Attack on Edmass
EDUCATION STUART MACLURE
He is a brave man who invites invidious com- parisons with a great model. This is what the High Master of St Paul's does in Culture. An- archy and the Public Schools (Cassell 21s), using Matthew Arnold's categories and his tech- nique of irony for a latter-day assault on egali- tarianism, philistinism and political malice in education.
There is a chapter on the Newsom report on the public schools. Mr Howarth has no more difficulty than anyone else in disposing of that indifferent document to his own satisfaction. But this book is not much concerned with the public school per se, but with the educational and cultural values which public schools share with the grammar schools. And, in fact, he pitches this pretty high, because he has in mind St Paul's and Manchester Grammar School rather than Bloxham.
His technique is to assemble a fine selection of the more foolish statements by members of what he describes as the 'Edmass': the baggage train of education—administrators, educational researchers, teachers of teachers, advisers, in- spectors, journalists, 'educaltionists.' As can be imagined there is no shortage of weak-minded quotes. In his own definition of Edmass, teachers and heads who are actually practising don't qualify, but when he wants to be rude about comprehensive school headmasters, they, too, come under the Edmass lash. ,
Edmass provides texts for disquisitions on the egalitarian heresy and the contemporary shame of greatness. To the quest for egalitarianism he attributes, on the one hand, the reluctance to accept a selecjive educational system which par- cels children out into separate schools at eleven, and on the other, tele-satirists who spend their time cutting politicians down to their own size, and people like Dr Michael Young 'whose stric- tures on what he calls "meritocracy" have suc- ceeded in developing a curiously persistent myth in this country that merit is something to be both eschewed and unrewarded.'
Mr. Howarth goes on to consider the wider cultural consequences of the current obsession with education as social engineering. Among these, in his view, is a retreat from Matthew Arnold's definition of the pursuit of culture as 'acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world and thus with the history of the human spirit.' In place of classical culture is an excessive preoccupati9n with the contemporary and the 'relevant,' which usually means substituting inferior up-to-date models for great examples from antiquity or from 0,- immediate past. With this 'spirit of red, aon u, academic matters goes the out-
working in early education of the pernicious doctrines of Rousseau and Pestalozzi. Mr Howarth devotes several pages to Walter Lipp- mann's refutation of Pestalozzi and to the errors which flow from regarding a child as a plant to be nurtured rather than as an animal to be trained or a pot to be filled. It isn't clear whether he also regards Piaget (who has pro- vided a far stronger intellectual basis for mod- ern primary education than Rousseau or Pesta- lozzi) as similarly misguided, but if so he is wise enough to hold his fire.
In a revealing passage, Mr Howarth finds .• plenty of scope for irony with the concept of 'parity of esteem'—how old hat it seems now— which devotees of the secondary modern schools once claimed for their institutions vis- a-vis the grammar schools. Mr Howarth doesn't seem to realise that this idealistic hope was the only thing which could have made the indefinite coexistence of the two sections of a divided secondary system tolerable. Instead of building it up as part of his attempt to defend the gram- mar schools, he concentrates on mocking the idea for its sentimentality. And, of course, he is right: the realists soon recognised that parity of esteem was never going to be obtained be- tween one set of schools where most of the pupils leave at fifteen and another set of schools where most of the pupils leave at seventeen or eighteen. Mr Howarth's answer as one kind of realist is to say in effect: 'what we need is an honest disparity of esteem.' For some reason it surprises him that other quite intelligent people find this difficult to swallow as a basis for a national system of secondary education.
It is this lack of perception which makes the last, prescriptive chapter less than satisfactory. It adds up to little more than a plea to defend the status quo—with grammar schools, public schools and direct grant schools flourishing alongside secondary modern schools and a few schools called comprehensive. This is such a lame conclusion to a piece of controversial-writ- ing that in other respects is something of a tour de force, that it can be explained only by the fact that the head of a public school and chair- man of the HMC is himself part of the Edmass with institutional pressures and orthodoxies which bear upon him.
This is, in every sense, a pity, for so much of what he says is inspired by an earthy common sense. If he had continued to use his rigorous approach to the end he would have discussed the impact of numbers which over the next de- cade is going to shake up secondary education whatever system is maintained. In a county like Surrey, for instance, if separate grammar and non-grammar schools are retained in the 1980s, as many pupils could be going on to higher education from the non-grammar schools as from the grammar schools. Mr Howarth does not give the impression of knowing about this —nor yet of recognising that this suggests look- ing at the resources of secondary education as. a whole, instead of maintaining the stockade be- tween different types of secondary school. Oh, dear, how Edmass this sounds. But if you want to talk and think about the education of all the nation's children instead of concentrating only on the ablest quarter, then there is no alterna- tive but to take a broad view.
There is little in the book about curriculum, except for a few sneers at the critics; no doubts about early specialisation, no queries about the dreary lower streams of undistinguished gram- mar schools,- no diffidence about the way in which schools in practice match up to the high standards which Mr Howarth claims for them. This is a vigorous defence of the high grammar school tradition of a handful of the most dis- tinguished puha schools. There is real virtue in this tradition Which needs to be defended— maybe by preserving some selective schools for the exceptionally bright for the same reason that it is necessary to provide special schools for the sub-normal, and certainly by the continuation, on general principles, of the independence of independent schools.
But for maintained secondary education as a whole the real problem is to find the best way of continuing the traditional grammar school values, not in isolation, but in such a way as to protect the comprehensive school from the crippling mediocrity.which could so easily over- come it. In this, Mr Howarth's book is of limited value.
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