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'Philistinism and Cultural Renewal':
Essays on Education
by Tony McManus

Higher Still and Lower Yet – Education In The Philistine Society (1997)

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[First published in Cencrastus, 1997, and reproduced with the permission of the editor, Raymond Ross]

The Abominable Dominie

The newspapers have been full of educational 'news' again, mainly the teacher-baiting that the educational community has come to expect, but one item in the Times Educational Supplement of October 30th was of a more interesting nature. It reported that teachers of English were in open revolt against the Government's proposals for reforms of the senior school curriculum - Higher Still. What made this interesting was not only that teachers were reacting to these developments (demoralised submission has been the norm for some time now) but that they were making a stand on the issue of educational standards, the very issue which has been used as a stick to beat teachers with for the past ten years.

Their complaints are outlined in a document produced by Lothian teachers of English which has been circulating round Scotland and has met with remarkable consensus not only around its general conclusion that the Higher Still proposals are both unworkable and undesirable, but also around the detailed critique which the document goes into. The campaign newsletter's title - Teach! - indicates the campaigners' priorities and points to the experience of classroom teaching which far too many of the people behind Higher Still do not share with them. The groundswell of opinion against Higher Still has now begun to reach into other subject areas. The matter is of national interest because it has grave implications for the intellectual-cultural nature of Scotland and the tradition from which it springs.

It is important to establish from the outset that few teachers will argue that there is nothing wrong with the educational system at the moment. As Professor Howie said, in the initial report into this area which was rejected in favour of the Higher Still Arrangements, 'the status quo is not an option.' (However, it ought to remain in place until the mess is sorted out.) Indeed, the education system in our schools is in serious trouble, but to blame teachers for that is symptomatic of the problem not indicative of the solution. The anger that spilled over at that seminal Edinburgh meeting reported in the TES was the positive anger of those who are genuinely concerned about the standards of expectation and achievement in our schools and legitimately resentful at being made to take the blame for a situation brought about by social change over which they have had no control. In short, levels of academic achievement in our schools are low because the level of intellectual activity in society at large has plummeted and teachers have recognised that, far from altering this state of affairs, Higher Still is a further contribution to reactionary philistinism.

Democratic Intellectualism

In order to see quite what is wrong with Higher Still it is necessary to set it in the context of the Scottish educational tradition especially as it is established by George Elder Davie in his exploration of what Walter Elliot called 'the democratic intellect'. The question, Davie tells us, is:

whether the aim of education is to produce people who, in Arnold's words, see life steadily and see it whole, or people who are trained to look at things in detail and who are expert in isolating problems and propounding observationally testable hypotheses in regard to them and thereby producing obviously socially useful results in the short term. (Crisis of the Democratic Intellect p.v)

'Metaphysical Scotland' favoured the former not only out of a general preference for philosophy, but also because she felt that the latter was embraced by the former, that specialism and socially useful knowledge would be more effectively and efficiently produced, in the long term, by a pure education seen as arising from philosophy and aspiring to philosophy. The comprehensive nature of this approach can be revealed in the work of those who graduated from it, for example the biologist D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson whose specialist knowledge was driven by, and aimed at, a generalist contemplation:

The search for differences or essential contrasts between the phenomena of organic and inorganic, of animate and inanimate things, has occupied many men's minds, while the search for community of principles, or essential similitudes, has been followed by few; and the contrasts are apt to loom too large, great as they may be. (On Growth and Form CUP 1917, p.7)

In The Democratic Intellect (EUP 1961) and The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect (Polygon, 1986), George Elder Davie establishes the identifying features of this Scottish educational tradition and offers a historical account of the struggle of the cogent features of that tradition to maintain its position in the post-1707 Union, a struggle against concerted efforts by Westminster to align the Scottish system with the English. Davie's account reveals that this conflict was a continuous one fought out around the different contexts offered by each generation.

Davie's analysis is, as is well-established now, of more universal interest than the merely educational. These last two words sound a self-contradiction in the Scottish ear because there is nothing more potent in the make up of what we call Scotland than education. More than anything else, education has kept Scottish culture distinctive within the Union. As Davie points out, far from suggesting a narrow nationalist perspective, this meant conserving the European nature of Scottish culture against the more insular cultural perspective of southern England/Great Britain. (The Union, let us recall, was made in order to separate Scotland from Europe, it has always been the Unionists who have been of the 'separatist' persuasion).

For Davie, then, the key feature of Scottish education is its insistence upon philosophy as both source and aim of all educational activity. It is because of this philosophical insistence that Scottish education is characterised by a generalism quite opposite to the highly specialist tradition of English education. It is also because of this intellectual insistence that Davie can lay claim to democracy in the tradition. Class, caste, race and means are irrelevant in a philosophically-based education. And it is the philosophical source and aim which leads to the famed breadth of education which we have come to expect in the Scottish system. Students were expected to enquire into the connections between subjects, their intellectual and ethical grounding and relationships as well as their functional application and usefulness to the community. Again, the application of knowledge in the economy was not thought to be a separate issue from the philosophical drive of education. Far from it - the high point of Scotland's functional contribution world-wide in engineering, industry, science and architecture, coincided with the high point of her philosophical and literary influence. From this generalist grounding, specialism could then be pursued, although this would be put off for as long as possible, safe in the knowledge that specialising students would have been so well educated in the philosophical perspective that they would always refer that specialism back to its relation and significance within the generalist context.

The above quickly outlines the spirit of the tradition. The reality in practice was often short of the ideal especially as the responsibility for education of youngsters moved from Universities to the evolving schools during the twentieth century. However, it is clear that ever since the eighteenth century, Scottish education was so successful as to be the model for educational systems in other countries, not least France.

The Philistine Society

It is against this historical context of education in Scotland that the Higher Still proposals, and the recent attacks on teachers and teaching, must be seen. For much of the twentieth century, in sharp contrast to the sort of culture envisaged by the democratic intellect, has been a history of intellectual and cultural decline. The changes in British society which have been gathered under the title 'Thatcherism' - inaccurately since they began before the lady was turned into Prime Minister - were not primarily economic or political, they were of a cultural nature. They were so successful because they were always fought on the economic-political ground, and the cultural ground was left wide open for them to occupy and sow with the rank seed of philistinism. Our children are reaping the sorry harvest.

The main project was to de-intellectualise society - not a difficult job in Britain, at first sight, however it is easy to undermeasure the sheer descent into platitude and banality down which discourse has tumbled in the past twenty years; the marginalisation of the intellectual; the conditioning of the people through abuse of mass media systems towards short concentration spans; the elevation of message above content; narrowing of context; fragmentation and compartmentalisation of fields of knowledge and experience; the removal of the concise and precise from linguistic expression. Meanwhile, the tawdry culture of systems management has been consciously promoted as the grounding for all activities.

Education has been a constant target for this new reactionary momentum. It has been a long-term and strategically progressive campaign. First the newspapers were organised to mount regular abusive attacks upon teachers and the curriculum and spread discontent. Then it was put about that the high level of unemployment required by a 'modern' economy to guarantee 'growth' was not really 'unemployment' at all but 'unemployability' and that the education system was to blame. Then we saw the features of systems management thinking being proposed for our educational institutions - 'league tables' based on examination results, 'performance indicators', 'appraisal', 'enterprise education', 'quality assurance', 'mission statements' (from all of which the words mind and think are gloriously absent)… In Scotland, where some resistance to all of this has been possible, the planning of the reactionary culture has had to be a little more subtle. However, with Higher Still the full force of reactionary philistinism is about to be brought to bear upon our distinctive intellectual and cultural tradition unless the growing unrest in the ranks of the teachers is successful in putting a stop to it.

Higher Still and Lower Yet

Higher Still employs many of the buzzwords of progressive education to further the project of philistinism. So we have it that Higher Still is about 'equality of opportunity'; that it seeks to establish 'parity of esteem' between the vocational and the academic; and, of course, in the mantra of the day, it will 'raise standards'. Needless to say, Higher Still would, if implemented, achieve the opposite of these public claims in the pursuit of more private, philistine aims.

The key claim, which has duped many a parent, politician and, less forgivably, teacher, is the aspiration to 'parity of esteem'. In structural terms, this means that the old Scottish Examination Board (SEB) has been replaced by a new organisation called the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) which was created by a merger of the SEB with SCOTVEC. The SEB was an organisation of long standing which had been responsible for the Scottish school's leaving certificate qualifications for over a century, adapting to changing economic and social circumstances while retaining the credibility that comes with an internationally recognised rigour and fairness especially in the Higher examination system. SCOTVEC, in contrast, is a private company which authorises and certificates courses designed for Further Education Colleges. During the 1980's SCOTVEC was allowed into schools to cater for the growing number of pupils staying on in school after fourth year because of chronic unemployment outside the school gates. Highers were unsuitable for them so SCOTVEC at least seemed to offer them the chance to make a further year or two at school fruitful. Many teachers now regret having allowed what was quickly discovered to be a dubious certification system into their schools. That regret has become particularly sharp now, for SQA is effectively a SCOTVEC takeover of the national qualification system, and Higher Still is modelled on its questionable procedures.

As such, Higher Still is not a course of study in any of the subject areas, it is merely a framework for assessment. The public will be used to an assessment procedure whereby a candidate is asked to perform over a range of tasks and skills within the subject and weak performance in one area may be compensated for by strength in another. So, for (a very simple) example, a test worth one hundred marks is passed by a candidate who achieves fifty marks. A candidate gaining sixty or more marks will be deemed to have done well, one who gains seventy or more to have done very well. It is tried and tested, fair and yet rigorous and allows examiners some space to maintain standards while making allowances for personal circumstance, unfairnesses, undue difficulty and, indeed, unwonted easiness in a test.

The SCOTVEC model proposed for Higher Still is quite different. It specifies the abilities ('Learning Outcomes') which are to be demonstrated in any area within a subject, then splits those abilities up into certain components ('Performance Criteria') all of which must be passed by the candidate before s/he is deemed to have passed the test in that particular ability. And this assessment is not carried out at the end of a course in order to objectively assess what a pupil has learned from that course, it is done internally by the pupil's teacher at various points throughout. The effect of this is to turn the assessment into a measuring exercise dominated by tickable boxes, and the teaching process into a mechanistic affair, training pupils towards the narrow needs of an overweening and inflexible assessment system which is then driving the entire educational process. There are so many of these assessments that there will remain little time for what the public properly understands as 'teaching'. What is more, if pupils fail any of these assessments, in whole or in part (and this is more than likely since they are required effectively to achieve 100%), then they are to be offered the opportunity to 'do it again till they get it right'. It does not require a teacher to imagine the sheer impracticality of such a system, nor to perceive the lack of rigour it betrays.

The strategy to be adopted by the teacher in this situation is simple. Dilute the content of your course so as to make it so easy that failure is less likely. And if, despite this, pupils come up with unsatisfactory answers, pass them anyway, tell them the answer, because, if you do not, chaos will ensue, parents may visit you asking what it is that you are doing wrong (because in this system it is really the teacher who sits the test not the pupil) because failure will stop their child from being able to sit the final exam, and the school management team will be knocking at your door because necks will be on the chopping block when the exam league tables come out at the end of the year and standards must be seen to be rising.

Now standards which are seen to be rising are not necessarily the same as standards which really are rising, and this is the crux of the philistine project. What Higher Still achieves is the lowering of standards, the anti-intellectual shift from education to training which reactionary philistinism requires, while presenting it as a raising of standards ('year-on-year', no doubt!) because the content of the curriculum will have been so reduced to the mechanistic and measurable that the prospect of failure, which is the risk of intellectual challenge, will have been, rather shadily, removed from the process, while leaving the teacher accountable for the whole sorry charade. And once such a system is in operation and the intellectual potential has been taken out of it, the next thing to go could be the teacher. For, if a curriculum can be 'delivered' by the ticking of boxes of the mechanically measurable, then trainers can replace teachers for half the price. And there you have it - the philistine society: cheap, trained and unthinking.

In the meantime, some of the middle classes, exploiting the independent sector and the 'leafy suburb' schools of the state sector, will home in on the Advanced Higher which is to replace the current discredited Certificate of Sixth Year Studies, and leave the rest to the banalities of the Higher Still programme.

Consuming Children

The main reason philistinism has been able to get away with all this is because the right has been able to exploit genuine concern about our schools. Our education system is seriously, and dangerously, inadequate. Compare the intellectual/cultural awareness of the average intelligent Scottish youth with that of her/his European peers and you find the opposite condition of the Scottish nation to that which famously pertained in the past. The supposedly 'progressive' ideas of the sixties in education have been found seriously wanting in many respects, although it must be stressed that they were never taken as fully on board in Scotland as they were in England. The problem has been that the critique of contemporary education has been left to the philistine right. There has been no serious critique able to gather momentum emanating from the great intellectual tradition of Scottish education. Initiatives from England, dealing with a quite different situation, have dominated the agenda and Scottish ministers and educationalists have been forced into responding to them, watering them down, adapting them to suit our different structures. The guardians of the Scottish educational system have seen their role as avoiding the worst aspects of the English reforms. They ought to have been analysing and debating the needs of the Scottish system which evolves from a long and distinguished tradition, in the new international context opened up by a self-governing Scotland remaking its links with a Europe which is itself working out its relationship with an increasingly global culture.

Caught up in reacting to the reactionary, they have failed to protect our children from the worst effects of the 'enterprise' culture (whose main purpose, of course, is to stifle genuine enterprise). Our children became the targets of renascent capitalism in the late seventies and eighties. Looking for growth areas among consumers the electronics, food, clothing and entertainment industries, some of them using children in other parts of the globe as cheap, even slave labour to produce the goods, swooped on the mass market offered to them by the children of the employed whose disposable income was boosted artificially and who were spun a superficial cultural line (superficially attractive for parents brought up in the forties and fifties) about allowing children freer choice, giving children their say, treating them as adults ('not treating them like children' as it is sometimes ludicrously put), and so on.

The education system, working as a part of the society in which it is established, has been forced to collaborate with this 'thinking' by watering down the content at all levels and failing to apply or exact rigour. Most literature published for children is unforgivably poor, dominated by low-level sociological concerns and badly written, unremittingly banal in its vocabulary, unsophisticated in its construction, innocent of the vital role played by rhythm in linguistic expression, turning children's minds in upon the most petty of personal concerns and away from the great outside world - philistine injection rather than imaginative projection. Mathematics - that most beautiful of abstract disciplines - is a series of apparently isolated exercises whose connection with thought, perception and imagination is passed over in silence. History begins in 1914 and ends in 1950, our children heads full of trench warfare because that is what their teachers were taught at school themselves, and empty of the history of ideas, anthropological awareness, the achievements of the Scottish Enlightenment (or anything else remotely Scottish), the thinking of non-western cultures. The other disciplines seem to have allowed themselves already to be reduced to the merely measurable, the box-tickable accumulation of testable 'knowledge', the weary illusion that they are training children for jobs.

It is not being envisaged here (need it be said?) that all our children may become intellectuals, academic, scholarly. It is a question of formulating a curriculum which opens the intellectual landscape to anyone who wishes to venture into it, and which ensures that everyone, regardless of the levels reached, approaches life and its tasks with mind open to the significance of, and relations between, all things, and the growth which can originate from such awareness. That is the grounding of a genuine social ethics as well as individual fulfilment.

Remaking the Future

The radical edge of cultural discourse today is turning its back on fragmented knowledge and experience, on the gods of illusory growth and the hegemony of mediocrity. The re-establishment of the Scottish Parliament two years from now gives us the opportunity to win back, indeed create, the agenda in all areas of the life of the community as teachers have shown signs of trying to do lately in the educational field. Education will be one of the main areas of debate within that Parliament and it is up to those who have the knowledge of the real needs of our community and its children and those who have the intelligent and committed (as opposed to self-seeking) experience of working with them to raise the intellectual questions, to debate the cultural decline we have been complying with and to come up with a plan for the education system of the new Scotland which will revive her intellectual, generalist and truly democratic credentials in the new global context of the next century.

In his Early Celtic Christianity (Constable 1994), Brendan Lehane tells us that Robert Schumann's choice for patron saint of those working towards a united Europe was Columbanus, the Scottish-Irish saint of an earlier European Enlightenment in which this remarkable man, like so many others from these islands in what people like to call 'the dark ages', was a key figure. Speaking to the Pope, that supreme representative of authoritarian Augustinian Christianity - the political project of urban civilisation dressed up as a religious faith - Columbanus told him: 'Liberty was ever the tradition of my fathers and, among us, no person avails, but rather reason.' Clearly, a 'democratic intellect' tradition can be traced a great deal further back than we normally think. It is up to us to remake it for our time and project it forward far into the future as well.

(Published Online: 28 June 2006)

Other essays available

Introduction by Lindsay Paterson

Paths of Perception (1997): an essay on the Celtic and European basis of Scottish thought.

Philistinism and Cultural Renewal (2000): a general cultural critique, with particular attention to the state of education.

New Labour and the Poverty of Ideas (2001): a political polemic, arguing that the UK Labour government and its predecessors have come close to destroying the intellectual basis for social renewal.

[This essay] Higher Still and Lower Yet (1997): critique of the reform to the examination system in the senior years of Scottish secondary schools that was put in place between 1994 and 1999.

Inaugural Lecture to the Scottish Association of Teachers of Language and Literature (1999): political activism set in the intellectual context explained in the other essays.

Background paper by Lindsay Paterson

 

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