Educating classes

“My mother sang “I’m in heaven...” celebrating her love..
And, aged 4, I thought she was celebrating death.”
From Yaadein by Bachchoo

The biggest debate the present British Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government faces, its first real challenge, is over its policy on schools. The education secretary of the new government, Michael Gove, is attempting to implement the coalition’s first and most radical policy in two steps.
Firstly, he has offered successful schools in the state sector — which means schools whose pupils don’t pay fees but go to schools paid for by the central government through the administration of the local government — to choose to become “Academies”. This would give them a status which would free them from their own local government’s control.
What does that mean? In practical terms it would mean that these schools and their governing bodies and head teachers could determine the school’s structure and the pay structure of their staff. They would have more control over the ethos and curriculum of the school and they could more easily hire and fire teachers for not coming up to the mark.
Breaking loose of local government would mean in practice that the school got more money from central government which it could use on staff and equipment. The policy of freeing “good” schools, by and large those which have achieved high exam results and been praised by the inspecting authorities as working under sound administration, is opposed by the teachers’ unions. They fear that Academy status would grant the head teacher and the governors’ powers of hiring and firing which would be an assault on the job-security of the classroom teacher. It would also undermine the pay structures that the unions have patiently and painstakingly negotiated with local authorities over the years. Schools would be allowed to offer teachers a wage according to market prices and forces — a shortage of physics teachers? Pay them more than teachers of French or English — unless those are in short supply too.
Mr Gove’s second radical innovation, going much further than the plan for “Academy status” is allowing anyone — parents teachers, businessmen — to set up their own school, meet with government requirements and be financed by the state. Mr Gove’s calculation is that the central government gives each local borough money for the number of pupils that go to school there. The number of pupils, determined by the yearly birth and immigration and emigration rate in that borough, will remain the same whichever school they attend. So the central government will not spend much more money but will achieve the ideological conservative (and now coalition) goal of allowing free market forces to enter schooling. The groups of parents, who set up their own school and attract the children of other parents, will be allowed to appoint their own head teachers and staff and determine the policy of the school.
The British school system has always been divided into several layers. The post-Second World War Labour government, elected on a wave of anti-class feeling, set up universal secondary education, compulsory for all children up to the age of 15. The schools were at the time divided into four layers. At the bottom were the trade schools, dedicating to turning out apprentices to the metal, wood and industrial crafts and trades. Then came the “secondary moderns” designed to absorb into education and teach routines and disciplines to the majority of working class children. Then the top layer for the general public were the grammar schools which chose the best of pupils at the age of 11, subjecting them to tests of English, maths and general knowledge, selecting and separating them and then training them to join the professional classes.
At the top, not paid for by the state, were the “Public schools” (the paradox being that the private schools were called “public”). These were, as the world has been taught to appreciate, Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Marlborough and the rest.
Under the 1964 Labour government of Harold Wilson, an education secretary called Anthony Crosland initiated a radical policy of amalgamating the state schools into a single layer of secondary “serve-all” schools, appropriately called Comprehensives. His aim was to put all young Britons into the same educational melting pot at the age of 11 and then allowing them to demonstrate their merit and sink or swim. The ablest would get the best results. The less able would be inspired by their cleverer or more fortunate and literate contemporaries.
It was a noble vision but it left out the fee-paying public schools which would retain their status as the perpetrators and markers of class.
The Indian school system was not modelled on the British. Undoubtedly, the school to which I went in Poona, now Pune, was a paradigmatic attempt by its Anglican Christian founders to emulate the structure, systems and ideals of some British equivalent.
My parents paid the fees. We wore ties and blazers and were, as a student body, divided into Houses named after British Bishops, competing against each other in football, hockey, cricket, athletics and swimming. We were aware that there were grander schools to which richer boys and girls were sent, boarding in the hills and being groomed and pedigreed for high office and social favour.
Below that layer of commanding aspiration there was no school system orchestrated on the British model. Indian nationalism, ambition and the demand for literacy in the market caused successive governments over the period of independence to legislate for compulsory education which was layered into the English-speaking schools and the “vernacular” ones.
No Indian government now or under the present democratic dispensation will be able to legislate to bring any uniformity into this Indian school system. There can be no Anthony Crosland, seeking to level the opportunities of all citizens and succeeding in creating a vast meritocracy. There can be, because the countries start from very different dispositions, no Michael Gove of India, someone who himself was not privileged by birth to be a public school boy (as were his colleagues in? government, the Prime Minister David Cameron, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne and the deputy prime minister Nick Clegg).?
Or am I wrong? Will there in some Indian government soon be a Prime Minister and education minister who can, as the Chinese Communist government has, muster the determination to work towards a uniform educational system in which the pupils of Doon school compete in the same league, linguistically, academically and socially with the pupils of, say, the local school of Sawant Vadi, Karwan Jilla? Not likely, but possible.