John Connell: The Blog

Like war, for­mal edu­ca­tion is a con­tin­u­a­tion of pol­i­tics by other means — less direct, less con­trolled, less con­trol­lable, but no less pow­er­ful in its long term effects.

I wrote the above on this blog three years ago in a post that lamented the sheer cack-handedness of most Gov­ern­ment inter­fer­ence in edu­ca­tion (they call it policy-making) in Eng­land over the past 30 years. I should have empha­sised the uncon­trol­lable effects of this ‘policy-making’ much more than I did — a long suc­ces­sion of edu­ca­tion min­is­ters in West­min­ster over the past 3 decades have attempted to inflict their own vari­ants on social engi­neer­ing, and all of them have failed spec­tac­u­larly. Unfor­tu­nately, each inevitable fail­ure leaves a legacy of yet more dis­ar­ray behind it.

Simon Jenk­ins, writ­ing in today’s Guardian, agrees:

Account­abil­ity for England’s schools is now a total mess.

Jenk­ins takes aim at the lat­est ridicu­lous ‘league table’ to be imposed on England’s schools by Michael Gove. As he writes:

The crav­ing for uni­for­mity in pub­lic ser­vices has become a frenzy.…The belief that the crooked tim­ber of mankind can be beaten straight on a White­hall work­table is the great­est of all min­is­te­r­ial fallacies.

It reminds me of Campbell’s Law, first stated by Don­ald T. Camp­bell, the psy­chol­o­gist who pio­neered the study of human creativity:

The more any quan­ti­ta­tive social indi­ca­tor is used for social decision-making, the more sub­ject it will be to cor­rup­tion pres­sures and the more apt it will be to dis­tort and cor­rupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

Michael Gove might well be push­ing for a par­tic­u­lar ver­sion of his­tory to be imposed on England’s schools, but he is obvi­ously less than keen to learn history’s lessons himself.