POLITICS

Mr Baker has to dare to explain that good is better than bad

FERDINAND MOUNT

Should a deputy headmistress at St Monica's Church of England Primary School with 25 years' experience be paid more or less than a 43-year-old English teacher at Herbert Morrison Comprehen- sive who refuses to supervise meal breaks because he is a vegetarian?

These are deep waters, and the wise man does not even change into his bathing suit. All that needs to be said is that, whether or not Mr Kenneth Baker eventually accepts the agreement between the local education authorities and the teachers' unions or insists on further improvements to reward merit and responsibility (at the risk of stirring up fresh trouble at the chalkface), Sir Keith Joseph has secured a victory, albeit a posthumous one.

One way or another, teachers will in future have contracts of employment which spell out their duties. Their pay will be considered at the same time as their terms and conditions of service. And we have seen the last of the Burnham Committee. The leaching profession in the maintained schools is to be brought under some semblance of professional discipline. In return, they are to be paid considerably more money. Precisely how much more is a secondary question (though not to the Treasury).

It is a clumsy process, and Mr Kinnock and Mr Radice were able to floor Mr Baker in the Commons by asking how the Government proposed to enforce the new contracts of employment, since it is the local authorities who remain the em- ployers. In fact, Mr Baker could easily bring in a Bill to stipulate that the Govern- ment will maintain a school only where the teachers have signed approved contracts.

What the Labour Party cannot do is to argue that all these transitional inelegan- cies could have been avoided if Sir Keith had been more 'flexible' or 'realistic' a couple of years ago. The unions would never have accepted professional obliga- tions without a fight, any more than the miners would have accepted economic reality without a fight.

The claim that there was a painless alternative is rather like the bogus argu- ment, current in the 1960s and 1970s, that the bad state schools would be all right if only the middle classes patronised them more. The structural realities — LEA political control and NUT dominance of Burnham — were far too strong to be overcome by bien-pensants bravely sacri- ficing Jeremy and Tamsin. Look at the bizarre ordeals still suffered by head teachers who fall foul of LEAs, even when they have the full backing of their parents and their governing bodies.

The remnants of the old ideals (or illusions) linger on in the public prints and on the battleground of north London dinner tables. Mr Hunter Davies still be- lieves that `comprehensives have never been given a proper chance'. But Miss Bel Mooney has gone private; The real `clash of cultures' can no longer be concealed. Some people believe that children go to school primarily in order to be 'socialised', turned into caring social beings; other people believe that children go to school primarily to learn things, to acquire know- ledge and skills. These two aims are, of course, both as old as Plato and are not mutually exclusive. But which of them you put first profoundly affects the character of the school.

Hunter Davies says, 'I am still totally convinced of the rightness of the compre- hensive ideal, but I become depressed when I see what is happening in practice. My youngest child, aged 14, now in her third year, has not had an exam or a report in her school life.'

Mr Davies says he knows the reasons for this, although he does not tell us what they are. But whatever they may be — staff shortages, miserly governments, 'industrial action' — to people who put learning before socialising, nothing could justify the school's failure to provide reports and exams as a measure of progress and a spur to improvement.

Another distraction is the old Two Cul- tures debate -- inflicted upon us so fright- fully by C. P. Snow and Dr Leavis. The Times and the Prince of Wales have been at it again recently. As George Walden, the higher education minister, pointed out acerbically, 'it is a cosy, predictable sort of debate, with a consoling, backward and forward rocking-chair movement'. On the one hand, technology and progress; on the other, the trained mind, the soul, the rounded man.

Both sides are right. Both sides miss the point. It's not an either-or. What matters is the quality, standards, the pursuit of ex- cellence — all the words which have got a bad name from being exploited by BBC directors-general defending the Late, Late Breakfast Show.

Educationspeak says the aim of educa- tion is to produce 'a critical, questioning, sceptical, sensitive etc mind'. That sounds all right, but it is very often used as an excuse for producing a mind which is not so much sceptical as pretty blank, empty of information and low on skills. In a way, the sceptical tradition in philosophy has only itself to blame for being taken so literally. If the highest peak of achievement is to kriow that I know nothing, then I might just as well really know nothing.

From the Butler Act and probably from the Balfour Ad onward, the Board/ Ministry/Department of Education has taken the view that its responsibilities for a national system of education were accept- able only if it took no precise or detailed view as to the content of that education, expecting that the LEAs would take a similar hands-off view of their responsibili- ties, as indeed they virtually all did until very recently. Thus both educational theory and administrative practice cleared an empty space for the left-wing `socialists' to frolic in.

If power is to be reclaimed for parents and head teachers as against local author- ities, if the state is no longer indifferent to the warped and tendentious teaching of some of the schools it maintains, should not the state also insist on certain standards of academic performance, just as it insists on standards of safety and hygiene in its schools? And if we are talking about a `core curriculum', can that core restrict itself to purely technical matters? If Mr Baker cares as deeply about the English language as his recent lecture suggests, then should he not somehow see to it, as Mr Walden daringly suggests, that children should read less Adrian Mole in class and more Milton? Should education ministers stop being closet highbrows and dare to come out?

In fact, this is just about the most daring thing any politician could do, since it not only defies the old anti-continental shib- boleths about the state declining to dictate what should be taught in every schOol, but also reverses the cowardly flight from pretension, the terror of asserting that one work of art or course of behaviour is better than another, just as a fresh Dover sole, lightly grilled, is better than a chumpybur- ger with chips. Mr Walden is in danger of becoming the Edwina Currie of Eng. Lit.