Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

enough and develop prerequisite respect for authority, willingness to die for your country and a love of (and fear of) God.
    And what better model for a school than a factory? I was observing a history lesson once where a group of children in a dire and bleak inner-city school were being shown a video on life for children in the Victorian mills. Although they seemed oblivious to it, the irony was not lost on me of how the list of rules the Victorian children were subjected to – punishments for being late, for whistling, singing or talking, for opening a window, for swearing, for not immediately following instructions, for leaving the workplace untidy or for leaving it without permission – were pretty much identical to the rules these twentieth-century children were expected to follow at school.
    In
The Unfinished Revolution
by John Abbott and Terry Ryan, a book that I have been urging teachers to read for years, they describe how, far from being designed as a process whereby we bring the best out of young minds, ‘a primary aim of education became preparing workers for their place in rationally planned manufacturing’ with formal education being used by successive governments ‘to develop loyal, productive and socially contented citizens’. And for us, in class-ridden England, this was especially so:
    For England, probably more than for any other Western country, education of the masses was a form of social control totally separate from the education of the elite.
    (Abbot and Ryan 2000)
    (By the way, before you dismiss such claims as ‘socialist conspiracy theory propaganda’ you may want to look at the profile of the man who wrote them, John Abbott, 4 head of the
21st Century Learning Initiative
, 5 public-school and Trinity College educated, ex-Geography teacher at Manchester Grammar School when it was ‘the most highly selective grammar school in the UK’ and a former grammar school headteacher. The sort of school that Peter Ustinov went to where they wrote on one of his reports, ‘He shows great originality which must be curbed at all cost’.)
    What’s more, as Adam Smith pointed out in
The Wealth of Nations
, it became a vicious circle:
    The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations … has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention … He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.
    (Smith 1776)
    No wonder we are having such a battle to change the way we do things in schools. No wonder introducing areas such as thinking skills can be so challenging. Built into the very DNA of the whole concept of schools – even the buildings themselves if you still happen to be teaching in a Victorian school with its factory-like high windows and austere appearance – is the goal of getting young people
not
to think for themselves.

Chapter 18
An accidental school system
    So, we have established that the early roots of what we have now as our national system of education in the UK were designed to create children who would respect authority (do what the teachers say), respect God (do what the Church says), obey the Monarch (do what the government says), be good unthinking workers (do what the boss says) and die for their country (do what the general says).
    And if you don’t believe me on this then surely you will trust the word of a Tory politician speaking in the House of Commons and recorded in Hansard in 1807: 1
    Giving education to the labouring classes of the poor … would teach them to despise their lot in life, instead of making them good servants in agriculture and other laborious employments to which their rank in society has destined them; instead of teaching them the virtue of subordination, it would render them factious and refactory … it would enable them to read seditious pamphlets, vicious books and publications against Christianity.
    (Gillard 2007)
    What about, then, the make-up of the school system with its classification and grouping of children according to age? Why did we start doing it like that and, more pressingly, why do we still persist in doing it that way across the vast majority of schools in the entire world?
    Let’s start our journey then in the obvious time and place – the seventeenth century and what is now the Czech Republic. Here you will find a man called Comenius 2 , 3 who is known both as the ‘teacher of