Who and What do we Serve?

Posted on | November 14, 2007 | Comments Off

Don Ledingham picks up on a forthright response to his post on the parent as ‘customer’ of education. Don’s original post and the response from ‘Teacher’ can be read here.

Anyone who has ever taught might agree at an instinctive level with the views of ‘Teacher’ as expressed in the response (although I did find the patronizing tenor of the views a little distasteful). It is, of course, absurd to see parents (and even more importantly, children and young people) as customers in the sense in which that term is used in, for instance, the retail relationship or in other, more transactional, areas of the public services.

However, there is just as much danger of succumbing to an overly-simplified perspective if we take Teacher’s sentiments at face value.

Yes, education serves: “…the greater ‘customer’ of society itself…”, and, yes, we absolutely need to look to “…principle and political understanding…” if we are to serve the needs of society effectively. But we also have to ask, which society are we serving? Or, whose society are we serving? Education is always in a Janus-like position – serving to reproduce the society as it is, and giving people the knowledge and understanding they require in order to be able to change society for the better. Viewing those we serve as mere ‘customers’, I believe, forces education into a position where the ‘looking back’ perspective becomes more influential than the ‘looking forward’ perspective. Thus far, I agree with ‘Teacher’. But we have to go further, I think, and be very clear what we mean when we say we are serving the wider needs of society as a whole. Society comprises a very complex mix of interests – which particular subset of interests should we seek to serve?

To be fair to ‘Teacher’, of course, he or she did not take enough space in the reply to Don’s earlier post to explain this more fully. But our views on this question are a fundamental aspect of education’s role in reflecting and reproducing the society we inhabit.

There is, in current circumstances, a conservative nexus of politicians and media that serves to constrain education, that pressurises education to take on a conservative hue itself – and the ‘parent body’ tends to lean towards that same backward looking outlook. It is difficult for parents, as a body, to hold a more radical position given that they are themselves a product of past schooling and will always therefore view today’s education through the lens of their own experiences (not necessarily true, of course, for individuals within that ‘body’). But we need to be clear that the ‘teaching body’ can also be conservative in its outlook and in its practice. I wonder how many in teaching, either by commission or omission, serve society as it is rather than society as it might be?

Finally, I can’t help but be a little suspicious of any ‘Teacher’ who is able to express the somewhat superior and disparaging views about those they are in education to serve. Whether or not we see our ‘customers’ as “…unknowing, inexperienced, untutored, hormone-ravaged, naive, self-centred, arrogant products of the weak state education of the past twenty years…” is at least as much a function of one’s own attitudes as it is to the actual circumstances of those who come through the doors of our schools seeking education for themselves or their children.

Category: education, elitism, politics, principle, society