School teaches us that instruction produces learning. The existence of schools produces the demand for schooling. Once we have learned to need school, all our activities tend to take the shape of client relationships to other specialized institutions. Once the self-taught man or woman has been discredited, all nonprofessional activity is rendered suspect. In school we are taught that valuable learning is the result of attendance; that the value of learning increases with the amount of input; and, finally, that this value can be measured and documented by grades and certificates. In fact, learning is the human activity which least needs manipulation by others. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting.
Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, 1971
We started South Villas Comprehensive – later to be Freightliners Free School – in 1971 with eight pupils, seven from the same family, two teachers and the promise of $100. It was thought up on a Friday and opened for business in my two-roomed flat in North London the following Monday. It was an entirely pragmatic invention. An intervention. That Friday afternoon a woman knocked on my door. She introduced herself as the social worker of some local kids I had got to know who hung out in the streets and adventure playground nearby.
‘Allie B. says you’re training to be a teacher and that you’re interested in alternative education. The thing is that all the B. children are going to be split up and taken into care next week, for persistent truanting. Allie said you talked to her about free schools. If you started one for them I might be able to keep them out of local authority care and make a case for them to stay at home and together. But it needs to be up and running with a timetable and syllabus and something on paper by Monday, so I can show it to the case conference and get them to put the care order on hold.’
In 1971, the dog days of the Sixties, it didn’t seem impossible to start a school over a weekend. I was training to be a teacher and I had just had an article published (my first) in a radical magazine called Children’s Rights about a teaching practice I’d done. I phoned Roger, the editor, and asked if he had any ideas. Energy was the thing. I never had much, but Roger was full of it. By Saturday afternoon we had promises from local people to teach weekly or twice-weekly sessions. We produced a timetable, with lessons on architecture by a local architect who would also double up as a maths teacher; art and pottery were promised from a nearby artist who knew a potter who had a studio. Woodwork was taken care of by a carpenter who had a workshop a few streets away. French would be taught by a local woman at home with small children. A dropout physics graduate we knew would do science and I would take care of English. Roger, with a degree in politics and history, would teach history and current affairs and there was a swimming pool close by for PE. A friend in California offered us 100 dollars a month to keep us going with outings, equipment and lunches while we sorted out funding, and my flat was available, as was the virtually derelict basement of the family council house the kids lived in just off Camden Square. Getting the basement ready, and planning, shopping for and preparing lunch every day, were part of the curriculum (home economics), and so was attending meetings to discuss the running of the school (current events – citizenship, we’d call it now). The day started at 10.30, giving the virtually unparented, bedtime-less kids a chance to get up – after I had battled with the total-freedom fraction of the by-now sizeable Free School Committee for any start time at all. At least, I insisted, the kids would be able to practise getting up if any of them ever wanted to hold down a job. Autocrat, they murmured. How many of them were committing time to the free school, aside from coming to meetings, I asked. Fascist, they muttered, but almost all of them faded away. Their time was almost entirely devoted to political meetings of one sort or another. Roger had just discovered that the editorial board of Children’s Rights, which consisted of a Reichian analyst and several of his patients, was more interested in the encouragement of active childhood sexuality than rights as such. He resigned, went on the dole (that, again) and became the school’s first full-time teacher.
For some of the kids, it was a couple of years since they had been in school. Allie, the thirteen-year-old, had gone back once, but during registration the class teacher was so used to her not being there that she hadn’t bothered to call out her name, so Allie left before the first lesson and never went back. The two youngest children, aged seven and six, were just launching on their career of absenteeism, but the whole family, eleven in all, were in danger of being institutionalised. The police had a long-term plan for this criminal family, all of whom, even the youngest, regularly broke into the gentrified houses that had sprung up in the formerly working-class area and stole whatever electronic items appealed to them – while the little ones found chocolates, gorged themselves, and ground the surplus into the stripped and polished wooden floors. The two oldest brothers, aged sixteen and seventeen, were due in court the same week for attempted robbery of a post office, a plan that came to the attention of the law when they were caught with a sawn-off shotgun in a stolen van on their way to the job, because they were speeding. I thought at worst the free school might educate the younger kids to be more thoughtful criminals. We went to the local police station about getting the oldest boys bail. The sooner the whole family were locked up, the police told us, the better it would be for society (not so long afterwards, society would be declared non-existent, though this didn’t seem to improve relations between the radically impoverished and the wealthy).
Both Mr and Mrs B. were alcoholics, usually out of work, and completely baffled by life. There was an almost new fridge without a door rusting in the garden. Mrs B had got it from social services, but just afterwards she heard about a newspaper report of a child who had climbed into a fridge and suffocated, because the door had locked behind him and there was no way of opening it from the inside. Mrs B, in a moment of concerned parenthood, had taken the door off the fridge. When it turned out that the fridge no longer worked (because without a door it was no longer a fridge), she chucked it out into the garden. She didn’t show up in court the day the two older boys’ case came up. Roger and I went round early, but she was more or less unconscious from a night of drinking, and we couldn’t rouse her. The eldest boy was sentenced to prison, and the younger one was given yet another period of probation, on the condition that we kept an eye on him and he helped out with the younger kids in the free school. In fact, none of them minded much about going to prison or borstal. They quite liked the regular hours and meals, and being kept busy during the day in the kitchen or laundry or workshops.
Roger besieged Camden Council, and I followed in his slipstream, marching through the corridors of the Town Hall and barging into offices, explaining that we were saving the local community an enormous amount of money by keeping the B. children and their friend out of care, and asking for a grant so that we could continue doing so. We weren’t arrested, not even thrown out. These days, of course, we wouldn’t have got past security at the front entrance. It was a lesson in persistence. After producing formal written proposals and making it clear that we weren’t going to go away, we met with the then Councillor Frank Dobson (later to be a minister in the New Labour government), who headed up the Education Committee. He saw our financial argument, if nothing else, and put the case to the Council. Finally, we were given an astonishingly large grant of £20,000 for the year (far more than we’d asked for), on condition that we based the school on the nearby, presently disused sixteen-acre freightliner site behind King’s Cross Station, and set up other useful social amenities along with the school – an old people’s lunch club, an evening youth club, and a women’s centre. While we were at it, we also started an urban farm – pigs, donkeys, goats, chickens – and sold manure to local gardeners. Suddenly we had an empire to run. Camden Local Education Authority sent its senior school inspector. The kids made him lunch, he sat in on the lessons, squeezed into Roger’s fifteen-year-old Morris 1000 with some of the kids to go to an exhibition, and two weeks later passed the school as ‘efficient’, meaning that it was on a par as a teaching establishment with school for the time being. All done through energy. But achieved because it was still the tail-end of the Sixties and it wasn’t impossible.
It started to occur to me by the late Sixties, once getting stoned stopped feeling like I was doing something, that there was nothing more important to be involved in and to get right than the education of children. It still strikes me as true, though my belief in the possibility of its achievement is close to zero now. I wasn’t alone in the Sixties and early Seventies. Acknowledging the centrality of education to any improvement in society (that word again, its dying gasp) didn’t require an excess of hard thinking, and the idea of children’s rights caught on as other rights – gender, racial, social class – were demanded. If ever any group was unrepresented, powerless and without a concerted voice in society, it was children. The Children’s Rights movement allowed anyone to project. Even if we had never been a woman, black or working-class, we had all been children, and recalled that outraged helplessness at the adult world being arbitrary and unfair towards us. We had been children not so very long ago. It was easy to recollect how stifling and trivial much of our education had been, and how it failed to engage anyone without strong motivation or exceptional schooling: either of which usually meant having the good fortune to have access to resources most people lacked – books, money, parents who had benefited themselves from learning, or parents who had missed out on it and were therefore passionate about it for their children. If we hadn’t been sidelined by education, we knew most people had been. Those of us who had been to state schools had watched the sidelined ones slip away into no-hope streams; some of those who had been to private schools understood the extent of their privilege and suffered survivor guilt. We perceived the world as irrelevant and unjust to the majority, and the manifestation of irrelevance and injustice in the schools was closest to what most of us knew.
Those who were students – at university, college, art school – tried out radical education on themselves to start with. In America there was far more student unrest much earlier than in the UK, centring around resistance to the Vietnam war. The brutality with which demonstrations were dealt with by the police and authorities was astonishing to those of us who watched. Four students died from bullet wounds at Kent State, and suddenly being a student didn’t seem to be simply a way of passing from childhood to adulthood with a period of blithe irresponsibility. The adults were killing their children, not just by sending them to war, but by shooting them for complaining about it. There was a general resentment of students around the world. It looked as if the grownups had got fed up with funding their young for a period of wildness. Perhaps there comes a point where the old simply resent the young and the fact the world will belong to them, rather than wanting to indulge them with what they had missed themselves. It does look at present as if the nostalgia my generation has for their Sixties is joined by our disapproval for the contemporary young – ‘You only care about money, career and status. When we were young...’ In the early Seventies, at any rate, it seemed that wildness was getting out of hand. Not just sex, drugs and rock and roll, but they were messing about in politics, too. The young were messing with the order of things, and on the old ones’ money. So they sent in the cops. This gave students in America, and by association, around the world the chance to take themselves seriously.
They took over lecture halls and classrooms and refused to move. Sit-ins became teach-ins, and political speeches made room for an experimental pedagogy: students and some lecturers thought about sharing knowledge rather than having it poured into them to be regurgitated again during exams. The politics of education as well as the need for a political education caught fire and lit up the imagination as a way to shake the world into a better shape. The idea of voluntary learning grew into the thought that curricula should be as much the responsibility of the student as the teacher. The magisterial application of knowledge to the young was no longer self-evident. What this meant, of course, was an exponential growth of meetings and talk. The official educators and administrators were locked out, and the buildings were commandeered for lengthy debates in classrooms, lecture theatres and cafeterias among striking students about what should be learned, how it should be learned and who should teach it. At its best, it was a useful period of reassessment, but it was also a party, an avoidance, and a gift to the more dogmatic and pedantic students who differed from the authoritarian establishment only in their age and access to official power. There was much talk of cutting through the bullshit which was being taught in schools and colleges that had stopped pupils and students from thinking about what they were doing and why, and there was certainly also a good deal of bullshit talked. The accusations from establishment educators and politicians of self-indulgence were true, but that will and energy to look at the nature of what should be learned and how also represented the best of what the Sixties were about. The press berated the students for abusing the privilege of education and the grants they received from the society which they so disparaged, but this was exactly what the students should have been doing. When the young keep their heads down for fear of failing exams and not getting highly-paid jobs, they are not taking their privilege of learning seriously. For all that these were privileged people (all students are regarded as privileged, even by those who were once students themselves) in a time of full employment, in the Sixties the young at least risked those privileges to investigate what it was they were doing, rather than simply accept what they were told. Most dissenting students got back on the bourgeois straight and narrow, we are told, just as the majority of the radicals became card-carrying members of conventional society. But that doesn’t prove, as it is sometimes held to, that they were wrong-headed in their briefly wayward youth. The young have a job to do of frightening the grown-ups.
And what could frighten the grown-ups more than subverting the education system of those who have yet to become students? The change-over from the two-tier grammar/secondary moderns to comprehensive schools* that began under Harold Wilson in 1965 had speeded up, and by 1970, in spite of the new Conservative government and Margaret Thatcher becoming Secretary of State for Education, the dismantling of the old system was unstoppable. The division of children at the age of eleven by examination into either academic or ‘practical’ schools (to become university students or to leave school at fifteen respectively†) had largely gone, but mixed-ability teaching was an untried and under-researched discipline and the result usually was that both ends of the ability spectrum were short-changed. By the end of the decade, the comprehensive system was far from proving itself a force for social equality and liberal education. Many schools had given up and divided year groups into separate classes according to academic ability. Grammar and secondary modern schools coexisted in effect within the comprehensives. Nobody really knew what they were doing and it was showing. At the East End comprehensive where I taught, each year was split into seven groups labelled with one letter of the word HACKNEY. In order to prevent the children from being demoralised by finding themselves in the bottom two groups (which were designated by the teachers ‘remedial’), each year started at the other end of the word. 1H, 1A, 1C, 1K, 1N, 1E, 1Y became 2Y, 2E, 2N, 2K, 2C, 2A, 2H the following year. Not even the poorest of intellects could fail to know where they were in the ability hierarchy. In Islington, a passionately child-centred, progressive headteacher Michael Duane, had tried to put ideals into practice at Risinghill Comprehensive. In 1965 it was closed down as an experiment out of control. The book that came out about it in 1968 made Duane a hero, and Risinghill a rallying cry, though there were serious problems with Duane’s new lack of order, as there had been with the old excess of it.17
The comprehensive system had stopped looking like an experiment in the liberation of working-class children and seemed already to be achieving little more than providing a minimally educated workforce for an industrial economy. The power of institutions to make even new ideas conform to the requirements of the status quo was evident, but we were still close enough to the Sixties and our youth to believe that it could be subverted. Schools and schooling became a cause among the young liberal and radical Left. Teachers, students and academics considered alternative forms of teaching. The question was again what should be taught and how pupils could participate in their own learning. Education under the dead hand of the institution deprived children of the social and philosophical freedom to think, often even of the ability to obtain basic literacy and numeracy – a serious problem that comprehensive schools have still not solved. The majority of children were leaving school with just enough knowledge to take up the unskilled jobs society needed doing. Those who call themselves realists and pragmatists will tell you, then and now, that that is precisely the purpose of state education. We chose to believe (and I still like us for it) that everyone was capable of doing better than that – of having broader horizons, and of being educated into a wide curiosity that might mean they were dissatisfied with their lot, but which also gave them the tools for independent thought.
This, of course, was the paternalism of an educated youthful elite with world-changing on their mind, who rejoiced in dissent, having enjoyed several years of living it without the fear of long-term unemployment. Or, to put it another way, it was an imaginative merging of us and the children (only a few years apart in age). The Peter Pan generation were trying to give our younger selves the liberated childhood we had belatedly discovered and were presently acting out, just as our parents had funded us to have a carefree misspent youth that they had lacked. Idealistically, numbers of us enlisted in the education system (in those days, just having a degree qualified you to become a teacher, and for those of us who didn’t have degrees, there were teacher training colleges and, of course, grants to attend them that could be lived on). Not having been to university, I got a grant and started teacher training, while postgraduates went directly to work in inner-city comprehensive schools which by now had major problems with discipline and motivation. Sink schools, they were being called by the panicking press. We would work in the system, at the tough end, work with the kids, on their side, and change things radically. We weren’t disciplinarian or jealous of our status, so we talked to the pupils and required dialogue in return. On the whole, it worked rather well; we had to do less ducking to avoid chairs being thrown than our colleagues who enforced pointless rules and shouted their theoretical authority at kids who didn’t believe a word of it and couldn’t care less. We may have done more social work than actual teaching, but our classroom discipline techniques, which mostly involved taking a non-combative stance and actually liking the kids, were quite effective, and we thought that once we’d got them quiet enough to listen we could say some things that mattered. Our logic was as compelling as that which had made us already believe we would change everything just by our novel presence in the reactionary world. It was a takeover, but an inevitable one. A generational takeover, by the generation that thought differently. The kids would recognise our benevolent and socially radical intentions and join us in the endeavour. Institutions couldn’t resist our will if we participated in them. Now we got the idea of ‘boring from within’. They would become our institutions, new, compassionate, world-changing, and above all equitable. We’d done drugs, expanded our minds, read and trekked the world, east and west, and now we were going to teach. Obvious really. Of course, we had many moments of discouragement – it turned out there were some kids who didn’t want our benevolence at all, and sometimes we had to duck chairs along with the oldest and most unregenerated of our colleagues. A fellow world-changer, a member of IS, who taught remedial classes (EY or HA according to the year), slammed into the staffroom one breaktime and threw herself despairingly into a chair, announcing, ‘These kids are no good for socialism’ – but, for all that, how could we not prevail in the end?
Ivan Illich, a former turbulent priest who had worked in Latin America, thought otherwise. In 1971, he published Deschooling Society.18 His target in this and his other books was the institution, by which he meant institutions of every kind – educational, technological, industrial, medical: the divisive and divided fortresses of knowledge itself. The institutions aped and were always and unalterably governed by economic forces for their own benefit. There was no possibility of changing the world by tinkering with the institutions that controlled it. The nature of education had to change fundamentally, he said. I read Illich, as well as others19 who advocated the idea of taking education into the hands of the local community, of creating new, small institutions, rethinking the content and meaning of learning, and I somehow managed to participate both in the noble idea of changing education from within its fortifications, and the new free school/community school movement. While I did the required teacher training, I was intensely involved in the (somewhat unintentional) Freightliners Free School. It wasn’t contradictory, to my mind. The free school would be the ideal practice (a live experiment, not a rehearsal as were the teaching practices of the training colleges) for the changes that we would implement in the comprehensives to turn them into the humane, creative institutions they ought to be. But I was not reading Illich very carefully. I (and others) misread his clear statements of libertarianism as liberalism.
Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools. Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue’s responsibility until it engulfs his pupils’ lifetimes will deliver universal education.20
Neither the Free School movement, nor the new influx of radical teachers into the comprehensive system, had suggested not teaching. We were trying for good teaching, better and wider teaching. It wasn’t what Illich was on about at all.
The free-school movement entices unconventional educators, but ultimately does so in support of the conventional ideology of schooling...Even the seemingly radical critics of the school system are not willing to abandon the idea that they have an obligation to the young, especially to the poor, an obligation to process them, whether by love or by fear...And there is, finally, a shared view of youth which is psychologically romantic and politically conservative. According to this view, changes in society must be brought about by burdening the young with the responsibility of transforming it – but only after their eventual release from school.21
Rereading Illich now, I wonder what happened in my head, back in 1971, when I got to those passages? Did I simply not see them? Did I refuse to read them in such a way that what they actually said entered my consciousness? His analysis of the result of liberals taking over the schools was precise and accurate, it was to turn out, but it was paralysing unless the economic and industrial reality we lived in was torn into small pieces. People would only be free when they educated themselves and each other all at the same level. Illich was too radical for the radical generation. We were not so idealistic that we trusted in Illich’s radical alteration of society ever happening. And though we didn’t want to see ourselves as part of the old reactionary system, nor, truth be told, did we want to risk losing control of what we valued. We supposed, without quite articulating it, that left to itself, a self-educated population would fail to notice the literature, philosophy and art of which we thought so highly. Illich didn’t care whether they noticed or not. He wasn’t coming from a left/liberal position. He wasn’t interested in making things nice, or expanding minds according to anyone’s view of how minds should or could be expanded.
I took my fifteen-year-old class from Hackney on a school trip to the Roundhouse to see the radical and often-naked Living Theatre company from the US perform. I thought that my pupils’ dropping jaws at the sights and sounds they encountered would function in a similar way to the Methedrine the psychiatrists at the Maudsley injected into my veins. That they would be abreacted into art. But the absolute freedom of the individual was Ivan Illich’s only interest, whatever its consequences.
The right of free assembly has been politically recognised and culturally accepted. We should now understand that this right is curtailed by laws that make some form of assembly obligatory. This is especially the case with institutions which conscript according to age group, class, or sex, and which are very time consuming. The army is one example. School is an even more outrageous one.22
We wanted small, local groupings of teachers and learners, not none at all. His ‘web’ of learning was a loose, always shifting network, that depended not on any kind of qualification or well-meaning, but only on individuals who simultaneously and freely wanted knowledge and offered knowledge, and who needed only to be provided with the means (an imagined universal computerised access) for each to get in touch with the other. That was the point, to dispense completely with structure, to undercut the authority of hierarchy and the hierarchy of authority. Crucially, the majority of the activists in my generation were never as interested in individual liberty as we were in finding ways to implement our own ideas of how the world should be. I’m not sure, on Illich’s still startlingly strict definition, if we were interested in liberty at all. Certainly, we didn’t get that ‘freedom’ was not solely the property of the liberal Left. Yet again, aside from a rigorous few, we were too young, and not thinking coldly enough, to imagine what a Margaret Thatcher might do with the word. Illich could well have joined Thatcher and Reagan’s theoretical advisers. I’d resist the claim that the Sixties generation were responsible for the Thatcher years, as I would resist the notion that the Jewish community in Germany were responsible for the advent of the Nazis, but sometimes I can’t help but see how unwittingly we might have been sweeping the path in readiness for the radical Right, preparing, with the best of good intentions, the road to hell for paving.
I think perhaps we were also romanticising some nebulously defined educational processes at the cost of a simpler acquisition of basic skills. The intention was to get children engaged in learning, interested in what they were doing without having to be competitive. Learning how to learn, rather than learning the same old facts without being given an understanding of the basis of them. Ideas which in my view are still admirable, and still sorely lacking in education systems, but in noticing the barriers to education we rejected some kinds of learning that simply made life easier. We hadn’t, most of us, by then, had children of our own to observe. The fact is that young children are wonderfully programmed for learning by rote. Why understand the alphabet or times tables, when you can chant them meaninglessly and learn them fast to have at will for the rest of your life? Child-centred education was, at least in part, our own misty eyes centring on our wishful thinking about childhood. We had all learned to read by reciting the alphabet, and sing-songed the multiplication tables until we had them off by heart, and can still call them up whenever needed, even in our sixties chanting the alphabet or the eight times table in our heads in moments of need. We made life more difficult, I think, in respect of elementary learning, for both pupil and teacher by demanding that everything had to be understood. Get the automatic stuff under your belt and then you can have all the time in the world to sit back and learn to understand it to your heart’s content, is what I would say now. And I do wonder if the awful educational backlash of the subsequent Thatcher and post-Thatcher Blair years that continues to demand efficiency over content, measurable outcomes becoming everything, were not, in part, fuelled by our over-emphasis on making the relevance of every aspect of learning a priority. We forgot what pleasure we had had from irrelevance, from the strange and the half-understood, and even from the difficult. There was also an embarrassment about our own abilities, the gifts of our own minds. We tended devotedly to the lower end of the ability spectrum but paid little attention to the more able. They were us, after all, and we were quite ashamed of our privileges. It got to the point where in some sense we punished the brighter kids for not being underprivileged. When Allie had been at the free school for a while, she became very taken with looking at buildings in a new way that had been pointed out to her on school visits round London with the local architect. She began to think she might want to be an architect. She told this to one of the play-leaders at the adventure playground whom she had known and been friends with in the days when she bunked off school all the time. ‘You’re getting a bit above yourself, aren’t you?’ he said. The radicals couldn’t always cope with education actually having an effect. If the oppressed stopped behaving like the oppressed, we didn’t really like it. And there was another side. One day Allie came to me and said she wanted to go back to regular school. I said that was fine if it was what she wanted, but I wondered why. ‘I want to be like my mates,’ she said. ‘I want to bunk off like they do. With Freightliners being our special school I have to keep on going to it, and I just want to be normal.’
We were a generation that wanted to give the children the childhoods we wished we had had, or thought we wished we had had. Unless the easy access we had to the dole and those generous education grants was, after all, a covert gift driven by a similar wish in the older generation, we were different from our parents. And we have turned out to be different from our children. Both those generations, older and younger than us, were and are more inclined than we were to reproduce for their young what they experienced in their childhood, rather than offer them Wonderland. We were stardust, we were golden and we had to get ourselves back to the garden ...
* Previously all children in the State system took an exam at eleven, the results of which filtered those who passed to academic grammar schools, and those who failed to ‘practical’ secondary modern schools, where a good deal of woodwork and metalwork was on the curriculum. Comprehensive schools were mixed-ability schools that children attended on the basis of locality, not an exam. The eleven-plus was abolished with a few exceptions.
† The school leaving age was raised to sixteen in 1973.