was going to be their life when they grew up. Proudhon saw nothing wrong with this. The work a man did was something to be proud of, it was what gave interest, value and dignity to his life. It was right, therefore, that school should prepare the young for a life of work.

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