Education

Let our children go!

Rhodes Boyson

When our major political parties have taken up a particular stance on something they know little about, it is almost impossible to move them. This particularly applies where the growth of collectivist thinking brings politicians to accept the view that by more and more legislation and restrictions they can approach the god society irrespective of the views and wishes of the general populace.

The disastrous raising of the minimum school leaving age is a case in point. It was opposed by the overwhelming majority of teachers who had any contact with the fifteen-year-old leavers. Some 80 per cent of Scotland's secondary school teachers signed a petition against it, the National Association of Schoolmasters resolved against it, and a referendum held in Oldham in 1970 among 251 teachers in comprehensive and general secondary schools voted 91 per cent against the proposal. Yet the political parties with the support of the primary-school-dominated National Un:on of Teachers went ahead with the 'reform.'

If the political parties had been realistic they would have inquired why twice as many fourteenyear-olds as eleven-year-olds were already playing truant from school, why 42 per cent of schoolchildren left voluntarily at the age of fifteen and why the problems in cities were already threatening a complete breakdown of schooling. It did not occur to our political masters that, if violence, vandalism and outright iesson resistance were already reaching crisis proportions, the raising of the school leaving age could be the final straw which broke the teacher's back. No, the parties continued with their support of what Dr Harry Judge, late '-lead of Banbury Comprehensive school and now Director of the Dxford University Department of E:ducation, called a "mindless Tror."

The result of their decision can low be clearly seen. Teachers are leeing from London and other "ity schools not just because of ow salaries but because 'danger ,noney ' is not paid in the lassrooms and corridors. There is ass education going on in the fifth orms of state schools of this

. ountry, now that 100 per cent of

fifteen-year-olds are supposed to be there, than went on when 58 per cent stayed on voluntarily.

The national figures for truancy have increased by some 40 to 50 per cent in one year. Last year some 500,000 schoolchildren played truant every day; this year the number is up to 700,000. Many schools have one quarter, one third or even one half of their fifth forms absent, often with the tacit agreement of the teachers who can only really teach when the hard core of recalcitrants is absent. Such truancy continued over weeks or even months is likely to create a sub-criminal class of unemployable adults.

Yet we are told by some of the leaders of educational opinion that the situation will ease with time and that it was the same in 1949 when the school leaving age was raised to fifteen. This is just not true! Discipline in schools was improving in 1947, 1948 and 1949 as men returned from the armed services to the classroom and there was a general air of optimism. There was also the arrival of tens of thousands of emergency-trained teachers who after long wartime service spoke the language of the ordinary pupil in a way most of the present teacher entrants, fed on a diet of vague social liberation, integrated studies and even paper-tiger revolution in their colleges, do not. Many of the levitating ideas of the present teacher entrants are justly scorned by the mature, realistic fifteen-year-olds.

The academic products of our schools who found their '0' and, 'A' le■bel GCEs a passport to proltion, university and increased earnings cannot comprehend the attitude of many fifteen-year-olds who consciously reject what school has to offer them. Many fifteen-year-old boys and girls want to leave school to go to work not only to earn wages but to hasten the reality of growing up. They want to join the adult world where they will have the satisfaction of being taken seriously, of being on their own, of being responsible for themselves and indeed for others. Continued 'Save the Direct Grant Schools', the second of Logie Bruce Lockhart's articles for The Spectator, will appear in next week's issue compulsory schooling simply increases the problems of the boy or girl who is not academically gifted. Additional compulsory education structures society and creates a real sense of failure in the failed pupil. He loses selfconfidence, he is bored and becomes restless and he loses income. Thus frustrated he is likely to wreak vengeance on society.

School is the place where the non-academic boy or girl is not equal. He knows that the academic pupil gains from schooling while at the age of fifteen he can only lose. If he is offered ' adventure schools' and vague orientation courses he knows that these have no currency in the outside world and they are just sops to keep him amused. He simply wants to be treated as a grown-up and to test his endurance, skills, courage and manhood against the real adult world. Even a dull job is more exciting than sitting at the back of a classroom where the subjects

discussed are boring, incomprehensible or a waste of time. Outside, the factory belongs to a real world offering a real wage.

Society cannot let people marry at sixteen, vote and serve on juries at eighteen, and then turn round and say that pupils are so immature at fifteen that they have to stay at school until sixteen. This is crooked thinking made even more crooked by the present Government's decision to issue free contraceptives at the age of thirteen. Young people cannot fail to realise the hypocritical attitude of society freeing them from all restraints on one side while it increases restraints in another way.

The new minimum school leaving age is, for many, sixteen years eight months and not sixteen years, since a pupil who becomes sixteen on September 3 one year cannot leave until Easter of the following year. As Mr Evelyn King, the Conservative Member for Dorset South, has pointed out, girls can now marry and give birth while still below the school leaving age. Some 2,000 fifteen-yearold girls and 5,000 sixteen-yearold girls became pregnant in 1970, and what is to happen to all the teenage brides and mothers? Will a marriage certificate for a girl become an exit licence from school and a job ticket?

In 1861, the Commissioners appointed to look into the state of popular education in England advised, "The sooner we get rid of the idea that all the education of our people must necessarily be given before people go out to work the better." This is the clue to reality. The present support for life-long education doesn't reauire an extension of school attendance, Why should young people not be allowed to leave at fourteen years if they are literate and numerate, have a job to go to, and have attended 95 per cent over the previous three years? They could be gi• en a fistful of vouchers enabling them to come back for four to five years full-time education any time later in life. If certain twelve and thirteenvear-olds knew that they could

opectator April 27, 1974

leave at fourteen or fifteen if they passed a literacy, numeracy and basic knowledge test they would be far more advanced at that age than they are now at sixteen, which is a chronological age with no achievement test.

There is nothing sacred about a sixteen-year-old minimum school leaving age. New Zealand which had a school leaving age of fifteen altered her laws last year so that a boy or girl of any age could leave where there was agreement of the parents, the teachers and the school guidance advisers. France is also considering reducing her minimum school leaving age to fourteen from the age of sixteen, to which it was raised in 1959. China has also reduced her normal length of compulsory school attendance, where it is enforced, to nine or ten years. Italy has a school leaving age of fourteen and Holland of fourteen and a half. It is also estimated that in Italy some 25 to 30 per cent of pupils cease to attend school before their thirteenth birthday. We could immediately amend the law to allow boys and girls to take up apprenticeships at the age of fifteen and to permit boys to enter the excellent armed service training schools at that age. This might help to bring back the respect and pride of craftsmanship which we need so badly.

Politicians will be more respected in this country when they admit when they make mistakes instead of distorting further the economic and social structure to try to make their mistakes successful. Our city schools are near collapse, our general standards of schooling are declining, Inner London and other schools are no longer fulfilling their statutory duty but are sending children home within the years of com pulsory school attendance, truancy is rising and a resentful class of adolescents are encouraged to declare war on society. Let us reduce the school leaving age and concentrate our resources on those who want to profit from them while we offer the others a two-way ticket in and out of education at any age. This would not only be an act of great sense but it would be a blow for increased freedom against a state foolishly taking unto itself more and more powers it cannot fulfil.

Dr Rhodes Boyson relinquished the headmastership of High bury Grove School on his election as Conservative MP for Brent North.