Too Much Pupil Power?

BBC News has been running a story, all day, about discussions, at the NASUWT Conference, complaining that school students now have too much power in schools. Pupils Interviewing Teachers For Jobs.

It’s a long time since I was a lecturer, in the early 1980’s, and I’m sure things have probably got worse since then. Teachers face many problems dealing with disruptive students, aggressive parents, and all in the context of being under pressure. But, too much organised pupil power is not one of those problems. Some of the anecdotal evidence, given by teachers, in the news reports, had all the flavour of the kind of, “its political correctness gone mad”, stories that the tabloid press run. Taking two of those anecdotes, though, even if they were actually the full story, shows the problem. In one anecdote we are told the student representative on a selection panel asked the teacher to sing their favourite song, and when they refused did not get the job. Of course, we have no proof that this is the reason they did not get the job, but, if it is, so what? Surely, part of what the student was testing here was the extent to which the teacher was prepared to abandon the traditional power relationship that exists in the classroom, and the extent to which the teacher was prepared to have a relaxed attitude. After all, students are asked to sing all kinds of songs, quite frequently, in school without questioning the request to do so. In the second, we were told that a teacher didn’t get the job because the student thought they looked like Humpty Dumpty. Now, assuming that this is an accurate depiction of events, socialists would obviously oppose any kind of prejudice displayed by any employers against employees, but is the answer to this to remove the right of students to have a say in who those employees are. After all, it is they the students who are the consumers of the service here, it is their families that pay the wages of those they employ to provide this service, and in no other sphere of life do the employees get to dictate to those who pay the wages. And the response that, as socialists, we want to bring that situation about, is false, because, as a Marxist, that is not what I seek to bring about, but “Abolition of the Wages System”; I want to abolish the distinction between those paying the wages, and those receiving them, as a precondition for abolishing wages, the purchase of Labour Power as a commodity, altogether.

In fact, far from students having too much power, the reality is that the school is one of the few places in society where the kind of paternalistic, feudal social relations continue to exist. As I wrote, in a blog, some time ago, taken from an essay, I wrote as a trainee teacher, Marxism, Education & The State, there needs to be a thorough democratisation of the school that challenges these remaining paternal relations, and building effective school student unions, and other democratic structures is an essential part of bringing that about. The school is an integral part of the means, by which the Capitalist State socialises workers, and makes them fit for employment by Capital. As Marx put it in his Critique of the Gotha Programme objecting to the involvement of the State in educational provision,

"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."

Rather than arguing in favour of the Capitalist State engaging in that role of Educator of the People, it is the task of Marxists, as in other spheres of life to argue for that role to be undertaken by the self-activity, and independent action of the working class itself. With far fewer financial, physical and intellectual resources than workers have today, the working class and its organisations have undertaken that role in the past as I described in my blog on The Plebs League. It was done in thousands of Workers Reading groups, Educational Groups and so on set up spontaneously by workers, or under the guidance of socialists and Trade Unionists. It is achieved at a high level by the Co-operative University established from the beginning by the workers of the Mondragon Co-op in Spain.

Rather than driving a wedge between organised educational workers, in the classroom, and organised students, the teaching unions need to be forming links with those organised students in schools. That is the way to discuss, and resolve any problems that arise from conflicting interests. It may be the case that school students make silly mistakes in how they decide what teachers they would like to see employed, but democracy especially workers, direct democracy, involves the right to make such mistakes; it is the only way as human beings that we learn, so as not to make those mistakes again. Indeed, the best way to deal with the problems of disruptive students in schools is by these methods, just as the best means of dealing with crime and anti-social behaviour on working class estates is through ownership and control of those estates by the workers who live there themselves, rather than by the heavy-handed, class based solutions of the capitalist State, and its police force. The only people who have an incentive, and the means to put into practice the mantra, “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”, are the workers themselves in those communities affected by it. And there have already been many instances of where this has been shown to be the case.

The same is true in the school. The best way of dealing with disruption is via the organised activity of school students, and their parents themselves. The best way of dealing with the social conditions that lead to such behaviour is by the organised activity of working class communities themselves. That can’t happen under the restricted concept of Co-ops put forward by the Tories for the provision of services, limited within budgets set by the Capitalist State, but only if workers have real control over their communities, including the setting of budgets, and raising of the necessary finance to meet their needs as and when they arise.
See also:Communities In Control.