EDUCATION, EDUCATION, EDUCATION.

 

For most youth growing up in the 1950s and 60s the educational options were either secondary modern or grammar schools. If you passed your eleven plus examination you went to a grammar school and if you failed you ended up in a secondary modern.

 

Approximately 10% - 15% made it through to grammar school. This was not a random percentage but reflected the needs of the capitalist system at the time. This was because capitalism needed approximately 10% - 15% of children educated enough to fill roles such as middle-management and supervisory positions etc. The remaining percentage of children needed only to be turned out fit enough to fulfill the role of work fodder for the factories and offices etc.

 

Today, with the destruction of domestic manufacturing and the rise of globalised production the needs of capital have changed. It no longer needs to educate to a relative high degree the previous 10% - 15% and it certainly has no need to give even a standard education to the remainder, due to the outsourcing of labour to much cheaper foreign markets.

 

Therefore, as capitalism is a system driven by the profit motive it would be folly for it to spend money on educating youth it has no need for. Consequently the pool of youth leaving education today is, more than any post-war generation, lacking in basic literacy numeracy and social skills, and as such is facing a future that holds no hope, only frustration, and at best employment in the mainly poorly paid and poorly regulated service industry.

 

It is this layer of youth that are now targeted as ‘feral’ by the authorities and classed as anti-social elements subject to ASBOs and other ‘control orders’.

 

However, they are the product of the capitalist system itself, yet capitalism wishes to wash its hands of any social responsibility and instead looks for ‘genetic determinism’ to persuade us that ‘they were born like that’ and try to convince us that society has played no role in producing such ‘wild, rude and aggressive youths’.

 

The increase in examinations that children must now undertake, and the subsequent stress that is placed on the child, has done nothing more than allow schools to reach pre-set government targets which rather than help educate has simply supplanted a ‘rote learning of disconnected facts’ at the expense of real learning and the teaching of the ability of ‘how to learn’, a process that is never taught to working class children.

 

Ends.

Notes on Education.

 

“The initiative for this seminar on education comes from a resolution passed at the annual North West Congress, and the Regional Committee decided one way to support this resolution was to have a seminar covering all aspects of the education system and I thank them for arranging this seminar and trust it will be the first of several that will discuss the direction the education system is taking and the reasons why.

 

Let’s start by stretching your imagination and let’s pretend that I am a successful financial speculator.

 

Say I speculated on the price of wheat and I made one million pounds. Of course because of the fluctuation of the price of wheat on the financial markets millions of children are now going without nourishment in the developing world, but hey, that’s the market economy for you.

 

So I have one million pounds that I don’t know what to do with.

 

I could put it in the bank and with the right deal I could get 7% interest on it per year.

 

But if I put it into a government PFI scheme for instance, then my return would be 25% per year. So for instance I could invest my million into a hospital and get a quarter of a million back every year for 25 years.

 

And who pays me this quarter of a million every year? You do, the taxpayer. Because it is your money, through your taxes and your National Insurance contributions that are used to benefit me, a millionaire!

 

So it’s not only a get rich quick scheme…it is a get rich quick and for a very long time scheme.

Couldn’t get better could it?

 

Well yes it could actually.

For instance if I invested in a school, using the PFI arrangement, I would only have to invest 10% of the cost of the school and it will all be mine.

 

And who pays the other 90% of the cost?

 

Well you do of course…the taxpayers.

 

And for my 10% I get to choose the staff and along with some basic government guidelines I choose the curriculum.

 

Who pays the staff and who pays for the maintenance and upkeep of the school?

Well, you do of course…the taxpayers.

 

 

Yet although you put 90% of the money in you get no return on that investment and have no say in the running of the school.

 

(To give you an objective view of PFI let me quote from a report by the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants

They found that between 2000 and 2003, 26% of all NHS income went towards paying PFI charges. The ACCA predicted that continued PFI would lead to a redistribution of income from the public sector to the corporate sector. And the main beneficiaries will be the financial institutions.

So if you wonder why the donations and loans to the Labour government come from financiers, bankers and entrepreneurs and such like, now you know.

Blair and now Brown represent those kinds of people. And have done so since elected in 1997).

 

Of course New Labour can’t be open and honest about what they are doing to the education system and health service and so they try to cover it up with spin such as making the claim of 'equal opportunities for all children'etc.

 

But the essence of their policies is to turn such things as health and education into commodities, like a tin of baked beans or a bag of sugar, and then offer these commodities for workers to buy.

 

You want health treatment, well buy it, you want education for your children, certainly. that will be x amount of pounds. It is introducing the ‘market’ into education and health.

 

When Labour launched its white paper on higher education back in 2003 the then Education Secretary Charles Clarke said the government’s aim was to create a "fundamentally market based higher education system".

 

Which meant that a student’s ability to take up university study and even their choice of course and college would be determined by their ability to pay.

 

The government’s intent was to deregulate higher education and allow universities to set their own level of tuition fees. Which would of course bring about a sharp reduction in the number of students from working class families who would be able to attend.

The intention was also to drop the £3,000 payment in favour of letting market forces dictate fee levels. Imperial College, London, has already floated the prospective figure of £11,000 per year for undergraduate students.

 

If you ever get to read any of the government’s education documents its very clear what they are doing.

For instance the proposals outlined in the Department for Education and Skills (DFES) "Five-Year Strategy for Children and Learners" in 2004 was analysed by education chiefs as:

 

"The clearest declaration ever made by a post-war government to end what remains of the comprehensive state education system in England.

The essential thrust of the 114-page document is a determined push for the privatisation of state-run schools."

 

In the document, Charles Clarke states that the government wants to establish an entirely different type of local education system to that currently run by the Local Education Authorities (LEAs).

This would ensure schools have "the freedom to shape and reshape the offer to meet different and changing needs."

 

The question of what ‘different and changing needs’ they are talking about is of course related to the different and changing needs of capitalism and not to the needs of the educational potential of children and students themselves.

 

By effectively dismantling any centralised form of control over schools, the government is opening the way for significantly extending the role of private capital and private sponsors in education.

 

Also you have the government white paper on education, ‘Higher Standards, Better Schools for All’ which is another government effort to dismantle the comprehensive state education system in England and Wales.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair said that the "purpose of the schools white paper is to ensure that the choices now exercised only by the fortunate and the well-off can be given to all parents."

But if you read the white paper you find that the main "opportunities" are made available to private capital in escalating its penetration of the education sector at taxpayers’ expense.

 

And taxes…your taxes.. will be allocated to “companies contracted to provide various education-related services, up to running whole schools.”

 

And what kind of companies will be running our state schools?

 

One example is the car dealer Reg Vardy who owns and runs three state schools in the north east.

 

Vardy is a Christian Evangelist, and as he can choose his own staff, he hires other Christian Evangelists…..and you pay the wages don’t forget… and these teachers teach creationism…that is that the Bible…written by various authors and written over hundreds of years after the events they are writing about… is literally the word of god. That the world was created by god in six days, that the world is only 5000 years old etc etc.

 

By opening up state schools to the private sector the Labour government is offering companies access to government funds and basically unlimited profit and ‘freeing’ schools from control by the Local Education Authorities and from any accountability.

 

However, the business sector is becoming impatient at the time it is taking the Government to implement these anti-working class policies.

 

As one report outlined: ‘Sunny Varkey, from the private education company Global Education Management Systems (Gems), which runs 50 schools internationally, complained, "Why didn’t they catch the bull by the horns? They are halfway through this half-cooked thing."

"Make it a free market and the children will benefit," he said, predicting that government would eventually have to relax any restrictions on companies running schools for profit.”

 

The point of the government changes in education is to make it a profitable investment for big business, but just as importantly it is to produce a disciplined work force for the needs of capital.

 

For example, the introduction of school/parent contracts, whereby the parents have to give certain levels of guarantees and if for whatever reason the parents lapse on any guarantee then they can be punished, financially and by imprisonment.

 

And flowing from this will be the new, ‘good citizen’ contracts that all citizens will have to sign. It is being brought in as voluntary at the moment but it will become compulsory.

And this contract commits people to be ‘good citizens’ which includes not being ‘anti-social’ a term still to be defined, but no doubt including the ‘anti-social’ act of putting political leaflets through doors, amongst many other attacks on existing rights and liberties.”

 

Ends.