ABSTRACT
I have been asked to comment briefly on the chapters written for this collection by way of being something of an offshore outsider. As an historian of universities, who has spent his career in departments of history or history of science (only occasionally teaching courses in graduate schools of education), I have limited first-hand knowledge of the state and condition of teacher training, or, for that matter, primary and secondary schooling. But insofar as the contributions deal with inter-institutional connections affecting a nation’s provision for education, broadly and narrowly conceived, I can at least reflect on the relationships. I can identify the sources of tensions and salient political and social changes in the history of schools, schooling and teacher education on both sides of the Atlantic. Historians differ in their approaches to complex issues. Mine is rather to illustrate structural bottlenecks with some indication of causes. But indicating causes does not automatically suggest remedies. I cannot, however, deny that readers may find some furtive opinions lurking among the reflections. The editors describe a Britain where members of the academic profession who work on education and learning in the schools may have lost a capacity for perspective, for engaging with the ghosts of yesteryear. Some of this may be a tendency within professions to focus on careers, forgetting the function of professions to further the common good. Some may be a loss of internal intellectual cohesion, partly, maybe largely, the consequence of government policies stressing educational goals that are narrowly utilitarian. This, of course, is an old quarrel in the history of education. It still produces much heat on my side of the Atlantic regarding the correct dimensions of a liberal education in schools and universities. But whether or not government is wholly to blame, some of the disciplines, it is suggested, have succumbed to the lure of markets and pots of gold. There is a loss of public visibility, as it were. The argument of the editors continues to say that disciplines forming education are no longer mediating influences in public policy debates. They have lost whatever capacity they once possessed for elevating discussions and providing heft and weight to
decision-making. In the hurly-burly of today’s educational ferment, clearheaded, dispassionate analysis is both lacking and compromised. The contrast is again with the ghosts of the past. The role of the disciplines today is far less assured in Britain than in the decades following World War II. Schools of education had proliferated, and intending teachers were solidly grounded in a core of ‘foundation’ disciplines such as those represented in this volume. The editors attribute the changes to neo-liberal funding policies begun by Thatcher governments but continued under New Labour.1 These favor practitioner-led education, ‘efficiency gains’, ‘rates of return’ and market responses – in a word, a culture of ‘accountability’, which also means a culture of mistrust in established institutions shared by civil servants and the public. I will broadly comment on those dimensions that lie closest to my own understanding of educational issues, lower and higher, on both sides of the Atlantic.
