All Must Have Prizes. - book reviews

Contemporary Review, Feb, 1997 by Stephen Wade

Teachers at the chalk face reading this book would find all their coffee-break complaints not only justified, but regulated into a systematic polemic against all the perceived ills of a libertarian philosophy of education in Britain today. Melanie Philips has written an impressive work of collation, well-researched, always interesting and astoundingly provoking. But there is a weakness: she is a journalist treading into too many areas in which specialists role. Consequently, many of her statements appear to be ill-conceived, sweeping generalisations which are often based on shallow evidence.

Having said this, however, it is a remarkable feat to embrace in one book such intractable and complex topics as the teaching of English, the examination system, the National Curriculum and the emergence of 'Cultural Studies' as an academic discipline. In some ways, this is the main virtue of this well-written and challenging book: it crystallises many by-ways of contemporary educational history, covering material as diverse as the arrival of GCSE, the easing of examination thresholds and Rogerian philosophy. In other words, one disagrees with so much that there is a constant stimulus to further thought.

For this reason alone, this book should be read and discussed by all trainee teachers. It should be essential reading on a philosophy of education programme, as Melanie Philips' most interesting thesis is that teachers have been, over the last twenty years, passive and almost bovine in their acceptance of glib, trendy philosophies and of classroom methodologies which have propped up the ailing society from which pupils arrive into the learning process. In fact, one inevitable conclusion to such an enquiry must be that as long as teachers shun the interest in theory that seems necessary for the right-thinking attitudes the author advocates, there will always be a major problem in our schools. One feels that a closer examination of teacher training might have strengthened the argument.

However, the insistence that traditional values, discipline and structure in learning and teaching would solve all ills is a narrow view. The insistence on 'decline' being explained by the death of conventional wisdom, with its authoritarian stance, becomes too facile a remedy. Miss Philips wants the essay back, and the formal, controlled learning which brings a definable success but at what cost?

The worst misreading of our present 'malaise' is when the author addresses the problems that have beset English over recent decades. She is hard on Brian Cox, isolating him as an example of the inadequacies of English dons when asked to provide remedies for the linguistic incompetence observed in so many official reports. The simplifications and misunderstandings are most apparent in her attack on Terry Eagleton et al. in the celebrated letter concerning English teaching in The Times (1992). This letter, signed by 576 dons, simply explains the belief in literature as an imaginative exploration of values and of the human sense of being. It avoids any enforced study of classics and deplores the promulgation of a canon of 'great works'.

Melanie Philips takes this letter as evidence of ingenuousness on the part of the experts. She knows better. The formula is simple - give them all grammar and Shakespeare and all will be well. The world of Dickens' Gradgrind is not far away here, and Miss Philips would certainly supply the chalk and slates for this Brave New World where parsing and spelling rules would put everything right.

All Must Have Prizes will certainly be passed around the staffroom, and there will be nodding heads and chuckles with such statements as, 'What has happened is nothing less than a breakdown of the accepted conventions of the transmissions of our culture. . .' The book does provide an argument that many teachers and educationists will feel to be substantially valid. But in the end, this is simply fine journalism: exceptionally stylish and cogently argued, but falling short of ten out of ten. Readers will be led back to the systematic and scholarly research in order to check on the assertions made here, and that is no bad thing.

STEPHEN WADE