No liberal hour
EDUCATION A. E. DYSON
The Minister of Education, Mr Edward Short. this week attacked the recently-published pamphlet 'Fight for Education' (discussed here last month). In this article, A. E. Dyson, senior lecturer at the University of East Anglia Lind one of the two joint editors of the pamphlet, argues that the present debate over education is fundamentally about liberal values themselves.
Among the more bizarre trends in intellectual fashion has been the use of 'permissive' and 'anti-permissive' as terms of debate. There is a suggestion of irrevocable opposition between two package deals—the 'permissive' all for Spock, Marcuse, long hair, mini-skirts and pop- culture, the 'anti-permissive' all for hanging, flogging, military service and cold baths. Spelled out, the absurdity is self-evident, but there are sharply precise dangers here for the liberal cause. The liberal 'fifties seem to have mutated into the progressive 'sixties, with potentially suicidal results.
My immediate concern is with the recent pamphlet Fight for Education, since as one of its editors I am naturally anti-`anti-permissive' as a mode of debate. As Stuart Maclure wrote in the SPECTATOR on 14 March, it is anti-permis- sive in that it is opposed to Spock and to free- play methods, and favours discipline, especially in the junior school. But it is not anti-permissive in•the sense implied by one or two other critics, who have equated it with an unconditional throwback to Squeers. It is not anti-permissive in any puritan sense, either. To insist that self- expression is good only when the self is worth expressing is in no way to propose Mrs Grundy as a norm. On the contrary, the most natural norm for education is still Matthew Arnold's, the best that has been said and thought in the world. Humanity and tolerance require rich soil and careful tending, and a society which over- throws all respect for its own traditions, its own skills, insights and successful institutions, will reap anarchy and not culture at the end. To be- lieve this is in no sense to look back with roman- tic nostalgia to a past which never existed. It is to assert, rather, that there are ideals implicit in the very idea of education which self-styled pro- gressives are at present trying to subvert.
But the talk of permissive versus anti-permis- sive holds wider threats to liberalism. The vari- ous religious and moral freedoms which have been achieved gradually in Britain over several centuries could be put in peril if it continues unchecked. If such freedoms are made to stand together, they might equally fall together; for liberals to simplify them into 'permissive' legis- lation to be automatically approved of, is to invite a no less automatic riposte from the other side. In fact, the liberal reforms were never argued on mindless slogans and package deals; each was stated and argued as a particular case. In the 1950s, there were a number of such cam- paigns—for homosexual law reform, for in- stance, and against the death penalty—and these were 'permissive' only in travesty, or in enemy hands. The reformers staked themselves on reasoned arguments and on democratic methods, and harnessed liberal sentiments to a close scrutiny of complex facts. The long debates in Parliament, though frustrating for the reformers, were in no way wasted, since reforms entered into cautiously and democratically are not likely to be suddenly reversed.
At this fairly obvious level, then, permissive versus anti-permissive is certainly oversimplified, and may be dangerous; at the very least, it is playing the extreme reactionaries' own game. But the terms are already encroaching on other spheres; it seems that educational topics are now to be brought into the ambiance, whether free- play methods in junior schools are being con- sidered, or student rebellion anywhere in the would identify as political claptrap. In. speaking dramatising themselves as victims of a 'backlash' —as though they really were in the unenviable position of American negroes, persecuted by re- actionary and irrational forces of the en- trenched. Indeed, Mr Short has now joined in the game, with an attack on Fight for Educa- tion as an illiberal backlash compiled by ex- treme reactionaries, which any fourth-former would identify as political claptrap. In speaking of a recent mutation of liberalism I mean this phenomenon, the upsurge of simple slogans, absurd analogies, in the liberal name.
It appears also that many self-styled liberals
now feel committed to attacking not the abuses of authority but the principle of authority, in- cluding their own authority to keep order (for instance) or to teach. In universities, one hears the claim that students are now more informed than their teachers, whose role, according to Roger Poole in the Guardian, is to 'decode' the 'radical critique of the young.' There are even teachers who seem impelled towards guilt and expiation for past sins of their profession—all those beatings, all those lines—as though they can hardly wait for the Red Guard to arrive.
The distinctions involved in this matter may be even more critical than those related to (say) divorce or abortion, since they suggest some basic failure of liberal grip. The key matter is respect for democracy; though student revolutionaries talk of democracy. they mean it only in some unacceptable—to my mind totally meaningless—sense. The howling down of MPS which goes on now in British universities is an affront to democracy for at least three reasons. It prevents free speech, an inalienable right in .a democracy, and the means by which liberal causes, in particular, need to advance. It selects for its protests people who have been democratically elected to a parlia- mentary constituency, and whose 'unpopu- larity' can be asserted, therefore, on no democratic test. Worst of all, it makes a mockery of informed opinion, by reducing the institutions particularly intended to work by reason to the home of the mob. It seems to me unthinkable that any real liberal could approve of this situation, whatever his views on the rights or wrongs of any particular protest.
Indeed, it is amazing that liberals whose own tradition is a late and fine, but precarious flowering of a relatively stable culture should endorse developments likely to sweep everyone, themselves included—themselves very particu- larly—away. And if we are right to sense that liberalism is always the first casualty of extremism, and that all extremists hate a liberal, what degree of inner erosion or self- hatred can have produced this mutation in the liberal camp?
One of this century's lessons for liberals has been that they cannot afford to despise an ordered society, the only soil they can flourish in themselves. Another is that they cannot afford to tolerate intolerance, even if intoler- ance claims to speak with a liberal voice. The time seems to have come for liberals to analyse again what kinds of adult freedom they really cherish, and what social frame is required for these to exist. This will involve a very basic critique of modern education, and of the notion that 'self-expression,' undisciplined by competi- tion, examination, or real knowledge and wisdom, is likely to produce a liberal world.
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