Adrian Buck’s Reviews > Education for Tomorrow > Status Update

"All young people should have access to playing fields, common rooms and gymnasia..." - and auditoria, and the stage, and studios and workshops, and professionally equipped kitchens, and to debates and discussion.

"We must develop a way of giving continuously new chances and second chances to all children and young people..." - long life expectancy and rapid technological change imply that education is not just a feature of childhood and youth, but should continue through the whole of life.

He is so wide of the mark that it's difficult to comment. Teachers have not professionalised and taken control of education, as doctors did in the NHS. In fact, in both Education and Health a new class replaced the bureaucrats to manage the internal markets created by consecutive Conservative governments.

'In an age of complex technology the power of the expert is great. A profession gives responsibility to that power, and the gowth of other professions emphasizes the situation of mutual dependence in which we all live." - Surprisingly, Scruton makes a similar argument in 'The Meaning of Conservatism'. Populism has been a rebellion against professionalised expertise: is it now coming to an end in America's courtrooms?

"There is a real problem in teaching people about children and schools when their instincts are to teach as they were themselves taught" - also most teachers were themselves successful at school. This makes it difficult to understand those who are not.

"Thus a change in a social status of teaching is dependent upon, and implies, a change in the social status of women." - I've always looked at it the other way round, that teaching offers mother-friendly hours and so many women choose to teach. Chicken and egg?

"We are in direct competition with institutions overseas, especially in the United States" - this seems surprisingly clearsighted in 1970.

"There is room for experiment in more and less streaming by ability and attainment..." - in Hungary, at least, we need to get away from the tyranny of the form which bundles groups of 30-40 into packages of subjects taught at the same level. The students need a more individuated relationship with the school.

"In Sweden...there has been for the last ten years a movement towards the comprehensive school which has been so successful that it now become universal" - and, since this was published, has it gone the way of the comprehensive school movement in the UK? The interesting thing is that independent schools are comprehensive in spirit, they are just massively better funded.

"The wisest course, it seems to many, is to leave the [Independent] schools alone" - most political perhaps, but if anything they are now more representative of a global elite than the British ruling class. Even so, the cult of stupid now governs the country again. They should at least pay tax on their foreign earnings.