ut vero aliquis libenter educationis taedium lahoremque suscipiat, non praemiis modo verum etiam exquisitis adhortationibus impetrandum est.

—Pliny (I, 8)

Those who read my “Letter From Banausia” in the June Chronicles will perhaps recall that it described the studied destruction of the tradition of learning in English schools and its replacement by politicized, centrist, authoritarian, line-managed training for employment. It reported how the new “educational” orthodoxy is enforced by subjecting schools to the destructive testing methods of a tyrannical and unchallengeable inspectorate. And it related the virtual collapse of secondary teacher recruitment that has followed these developments, despite the government’s attempts to attract applicants by a campaign of sentimentalized cinema and newspaper advertisements. Well, three months later, and—as the venerable Jesuit who taught me English all those years ago would say (daily, in response to the morning’s news broadcast on what we then called the “wireless”)—”It’s getting worse.”

In peri-millennial England, it would seem, just as in the Rome of Pliny the Younger, “a good deal of persuasion, not just financial incentives, is needed to get an}one to choose to put up with the boredom and hard work involved in teaching children.” The exquisitae adhortationes I described in my last dispatch continue, through the inexhaustibly comic catch phrase—still, “Nobody forgets a good teacher!”; still, nobody wants to be one—and now through a comic book, too. For every teacher in England has recently become an involuntary subscriber to a free government-produced journal called Teachers, in which the party line is set forth with much of the glossiness of Cosmopolitan and with all of the subtlety of Der Stürmer.

The first number (Spring 1999) of this humorless and heavily designed magazine is a giveaway in more than one sense. Beside the bright eyes, hope-filled smile, and unwrinkled forehead of its glamorous 20-something cover girl (over 50 percent of serving teachers are over 40, by the way) are five telling headlines. Three of them promise praemia: “Pay latest: How to earn £35,000”; “Recruit, retain, reward”—the education minister on his “plans for a modern profession”; and an invitation to “Win a holiday for two in New York!” (To enter this drawing, you have to be a serving teacher who is culturally knowledgeable enough to identify which of three named American TV comedy series is set in that city.) The fourth and fifth headlines are confident adhortationes to accept two recent education ministry edicts: that primary-school children should have an hour of prescribed and pre-scripted reading and writing lessons daily (“Literacy Hour: It’s their favorite lesson!”) and that the number of pupils excluded from schools should be reduced to meet specific targets (“I was a teenage truant . . . “) To examine what lies beneath each of these carefully coined headlines is to discover how rapidly the tradition of an English liberal education is being replaced by a market-driven, utilitarian system designed not to encourage thinking but to instill obedience in both teacher and taught.

How a teacher—or, less misleadingly, some teachers—might be able to earn £5,000 a year (half again as much as the current salary for one at the top of the scale and without additional responsibilities) is far from straightforward. A closer look at this carrot reveals it to be a stick. To the general public, the education ministry can say, “Lo, for the teachers asked for more pay, and behold, we offered riches—unto the best of them.” (The best of them, of course, being those who consent, conform, and cooperate with them in their redefinition of what it is to be a teacher.) To the teachers themselves, the ministry says, “Sure, we will consider paying you a bundle—provided you tear up your current contract, and accept even longer working hours, shorter holidays, and—crucially—the principle of payment by results.” (This is what is meant by the mantra of “recruit, retain, reward,” however it might be dressed up and larded by the propagandist’s arrogation of such terms as “professionalism” and “development.”) “Results, of course, like everything else in contemporary education, have to be measured. So we’ll set you personal targets—moving targets, that is —and you’ll have to come to us every year with your cap in one hand and a dossier of your achievements in the other and prove to us that you have hit them and are thus worthy of your salary.” Little wonder, then, that the National Union of Teachers has resisted this invitation to subscribe to a deal of such Faustian foolishness, and has for the first time in a generation voted to refuse to cooperate with its political masters.

So much for the inducements which continue to fail to attract intelligent young people to audition for a part in our politicians’ pantomime parody of education. The other two stories flagged on the front of their propaganda comic concern the internal economy of schools. The claim that the virtually inescapable daily “literacy hour” can be children’s “favorite lesson” is no more representative of reality than are the top-of-the-rictus-scale grins on the faces of every teacher and child whose face appears in the magazine. My wife is a primary-school teacher who has to act out this government-scripted charade daily with the pupils in her charge. Whilst it has its good points, it does nothing for the children who have the greatest difficulties in reading and writing, and little for those who have none. Research that shows this is ignored. Moreover, from the first of this month, a second whole hour of each primary schoolchild’s day must now be taught from a government-issue script—”numeracy.” In every corner of the country, children will be lisping in numbers—the same numbers, in response to their teachers’ prompts; the same prompts, as dictated by ministerial ukase. Again, aside from its totalitarian take on education, there is some merit in the scheme, for some; but this teaching of numbers, by numbers, is ultimately for numbers—there is no doubt that it will lead to carefully concocted statistical targets being met.

There is further evidence of the “control freakery” we have seen so far under the headline, “I was a teenage truant.” It turns out not to be a story about a recalcitrant child being won over by a charismatic and pastorally minded teacher, but a paean for a school that has improved its attendance figures (authorized and unauthorized) by one percent—yes, one percent—by “focusing their efforts and making the most of innovative new technology.” This turns out to be a £50,000 combination of electronic registers, radio transmitters, pagers, and centralized computers.

The state school attended by two of my four children has a more modest version of such a system. Last term, we received a computer-generated letter informing us that attendance in my son Matthew’s year group was currently running at 88 percent, and his own at 85.98 percent. (Education by numbers, it seems, is nothing if not precise.) “Less than 90 percent attendance for an individual pupil, let alone for a year group as a whole, is a cause for concern,” we read. “We do monitor the situation closely and if there is no improvement over the coming weeks we shall make further contact.” The letter was accompanied by a printout showing that all of Matthew’s absences had been authorized. We already knew this: He is asthmatic. Supportive though we are of his school, our commitment to it does not extend to calculating how to identify what amounts to 4.02 percent of his school time when his asthma was at its least severe, so that we could send him in to satisfy his teachers’ targets. Our view of Matthew is that he is an individual, not fodder for statistics.

If all this sounds like a catalogue of intrusions and interventions by a centralist, authoritarian, and intolerant government that regards education as a medium through which its political decisions can be enforced, then that is what it is. If there were ever any doubt about it, it was surely settled recently, when the thought police of the school’s inspectorate visited, and condemned, a school whose particular ethos is the very antithesis of our politicians’ Gradgrindian credo. Summerhill, a coeducational boarding school in Suffolk, is independent in every sense. Founded by the avant-garde educationalist A.S. Neill in the 1920’s, it is the Liberty’ Hall of the educational world: Lessons are voluntary, and such order and discipline as obtains is achieved by a democratic council of the whole community, adults and children alike. It is not a school to which I would send my own children, even if I could afford the fees. I would, however, defend its right to exist. Right now, Summerhill needs all the defenders it can get. It faces closure. The inspectors condemned the school unequivocally, and no wonder. The framework through which they operate is designed to measure conformity; Summerhill exists to rebut it. You might as well try to measure the temperature of the fire in your hearth with a ruler, or the distance from the earth to the sun with your bathroom scale, as attempt to judge the quality of a school devoted to liberty by employing an instrument used everywhere else to suppress it.