Policed Academy
An excellent I.T post on a turn of phrase in a (perhaps rather knowing) Stephen Bayley piece on the architecture of City Academies which actually made me groan in pain upon reading it: 'Academies must respect key stage testing, but do not have to follow the national curriculum. This ventilates both the style of teaching and the plan of the building. The way it was explained to me was: we don't do French language and history, we do 'Napoleon'. This way, pupils learn about motivational leadership and acquire French language and history at the same time'.
A couple of quick glosses on this one while I try and calm myself down. First, Bayley's piece immediately made me think of a recent issue of the AJ on new school design. This was a faintly boosterish profile of the new typologies being developed by architects for schools, an example of the ethical commitment the profession seems to yearn for, with back-slapping aplenty. Nowhere was there any real examination of the fact that all of these were City Academies - that obscurantist corporate scam where businesses make a tiny contribution and gain vast powers, and where any residual egalitarianism is abandoned (none of those 'bog-standard' comprehensives for us, oh no). The buildings are sometimes pretty, sometimes quite ingenious, and sometimes straightforward examples of serving their true clients, as with the Norman Foster school designed sans playground so that the sell-off of publicly-owned land can proceed apace.
Oh, and second - I had assumed, perhaps as this is how I was - foolishly! - taught at my 'bog-standard' comprehensive, that one of the few socialist ideas which had conclusively penetrated into schools was history from below. When we were taught World War One we focused on the trenches, not on Clemenceau's statesmanship. But if 'we do Napoleon', we don't 'do' the sans-culottes, we don't 'do' the Jacobins, and especially pertinently, given the Caribbean ancestry of many of the pupils at the Paddington school in question - we don't 'do' the black Jacobins of Haiti, but we focus instead on the personality of the emperor who brought slavery back. Once again the exploited are asked to identify with their exploiters - and have dangled at them the tantalising prospect that, given enough 'motivation', they might become exploiters too. Can we please have done with the arrant bollocks that this has anything whatsover to do with the 'ethics' of anything other than capital?
A couple of quick glosses on this one while I try and calm myself down. First, Bayley's piece immediately made me think of a recent issue of the AJ on new school design. This was a faintly boosterish profile of the new typologies being developed by architects for schools, an example of the ethical commitment the profession seems to yearn for, with back-slapping aplenty. Nowhere was there any real examination of the fact that all of these were City Academies - that obscurantist corporate scam where businesses make a tiny contribution and gain vast powers, and where any residual egalitarianism is abandoned (none of those 'bog-standard' comprehensives for us, oh no). The buildings are sometimes pretty, sometimes quite ingenious, and sometimes straightforward examples of serving their true clients, as with the Norman Foster school designed sans playground so that the sell-off of publicly-owned land can proceed apace.
Oh, and second - I had assumed, perhaps as this is how I was - foolishly! - taught at my 'bog-standard' comprehensive, that one of the few socialist ideas which had conclusively penetrated into schools was history from below. When we were taught World War One we focused on the trenches, not on Clemenceau's statesmanship. But if 'we do Napoleon', we don't 'do' the sans-culottes, we don't 'do' the Jacobins, and especially pertinently, given the Caribbean ancestry of many of the pupils at the Paddington school in question - we don't 'do' the black Jacobins of Haiti, but we focus instead on the personality of the emperor who brought slavery back. Once again the exploited are asked to identify with their exploiters - and have dangled at them the tantalising prospect that, given enough 'motivation', they might become exploiters too. Can we please have done with the arrant bollocks that this has anything whatsover to do with the 'ethics' of anything other than capital?
posted by owen hatherley at 1:52 am
5 Comments:
Excellent post. Find it hard to think of anything this government has done with as high a wilful stupidity content as City Academies. (Iraq?)
This is a depressing read:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n13/mcki01_.html
"The least damage would be done if all secondary schools became quasi-academies: schools which possessed much of the academies’ autonomy and their academic culture. But such a compromise should carry with it certain conditions. The first is the abandonment of sponsorship – notions of which are becoming increasingly preposterous and socially regressive. Nothing would be lost and everything gained. The only obstacle is the government’s distrust of LEAs and local communities. The LEAs are perfectly able to live with quasi-academies and vice versa. This is in fact the way comprehensives are evolving: towards greater autonomy and more authoritative leadership. The second is the end of grammar schools. Where they survive they are having the same effect on comprehensives as they had on secondary moderns in the 1950s. Grammar schools and failing comprehensives go hand in hand. (Kent has more than thirty ‘failing’ schools because it also has a large number of grammar schools.) Adonis’s solution to this problem – that grammar schools should in some way sponsor ‘failing’ comprehensives – is extraordinary. The third is the removal of that incubus, the league tables, which everybody (except the government) now wants. Since too many passes have already been sold, such a compromise is as close to a democratic secondary school system as we are ever likely to get."
We did the long march at school (Forest Lodge comprehensive - since knocked down which I feel is a poetic comment on my educational experience) - too Maoist for you Owen I know...
I also wonder how they teach modern German history...
Grimmer schools for all!
Or the Hogwarts option: Grimoire schools for all.
You'd have to pity the poor kids that might end up at this place:
The Daily Mail school
It could almost be Daily Mail Island straight out of TV Go Home
Post a Comment
<< Home