ABSTRACT
Some time around the early 80s in the UK, I remember hearing Richard Hoggart participating in a BBC Radio 4 discussion programme dealing with educational reform. Almost as an afterthought it seemed Richard referred to ‘the books at the very end of the shelf which don’t get read too much’ and which raised the troubling possibility that state education might not always be in the complete best interests of the working class. I remember thinking that this revealed more about Richard’s relation to and view of the Centre (peripheral) and the way he organised his bookshelf (left, extreme left) than about anything else but I recollected his words on re-reading the papers which follow. Now the books will have tumbled right off the end of his shelf into the trashcan along with the hopes they carried and expressed of linking educational policy and practice to critical debate and popular elements outside the educational establishment and the state. Twenty five years and more ago at the Centre we were like Arthur Dent from the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, enjoying a drink we could not imagine would be our last in our local pub that we took, astonishingly, to be somehow organically connected to a more or less stable wider community. Then the Tory demolition squad arrived to change the educational world as we knew it. Now in the refabricated world of the ‘commodisation of everything’ mysteriously replacing the one we thought we knew, our practical politics have veered around one hundred and eighty degrees. Where before we were targeting social democracy and its trust in the state to deliver education to the working class, we now vociferously defend the very same even more tattered, contradictory, undermined (not least by us) state forms against rampant privatisation and, horrifyingly, the ‘slow reach for control’, not least through New Labour, of schooling by capitalist and traditionalist interests bent on the re-introduction of selection, high academic standards for the elite and vocationalism with progressive trappings for the masses. Any hope or even rhetoric of education as a means for the collective emancipation of the popular classes has simply evaporated1 and we are forced to fight to hold absolutely minimalist positions in what would have been seen before as an unrelieved flat plain of unremitting defeat. Contemporary research writings seem to have come from a different planet and have lost their interest in overarching questions, the big issues and any sense of optimism that agency from below always registers its presence, if not in direct mobilisation then in one way or another and through myriad cultural manifestations. For, driving everything, the basic sense of all our centre work on education was precisely to show and argue for this interest, force and presence from below. Only too clearly our centre work showed the history of how the ‘bottom up’ organised forms representing (in both senses), organising and meeting, organic feelings and interests from below were progressively displaced by state forms, especially in education. The Education Group depicted how the ‘invisible social services’ of the friendly societies, ragged schools and provident associations were run over by the state
juggernaut, waved through by approving social democrats often in official uniform, but they did not foresee how the same continuing juggernaut, now in neo-liberal livery, would also squash the very remaining organs,2 atrophied and ailing as they were, to which they were appealing for an educational renewal from below. With the extinguishing of their last remnants it seems that the very existence and possibility of feeling and interest from below (except as deficit or pathology to be remedied) has been destroyed, leaving the field open only for continuous educational reorganisation, mind-numbing technical initiatives for the never ending, though automatically self-limiting, ‘raising of standards’ and the subordination of education ever more fully to the perceived needs and interests of neo-liberalism and the elites it creates or sustains. All of this makes this introduction rather hard to write. If only, as it may be possible to argue in other sections of this book, these early works had laid foundations upon which others have built in more or less straight lines upwards! If only it were possible to indulge an historicism which sees in present full flowerings the genetic seeds of our early pioneering work.
