Education is a key election battleground according to Gordon Brown. He boasts that ‘No government has sought to invest more in education, training and future qualifications’ (TES, 9 April 2010). Why then do parents, teachers and educationists, and many students leaving education, feel that this investment has not paid off? Why do many people feel that the rhetoric is false and they are not being told the truth about the state of education, the curriculum, teaching and qualifications?

On the current battleground the three main parties all declare that they will mess about with education even more. Labour want ‘theme-based learning’ in primary schools. The Tories want to reform the curriculum and tell teachers what to teach. The Lib Dems want to scrap and then streamline the curriculum.

What members of the Institute of Ideas’ Education Forum know is that all these reforms will make matters worse. Other initiatives such as handing control of schools over to parents or giving more emphasis to teacher training experiments like Teach First, will also make education worse for all children. How do we know this? We know it because the root of the current general dissatisfaction about education is that politicians have forgotten what education means. Without a debate that clarifies what education is for, all initiatives and changes will make the situation in our schools worse.

We do not blame teacher trainers, teachers or parents for the current emptying out of the content of education. Politicians and their quangocrats have seen education as the solution to all social problems, including the lack of participation in politics, low voting turnouts, the lack of saleable skills and qualifications, obesity,  antisocial behaviour and poor ‘community cohesion.’ 

The Education Forum has not produced a manifesto for the election. There are enough of these already. Many are rattle-bags of eccentric initiatives that can only make education worse. Instead, we have written a clear statement of what education is for, and what we know about the state of education and, most importantly what we could do better.

We begin our statement with the deceptively simple declaration that ‘Education at its best offers children knowledge and understanding of the world so they can think for themselves’. This is because for us education is what defines our humanity. As the educational thinker Paulo Freire famously said ‘To be human is to engage in relationships with others and the world. It is to experience that world as an objective reality, independent of oneself, capable of being known’ (1).  This experience is the experience of education.

Our desire for clarity led us to emphasise throughout the importance of a subject-based curriculum and why it is necessary to be utterly consistent and thorough in arguing for constructing the curriculum around subject knowledge and that teaching means teaching subjects.

Our statement is addressed to the many thoughtful, concerned parents, teachers and educationalists who are worried about the state of education. We ask them to read the statement carefully and see if it makes sense to them. If it does, there will be many things they may want to take up with politicians and others. If it does not then we want them to take disagreements up with us.

The next few weeks will be a rare opportunity to raise and clarify the purpose of education and direct whoever gets elected on 6 May 2010 not to abandon our children to manipulative social engineering but to keep open the possibility of an intellectual life for future generations.

(1) Paulo Freire (1974 [2008])‘Society in Transition’ in Education For Critical Consciousness, London and New York: Continuum. (p3)

The Education Forum’s Election Statement will be published on Monday 19 April.