POLITICS
Mrs Thatcher's accent on education: sometimes robust, sometimes faltering
NOEL MALCOLM
If Mrs Thatcher had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent her. Indeed, there are those who think that this is roughly what did happen: that she was put together in some underground laboratory by Sir Keith Joseph, and that someone at No. 10 had the job of winding up a large key in her back every morning.
But there are times when the reality outruns even the most adventurous crea- tive imagination. Which novelist would have dared put in her mouth some of the sentences which she uttered in her inter- view with the editor of the Sunday Tele- graph last week? That endorsement of what she called the taboos of a small town, for example: `We do not do these things here [Mrs Thatcher dropped into a robust northern accent] . . . . You are not going to do that so long as you put your feet under my table.' John Mortimer or Michael Frayn might have caught the sentiment, but their pens would not have hovered long, surely, over that 'robust northern accent' before crossing it out.
For the truth is that Mrs Thatcher is at her most surprising when she is not being artificial at all — when she is speaking her mind with what one can only describe as complete ingenuousness. Throughout the Sunday Telegraph interview she spoke of the things which she really cares about most of all: social values, the home, the family, education. It is easy to deride her small-town vision of these matters, to complain that 'morality', in her eyes, means tidiness and punctuality, and 'caring for the environment' means not dropping sweet-wrappers. There is something that offends us about the idea that politics, like charity, begins at home: we prefer to think that the things which politics is about constitute a separate realm, a realm, popu- lated by experts armed with policy docu- ments and proposals and pilot schemes. So when a politician, of all people, starts to remind us that the cleverest policies in the world can avail us nothing unless we already have some basic sense of the need to obey laws, respect institutions and prop- erty, honour agreements, and so on, we do not know quite how to react. Either we find it too overbearing — politics interfer- ing too intimately with real life — or it seems too feeble, too much an admission of defeat (as if a better politician would have found some cleverer policies to solve all these problems for us). The Prime Minister's remarks on educa- tion are a classic case: overbearing in some ways, feeble and bewildered-sounding in others — and offering a perfect illustration of the gap between the politics of common sense and the theories of the 'experts'. Everyone simply must be trained in mathematics up to a certain standard. You must be trained in language up to a certain standard, you really must. . . . And you simply must have the basic structure of science. . . . Now that is to me the core curriculum, the basic core curriculum. And it is so important that you simply must be tested on it.
Five `musts' in a row: that is enough for most people. But not for the experts, the professional educationalists and policy- makers, the serried ranks of DES and HMI. What began in the 1987 Conserva- tive manifesto as a common-sensical prop- osal for a core curriculum in maths, En- glish and science with compulsory testing, was soon turned by the educationalists into a huge battery of curricula, a Byzantine siege-engine bristling with course units, study programmes and attainment targets. Hence the bewildered-sounding comments later in Mrs Thatcher's interview:
When we first started this, I do not think I ever thought they would do the syllabus in such detail as they are doing now. . . . Now the History report has come out. It is very detailed. My worry is whether we should put out such a detailed one. You see, once you put out an approved curriculum, if you have got it wrong, the situation is worse after- wards than it was before.
The entire policy of the National Curri- culum started from the perception that the educational establishment had failed. It had failed to ensure that all children left school (after eleven years there — eleven years) with basic levels of numeracy and literacy. The National Curriculum was meant to put that right, cutting through the fog of methodology and sociology which filled the teacher-training colleges, and reinstating a few simple and necessary `Little do they know that its a giant phallic symbol.' goals at the heart of the educational system. But who was given the task of working out the details of the curriculum? Not the schoolteachers who had some practical idea of what children should and could learn, but the officials at the DES, the HMI theorists and the professional `educationalists'. Far from dispelling the fog, they have transformed it into some- thing solid, elaborate and enduring.
How was this allowed to happen? Mr Kenneth Baker, the minister who oversaw this process, was a busy man and a man in a hurry. With a whole repertoire of major reforms to cram into his Great Education Reform Bill, he was prepared to comprom- ise on every one of them, in order to ease them past the professionals and the offi- cials. But he was also a man conscious of his role as an introducer of historic changes — and the bigger and more elaborate the changes, the more historic they would be. Mr Baker, unfortunately, reads too many history books to be altogether unmindful of his own future place in them.
Mrs Thatcher looked on, meanwhile, with surprise and increasing impotence. `She watched Baker like a hawk', one former Conservative official told me, 'but in the end what could she do? He's a fluent and persuasive man, and he had the experts on his side. The whole policy just grew and grew — there was no clear point at which she could call a halt.'
There are two lessons to be learnt here. One is about the limitations of prime ministerial power. We like to imagine that prime ministers in general, and Mrs Thatcher in particular, can dictate every detail of their government's policies if they want to; and we are wrong.
But the other lesson concerns the pecu- liarity of Mrs Thatcher herself. On the things which matter most to her, she is curiously not like a professional politician at all. A real professional, such as Mr Baker knows how to assimilate the jargon and generally play the game. Mrs Thatcher can sometimes seem unreal as a politician, because, against all our expectations, she thinks like a real human being: like some- one from a small town in Lincolnshire, say, who knows what schools are for. While the politicians adopt the language of the 'ex- perts', she continues to think in what the Sunday Telegraph identifies as a northern accent — sometimes robust, and some- times faltering.
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