File downloaded from www.braehead.info web site

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Many thanks. To get a better understanding of RF Mackenzie and his unique view of education, for information on Braehead school, Buckhaven, Fife, for views from former staff and pupils, for old photographs taken in and around Braehead then visit www.braehead.info web site dedicated to all of the above.

Manifesto for the Educational Revolution

“The only possible revolution, the only worthwhile revolution, must be created not by politicians or militarists, but by educators.
Rimbaud was right when he said that, ‘ everything we are taught is false’
Henry Miller

R.F.Mackenzie
1980

Forward
 
"This is the story of how a child in a Scottish rural community saw the
world, the picture of earth-life presented by school and church and received
folklore; the widening horizons illumined by questing amateurs and clouded
by defensive professionals; a teenager¹s innate and continuing belief that
things should make sense confronted with the forbidding incomprehensibility
of his mentors in school and university; the sense of wonder and enquiry and
hope re-emerging under the stimulus of people throughout the world who this
century tried to alter their society¹s set pattern of ideas and to make
education intelligible; their widescale failure, in the USSR and the USA and
western Europe, to make any appreciable difference to the way children are
still everywhere herded and controlled and puzzled and disheartened."
    In his conclusion R.F.makes,  "One more effort to take the ordering of
our thoughts and feelings out of the hands of the priestly rulers, and pool
our wisdom and devise a better way of bringing up our children.  Altogether,
the book could be called a sketch plan or manifesto for the educational
revolution. "
Manifesto For the Educational Revolution was written in 1980 by R.F.
Mackenzie and turned down for publication at the time.  Mrs D.C. Mackenzie,
wife of R.F., kindly agreed to allow us to publish after it had been found
among R.F.¹s papers.
The book has been transcribed directly as read from the original manuscript.
In chapter 4 there are pieces of writing in the original that we have not
been able to discern.  Where these occur we have indicated as much in bold
italic writing.  These have been minor but we leave you to make your own
judgements, not wishing to impose any ideas of our own.  You will have to
fill the gaps, something R.F. saw as a preferred option to imposed will.
Other works by R.F. Mackenzie are
Road Fortune
A Question of Living
Escape from the Classroom
The Sins of the Children
The Unbowed Head
State School
A Search for Scotland
For further background and information on R.F.Mackenzie visit
www.braehead-news.org.uk/
a web site, which is dedicated to Braehead School, staff and pupils; at
which R.F. was headteacher.  There are discussion forums at the web site
which can be used by anyone wishing to discuss this book and related issues.
E-mail comments or requests for the book can also be addressed to:-
kushday@globalnet.co.uk
We hope you find the work of value and ask if you find it so, to pass on
it¹s availability to those you think would appreciate reading it.

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Chapter 1

The Incomprehensible School

“The concept of objective truth is fading out of the world “
-	George Orwell

	The secondary school, like the old poorhouse, is no place for human beings.  It is time to call the schools to account.  They operate a confidence trick on a massive scale.  In the twilight of western Christianity they have replaced the church as the main institution for controlling the thoughts of the young.  The schools are the main providers of the package of ideas about our world with which the young enter employment or unemployment.  The group that controls the schools controls the society.  There is little hope of major continuing improvement in our disintegrating society until we cope with the schools.
	Since it was introduced a hundred years ago, public education has largely escaped basic questioning.  It is here that we shall find answers to questions that baffle our generation.  Why did the majority of people in Britain support, or permit, the Falklands war?  Why do millions of people support the present popular daily newspapers?  Why do Labour MPs and TUC chiefs and university professors jostle one another to get a seat in the House of Lords?  Why has the bright hope of the Labour Party faded?  Why have the majority of Scotsmen and Scotswomen become more docile than their seventeenth and eighteenth century ancestors?  The major answer is to be found in the secondary schools’ curriculum.
	I should give my credentials for making these statements.  From the age of five until seventeen I attended a school in a small Aberdeenshire town and Robert Gordon’s College in Aberdeen.  Then I went to Aberdeen University and took a degree in English Literature and Language.  I taught at a pioneer school in Hampshire.  In 1946, when I returned from service as a RAF navigator, I re-entered Scottish education as a teacher of English and History in a wool town in the Scottish borders.  Thereafter I was appointed head of the English department in a Fife school.  Six years later I became headmaster of another Fife school in a coal town.  After eleven years I became headmaster of a large Aberdeen comprehensive.  Five books, A Question of Living, Escape from the Classroom, The Sins of the Children, State School and The Unbowed Head described these schools and the efforts we made to alter the classroom work.
	I travelled widely in Europe, Asia, Africa and America, wrote articles on travel and education for the newspapers and programmes for radio and television.  I reviewed books for the daily and educational press and lectured in most of the universities and colleges of education in Scotland and England.  While in the RAF I was married, and my wife and I know what it is to try and educate also our own family.
When I was sacked from my job in Aberdeen for refusing to re-introduce corporal punishment and was bundled out of the state system, I had leisure for the first time since I had entered it at the age of five, to look around and consider what life is about and what education should be about.  Until then I had been content largely to accept the picture of education presented by liberal newspapers like the Guardian and by many radicals.  I felt that the schools, however conservative, were sound at heart and accessible to ideas.  I knew that much of the history they taught was untrue, that science was a drilled memory exercise lacking in the enquiring, probing, scientific spirit, that opinions in literature were enforced by the award of marks for saying the acceptable things in the external examinations.  But I put much of that down to bumbling inefficiency and a blind, misguided loyalty to the tradition.  Ultimately in the educational firmament, I felt, there were top people who had a deep and abiding concern for the well-being of their pupils, of all their pupils, who had sized it all up wisely and, since politics is the art of the possible, were biding their time until the time was ripe for change.
	Maybe this child-like belief in a kindly power stems from early religious teaching.  The image of a heavenly father, able and ready to rule us, attaches itself to our view of those he has appointed on earth to control us.  “The Lord Jesus Christ” has the same title as the peers in the upper house of parliament and this choice of words colours our thoughts.  We continue into adult life to cherish a longing for security and a disposition to trust.  “Underneath are the everlasting arms.”  This faith in the fundamental goodness of government survives the shock of disproving experience. It was only after I had ceased to be preoccupied with the daily busyness of a school and had time to reconsider the philosophy and its detailed programme that I began to ask questions, not rhetorical, about the growth retarding effect that the schools were having on the young.
Why is so much of the classroom work incomprehensible to the majority of pupils?
Why does the system have such a low opinion of the intelligence of most of its pupils?
Why do so many pupils dislike their schools?
Why do so many primary and secondary schools hit their boys and girls with a leather belt or cane?
Why do state schools and private schools allow the external examinations to dominate their curriculum?
Why have educational initiatives in Europe and the USA and the USSR so uniformly failed?
Why is fundamental research encouraged in science and discouraged in education?
	A simple hypothesis suggested itself in a unifying answer to these questions.  The school is not intended to be a caring association.  We were naive to accept the traditional job-description put out by the educational priesthood that they were helping the young to develop, and understand, and enter fully into their heritage.  It is not so.  The schools do not exist for the benefit of our children.  Their purpose is to control them, all their thoughts and words and deeds, all their work and play.  There is no assurance that the majority of them will not be forsaken.  It’s a colder, uglier world than we were brought up to believe.
	One evening in wartime when I was undergoing RAF training in South Africa I was walking through a dark wood along a track that led uphill from Grahamstown to the air station.  Ahead of me I heard trails of singing, frequently broken off, and resumed.  When I drew level I found that the singer was a Zulu.  He was slightly drunk.  We walked along together.  Sometimes he spoke and sometimes he lapsed again into song.  Then he said in a brief interval of concentration, “Once I believed that Jesus would make everything all right. I don’t believe it any more.” This book is the story of a comparable discovery.
	Once a new hypothesis is formed (that is, that the educational system is not a caring system) random facts that were unintelligible within the old package of ideas, take on a new significance and connection and can be understood.  The incomprehensibility of much of the classroom work is no longer a cause for surprise since understanding is not what schools are about.  They are mainly about communicating the accepted answers.  If you can’t make head or tail of them (as I often couldn’t) you are not supposed to prosecute your own enquiries.  You should just let the waves of incomprehensibility wash over you.  Most of us go through school puzzled, or even disturbed, or else insensitive to the whole operation, accepting it as fully and freely and uncritically as the MP in Brideshead Revisited accepted the whole Roman Catholic canon, so that he could marry the girl.  The schools provide the training ground to accustom adults to the non-asking of questions.  The political priests use their colleagues who work in the educational sector to produce disciplined members of the work force who have put the luxury of private questioning out of their minds.  That makes it easier for them to distort and squeeze the truth to accommodate it to their systems, whether it’s the political system of Westminster, Washington or Moscow.  The school serves the same purpose in all of them.  The incomprehensible political speech is the inevitable consequence of the incomprehensible school lesson.
	Three quarters of the school population, alike under western capitalism and Russian communism, are ‘non-academic’ according to the educationists.  It’s a vague term of abuse.  But once you begin to entertain a more realistic hypothesis, the device of undervaluing the majority is simply explained.  Independent-minded characters must be convinced that they lack intellectual ability.  If they were more intelligent, they would understand and accept the classroom and ballot-box package.  When the heretics proved stubborn, St. Dominic called down the wrath of heaven, and of earthly princes, upon them.  “Where blessing can accomplish nothing, blows may avail,” he thundered.  The vocabulary of the exasperated indoctrinator doesn’t alter much down the centuries.  Today’s political priests speak of “short, sharp shocks”.  The recusant pupils are said to be difficult, out-of-step, uncooperative, recalcitrant, disruptive, extremist.  Like the 13th century Vatican, the Scottish Education Department and the Westminster Ministry are not perturbed that they have alienated and antagonised a large proportion of their flock.  It just shows the bloodymindedness of all heretical characters.  The vocabulary of required virtues makes a daily incantation in the schools.  The words are obedience, humility, long-suffering, endurance, respect, reverence, discipline, patience, submission.
	In church and school I was brought up to be respectful and uncritical.  In this book I’ve tried to put together an educational autobiography so that the indoctrinating mechanisms and their influence on one individual can be studied in detail.  If we are to escape from the prison, we have to know its personnel and practices, its hierarchy, its promotion ladders, its warders and their routines and privileges, its searchlights and dogs, the tunnels dug as a part of earlier attempts to escape.  This is the story of how a child in a Scottish rural community saw the world, the picture of earth-life presented by school and church and received folklore; the widening horizons illumined by questing amateurs and clouded by defensive professionals; a teenager’s innate and continuing belief that things should make sense confronted with the forbidding incomprehensibility of his mentors in school and university; the sense of wonder and enquiry and hope re-emerging under the stimulus of people throughout the world who this century tried to alter their society’s set pattern of ideas and to make education intelligible; their widescale failure, in the USSR and the USA and western Europe, to make any appreciable difference to the way children are still everywhere herded and controlled and puzzled and disheartened.
	The final chapter is one more effort to take the ordering of our thoughts and feelings out of the hands of the priestly rulers, and pool our wisdom and devise a better way of bringing up our children.  Altogether, the book could be called a sketch plan or manifesto for the educational revolution. 

Chapter 2

The Educational Priesthood

“The later phase of life on earth has tended to destroy the wholeness of the child mind at a very early stage.  The intensive pursuit of what is called education has also tended to disintegrate the young mind.  Where the young mind undergoes disintegration, its capacity for coherence and action are impaired.  It can thus quickly be made amenable to those who can gather the parts together and suggest a saving line of action.”
- Neil Gunn, The Green Isle of the Great Deep

	Of the four groups who compose the College of Priesthoods (ecclesiastical, legal, political and educational) this is the priesthood of which I have the most intimate knowledge.  I first came into contact with the education system at five years old in a red sandstone school in a small market town in Aberdeenshire.  The reading was dull and the writing laborious but there was a sense of satisfaction in doing long division sums that came out exactly, like the lived-happily-ever-afterwards stories.  We could spell accommodation and harassed and cemetery and diarrhoea.  We could parse and analyse sentences.  We knew that adverbial clauses modified while adjectival clauses qualified and felt that there must be some subtle difference between a modification and a qualification.
I look back over the years to the geography that my teachers taught me.  The Great Australian Bight.  Icebergs in the Antarctic, rice in the tropics.  Sacred cows in India.  Cancer and Capricorn, prairies and savannahs, latitude and longitude (and the various ways that teachers pronounced that word), tundra and steppes and wigwams and kayaks and, caiques and igloos, temperate and torrid zones, palm and pine, the Gulf Stream. the Kalahari Desert, the Rockies, Fuji Yama, the Equator and the Arctic Circle and map projections and exports and imports.  A redeeming sense of violence and drama was briefly introduced by the volcanoes, Vesuvius, Etna, Kekla and Stromboli.
I tried to differentiate between Henry I and Henry II (which was the king who never smiled again?) and Henry III (was he the one who was described as a weak character? I always felt sorry for him).  Henry IV, Henry V (who stood out from the others: Agincourt 1415), Henry VI (or was he the weak character?), Henry VII, Henry VIII (wives).  And the Scottish Jameses.  James I (killed at Perth when Catherine somebody tried to bar the door to his enemies with her arm), James II (he had ‘favourites’, the history book said.  He was killed by the explosion of his own cannon at the seige of Roxburgh), James III (killed after having been captured at Sauchieburn), James IV (Flodden 1513), James V (who said, referring to the Scottish crown, ’It cam wi a lass and it will gang wi a lass’).   And then James VI and I whom the translators of the bible hoped would be ‘the wonder of the world’ and somebody else described as ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’.  And then into the boredom of Charleses and Jameses and petitions of right and solemn leagues and covenants and from that into the murk of religious wars.
There were wars and treaties and the mystery of treaty-making.  We had to memorise the provisions of the treaties of Utrecht and Versailles.  Custer and Disraeli and Dundas and Wellington and Marlborough and Peel.  I discovered much later that the Irish called him ‘Orange Peel’ but none of this irreverence desecrated the solemnity of our history lessons.  There were the noble Pitts (one of them called ‘ the great Commoner’).  There were the Black Hole of Calcutta, the Siege of Lucknow and the Siege of Ladysmith, Magna Carta (which made everything different), the North-west Passage, Peary and Nansen and Scott and Amundsen, Cavour and Garibaldi, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Sodom and Gomorrah, David and Jonathan.  The dull history of Scotland, Scots and Picts and Britons and all that, and Columbus and Columba and Colombo and Colombia, and Einstein and Darwin, and Churchill and Lloyd George and Bonar Law and Campbell Bannerman, and Balfour and Sheridan and Fox and Derby, and Devonshire and Aberdeen and Lord Eustace Percy, the South-Sea Bubble and the Boston Tea Party.  And trade unions and truck acts.  And Wilberforce and the freeing of the slaves and the Great Reform Act and indulgences and the Vicar of Bray.  Alexander and Don John of Austria and Wolfe and Claverhouse and Montrose and the Earl of Dundee and the Duke of Montrose and Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns.  I look back on my educational career, littered with information like a road littered with pages from books that have fallen off a lorry.
	Most of the characters of history, as presented to us, emerged as unattractive characters.  Gladstone and Washington were the proto-types.  I couldn’t imagine them swearing, or winking to us, or smiling.  They were all too good or too perfect or too noble for us sinners.  GREAT MEN they were called.  There were many such, gods of war and poetry and music, Caesar and Napoleon and Alexander, Shakespeare and Beethoven and Leonardo da Vinci.  Gladstone made long speeches and was on our side.  Nobody ever said so, but that was what we were given to believe.  Now I know that he was no more on our side than the Dukes of Devonshire or the Pharaohs.  John Knox was a kind of earlier Gladstone, frowning on sinners, both of them like ministers or dominies.  
	I sit back now and let the memories of my education flow back into my recollection.  South America meant Aztecs and Mayas, and lordly conquistadors making circles round the aborigines, but who was caring for these dull aborigines?  There were piranha fish and jaguars.  I remember looking up the atlas to see which was longest, the Nile , the Amazon or the Volga.  The Volga flowed into the Caspian Sea, or did it?  And along its banks peasants sang the Volga Boat Song.  There was Nijni Novgorod, or had that changed its name?  There were endless steppes, and tea-kettles called - but there, I’ve forgotten what these tea-kettles were called - and ikons and kulaks and collective farms and the Bolshoi theatre.  Samovars, yes, that was the name of the tea-kettles.  And tundra and reindeer.
	The school world was a world of question and answer.  What is Chemnitz famous for?  Who wrote Bleak House?  Which century did Milton live in?  What is a crotchet?  Where is Perrambuco? What is x squared – y squared ?  What is the chemical formula for common salt?  What is biltong?  We progressed from simple questions like these to more recondite information.  Where did Ann Hathaway live?  In which book does Meg Merrilees appear?  Who were the Forty-niners?  What is the chemical formula for sugar?  Who was Metternich?  What was the Agadir Crisis?  What is a philosopher?  What do you know about Peterloo?  Who is the Chancellor of the Exchequer?  What is onomatopoeia?  What is osmosis?  What are the Roaring Forties?  Who wrote Major Barbara?  
Who wrote,  “And the red glare on Skiddaw roused the burghers of Carlisle”?  Who was Mercutio?  What is psychology?  Who was Osiris?  Where is Kamchatka? Who was Peary?  What is a trochee?  What was the money from the Forfeited Estates used for?  What is an inversion in meteorology?  What is Avogadro’s Law?  Who were the Lords of the Articles?  Where is graphite mined?
	I spent six years learning Latin.  Cum with the subjunctive ( and the rare occasions when the rules were relaxed on cum and it wasn’t lumbered with the subjunctive).  There were ablative absolutes, gerundives and defective verbs.  We plodded through Vergil’s Aeneid.  It was one of the WORLD’S GREAT POEMS we were told, but I never felt the impact of greatness.  It was a dull story, made duller by our labour to translate it and pass examinations in “seen” and “unseen” passages.  We achieved some facility in translation and got some satisfaction out of that as out of completing a newspaper crossword.  The thoughts and feelings of an earlier civilisation didn’t penetrate into our scholarly classroom.  Their cookery or clothes were never enlarged on. ‘Pius Aeneas’ didn’t come alive.  We were sorry for jilted Dido.  But no teacher dwelt on this human and therefore subsidiary side of the poem.   The language was the important thing, and especially the way in which constructions which would not be acceptable in prose were acceptable and perhaps admirable in verse.  Once in an examination a pupil (later a minister of the Church of Scotland) explaining a poetic usage in Aeneid Book VI illustrated his answer by a comparison with a similar usage of the word in Aeneid Book I which we had studied the previous year.  He gave the number of the line in Aeneid I and Aeneid VI in which this word appeared.  I remember the teacher’s delight at this piece of scholarship in a sixteen year old boy.  Suddenly the teacher felt that all his work was worthwhile; this was the quintessence of education.
	We read Livy, but not as history.  Ovil might have been interesting.  He wrote ‘Ars Amatoria’ but it never occurred to us that this might be a book about sex.  He departed from Rome under a shadow but he didn’t emerge in our classroom as a real, sinning, suffering mortal, just as a dull verse-spinner.  Years later, on a snowy day at Constansa on the Black Sea waiting for a passage to Istanbul on a cattleboat, I wished I’d known more about Ovid and his exile in this Rumanian port.  Cicero’s eloquence didn’t illuminate the classroom.  There were some doubts about him to, some possible flaws in his character, and I was not sure whether to put him with the goodies or the baddies.  Catiline was a baddie but the lurid lights of his sin didn’t penetrate the blinds of our educational system.
	We worked hard and got as far as Catullus and - amazing that I should remember the word all these years later - his hendecasyllabic metre. I remember part of a translation into English, in that metre,
“Dead my Lesbia’s sparrow is,
Sparrow that was all her bliss.”
Even at that time I thought it was a poor piece of verse.  Back it comes as I write, even one of the lines of the original Latin,
“Qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum.”
We were told to admire the light touch of the comic poet talking of the dead sparrow treading the dark road, and although I’ve no doubt I’d have elaborated on this ‘light touch’ if I’d got a question about it in an examination, I thought then and do now that it was artificial and dull.
	Roman history lessons were conveyed in indistinct words.  Romulus and Remus were ‘suckled by a wolf’.  It was a vague, polite term.  Much later I saw a picture which showed me that they put their mouths to a wolf’s teats.  If we’d been told the meaning of ‘suckled’ in these words, we’d have sat up more actively and taken notice.  In examinations we, too, probably used the word ‘suckled’, in a vague way meaning “nourished’.  It was almost an abstract term, and we became good at using such abstract terms with the implication that we fully knew what they meant.  Roman history included information about army and government posts.  We learned about tribunes of the people, consuls, praetors, but it was a limited knowledge, the information which would earn two marks in a composite question which said, “Explain briefly the function of the tribune, consul...”  We learned that the quaestor was an official who dealt with money and, in the examination, we said that, and got the two marks and there was an end of it.  It was as if children were offered apple pies, and, as they stretched out their hands, they were quietly told that they were only to look at the apple pies, so as to be able to write about their appearance if they were asked a question in an examination.  I’d have liked to bite into the quaestor knowledge.  What did he really do?  He got up in the morning and had his breakfast and went to the government office.  What happened then?  We had not the beginning of a notion of how a quaestor spent his day.  And this was a school which had a reputation for turning out classicists, and I was in a top class, a member of a group expected to bring kudos to the school.  Milton, writing about his blindness, said that for the book of knowledge fair he was presented with ‘an universal blank’.  There was the same blankness about a classical education in Aberdeen.  Inflation, wages, prices - none of this entered the classical scheme of education.  We knew about the Roman coins, the cesterce and the denarius and their value in our own currency but that was all we knew about Rome’s finance.
	The English literature presented to us was as remote from our lives as Roman literature.  Even Goldsmith’s Deserted Village was dissociated from our villages.
“Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain,
Where health and plenty cheered the labouring swain,”

 we memorised in school, and we loathed, sweet Auburn.  Goldsmith’s polished couplets were not for us.  Many years later at an educational conference in County Down no Irish headmaster could tell me which village Goldsmith had in mind when he wrote of ‘Sweet Auburn’.  The ‘labouring swain’ illustrated the literary attitude towards ordinary people, continued in the 20th century theatre where actors and actresses imitated the accent of duchesses for serious discussion and the accent of labouring swains for comic effect.
	The professor of English Literature and Language at Aberdeen University told us that before his time English had been merely a part of the Latin Department.  The professor of Latin had the oversight of English as an additional activity.  The priority that Latin took over English in the university influenced the attitudes of the North-east of Scotland (Education Committee members would rather choose a Classics graduate for a headmastership than a graduate in English) and influenced the teaching of English in the schools.  In our homework we studied a scene from Midsummer Night’s Dream as we studied a passage from the Aeneid, - with the thumb of the left hand at the text and the fore-finger of the right hand at the notes and constantly flicking from one to the other, trying desperately to make out what Helena meant when she said,

“Two of the first, like coats in heraldry,
Due but to one, and crowned with one crest.”

Macbeth and Julius Caesar were just an easier kind of Aeneid. Peterson of the Oxford Institute of Education pointed out that the reverence paid to Classics teachers influenced the whole of the curriculum, - that science teachers, for example, felt that the more they could make science look like Latin grammar, the more highly regarded would science teaching (and science teachers) be.  This influence has endured right down to the science classrooms of the present.  “Nothing is less scientific than science teaching in school”, a Latin teacher pointed out to me.  I think he was right.  At school we learned about current and resistance, potentiometers and ammeters in the same removed-from-real-life way that we learned about the use of ‘Quippe qui’ and ‘Quo usque tandem’ in Latin.  It was something to be memorised.
	Three years of schooling in Robert Gordon’s College in Aberdeen were spent mostly on mental exercises for their own sake.  We learned nothing of the past of the city or the country.  We reached a stage of writing almost impeccable Latin but nobody mentioned that Roman soldiers had marched through our region.  We learned details of treaties made by castle-defending armies but never visited any castles.  I didn’t know that the North-east of Scotland had a richer heritage of castles than most areas.  I didn’t know that Aberdeen holds gems of 18th century architecture.  We didn’t see the city as a growing organism, spreading out during the centuries from the marshy areas at the mouth of the Dee westwards, workmen digging granite out of the ground to build stylish houses.  Anything done outwith the classroom was regarded as an unnecessary and unjustifiable break in the continuity of word-smithing, the manipulation of word-symbols or numbers for their own sake.  Mathematics was a kind of higher chess for which we were acquiring the skills.  Physics made little reference to the physical world about us.
	There was a status order of studies - Latin and Greek; then mathematics; then English; then history (but not yet geography); then science; then other notebook studies like French and German and geography.  The other subjects, art, music, domestic science, technical subjects, religious education, physical education were like a gaggle of camp followers. In many schools there was a separate, less-esteemed staffroom for teachers of physical education and technical subjects.  The rude mechanicals were not to mix with the cultural elite.
	School offered me little beyond the primary stage.  There was the kindness and help of individual teachers but that’s another thing.  It’s the nature of the classroom work that I am concerned with here.  I know that the content has changed and they no longer ask examination questions about capes, bays and watering places.  But it is significant that reformers, seeking to alter the system, have been stymied and have had to settle for changes in the content.  Secondary education is still about quantity of memorised information.
	At the university I enjoyed zoology and political economy and I acknowledge an indebtedness.  There were lines of poetry which still vibrate in my memory.  There was the intellectual exercise of hanging on tenaciously to the involved thinking of a philosopher like Kant or an economist like Adam Smith.
	Professor Sanford Terry, Bach’s biographer, taught us history.  I enjoyed his lectures, but only two things have been retained in the sieve of my memory.  He was an Englishman and said that the mediaeval era had been described as the cold ages.  At least that is what we thought he said; and obviously that is what he thought we thought, because he stopped to spell the adjective, -’cowled’.  The other thing I remember is a quotation from the Cambridge Modern History describing a monk walking along the shore of Lac Leman pulling his cowl closer round his head lest he be distracted from his thoughts of heaven by the beauty of the earthly lake.
	I remember with gratitude J. Arthur Thomson, professor of Zoology.  There was a grace and excellence in his lectures and I have always felt the appeal of a piece of work done with distinction, whether it was ballet dancing, or dribbling the football down the wing at Pittodrie, or a piece of theatre acting.  Some call it art and some call it a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven, and it is as unmistakable as sunshine.  His lectures were like that.  There was an elegance and a simplicity about them.  But more than that, there was a sensuous delight in the squirming of primeval life and in the development of the senses.  Browning has a poem called Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis, in which he describes his retrieval of a dull book he had thrown a long time previously into the crevice of a garden wall where rain drippings stagnated.  A toadstool had got stuck in chapter six; a worm, slug and eft had taken away pieces of paper; the water beetle had laid eggs; there was life and fun and romping, frisking and twisting and coupling; and the newt borrowed just so much of the preface as tiled in the top of his black wife’s closet.  That was the richness of life probing its environment.  Professor Thomson conveyed some of this sensuous delight that Browning felt, and he too was helping us to probe our environment, to discover more about the nature of life.
	The professor of Political Economy (as it was called), Alexander Gray, a country boy from the Braes of Angus, who had helped to shape the new Health Insurance Act, told us about the squirmings and ramifications of living at another level.  He was a lively man, walking up and down the length of his dais as he lectured, humorously and persistently exploring an argument.  But that was unusual.  Many of the professors and lecturers went through the operation of the machinery, their daily lecture as irrelevant as what Milton called the “weekly charge of sermoning” of the parsons.  There was no Fifth Column inside the walls.  Aberdeen students are docile.  Industriously they copy down the lecturers’ words in their notebooks, and they have no taste for discussion; discussing doesn’t get you more marks in an examination.  A student who asks a question is regarded by the other students as a time-wasting show-off.
	But whether the docility of the students is due to the university, or the university itself is the product of a tradition-dominated area, I don’t know.  Lecturers have asked ‘Where do you break into this closed circle?’ and have shaken their heads.  A university should exist to combat mental defeatism and apathy, not to reinforce it.  It should encourage its students to articulate all the questions that linger timorously just below the level of consciousness, to bring them out and inspect them.  But Aberdeen University in a dignified way pushed the questions deeper down.  It took some of us many years in the outside world before we recovered from the reverence and acceptance induced in us by the university and began gingerly to ask more and more questions and finally to question the function of the university.
	Not all the staff were remote.  The genial Englishman in charge of Physical Education, Captain Brock, had a ready welcome for all students, irrespective of their athletic abilities, a concern for all of us and gave us encouragement to take part, which bred confidence.
	You would have thought that teachers and inspectors and professors and government ministers would have been asking themselves the purpose of all this educational activity.  But they didn’t.  Like an old ploughman they got into a furrow and trudged along it, enquiry deadened.
“And custom lie upon thee with a weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life”
Many years ago when the Scottish Education Department were encouraging schools to teach navigation I accepted their invitation to send an inspector to discuss it with us.  But I soon learned that their navigation was largely concerned with astro-navigation and looking up tables.  What we wanted was help for the pupils to navigate a school boat in the Forth estuary.  The inspector said that pupils could study the Department’s programme on navigation (and sit the examination) without a boat.  It was a revealing admission, because it must refer to most of the school work, history and literature, French grammar, higher mathematics, dictated notes on geography.  You weren’t expected to use or apply the knowledge; the important thing was the mental exercise involved.
	It is this school and university experience that I now try to evaluate.  It is difficult to be truthful without sounding ungrateful.  Many of the teachers were gifted, friendly, helpful people.  There was a mathematics teacher (to whom I owe much) who said that the purpose of geometry was to teach pupils to dig out what was necessary and sufficient to establish the truth of a proposition, and to be satisfied with nothing less, or more.
	Village friends and relations probed mercilessly at the propositions I brought home from the university and nettled me into probing them myself.  They introduced me to Wells’s Outline of History (assuredly not a set book of the university) and Sean O’Casey’s plays.  Gradually I found that the proofs on which many of the school and university propositions stood were less than satisfactory.  But I still felt that my failure to understand their grand design was a failure in me and that as I grew in knowledge, I would come to see it their way.  But now that I do have a more extensive knowledge, I know that my early doubts were justified.  The educational system is as unintelligent as I feared.  The strange thing is that when you meet them at home or in a pub or in the intervals of a conference, many of the people who operate the system are intelligent and sensitive, aware of its obscurities and faults.  Some of them, friends of mine, are doing what they can to humanise it.  An anthropologist from the Third World, investigating our customs, would be hard put to it to explain why the joint efforts of people, many of whom are not cruel, produce a cruel system.  The phenomena0n extends widely.  There are liberal-minded journalists trying to temper the excesses of Tory newspapers.  I dare say that in the Inquisition there were humane priests.  I have no doubt that in the papal Curia I’d find kindred spirits who would reply to an attack on a reactionary papal pronouncement by saying, “You should have seen it before we got to work on it.”  I get the impression that there are Labour MPs who have found their encounters with Westminster traumatic.  We need more study of the singular ineffectiveness, this century, of teachers, lecturers, bishops, journalists and members of parliament.
	I think part of the explanation is that they want to have it both ways.  The bishops want to serve God and Mammon.  The Labour leaders want to advance socialism without breaking with capitalism.  The school inspectors want to encourage new ventures in education while retaining the external examination system.  I had not guessed the implacable staunchness with which even liberal-minded educational prelates defend their examination-based rituals.  We were the first school in Scotland to introduce a school bus to take pupils afield, to rent a country cottage and to introduce gliding, and there was a big battle to fight on all of these issues.  Tory and Labour councillors opposed them, being part of the educational establishment, but eventually conceded these changes.  I had believed that after an even more prolonged battle we could persuade them to reconsider the examination system.  I had not realised that there is a world of a difference between these things.  To take pupils into the hills, or into the air, was merely an extension of the curriculum.  Grudgingly, in the past, new subjects had been introduced, technical subjects, physical training.  I remember the opposition in the north-east of Scotland to the introduction of physical training.    “Jumping about”, was how an educational conservative described it, and he added, “Jumping about is not what they are sent to the school to do.  They can do that at home at the weekends.”  But physical education was permitted to come into the programme after a pushing out of the walls of education.  After all, it was just another ‘subject’.  Then hill-walking was conceded since hill-walking is only an extension of gymnasium activity.  The prelates of the Scottish Educational Department were ill at ease about our cottage in the Highlands until they found a part of the old curriculum into which they could slot it.  They were on our side.  They wanted to support us when the Forestry Commission said they’d let us rent a cottage in Rannoch; they wanted to find ancient reasons to adduce in support of this new initiative.  So they said that watching the cows being milked helped the pupils’ biology, a trek up to the Coire Carie contributed to their geology, a walk to an ancient castle was a lesson in history.  The educational priests were trying to contain change within the pattern which had been laid down and which they accepted.  Change outwith that pattern was unacceptable.  We were less interested in the pupils’ biology and geology and history than in the pupils.  The pupils were learning about udders and milk, corries and hanging valleys and the way the retreating ice chiselled and tore at the landscape, the thick castle walls that our Highland ancestors needed to help them to sleep secure at night.  We pointed out things to them as we passed; sometimes they were interested and remembered, sometimes they weren’t and forgot.  We didn’t revise it the following week, nor give them an examination question about it a month later.  One of our teachers took a group of the Coaltown pupils for a trek over Kinnoull Hill near Perth.  He stopped here and there, telling them about Agricola and the Romans, Walter Scott and the Fair Maid of Perth, an outlook tower built on a precipice overlooking the Tay in imitation of the towers on the Rhine, and other things.  But there was little apparent interest.  
A pupil told me, “We saw ravens back there.”
I said, “How do you know they were ravens?  Might have been crows.”
He replied, “Ravens move their wings like this,” giving a hunching movement to his shoulders, like a fish pushing itself forward on its pectoral fins.  He had appropriated the information which the teacher had given him shortly before and made it his own, incorporating it into the body of his knowledge.  Agricola and Walter Scott and Rhine towers were of no interest to him, but the movement of a raven’s wings, that was something else.  The wind bloweth where it listeth.
	Several of the school inspectors admitted the value of work of this kind.  They were willing to help us and to find loopholes in the regulations which would permit them to turn a blind eye on our deviations from orthodoxy.  History presents similar examples of liberal priests who found orthodox reasons for making room for unorthodoxy.
	But there are limits.  To abolish the external examinations (and thus give to teachers the freedom to work totally outwith their control) would eventually mean a change in our society, and that is something that the educational priests are ordained to oppose.  The examination system is a vital part of the defence against change.  It emphasises the past and the opinions of the groups who controlled our society in the past; it encourages competitiveness among the young and allocates prizes and certificates, confident in the measure that the young can be enlisted in the competition.  Most gods are jealous gods, and the examination god is as jealous as any.  He grudges time spent in the acquiring of knowledge or in the discussion of issues that will not be the subject of an examination question.  The questing spirit of youth is diverted into channels less dangerous to the dogmas.
	The educational priesthood is not the only one which defends the examination system.  Our physicians know that a fair amount of illness, of dis-ease, can be traced to worry about the examinations.  There is nothing like a good examination for putting up everybody’s blood pressure.  The requirement to drill dull information into the reluctant memories of the pupils forces teachers, violating their own nature, to inflict corporal punishment.  An earlier physician, dealing with root causes, said,  “Let not your heart be troubled.”  Our physicians are less free to enquire into causes.  They spend most of their time coping with symptoms, and administer pills to worried pupils and worried teachers and sometimes worried parents.
	A proposal to abolish the school examinations will encounter protest from outraged interests to whom they give secure employment, - administrators, question-setters, markers, textbook publishers and drug companies.  The law-and-order lobby see the examinations as a controlling force.  The teachers’ unions will be in the forefront of the retentionists, claiming that the examinations are the backbone of the educational system and that, without this supporting structure, the organs of education will flop on the ground like a stranded jellyfish.  Only a century and a half ago some of the controllers of society declared that slavery was an irreplaceable structure of society, but society survived the emancipation of the slaves and it will survive the emancipation of the pupils.  Many teachers and even pupils will defend the examinations as some of the freed slaves of America defended slavery.  “Give us back our chains,” they are reported to have said;  “We were happy in them.”  But that is only further evidence of the deep influence of long-endured mental control and we have to bear in mind that, to many of the young, the possibility of education free from examinations has never occurred.  Professors use the examinations to fortify their control and exclude questioners.  Professor Boissevain, a Dutch social anthropologist wrote, 
“Those at the top also have the greatest voice in planning the teaching programmes designed to prepare students for the examination questions, which, naturally, have been set by themselves and, not surprisingly, reflect their views.  In short, a theory, once it is established within the academic community, tends to become self-perpetuating.”
	These defenders of the examinations use varying arguments to defend their system.  The examinations (they say) motivate the pupils; they discipline the pupils; they provide an objective assessment of pupils’ abilities.  Together with these arguments there is a vaguer, more philosophical-looking technique, calculated to baffle enquirers.  Professor Bailey of the Chair of Sociology in the University of Sussex said that in Britain we favour, “a bumbling, rambling, reasonable-man style which is sometimes used quite deliberately to take the edge out of a situation and obscure lines of division and enmity until no-one quite knows what the trouble was about.”  That mechanism is used to defend the examinations.  But when they are subjected to increasingly detailed criticism, the retentionists invent more and more convoluted patterns of testing in order to meet the criticisms and, by so doing, cunningly sidetrack all discussion of education into discussion of examining techniques until the public comes to believe that education and examinations are the same thing.  Most of the education correspondents of the newspapers fall for it and treat the examination ritual with the same reverence as religious affairs correspondents treat an Easter ritual in the religious calendar.
	This journey into the interior of education showed me how it is powered.  I had been aware of its faults and strove to make improvements because I believed that at heart it was sound.  I know now that I was mistaken.  At its heart it is not sound.  The commodity it is merchandising is Authority, and the teachers, like the commercial advertisers, are the hidden persuaders using subliminal, quasi-religious concepts to assure pupils and parents that their salvation lies in the worship of Authority, in accepting the Law, in preferring the judgements of this ‘revealed’ religion above their own unlettered thoughts.
	Two centuries ago the Scottish Council for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, a forbear of the Scottish educational system, defined its objectives.  They were to spread Christianity, loyalty to the king and his heirs and successors, to provide tuition in reading and writing, and were “for no other purpose whatever”.  It was a battle-cry, rallying education under the banner of the ecclesiastical priests in the service of the principalities and powers; and that, with some minor modifications, is its continuing purpose.

Chapter 3

THE ECCLESIASTICAL PRIESTHOOD

“There was no voice, nor any that answered...  And it came to pass at noon, that Elijah mocked them, and said,  ‘Cry aloud; for he is god:  either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked.’.......And it came to pass that there was neither voice, nor any to answer, nor any that regarded.”

-Bible The first Book of the Kings

Both in school and church, religion was badly taught.  Adam and Eve were shadowy characters.  With a child’s trust we at first believed in them as real characters, holding a real conversation with a serpent.  Later we sensed that it wasn’t as actual as this, but nobody said either that there was a different meaning to be read into the story or that it was just a fairy story.  The teachers and the ministers implied that (even if in the vaguest way they had led us to believe that Adam and Eve was a fairy story), a Bible fairy story was different from the Grimms’ fairy tales.  We would have welcomed a teacher or minister who said. “This and this I believe utterly; this and this I don’t believe at all”.  But they never spoke in these terms.  If they had said that God was an old man with a beard, the proprietor of a large country estate called Heaven, I would have understood.  It was an elaborate estate, there were many mansions, portals and judgement seats, and so many choirs that it seemed like Glyndebourne, of which I read much later; it was warmer, of course, than Aberdeenshire.  I knew that, because they all went about in loose white robes; ‘shining raiment’ it was called.  Later I heard that a missionary, translating ‘shining raiment’ into some African native dialect, had to be content with ‘white shirts’ and I envied the Africans whose angels wore such endearingly terrestrial clothes.  But these were daydreams, a vulgar unspiritual fumbling for the comfort of earthly reality.  We didn’t visualise Heaven like that.  No white shirts flapped from the ropes of drying greens there on a Monday morning.  Moses, like the image we got of God himself, was a bad-tempered old man, his grizzly beard vibrating as he shouted at you.  Jacob was a cunning twister.  He conned his old father and stole his brother Esau’s birthright.  My heart went out to Esau, and I detested Jacob and especially when his story showed that his deceit had paid off.  Joseph was too perfect.  David started off all right by knocking out a giant but when he achieved power he was corrupted and got up to all the dirty tricks.  Daniel in the Lion’s Den had no more reality than Jack and the Beanstalk, but the names of his friends, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, held the romance of the Arabian Nights.  Elijah stood out as one of the most appealing characters of ancient literature.  I didn’t find in the proverbs any truths that came white-hot from the forge of experience.  An invisible censorship silenced the Song of Solomon when we passed it in church on our way over the pages seeking some more respectable passage that the minister was reading.  Isaiah was largely incomprehensible but I enjoyed the poetry of the fifty-fifth chapter read by the young minister, and in other chapters I could feel dimly that there was a glory of cherubim and seraphim and angel voices singing.  It wasn’t often, though, that this glory penetrated into the grey Scottish kirk or the grey Scottish school.  I got the impression that neither of them believed very much in glory: there was a seductive aura of sin about it.  
Twice a year the church held a “communion” when people who never attended during the rest of the year put on dark clothes and yoked the sheltie in the cart and appeared for the ritual.  My father, regular church attender, never went to these rituals.  I believe now that he was ahead of his time and felt that there was in them a kind of African magic with which he felt no sympathy.  The bread stood for the body of Christ and the wine stood for the blood of Christ.  As a child I felt that this symbolism was unconvincing.  Why should Aberdeenshire farmers in the twentieth century eat the flesh and drink the blood, even symbolically, of a Levantine carpenter of two thousand years ago?  They did so with reverence and credulity, even the sinners who never graced the church for the rest of the six months.  I find it difficult to enter into their feelings about it.  But I expect that they didn’t give it much thought, any more than they gave any thought to the dress that custom had decreed should accompany the ritual, the men’s black hats and black suits.  Life was full of unexplained phenomena, bread and wine and black suits, rings at weddings, whisky at hogmanay; and a wise man collaborated.  He didn’t collaborate too much: in spite of the ministers’ moanings, he didn’t have to go to church oftener than these two important occasions; but just in case there might be entry qualifications for the next world, he kept his name on the church’s books.  I don’t think the church played an active part in the lives of Aberdeenshire farmers.  
But even as I write that, I’m not sure.  There was kindness and generosity and love in these farm towns.  Was this a natural upsurge of human feelings, or was it due to a Christian heritage?  I don’t know.  I don’t think it was due directly to the ministrations of the ministers.  Maybe the ministers believed that they played an active part in the life of the community, presiding at social meetings and speaking at Parish and County Council meetings, playing Santa Claus at Sunday school gatherings, sprinkling babies when they got their names, and conducting ritual wedding and funeral ceremonies.  I don’t think most of them really counted for much in the community.  Some did, wise men, comforting the sick, advising their flock, reconciling the adventurous young with the conservative old.  But perhaps they made this valuable contribution because of their individual wisdom and not because of their ministerial training.  Most of them were as much cogs in an inexplicable wheel as their parishioners, making the required responses as occasion demanded.  There were two ministers in our parish.  The United Free Church of Scotland minister was generally regarded as a fine man, but I never managed to follow a sermon of his from beginning to end.  Few people did.  A long sermon, or a long prayer, like long rain in autumn or snow in winter, was one of the facts of life and you accepted it.  Nobody dreamt of complaining that he didn’t understand the sermons.  
The Church of Scotland minister was a younger man and he was popular among the young because his prayers and sermons were shorter.  He always said the same prayers and we got to know them, and therefore the end of the prayer was always a measurable distance away, not an infinite distance as we felt about the United Free Church minister’s prayers.  I can still remember them.  “Hasten the time, Oh Lord, when all the earth shall be full of the love and the knowledge of thee, when pure religion shall everywhere prevail, when the wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad and the desert rejoice and blossom as the rose.”  And then he would finish by asking “an answer in peace.  Amen.” 
The status of ministers was raised by the prefix, ‘The Rev....’  We all said ‘the Reverent’, not knowing that we should have said ‘the Reverend’, which meant ‘requiring to be reverenced’.  Sunday after Sunday we listened reverently as they read to us ‘the word of the Lord’ as spoken by his prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea and other spokesmen.  Farmers, railwaymen, shopkeepers, and the dominie endured it in silence.  Occasionally when the sermon came up, the dominie improved the shining hour by practising his shorthand.  Peppermints were passed in a hush along the back of the seats.  But otherwise no secular noise broke the sacred awesomeness of the occasion.  The minister’s sermon droned on and on.  “Will it be long before he’s done?” I whispered to my mother.  Gently she whispered back, “No, not long now”, and I started to count the golden stars painted on a large panel behind the pulpit.  They were eight stars high and four stars wide.  I counted them individually.  Then I counted eight rows of four.  Then four rows of eight.  Then I read the pamphlet appealing for the aged and infirm ministers’ fund, for which in his ‘Intimations’ the minister said there would be a ‘retiring collection’.  I was never sure what a retiring collection was but I thought it had something to do with these retired ministers.  And still the sermon went on.  In front of us was a farmer with big floppy ears, and I corroborated the observation of my mother (a mimic and acutely observant) that the ears of the shopkeeper in the next row looked as if they were pinned close to the side of his head.  Golden shafts of light seemed to be tickling the backs of several people’s necks and the birds sang sweetly.  And then the minister said ‘Finally’ and we realised that although we shouldn’t be too optimistic, we were approaching the end of the sermon.  It was as if we had passed Kittybrewster station on the way to Aberdeen by train and could start thinking of collecting our coats from the rack.  And then the release of the final hymn came and we were back out in the open air.
One summer when I was seventeen, a friend who was a railway clerk and I got up early on Sunday mornings and cycled to different kirks, hoping to find the words of eternal life, although we’d have settled for intelligibility.  ‘Hear the word of the Lord,‘  the minister would begin.  Occasionally a minister had a glimmering of what we sought or recreated the drama of a Bible passage.  But mostly it was words without an attached sense of reality.  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,“ says the opening paragraph of John’s gospel, and we shook our heads and came out by that same door wherein we went.  Words were not meant to explain, to clarify, we felt they wrapped life in a cloud.  The ministers spoke about the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.  These were ‘The Trinity’ and all sensible people accepted the Trinity.  There were some strange characters who called themselves Unitarians, but they were so small a minority as not to count.  I never understood who the Holy Ghost was.  He was something not to be enquired into.  Enquiry was successfully diverted from this incomprehensibility. We all spoke about ghosts and read ghost stories, but we never associated the holy ghost with other ghosts.  He lived in a house not made with hands and we made a big detour round it whenever we went in that direction; it was a vast, imponderable, ineluctable area.
Most of us just came to accept incomprehensibility.  Only this drawing of blinds over the windows of the intelligence can explain the acceptance of some of the hymns we sang.
There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Immanuel’s veins.
And sinners plunged beneath that flood
Lose all their guilty stains.

Some people said that such hymns were horrible and must have given nightmares to children.  I never found them having the slightest gruesome effect.  We had been so accustomed to read words without conjuring up in our minds a corresponding picture that we never imagined cut veins dripping blood into a fountain, or dirty sinners taking a dive into a bath of blood and emerging clean.  I had no sense of horror, only of unattached sound and a tune.  We were unaffected by the revivalist hymn,
Are you washed
Are you washed
In the blood
In the blood
In the soul-cleansing blood of the Lamb?
Are your sins as scarlet, are they white as snow,
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?

These dramatic words left us unaffected.  We didn’t visualise either the blood or the snow.  My chief recollection is of enjoying the bass voices like a deeper echo taking up the words ‘Are you washed’ and repeating them, and taking up the words ‘In the blood’, and then enjoying listening to sopranos and basses coalescing in the third line; and then I waited for them to separate again in the next verse and come together again in a felicitous harmony.
Singing a hymn in which the words are divorced from reality is incantation, the invoking of magic.  I think there was something of the same nature in part of the university training of the divinity students.  They studied Hebrew which was an even more powerful magic than Latin and Greek.  It is told that in the sixteenth century James IV sent two babies with a mute nurse to an island in the Firth of Forth in order to discover what language they would speak under these conditions.  The experimenters announced that the babies talked pure Hebrew.  Glorious nonsense of this kind still permeates our national life to a far greater extent than I had imagined.  I was brought up on the assumption that most things are accessible to rational enquiry.  They’re not.  When we were in the RAF in South Africa, a friend of mine said to a black truck-driver, “If your child were ill, would you go to a witch doctor or a white doctor?”  The black man said,  “I’d go to both.”  We in Scotland and England are in the same betwixt-and-between position.  We’re half rational but also subject to irrational, subliminal control.  To insure ourselves against unforeseen emergencies, we keep up the premiums to the witch doctor.  All sorts of inexplicable things may be good for us, singing hymns uncomprehendingly, sitting examinations.  And, for divinity students, studying Hebrew.  But there is a radical, rational enquiry going on inside the church.  When some independent spirits among the divinity students wanted to change the curriculum and replace Hebrew with something which would be of more value to them in helping others to meet the stresses of life, the professors of Hebrew said that this was cheapening the value of their degree.  
Maybe I’ve been less than just to radical ministers who are seeking to salvage their church, realising that times change and values alter and questions are asked and a new vision is needed, or maybe only a re-statement of the old vision in more comprehensible terms.  Within the church there are priests who are capable of restating the vision.  There are ministers of the Church of Scotland and Catholic priests and religious communities who, under attack even from their own hierarchies, continue steadfast to live justly and love mercy and walk humbly and bear witness to the same light that the rest of us, outwith their communities, are seeking to follow.  But their loyalty to the institution which cradled them, or the argument that you can more effectively reform an institution from inside, a complex of reasons, prevents them from whole-hearted, frontal attack, and their church regains its equilibrium and momentum and continues on the same course, collaborating with the other state priesthoods.   
It is on high-priestly occasions such as a jubilee or a royal funeral that the other colleges of priests are most clearly seen closing round the ecclesiastical priesthood.  Mountbatten said he liked Kipling’s Recessional because of its warning that we could get drunk with sight of power and forget that our imperial pomp would pass away like Nineveh and Tyre.  In the Abbey they sang the Recessional at his funeral.  The hymn finishes,

For frantic boast and foolish word,
Thy mercy on thy people, Lord.

But the hymn didn’t stop the BBC from magnifying all the pomp of yesterday.  Through the magnifying glass of the television screen they showed us reverentially the bemedalled commanders, the ex-kings, the gloriously-robed clergy, their eminences and graces and excellences, the honours reverberatingly rolled off the commentator’s tongue.  They were asking mercy for frantic boast and foolish word while continuing to utter them, warning us not to be taken in by pomp while they put on one of the biggest spectaculars of the century.  It was the subliminal pressure of the hidden persuaders at its most intense.  “Take unto you the whole armour of God . . having on the breastplate of righteousness.. and take the helmet of salvation,” and as the priest spoke, the camera illuminated his words by concentrating on one of the Life Guards, his breastplate, his helmet, his whole armour.  In that very passage Paul said that “We wrestle against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of the world,” but here in the Abbey were the principalities and powers declaring themselves on Paul’s side.  They sang Blake’s hymn about the dark satanic mills.  I wonder how Blake would have felt about being used to buttress a system that he abominated.
A pale blue light filtered on to the pillars and throngs of worshippers.  It would have been a healing, whole-making experience to feel at one with this fellowship and communion, members one of another.  It could have been one occasion on our earthly pilgrimage when we met together to share our joy and sorrow, not seeking power or advantage over one another.  If only they had meant it.  If only it had been real.
But it wasn’t real.  It was only a military parade, a feudal pageant and a music festival, a party political broadcast on behalf of the Tory party.  The Archbishop of Canterbury, grandly robed, carried out the traditional role of the High Priest down the ages, in a clear voice and in dignified words saying the right things equivocally, so that the system’s requirements seemed to square with the values of the god who was being worshipped.  He was proof against the rebuke of a poet laureate of fifty years earlier who prefaced the book containing his life’s work with a different kind of consecration.

Not of the princes and prelates with periwigged charioteers
Riding triumphantly laurelled to lap the fat of the years;

Not the bemedalled Commander, beloved of the Throne,
Riding cock-horse to parade when the bugles are blown;

THEIRS be the music, the colour, the glory, the gold;
Mine be a handful of ashes, a mouthful of mould.

Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and the cold,
Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tales be told.
AMEN

The reverberating AMEN (which Masefield printed in block capitals at the end of his consecration) was a desperate shout which declared that he meant it literally.  I know exactly how he felt.  The priesthood which gave him a resounding title and minimal pay regarded him almost as a court jester, a versifier who wasn’t meant to be taken seriously.  Now here’s a question confronting the anthropologist who enquires into the devious practices of the high priests of this country in the last quarter of the twentieth century.  The Archbishop of Canterbury was an intelligent man, conversant with the literature of his century.  Presumably he had read Masefield’s Consecration.  For the Archbishop, was English literature a plaything, like an Elizabethan madrigal sung in his palace after dinner, lightly regarded and soon forgotten?  Did he think that Masefield was just versifying, or did the possibility occur to him that Masefield meant it desperately?  If that were so, did the Archbishop believe literally the fine-sounding words he was uttering?  Did he find the dualism of these roles a strain upon him?  Or did he switch off at these times, like a black-gowned Durham student gabbling through a grace-before-meat in the ancient hall in the evening?  Did the priestly incantations in ancient Egypt fall on ears equally calloused by usage?  Or were the fellahin so well rehearsed in their parts by the priests of the Pharaohs that they played them like zombies?  I had been brought up to give a child’s implicit trust to the ecclesiastical priests, believing them to be natural parts of the human community just as the power that made blood coagulate over a knee wound, or the bonds of frost that arrested the flow of water in winter, were parts of the physical world.  History, I had imagined, was the story of the natural reaction of free human beings to the circumstances of their life.  But I discovered that there are acts of the historical drama that are as stilted and jerky and artificial as the elaborate ritual of the generals on the roundabout in the film, “Oh’ what a lovely War”.  People are puppets on strings manipulated by the priests.  These priests exist to prop up an insecure fiction and keep the show on the road.  The cardinal in Osborne’s play asked Luther to consider the forces that would be unleashed if he encouraged the populace to ask questions.  It is the function of the priesthood to deploy all their magic to make questions taboo.  And therefore, if there is to be a renaissance, we have to encourage everybody to go on asking questions.
The high priests are worried.  One Sunday the BBC reviewed a book in which some deviant ecclesiastics denied the divinity of Jesus.  Then the BBC brought in a high priest from Oxford to combat this heresy.  Like an official guardian, protective of a ward’s innocence, they were so frightened to allow the ward to come to his or her own conclusion about the book, that they couldn’t allow even a brief account of the book to go out without an official disclaimer and a warning.  It was like Pravda injecting the faithful against possible contagion.  The BBC and Pravda share the priestly duty to propagate the dogmas of the system.  Both distrust people’s ability to reach their own conclusions; always there is the shepherding, the denial of freedom of thought.  It was only in the seventies that the evidence of widespread indoctrination, of the doctoring of the facts, began to be widely discussed.  To emerge from a ubiquitous indoctrination is a long, slow process.  A question here, a doubt there, an observation from a foreign visitor.  Occasionally in their exuberance, the high priests overdo it, as in the jubilee, and there is a jolt to conciousness.  The Duke of Edinburgh appears in technicolour as fantastically bemedalled as ex-President Idi Amin, and people register the comparison and file the memory for future reference.  The still small voice of the human spirit utters a doubt in the midst of the priestly diapason.  An atmosphere of tolerant irreverence is spreading in Britain, even within the priestly castes.
Down the ages a persisting scepticism has survived the united onslaught of the priesthoods.  Maverick characters like Roger Bacon, Paracelsus, Shelley and Paine and Blake, in spite of intense vilification, have gone on questioning the current dogmas.  Charlatans, dreamers, agitators, they have been labelled, but their message has got through and we start making our own private and simple researches.  It’s like being brought up to believe in angels and then being encouraged to dissect the bulging muscles that power a bird’s wings and enquiring how those swan-like wings, attached to an angel’s back, operated.  More people are putting two and two together and wondering why they get a different answer from the official answer.  We are not alone in wondering why the priesthoods spread not enlightenment but obscurity.  Three thousand years ago Zoroaster said something like that.  Ormuzd was the god of light, truth, frankness, and the sun; and Ahriman was the god of secrecy, cunning, diplomacy, darkness, and night.  Mani, the founder of Manichaeism, took up the same vision of life, two centuries after Jesus.  He said that man fell from light into darkness, that he is being disentangled and redeemed from the darkness, and that Jesus sought so to redeem him.  Thus the prophets were on the side of the light, and the churches and schools which they founded gradually crept away into the darkness and became indistinguishable from it.  I found little sense of light, of enlightenment, in the Scottish church, or school, of my boyhood.  They perpetuated the darkness, the complicated thinking, the incomprehensibility, and the diplomatic relations with the state.  It taught us to submit, to “close your eyes and bow your head” and worship the existing state of things, the accepted ideas.  In 1975 a seven-year-old girl was hit with a leather strap in an Edinburgh primary school for having had her eyes open during the grace that preceded a school meal.
“Seeing many things, but thou observest not; opening the ears, but he heareth not.
“But this is a people robbed and spoiled; they are all of them snared in holes, and they are hid in prison houses; they are for a prey, and none delivereth; for a spoil, and none saith, Restore.”
These words are intelligible to us because we are also snared in holes by the priesthoods and hid in prison houses and preyed upon and despoiled.  Equally relevant is Isaiah’s message of hope.  In fifteen words he formulated one of the principles of life, the power of survival.  “A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench.”  Our pupils are bruised by examination failure, a twentieth century refinement of large-scale torture; buckets of cold water are thrown over them by the job centres.  The human spirit survives, unbroken and unquenched, and declares, “We shall overcome one day.”  Isaiah described what that emancipation could be like.  “Ye shall go out with joy, and be lead forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the fields shall clap their hands.”  I’ve seen that happen, an explosion of joy, when we’ve taken the sons and daughters of Fife miners to the Scottish mountains.  “I’d like to bide here all the time,” one of them told me.  He was expressing an awareness of what life could be like if we took over from the controllers.  We could be standing on top of the world.  But the controllers of our state (as of Isaiah’s) don’t want to contemplate such an emancipation.  They seek to prevent it by taking the meaning out of the message.  They do that in schools and kirks by giving the impression that Isaiah is living in a limbo and therefore has no relationship to our time and place , and thus implying that there’s no point in trying to extort concrete meaning out of what he said.  It’s all metaphorical and “spiritual” and “prophetic”.  By that they mean incomprehensible to our earthly understanding.
At the time I was baffled by the obscurity of the scriptural readings and I vaguely believed that this was of the nature of prophetic writing.  You weren’t supposed to really understand it; but in some magical way exposure to it did you good.  Today I find it incredible that a large majority of adults should have suffered this unintelligibility without demanding, and going on demanding, an explanation.  I believe that at the core of all of us there is an instinct to extort meaning out of what we hear and see and read.  But the instinct is frustrated, baffled, and we can’t even get at what it is that prevents us from enquiring.  There is no other word for our condition than imprisonment.  Some controlling power vetoes the communication of enlightening knowledge.  Let me give an example of the effect of the veto.  Isaiah’s name was constantly coming up in these kirk services.  I ettled to know what kind of man he was, his working life, his food, his clothes, the women he knew, and above all what he was going on about.  But there was a universal blank, a shut-down on intelligence about him.  I believe now that it was the kirk ministers and not Isaiah himself who clogged up the channels of communication.  Some of his writing was clear and vivid.

“The smith with the tongs both worketh in the coals, and fashioneth it with hammers, and worketh it with the strength of his arms: yea, he is hungry, and his strength faileth: he drinketh no water and is faint.

“The carpenter stretcheth out his rule, he marketh it out with a line, he fitteth it with planes, and he marketh it out with the compass.”

If he could write as clearly as that about the smith and the carpenter, why should the rest of what he was trying to put across, his main ideas, be so obscure?  Recently I looked again at what he had written, with eyes less glazed than when as a youngster I tried to follow the minister’s reading of “the Old Testament lesson for this morning”.  I suggest that these words are not as remote as we were led to believe.

“To open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoner from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house.

“And I will bring the blind by a way that they know not: I will lead them in paths that they have not known: I will make darkness light before them, and crooked things straight.  These things will I do unto them, and not forsake them.

“Hear, ye deaf: and look, ye blind, that ye may see.

“Seeing many things, but thou observest not; opening the ears, but he heareth not.

“But this is a people robbed and spoiled; they are all of them snared in holes, and they are hid in prison houses; they are for a prey, and none delivereth; for a spoil, and none saith, Restore.”

These words are intelligible to us because we also are snared in holes by the priesthoods and hid in prison houses and preyed upon and despoiled.  Equally relevant is Isaiah’s message of hope.  In fifteen words he formulated one of the principles of life, the power of survival.  “A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench.”  Our pupils are bruised by examination failure, a twentieth-century refinement of large-scale torture;  buckets of cold water are thrown over them by the job centres.  The human spirit survives, unbroken and unquenched, and declares, “We shall overcome one day.”  Isaiah described what that emancipation could be like.  “Ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the fields shall clap their hands.”  I’ve seen that happen, an explosion of joy, when we’ve taken the sons and daughters of Fife miners to the Scottish mountains.  “I’d like to bide here all the time,” one of them told me.  He was expressing an awareness of what life could be like if we took over from the controllers.  We could be standing on top of the world.  But the controllers of our state (as of Isaiah’s) don’t want to contemplate such an emancipation.  They seek to prevent it by taking the meaning out of the message.  They do that in schools and kirks by giving the impression that Isaiah is living in a limbo and therefore has no relationship to our time and place, and thus implying that there’s no point in trying to extort concrete meaning out of what he said.  It’s all metaphorical and “spiritual” and “prophetic”.  By that they mean incomprehensible to our earthy understanding.
I discovered that once I had escaped from half a lifetime’s indoctrination of reverence towards the existing priesthoods and their insufficient and unsatisfying explanations, there was a feeling almost of exhilaration, of relief at being free of the burden of having to try and reconcile my inmost thoughts and feelings with the prevailing doctrines.  Everything, everything, was open for reconsideration.  New hypotheses, wild surmises, presented themselves for examination.  For example there was that agonising horror story of Abraham about to slaughter his son. (He really did mean to cut his throat.)  But he saw a ram caught in the thicket and he stopped when he heard a voice saying that he needn’t kill Isaac.  The Scottish kirk presented it to us as a fairy story, a tragedy narrowly averted by supernatural intervention, and that turned us off.  We would have entered into the dilemma of a human being, at an early stage of history, torn between his love for his son and the dreadful compulsions imprinted on him by his priests, and desperate.  Why did the ministers not seek within themselves for a deeper explanation of the story?  I think they realised that their kirk’s authority depended on a restriction of the privilege of hearing  ‘voices’.  Our lives are still beset with hoodoos and the priests capitalise on these fears.  The possibility that we too, might hear a ‘voice’ encouraging us to challenge a hoodoo was not one that they could contemplate with equanimity.  We were not encouraged to confer on our private doubts the authenticity of ‘voices’.  People who heard voices were supposed to be crackers.  In France they were mocked as ‘illumines.  Ordinary, stable people don’t feel like that.
But the norm is a fiction of the governing elite.  If we were all encouraged to listen to our voices and fearlessly share their message with one another, we would realise that we are not ‘abnormal’ in harbouring fears and uncertainties and hesitations and unspeakable thoughts which run counter to the current view of what is normal.  Our hopes and fears and dreams are too multitudinous to be contained within a Christian priesthood’s creed and they rove back through wild centuries to nomads and shamans and all the myths and songs by which our forefathers strove to make sense of their tumultuous life.  Maybe in the end it is all random and doesn’t make sense and there is no working pattern into which its components can be fitted.  Maybe it’s like the deck-chair in Candid Camera, specially contrived to fool all those who thought they could set it up to take the baffled holiday-maker’s weight.  But there is in all of us a deep, finally irrepressible, conviction that we have the right to apply all our intelligence and perception in an effort to extort some answer out of the tantalising mystery of life on earth.  We are breaking out from imposed explanations into our own searches for reality; we want to get to grips with it ourselves.  We have an insatiable hunger and thirst for reality.
An old roadman from our Aberdeenshire village went to visit Robert Burns’s house at Alloway.  He told us that when the caretaker wasn’t looking he closed his fist over Burns’s bed-clothes.  “I was just longing to get a feel of his bed,” he explained.  He had a longing to grasp with his senses the physical realities of Burns’s life, to enter into a fuller intelligibility of what it was like to be Robert Burns.  The words which have been used to convey to us the experience of others are generally poor substitutes for the reality.  In the daily commerce of speech, words are processed and homogenised and lose their tang.  In the early days of the 1939 - 1945 war the RAF trained us in the use of the bayonet.  We advanced from one line of straw-stuffed sacks to another, and the instructor pointed out that the difference with real life was the suction of a human body, which makes it difficult to pull the bayonet out.  You have to shove your foot against the bayoneted belly and at the same moment pull with all your strength.  Such brutal reality didn’t stain the pages of my history books.  They didn’t go in much for the drama of military mutilation.  Nor did the kirk ministers convey to us the reality of a Roman crucifixion, the soldiers collecting at the regimental stores the nails of the prescribed length, the victims in incredible suffering shitting themselves, so that the stench of the crucified gladiators on the Appian Way turned the stomachs of the passers-by.  The kirk didn’t dwell much on the cry of stark despair that Jesus uttered on the cross, “My God, why have you deserted me?”
Arthur Koestler wrote a short story in which he tried to recreate, to bring alive, the last hours of Jesus.  He’d been flogged and the weals of the lash disfigured his body.  The heavy beam of wood cut into his shoulder as he carried it.  Maybe worst of all was the heart-ache and the engulfing doubt.  The voice he heard, howling like a wolf’s, it couldn’t be his.
In THE FOREIGNER  A Search for the First Century Jesus, Desmond Stewart also tried to dig out the reality for himself.  His background of English public school and Oxford and the near East entitles his conclusions to a hearing when he puts Pilate under enquiry.  “He is a gentleman, of the equestrian, not the patrician, order; similar to the public schoolboys who ran the British empire on Dr Arnold’s model: a blend of the classics, biblical pieties, practicality.  Modest to their betters, not to others.”  “The ruthless Pilate had been educated in a curriculum which taught how to lead a sentence to a euphonius conclusion.  Like other Roman schoolboys he was familiarised not only with rhetorical arguments for the simple life or the claims of patriotism, but with a knowledge of such teachers as Plato, Zeno and Epicurus.  In the decoration of his palace, in the arrangement of his dinners, he was no barbarian.  The survival of the soul after death, the nature of true courage, such dinner topics were discussed after the suppression of a riot or the deduction of temple funds to finance an aqueduct.”  When Jesus, under questioning, said he wanted to reveal the truth, Pilate replied, ‘Ah truth.’  “The world-weary voice is a sound of Europe: it echoes from Greek sophists to Maugham and Malraux. ‘What on earth is that?’ ”
But nowhere is the likeness of our western civilisation to the first century middle east clearer than in the questions that former high priest Annas put to Jesus.  Who constituted his disciples?  What doctrines did he teach? “These are the questions, if we substitute cell and ideology for disciples and doctrines, put to middle east dissidents today, with the first electric shocks.”
Enquirers like Koestler and Stewart open up a richness of understanding unavailable to the worshippers who humbly accept unintelligibility.  If religion is regarded as a separate ministry manned by experts trained in the interpretation of holy texts, the days of the church are numbered, like those of the school.  The ecclesiastical priesthood presented an apparently integrated vision of reality by dropping all the discordant elements or explaining them away.  But these intractable questions become louder and won’t go away.  Sometimes they are articulated into a shout of defiance as in the ending of Koestler’s short story.  Jesus says, with his last breaths, “Eli, Eli, how can you bear watching this ?  Thou dumb spirit, vapour of the desert, ignoble absence, thou art not, hast never been.  Only a parable.  And my own death another parable; they will remember it and twist its meaning.  They will torture and kill in the name of a parable.  They will slay children for the love of a metaphor and burn women alive in praise of an allegory.  And thus will your will be done, not mine.”
These are the ultimate things that the story is about.  Does the old boy up there exist (in whatever insubstantial or ethereal or different cosmic form) standing for love and compassion, honesty and all that about whatsoever things are true and lovely and just; or does he not, as considerable recent evidence indicates?  That’s the question, THE question.  It’s no good pretending that we know the answer.  We don’t.  Jesus didn’t.  What is finally wrong with our civilisation is that it pays our upbringers to persuade us to be content with penny-in-the-slot answers.
I’m not sure we need the word religion any more, but if we do, it means a much richer thing than the ecclesiastics’ department.  It is one with art and music and education and science and politics, indivisible, the way in which we grope after reality, trying to comprehend the mystery.  In our yearning to understand reality we have to be encouraged to support all the lingering doubts in the minds of all of us, that the ecclesiastics try to dispel, we have to use them, for they are further clues to the mystery.  And we have to examine also the reliability of the instruments by which we seek to grasp the truth.  For example, unless we are put on our guard, we take words too seriously, as if they had a separate existence, an ultimate reality.  Because we were brought up to trust adults and all the people set in authority over us, we believed that if there was a word, there was bound to be a thing which the word stood for, in the same way as we believed in the value of pound notes.  It was unthinkable that anyone would devalue the currency by issuing words that didn’t stand for anything.  But sometimes, like Koestler’s parables and allegories and metaphors, words are shadows, not substantial things.  And sometimes they are string-bags, temporary make-do’s for the portage of an idea which will suffice until we get home and can handle it with more sensitivity and precision.  With a little help and encouragement and leisure, teenagers cotton on to what I’m saying.  They can handle words with discrimination.  It’s not a skill which the educational and ecclesiastical priests encourage them to develop.  They hurry the pupils along and chivvy them to learn lesson and repeat the ritual, not wishing them to linger over an inspection of the words that comprise the lesson and the ritual.
One of the words I’d invite pupils to inspect is ‘individual’.  In my teens I had never lingered on its meaning.  The ecclesiastical priests quoted Paul who said that we are members one of another, but the idea soon withered away, having no depth of soil.  We thought of the local tennis club of which we were members, a friendly but loose relationship.  It wasn’t until the zoology professor at Aberdeen described a colony of corals that I questioned my previous acceptance of what an individual is, and threw away the string-bag.  The colony is indivisible, it is the individual.  The bits that stick out have no existence except in relation to the whole colony.  Then I realised what Paul meant when he said that we are members one of another.  I knew that members means limbs and that limbs do not have an individual existence independent of the whole body.  Our teachers chose to conceal from us our membership one of another.  I had not realised that school and church are united in imprinting on us the belief that life on earth is ruthlessly competitive.  I just thought that this separateness was the natural order.  It was cissy to admit to longing for tenderness and sympathy, a desire to escape from the endless combativeness of our civilisation.  Our virility demanded its denial.  The heartbreak of our alienation from one another is nowhere more poignantly expressed than by Matthew Arnold in the best poem he wrote.

Yes: in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know.

But when the moon their hollows lights,
And they are swept by balms of spring,
And in their glens, on starry nights,
The nightingales divinely sing;
And lovely notes, from shore to shore,
Across the sounds and channels pour;

O then a longing like despair
Is to their farthest caverns sent!
For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent.
Now round us spreads the watery plain -
O might our marges meet again!

Who order’d that their longing’s fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cool’d?
Who renders vain their deep desire? -
A God, a God their severance ruled;
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unpumb’d, salt, estranging sea.

Arnold’s desire was for a merging of one’s separate life in a fuller, deeper flow.  A hundred years later, Koestler spoke of the oceanic feeling.  Arnold sensed that some power had intervened to thwart humanity’s longing for union.  He sensed that a god had rendered vain this deep desire, but he never got round to identifying the god.
It wasn’t until I read Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid that I discovered the identity.  Church and school had not revealed to me the extent to which, up to two hundred years ago, European communities (and ours) had lived successfully as members one of another.  Kropotkin said that it took nearly 4,000 Acts of Parliament between 1760 and 1844 to destroy communal ownership of land in England.  The same happened in France, Germany, Austria and Belgium.  “The King’s sword and the Church’s fire” (he said) sought to destroy co-operation and to make people believe that individualism is the only secure base for the maintenance of society.  I was heartened to read that this distinguished Russian biologist and statesman had studied common ownership of land in the counties of Forfar and Inverness and in Kilmorie and saw it as an ancient custom that we shared with the communities of Europe.  I began to see my childhood days in rural Aberdeenshire in a new light.  One day at the age of ten, returning on a bicycle from delivering a telegram, I saw, pinned on a tree, a notice headed ‘Love Darg’.  A love darg is a piece of work undertaken for the love of it, that is to say, without payment.  The notice bade everyone to share in the turnip-hoeing at the croft of our nearest neighbour who couldn’t work because his leg had been broken by the kick of a horse.  It was a certificate of our rural ancestry, our ancient kinship with the whole continent which was bound together in a spirit of mutual aid.  I was happy when Kropotkin revealed to me my background.  As a child I had had no idea that we had those close ties with the country people of Europe, lived in the same neighbourly relations with one another as they did, were members of the same civilisation.

We are at heart better than the characters that our imprinted education has made of us.  Humanity and loving-kindness keep surging back in history and tenderness outflows when the barriers are down.  German and British soldiers played football in no-man’s-land on that first Christmas of World War 1, but the chiefs hastened to stop the football and get the war going again.  At a conference in Northern Ireland I was surprised to discover how well the Protestant and Catholic headmasters and headmistresses got on together.  It wasn’t just professional courtesy; there was a quality of love that illuminated the conversation around the coffee tables after the evening meal.  I suggested to them that they should pension off their political chiefs and take over the framing of a new dispensation together.  A charming, smiling nun shook her head.  I continued with the argument, quoting a Catholic bishop whose uncompromising attitudes were different from those that the nuns had been expressing all evening.  She replied, “Perhaps the bishops have a clearer understanding of the dangers that our co-operation would lead us into.  They are wiser and more farsighted than we are.”  I left it at that, but I wish all the people of Northern Ireland could learn a little irreverence towards those who control their thinking  “All we are saying is give peace a chance.”  It is these controllers, throughout the world, who have closed our minds, making us innaccessible to the possibilitity of major change.  It was they who moulded the stereotype of Scotsmen and Scotswomen, just as they moulded the stereotypes of Irish Catholics and Iris Protestants, German and French and Americans and Afrikaners.  This is not the real us.  This is what our upbringing has made of us.  We are at heart diferent, and I can see the real nature of us, imprisoned for so long within an alien bond, now breaking through in our children.  In another twenty years or less the natural exuberance will have freed itself, and strangers will try to explain why what is called the Scottish national character has changed.
I was born into an agricultural society, inured to ploughing along  furrow after squelching furrow, scything swathe after swathe of grass or oats, plodding all the time.  For farm workers, life hadn’t altered much for six hundred years.  John Ball, itinerant preacher of the Peasants’ Revolt, said, “We have the payne and traveyle, rayne and wind in the feldes.”  In 1367 he was excommunicated for promulgating  “errors, schisms, and scandals against the Pope, archbishops, bishops, and clergy.”  The twentieth century Aberdeenshire church had the farm workers under firmer control.  There was no need for excommunications.  We were subdued to accept lives of drudgery without complaint.  “God hath given each his station”, we sang in church.  The Presbyterian priesthood conformed to the political.
I imagine that the nomadic society, which preceded the era of the settled agriculturalists, would have brought up their children differently.  Their survival required initiative, the ability to make speedy individual decisions.  We are reverting to nomadic requirements.  All over Europe, in Scotland and Brittany and the Basque country and Galicia and Andalucia, local tribes are demanding the right to make their own local decisions without forever referring to a centralised and containing priesthood.  I would hazard a guess that more people are admitting to a nostalgia for an open air life, sun and sky and the wind on the heath.  Nomadic peoples, we are told, had more personal dignity and no great class inequalities.  I think we are altering our values, becoming less attached to comfort and security and possessions.  In his book, To Have or to Be, the German-American psychiatrist, Erich Fromm, said that we bolster ourselves up with possessions because we are insecure.  Money proves to our neighbours, if not to ourselves, that we have achieved success.  Capitalist and communist education alike propagate the religion of having and glorify material possessions.  Certificates and degrees are ‘securities’, insurances against insecurity.  There is reassurance even in the words.  A certificate is something that makes certain.  If you’ve got one of these, you can rest assured of your future in the same way as the insecure people of Wittenburg in 1517 could be assured that their sufferings in purgatory would be cancelled if they bought an ‘indulgence’ from the papal emissary, John Tetzel.  It was an incredible confidence trick.  I didn’t realise how blatant and impudent the trick was xxxxxxxx  until Bamber Gascoigne, in a television programme, produced an actual indulgence and I looked at it close-up and realised that it was only an ordinary, grubby piece of paper.  The twentieth century school tries to invest its certificates with the same aura of magic as the fifteenth century Catholic church invested its indulgences; both of them trading in insecurity.
I’d like to interpolate an autobiographical note.  As a student at Aberdeen University studying the effect that the sale of indulgences had on the progress of the Reformation, I felt that there was something unco about this scrip, a talisman of such potent magic that it extended into the next world.  Even a Presbyterian imagination was influenced by its power.  It was only when Gascoigne showed us a real, actual indulgence that its spell was broken for me.  There’s nothing like concrete reality for demystifying priestly teachings.  I had not realised that the priestly con-trick was so simple and shameless or that people could be so easily taken in.
We teachers should be demystifying the school examination certificates.  Some pupils have already seen through the certificates and make them into paper aeroplanes and throw them in the air when they get into the playground.  I’d like to think that, in the same way as the Wittenberg farmworkers, by making fun of Tetzel’s indulgences, were preparing the way for the Reformation, our twentieth-century pupils are preparing the way for the educational revolution.
The indulgences and certificates are only the more obvious signs of a wholesale trading in unreality.  Slowly realism percolates down into the understanding of the most deeply indoctrinated.  I was brought up to believe that the church was our guide and friend, the shadow of a great rock in a weary land, an ever-present on whom we could call in time of trouble.  But it is not so.  Religious education in Scotland is as uncaring as the school education.  The ecclesiastical priests have taken up service with Baal, the god of Capitalism who, as Elijah said, is unavailable when we ordinary folk call on him.

Chapter four

THE POLITICAL PRIESTHOOD

"It is the privilege of the common people of England to be represented by the greatest and learnedest and wealthiest and wisest persons that can be chosen out of the nation."

-	The Earl of Clarendon (seventeenth-century constitutional royalist).

	The capitalist con-trick is played at its most audacious by the political priests, the MPs.  Their exemplar was Richard II who rode fearlessly into the midst of the Peasants' Revolt shouting, "I myself will be your leader!"  Six centuries of being taken in has hardly diminished our credulity.  Pitt was the great Commoner.  Gladstone, we were told, was one of us.  (I was really surprised to discover, late in my education, that he was a product of Eton.)  He was followed by Asquith, also knocking out his pan on our behalf.  Richard II all over again.  
	But then came the Labour Party.  There was a new world beginning.  In the North Kirk in Aberdeen the Rev James Barr, a Labour MP from Glasgow, giving a Christmas sermon, said, "A new star has risen in the east, the British Labour Party."  Here at last....   But when Ramsay MacDonald insisted on wearing knee-breeches on the occasion of presenting the first Labour cabinet to King George V (although the king said it wasn't necessary) there was a jolt to our credulity.  And when MacDonald over-stepped the limits by collaborating with Baldwin in a national government, Labour made a fresh start.  In post-war Britain, Major Attlee stepped forward to be our leader.  He had integrity and he was better than most of them but he finally couldn't escape from his inexorable public school upbringing.  
	Slowly the gleam faded, like the almost imperceptible dimming of lights in the theatre.  It was a drama of slow decline and fall, of strange characters prowling about in the wings.  In his book, No Shining Armour, the Labour MP for Blyth in Northumberland, Eddie Milne (an Aberdeen plumber) described how the fixers were taking over.  It might have lingered on like that for a long time, but Wilson's honours list laughed the characters off the stage.  The Party was over.  
	The political movement that fills the vacuum left by the Labour Party, whether it is an offshoot from the present party or a new regrouping, will have no great future unless it understands clearly why the Labour Party failed.  It failed because it was cradled in a capitalist system of education.  Most of its members believed what they were taught at school and were unaware of the profound influence that their schooling had on their philosophy of life.  
	From random sources of information they are beginning to know better.  In spite of its exotic background the television serial, The Jewel in the Crown, was uncannily familiar to Scottish watchers.  It was bizarre for us to view the British raj anaesthetised on an Indian table and dissected, because the comparison of the conquerors of the Indians with the conquerors of our own people at home was inescapable.  The film showed the rajah whose English-public-school-educated son spoke posh English, the British army officers who kicked the Indians around, the Indian NCOs who had been brain-washed into an attitude of contempt for their own fellow Indians.  In Scotland, the English-public-school-educated sons of the former highland chiefs speak the identical posh English of the rajah's son, an alienated gentry in St. Andrew's House in Edinburgh push ordinary people around, their NCOs both in the services and in civilian life have been brain-washed into an attitude of contempt for their fellow-Scots.  The comparison is not surprising since for two centuries the Indian people and the Scottish people endured an identical pattern of conquest under the Hanoverian kings.  Cumberland conquered Scotland at the Battle of Culloden in 1746 and Clive conquered India at the battle of Plassey in 1757.  Like the rajahs, the Scottish chiefs collaborated with the conqueror for the sake of not forfeiting their estates.  They became insensitive to the feelings of their own countrymen, uncaring, unkind, lacking the warm feeling of kin, and associated with the alien oppressor.  They dragooned their countrymen into service in the conqueror's armies.  
	But in the Scottish classrooms there was no clear market-report of this take-over.  Working-class pupils in Scotland are not taught the facts of political life.  They are fed a romantic story of noble characters outwith their ken, heroes whose excellence contrasts with our mediocrity, who are fearless when we would be scared, selfless when we would be selfish, who show initiative beyond our imagining.  The basic failure in education in western schools is that it perpetuates romantic fibs.  Recently a Moslem bewailed the ease with which centuries of Islamic tradition disintegrate before the temptation of material self-interest in the Arab countries.  It is no new phenomenon.  The Indian rajahs and the highland chiefs alike sold out to the Hanoverian kings.  In Scotland the noble folklore about the clan and its caring chief went for a Burton.  			Probably most people would have done the same if they were confronted with the same dilemma.  But the schools owe it to their pupils to give them a sober, unromanticised account of how most people react to temptation.  It is not the function of education in a democracy to propagate the lordly account that the conquerors put out about their conquest, or to conceal the apartheid that they created, on the one hand the Hanoverian aristocracy abetted by rajahs and chiefs, on the other hand the ordinary people of India and of Scotland who bore the brunt of the defeat.  The conquerors imposed on India and on Scotland the same richly-detailed pattern of control, a beautifully orchestrated symphony.  The artists were brought in, Kipling in India, Barrie and Buchan in Scotland, to weave a romantic tapestry, the colourful clothes of the Indians and the pawky speech of the Scots adding a vivid patch to the glorious pattern.  In lavish ceremonials, theatrically presented and backed with trumpets, they decorated the Gurkhas and the Jocks with ribbons and medals.  Coronations and durbars, like Nuremburg rallies, confirmed our emotional attachment to the grand design, hiding the sober realities.  In both countries the conquerors brought the NCOs, both in army and civilian life, into competition for advancement in the service of the overlords.  The grand policy in India and Scotland, as in South Africa, depended on apartheid.  
	It is against these two centuries of alien rule and the imposition of alien values that politicians have to view any programme for the establishment of a different kind of society, alike in India and Scotland.  We might reasonably have expected Tory and Liberal MPs to be part of this policy of conquest, but we thought the Labour MPs would be different.  We underestimated the powers of sophisticated persuasion employed by the conquerors.  They were able to recruit into their service ambitious Indians and ambitious Labour MPs in Britain, keeping them waiting tantalisingly in the anterooms to fuel their ardour.  In turn these junior officers of the establishment recruited their equally ambitious NCOs into the maintenance of apartheid.  Many Scottish teachers (the civilian equivalent, in the eyes of their overlords, of NCOs) who have come from working-class homes look down on their working-class pupils, shout at them like sergeant- majors, preach about discipline, hit them with leather belts, dissociate themselves from them and their speech and customs and attitudes, lack kindness, kinship.  The Labour MPs have been part and parcel of the imposition and maintenance of this apartheid.  The comprehensive school did little more than make the traditional Tory curriculum and view of society available to a larger number of working-class children.  In the headlong rush to get examination marks, as few questions about our society are raised in the
comprehensive schools as in the traditional grammar schools.  Handed down from generations in Scottish rural life is the story that the laird said to the priest, "I'll keep them poor and you'll keep them ignorant."  The advent of the Labour Party caused scarcely a hiccup in the priestly tradition.  For the majority of working-class pupils the schools are still cold, forbidding places.  
	The Indian parallel helps us to get into perspective the nature of our own Scottish society and the continuing roles allocated to us by the alien masters.  Working-class pupils in Scottish schools still feel that it is they who are the aliens in their own land.  School and theatre feed into them attitudes of contempt for their own origins, their broad accent.  Even the words of our daily language, noble, common, high class dye our thoughts and attitudes.  Double-speak came into English centuries before Orwell's 1984.  Our total immersion in the values of capitalism has coloured the deepest pools of our minds.  Many working-class Scots, particularly in rural areas, are brain-rinsed true-blue.  We are not different from the Indians who were brain-washed into collaboration with the British raj.  Political change must begin with the nourishment with which our children are fed.  
	It was inevitable that the majority of Labour MPs should collaborate.  Few of them had read Browning's long poem, A Leader of Revolt.  They are essentially defenders (as the Russians are) of the system which makes a chasm between officers and other ranks, academic and non-academic, managers and workers, MPs and voters.  They are amenable to authority, and marching in step and saluting.  They wouldn't deviate from the Westminster rules of decorum.  They see civilisation through Lord Clark's eyes and themselves through the eyes of the Earl of Clarendon.  They have accommodated themselves to the system that we thought they were replacing.  They have taken upon themselves the traditional characteristics of the old priesthoods, - the discouraging of independent, amateur enquiry; the retention of policy-making within the official ranks; respect for hierarchy and obedience to its decrees.  (Wilson and Kinnock spoke with obvious approval of "the smack of firm government".)  As a result they have become ossified in their thinking.  The higher you go in the echelons, said Galbraith in a study of power, the less is the original thought.  A cabinet minister, like a chief priest, has to believe in his creed and defend it.  The political prelates can hardly be regarded as research workers, following the truth.  Galbraith refers to 'plausible myths' with which people in power delude us, and themselves.  For example the tycoon says that the consumer is sovereign and that he (the tycoon) can prosper only by giving the consumer what he wants.  In the same way, I suppose, the inner circle of a political party does the same.  "This is what the People want," they say.  They are both like the ecclesiastical priest who controls his congregation by saying, "This is what God wants."  
	Studies such as Galbraith's are reaching a wider audience and more people are asking more questions about the pronouncements of the high priests of politics and the law and education and literature and economics and finance.  But there is still a feeling, even among Labour MPs, that if we all get into the act and begin asking questions, things will get out of hand.  Their caution is understandable.  If the demystification goes on, and especially if it is attended by glints of humour, the political gurus will be seen to be just ordinary sinners like the rest of us.  Some years ago, for example, social anthropologists reduced the political crisis in Britain in 1916, in which Lloyd George replaced Asquith, to a leadership squabble conducted according to tribal rules similar to those which govern such squabbles among the Swat Pathans of Pakistan.  We had been accustomed to regard as quaint those practices of natives tucked away in remote valleys somewhere in the region of the Hindukush.  Now our attention was drawn to the similarity of quaint Westminster customs.  There is the same advancing and retreating, the priestly rules, the speech patterns, the concealing of raw ambition under the required noble posturings, the belief of combatants that spectators are watching reverently, the noble Asquith and the noble Lloyd George re-enacting the duels of the Iliad.  What is reassuring about the work of the social anthropologists who are coolly reassessing these historical tournaments is the absence of anger.  "This mode of enquiry does not deny the existence of altruistic action or the fact that men have ideals."  
	The discussion of such things is appropriate to the secondary schools.  Democracy is still at the string-and-safety-pin stage and there are many more things to discuss than my schools and university led me to believe.  I did think that it had all been sewn up long ago.  Some of the unresolved issues reach to the foundation of our society.  There is this emphasis, in the schools, on leadership.  Maybe we could look into that.  Is it an obsession to be expected in a society divided into leaders and led?   If an inferiority complex drives people to publicly-acclaimed achievement, is the emphasis on leadership a symptom of seeking escape from a general climate of        ?   I don't know.  What I'm saying is that we could work out the answers to many of these questions in the classroom, and not accept the say-so from the politicians, who are  ?  Youngsters are notably forgiving towards teachers who have relinquished all pretensions, and treat the teachers' shortcomings with humour and generosity.  We need tribunes of the people who have, like these teachers, shed their claims to superior wisdom and who, rejecting apartheid, accept that we are all in on this political scene together.  A healthy society needs the participation of everybody.  It needs the sanity of the majority to redress the occasional imbalance of the minority.  The words health and wholeness are closely related.  A whole society (as distinguished from an apartheid society) is more likely to address itself with energy and competence to all its problems than a divided society.  The Chinese have lately discovered that if people are convinced that they count, each one of them, and can make changes in their society, they develop greater confidence in coping with the ordinary problems of everyday life.  There is a release of potential.  As a schoolteacher I'd like to testify that those of my associates who have given freedom to pupils to think and develop their own thoughts and trust their intuitions have become aware of the potential of ability scattered widely throughout the community.  I have to put on record my own experience of the gleams, the insights, the ingenuity and initiatives, the goodwill of those who are patronisingly referred to as ordinary pupils as well as their longing to be fully accepted and to co-operate fully.  
	In his book, Children of War, Roger Rosenblatt said that children, "remind us that... we never lost any of the virtues of childhood.   The acquisition of size, power, zeal, authority and territory may have pushed our best feelings aside or below, but we did not really lose them....  The trick of living satisfactorily as an adult lies in being able to unearth that gentleness and to then apply to it a more complicated life." 

Chapter five

AN ANATOMY OF PRIESTCRAFT

"The schools are quite literally destructive of human beings. I think they are the most grim, joyless places on the face of the earth. They are needlessly authoritarian and repressive... because nobody ever asks why: why the rules, or why the curriculum?"

-  Charles E Silberman, author of Crisis in the
Classroom, the Remaking of American Education.

	When I left Summerhill in Aberdeen, I left a priestcraft with which I had been associated, man and boy, since I first entered one of its seminaries at the age of five.  The momentum of its influence took months to run down.  An Elizabethan wrote, 
We shall grow old apace and die
Before we know our liberty.

I began slowly to know my liberty.  I had no idea that so much unchallenged
dogma controlled my life.  I realised how little time I had during my teaching career for independent enquiry.  There are snatches of classroom discussion, pub discussion, weekend conferences, books, but there is not enough opportunity to follow up the tentative conclusions reached.  One purpose of the work ethic, in school and in adult life, is to diminish the time available for extended private enquiry.  At last I had time to read more widely and freely, seeking enlightenment on many problems, the solution of which I had too lightly conceded to the priesthoods.  There were three studies in particular that spoke to my condition.  
	One of the minor surprises of my life is the manner in which, once I've embarked upon an enquiry, potential answers make themselves available.  Casually I switch on the television and somebody is proposing answers immediately relevant.  A friend writes and recommends a book he has chanced to read.  It is as if knowledge and insight, once set down in speech and writing, homes in on anybody seeking it.  At such a time I read a book, published in 1912, entitled, What Is and What Might Be.  The author, Edmond Holmes, was a senior inspector of schools in England at the turn of the century.  Significantly, he wrote the book when he had retired and had leisure to look back on his career in the educational system.  He tried to explain how the futility of our educational system had come about.  He found it had long, deep roots.  It wasn't just a hastily improvised product of the industrial system; its faults are the deficiencies of our civilisation.  As an inspector he went into an elementary school and asked the pupils a simple question.  A farmer had 126 sheep.  He bought another 9.   How many had he then?  Out of 50 boys, only one got the right answer.  Of the rest, a third multiplied 126 by 9; a third divided 126 by 9; a third subtracted 9 from 126.  Holmes said that this failure wasn't an exceptional happening in an otherwise efficient school-system.  It was a normal happening, and, to find the reason, he went back to the nature of our beliefs about good and evil and the fears and myths with which our forefathers confronted their world.  This book is the best attempt I know to explain why the western world got such a fixation on exams.  
	A liberal-minded teacher, reading school inspector Holmes's report in 1912, might have expected that teaching would become a liberal profession.   But Edmond Holmes had as little influence on the high priests of education in London in 1912 as inspector Matthew Arnold had, forty years earlier.  Education is not amenable to ideas, except in a minor and superficial way.   This is the basic mistake that modern liberal innovators make.  They believe that ours is a modern, liberal society and proposals for improvement will be considered on their merits.  It is not so.  Ours is a priestly society which resists change.  It took me most of my teaching career to make that discovery but Holmes had already set it down in print in 1912, analysing the way in which the ecclesiastical priests influenced the ideas of the educational priests and therefore of the whole society.  
Holmes's thesis starts with early man and his fumbling efforts to make sense of his world.  Early man dreamed about a world of heart's desire, and invented myths to explain why the real world wasn't like that, and how a good God could have created a bad world. The myth said that once upon a time the natural world and the supernatural world were one; but, in the garden of Eden, man spoiled it all and was driven out.  There was then two worlds, a supernatural world sharing in the glory of God, and a world of nature, fallen and accursed; and no communication between them.  God sent his son to re-establish communication and to advise man.  But how could man, if he were utterly evil and corrupt, understand and benefit from the son's advice?  That was a dilemma.  An ingenious answer was provided.  The answer was that intermediaries, priests, were appointed to interpret that son's advice and the Law.  That solution of the dilemma has continued to be accepted to this day.  Our world is run for us by intermediaries, special people who are not as other men.  (The word pharisee means separated.)  The answer is unconvincing because it doesn't cope with the further question, "If theses intermediaries are human and therefore evil and corrupt like the rest of humanity, how could they be trusted to interpret the Law wisely?"  This doubt had been expressed by the prophets Elijah and Amos; but the ecclesiastical priests, and their successors in other walks of life, evaded it, and maintained their monopoly in the interpretation of the Law.  No interpretations were to be accepted from poets or prophets or other amateurs outside the priestly profession.
	Theirs is a simple system of rules and mechanical obedience.  The pharisees wrote out the letter of the Law in the utmost detail.  (For example, no work was to be done on the sabbath day, and, since the definition of work included turning over the earth, a man idly scraping the earth with his foot was guilty of 'working' and thus breaking the law of the sabbath.)  The letter of the law took precedence over the spirit.  When Christianity extended far beyond the confines of Israel, the code of detailed law couldn't cover all the differences of climate and custom, and a controlling priesthood beyond Israel translated the legal code of the pharisees into a wider code.  Obedience to the one supernaturally commissioned church was the fundamental assumption of Catholicism.  The church controlled the outflowing of divine grace.  Its dominion over the souls of men would endure beyond time.  Its doctrine was infallible, and the church retained in its own hands all control of what the law meant, reinforcing its observance with rewards and punishments.  Mechanical
obedience meant the triumph of machinery over life.  
	Protestantism devised a dogmatism of its own to support those who, although disobedient to the Catholic despotism, feared to walk by their own inner light.  In an article in the Scotsman, John Cooney described Pope Leo XIII's efforts in 1898 to persuade the Presbyterians to re-enter the Catholic church.  Leo said that it was Christ's will that Peter and his successors would preserve Holy Writ intact and save people from the errors of private judgement.  The pope would have been encouraged to read, in reports of the unity talks then taking place between the Free Church and the United Presbyterian Church, that these Presbyterians laid it down that the scriptures must be understood in the sense of the doctrine of their church.  That is to say, the Free churchman was no more free than the Catholic churchman to make his own interpretations of scripture.
	The bonds of this priestly monopoly have continued to hold man in its grip.  In Islamic as well as Christian countries, education was largely education in the details of the law and the scriptures.  Last century in Britain, students training to be teachers had to pass a written examination which tested their knowledge of the dimensions of Noah's Ark and Solomon's Temple.  A senior educationist of the time was questioned about the value of this information.  Apparently unaware of its pharisaic precedents, he tried to give his own gloss to it.  He said that if a student knew the details of the Bible, it could be assumed that he would understand the divine truth it contained.  Schoolteachers modelled themselves on the ecclesiastical tradition and used the approved methods.  For example, history examinations are largely concerned with the memorising of historical details; perhaps the educationists would use the same method of justification, saying that if students know the battles of the Thirty Years' War, and the terms of the treaty that ended it, they will understand how it affected the development of Europe.  That is why educational reform has been superficial and ineffectual: it doesn't challenge the pervading priestly tradition in which we live and move and have our being.  
	Innovating is forbidden unless it is within the priestly dogma.  In a society that was changing only very slowly, the priests got away with this method of education.  But in our present rapidly-changing society its flaws stand out.  That is a basic truth that hasn't yet hit the prefects of our society.  They wanted us to develop a limited freedom of thought.  They encouraged enquiry into improved methods of transport and discouraged enquiry into new methods of human association.  But they can't have the one without the other.  In the educational system they played it safe.  I doubt if they realise that limiting education to the memorising of formulae has led to the lack of understanding of mathematics in the schools and the lack of understanding of economics and finance in the government.  The inability of the pupils inspected by Holmes to add up the farmer's sheep was no accident.  It was the inevitable effect of the pharisees' system of controlling thought by dictating answers or rigorously laying down formulas by the application of which the pupils are to find the answer.  They follow the appropriate formula, or, if they can't hit on the right formula, whichever formula they can remember.  Holmes's story applies to Westminster government in the nineteen-eighties.  Whether it is a 1912 arithmetic teacher or a 1984 BBC economics expert, the lessons are equally formal, formulae-based, lacking in lucidity.
	These two things, priestly monopoly and the nature of the school examination are complementary.  Many teachers and university lecturers still perpetuate the tradition.  Just as there are right answers, laid down in catechisms, to religious questions, there are right answers to educational questions.  Pupils and students memorise them and reproduce them in examinations.  If you don't reproduce the right answers, not only will you not qualify to become a priest in church or school (or lawcourt or political party) you will not qualify to get any sort of employment except menial.  The teacher, keeping control, lays down correct actions and creeds.  Pupils have to feel, see, say and do what the teacher tells them.  In the same way as the priests controlled the ecclesiastical world, the universities and schools claim to control the educational world.  They challenge the right of laymen to contribute to knowledge and understanding, and fight against intruders like uncertified teachers, bone-setters, water-diviners and all the unqualified rabble.  There are right answers to everything, vouchsafed only to the elect.  An alternative way of thinking is unthinkable.  The mediaeval church exhibited fifteen relics all claiming to be genuine foreskins of Jesus, but the faith of the faithful was not thereby diminished.  The modern educational system is similarly proof
against any demonstration of its own absurdity.
	Priestly domination wasn't without challengers, like Galileo.  Rather than risk the opening up of the whole of life and thought to the influence of new questions, the church permitted questions in the spheres of science and art and politics, and contained the infection by separating these from the spheres in which it still maintained undisputed control.  The effect of that estrangement, said Holmes, was that these things were regarded as secular, unspiritual, unrelated to the eternal questions about the nature of man and his life on the earth.  Life was split up into separate compartments.  The result was that scientists came to deify knowledge for its own sake, artists believed in art for art's sake, politicians regarded political power as intrinsically desirable, and schoolteachers regarded education as the acquisition of certificates.  Holmes longed for a re-synthesis of all these things into a concern with the quality of life and the upbringing of children.  He was disturbed by the alienation of teachers from an understanding of living and nourishment and by their concentration on the details of the educational Law.
	"All the inmates of these schools are cheating themselves with forms, figures, marks and such other empty symbols.... Timetables, schemes of work, syllabuses, record books, examination result books, and the rest, - hours and hours are spent by the teacher on the clerical work which these mechanical contrivances demand."  That useless activity culminates in the examinations, which Holmes saw as reflecting and causing our national outlook on life.  "The examination system, with its implicit demands for trickery and shiftiness, and its almost open invitation to cram and cheat, is not confined to the school but has its equivalent in 'the world' and is in fact the basis of civilisation as well as of education in the West."  We have to re-examine (said Holmes) the emphasis on 'discipline' which tries to overcome a child's natural repugnance to such unworthy treatment and evokes an opposite reaction.  Hooliganism is due to years of educational repression which block up the normal channels of a child's expansive energies.  "An entire range of qualities, spiritual and mental...which exist in every normal child, fail to germinate (or at best only
just begin to germinate)."
	All of that, the disciplining, the drilling in information, the dominant classroom attitudes, Holmes traces back to Jewish mythology and its invention of a God who assumed that man, left to himself, would take delight in breaking his commandments.  This is the God "whose nimbus over-shadows the life of the west".  Holmes said that we have to change our standard of reality.  His book was a milestone in my search.  I'd started off believing in the standard of reality that I'd been taught and grown up with.  I'd found superficial and obvious things that needed to be changed, and came up against deep forces that resisted change.  I enquired further, and finally was pushed to Holmes's answer.  It's the whole of our philosophy of life, our values, our standard of reality that needs to be looked at again.
	Few people have the leisure that Holmes had to sit down and assess a lifetime's experience.  Most teachers, on retiring, are content to trade in books for golf-clubs and to bid farewell to educational enquiry, so tired are they.  Emerging from a long tunnel, they have no heart to relive their experience and analyse the philosophy that created it.  
But if we are to open up the tunnel to inspection, more of us have to go back painfully and retrace our steps.  We have then to publish our findings, so that we can show parents what schoolroom education is doing to their children and how it is tied up with ecclesiastical beliefs.
	I'd like to add my testimony to Holmes's.  I've discovered that there's no real reason that we should be so expert at dealing with sewage or photographing the other side of the moon, and so bad at running our lives.  What has happened is that the technicians were given freedom to devise answers to their problems while the culturalists stayed with their catechisms.  When we remove education and philosophy from the exclusive hands of the priests and professionals and take them over ourselves, human life could experience a release such as scientific enquiry gained at the Renaissance.  The young are beginning to be aware of the magnitude of the discovery they are making.  I've learned that what we call the Establishment is the same power as the Old Testament called Baal and Mammon and that its priests are still up to their old tricks of luring us with trashy satisfactions and obscuring from us the things that give us a more enduring happiness.  When we gain liberty from that enforced pursuit of status and goods, a new earth swims into our ken.  We have all the time in the world to wait and become aware of what it has to offer, - the swirling patterns that an interrupting stone makes on the smooth face of a stream, the chorus of its chortlings and bubblings; the variety of sounds in the trees round the stream in an early morning in August, the chack-chack call of a robin, the wing-clatter of a surprised mallard, the loud murmur of bees in a lofty beech-tree; the flowers of late August, knapweed and harebells, and rosebay willowherb staking out a red claim over vast stretches of the landscape.  These things do in sober fact belong to our peace, more than status and its symbols.  Children have a more realistic sense of where the life-giving values are.  They react, sometimes violently, against Mammon's ubiquitous gospel.  The increase in juvenile delinquency is a sign of health in the community, an angry turning-away from Mammon's vomit.
	The Director of Edinburgh Zoo said, "I think delinquency is a natural failing among children... and I think nature study is the answer."  From the worst areas of Glasgow, children went out under his guidance to find natural history specimens of their own.  One boy found caterpillars in the Gallowgate.  He found them on carrots on a fruit stall, and the stall-keeper gave him the carrots too.  Another found pupae in a park.  Their normal pastimes had been stealing and vandalism.  That shouldn't be a surprise to the educationists because children are interested in life.  But the educationists are absorbed in their systems, their 'dry wells' as Browning called them.     
                How can we get across to the educationists the fact that by denying life they are causing death?  I mean that literally.  The problem was so great, said a consultant psychiatrist, that thirty beds were to be made available at Birmingham for children needing psychiatric help.  Attempted suicide among school children is increasing.  A pupil told me about a fellow-pupil at one of the most pressurised of Scotland's schools, "He said he couldn't stand it any more.  He just wanted to get away and watch green things growing.  They all laughed.  Imagine! What a stupid thing to want to do, - to watch green things growing!  Later he committed suicide."
	Holmes said that it was the whole of our philosophy, our values, our standards of reality, that needed to be looked at again.  How does a people, engulfed in the refuse of old ideas, discover (or rediscover) its values and put them into practice?  Five years after Holmes's book appeared, an attempt was made to do just that, and it failed.  We can learn from the experience. 

Chapter six

EDUCATION IN RUSSIA   -  THE DEFEAT OF THE REVOLUTION

"We do not recognise juvenile crime. We know only sick
children, spoilt by an ugly environment and education.”

-  Krupskaya

	For this account of an experiment in education I am indebted to Sheila Fitzpatrick's books, The Commissariat of Enlightenment, Soviet Organisation of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, October 1917-1921, and Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union 1921 - 1934.  (Both, Cambridge University Press.)  The experiment had much going for it.  There was "a sense of a world in flux but changing for the better".  The minister in charge, Lunacharsky, had all the qualities to pilot a new venture in education.  Once when he had not carried out an instruction of Lenin, a disapproving subordinate said to Lenin, "And you are still fond of him."  Lenin replied, "And I advise you also to be fond of him.  He is drawn towards the future with his whole being.  That is why there is such joy and laughter in him.  And he is ready to give that joy and laughter to everyone."
	Lunacharsky had the full support of Lenin, who rarely missed a meeting of Narkompros, the education ministry.  Equally valuable was the loyal support of Lenin's wife, Krupskaya, who (it seems to me) emerges from this story as one of the great educators of our century.  The photograph and the story suggest a warm, motherly figure, so wrapped up in providing for the deprived children of Russia that she was devoid of egoism and pretentiousness and glitter.  (She was not interested in meeting Bernard Shaw in his much-starred tour of Russia in the company of Lady Astor.)  She was a simple, highly intelligent character, not of the intelligentsia.  She said that the opponents of the educational experiment they were carrying out "still cannot throw off the old view of the mass as an object of the intelligentsia's care, like a small and unreasonable child.... We were not afraid to organise a revolution.  Let us not be afraid of the people, let us not be afraid that they will elect the wrong sort of representatives, bring in the priests.  We want the people to direct the country and be their own masters.  We are always thinking in old terms, that if we do not spare ourselves and work day and night in the people's cause, that is enough.  But it is nothing.  Our job is to help the people in fact to take their fate into their own hands."
	Largely unaided by the experts, they were creating a new kind of education.  It was to be compulsory, co-educational and secular, for all young people between the ages of eight and seventeen.  Hot breakfasts were provided.  There was a month's open-air instruction in summer.  Homework, punishments and examinations were abolished.  The local groups, administering education, consisted of teachers, representatives of the local working people, senior pupils and one official representative.  These local authorities were given maximum autonomy and there were no inspectors because inspectors recalled Tsarist methods.  Pupils were to get aesthetic training and physical training and were to participate in work for the community.
	Anyone who has tried to introduce changes in a school knows the desolating gulf that exists between the noble principles and the clumsy practice.  Things go wrong and the priests and the intelligentsia scoff.  The junior secondary experiment in Scotland later in the century (a modest venture) ran into the same boggy ground as Russia's experiment in education.  Both gave much freedom to the teachers to put their own initiatives and dreams into practice and in both countries the teachers failed them.  I suppose it was inevitable.  How can teachers, brought up in a narrowly authoritarian society, suddenly cope when given control of their own destiny?  The Russian educational HQ passed down messages asking the local teachers what innovations they had introduced, what subjects taught, what integration of subjects, what work-based courses.  
	Was there an enfolding aim of helping pupils to see their society and themselves as 'a living organism'?  What were their plans for the future?   Back came the answers, obscure, badly written, often indecipherable.  The local teachers were bewildered.  There were requests for textbooks and 'full, simple and clear' instructions.  I understand feelingly what happened.  At Buckhaven in Fife I offered teachers the opportunity to run their classes in their own way, putting into practice their own ideas.  But many of them replied, "Could you not give us a book to work from?"
	But, as in Scotland, there were a minority of Russian teachers who thrived on the new freedom, linking the school with local production, offering culture to the local people, thinking about the aims and pitfalls of political education.  Enough for Lenin, visiting them, to see the beginning of a new world.
	But the failure was crude and widespread and distressing.  Little children were doing their own washing.  Nothing 'productive' about that, nor about the many hours spent in cutting wood and carrying water uphill.  Local committees were out of touch with local needs.  Krupskaya, touring the Volga-Kama region in 1919, was critical of the passion for theatricals (often poor plays) and modelling and woodwork, which she considered genteel abstractions from real life.  Parents were hostile.  Many teachers had no ideas of their own.  So they had to send out inspectors to give practical demonstrations of how the ideal was to be realised.
	The same narrow professionalism which exists as strong as ever in Scotland in the last quarter of the century confronted Lunacharsky in the first quarter and he fought against it.  He opposed early professional specialisation; Communism, he said, had to provide an education to make the workers masters of industry and it wasn't enough to put them through a trade apprenticeship to make them semi-skilled workers.  University entrance was without entry qualifications, and fees were abolished.  Professors fought against these changes and talked (as many still do) of 'academic freedom' when they meant the freedom of a few professors to control the whole of education.  Some of the professors (said the Communists) were sleeping quietly with their heads on the doctrinal theses they had written twenty years earlier.  Professional resistance was the greater because Deniken was advancing on Moscow and many of the professors expected that he'd soon restore the old educational order.
	Lunacharsky's first declaration as Commissar of Education abdicated the powers of Soviet government institutions over cultural affairs.  "The people themselves, consciously or unconsciously, must evolve their own culture."  It is greatly to the credit of the Russians that, even at this juncture of extreme danger of attack from outside, they gave time to a national debate on what culture really means.  It was a fierce debate between those who saw European culture as a storehouse of riches to which all the Russian people should be given access, and those who saw it as bourgeois propaganda which would blunt the edge of the proletarian revolution.  No punches were pulled.  The participants felt deeply, and were aware that they were dealing with the deep roots and the ideas containing sap that nourishes or fails to nourish the human personality.  Both sides would have agreed that culture fed life itself.  What they were contesting was the nature of this life-giving food.
	One speaker said, "Let us throw away bourgeois culture entirely as old rubbish."  Kalinin said that that was 'anarcho-individualism'.  But Bogdanov said that sending proletarian students to bourgeois universities would make them succumb to the bourgeois universities' ideology.  (That's one of the problems Scotland hasn't yet faced up to.  I remember seeing students from working-class homes in Aberdeen acting as strike-breakers during the 1926 General Strike when they drove buses and railway engines and helped to keep the economy moving.)  Bogdanov continued that the body of knowledge accumulated by the bourgeoisie was useful to the proletariat only when reformulated in proletarian terms, and while his audience were wondering what that meant exactly, he expanded on it, showing that for him it wasn't an empty phrase.  He said that the workers' universities had to do for the proletariat what Diderot and the Encyclopedistes had done for the French bourgeoisie in the 18th century.  Each great class, he said, reinterprets knowledge in the light of its own class-consciousness.
	At that point I realised that what Bogdanov said in September 1918 is what I'm trying to say in this book.  It took me many years to rediscover this truth.  Reading up about Diderot and the Encyclopedistes, I realise the strange twilight way in which the University of Aberdeen provided us with the information about these French rebels without implying that this information had any application to the present day.  It might have been information about Ming vases for all the difference it made to our outlook on twentieth-century Scotland.  The professor gave us, for example, a short biographical note on Montesquieu but I had no inkling that his Esprit des Lois had subjected social, political and religious institutions to the same searching and fundamental analysis as we might be persuaded to apply to the present institutions of Scotland.  Aberdeen University's twentieth-century class-consciousness subtly fulfilled the requirement of a liberal university that it should make the information available, while at the same time preventing us from applying the information to twentieth-century Scotland and acting upon it.  The university didn't stir itself to re-interpret the knowledge for us.  And that is pretty much what Bogdanov was saying.
	Nothing of this Moscow debate on culture percolated through to Aberdeen University.  It was not within the University's brief to communicate to its students any awareness of a fundamental issue that had been debated, how ordinary people are educated to take over the running of their country.  At Aberdeen the professor lectured; I copied down the notes; I revised them; I passed the examinations; I got my degree.  And never at any time did I feel that I was capable of following the example of Montesquieu or Diderot or Voltaire and trying to shape the government of my country or influence the ideas of its people.  That was reserved for a special class outwith our ken.  It's so obvious to me now that we should all become involved in reshaping the government of our country that I cannot understand how the university could have been successful in directing our steps away from that path.  I understand now what the Russians meant by proletarian consciousness.
	Although he didn't participate in that Moscow debate (having been called away to Petrograd) Lunacharsky thought that, although art is moulded by its class origin, the best art of all classes and all periods is part of the 'human treasury' of art and the proletariat must draw on this in order to produce its own.  A single class may produce different kinds of art, mirroring its rise and fall in artistic terms.  Bogdanov, thinking in less abstract terms, said that the people must use this 'human treasury' to help them to understand the old world that created it and therefore be better able to fight against it.
This discussion on the function of art continued long after the conference. On one hand they said that art should serve the revolution.  In a time of bloody
revolution they should reject the past culture.  In Pravda, Bukharin wrote that it was sad and ridiculous to put on The Cherry Orchard "in the days of this greatest of revolutions"; the working class, he wrote, tried to understand the value of all these nice things and to adapt their psychology to that of their grandmothers.  "The remnants of slavish respect for aristocratic culture are deepened by the preaching of some of our ideologists who support the corruption of the proletariat."  Some said that the theatres should be compelled to put on revolutionary plays.  (In the same vein, they said that science should concern itself with immediate reality-heavy industry - and not with a love of nature)  Lunacharsky, supported by Lenin, stood out against allocating a monopoly to revolutionary art.  He denied that revolutionary art had any necessary connection with revolutionary politics.  The revolutionary artists, he said, were "captives of the Paris cafes".  He would defend the rights of free culture against "red sycophancy".  "We are establishing a state dictatorship so as to send the state itself to the devil."  "Let the worker hear and evaluate everything, the old and the new. We will not impose anything on him; we will show him everything."  He said he'd seen the proletariat bored by revolutionary plays, and the Kronstadt sailors had asked them to be replaced by performances of Gogol and Ostrovsky.
Maybe it needs a political revolution to provoke a probing enquiry like this into the nature of culture.  The food store labelled 'culture' generally contains some wheat and much chaff.  We should be opening it up and looking into it.  Human capacity for being taken in is far greater than I imagined when I was a student of Aberdeen University.  No political or cultural revolution can succeed unless it has understood people's capacity to be conned and how to open their eyes to the extent of the con trick.  If we lived in a less credulous society, the Education Department of Edinburgh University would be enquiring how many people go to see a Moliere play in French at the Edinburgh Festival, how many people speak French well enough to follow it, and what the net gain of the expensive performance is in human understanding.  My own impression is that it is the middle, professional classes who are most easily taken in by the 'culture' label and who want to be seen to take an interest in culture'.
In the Russian debate on culture, both sides scored palpable hits.  When I write that phrase, I realise that I'm part of the culture con trick.  The cognoscenti, the culture in-group, will identify the Hamlet reference.  In the fencing match in Act V between Hamlet and Laertes, Hamlet claimed a hit and appealed to Osric, and he agreed that it was "a hit, a very palpable hit".  Having been brought up in the Eng Lit idiom, I find it difficult to resist the temptation to play on it.  Through a cultural allusion you score points and gain support in the same way as Asquith did through a Greek or Latin quotation in the House of Commons, or a Catholic student who can quote St. Thomas Aquinas in a debate in the Gregorian University in Rome.  We are all a long, long way from freedom of thought, from judging an issue on its merits.  The Russian debate was breaking clear of these irrelevant influences on men's minds.  They were getting nearer to a grasp of the realities that they were debating.  They were trying, however clumsily, to grasp the truth, to get down to essentials, - which isn't happening in the debate on education in Britain.  In September 1977, the Scottish Council for Research in Education presented its silver medal (for meritorious research) to an expert who had undertaken a study (carried out for the Scottish Certificate of Education Examination Board) of the comparability of examining standards.  Neither side in the vigorous Russian debate thought that education was about examinations. 
The Russian debate could have gone either way, with enduring results. One side said, "Experience shows that students are too naive in the struggle with the well-organised class enemy, and lightly abandon their positions".  That still happens widely in Aberdeen.  Our douce respectful students feel that it is uncouth and arrogant to dispute the basic ideas fluently presented by the lecturers.  Who are we (they feel) to set up our puny ideas against the wisdom of the ages?  Movements for revolutionary, or even liberal, change are up against it when they collide with rich and deeply-entrenched communicators.  Shouldn't the unsophisticated student (or the unsophisticated reader of the Sun newspaper) be protected and sheltered until he or she has gained enough strength to be able to swim against that current?  On the other hand the providing of such shelter can lead to untenable propositions.  It was asserted that "Applications for the Proletkult choir in Petrograd were invited only from people 'with party recommendations' ".  That restriction implied that the only good singers were Communist singers, and therefore that the only good poets, dramatists, actors, novelists, scientists, lawyers, teachers were Communist poets, dramatists.... It's obviously not true; but once you confer influence on those who are indifferent to the Communist Revolution, you endanger the Revolution.  So what do you do?
Lunacharsky and Lenin and Krupskaya were in no doubt.  "The people themselves, consciously or unconsciously, must evolve their own culture."  The government stood for the complete separation of art from the state, and opposed state support of any single artistic group on the grounds that it would inhibit the development of other groups.  It was Communism with a human face. Thus Lenin and Krupskaya and Lunacharsky, the party in the middle, were assailed on one side by the professional educators who wanted to restore the old curricula and the university traditions, and on the other by the revolutionary artists who wanted to ban The Cherry Orchard.  Both these groups had in common that they distrusted the judgement of the majority and wanted to impose on them what they regarded as appropriate education.  But Lenin was ill, and there were immediate dangers to the Revolution, - hunger, civil war and the threat of economic collapse.  The tide began to recede.  It was as if all that creative energy expended by Lunacharsky and Krupskaya was exhausted by the opposition it encountered.  For them the educational revolution was at the heart of the Russian Revolution.
They wanted a society in the running of which everyone participated.  To do that they had to take the priestcraft out of schools, they had to make the schools comprehensible so that everyone understood clearly not only the classroom work but its function in preparing the young confidently to take over the running of their society.  For a brief spell it looked like the dawn of a new era, but the red promise in the eastern sky faded.  Why did it fade?   Out of a complex of causes I'd guess that the main one was the hold that centuries of priestcraft had established on the human mind.  Three centuries earlier, in The Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan described in allegory what befalls anybody who seeks to escape the dominion of the controlling ideas of his time.  He makes Apollyon say that there is no prince that will lightly lose his subjects, and, when the pilgrim refused to return to his allegiance, "Apollyon straddled quite over the whole breadth of the way."  In Russia, Apollyon reasserted his authority. Education and politics became again areas for the exercise of obscure priestly rituals unintelligible to the majority.  The reversion didn't happen suddenly. There were reluctantly ceded areas and one major advance before Stalin clouds finally settled over the landscape.
Russia's failure of nerve in education is deserving of more study than it has received because it is the same failure as has bedevilled political reform in the west.  Surprising that the politicians haven't realised that it all comes back to ideas in people's minds.  That is to say, education.  The failure of the
Labour Party in Britain and of the Scottish National Party in Scotland is related to their assumption that politics is a separate sphere of human activity largely unrelated to education and such-like.  When will they ever learn that politics is about values, not just about material gains, and that education is about values, not the passing of examinations and acquiring of information?  And that therefore we should spend some time enquiring into what our values are? There is in western society an energetic disposition which encourages us to 'get on with the job' and not 'waste' time talking about basic things.  We're brought up to long for reassurance.  We find it uncomfortable to live with unanswered basic questions and we'd rather accept an authoritarian pronouncement that lets us get on with the job and put our energies into the daily detail.  We can then limit our enquiries to more immediately practical things.  The Russian teachers reverted to the traditional belief that education is largely about the communicating of information and, like teachers in western schools, they discussed what was the best way to communicate information.
In capitalist countries the Dalton Plan was the fashion.  The idea was to settle on a unifying project, - water, or fire-arms, or cities, for example - and relate most of your studies for the term to that single theme.  You could study the chemistry of water, hydrostatics, hydroelectricity, geology and the seas, ships, drainage and town-planning, and the English teacher would present poems about water.  Russia imported the Dalton Plan and utilised it to engage the interest of the pupils in community farms and factories and political campaigns. Sometimes the children were used as cheap labour, sowing and picking cotton. They were like the later 'work-based' courses in Britain and ran into the same snags.  Factory managers didn't like children under their feet.  The basic argument was that the pupils got a knowledge of the industry.  It's one of the flattering unctions that teachers lay to their souls.  I took a group of Kirkcaldy children to a linoleum factory and they got up to all sorts of tricks.  We did a project on mining.  A Fife miner angrily asked me, 'What are you trying to do? Turn my son into a miner?"  The failure of these courses, in Fife as in the Donbass, was due to the old belief that the best way to bring up children is to fill them with information.  Later the Russians burned in effigy "Lord Dalton, an English bourgeois."
A more promising development was the "School of Peasant Youth".  It was an attempt to provide a curriculum based on the skills and interests of a rural community, but that also failed.  Later, in Botswana, Patrick van Rensburg pioneered a similar programme of secondary education more relevant to the needs of the people.  There was a background of practical work, in harmony with the local industries, - washing mohair from Angora goats or Kalahari karakul, spinning, weaving it into tapestries of the pupils' own colours and designs, welding school furniture, tanning, growing vegetables, making pottery, repairing cars and installing a generator.  He had hoped that the study of literature and mathematics and science would activate a leaven of thought and feeling which would interpenetrate the social and political system.  It didn't work out that way.  In his Report from Swaneng Hill : Education and Employment in an African Country (published by the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation) he wrote, "More important was the extent to which the students saw the aims of the school as improving or affecting their future job prospects, the key to which was examination results." He was up against the ethos of the black parents who wanted more discipline, finer accommodation, smarter appearance.  "School is the gateway to privilege, and entry demarcates for most the border-line between well-being and neglected stagnation in a rural village or an urban slum."
These were the forces, in Russia as in Africa, which took the momentum out of educational experiments and swung them back into the old channels. Economic insecurity reinforces material values. "A good job" is paramount.
There were other forces, some of them unexpected, that bedevilled educational reform in Russia.  In the early days, when they knew that they were on the frontiers of pedagogy, there was an intoxicating hope that a revolutionary change in his environment would make a change in the nature of man.  They hoped that a child growing up in that new environment would acquire characteristics that he would hand on in his germ-plasm to unborn generations. But when geneticists questioned that belief, an optimist like Bukharin became disproportionately depressed.  "If we took the view that racial and national peculiarities are so persistent that it would take thousands of years to change them, then of course our whole work would be absurd because it would be built upon sand."  There is an echo of the apostle Paul who wrote to the faithful in Corinth, "If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain."  Revolutionaries have to learn not to place all their hopes on Christ's resurrection or the inheritance of acquired characteristics. 
The liberal-minded Commissariat of Enlightenment was buffetted by many contrary winds, the habits and instincts of the rank-and-file, parents who wanted vocational training for their children, teachers who wanted to get back to the security of textbooks and subject-teaching.  The old curricula, crammed with information, were reintroduced.  But school-children called social studies "the most boring and dreary" subject in the school, and referred to its teacher as "the Soviet priest".  Others referred to it as "a canonisation of Marx", "a Soviet Law of God".  The use of examinations to fix it in the curriculum didn't commend the subject.  Fifty years later some of the ecclesiastical priests in Scottish and English schools are using the same methods as the Soviets used to promote their religion and they are likely to have similar results. 
Victor Shulgin, a young Communist intellectual who had entered the
Commissariat in the 1920s, led the battle to restore Russia's experiment in education.  He appealed for a reappraisal of the foundations of Marxist pedagogy.  What is pedagogy? he asked.  Is it merely a study of the formal processes in a school?   Or a study of everything that influences a child, including the social environment?  In this book all I'm doing is to reiterate Shulgin's questions.  He thought, as I do, that the school was an essential bourgeois institution and he hoped it would wither away as the Bolsheviks hoped that the state would wither away.
But much of this work was nullified at the "great turning point" of 1928 -
1929.  The state prosecutor had announced the discovery of a counter-revolutionary economic conspiracy' in the Shakhty region of the Donbass, in which mining engineers had sabotaged coal production.  Stalin claimed that the future of the country depended on the speed of industrialisation.  "Bolsheviks must master technology," he said.  He wanted to create from the working class a loyal intelligentsia skilled in engineering and capable of understanding and carrying out working-class policy.  "Not a single ruling class has managed without its own intelligentsia," he said.
Everything was subordinated to that over-riding object, and it was useless for the old guard to maintain that the Soviet Union, like the Capitalist world, was degrading the working class into a mere labour force.  From about 1931 the old traditional beliefs and attitudes came surging back into the schools.  Student self-government was abolished and students were told to "learn the traditions of the profession from those who have won professional honour and respect."  There were monitors, 'grades' as in the USA, and examinations for each academic subject.  Pupils were filled with 'general knowledge'.  They were taught grammar.  The schools became almost identical with western schools.  One small difference was that incomprehensibility in Russian classrooms was given a communist slant.  A sentence, the pupils learned, is "a unit of communication expressing objective reality through class consciousness."
Chronological history was introduced, to make the subject systematic like mathematics and the sciences, and thereby (it was hoped) to fix in children's minds important historic events, personages and dates.  The history faculties of Moscow and Leningrad universities were re-established to write history textbooks for the schools and reinforce the prestige of the old bourgeois historians.  Stalin wanted 'real' history for the schools by which (says
Professor Fitzpatrick) he meant books which poorly-trained teachers could understand and on which students could be examined.  Stalin had a crack at writing a school history book himself, and, says the professor, it was probably small comfort to the university historians that Stalin's attempt was even worse than theirs.  By 1940 the old educational order was back in control.  Uniforms were re-established in the schools and recalcitrant pupils expelled for one, two or three years.  There were fewer working-class students.
At the time A.S. Neill said that Russia had put the clock back.  Vera S.
Dunham, who has studied middle-class values in Soviet fiction, said that "the
party leadership had made a 'Big Deal' with the new elite: bourgeois life-style in exchange for political loyalty."  It gave them dachas, access to special stores and resorts, better accommodation, higher salaries and bonuses.  The re-introduction of ranks and uniforms into the army brought formality and uniformity.  Members of the elite and their wives should be dressed appropriately.  A popular 'New Class' writer describes a scene in which a father tells his son that "a lord and master ought to dress like a lord and master" and buy the best serge suit in the store.  As in the capitalist west, conformity began in the schools.  There were to be formal procedures, respect for teachers and parents and academic standards.  The ambitious young were to go to the Bolshoi Ballet and the Stanislavsky theatre and admire nineteenth-century Russian literary classics.  Prominent in the Russian literature of that period are parents who want their children to have a better life than they had, by which they meant access to material and cultural luxuries.  They wanted their children to know Pushkin's fairy tales.   A tractor-driver was happy beyond measure to watch his daughter at the grand piano playing Chopin and Tchaikovsky, "her plump little hands flying like birds over the keyboard."  A Central Committee resolution had said that higher education was to give to what they called culture cadres, "the knowledge of all the riches which mankind has fashioned."  It was a Lenin quotation and Lenin knew clearly what he meant.  He was saying that human beings have tried to extort from their experience and express in the arts an understanding of what life is about, which may shed light on our dark path. But I doubt if the later Central Committee was as clear about it.  By that time culture had resumed the vague connotation which it still holds, alike in Moscow and Edinburgh, - Shakespeare and all that.  The Russian and Scottish schools alike connive at this posh, remote culture, teaching their pupils to say the right things in the examinations on literature.  Recently I watched them doing the same in California.
In the German town of Elberfeld in 1938 a Jew, about to emigrate to Australia, told me about a visit he had from an up-and-coming member of the local Nazi elite, who wanted to buy his furniture.  The Nazi had brought his wife along with him and said to her, “Wouldn’t these rows of beautiful books look well in our drawing-room!”  In most societies upwardly-mobile groups capitulate to the culture and manners of the formerly privileged class.  Some Scottish-born television announcers in Glasgow and Aberdeen adopt an accent more English than the English.  We need more study of this phenomenon and a sympathetic understanding of the people who come within its influence.  Many members of Stalin’s new class had the high seriousness of Scots in mechanics’ institutes and mutual improvement associations and the early WEA, Samuel Smiles characters concerned about education and improving themselves.  It is when they have made good and arrived that subtle influences (against which their school education in conformity has not protected them) begin to weave a spell. An elderly Labour councillor in Fife, a miner, told me, “In the old days of the Tories we wandered up to the table and talked and after a while the convener would say, ‘Well, gentlemen, maybe we should make a start.  The first business...’  But now we have a Labour council and a convener with a chain of office.  An official commands us, ‘Be upstanding for the County Convener!’ and we all stand up and the convener marches smartly in and says, ‘Be seated, gentlemen,’ and we all sit down.”
He smiled humorously at the antics of his formal colleague, but humour has not been the solvent of these pretensions that I would have expected it to be.  It is ultimately a problem for the schools, that is to say a cultural problem, to protect their pupils against these subtle infections.  The Communists in Russia, like the Labour Party in Britain, failed because their members were seduced by titles and such-like.  It’s a world-wide malady.  In Zambia the new elite entered with gusto into the possession of the airy bungalows, the spacious leafy gardens, the swimming-pools that the British had vacated.  They had Mercedes-Benz cars and retinues of servants and sent their children to the ‘best schools’. And with this heritage of material possessions went also the accompanying programmes of automated factories, giant state farms, luxury imports, and elaborate city-based hospitals and schools, highly convenient for the new class.
Associated with this phenomenon, wherever on earth it happens, in Russia or Scotland or Zambia or the USA, are a respect and care for material possessions, high-quality goods, pride in a subway or a monumental palace, and sometimes a contempt for people who work on the land.  It expresses itself in conformity, formal procedures, ‘discipline’, ribbons and ostentation, emphasis on hierarchy, docile study and examinations.  This is an area of social anthropology which we have to understand more fully before we can improve the upbringing of our children.  It is the same kind of temptation, although more subtle, as that to which Jesus was exposed in the desert, according to the Matthew account.  The young technical experts of the Russian Revolution also were taken into an exceeding high mountain and shown all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them, and told, by a very cunning devil, “All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.”  The wording was less simple, though. It said that the Bolsheviks had given up on the Marxist promise that the workers would rule, but they did hold out the promise (which they kept) that workers and peasants would have the opportunity to rise into the new ruling elite.
For these likely lads of the working class (Brezhnev was one of them)
“industrialisation was an heroic achievement and their own promotion a fulfilment of the promises of the revolution,” and they were swept along with its momentum, and even cooperated in forming excuses for its excesses.  The tragic sequel was chronicled by Milovan Djilas, former vice-president of Yugoslavia, imprisoned by Tito.  In The New Class he describes the political priesthood which now runs Russia and Yugoslavia.  The former lively, initiating groups had been transformed.  Once established, they were interested in the proletariat only to develop production.  It controlled the ideas of the enquirers in the ranks of the working class and recruited clever and ambitious members of the working class.  “It has always been the fate of slaves to provide for their masters the most clever and gifted representatives.” 
Djilas said that all human systems have depended ultimately on the kind of people who run them and he saw the communist priesthood as self-seeking, and credulous.  Many of them do believe that it is in the interests of the proletariat that power should remain in their hands.  That fits in with Stalin’s view of people.  He saw men as either obedient servants or enemies, and himself as a god.  Power, briefly extended to the people, was assumed by the commissars.  The dreams of yester year, freedom of education and culture, the abolition of honours and exclusive privileges, were lying in the gutter like bunting in the rain that followed a festival.  There was a drop in temperature. The compassion was gone.  In those early days Krupskaya had proclaimed, “We do not recognise juvenile crime.  We know only sick children, spoilt by an ugly environment and education,” and Zinoviev had written that their philosophy was “loving the muzhik as he is, - benighted, calloused, illiterate, superstitious, believing in spirits and the devil,” and helping him.  But Russia had lurched back into a government controlled by the few and more concerned with production than muzhiks and children.
Djilas’s assessment of the political priesthoods is now more widely shared on both sides of the iron curtain.  In capitalist and communist countries more sheep are realising that the shepherds are working cosily together in their own interests, lacking the noble qualities with which the current mystical attitude to shepherds endows them.  The shepherds are just sheep in special clothing, mitres, wigs, coronets, gowns, helmets.   As a disillusioned Communist, Djilas dwells on the Russian political priesthood who set wages and decide on economic developments and forbid strikes and pay themselves well; and maintain control over property, ideas and government.  They cannot permit even small undertakings to be independent since that makes them feel insecure.  Bureaucracy mushrooms also in the villages, since they fear the peasants unless they have control of their production.  Djilas says that the appointment of 30, 000 party workers to be presidents of the collective farms showed the importance they placed on controlling agriculture.  Decentralisation meant merely that more local bosses came in for benefits.  Decrease in crops doesn’t matter as much as the need to control the growers.
The new class get large cars and country houses and, as their material benefits accrue, their wealth of ideas decreases.  Their values are reflected in their career structure and its accompanying jealousies and duplicity.  Like all priesthoods, in order to maintain control they must maintain a common front of dogma and therefore they keep falling into profound internal contradictions, which they then seek to justify with abstract and unreal arguments.  They strengthen their brute force and cease to create.  “Only crumbs from the tables and illusions have been left to the workers.”
And there the drama of the communist enlightenment, which came in with a bang in 1917, peters out.  In the next chapter I want to show that, although the rest of the world did things less dramatically, the result was similar.

Chapter seven

EDUCATION IN THE WEST - THE RETREAT OF THE HUMANISTS

"To reform education is, in many ways, to reform the society that the people of California have created. Thus, the Commission urges all Californians to consider what kind of educational system, and what kind of society, they seek for their children and the larger community."

Report of the California Commission for Reform of… Education (1974)

In the nineteen-thirties a door had closed in Russia, but elsewhere doors were opening.  Serene, middle-class reformers were working away quietly in small schools like Bedales, Bembridge, Dartington, Frensham Heights, Forest School, St. Christopher’s, Summerhill in England, and, later, Kilquhanity in Scotland.   As long as the system in Britain felt itself secure, it tolerated these schools as one tolerates a kindly, picturesque eccentric, and that toleration gave Westminster a reputation for liberalism.  Working in one of these schools I felt was like working in the research lab of a big firm which would incorporate our successes into its system, and there seemed to be a friendly relationship between the boardroom and the lab.  A.S. Neill referred to ‘my friend, the editor of the Times Educational Supplement’.  There was evidence that the results of experiment were filtering into the main system.  Well-known educationists acknowledged the value of some of the lab work.  Universities and colleges of education directed students to visit the labs and write essays about them.  Many students saw, in action, ideas that they had regarded as utopian and impractical.  They saw children working happily, unsupervised, ‘undisciplined’, confident, and the vision remained with them, however limited the opportunities they had to realise it when they took up employment in private or state schools.
After the war, some of the wisdom seeped into official reports.  The Plowden and the Albemarle and Newsom reports in England and the Primary and Secondar ?? ??? Scotland were heartwarmingly outspoken.  No reader could escape the conviction that here were influential people who meant business.  I was convinced that the tide was beginning to turn.  I felt assured that even those who weighed everything in a commercial balance would accept that our children are our most precious assets and would support educational changes which were directed at improving and developing these assets. Educational paperbacks, supporting us, sold well.  We thought that this warmer influence would permeate education and it took us a long time to realise that it wasn’t happening.  Minor reforms, issuing from the small pioneer schools, were taking place in some larger state schools; but the system itself wasn’t thereby altered.  Newspapers which glorified a ‘free’ economy vilified a ‘free’ school.
In the Sixties there was a more urgent attitude amongst educators.  An international conference at Williamsburg in the USA agreed that in all countries of the world, curricula, methods and the learning process itself “require the most immediate attention to ways and means of replacing inflexibility with innovation, traditional or outdated ideas with fresh approaches and new ventures”.  Still optimistic, I felt that the educationists were getting to grips with the real problem and realising that things as different as juvenile delinquency and balance of payment difficulties have their roots in an inadequate and inflexible system of education.  In 1969 a British biologist, Sir George Pickering, said, “If the education system has been designed at all (and, of course, it hasn’t) it must have been designed to eliminate Britain as a world power in the second half of the twentieth century”.
The Province of Ontario published a report, Living and Learning, which said that ‘vast amounts of energy are devoted to consumption of factual content that is biased in selection, places undue emphasis on personal achievement...  and is almost totally unsuitable as a tool to understanding today’s problems’.  The result, it said, was an inability to contribute effectively to the solution of Canada’s problems.  Like the Russian pioneers, they opposed corporal punishment and the writing of lines, isolation, detention after school, extra work, sarcasm and ridicule.  They wanted teachers to act and be treated as professional people, making decisions and being supported but not directed by administrators, directors of education and headmasters.  They saw teaching as becoming (with scientific research, food production and the health service) ‘one of the four giants of the future’.  They wouldn’t pay teachers less than administrators.  They wanted methods of assessment to replace the ‘marks, examinations, report card syndrome’, and were especially critical of the American multiple-choice tests.  They summed up their proposals by saying, “Fragmentary action programmes already surround us on every side.  The real goal will be reached when our social philosophy cherishes children and we act accordingly”.
The official education departments of western civilisation showed little disposition to listen to the advice.  In the Seventies as the problems of western civilisation became still more acute, the reformers were digging deeper to find the cause of educational indifference.  One of the contributors to a book published by the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (1971) said, “Schools are not institutions that are deeply embedded in the culture of western civilisation, or in the civilisation of any other part of the world”.   Another contributor said that “The Province of Ontario is well on the road to a radical examination of the faith in schooling which has dominated it throughout its relatively brief history”.  It was an early stage in the erosion of a belief.  We’d thought of the school as a Rock of Ages.  Now we were beginning to see it as a temporary, leaking shack, maybe not worth repairing.
The most prestigious of the attacks on the old educational order was the USA report, Crisis in  the Classroom (1970) written by Charles E. Silberman. The study began when Carnegie Corporation officials found themselves besieged with calls from university presidents asking what to do with their schools of education and the Corporation allocated $300,000 and recruited some of America’s most famous educationists to answer the question.  The answer is devastating.  The schools, said Silberman, “are quite literally destructive of human beings.  I think they are the most grim, joyless places on the face of the earth.  They are needlessly authoritarian and repressive - not because the teachers and principals are stupid or venal, but because nobody ever asks why: why the rules, or why the curriculum?”  He broadened the notion of educator to include not only school teachers but also such other “teachers” as press and TV journalists, college professors, clergymen and museum directors. “The defect in the training of educators - and this includes journalists - is that it doesn’t force them to think about the purpose of what they’re going to be doing for the rest of  their lives.”  He says that the professional (architect, teacher, lawyer, engineer, doctor, journalist) should be much more than a man with knowledge.  He should have a deep concern for human values and use his knowledge to provide services that society needs.  For example, the social worker’s job is not merely to help people to adjust to society; it is also to help people to change society.  Journalists handle well the dramatic events (a moon landing, a riot, a presidential assassination) but haven’t learned how to handle the undramatic events that shape the future.  Children absorb most of their ideas on values and conduct not from lessons but by the way schools are organised, the way adults talk to children and to each other, the things they approve of and reward, or disapprove of and punish.  (We all know this but we go on teaching lessons and preaching sermons as before.) 
The following quotations show the radical nature of the report.

"American schools had taken over the curriculum and the instructional methods
of European schools, which had developed to instruct mainly the upper class;
they made little attempt to understand the special needs of their new
students."

“The criteria for deciding what should be in the curriculum should be to ask whether the subject or material is worth an adult’s knowing, and whether having known it as a child makes a person a better adult. If the answer to both questions is negative or ambiguous, then the material is cluttering the curriculum.”

I think Silberman realised that we can’t begin an overhaul of education as long as we retain our attitude of tutored respect for the venerable institutions, and he provided some inside knowledge about them.  Too many professors, he said, practise an intellectual colonialism as they set about their task of rescuing the natives from their ignorance and savagery, and he quoted a chancellor of New York University who said (in 1967) that the university was expected to “encourage those attributes of being which are associated with the cultured gentleman”.  Universities try, sometimes desperately, to become more like the institution on the next highest rung of the ladder and there is a pressure towards uniformity and conventionality.
Twelve members of the Ohio State University College of Education traded places for a week with the headmasters of twelve schools in a midwestern city.  One dean discovered that life there was a ‘charade’; neither teaching nor learning took place and violence was endemic.  There was an archaic building, an uncaring community, an irrelevant programme of studies, a student population out of hand, an overpressed staff, a sympathetic but frustrated central administration.  “We educators stand impotent, frightened, dishevelled, in the face of such tragedy,” wrote the dean.
Silberman diagnosed the lack of imagination as one of the main causes of the educational malady.
“The willingness of teachers, especially of those occupying administrative positions, to become submerged in the routine detail of their callings, to expend the bulk of their energies upon forms and rules and regulations, and reports, and percentages, is another evidence of the absence of intellectual vitality.... Mountains of facts were piled up, condensed, summarised and interpreted by the new quantitative technique.  The air was full of normal curves, standard deviations, coefficients of correlation, regression equations.”
The same picture emerges from Stone and deNevi’s book, Teaching Multi-Cultural Populations, (1971) which was written to alert the USA to its failure to integrate and cherish its Indian, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Negro, Japanese and Chinese minorities.  Chinese youth in San Francisco listened to the superintendent of schools who confronted them with “a grand drizzle of statistics and terminology... budget of 82 million dollars, tax ceiling of 97 million, teacher-pupil ratio, bad linkage with the State Labour Department”.  A cherry bomb went off and somebody shouted  “Bullshit!  Don’t try to shine us on with these numbers, man, “ and all hell was let loose.
Alarmed, the state of California published a report of its own in 1974, “Report of the California Commission for Reform of Intermediate and Secondary Education”.  There was plenty to be alarmed about and it published the figures.  By the age of twelve an average American youth has watched at least 10,000 hours of television.  69% of marriages ended in divorce.  Only 45% of eligible Californians had voted in the 1974 election.  Nevada and California had the highest alcoholism.  Suicide was the second highest cause of death for Californians between the ages of 15 and 24.  Rape had increased 100% in the past ten years, juvenile drug arrest twentyfold.  There was much child abuse.  VD was rising.  School vandalism cost 10 million dollars annually.   And the educational system, the report added, had not changed significantly in more than sixty years. 
Almost all caring teachers and loving parents throughout the world would agree with the California Commission’s hopes for its own children.  It wanted them to have a thirst for knowledge, skills to find work, and succeed in it, self-knowledge and self-esteem, care for the environment and a global perspective on it, an appreciation of all peoples and all cultures, the ability to read, write and count, an understanding of the American system of government and a citizen’s rights and responsibilities, an understanding of the economic system and of the management of money, knowledge of human biology and psychology, a sensitivity to artistic, literary and other aesthetic experience and to the beauty around them.
But, alas, having described so clearly their aim, the Commission side-stepped the means by which it is to be achieved.  “Rather than drawing a detailed blueprint of change that might hinder the flexibility and creativity the Commission seeks, this report is intended to rouse the imagination of educators, parents and learners.”   The implementing of the recommendations, they said, is the job of the California State Department of Education.
And that was, for the most part, the end of that.  The Report of the California Commission for Reform of Intermediate and Secondary Education took its place on the shelf next to the Silberman Report, Crisis in the Classroom, which was optimistically subtitled, The Remaking of American Education.  In a book called Schoolteacher. A Sociological Study (1975), Professor Lortie of Chicago, studying the failure of even the Silberman Report to initiate reforms, said that we must start analysing the devices by which institutions stymie change.  For example they use new methods in showplace schools while resisting their widespread adoption.  This tactic can ‘cool out’ enthusiasts until their ardour has waned.  Another ruse is to change the rhetoric of school practice while leaving the substance intact.
Lortie’s realism about the determined hostility to change offered by institutions should help to dispel the fallacy, widespread in European and American cultural universities and colleges of education, that liberal discussion is like yeast, working quietly until it leavens the whole lump.  There is a rigorous debate, a full and frank exchange of views, and we kid ourselves that we can go home now, confident that the new world will start on Monday morning, although we know in our heart of hearts that it won’t.  In his foreword Silberman said, “My motive is political, in the broadest sense of the term - as George Orwell defined it, “to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s ideas of the kind of society that they should strive after.”  Well, maybe his report did persuade some people to alter their ideas, but it didn’t alter American schools or American society.  Israel Scheffler, professor of Education and Philosophy at Harvard, wrote a book called Reason and Teaching (in which he condemned the elitist teaching of Plato’s Republic).  Scheffler’s purpose, he said, was “to enlarge the intellectual perspectives of the student”.  But the experience of those who have worked for educational change in the twentieth century is that enlightenment, enlarging the intellectual perspectives of the students, is not enough.
The story of education in Britain this century is no more comforting.  The experimental work of the Thirties, bright with hope, has largely ceased to exist, except in some embattled outposts struggling with their accounts.  A.S.  Neill’s influence continues but not entirely in the way he’d have hoped.  There is a greater courtesy to pupils, a more humane atmosphere in many classrooms.  But the schools themselves haven’t changed all that much.  When nobody was looking, someone let the steam out of these initiatives, using the same tricks as Lortie describes in America.  It’s only the educational priesthood which kids itself, in characteristic western fashion, that things are much better now.  The pupils themselves are not taken in.  As the pupil said who was quoted at the beginning of the Newsom Report, “It could be all marble, Sir, but it’s still a bloody school.”
Neither in Britain nor the USA did the work of the pioneers have much effect on the schools. Nor did the educational experimentation conducted by the western world this century have much impact on its political system.  Harold Wilson saw comprehensive schools as merely extending the benefits of ‘public’ school education to working-class children.  On school education his simple views were akin to Stalin’s.  Stalin and Wilson were uncritical admirers of the old educational order, examinations and marks and the paraphernalia of ‘subject’ teaching.  Neither of them could be described as enquirers.  They were, over a large area of human life, what their early schooling had made them, accepters.  The possibility of subjecting the old ideas on education to the same searching and probing enquiry as the old ideas on physics had been subjected to, never occurred to them.  It didn’t occur to them that in education, too, we could cut free from much of the inherited furniture of our minds, the frameworks on which our ideas are constructed, realising that it is these very frameworks that impede us, defeat us.  We have been brought up, for example, to believe in schools and our thinking on education has revolved round them. We should now be entertaining the proposition that schools are not in the best interests of children and an alternative way of bringing up our children should be sought.  To leave politics in the hands of these educational backwoodsmen would be like leaving medicine in the hands of doctors whose knowledge of physics hadn’t advanced beyond Aristotle’s.
It is not an accident that the ‘new class’ of rulers on both sides of the iron
curtain were opposed to major educational change.  The ideas and attitudes of
both groups were moulded when they were children in schools respectful to
tradition.  If he had been born in Russia, Wilson would have fitted comfortably
into the new class of rulers described by Djilas.  The ample diaries recounting
the life style and private ambitions and squabbles of several of Wilson’s
cabinet colleagues show how much they had in common with their counterparts in Moscow and Belgrade.  Mammon is a resilient character.  He survives, equally, attempts at major political change promoted by slow evolution in the western states and by revolution in the communist states.  He just lets religious and political and educational explosions erupt and is content to wait until they have spent their force and then he resumes his throne.  Like the Jesuits, he knows and trusts in the abiding influence of early schooling.  Since he has been able to mould them through their upbringing, he controls a fifth column among the reformers and can count on them to restore his old order.  The analogy of the fifth column is not accurate, though.  It implies a minority of infiltrators.  But all reformers have come under the influence of their schooling, including their leaders.  Luther was too much of a Catholic priest to let the Reformation get out of hand, George Washington sent Tom Paine packing from Philadelphia, Napoleon saw the French Revolution off and Stalin was having no educational nonsense in the Kremlin.
It was not only in the schools that the people in power became less indulgent towards experiment.  Philip Donnellan, veteran radio producer, said, “Features always insisted that it was the responsibility of the producer to stimulate the minds of the audience and alert them to the reality around them; but others saw this as a dangerous process which could be subversive and must be controlled.... Today, there is less probing than ever of the potential of imaginative broadcasting in sound and television.”
Mammon’s empire, whether in capitalist or communist countries, is founded on the control of the many by the few.  (Characteristically both of these elites claim that their system is ‘democratic’, but neither is ruled by the people.) Both depend on authoritarian schools to keep the populace quiet.  The west, which has more experience of sophisticated control, puts on a facade of liberalism and freedom, and holds the schools and the universities and the media on a loose rein.  But when things get difficult, the rein tightens.  In Scotland a 1984-type language has replaced the genial, cultured tones of the official reports that appeared in the immediately post-war period.  Recent official pronouncements are grimly worded.  Pupils who don’t obey orders are to be treated as law-breakers.  The official Scottish report on Truancy and Indiscipline (1977) proposed to remove these troublesome nonconformists to other centres, vulgarly referred to as sin bins.  The report said that transfer to the centres shouldn’t be by compulsion.  It was hoped that parents would recognise “the wisdom of co-operating with authority” but, if they refused, the authority would take stronger measures, legal sanctions.  The controllers of Scottish education no longer try to conceal the iron hand.  If you don’t see the wisdom of co-operating, they’ll use the law to compel you.  “Conform and co-operate, or else...”  Education in Britain is at the same time clarifying and darkening.  The issues are now more starkly defined, the outlook more sinister.  A contributor to a 1974 Ward Lock book on Recurrent Education quoted a statesman who told a group of senior administrators and others, “I am glad to speak to you; to you who have made peaceful evolutionary change impossible and have made violent revolutionary change inevitable.”

Chapter eight

THE NEXT LEAP FORWARD

“It will regularly be avowed that the purposes of government are too complicated for the untutored to understand; cultivation of the belief that this is so then becomes an aspect of social conditioning. In past times much of the power of the U.S. State Department, as also of its counterparts in other countries, rested on the belief that foreign policy was too subtle and intricate a matter for the average citizen or the ordinary politician to comprehend. Outsiders should keep out, not challenge the power of those who had a monopoly of the requisite knowledge and skills. The same social conditioning technique is now employed with great effect by those concerned with weapons policy and arms control....This deliberate conditioning, in combination with the size, complexity, and technological and other sophistication in the tasks of modern government, leads to the submission that is evident in the phrase ‘We must leave it to the experts.’ ”
J.K.Galbraith, The Anatomy of Power

So what? Where do we go from here?
In his report on the remaking of American education, Silberman quoted statements made by the Moravian educationist, Comenius (1632) and the American educationist, Zacharias (1966) agreeing that it is next to impossible to reform the schools.  Later, another American educationist, Lortie of Chicago, said that Silberman’s report had had as little effect as the efforts of these others. The implacable opposition to fundamental change in the schools of Scotland, England, the USA, France, Germany, the USSR and the ‘undeveloped’ countries is so ancient a phenomenon as not to be news and is unregarded by the newspapers. So what do we do? Shut up shop and go home?
	Long ago the fishermen on the Aberdeenshire coast would go out to the headland and look over the sea and the face of the sky, and, out of a gut reaction, announce, “There is a change working.”   I sense just such a change working in the thoughts and feelings of people throughout the world, the turning of a tide in the affairs of men, ‘such a tide as moving seems asleep’.  The educational revolution has to do with the whole nature of our life on earth.  Its sources of inspiration, the deep springs from which it draws its life, are the inner promptings of the human heart, the vague questions, the doubts, often unspoken, that have troubled humanity throughout its tenure of the planet.  Concerning the upsurge of one such question in the mind of one of his characters, Neil Gunn said, “You saw it - but you have not yet brought it into your head in order to put words on it.”  The change that is happening is that more human beings are becoming aware that they should have the freedom to bring those private doubts into their heads and put words on them.  
Down the ages the minorities, brutally imposing their ideology on humanity, have tried to make such thoughts unthinkable and therefore unutterable.  We, the bottom people, emerge from our hidey-holes and begin hesitantly to articulate these doubts.  I imagine the unspoken thoughts of the French farm-workers in the Millais picture, the Angelus, as they straighten their backs, relieved to have the excuse for a rest when they are called upon by the bell to think on time and eternity.  Glimmers of thoughts must have crossed their minds, asking what the whole business signified.  “Surely this back-breaking toil from early morn to night isn’t what life on earth was meant to be about.”   Such subversive thoughts must have teetered on the brink of consciousness throughout human history.   “What if the top people also don’t really know?”   The Greek slaves must have wondered sometimes about the confident statements of those distinguished Greeks sitting on Mars Hill and philosophising in the sunshine.  The Roman legionaries, goose-stepping in Caesar’s triumphs, maybe asked what there was in it for them.  Sometimes the doubts surfaced and were firmed into action.  The Maya peasants had doubts about their priests who were immersed in sacred mathematical calculations, and they drifted away and the priestly edifice crumbled.  It was a very slow process, the transubstantiation by which unquestioning loyalty and homage, offered during half a lifetime, disintegrates and emerges in some other form.  It took a long time for the friends and neighbours of the Tolpuddle martyrs, frightened and maintaining a low profile, to come to their own conclusions about the aristocracy and their kept clergymen.  Throughout history the religious priests have been so closely and sometimes clearly identified with the political powers, defending them and reinforcing their control over their subjects’ minds, that political doubts merge into pervasive religious doubt.  The fellahin, toiling on the pyramids, shrank in fear at the thought of doubting the god-king, the pharaoh, but the doubt was there, and kept surfacing down the centuries. Highland crofters, counselled by the Presbyterian ministers to accept their fate when the lairds cleared them from their lands, ventured alone into a nomansland of thought, groping for some vision of the inscrutable Presbyterian god that would make sense to them.  It’s usually a lonely quest because the strength of contrary opinion is so massive that the individual seeker hesitates to share his doubts.  The controllers invented a word, blasphemy, to scare off humanity from such impious speech.
But sometimes an outside group articulates thoughts that have hitherto been only wispy clouds, giving them a firm outline.  The 7:84 Theatre Company, touring the clachans and cities of Scotland, draw attention to the torture inflicted on Scottish political prisoner John Maclean, stone-breaking in the quarries attached to Peterhead prison, and the audience file the memory.  The image of the gentlemanly Tory has a provisional question-mark set against it.  The file, once opened, is available for the storage of other related information bearing question-marks.  The law-lords’ mistakes of judgement make us ask ourselves, “Why have we invested the Law with an aura of sanctity, as if ex-public-schoolboys become endowed with wisdom when they don their wigs?”  The published statements of scientists employed by drug companies and asbestos companies go into the file.  So does the International Herald Tribune’s headline, “Bumper Grain Harvest Around World Raises Fear of a Food Crisis.” And the report that a multinational company has persuaded African villagers that it is fashionable to get rid of the thatched roofs of their houses and save up for a tin roof.
Wraiths of ideas take shape and swirl in people’s heads and disintegrate and reform.  We are still in the indeterminate period that Arnold described, wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other (he thought) powerless to be born.  But I think he was unduly pessimistic, unaware of the events that were happening deep in the minds of people all over the earth just beginning to put clumsy words to their thoughts.  I think Arnold’s contemporary, Arthur Hugh Clough, may turn out to be the better prophet. 

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

Most of us fluctuate between these two views of our future.  But even if the odds are on Arnold’s new world, powerless to be born, the human will to survive makes us continue the struggle.  How can we teachers become enablers, obstetricians, helping into birth the concepts already kicking inside us?
The question deserves an answer as practical and workable and concrete as we can make it. In a stimulating book, THE FUTURE IN OUR HANDS.  What we can all do towards the shaping of  a better world, a Norwegian engineer, Erik Dammann, says that many of society’s apparent problems would be solved if people working in ideas could all be persuaded to take up physical labour for a year.  “I believe their inability to solve practical problems is partly due to the fact that they have gradually become far too isolated as theorists - that their thinking has become far too removed from real life because they have never been connected with physical actions and earthbound problems.”
Dammann has traced one cause of the failure of education to cope with society’s problems.  Unlike scientists, who are expected to enquire clearly into and solve scientific problems, such as going to the moon, the people who deal with the problems of society have had a high-priestly education which exempts them from such enquiry.  In a past generation the man who had studied Euripides and Vergil at Oxford was considered qualified to govern the Sudan.  In the present generation he is considered qualified to advise the ministers on monetarism and nuclear policy.  It’s beautiful magic, but alas, it doesn’t work. The problems of society are not clearly analysed.  They are wrapped in high-priestly terms and, when the answers don’t work out, the cultural priests don’t blame themselves, they blame the recalcitrance of ordinary people.
This is where Dammann’s explanation comes in.  All of us have encountered the recalcitrance of material things, the damp patch on the ceiling that obdurately persists after we’ve replaced the slates, the car that continues to stall at the traffic lights after we re-checked the ignition points, the bicycle tyre that goes flat after we’ve patched the inner tube and tested it in a bucket of water.  We realise sadly that we have to enquire further.  But in many schools, when recalcitrant pupils are encountered, there is no further enquiry.  The obstreperous language with which some educationists lambast their pupils is like the kick which the exasperated cyclist directs at the flat tyre of his bicycle. Many educationists don’t feel the need to submit their curriculum to practical tests any more than they enquired in detail into how classics qualified a man to lay down the law on monetarism.  They accept the hallowed answers of the priesthood.
It is this otherworldliness, this irrelevance of much of ‘cultural’ education, that conveys to many people that education doesn’t have much to contribute when we meet the problems of real, everyday life.  An Aberdeenshire farmer gave his foreman instructions for spreading sacks of artificial manure over a large field.  When he returned in the evening he found that all the manure sacks were empty but a third of the field remained to be manured.  He remonstrated with the foreman.  “You should have divided the area of the field by the number of sacks to see how much ground each sack had to cover.  One acre is 4480 square yards.  You knew that!” 
"God almighty," said the foreman, "they learned us that at the school but I never thought it would be any use to me."
Culture should be as directly relevant to our lives as arithmetic, helping us to frame the questions and think out the answers.  But when even the arithmetic taught in school is regarded as having little to contribute to the problems of everyday life, we realise how far the classroom lessons have been ritualised, losing contact with reality.  The educational revolution will re-establish the contact.  It will start with intelligibility.  No society is likely to live happily when three quarters of its pupils and of its adults are excluded from full participation in the understanding of its culture and its government, when culture and government are esoteric studies, a priestly preserve.  These two things, culture and government, are conducted like a game of tennis outside an ancient manor-house.  The rest of us are spectators, permitted to learn the rules and appreciate the skills so that we can applaud appropriately.  We may even get a friendly smile if we retrieve from the undergrowth a ball that has been driven too far out of court.  But that’s as far as it goes.  Now, following Dammann’s advice, since we are determined to participate in this absorbing game, we sit down and direct our practical attention to the causes of our exclusion and the steps we should take in order to gain entry.
Controversy immediately arises.  The tennis players say we haven’t the intelligence to play the game.  I’m saying that we don’t have to accept that statement until we’ve done further research into the nature of intelligibility and the impediments that shackle our pupils and adults when they try to encompass it.  As an engineer surveys his tools for their suitability to the work he wants them to do, we have to examine words, our tools of communication.  The schools give the impression of carrying out this examination.  The exercise is called grammar, but it’s a traditional ceremony, a ritual performed for its own sake, insulated from its purpose of aiding understanding.  At school I learned to write reasonably good English but I never understood the lessons on grammar. Priests do this all the time, ensuring the carrying out of rites without enquiring into the purpose for which the rites were initiated; they adjure their congregation or classroom to believe that the performance of the rite does them good.  Grammar is supposed to do you good in the same way as Latin does you good, or Art, or History, or French, or any other curriculum ritual.  The educational revolution asks, “How does it do you good?”  The examination of language does do you good, but not at all in the way that the ‘grammar’ rituals are performed.  We want our study of language to be of as concrete value as the study of the fuel system of an internal combustion engine.  What is it that is restricting the fuel supply?  What is interfering with the ignition?  Did the teachers use abstract words beyond the pupils’ experience and scope to translate into concrete terms?  While the pupil lingered over a particular word, trying to relate it to his experience, was the teacher driving remorselessly ahead, unaware that the pupil was no longer a passenger in the coach?  Have we adults lost contact with the world of children and adolescents, its idiom and tentative speech-patterns, its groping efforts to link one of our words to its perceived reality.  Matthew Arnold claimed that only a minority are capable of making fine distinctions but I doubt if he had conducted much imaginative enquiry, as a school inspector, into the speech of working-class children which would have entitled him to make the statement.  We need much more detailed research into comprehension and the nature of incomprehension.
The school atmosphere is uncongenial to the carrying out of fruitful enquiry of this kind.  Schools lack comeliness and conviviality, they are too compartmented to allow of the uncompetitive sharing of ideas, the engaging of different abilities and insights in a joint enterprise.  They divorce the artistic from the intellectual, the dreamers from the hard realists, the thinkers from doers in an artificial apartheid.  But we are all artists and scientific enquirers, dreamers and practical people who like to make things that work; and all of these qualities, that exist neglected in our children, are needed if the possibilities of earth-life that have haunted the dreams of our predecessors (the Garden of the Hesperides, Atlantis and Shangri-la and Utopia) are to be nursed into reality. Schools are too cold and forbidding to be a hearth in the glow of which the young learn about their heritage and prepare to take over what we hand to them. 
Starting from the here-and-now, how do we achieve the emancipation which would allow us to begin the remaking of our education?  The first step is to abolish the external examinations.  Until we overthrow this Bastille of the old regime, there will be no educational revolution, no freedom to ask questions about the upbringing of our children.  When teachers are freed from the task of making pupils accumulate information and memorise accepted opinions, the school ceases to be a punitive institution and the teachers will take their place among the research workers of our society, enquiring into the making of a real democracy.  They will respond.  Teachers, drudging through the examination syllabus, become changed people when presented with the opportunity to do original work.
We’ll bring the parents into the classroom.  One way in which they can help is to tell us what it was that they missed at school, the information, skills, experience that would have been valuable to them in later life.  Snatches of disappointment are voiced in random comments, overheard.  “I wish I’d really learned one foreign language.”  “I wish I could have spent a year learning about motor engines.  Then I’d have been able to go off on my own, exploring Africa in a land rover, or sailing round the Aegean.”  “I wish we’d been able to follow through a piece of scientific research for a whole term, sometimes improvising our own equipment.”  “I wish they had taught us many more skills, - ski-ing, gliding, horse-riding, squash, living off the countryside.”... But there is a more general contribution that the parents could make.  The elites, the officer class, the ‘academics’, the ‘top people’, all those groups ‘set apart’ like the pharisees in the New Testament, are lacking in some constituent of fundamental wisdom, perhaps because their upbringing has given them more experience in the manipulation of words than in the management of realities, or perhaps because power has corrupted them and intense competitiveness has hardened them and made them self-centred.  We need a richer wisdom and a greater simplicity than their select upbringing has given them.  We need a greater readiness to admit error than their insecurity permits them; they haven’t the confidence to put their embattled advantages at risk by inviting us in.
One writer has suggested that the participation of parents in running the schools may turn out to be the best way in which all adults will become fully involved in running their country.  Practice in helping to frame the policy and organise the practical affairs of the school would give them confidence to tackle wider-ranging activities.  Parent teacher co-operation could be an embryo that would grow into a living democracy.  I think he could be right.  The country will be better off when the majority contribute their common sense to the solution of problems that have hitherto baffled the minority.
The old system, which ignored the parents and forced upon the young the rigid, priestly ideas of elder statesmen, created the generation gap.  The new dispensation will be as blissfully unaware of a generation gap as an African village was.  The young and old members of the community, listening to one another, learning from one another, will be less likely to try to put anything across on one another.  Parents of very young children are bombarded with questions, and they wonder why the questions dry up when the children go to secondary school.  When the examinations disappear, the bombardment will recommence and parents will understand more fully the role of the teachers in facing this bombardment.  Teachers will be free to ransack the riches of film and radio and television to provide answers for the tumultuous questions that will assail them.  In more leisurely days, BBC script-writer Rhoda Power made of a twenty-minute programme an art form.  Her series How Things Began gave to young listeners a vivid picture of the story of life on the earth.  Before then, most youngsters had no idea at all of where they came from, the dark backward and abysm of time.  I think she was one of the great educators of our century. One early ITV programme, The Story of a River, traced the Dordogne from the Puy de Sancy to the sea, describing the difference between the mountaineers of its source and the inhabitants of the richer lands of the Gironde.  For the first time many pupils realised that where you live makes a difference.
We shall exploit much more fully the skills of film photography to help children to know their heritage.  The concrete reality of photographed material will remove the unintelligibility that at present clouds our word-based education. We shall take our pupils in aeroplanes, helicopters and gliders to show them what their home-planet looks like from outside.  If they are to get our earth-life into perspective, they need to look down on it from a great height and also more intimately from a few hundred feet.  We’ll read to them Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Scots Quhair and Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don and Virgin Soil Upturned, and fly them over the Mearns and the Don basin and exchange pupils so that Ukrainians and Scots can understand that they have almost everything in common.  Rural children of the Mearns of Scotland will visualise with total understanding the scene that Sholokhov describes outside the new collective stable on a winter’s evening when seven or eight previous owners of the horses would hang around, each concerned to see that his bay horse, or the little mare that he had tended solicitously from birth, was getting a fair share of the hay.
Capitalism doesn’t permit such ventures.  Inbuilt in its system is a requirement to economise on the upbringing of the very great majority of the young.  The educational revolution will regard our children as our most precious assets, not to be economised upon.  It will employ the most imaginative of the film and television producers to explain very clearly to the young, the long-back story of their local area, the glaciers scraping out the river valley and leaving the scratch-marks still visible on the rocks, the early colonisers extorting a living from the valley and the seashore, the lords immuring themselves in thick-walled castles, the Earl of Montrose savaging Aberdeen on behalf of his political-religious beliefs.  We’d have an intermission there to home in on the details of this story.  Most of the people who control the history-ideas communicated to the young say that Montrose was a noble character.  It is not the function of the teacher in the educational revolution to support or deny Montrose’s admission to the Scottish Valhalla.  What we have to do is to tell them the Montrose story as clearly and fairly as we can.  The forced march in a snowy winter over the mountains to Inverlochy, the endurance, the heroism, the mental conflict, the loyalty however mistaken, the murders, all of these form a story that will keep children from play and old men from the chimney-corner.  Capitalism’s educators maintain that the majority of teenagers are unqualified to adjudicate amongst the differing opinions about Montrose, and should sit down and memorise the textbook conclusions reached by experts.  We who support the educational revolution say, “Not so.”  Teachers are professional people who are to be trusted to dig up all the facts about Montrose and present them to the pupils.  The pupils have the subtlety and the generosity to decide for themselves what manner of man he was.  And they have the gumption also to realise, as they balance the ideas and feelings, tragically contradictory to each other, running round in Montrose’s head, that the same kinds of heart-breaking decisions, although in the idiom of the twentieth century, will confront them. What I am trying to emphasise, in the teeth of present educational practice, is that no democracy will endure that denies to these youngsters acknowledgement of their ability to size up these issues for themselves.
Then we’d resume the saga of our developing country and world, the growing towns, the awful factories, cholera, the reluctant concessions made by aristocrats and industrialists and archbishops.  The present dispensation teaches our history as if it described something that was over and done with, like the Roman Empire.  They give the pupils the impression that the major problems of society have been solved; everything has been settled and bestowed and zipped up.  We will unzip the package and open up many of the questions again.  We’ll tell the pupils of the provisional answers advanced by Buddha and Jesus, and St. Benedict in his educational experiment at Cassino, by Adam Smith and Tom Paine and Karl Marx.  We’ll apply these answers to present problems, in the way that Dammann suggested, to see if their answers can tell us where we should go from here.  We’ll be particularly concerned with basic values.  Why, for example, was Napoleon so keen to marry into a European royal family?  “He might have been the father of a new world.  He was content to be the son-in-law of the old.”  Did he feel, like an American tycoon, that material success was too earthy and needed to be validated by this sublimation of nobility?  We’ll help our pupils to analyse this ‘nobility’.  Two hundred years ago the new American revolution sent its representatives to the ancient courts of Europe.  Grey reality was contrasted unfavourably with colourful pageant.  H.G. Wells described it in THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY. “Some writers, even American writers, impressed by the artificial splendours of the European courts and by the tawdry and destructive exploits of a Frederick the Great or a Great Catherine, display a snobbish shame of something homespun about these makers of America.  They feel that Benjamin Franklin at the court of Louis XVI, with his long hair, his plain clothes, and his pawky manner, was sadly lacking in aristocratic distinction.”  We’ll read to our working-class pupils passages from today’s popular dailies in which we plodding, homespun characters are contrasted unfavourably with the dashing headline heroes.
History repeats itself, or nearly repeats itself as it follows a spiralling, cyclic course.  Life becomes intolerable for slaves, or wage slaves, soldiers, school-pupils.  The soldiers go berserk, the pupils smash the classroom.  Improvements are made, and life goes more smoothly until there is another build-up of intolerable conditions.  The cycle is caused by the determination of the minority to re-establish control after a bout of concessions.  Because of its restricted upbringing in which minority people communicate mainly with minority people, this minority has a narrower understanding of the nature of life on the earth than it would like the majority to think.  It doesn’t understand (or acts as if it didn’t understand) that growth continues all the time, and that, if the circumstances of living don’t alter to accommodate growth, there are strains. Milton in his Areopagitica emphasised the need of a healthy society to be open to new challenges and not to seek to censor them, from whatever source they came.  But the minority doesn’t allow for growth and change.  Its picture of the majority doesn’t change down the ages.  As long as the members of the majority give no trouble they are praised as loyal, law-abiding, god-fearing, industrious, co-operative.  When they step out of line they are anathematised as recalcitrant, atheistic, anarchic, vandals responsible for ‘senseless’ destruction, the mob.  The various priests are the minority’s officers whose function is to contain revolt and inhibit change.  They have been remarkably successful for millennia.  They have, for the most part, contained the majority, keeping them in a state of physical and intellectual subjection.  There are some indications that that era in human history, the era of ruthless division of humanity into controlling minority and subjected majority, may be moving to its close.  It will be a major event in what Heine called the Liberation War of Humanity when the thought-control, which the minority’s educational priests exercise over the majority, is overthrown.  The purpose of the educational revolution is to do away with the South African-type apartheid which has divided humanity for millennia.
What is surprising is that it has continued for so long. That long duration shows how effective has been the shut-down not merely on the asking of questions but on any general awareness that we might all participate in the running of our society.  The totality of the shut-down may be difficult for future generations to comprehend.  We were wholly immersed (as in a river) in the thought-feeling continuum in which we had our being, carried this way and that by the movement of the current.  Throughout my education I never felt that I was included in policy-making, asked for an opinion that counted, even at the university.  History was an army exercise and the instructions would come down to us from above and our education qualified us in different degrees to carry out these instructions.  The nearest we got to the controllers of power was when we saw an alumnus of the university who had returned, laden with honours, to a graduation ceremony from service in the far-flung empire, a grand vizier, and even he, we felt, was still only a servant of the mystery.  In no sense was the human venture our venture.  (Politics was about getting a few shillings’ increase in pay.)  We never got round to the ghost of an inkling that we might have something to say about how we would choose to spend our time on the earth on which we had so inexplicably appeared.  None of us could get into the holy places, the council chamber where the major decisions about our lives were made, far less bang on the council table and say, “Hang on a minute.  We have a few things to say about this.”  There was never any question about accepting the rulings of a remote, impalpable authority beyond our ken.  We accepted this higher power as we accepted the weather.  There was no way we could begin to doubt it, or question the evaluation it put on our modest abilities.  There was nobody, nobody at all, to whom we could have turned for support and encouragement in raising a small voice of protest (if we had been so minded). The kindly-disposed and distinguished and wise elders raised a finger of warning if I continued in questioning even a minor issue, like the insistence on Latin, and people in whom I had learned to put my trust leaned over, gently deprecating this breach of manners.  It was unseemly.  Our elders gently and firmly “put us in our place”.  They liked us and had helped us and now helped us further by saving us from ourselves, from the solecism of raising our voice in a holy place.  They said they appreciated this demonstration of the Scottish spirit of independence but there was the Greek doctrine of the mean, and, like them, we would learn as we grew older, and we would measure our words.  We felt properly reproved, but puzzled.  I had vaguely felt that enlightenment meant clarifying issues so that you could reach a clear conclusion.  But they said it wasn’t as simple as that.  There were imponderables not accessible to ordinary reasoning, to be taken into account, a sense of fitness, of knowing when to hold your peace.
I know now (but I wouldn’t have dared to say it then even if I had discovered it) that what prevented these kindly, scholarly people from giving voice to the truth as they felt it within themselves was not fear but something much more deeply imprinted on them, something of the nature of a hoodoo.  It had been handed down for such countless generations that they felt that it had taken on the quality of an instinctive reaction.  It continues to be interposed like a filter to prevent people from reaching the conclusion that rational argument would lead them to.  It appears when I talk to a churchman and find him intelligent and sensitive and sympathetic, and then we get to the details of the Nicene Creed (“descended into Hell and rose the third day”) and the filter comes down and there can be no further discussion.  It appears in debates on education when scientists, who question mercilessly every statement in their own field of study, accept with docility the current dogmas on the secondary school curricula.
In THE ANATOMY OF POWER  J.K. Galbraith says that the supreme expression of the use of power occurs “when the person does not know that he or she is being controlled.... Belief makes submission not a conscious act of will but a normal, natural manifestation of the approved behaviour.  Those who do not submit are deviant.”  The central effort of the educational revolution is, as Freire said, to make people conscious of these ancient patterns of deception.  The Mephistophelean grandeur of the deception, spanning the centuries, makes Machiavelli and Goebbels appear like small-time, local operators.  Our strategy to combat this general anaesthesia, to help people to wake up, is to un-complicate the fundamental issues and persuade people to start asking questions again, the self-same questions they asked or came near to asking when they were children.
The hymn says, “Tell me the story simply, that I may take it in.”  The story is this.  Here we are on the surface of a planet spinning round the sun; how should we be spending these three-score years and ten, or four-score years allocated to us?  For the first time in human history the opportunity, nay, the necessity, has arrived for everybody to be brought into the search for an answer, evaluating the richness of sexual experience, the peace of the countryside, the liberating effect of art which, as Sir Philip Sidney said, ‘claps wings to solid nature’, and, weighing these things against the accumulating of goods, or of power over our fellow-colonists of the planet, to give the young some clear understanding which would help them to make their own, independent choice between these things.
We who work in education have to tie our work into that major design.  I revert to the confrontation on Mount Carmel in the ninth century BC when the lights were going out in Israel (as today in Europe and the USA) and defeatism had become stronger and Baal’s crowd (as today) were on the up-and-up.  I imagine there had been a period of confusing of the issues, of neutrality and opting out, a period of Butskill compromise.  I had dismissed the Elijah story as irrelevant to our times, supposing that the god he was recruiting for was he of Rome and Geneva and Canterbury.  But it is possible that the crisis in belief, the gods contrasted, the opposition of values were nearly identical to our own.  Baal, the god of Ahab and Jezebel, is the god of Reagan and Thatcher; his values are their values.  Elijah cracked the mould of compromise with hammer blows.  “How long halt ye between two opinions?  If the Lord be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him.”  He left no room for neutrality, for opting out.  In our world of very rapidly sharpening crisis, that’s the choice the teachers are presented with.
They have to decide if their loyalty is to Baal and his values (inducing docility and defeatism in the majority) or to different values and a different god (requiring them to try and restore humanity’s belief in itself).
It will be difficult to restore a confidence that has been so relentlessly and calculatedly undermined, and the high priests of Baal will, of course, continue to confuse our judgement, “darkening counsel”, and above all, diminishing the pupils’ self-esteem.  This is the main issue on which the teachers will have to take their stand.  What kind of people do they really think our youngsters are? Are they the characters that Reagan and Thatcher, the military and the multinationals and their attendant priesthoods say they are, lumpish, credulous, mob-like; or are they something else?  Teachers who have accorded their pupils freedom and respect have seen an upsurge of energy and initiative. Surliness and suspicion are cleared away in a torrent of activity, glazed eyes begin to twinkle, ability sprouts in unexpected places, generosity replaces hostility.  We have babied them too long; here in Scotland we have the fittest generation that there has ever been in our history, and teachers have made them sit at their desks and learn their lessons.  In Fife we let them loose and were surprised at their overflowing energy.  Some of our fourteen-year-olds made record crossings of the Mamore Mountains and the Cuillins in Skye, beating adult times.  We begin to realise by how much we have under-estimated both the physical and mental ability of the young.  And consequently of our whole nation.
This down-valuing, de-grading, is a mechanism of the minority to price themselves up and confirm their control over us, and to take away our freedom.  It has been challenged often.  Milton warned us against them.  “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”  He was under no misconception about the worth of our people.  This was how he assessed them in 1644.  “A nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit; acute to invent, subtile and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to.”
Part of our contribution is to give to all our pupils an awareness that they can measure up to this assessment, and that history is not the story of a chosen group of kings and captains for whom the rest of us are capable only of hewing wood and drawing water. We teachers have to replace the reverence for institutions with reverence for life, for all human beings, and to give to our pupils the sense that they are history, a feeling of the integrity of the whole human race.

Chapter nine

SUMMARY

We are stumbling on the edge of a wild surmise that western civilisation is based on apartheid, on the belief that the minority is intelligent and caring and that the best hope for the dull majority is to entrust itself to the care of this gifted minority.  Apartheid in Britain is not as black-and-white as in South Africa but the intention is the same.
For centuries this climate of thought and feeling was ubiquitous and there was no escaping its influence.  The ruling minority devoted all the available resources of literature and religion, schools and universities and law-courts, political parties, the media to deny or submerge the ability of the many, and to present themselves as the heroes of a noble epic.  We did believe that cabinet ministers cared for us, that judges were just and journalists independent, that scientists were fearless in pursuit of the truth, that literature and philosophy and what was called our cultural heritage were about helping the whole human race to find its way through the darkling wood, and that school and university education existed to make this wisdom available to all.
This dome of belief has now been cracked in many places.  The distinguished journalists turn out to be Murdoch hacks, scientists line up for tinsel honours, drug companies act cruelly and irresponsibly in backward countries, university theologians perpetuate superstition.  Radio and television interviewers treat strikers with scant courtesy but stock-exchange pirates with Upstairs-Downstairs deference.  In museums, package tourists gaze at the insignia with which rulers ornamented one another.  In the Top-Kapi palace in Istanbul they see the Order of the Garter with which Victoria invested the Sultan. There it is in a showcase, all the effrontery of a jewelled garter designed to create awe.  Pure mumbo-jumbo.  It registers.
We knew that Mumbo-jumbo and all the other gods of the Congo could hoodoo the black sub-men of the Congo, but these spells couldn’t bind us.  Now we gaze at one another with a wild surmise.  Could it be that this western civilisation is not what it seems and that Mumbo-jumbo controls our world too? I’m suggesting that Rimbaud wasn’t so far out when he said that “everything we are taught is false”.
That is the awful realisation we are stumbling upon, that we have been totally misled.  And more than that, that humanity cannot trust any ruling elite for the simple reason that the elite will ultimately turn to Mumbo-jumbo for support, in its efforts to dominate the rest of us.  It is a fatal and inexorable flaw.
The only way out is that we should all participate in the running of our lives and of our society.  The entry into that way is by encouraging the young to ask questions about everything, removing all trespass notices, and giving them the confidence to query all the great men, the revered institutions (albeit with courtesy) and come to their own conclusions about new initiatives on how to live together so that we can make the best use of our time on the earth.  The way will be full of harms, and of doubts, not a known way.  But of one thing there is no doubt.  There is no future for humanity unless we are all involved in creating it.  To do that we need a change of heart in the way we regard all our children and in our upbringing of them.  That is what I mean by the educational revolution.

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Please include the download information with this file whether viewed or printed. Many thanks. To get a better understanding of RF Mackenzie and his unique view of education, for information on Braehead school, Buckhaven, Fife, for views from former staff and pupils, for old photographs taken in and around Braehead then visit www.braehead.info web site dedicated to all of the above.