EDUCATION FOR THE GOOD SOCIETY - Support

8 Wilfred Carr and AnthonyHartnett, Education and theStruggle for Democracy: ThePolitics of Educational Ideas, OpenUniversity Press, 1996, p.194.9 Hywel Williams, ‘Schoolsthat teach children to lie’, NewStatesman, 9 October 2000.7 Insistent affirmation of possibilityThere should be:• a generosity of presumption that requires us tokeep options open, to counter the confinementof customary or casual expectation• no ability grouping, emulation rather thancompetition, and intrinsic motivation andcommunal recognition rather than theparaphernalia of marks and prizes.8 Engaging the localThis involves:• education as a lifelong process and the school asite of community renewal and responsibilityin which young and old explore what it meansto live good lives together• school and community seen as reciprocalresources for broadly and more narrowlyconceived notions of learning.9 Accountability as shared responsibilityWe should:• understand and enact democraticaccountability better as a form of ‘sharedresponsibility’ – morally and politicallysituated, not merely technically andprocedurally ‘delivered’• develop new forms of accountability bettersuited to a more engaged understanding ofdemocratic living.10 Regional, national and globalsolidaritiesThis involves:• regional, national and global solidarities madereal through reciprocal ideological, materialand interpersonal support through valuesdrivennetworks and alliances, which drawon and contribute to the dynamic of radicalsocial movements.No doubt there are emphases, omissions andpoints of contestation that readers would wish toraise. The key point, however, is that together wedevelop a framework for democratic schoolingthat is theoretically robust, practically achievable,and humanly inspiring. Without a framework ofthis kind we will be in danger of slipping backinto the insidious, sometimes unwitting, betrayalsof quietism, condescending statism or neo-liberalincorporation that have at different times robbedthe comprehensive school movement of its emancipatorypotential. Writing 15 years ago WilfredCarr and Anthony Hartnett observed that:‘despite its portrayal as an institution of democraticeducation all the evidence suggests that thecomprehensive school has reinforced rather thanchallenged those non-democratic aspects of theEnglish education tradition –exclusiveness, separation,segregation – that have always frustrateddemocratic educational advance.’ 8‘Although many readers would quarrel with suchan interpretation, the challenge it poses needsto be taken as seriously as ever. So, too, doesthe even deeper challenge R.H. Tawney posedtowards the end of the 1945 Labour Government,when according to Hywel Williams, he insisted.’‘The failure to abolish public schools wouldundermine everything the Labour movement hadachieved in other areas. It was the one reform thatmattered – the profound one from which all otherchanges in the way the English treated each otherand looked at the world would flow.’ 9‘Although the contemporary political caseremains disgracefully unargued, the moral, civicand democratic case remains as strong as ever.’‘Some changes have to start now –else there is no beginning for us’If we believe in deep democracy we must putdemocratic schools – schools as democratic institutionsin which adults and young people liveand learn democracy together – at the centre ofEducation for the Good Society. While we maynot immediately be in a position to emulatepioneers like Alex Bloom there is much we cantake from current advances in student voice andincreasingly inclusive approaches to leadershipin schools. If harnessed to the patterns of partnershipand democratic frameworks for whichI have been arguing, they have the potentialto contribute to a new phase of democratic38 | www.compassonline.org.uk