There is probably even more ill-informed punditry around about our educational system and its contribution to Britain's decline than there is about the trade unions, management and industrial relations. Everyone thinks he knows what schools should do. However ignorant about the practicalities of teaching in the 1980s, people are willing to launch forth into diatribes against our state schools for failing to do this, that or the other. There is an ever-increasing list of demands made on the schools, some of which conflict with each other, so that it is hardly surprising that some of them sag under the weight of it all. At the same time, their clients become more critical, more hostile to authority and less manipulable.

LRB 2 December 1982 | PDF Download