Huff and Puff

Letters

Vol. 18 No. 20 · 17 October 1996

From Melanie Phillips

John Sutherland thinks the only people who should be allowed to report on what is happening in education or express a view about it are university professors like himself (LRB, 3 October). This appears to explain his despotic redefinition of evidence. Journalists cannot produce evidence about education, it seems, because we are not teachers. Presumably then, since we aren’t MPs, doctors or police officers either, we can’t produce evidence about politics, the Health Service, crime or indeed about anything at all except journalism.

Because I am a journalist, he assumes (with no evidence) that my book took only ‘a few months to dash off’. In his limited world, no doubt he thinks ‘dashing off’ is what all journalists do. For the record, my book took 18 months to put together and drew upon nine years of writing about the subject for the Observer and before that the Guardian. During that time, I spoke to or corresponded with teachers, education psychologists, government inspectors, university professors, GCSE and A-level examiners, politicians, civil servants, parents and pupils, and read many educational texts and research reports. I drew upon all this wealth of material for my book. Yet to Sutherland, none of this is evidence. He says it is all ‘secondhand tittle-tattle’. What is secondhand about talking to these people or reading that material? What would be firsthand?

As any fair-minded person can see, my book is crammed with evidence. Yet Sutherland dismisses it all out of hand as ‘flimsy’. ‘She might have got off her backside,’ he writes with all the elegance of the truly erudite, and ‘bought a day return to Oxford or Norwich’. Well, actually, I did buy day returns to both those places; just as I also visited primary and comprehensive and further education classrooms (how many of these has Sutherland’s backside ever graced, I wonder?) and both there and beyond talked to all those people at all levels of the education system who gave me the evidence of reality that Sutherland trashes with such arrogant disdain. Evidence, for example, of the kind of simple sentences which students reading German at good universities can no longer translate but which would once have been taught to 12-year-olds; evidence from mathematics professors about the collapse of knowledge among undergraduates of basic mathematical principles; evidence from a former chief examiner of the corruption of public examination grades; evidence from a French teacher in a rural comprehensive about the way the National Curriculum and the GCSE prevent teachers like herself from teaching a foreign language properly; evidence from A-level pupils about the failure of their schools to teach them any history or get them to read a book from start to finish.

Then there was the evidence from the mouths of teachers themselves about how they wouldn’t tell a child an answer was wrong because wrong answers were evidence of creativity; or wouldn’t teach systematic grammar because even bright children couldn’t grasp abstract concepts; or wouldn’t teach scientific facts to primary school-children who had failed to find them out for themselves through ‘discovery’ methods. And then there was the evidence I amassed from all those dire ideological tracts masquerading as educational texts, published by university departments of education or respected education journals, which redefined reading as guesswork or memorisation, which urged the transfer of ‘power’ from teacher to learner, which told language teachers not to teach correct forms of language but only enough for children to ‘get the gist’. Yet Sutherland is simply not interested in addressing this evidence. He merely chooses to sneer.

Sutherland boasts that the applicants for degree courses called for interview by his department are virtually all competent in their use of English, and spelling mistakes are rare. If anything, he adds, the standard of written English has gone up over the last twenty years. But the admissions tutor of his own department, Dr John Mullan, subsequently told the Daily Telegraph that standards have declined among applicants, with some of them unable to spell or punctuate properly or get a grip on a sentence. Presumably, though, Sutherland would dismiss this evidence as secondhand tittle-tattle.

Melanie Phillips
London W12

Vol. 18 No. 21 · 31 October 1996

From George Walden

When my book, We Should Know Better, came out, I warned the great Vicky Barnsley of Fourth Estate that she had a real bummer. The Right would like my criticism of state schools, but reject my view that our unique system of educational segregation was largely responsible. The Left would applaud my analysis of private schools while claiming, with careless logic, that state schools were doing fine. I was wrong. After reading the book, Tony Blair asked me to discuss its ideas with his staff, which I did. It was well reviewed in the Independent, the Guardian and the New Statesman, and serialised, to my surprise, in the Daily Mail. The chairman of the independent schools’ Headmasters’ Conference,Tony Evans, also expressed interest. Quite a galère.

Only John Sutherland (LRB, 3 October) fell into the logical trap (state schools are doing fine, segregation is harmful) but then he has an excuse: he has not read the book. I want to spend a utopian five billion on opening independent schools to all, he writes. The figure I gave was one billion, plus the proceeds from the abolition of the Assisted Places Scheme, plus fees that the successful children of rich parents would continue to pay, as they do in university maintenance. The remaining four billion would be spent in state schools, on nurseries for all, smaller classes, higher pay for better teachers, science and technology. Utopia? Then he says I want to raise taxes by three pence to pay for the policy he so wildly misrepresents. Oh dear. Tax rises are specifically ruled out on another skipped page, the money to come from the running down of mortgage tax relief (hinted at by Labour) and the taxation of child benefit (proposed by the Commission for Social Justice).

A switch of spending priorities to education is creeping up the political agenda, as is the problem of segregation. Meanwhile, like the Times and the Daily Telegraph, Sutherland seems happier grazing old pastures. Could it be that, like many of my Tory colleagues, he is just another status quo merchant in disguise?

George Walden
House of Commons

From John Mullan

Replying to John Sutherland’s review of her All Must Have Prizes, Melanie Phillips (Letters, 17 October) lines me up in support of her polemic about falling educational standards. She writes that I told a Daily Telegraph correspondent that ‘standards have declined among applicants’ to the UCL English Department, of which I am admissions tutor and John Sutherland is head.

Even in my gloomier moments (two UCAS forms in a row professing admiration for the novels of ‘Jane Austin’), it would be difficult for me to argue quite this. I have been admissions tutor for about a year, and am in no position to chart the decline over time that would fit my views to the case made in her book. Indeed, I tried to suggest to the Daily Telegraph journalist that discussion of standards too often relied on a person’s sense of how things might once have been, and that this was more often determined by prejudice than by evidence.

I did tell the Daily Telegraph that I have a less optimistic view of the state of English in secondary schools than John Sutherland (which is why he suggested to the journalist that she might want to talk to me). I agree that some of my anxieties would chime with Phillips’s. I mentioned some of the changes in examining methods that seem to have taken place without much widespread discussion (in English, for instance, most A-level candidates now being allowed to take their set texts, annotated if they wish, into the exam). I also observed, from my recent experience, that it seemed possible to obtain an A in GCSE English Language and yet be unable to punctuate properly or construct lucid sentences. I did add that the candidates without these skills were not offered places.

Admissions tutors see all the unsuccessful applications, and those of my comments that match Melanie Phillips’s views applied to these. The standard of the successful applicants seems high to me (although perhaps, twenty years ago, UCL English students were even more wonderful). We do not have to run the kinds of remedial literacy courses that she describes in her book. If competition produces high standards, as Melanie Phillips believes, then she will be glad that competition for places in my department seems fierce, and is becoming fiercer. I am sure that such is the case for many English departments. My worry is that the advantage enjoyed by candidates from independent schools is increasing. This is why, as I told the Telegraph and would have been happy to discuss with her, I was more preoccupied by George Walden’s proposals for breaking the independent/maintained school divide in We Should Know Better, the other book discussed in John Sutherland’s review.

John Mullan
University College London