Marxism, Education and the State

The following is an essay I wrote in 1980 when I was studying for my Post Graduate Certificate in Education. I doubt today that the contents of such an essay would be acceptable. I am not reproducing the essay here for the purpose of vanity publishing, but because, still, today, many of the ideas contained in it are valid, and some of the facts might be unknown to younger Marxists of the current generation. There is another reason. My views on what constitutes Marxism at that time were coloured by the fact of having been a member of a Trotskyist organisation for 6 years. Those views I now believe suffered from the debilitating infection of statism, which corrupted the body of Marxism after Marx’s death and result from the role of Lasalleanism in, first the Second International, and, in its Leninist successors. I seek to purge that from the ideas contained here.

Question: Since education is concerned with changing lives of individuals it must have an ideological purpose. Discuss.

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“The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.”

(Marx, “The Communist Manifesto”, Progress Publisher edition p.70)

It is within the context of this statement, by Marx, that I intend to answer this question. I shall deal specifically with the relation, between Education and the State within British society, pointing out the way in which the education system acts as a conveyor belt for bourgeois ideas, and as a socialising agent (changing the lives of individuals as the question puts it). Within this, I shall be looking at the way in which the education system constrains the ability of radical teachers to seriously question or undermine the dominant ideas. In conclusion, I shall attempt to outline the ways in which these constraints can be broken, and the role education will play under socialism as a means of overcoming past prejudices, and of developing a society based on co-operation rather than competition.

“The Communists have not invented intervention in education, they do but seek to change the content of that intervention and to rescue it from the ruling class.”

(ibid. p72.)

To the outsider, there appears great scope for the individual teacher, within the classroom. In fact, there are a whole range of constraints placed upon the teacher which limit their freedom of action considerably. In some societies, where there is a lack of social stability, these constraints tend to be overt, reflecting the need for high-powered socialisation. In the advanced capitalist countries, though, these constraints are more subtle. The State, according to bourgeois mythology, is neutral between classes. This idea is reinforced, in advanced capitalist countries, by the existence of representative bourgeois democracy. Any overt interference, by the State, to determine the type of ideology, conveyed through the education system, would be wholly counterproductive, because it would shatter the façade of a neutral state.

In “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”, Engels illustrates the development of human society from primitive communism to capitalism. He shows how the State developed along with the change from communal to private property as a means of protecting the interests of the property owners. Engels defined the State as being “bodies of armed men”. Nowadays, the State is more than just bodies of armed men. It has, with the development of representative bourgeois democracy, created an ideological arm. It is this ideological arm to which the education system belongs.

One of the first constraints that is placed on teachers, and one that is growing in importance as education cuts bite deeper is a financial and resources constraint. “In and Against the State” (London-Edinburgh Weekend Return Group) quoted one teacher they interviewed as saying,

“They give you the absolute minimum and expect you to obtain the maximum.”

She related how teaching comprised an endless juggling of priorities just to provide kids with the basic tools they require for everyday life.

But, there is an even more blatant use of financial resources to direct education. Grants are cut to areas of Higher Education such as Social Sciences, and redirected towards those areas where Capital is short of skilled labour. Money is cut from the state sector in order to prop up the private sector, and perpetuate the elitism of the education system.

Public expenditure cuts have a more long term effect also. It is the inner city areas, which have suffered most as a result both of overall cuts in Public Spending and the shift of resources from the cities to the Shire Counties as a result of the introduction of the Block Grant. General social deprivation and higher pupil-teacher ratios already meant that achievement was held back in the Inner Cities. These further cutbacks will inevitably result in even lower levels of achievement. The result will be an outcry over poor results, and a call from those responsible for more emphasis on the 3R’s so that these kids can grow up as good obedient proletarians who do not question their masters.

The further result will be that a bigger percentage of the kids, going into Higher Education, will come from middle class homes, and will tend to take their middle class ideas and values with them, which they will, consciously or unconsciously, transmit when they take up their places as captains of industry, members of the higher Civil Service, and other state positions, and in the education system.

Most analyses show that social and political affiliation cannot be attributed to any one factor, but that as the number of reinforcing factors increases the correlation becomes stronger. As the number of people entering Higher Education continues to be dominated by those who are white, male and middle class so the number of reinforcing factors amongst the products of Higher Education will be high. Some of these people will be the ones who produce the new ideas, which will be incorporated into the State’s ideological armoury to be in turn handed down, like tablets of stone, through the education system. This is not to say that all teachers are white, male and middle class, obviously they are not. It is to say though that the higher echelons of the education system, its values, and ethos, will tend to be white, male and middle class, whiles the number of teachers who are not, and who are sufficiently class conscious to seriously challenge the system will tend to be small.
There is another aspect to the role of ideology in the education system, that of the ideological framework of exams, and the methodology within which teaching takes place. The role of exams in the education system is pernicious. It leads to a situation in which non-examined subjects tend to be low status, and to education being focussed on obtaining a piece of paper at all costs. This leads to specialisation, and the prevention of the development of wider horizons within students. Exams themselves reflect the dominant ideology based upon dog eat dog competition, and a mindless regurgitation of ideas whether they be other people’s or one’s own, as though there were one set of correct ideas, or that the ideas that one had yesterday are just as relevant today.

Such mindless memory tests are fully in keeping with the empiricist tradition of British education. Even supposedly progressive teaching methods such as discovery learning fall into the same trap, by a) ensuring that at the end of the day the information that the teacher wants to convey is what the student discovers, and b) assuming that the sources of information etc. will not reflect the dominant ideas of society.

One of the teachers quoted in “In and Against the State” said that in a system dominated by exams what one should really be teaching the kids is why they are failing. Yet the kids themselves have taken on board the values of a competitive system geared to the needs of industry. She told how she showed a film to a group of ‘O’ level students, which demonstrated that accents and dialects were not inferior to Standard English. The kids hated to hear what they were aspiring to achieve analysed in this manner.

The school itself reflects the hierarchical nature of the society of which it is a part. Another teacher quoted in “In and Against the State”, said that the delicate trust built up between teacher and students can be shattered as a result of a command from above. He related how after graffiti had been written on school walls all teachers had been instructed to search all students in their tutor groups for felt tip pens. Another teacher related the existence of cross-cutting cleavages resulting from a House and Year system, while another told how when she was interviewed the headmaster asked if she was living with the Father of her child!!!!

Since the opening of the so called “Great Debate” there has arisen a “new settlement” involving greater centralisation of power and control over the curriculum. The Great Debate arose as a result of a speech by Callaghan in 1976 decrying the lack of suitably trained school leavers for the needs of industry. The debate came to be one between the ‘progressives’ who were defending professional autonomy, and the ‘reactionaries’ who were arguing for more traditional teaching methods. As one teacher in, “In and Against the State”, points out, the threat from parents cannot be seen as the same as that from the State. But, there are contradictions involved in encouraging greater participation in education by the parents. As one teacher said, they tend to focus on exams and outmoded ideas that teachers had discarded. He said that black parents especially asked, “What can you do to stop our children under achieving like it says in the newspapers,” without questioning how achievement is measured. One has to distinguish between what is defence of autonomy in the interests of the working class, and what in the interest of profession, he said.

The style of teaching is also constrained. One teacher said that the context in which teaching takes place is an authoritarian one in which the teacher sets the students tasks which they must fulfil. If you do not then according to any Headmaster or Inspector you are simply not doing your job. Moreover, in the period of readjustment chaos reigns and the teacher is unable to convey the things they want to convey.

Just in case there are still any holes in the State’s ideological armoury there is also a back-up. Unknown to the last Labour Government the Foreign and Commonwealth Committee provided a grant of £500 for NATO to carry out an education programme. The programme was created by a NATO official who was also the founder of the European Atlantic Movement. He describes the intention of the programme in the July 1980 NATO Review. It was he said to counteract the effect of propaganda on students from supporters of authoritarian regimes. The programme who’s focus was, ‘the defence of Western democracies’ was to be carried out by introducing “real politics (with the necessary emphasis on defence)” into the classroom. In a written reply to Frank Allaun MP, Douglas Hurd confirmed that 6 institutions were in fact taking part in the programme.

If direct intervention this way does not work then there are other right-wing bodies ready to step in. In 1977 the Institute for the Study of Conflict produced a paper entitled, “The Attack on Higher Education”, which received a lot of publicity from the media. The ISC is closely related to the right-wing NAFF (National Association for Freedom) and other employers organisations. Not surprisingly, Rhodes Boyson MP is a member of ISC and NAFF, but the magazine ‘State Research’ prints a list of those academics involved in the production of “The Attack on Higher Education”, a list which takes up half a page. Clearly, the tentacles of these right-wing bodies reaches into the highest levels of the state, and educational establishment.

If this type of intervention is not enough then the overt intervention of the State can be used. In 1975, seven teachers from William Tyndale school in London went on strike. The dispute was a complex one going back to an official NUT pay dispute over London Allowances in 1974. The seven teachers took part in that dispute. One right-wing member of staff, Dolly Walker, accused the seven of being “too political” and began to stir things up amongst some of the parents and the school managers. A meeting was called in which the teachers were to explain to parents the reasons for the dispute, but quickly degenerated into charges of political indoctrination. The charges eventually led to the dispute a year later. At first, the ILEA intended to use a Schools Inspection which could have been used to gather information which could be used against the teachers, without investigating the role of the school managers who had been opposing the teachers. This led to the teachers’ strike.

As a result of the attendant publicity the ILEA eventually agreed to a wider inquiry, and the teachers went back. That the authority was more concerned with an ideological battle than the interests of the students is clear from the fact that after the chaos of using Inspectors to replace the teachers, teachers who were normally used to travel from school to school for special teaching were brought in. At the same time the number of Inspectors for Primary Schools was doubled, and the resources made available by getting rid of Careers Advisors at a time when kids leaving school were finding it difficult to get any job.

When the inquiry reported the seven were sacked. It was clear that the school had been used as a test case against progressive education as a whole from the start. Dolly Walker had received letters from Rhodes Boyson, Shadow Education Secretary, and author of the Black Papers advocating a return to authoritarian teaching methods. As Terry Ellis, Headmaster, said at the time, it was nothing to do with the particular teaching methods of the school as many others used the same methods, it was he said politically motivated. Indeed, as the Daily Mail probably put its finger on it when it wrote at the time that the teaching methods at Tyndale would undermine the status quo of capitalist society. Yet, Terry Ellis pointed out that such statements are based on a false premise that you can take nine year old kids and turn them into Red Guards for the Revolution by acting upon them for a very small part of their lives.

If the State comes down heavily on Left-wing teachers it is not so keen to do so with right-wing and extreme right-wing teachers. Andrew Bron, the new Chairman of the National Front is a lecturer in Government and Politics at Harrogate College of Further Education. An article in “The Times” described him as young, articulate and a fresh change from the thuggishness of past leaders of Britain’s Nazi parties. Quite a remarkable statement when compared with statements from letters sent by Brons to Colin Jordan’s wife (Colin Jordan was the Fuehrer of the National Socialist Movement) printed in “Searchlight” magazine. In these letters, Brons states that his only qualms about bombing synagogues is the effect it might have on Public Opinion.

The State is also prepared to intervene in vetting job applicants. In Lothian, applicants for posts in Education and Social Work are vetted by the Lothian and Borders Police. While the police provide details on applicants for social work, they merely supply a recommendation of suitable or not suitable for Education. Police also went to two schools in Eastbourne and Boxhill to ask questions about the political affiliations and activities of teachers. In neither case was it suggested that any crime had been committed.

What then can radical teachers do to undermine the dominant ideology. If Tyndale’s shows the problems for a school then “socialism in one classroom” can be seen to be even more utopian. Often teachers tend to cut themselves off. If the State ideology is to be challenged, it must be done by progressive teachers taking up their ideas far more widely in the rest of the Labour Movement. In this way too problems arising from the participation of parents can be lessened.

The role of teachers’ Trade Unions is important here, and radical teachers must campaign to make their unions more democratic with leaders prepared to fight not only for better pupil teacher ratios and capitation allowances, but also to take the ideas of radical teachers into the labour Movement. Teachers must also address themselves through the unions to the question of the Labour Party. Without a Labour party committed to reforming Education and the democratic mechanism to ensure that such policies are carried out, even limited reforms will be impossible to achieve.

The demands that teachers should strive for now are the Transitional Demands which not only undermine the present system, but which presage the type of system we will have under socialism. Thus it is important that teachers encourage the setting up of school students unions able to demand equality with teachers, and a greater say in the way schools are run.

But, whatever reforms we may achieve they will always be limited so long as they remain within the confines of the capitalist system, and will always be in danger of reversal with the next economic crisis or shift in the balance of class forces. Only when capitalism has been replaced can a start be made on replacing its constricting ideology, and building a society in which in Education as elsewhere the condition for the development of the individual is the condition for the development of all.

Our present society treats Education as a producer of Labour power, the resources for which depend on what is left over after the needs of industry and Defence etc. have been met. Only when we create a society in which Education is seen as an end in itself can the constraints of such an approach be overcome. The ideas of such a society will themselves then become transmitted through education; ideas of co-operation rather than competition, of innovation and creativity rather than plagiarism and rote.

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Much of what I wrote here in 1980 I would not change significantly. But, at that time I was influence by the Statism of Leninism/Trotskyism. A good example of the consequences of that are given in this quote by Max Shachtman. In Solidarity 3/80, the AWL carried an article by Shachtman, “Stalinism and the ‘original sin’ myth”, which is an apologia for Leninism. I wrote a blog replying to the article, at the time, however, the Stalinist censors at the AWL, who fear their new members and contacts coming into any kind of serious critique of the beloved Shachtman, have, like many more of my blogs, deleted it. I will be reproducing my response to Shachtman here shortly. Shachtman says,

“To this should be added: neither would there be any need for a distinct, separate political movement of socialism – a socialist party – except, perhaps to fulfil the not very useful function of passive reflector of the welter of ideological and political confusion that, to one extent or another, will always exist in the working class, at least so long as it is a class deprived of social power and therewith of the means of wiping out its own inferior position under capitalism by force – but only in the last analysis, only at times of crisis. As a rule, be it under democratic or even under fascist capitalism, the ruling class maintains or seeks to maintain itself by ideological means.

“The whole of capitalism’s ‘headfixing industry’, as one Marxist wittily called it, is directed toward keeping the working class in ignorance or confusion about its social position, or rather about the purely capitalist reasons for its position, toward concealing from the working class the emancipating historical mission it has and the road it must travel to perform it.” ( Solidarity 3/80 p.17.)

But this is “Economism” in reverse, and leads to a lot of pseudo-Marxism that has left a lot of Marxists looking ridiculous as they contort to try make their theory fit reality. Shachtman, like Lenin, seems to rule out the possibility that poor gullible workers might be capable of rejecting the “welter of ideological and political confusion” if they are actually educated by the Communists on a daily basis in their struggles and in their Party, instead of the Communists giving it up as a bad job and concentrating on a few individuals (who by the same definition tend to be bourgeois or from a bourgeois milieu such as students). It is not Lenin’s organisational concept per se which leads to Stalinism, but this rejection of Marx’s belief in the working class as the agent of revolution once combined with socialist consciousness, disdain of that prospect prior to the revolution, and the substitution, therefore, of the Party for the class.

Look at the contortions of modern day Marxists in relation to the ideological arm of the State in relation to this comment by Shachtman,

“The whole of capitalism’s…perform it.” (ibid P17.)

If that were true, then, one of the most progressive demands Marxists could raise, would be “end education for our children”. There seems no concept of dialectics here at all, any more than there is in terms of the working class achieving class consciousness as a process in general. All sorts of contortions are required to explain the role of socialist teachers within this bourgeois ideological monolith whose only function is to “confuse” the workers. There is no sense that even within this ideological arm the contradictions of capitalism are reproduced and become manifest, and it becomes itself an arena for class struggle within which the workers, far from being simply passive recipients of bourgeois ideology, can develop their own class consciousness. Shachtman here has the same elitist, and dismissive attitude to the working class as the Leninists.

There are, as I said in my essay, limits to that, but so too are there limits to what workers can achieve in terms of fighting for wage increases, or better conditions and so on. That is not a reason for Marxists to abstain from such struggles, to push within them up to those limits. It is rather in that process to carry out Marx’s injunction:

“We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.”

Letter to Ruge, See:Marx to Ruge, Kreuznach, September 1843

Workers ultimately have to realise that simply fighting over and over again for pay rises does not change their basic condition. As Marx points out in the Grundrisse, even if workers become affluent as a result of high living standards they remain poor, because they remain non-owners of Capital, and only Capital constitutes real wealth. Without ownership of Capital workers remain tied and subordinated to it. They can only change that condition if they become owners of Capital, if as Marx suggests they create their own Co-operative enterprises. But, similarly they have to realise those restrictions that the bourgeois state imposes upon them in other spheres of life such as Education. The Leninist, statist view is the same essentially as it is in relation to Economic struggle. It is engage in struggle, but point out its ultimate futility and need for the vanguard, that alone can recognise that, to carry through a political revolution, and thereby bring the mass of the class along with it after the event.

But, Marx’s position is clearly different in this as in the case of the Economic struggle. Marx’s position is not that basically everything is hopeless short of this political revolution, but that the social revolution continues behind Men’s backs, that the forces that tend towards the economic and social relations of the new society continue to develop and they take the form of the Co-operative, and the Joint Stock Company. But, recognising this is not something that happens automatically it is up to the Marxists to demonstrate that this is so that this is what the workers should develop as opposed to those continued skirmishes. On the back of that consciousness and social relations change. Certainly, it is no part of Marx to argue for the role of the capitalists state in that process. In the “Critique of the Gotha Programme”, he rails mercilessly against such an approach put forward by the Lassalleans. Yet it is that statist approach that dominated the Second, Third and Fourth Internationals, including those anti-Trotsky Trotskyists of the “Third Camp” who claim to have “independent working class action” as the centrepiece of their politics. Indeed, it is these latter who more than most have collapsed into a reliance on the bourgeois state, and even into overt support for that bourgeois state.

In the same way that Marx argued against involvement of the State in resolving economic issues for the working class so he adopts the same attitude to the involvement of the State in Education. He writes,

“"Elementary education by the state" is altogether objectionable. Defining by a general law the expenditures on the elementary schools, the qualifications of the teaching staff, the branches of instruction, etc., and, as is done in the United States, supervising the fulfillment of these legal specifications by state inspectors, is a very different thing from appointing the state as the educator of the people! Government and church should rather be equally excluded from any influence on the school. Particularly, indeed, in the Prusso-German Empire (and one should not take refuge in the rotten subterfuge that one is speaking of a "state of the future"; we have seen how matters stand in this respect) the state has need, on the contrary, of a very stern education by the people.

But the whole program, for all its democratic clang, is tainted through and through by the Lassallean sect's servile belief in the state, or, what is no better, by a democratic belief in miracles; or rather it is a compromise between these two kinds of belief in miracles, both equally remote from socialism."

Critique of the Gotha Programme

But, it is clear that if the State is the “owner” of this education then it most certainly WILL interfere. And Marx makes clear that he has no illusions in that, or in the “democratic clang” of the idea that Education funded by the State could be under “democratic control”. He writes, in relation to such democratic control of state financed co-operatives,

“Instead of arising from the revolutionary process of transformation of society, the "socialist organization of the total labor" "arises" from the "state aid" that the state gives to the producers' co-operative societies and which the state, not the workers, "calls into being". It is worthy of Lassalle's imagination that with state loans one can build a new society just as well as a new railway!

From the remnants of a sense of shame, "state aid" has been put -- under the democratic control of the "toiling people"…

Second, "democratic" means in German "Volksherrschaftlich" [by the rule of the people]. But what does "control by the rule of the people of the toiling people" mean? And particularly in the case of a toiling people which, through these demands that it puts to the state, expresses its full consciousness that it neither rules nor is ripe for ruling!”

The clear solution to this problem is that in order to overcome the restrictions which bourgeois society will naturally place on the working class, and on socialist teachers, in order to break free from the stultifying hand of the bourgeois State, in order that workers can shape the education of themselves and their children, workers must themselves organise this education in the same way that the bourgeoisie organises its education. Within the confines of bourgeois State education workers can never receive “equal education”. Marx says,

“"Equal elementary education"? What idea lies behind these words? Is it believed that in present-day society (and it is only with this one has to deal) education can be equal for all classes? Or is it demanded that the upper classes also shall be compulsorily reduced to the modicum of education — the elementary school — that alone is compatible with the economic conditions not only of the wage-workers but of the peasants as well?

"Universal compulsory school attendance. Free instruction." The former exists even in Germany, the second in Switzerland and in the United States in the case of elementary schools. If in some states of the latter country higher education institutions are also "free", that only means in fact defraying the cost of education of the upper classes from the general tax receipts.”

In short, capitalist society may concede “free” education – though in reality it is paid for out of the general tax receipts, which are merely another expression of surplus value extracted from workers – especially, if a more technological capitalism requires educated workers, but it will certainly NOT be an “equal” education, and the extent to which it is “free” will really go to defray some of the costs of the bourgeoisie in educating their own children.

It is necessary then for workers to develop their own “co-operative” education system in the same way that the bourgeoisie has its private education system. The constraints of capitalist society will still mean that the education workers receive will not be “equal” to that of the bourgeoisie – as Marx points out, “Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby” – but it will be education under the ownership and control of workers not the bourgeoisie or their state. That State will undoubtedly still wish to interfere – for example in the way it did at Tyndale’s – and to an extent such interference will still be required. As Marx pointed out there is no reason why the State should not set minimum standards, but this requires a political struggle also by the working class in determining what they should be. The ability of the State, and for now at least the support in that of parents, to frame the provision of Education solely in terms of academic and specifically exam achievements, will still impose constraints on such education, yet it is clear that such an approach exploits to the full the dialectical contradiction that education for the working class within bourgeois society represents. It does not confine socialists to effectively nothing more than a resignation to the Leninist idea of revolution or nothing, with little more than guerrilla actions, and the recruitment of the vanguard in the intervening period.

Moreover, the stronger the working class becomes the greater the resources it can devote to its own educational sector, the more such education will approach an “equality” with the bourgeoisie in a way it can never do under provision by the bourgeois State. Marx hints at the way such education should be structures in what he says about child labour.

“"Prohibition of child labor." Here it was absolutely essential to state the age limit.

A general prohibition of child labor is incompatible with the existence of large-scale industry and hence an empty, pious wish. Its realization -- if it were possible -- would be reactionary, since, with a strict regulation of the working time according to the different age groups and other safety measures for the protection of children, an early combination of productive labor with education is one of the most potent means for the transformation of present-day society.”

Marx is effectively repeating in part here his comment that ““Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby”. He would have had nothing in common with those petit-bourgeois moralists of today who seek to further pauperise the workers and their children of developing economies through a ban on the employment of child labour. Rather, Marx seeks to organise a working class struggle to put such employment in appropriate conditions, to locate it as an essential aspect of class struggle. Moreover, if workers develop Co-operative industry, then as Marx argues, what better way to incorporate the class lessons learned their with the general education of the child other than through a combination of education and work. Even where children are employed in private industry what better way of developing class consciousness can there be than that the experiences gained in the workplace of the private capitalist are discussed and analysed within the school in a structured manner. How better could Marx’s argument in his letter to Ruge be accomplished, “We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.”

We have the clear example of how such Education can develop in the form of the Workers Educational Association, and even of the development of the Trade Union Colleges such as Ruskin. But, waiting for already class conscious workers to find their way to such institutions is not enough. Marxists have to argue here and now for the basis of the new society to be developed within the old. That is true in relation to the development of the means of challenging the hegemony of bourgeois ideology as it is to challenging the hegemony of Capital, or the hegemony of the bourgeois State.