“THE issue is, Phil,” says a friend of mine, “that there’s just no time to do anything well. The compulsory lesson format is so rigid that we rapidly flick through a few facts, read a bit of a text to them, make them do some written activity and then it’s on with the next one.

“Everyone is so heavily timetabled there’s no time at all to do any marking. There’s no depth to the learning, no quality. Kids in British state schools have to be the worst-educated in the world.”

“The market’s not interested in quality,” I say, “it’s interested in efficiencies.”
 
Under Thatcher, the Education Reform Act of 1988 outlined ways to introduce marketisation into the education system by treating the parents as consumers, increasing the level of choice they might have and by trying to inculcate competition into the system in order to improve its (and here’s that word again) quality.

She was arguably influenced in this by the famously compassionate Pinochet government in Chile which had attempted its own version of marketisation. The reforms that stemmed from the Act became influential worldwide and the “marketisation movement” spread globally. One of the key concepts of this ideological thrust was to somehow standardise teaching and learning across the country.

Professors from Boston College came up with what they termed “the third way.” This involved replacing the idea that teachers were professionals and, as such, should be allowed professional autonomy with the concepts of “efficiency, productivity and rapid service delivery.”

The focus on standardised testing resulted in more standardised approaches to teaching and to the search to find out what works.

If schools, and even teachers, were to be more competitive with each other and, if funding and pay were to be dependent on this competition, then human nature dictates that the education system would try to locate some form of golden key to success and, having found it, would then employ it.

This eventually resulted in inexperienced people (who were easy to indoctrinate as they didn’t really know anything at all about teaching, post-adolescents knocking the heads off statues in a municipal park) suffering from the delusion that there is “one particular, optimal pedagogy” when, in fact, Finnish academic, Pasi Sahlberg concludes that standardisation “prevents teachers from experimentation, reduces the use of alternative pedagogic methods and limits risk-taking in schools and classrooms.”

There is also the fact that the birth of all totalitarian movements begins with an obsession with consistency. Standardisation is just that. Teaching children is messy as human reality is messy. But consistency, according to Hannah Arendt, is an adequate enough explanation for the mob who seek quick and easy explanations of a reality which cannot so easily be explained.
 
Also, making everything about the test, as should be obvious, makes everything about the test.

I’ve written of this in my unpublished book, Pedagogy of the Oppressor: Teach Like a Totalitarian: “A school, a network of schools, or a pedagogic approach that has a value system as morally inconsiderate as ‘raise test scores’ is potentially dangerous to the children it serves as it no longer holds ordinary moral standards to be important.

“If the sole metric for the schools to appear successful is this single consideration, then all other ethical considerations might be thrown in the dumpster, and the schools might start viewing children purely as things.”

A further element of the Global Education Reform Movement is the borrowing of models of change from the business world: performance-related pay, harsh treatment of staff, the adoption of notions of efficacy (taken from the pharmaceutical industry) and efficiencies in which the noble art and sweet science of teaching is redefined as “delivery.”

This view of teaching changes it from being a dialogic artform in which students and teachers are questing together in a voyage of discovery to a dictatorial enterprise in which students are empty vessels to be coerced, controlled and then filled with (politically flavoured) content.

Management behaviour in the poisoned flowers of schools this movement has created borders on despotic; union membership, while not discouraged explicitly, marks one out as a “detractor”; staff are subject to constant surveillance; and outside providers with corporate names provide (for substantial sums of money) corporate training that treats teachers as if they’re little more than cretins.

An approved method of standardised teaching is implemented and anyone who shows the slightest bit of deviance from the compulsory style is corrected, made to comply. In this corporate version of schooling, employees unwittingly plunged into a version of low-wage hell driven by a management style that motivates through fear. “Imagine how much worse it would be if you lost the job that you know is destroying you, spiritually and physically.”

Barbara Ehrenreich, in her masterful ethnographic look at low-paid work in the US, Nickel and Dimed, describes the impact of this corporatisation: “There is no alternative to the megascale corporate order, from which every form of local creativity and initiative has been abolished by distant home offices.”

This bureaucratisation of education, this breaking of teaching down into tiny chunks of time that can all be delivered more efficiently is based on Fordism.

Every shaving of 10 seconds off a process is regarded as a fart in the face of fascism, and its progenitors, intellectual goldfish without a conceptual understanding of water, have such a shallow understanding of the form or the world they work in that they are entirely unaware of how quickly authoritarianism transmutes into totalitarianism.

Stupidity in the current iteration of education is bliss itself.

All this has resulted in a system where teachers are so deskilled that it doesn’t matter much at all if a teacher is any good or not as they are all replaceable since they are all the same. Down the line teaching will be scripted and delivered by programmable automatons, and the tradition of a deeply human art form will be erased for something far more financially efficient.

Quality counts. You get quality through craft and care and dialogue that runs at a more sedate pace than the freneticism the Walmart model assumes. You cannot properly educate children to any deep level by furiously throwing a succession of unconnected pieces of data at them; you cannot properly educate children by treating them as data themselves.

The tradition of education: slower, deeper with relatively well-remunerated and relatively well-respected teachers has disappeared.

Consequently, the quality of education the children receive has become a parade of disconnected facts and shallow conceptions that skim upon the surface of learning but do not impersonate it at all well. This impersonation takes place in environments with a corporate culture obsessed with control that suffocates both students and staff.

The Global Education Reform Movement is a juggernaut, a steamroller crushing the education and spirit. My friend, the late Ted Wragg, warned us presciently of the likely future back in 2005: “The market is a useful student, but a very cruel master. It doesn’t take care of quality, for a start … Nor does it work in the best interests of the least powerful in our society. It often grinds them into paste.”
 
My friend, a masterful practitioner with a deep and sedate talent for working with challenging children, has vowed that he will never teach in this country again. I am near to drawing a similar conclusion. I have no talent for compliance nor any desire to induce it in my students.

Phil Beadle is a teacher and author who has written extensively on literacy, social capital and white working-class achievement (www.philbeadle.com).