Slay the dragon not the knight

Chris Woodhead has been voicing his opinions in the Sunday Times and Guardian this week. For many people there is something about his comments that really rankles – I am one of them. Why?

He recently wrote of novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch: “She thought education in art and ideas and knowledge was the road to freedom. She knew it from her own life, as I know it from mine. By freedom I mean an appreciation of what the greatest human beings achieved; a sense of what other people in other ages knew to be important and possible; a liberation from the tyranny of the majority view; a release from the monotony of the quotidian”.

I liked that bit. However he went on to say, in response to the common desire among those in education that every child should be able to walk as far as they can down that road to freedom: “I do not think that every child is capable of travelling far along this road”. Now I disagree with this strongly - but that is not what gets under my skin.

What really gets my goat is the mischievous (I assume) setting up of an Aunt Sally of views he ascribes to the education community so that he can knock them down: “We can abandon our responsibility to initiate the young into the best that has been thought and written. We can impose a skills-based, socially relevant, politicised curriculum on teachers and pupils. … [Both main political parties have] no conception of education beyond the utilitarian…” etc. Does any educationalist really hold this view?

Of course it feels good to be a defender of the faith, a St George if you like, even if the dragon is invented. And the more you are then attacked the more real the dragon becomes … and the better it feels to slay it! My concern is that I see this rhetorical gambit being used more often, and it takes the place of informed debate. You might say it is a bit of harmless fun, but it is not – a lot of people believe that this really is the view of educationalists, and this then damages the status of the teaching profession.

The teaching profession is the knight in shining armour, not the dragon.