Education, Justice and Democracy: The Struggle over Ignorance and Opportunity

Abstract

This chapter begins with a very brief survey of current education policy in England, it describes a system of schooling riven with divisions, inequalities, alienation, failure, despondency and bias – 6 evils (See EHRC (2010) How Fair is Britain? London: Equality and Human Rights Commission; OECD (2011) Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising, Paris: OECD; and IFS (2013) Living Standards, Poverty and Equality in the UK: 2013, York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation.). This sets the scene for the second part of the chapter which outlines a new beginning for education – a kind of back to basics – that involves a fundamental shift from a system of education driven by economic necessities to one which gives priority to social and political necessities – a democratic education system, a system of hope and happiness and social renewal. A set of moves and possibilities are presented which are premised not on fixed proposals but on the need for local democratic debate, deliberation and decision-making. The vision here is of schools as centres of civic responsibility and as educative institutions. Schools that will both foster and respond to the participation of parents and students with teachers and other local stakeholders in the making of decisions about what education is for, what it means to be educated and what, and how, students should learn. Education would be reconceived in relation to other aspects of social policy and to social problems. What is outlined is somewhere different from where to start.

This chapter is based on a paper written for the think tank CLASS to mark the 70th anniversary of the Beveridge Report (http://classonline.org.uk/pubs/item/education-justice-and-democracy), or to give it its full title The Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee e on Social Insurance and Allied Services. The Committee was chaired by William Beveridge, an economist, who identified five “Giant Evils” in society: squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease, and went on to propose widespread reform to the system of social welfare to address these. Highly popular with the public, the report formed the basis for the post-war reforms known as the Welfare State.