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MELANIE PHILLIPS: A good school freed me from a suffocating life, but wanting the same for every child made the Left detest me

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Model pupil: Melanie's first day at junior school, aged five, in September 1956

One of the most toxic successes of the Left in Britain in the past 30 years has been to hijack the centre ground in politics and opinion, leaving them free to denounce as ‘extremist’ anyone who dares disagree with them.

The true middle ground — that area of truth, decency and reasoned debate where I believe most of us situate our thinking — is now vilified as ‘the Right’.

This is as mind-bending as it is destructive. By loudly asserting that Left-wing ideology is really ‘centrist’, the Left has succeeded in presenting their own extremist, anti-social and even nihilistic ideas as unarguably good.

A terrifying example of this is in the wrecking of our education system, where, rather than make things better, a so-called ‘progressive’ creed has actually turned back the clock. Education changes lives. It certainly transformed mine. School was where I — a solitary, serious-minded only child — felt free from my suffocating family background and happy.

Studying also made me feel in control of my life. If I worked hard, I could make good things happen, and they did — Oxford University, followed by a sought-after job as a journalist. Opportunities like this had been denied to my father back in the impoverished Thirties. 

His innate intelligence hit an early cul-de-sac when his parents turned down the grammar school place he had won because they couldn’t afford the school uniform and he was forced to leave school at 13. But decades later in the apparently enlightened Eighties, I was horrified to discover that people like him were still being denied opportunity for advancement.

The Left-wing dogma dominating education meant that many state schools were simply not up to the job — and once again it was the poor who were suffering.

In a column in the Guardian, where I had worked for ten years, I wrote in support of a national curriculum the Conservative government was introducing in a desperate attempt to ensure that teachers actually started teaching children something at school.

I argued that, while the better-off could buy their way out of the system through living in leafy suburbs or sending their children to private schools, the poor were trapped by lousy local schools to which there was no alternative for their own children.

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The reaction was instant and seismic. In Left-wing Guardianland, there was only one permitted explanation for the crisis in Britain’s schools, and that was the spending cuts imposed by the ‘heartless’ Thatcher government. To suggest it might actually have a point about the breakdown of teaching was simply unthinkable.

My colleagues gazed at me in perplexity and dismay. Overnight, I became ‘Right-wing’. ‘This is a Daily Mail view,’ I was told — the greatest possible crime and insult, since in such circles the Mail is considered to be off the graph in its opinions.

The fact that I had written with passion about the plight of poor people was totally disregarded.How had I reached this heretical position? By the staggering tactic of actually observing what was going on rather than following some ideological diktat. I looked at the local state schools for my own young children, Gabriel and Abigail, and found them wanting — not because they lacked money, but because the teachers had abandoned structured teaching in favour of ‘play’ and ‘self-discovery’.

There were two decent primary schools in my area in West London that stuck to traditional methods. I could get my children into neither —they were hugely over-subscribed. In the end I gave up and sent my children to independent schools. 

While the better-off could buy their way out of the system through sending their children to private schools, the poor were trapped by lousy local schools to which there was no alternative for their own children

I could afford it; but I knew most could not. As ever, I was concerned about those at the bottom of the heap. Desperate parents and teachers intimidated by the education orthodoxy wrote to me in support.

However, friends and colleagues denounced me as a reactionary Gradgrind, a devotee of the unimaginative, fact-obsessed headmaster in Dickens’s Hard Times.

What was ‘progressive’ about an approach that inflicted its most devastating damage upon children at the bottom of the social heap, who depended on school to lift them out of disadvantage but who were being left ignorant, illiterate and innumerate?

I ploughed on, though it was a lone furrow at the Guardian, writing next about the refusal to teach Standard English in speech, spelling and grammar in our classrooms on the grounds that this was ‘elitist’.

How could this be? I had seen at first hand in my own under-educated family of Jewish immigrants that an inability to control the language meant an inability to control their own lives.

My Polish grandmother had not been able to fill in an official form without help; and my father (although born in Britain) just didn’t have the words to express complicated thoughts, and would always lose out against those who looked down at him from their educated citadels.

The Left-wing dogma dominating education meant that many state schools were simply not up to the job - and once again it was the poor who were suffering

Teachers wrote to me in despair at the pressure on them not to impose Standard English on the grounds it was discriminatory. They knew that, on the contrary, this was to abandon vast numbers of children to permanent servitude and ignorance.

Yet it was clear that the professors, advisers and experts from the education establishment putting such pressure on these teachers were the supercilious upper-middle classes, who had no experience of what it was actually like to be poor and uneducated or an immigrant, but were nevertheless imposing their own ideological fantasies on the vulnerable — and harming them as a result.

I also wrote about how black parents in inner London were cheering on the government’s education reforms, despairing of a system which had so grievously failed two generations of black children. But at the so anti-racist Guardian, the views of those black parents counted for nothing. 

The Left-wing Inner London Education Authority (which ran schools in the capital at that time) could never be wrong; the Tory government could never be right.

My view was that deteriorating education standards had little to do with low pay for teachers or schools starved of money. It was teachers and teaching that made the difference to children’s lives.

The problem was that the entire education establishment had taken a desperately wrong turn and the increasing number of bad teachers were turning good teachers into a beleaguered minority.

Here was, as I wrote in the Guardian, ‘the vicious circle of an education establishment that perpetuates its own myths down through generations of poorly taught children’.

Reaction to this was extreme and ugly. I was described as ‘ignorant, silly, intellectually vulgar, vicious, irresponsible, elitist, middle-class, fatuous, dangerous, intemperate, shallow, strident, reactionary, near-hysterical, propagandist, simplistic, unbalanced, prejudiced, rabid, venomous and pathetic’.

Three-quarters of the letters were hostile. But it was the letters of support which shed a devastating light on the situation in our classrooms.

One educational psychologist wrote: ‘In my job I see small children whose ability to focus on a task is chronic —yet they are put to learn in an [open and noisy] environment.

‘Children do not learn through play but through instruction, explanation, guidance, motivation from an adult. Children need to be taught to make connections, to look for meanings. They do not learn from Wendy houses or computers, they learn from people.

Melanie's view was that deteriorating education standards had little to do with low pay for teachers or schools starved of money. It was teachers and teaching that made the difference to children's lives

‘And whenever I say this to a group of teachers, the older and wiser ones thank me; they have been waiting for years for someone to make this point. But for some reason they cannot say this in public.

‘And neither can I — which is why I do not want my name published. My job is important to me, and public condemnation of teaching methods will not be approved.’

A chill came over me when I read those words. What was being described was more akin to life in a totalitarian state. Dissent was being silenced, and those who ran against the orthodoxy were being forced to operate in secret.

Worse still, the very meaning of concepts such as education, teaching and knowledge was being unilaterally altered and thousands of children were being abandoned to ignorance and institutionalised disadvantage.

If ever there was an abuse of power for journalists to investigate, this was surely it. But for most of my colleagues, it was I who was out of step.

In 1996, I published a book called All Must Have Prizes, from the race in Alice In Wonderland where the dodo announces that ‘everybody has won, and all must have prizes’.

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Education standards, I wrote, had not only plummeted but education itself had been redefined. It was no longer the transmission of knowledge and culture, but a process of self-discovery by ‘autonomous meaning-makers’, once known as pupils.

Knowledge had given way to creativity and spontaneity. The essay had been replaced by the imaginative story, substituting teaching children to think by allowing them to imagine.

Teaching the rules of grammar or maths was frowned upon for stifling a child’s creativity. Right and wrong answers were no longer distinguished from each other; relativism reigned and children were told to make it up as they went along.

I suspected a deeper and even more sinister ideological agenda here. The so-called ‘New Literacy’, which substituted listening, memorising and guesswork for being taught to decode the printed page, encouraged the use of English teaching to ‘empower’ children to correct social inequalities.

Since teaching children to read was apparently an injustice against working-class students, children were to be empowered by ‘making their own meaning’. Correcting children’s mistakes was an illegitimate exercise of power.

The outcome was the disaster of mass illiteracy among school-leavers and soaring behavioural problems among pupils excluded from classroom life through their inability to read. Even universities were forced to provide remedial courses for undergraduates to  compensate for the inadequacies of the education system.

How had this self-destructive process come about? To my mind what was happening in our schools was part and parcel of a country and a society that had become radically demoralised.

The ideological dogmas undermining education were also eroding family life and the moral codes that kept civilised society together, replacing these by the ‘no blame, no shame, no pain society’.

Respect for authority both in and outside the classroom had collapsed.

Most teachers, I wrote, were unaware that they were the unwitting troops of a dangerous cultural revolution. In our universities and training establishments, they were being taught to teach according to far-Left doctrines whose core aim was to subvert the fundamental tenets of western society.

My book caused a sensation. I was accused of ‘paranoia’, ‘tunnel vision’, ‘unfounded prejudices’, ‘ignorance’ and ‘arrogance’.

I was the author of the ‘worst written book of the year’, ‘a farrago of ignorance and inaccuracy’ and a ‘reactionary diatribe’. A former senior chief inspector of schools called the book ‘beneath contempt’ while a leading professor of education pronounced it ‘cr*p by anybody’s standards’.

He implied that I had cooked the evidence and quoted non-existent sources. Apparently all the teachers, psychologists, government inspectors, university professors, politicians, civil servants, parents and pupils I had spoken to, and all the educational texts and research reports I had read, were just ‘anecdote’ and ‘tittle-tattle’.

In 1996, Melanie wrote that education itself had been redefined. It was no longer the transmission of knowledge and culture, but a process of self-discovery by 'autonomous meaning-makers', once known as pupils

None of the evidence I produced was debated, merely denied. As usual.

But the campaign against me took a vicious turn and reached to some surprisingly high places when innuendo appeared in print about the proximity of my views with those of Chris Woodhead, then the outspoken Chief Inspector of Schools.

He had controversially gone to war against what he described as failed teaching methods; in piece after piece, I endorsed his views.

As a result, the education press presented us as conspirators and perhaps more. The phrase ‘an item’ was used. ‘Nothing romantic, you understand,’ wrote one commentator in the Times Educational Supplement. ‘No, the link with Chris and Melanie is intellectual, but it is powerful and dangerous all the same.’

I suspected that some of this sniping was being fed by those around the then Education Secretary, David Blunkett, who seemed to feel personally undermined by Woodhead.

There were other funny goings-on. For some years during the Nineties I was in fairly regular touch with Prince Charles on the state of British education — until I suddenly found myself out in the cold.

I believe the reason was that I thought some education advisers in his circle were less than wholly sound, and I told him so. Whether, as a result, I was deemed by his people to have become too difficult I do not know; but, from that time on, all contact with the Prince ceased.

Adapted from Guardian Angel: My Story, My Britain, by Melanie Phillips, published by emBooks and available for purchase for £6.99 at embooks.com





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