Debating Education

I’ve been meaning to post this for a day or two - some great stuff last week about education on Newsnight. This clip has Francis Gilbert, Fiona Miller aka Mrs Alistair Campbell (not a sexist observation, just a bit of interesting background) and David ‘Two Brains’ Willett.

Very interesting comments - and a bit of debate. Francis Gilbert interesting seems rather ‘old school Tory’ in his denunciation of ‘standards’ (of behaviour) and talk of the ‘yob nation’ - although in some respects I think he has some valid points. Willetts - of course - sees everything through the prism of ‘choice’. Fiona Miller - well, I wasn’t really quite sure what to make of her to be honest.

For teachers - and students - if you try to map these views onto sociological perspectives, well it might be a bit tricky. I don’t think there are any Marxists here - at all! But several of the speakers echo points which could easily come from functionalism. It seems we all have a narrow, instrumentalist view of education in Britain at the moment. And for anyone on the left, there’s the difficulty that highlighting the ‘cultural’ side of education, simply puts them into the old aristocratic - ‘keep it from the masses’ view of education.

Maybe that’s a sign that we need a new generation of sociologists to widen the terms of the debate?