Thanks to the democratic miracle of #Twitter I have ended up in an unlikely place, namely the website of Labour Teachers (Labour at the chalkface).

I was pointed in this direction by a Tweet picking up on my Commentator piece about teaching grammar.

And there I find a really good piece by one oldandrew on how Labour (and the rest of us) have ended up having the wrong sort of arguments about education:

Traditionalists and elitists hold what are often recognised as “right-wing” positions. Radicals and egalitarians are typically described as “left-wing” positions. However, traditionalism and elitism are not the same position at all, nor are radicalism and egalitarianism. A lot of reason for the poor quality of much education debate is due to attempts to conflate this into a single spectrum, where the two alternatives are the “right-right” position of combined elitism and traditionalism and the “left-left” position of egalitarianism and radicalism.

He develops this argument with a clever diagram, which is better seen than explained. He concludes by arguing (convincingly) that Labour has messed up its own approach:

… This is the worst possible position, because it is a middle class vision of what working class families should want, which ignores the concerns of middle class voters while nevertheless patronising working class voters. The party needs to recognise that parents from all backgrounds have aspirations for their children, and that this requires a whole-hearted advocacy of academic standards for all. It is simply not good enough to go into elections promising great opportunities for “other people’s children”.

Labour needs a vision of aspiration in education that will mean something to all voters and the most important test of this will be a willingness for Labour politicians to argue that the things they want for

Not that I am any expert on education policies on the grand scale, but that analysis seems to make sense.

What is baffling in the whole business is that after running state-supported education for well over 100 years we still don’t agree on what works. If we end up in a situation where poor children in rural Poland can be taught to a high level the complexities of Polish grammar (and there are plenty of them), what are we to make of system in which a fairly posh Oxford graduate in English(!) joins the FCO and serves up the word sebatical in a draft report? That person has gone through the whole system but has missed something pretty damn big about the English language.

This attitude now allows tens of thousands of young people to leave school here with barely functional literacy – a horrible social problem for all of us, a horrible betrayal of them and a horrible indictment of all that lumbering investment in state education.

Some teaching methods just work better than others. Many of them may even be ‘traditional’. Until the smirking progressives in our midst stop denying reality just because ‘traditional’ people support it, the disaster will only grow.

By the way, when I lambasted the nonsense of Michael Rosen’s views on grammar I had not realised that this man has hard-core communist form. Well done oldandrew for refreshing honesty on this score too:

It is often simply assumed that the opinions of a politician are worthless because they are “political” and the opinions of an educationalist, education journalist or education commentator are not. Michael Gove will always be identified as a Tory; David Blunkett as New Labour.

But when a non-politician talks about education, whether they are an academic, journalist or activist, their politics are considered incidental to their views. This is even the case for those education commentators who have a history of involvement in politics and extremist politics.

I for one would love it if next time Michael Rosen is on the radio arguing against teaching children to read he was described as “an associate of the SWP” or “a former candidate for Respect” rather than as “a children’s author”.

Me too. What an education that would be.