Analysing Underachievement in Schools Book

Mostly this one will just be a couple of quotes I've selected from the text to perhaps use in an essay I'm writing - but that will probably never actually make it. This book starts and ends with a discussion of the difference between educating people as citizens and educating them as individuals. There are problems with both extremes, although, today we no longer seem to think of them as extremes on a continuum.

Essentially, the argument is that since the state is the main force responsible for providing education to the young and since the state is greatly interested in its own preservation, education will tend to be indoctrination. To the extent that education by the state is about developing citizens it will also tend to be about developing 'yes-men'. This is an interesting alternative to Dewey's view that education in a democracy is about developing citizens who can think for themselves.

The issue here is really Aristotelian, and his golden mean. Individuals are pains, citizens are morons - fortunately there is a grey area in the middle and my advice, for what it is worth, is aim for that.

There are lots of speculations at the end of this about how the Soviet Union is likely to progress and how this might present a challenge to capitalism in ways that capitalism ought to be challenged. These must be read with the fact this was written between the wars firmly at front of mind.

Otherwise, a lot of this is interesting, often insightful and some of it even amusing. It is written in a very plain style, which I always feel is a plus, but it is hardly 'systematic' and suffers from appearing to be 'the thoughts of Bertie'.

Some quotes and page numbers:


"Educators in every country except Russia tend to be constitutionally timid, and, either by their income or by their snobbery, to be adherents of the rich. On both grounds their teaching tends to over-emphases the importance of the law and the constitution, although these give the past a paralysing hold over the present." 13

"There are, however, certain respects in which the advocate of change is likely to give better education than the advocate of the status quo. Animal habit is sufficient in itself to make a man like the old ways, just as it makes a horse like to turn down a road which it usually turns down. None of the higher mental processes are required for conservatism. The advocate of change, on the contrary, must have a certain degree of imagination in order to be able to conceive of anything different from what exists. He must also have some power of judging the present from the standpoint of values, and, since he cannot well be unaware that the status quo has its advocates, he must realise that there are at least two views which are possible for a sane human being. Moreover, he is not obliged to close his sympathies against the victims of existing cruelties, or to invent elaborate reasons to prove that easily preventable sufferings ought not to be prevented. Both intelligence and sympathy, therefore, tend to be less repressed by an education hostile to the status quo then by one which is friendly to it." 13

"Persons reaching a certain level in examinations will be allowed to place after their names the letters L.T., meaning 'Licensed to Think'. Such persons shall thereafter never be disqualified from any post on the ground that they think their superiors fools." 15

"The causes of this failure are partly intellectual , partly psychological. To begin with the intellectual causes, which lie nearer the surface: the spirit of the public schools is one of contempt for intelligence. Masters are selected largely for their athletic qualifications; they must conform, at least outwardly, to a whole code of behaviour, religious, political, social, and moral, which is intolerable to most intelligent people; they must encourage the boys to be so constantly occupied that they will have no time for sexual sin, and incidentally no time to think; they must discourage whatever traces of mental independence may survive here and there among the cleverer boys; and in the end they must turn out a finished product so imbued with the worship of good form as to be incapable of learning anything important for the rest of life." 47-48

"Democratic education unadulterated has evils which are as great as those of aristocracy, if not greater. Democracy as a sentiment has two sides. When it says 'I am as good as you', it is wholesome; but when it says 'you are no better than I am', it becomes oppressive and an obstacle to the development of exceptional merit." 49

"I have dealt hitherto with incidental disadvantages derived from class-distinctions, but I have only touched upon the greatest disadvantage, which is ethical. Wherever unjust inequities exist, a man who profits by them tends to protect himself from a sense of guilt by theories suggesting that he is some way better than those who are less fortunate." 92

"The first thing the average educator sets to work to kill in the young is imagination. Imagination is lawless, undisciplined, individual, and neither correct nor incorrect; in all these respects it is inconvenient to the teacher." 95

"For the sake of examinations, young people have to learn by heart all kinds of things, such as dates, which it is far more sensible to look up in books of reference. The proper sort of instruction teaches the use of books, not useless feats of memory designed to make books unnecessary." 103

"The fatigue of intellectual work is largely due to the effort of forcing oneself to give attention to what is boring, and therefore any method that removes the boredom also removes most of the fatigue." 103