MANAGERS OF LEARNING ?
By R. B. GRAHAM (Headmaster of Bradford Grammar School)
THE modern technique of management has long been applied un- noticed to public education. It means, in a nutshell, the sub- ordination of the man of learning to the administrator, just as in many businesses the man of technical skill is subordinated to the man trained to be a manager. The rugged captain of industry, often himself a technical inventor, had his counterpart in the more polished but equally dominant headmaster of Victorian tradition. Both have given place to a smoother type, skilled in the large-scale administra- tion which still bigger and still more efficient large-scale machinery has forced upon our industry and on our polity as a whole. Is it not written in the clever works of Mr. James D. Burnham?
Unavoidably, but most dangerously, this tendency of modern times has supplied the framework into which most of the schbols of this country are fitted. Teachers are regarded as "on the staff" of administrators, and schools as identical slices of a municipal cake. The independent schools have not kept free from the trend, and Sir Arthur fforde is not the first headmaster to have commended himself to a Board of Governors by ability in public business. But the trend itself is alien to the best traditions of the schools and to real education. How alien is clearly demonstrated by the Head- master of Tonbridge in an article on the Rugby appointment con- tributed to The Spectator of January 16th. The universities also feel it. A general, an admiral and a politician, all men of " proved administrative capacity," have been made Heads of Houses at Cam- bridge, and similar ability .shown in the Civil Service, especially in war-time, has brought similar promotion at Oxford. The newer universities choose their Vice-Chancellors as a rule with at least one eye in the same direction, and the impact of large-scale organisa- tion upon them can sometimes regrettably be seen in the calculated bestowal of an honorary degree on the powerful Director of Education in a neighbouring Local Authority. In Research Departments, both public and private, all over the country there is tension between the man of learning and his less learned but more " efficient " controller ; he who holds the purse-strings calls the tune.
These managers of learning often make a real success of their jobs. So doubtless may the manager of a great textile mill, who was trained only as an accountant and at first hardly knew a loom from a spindle. Management can offer great prizes, both in material reward and in power and responsibility ; it draws thereby some who have only ambition, drive and cunning to recommend them ; but it also attracts many men and some women of outstanding ability and personality who have the wisdom and the humility that are required in the management of, say, a corps of touchy professors or the masters' common room of a great school. It is not impossible for these appointments to be good appointments.
Moreover, we have here a modern trend. Merely to deplore it is as feeble an occupation as lamenting the weather. Our trend, like the weather, comes from ascertainable causes ; its undesirable effects, unlike those of the weather, should be mitigated rather than endured. Undesirable they certainly are. Our primary schools, for example, are a national disgrace. Headmasters outside the system continually get letters requesting the admission of pupils prefaced by: " My son is not making much progress in a class of 53," or " My boy is for the third year in succession in the same class in the village school ; there are now children two years younger in it, and all have to be taught together." No real education is possible in such conditions. The blame does not lie all in one quarter ; some of it can be traced to political parsimony and some to a snobbish neglect ; but it is hard to think that the principal advisers of Education Committees are free from a share. The major error of the Butler Act was that it directed the reforming energy of 1944, not into an improvement of these elementary schools, but to an equalitarian reorganisation of the secondary branch, which was on the whole very much more efficient. Much of the responsibility lies on the National Union of Teachers, itself a large-scale organisation. But equally with the N.U.T. the error was that of the Association of Education Com- mittees, a body largely steered by the officials, and of the " Orange Book " issued by the officials themselves.
Are these officials really necessary? Undoubtedly they are. Education is a business, whether parents pay fees or not, and its material side needs efficient management. But the Chief Officer of an Education Committee does much more than arrange for the pro- vision of books, buildings and meals, and of funds for staff salaries. He advises the Committee on policy and on the best use of its resources. In the process he is bound to consider the decisive question of priorities. Is a new school to be built here now ? And if so, for what numbers and what size of class shall we provide ? If we can afford a few extra salaries shall we improve our staffing ratios and decrease our classes, or shall we increase our inspectorate and our office staff ? What sort of person shall be promoted in the service, those who give themselves heart and soul to theirgteaching but resent " interference " from officials, or those with whom officials find it " easy to work "? At what point is a school so big that the individuality of each child cannot still be considered and his special needs met ?
In all such matters advisers are wanted who are, in their bones and by long experience, schoolmasters. They must, of course, have business capacity as well. But only a teacher really knows what effect this change of plan or that adjustment of resources is going to have on the children and teachers concerned. And he should know better than anyone else how to leave untrammeled the selfless but " awkward " person who is often himself a scholar and also a genius with the young. There will be no solution to this problem until men of administrative capacity can be found in the teaching pro- fession itself to occupy the responsible posts in the Education Offices. Probably the best-trained education officer will be one who has him- self been brought up in a good school and then has taught for years in some of the worst.
In the universities and in the field of research the same is true. The men of learning must themselves be allowed and encouraged to shoulder the responsibilities of administration. That they have the capacity to do so is proved by the experience of war-time on the fighting staffs and in the Civil Service. U.N.E.S.C.O. has wisely chosen a distinguished biologist for the head of its secretariat. Administration is very much simpler and easier than most of the problems to which such men habitually give their minds. Our philosophers have easily become efficient " kings."
If all this be true, a major alteration in our present allocation of rewards for service must be made at once. The present drift of able people from teaching into work of less merit but with better pay must be reversed, and far more people of first-rate ability must be attracted into the teaching profession at all levels. Moreover, the scales must be so directed, in spite of the National Union of Teachers, first, that those most highly qualified shall be sufficiently rewarded from the start, and, secondly, so that there is every incen- tive for a man to do more than his share of work and to rise out of the ruck, while still remaining within the profession. Among those who avail themselves of these opportunities should be found both those part-time administrators, the headmasters, and also the full- time administrators and advisers of the Education Offices.
A second change also must be made in the national system. So that future administrators may have experience and show their quality, each school must have a great deal more autonomy and a great deal more responsibility for its own affairs than schools at present have under most authorities. The trust of school governors in a headmaster must replace the trust of an administrator in the report of an inspector.
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