Changing Schools and the Professions

One of the things that has happened in the western world in recent years--which Christopher Lasch foresaw--is that middle class minds and their mimics have become sclerotic. The professional classes and those who call themselves professional have developed hardened pathways, whether in the law, academia, or for that matter science, and any improvising, creative solution to a problem that takes account of reality has tended to have a hard time.

Part of the problem is that when money comes from big bureaucracies or government, the surest route to be seen as wise is to play things safe, and to defer to those who by some chance or mischance made it into positions of authority. This gives rise to a sort of flock-based hierarchy. This then is ossified by the mimicry of students, and often, by the adulation which accompanies 'achievement' in tests designed to elicit the agreement of those tested with the consensus of wisdom.

The final stage of such behaviours, and there is a pathology to them, is that self-serving ideologies whose adherents could stand no intellectual mirror where they might gaze upon themselves are created.

In the law, this has come to refer to the dubious political project lurking behind what is sometimes called the human rights and non discrimination agenda. In schools and universities, it is the idea of the comprehensive school, or of testing children expensively rather than funding public libraries and school resources. Often, the finalised mindset is profoundly reactionary and negative, and it is therefore easy to say what the adherents are 'against'.

Sometimes, institutions have the sense to adopt skills-based tests; but even these depend upon the perception of what a skill is and what its capacities are. Engineers, I note, tend to choke on learning and spasm in practice given this background, as increasingly do doctors, lawyers and those whose research in universities depends upon pleasing committees.

Galileo and Einstein, at the top of the tree, knew that different worlds were possible and that by carefully laying out ideas based upon observable facts, all the armoury of the conventional wisdom--social approval, allegations of madness, the whole panjandrum of bows to be fired by the timid against sprezzatura--would be as nothing.

I think that this excellent article in the Times Higher Education Supplement touches on that, in the midst of a slightly confused attempt to justify the sort of dynamic, improvising lecturers and speakers whom I admire.

What can we do? Are there any general principles which could allow a decaying society like this one to transform its institutions for the twenty first century?

Saturday morning thoughts. Three principles spring to mind ; those of Localism, a good dose of libertarianism, and elective democracy. I think that we should also have a rule that those who talk or write about a thing must do that thing. A corollary would be that those who do it must be able to pass creative tests based on the skills of it.

A test need not be administered separately from work; it could be demonstrated by practice, and possibly be regulated socially by the professions and the market. The latter would express itself in terms of how many people were willing to pay for services from the person who offered them. If there were people who then said 'a professional sometimes cannot be self-employed', my response would be 'if you have a job, you are an employee' and possibly to allow a mix of part-time and self-employed consultancy to maintain professional status.

What would be the best way to inculcate this way of thinking? Simply moving to a completely free market in education, through vouchers and fully private universities, would to my mind open a system up to potential confidence tricksters who run forever alongside and sometimes within the best of innovators, and would also undermine continuity of tradition. Academic tradition, the transmission of learned ideas, is, so long as they can be criticised with respect, a vital way to sustain a community.

Simply moving to the other extreme of constantly demanding adaptation and changed from state or guild-controlled bodies which change from the top and implement decisions below, is however, one of the key drivers of the sort of mess we are in as a society now.

I'm very tempted to say that we need as a society and a world some version of grammar schools, technical schools, independent universities, an element of top-up from parents and students, and a much tighter focus on academic quality and rigorous examination than we have at the present time.

I also think that using schools and the professions as social experiments in a way that pleases the institutional left but that increasingly delivers lower quality technically 'safe' performances is wrong. I think that attaching anti-religious agendae to schools is wrong. There is a very good case for saying that state involvement with anything professional or educational is wrong.

So how do we get to what is right? If anyone has any thoughts about how this society might be saved, or if it can be, please feel free to post a comment, though I'd prefer it if you didn't do so anonymously and I will censor swearing or abuse.