'Common schools for a common culture': how to create a socially just education system.

AuthorReay, Diane
PositionEssays

Introduction

In the 1930s R. H. Tawney wrote:

I should be lacking in candour if I did not state my conviction that the only basis of educational policy worthy of a civilised nation is one which accepts as its objective, unpopular though such a view is in England, the establishment of the completest possible educational equality and that it is the duty of such educationalists as agree with that view to make it clear by definite, explicit and repeated statements that that and nothing less is what they mean. (Tawney, 1934, 1) Nearly 80 years later the English educational system is one in which a gaping chasm has opened up between today's status quo and what Tawney called 'the establishment of the completest possible educational equality'.

In his seminal text Equality Tawney argued against the view that was dominant in England at the time, that liberty and equality are antithetical. Rather he asserted that inequalities, and in particular economic inequalities, were a major threat to liberty. For Tawney, the liberty of the working classes depended on the restraint of the middle and upper classes. He quoted A. F. Pollard: 'Every man (sic) should have this liberty and no more, to do unto others as he would that they should do unto him; upon that common foundation rest liberty, equality and morality' (Tawney, 1964a, 58). The socially just society is one that can call itself a community rather than being comprised of competing factions with very unequal distributions of social and economic power. Such communal societies are based on a common culture because, as Tawney points out, a community without a common culture is not a community at all:

Social well-being depends upon cohesion and solidarity. It implies the existence, not merely of opportunities to ascend, but of a high level of general culture, and a strong sense of common interests, and a diffusion throughout society of a conviction that civilization is not the business of an elite alone, but a common enterprise which is the concern of all. And individual happiness does not only require that men (sic) should be free to rise to new positions of comfort and distinction; it also requires that they should be able to lead a life of dignity and culture, whether they rise or not. (Tawney, 1964a, 108) 'The good society' was one that resolutely pursued the elimination of all forms of special privilege, especially in education. The price of a socially unjust educational system, underpinned by a tradition of inequality, was servility and resentment on the one side and arrogance and patronage on the other (Tawney, 1964a). It is unsurprising then that Tawney advocated an educational system unimpeded by 'the vulgar irrelevancies of class and income' (Tawney, 1943, 149) and argued for universal university education on the basis that it is just as important for those who remain working class all their lives as it is for the upper and middle classes (Tawney, 1964a). Despite attending a private school himself, Tawney denounced private schooling throughout his life, arguing that:

The effect of the division of schools into free and fee-paying is to create a mistaken impression that the latter are in some sense superior, and thus to encourage a social snobbery which it should be one of the functions of education to discredit. (Tawney, 1942, 4) Tawney abhorred the practice of 'getting the best for your own child' if it was at the expense of other people's children, labelling this as 'antisocial egotism' (Tawney, 1943, 149). Also, for Tawney, a vision of a socially just educational system should be much bolder and brighter than a focus on social mobility, which he dismissed as 'merely converting into doctors, barristers and professors a certain number of people who would otherwise have been manual workers' (Tawney, 1964b, 77). Rather, a socially just educational system is one in which education is seen as an end in itself, a space that 'people seek out not in order that they may become something else but because they are what they are' (Tawney, 1964b, 78). Tawney put the case for a common school, asserting that 'the English educational system will never be one worthy of a civilised society until the children of all classes in the nation attend the same schools' (Tawney, 1964a, 144). So in Tawney's terms a socially just educational system is one in which a nation secures educationally for all children 'what a wise parent would desire for his own children' (Tawney, 1964a, 146). In a contemporary educational landscape characterised by a steeply unequal hierarchy of educational provision, and surrounded by growing economic inequalities that translate into hugely inequitable educational opportunities (Dorling, 2010), we are still miles away from realising either Tawney's common culture or his common school. In the next section I turn to the contemporary situation and explore how a currently unjust educational system might become a just one.

A socially just education system for the twenty-first century

A socially just educational system would require a very different structure to the existing one, with a much flatter hierarchy of schooling. Currently 23 per cent of British school educational spending goes on the 7 per cent of pupils who are privately educated...

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