ABSTRACT
Thinking about children reading involves thinking about what human beings always have been, what (most importantly) they are and what they might become. This, not understood by politicians, inspectors and institutions like OFSTED (with their larger concerns), is true of all (I choose these two words carefully) training and education. Are children destined to become hired labourers in a society that values individual freedom very little (training)? Or are they, on the other hand, to become participants in a democracy (education)? Deciding whether we should train or educate children is a political decision. Most of us make decisions about schools without ever verbalising the politics of them, or the politics of the system in which they exist. Indeed, many of us are offended at the very notion that we are political beings at all, or dwellers in a political context. Three days after the 1997 general election a headteacher told me, in answer to my question about the boundaries of the constituency in which her school stood, ‘I don’t get involved with the politics.’ But this unawareness of-and, indeed, hostility to-the politics of educational decisions serves only to make the politics all the stronger because, by disguising the political hegemony as common sense, we make it invisible.
