The Death of Educational Theory: School Management

Is it not enough that we choose to lock our children up in institutions for twelve years without exposing them to what is becoming a grave system of Machiavellian management structures? These days people do MBAs in education, so-called “super-heads” are earning in excess of £100k a year, and schools are being transformed into multi-level corporate structures. The usual criticisms surround corruption, for example the ongoing case at Copland Community School in Wembley. But perhaps there is something of greater importance going on here. Through systems by which schools are judged in league tables, in exam results, what is ultimately being relegated is the important and complex relationship between student and teacher. Once a reciprocal or dialogic relationship, we now treat children as if they are blank carcasses upon which mechanical processes are acted so as to make them people.

Teach First, the training programme for getting “top graduates” into teaching in the state sector has a huge emphasis on fast-streaming these new recruits into management positions in schools. What looks at first site to be a scheme allowing graduates to avoid the city if they want a well-paying job is in fact a means by which our schools are being infiltrated with corporate whoredom. And yet processes such as these are only possible when a totally under-theorised notion of education is allowed to subsist. One in which the results of education are measurable in purely positive terms, and in which the thinking of a student is inherently quantifiable.

It is of course possible that the original sin was something that happened earlier, at the origin of the system of schools in which students were made to engage with institutions rather than people, or rather that they were forced to engage with knowledge through structure under the design and control of others. But identifying this original sin is not enough, as there is no doubt that the corporatisation of education has come on leaps and bounds in the last two decades. Even within older school systems there remained the primacy of the relationship between student and teacher. That is, that the school was the medium whereby the teacher could engage in education. It seems that now there has been a deeply cynical reversal in which the teacher becomes the medium for the school. Maybe this is an over-generalisation, but in light of the other changes in structures in education examined in this series of articles one cannot help but feel a level of interconnectedness in these projects.

It should be of great concern to us now that headteachers engage themselves not in providing a Weltanschauung or an ethos for a school, but rather concerning themselves with positive PR, expediency, exam-grades, league-tables, and how to present themselves in the best light for the next OFSTED inspection. And more to the point we should not kid ourselves that just because these structures are aimed at the running or management of a school rather than directly at the children that they are inconsequential to what education is, or what education is about. If we are to take seriously the notion that classroom teaching is becoming a mediation of this very corporate structure then it is also serving as a great limit on the scope of children’s minds whilst at school. If we consider this to be an aid to our children “performing better” then at best they can be performing better within ever more heavily circumscribed boundaries.