A New View of Society

Last week we were in Scotland, ending with New Lanark and Biggar. The latter was probably not home of my forebears, although my paternal grandparents came from Scotland, settling via Canada in Dublin where the Bigger family had a history. Probably grandmother Macmillan family was 'settled' in Canada to make way for sheep. Grandfather was a bookbinder, an artisan. Together they had thirteen children in Dublin, a large Protestant family.

A society which promoted wealth over poverty, fostered ignorance through child labour rather than education, and oppressed its already traumatised workforce, leads us to New Lanark and Robert Owen. The cotton mill there is now a World Heritage site, with exhibitions, preserved buildings, and one mill rebuilt into a hotel which was filled, when we stayed, with Freddie Mercury fans attending a tribute concert. A ghost train in an exhibition mill let Annie guide us round her times, the work she did, how her family lived - and how she was educated. Robert Owen was the first employer to open a nursery school in the mill, ensure that both children and adults had opportunities for education, introduced a health service, and ran a fairtrade shop for the benefit of workers. For him, healthy intelligent workers were worth investing in. If all other employers did likewise, society itself would change.

His treatise A New View of Society argued the point, but failed to win over his fellow employers. Rather it made him enemies. I quote merely his essay heading quotations:

Any general character, from the best to the worst, from the most ignorant to the most enlightened, may be given to any community, even to the world at large, by the application of proper means; these means are to a great extent at the command and under the control of those who have influence in the affairs of men.

It is not unreasonable to hope that hostility may cease, even when perfect agreement cannot be established. If we cannot reconcile all opinions, let us endeavour to unite all hearts.

Truth must ultimately prevail over error.

It is beyond all comparison better to prevent than to punish crime. A system of government therefore which shall prevent ignorance, and consequently crime, will be infinitely superior to one, which, by encouraging the first, creates the necessity for the last, and afterwards inflicts punishment on both.

This was a radical, new, rationalist view of society which sowed seeds for the modern world.

Do we today need a new view of society? Education has not created utopia. Nor has it empowered young people. Nor does it provide the skills and creativity that citizens and employees will need in twenty years time. Employers and entrepreneurs are more likely to be created by school failure than by success. The curriculum fails to excite, and refuses to allow focus on things that do excite. There is no flexibility, no broad measure of achievement other than mechanistic SATs and exams. There is no room for the joy of ambiguity, or wrestling with problems and issues. None of this is the fault of teachers; rather it is the myopia of policy makers of both ruling parties since 1988, supported by media idiocy.

If the answers to my questions will be challenging to find, we need now to begin asking the right questions of how education, the curriculum and assessment fits children and young people to become adults who have something worthwhile to contribute to their world, a world in which there will be no smooth sailing. I hope this is a world without prejudice, persecution, oppression and injustice - such is certainly worth fighting for.