THIS week, children and young people return to school in England where they face being subjected to a new education curriculum devised by the former Tory education minister, Michael Gove, with the express purpose of setting up the vast majority to fail.
This new compulsory curriculum – only compulsory in local authority run schools, not in the independent academies which now provide the majority of secondary education – aims at turning the clock back in education to a time when pupils were regarded as little more than ‘empty vessels’ whose heads had to be crammed with facts.
This cramming process in the past was effected by a learning by rote system designed to stifle any creativity and replace genuine understanding with an ability to regurgitate the ‘facts’ drilled into them, usually with the aid of the cane as a method of reinforcement.
In the absence of corporal punishment, the cramming today will be policed by a reign of terror over being labelled failures by the education system from an early age.
Under the new curriculum five year olds will be expected to have mastered fractions and computer coding. The danger in this wholesale rush to cram mathematical concepts into young children has been highlighted by Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, who yesterday said: ‘In maths you need to learn the early concepts before you learn the later concepts, so there is a problem that there will be children who have not learned the earlier concepts before being expected to learn the more demanding ones.’
None of this worried Gove or Cameron. When the new curriculum was unveiled they justified their plans by using international comparison with education systems in Europe and the Far East. In particular, they cited the successful Finnish model and that of Singapore.
What they deliberately omitted, was the main fact that in Finland private education is outlawed and that, far from cramming children as young as five with fractions and decimals, to say nothing of computer coding, formal education in Finland does not start until age seven.
Before that, Finnish children attend kindergarten, where a ‘learn through play’ educational policy is followed.
In addition to having no private schools, educational segregation through streaming is unknown in the country, free school meals are provided for all children along with free transport for those forced to travel to school.
Also the status of teachers is very high in the country, unlike in Britain where the entire profession has been vilified and attacked at every turn by Gove and the government.
Singapore had a reputation for being a global role model for excessive cramming, with a regime of constant examinations.
In 2012, the minister for education announced that Singapore wanted to move away from this educational model to something that cultivates creativity, what he termed a ‘holistic education’ system that is ‘less about knowledge’ but ‘more about how to process information’.
Speaking about the comparison between Gove’s new curriculum and Finland and Singpore, the education expert, Professor Terry Wrigley, noted: ‘These countries do not achieve high standards by cramming young children. This is the Pied Piper curriculum: it abolishes childhood.’
When Cameron says that this curriculum is designed to fit children for life in Britain in the rest of the century, he was in a sense speaking the truth.
Under capitalism, Britain today is a bankrupt country whose manufacturing base has been completely smashed and whose economy relies entirely on the debt ridden financial services.
What capitalist Britain does not need is an educated generation of young people – it would dearly love to turn out hundreds of thousands of ‘failures’ fitted only for zero hour jobs or a life spent accepting the discipline of unemployment.
Youth, however, will not be disciplined in this way and despite everything that Gove and the Tories are inflicting upon the education system, they are creatively coming to the conclusion that capitalism offers them no future and its revolutionary overthrow is the only answer.