How long the revolution?

Posted on | September 12, 2006 | 1 Comment

Don Ledingham’s post on our conversation about “inverting the core” led me to something I last read many many moons ago: Raymond Williams” book, “The Long Revolution”. In a chapter on “Education and Society”, Williams wrote (Part II, Chapter I):

“…we speak sometimes as if education were a fixed abstraction, a settled body of teaching and learning, and as if the only problem it presents to us is that of distribution: this amount, for this period of time, to this or that group.”

He went on: “…to conduct the business [of education] as if it were the distribution of a simple product is wholly misleading.”

And finally: “…what has been thought of as a simple distrubution is in fact an active shaping to particular social ends.”

So, the way in which we organise education, the particular structure our education system has taken, the shape of our curriculum, the specific selection of content we choose to “deliver” through that curriculum – all these and more are not timeless abstractions, but particular to the social, political and economic context in which we construct and operate an education system.

This, of course, comes as no surprise to anyone who has ever thought seriously about education, its purpose and its organisation in different societies. Nonetheless, it is good to be reminded that education has two key functions. In no particular order, they are: to reflect the society we live in, and; to reproduce the society we live in.

Tensions arise when our education system no longer reflects our society, when changes in society happen too fast for our education system to keep up. Is that the situation we are in today?

And what if our education system continues to seek the reproduction of a society that no longer exists? If social relations are changing, if our vision of a future society is different from what has been before, how do we ensure that education is set up to help us get there, rather than drag us in the opposite direction?

Does inverting the core have a part to play here? Perhaps it depends on the perspective you take – what level do we attack such issues from? Changing practice in the classroom (micro-level change?) is one thing, but changing the very nature of our education system (macro-level change?) to reflect and (re-)produce the society we seek is a very different beast altogether. Can one lead us to the other? Or do we have to attack both simultaneously and synchronously?

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One Response to “How long the revolution?”

Micro and Mcro Management of Education « Questions and Reflections
September 17th, 2006 @ 7:09 pm

[...] John Connell’s post which briefly touches this subject gives me a chance to suggest that, in spite of the upsurge in ideas here in Scottish education , we should probably pose some practical questions. [...]