Reglamento de la Ley Federal sobre Metrología y Normalización. 49

Major recent educational changes have been: the imposition of a National Curriculum (as opposed to one agreed with local authorities and Her Majesty’s Inspectors (HMIs)); the introduction of pre-GCSE examinations;

and the publication of league tables of schools’ performances (since aban-doned in Wales and Northern Ireland). Opponents of a national curriculum felt it was closing down room for individual initiative and saw it as sinister in its regimenting of pupils. They referred to a French Minister of Education who boasted that he knew at any hour of the day which page of which book pupils would be turning. Supporters of a national curriculum promoted it as a necessary educational reform which would ensure uniform standards in schools.

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Reform was necessary if only because of the underachievement and disaffection of many children in school. People can still relate to George Orwell’s statement in the 1930s: ‘There is not one working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will leave school. He wants to be doing real work not wasting his time on ridiculous rubbish like history and geography’ (The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937).

To the consternation of those working and studying in them, Tony Blair (educated at the Edinburgh public school, Fettes College) in 2001 referred to comprehensive schools as ‘bog-standard’. The School Standards Minister, Stephen Timms, echoed this view in 2001, complaining of ‘one-size-fits-all’ educational provision. Because many children are bored by the GCSEs they are doing, the government is proposing to enable them to embark on apprenticeships two days a week at fourteen years of age, once forty thousand industrial placements have been found.

Previous such initiatives have failed amid complaints that firms have exploited students on work experience as unpaid labour. Ken Spours, of London University’s Institute of Education, said: ‘In the era of league tables, it could mean schools just getting rid of their disruptive pupils – and I don’t see industry falling over themselves to take them.’ Some see this leading to a divisive two-tier education system where some children are denied good-quality education and others, with a privileged background, are enabled to flower.

Some schools are considering offering the International Baccalaureate as an alternative to AS levels, particularly after the new sixth form curriculum’s chaotic first year. Traditionally the lower sixth year is one without examination, where pupils are given space to find their feet in inde-pendent study and develop a love of a subject. Instead the AS system placed them under great pressure to perform, and they had to endure public examinations three years in succession. However the Education & Skills Minister, Estelle Morris, is now promising schools more flexibility.

Debate on educational change has featured in much popular culture, including Grange Hill, a children’s soap opera set in a comprehensive school and in the soap Brookside. Contrasting the worlds portrayed there, or in a film such as Kes (1969, re-released 2001), with those of films such as Good-bye Mr Chips (1939) or The Belles of St Trinians (1954) shows the extent of the changes in both education and representation that have taken place. The former relate to the everyday lives of their viewers. The latter invite audiences to peep into a privileged world to which few of them will ever have access.

Schools matter to people because education is not just about the delivery of syllabuses. Primary schools in particular are the sites for the transmission from one generation to the next of shared culture. The culture is of the classroom, but also of the playground. Children socialise there.

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The playground is a concrete jungle where children practise their games and learn, where society’s folk memories and myths are recycled through chants. The song ‘A Ring a Ring a roses / A pocketful of posies / Atishoo!

Atishoo! / We all fall down’ contains memories of the Black Death which swept Europe in the Middle Ages. Another reminder comes when, on the passing of an ambulance, children say: ‘Touch your collar / Never swallow / Never catch the fever.’

In choosing a school for their children, parents worry about poten-tial academic progress, but also about the prevalence of bullying, the development of life skills, and the kind of social, cultural, and spiritual experience offered by the school. Furthermore, because schools are so important in the formation of shared cultural identity, people are interested in the way in which prominent public figures choose to educate their chil-dren, and comment on their decisions. For example, Prince Charles was the first member of the royal family not to be educated by palace tutors. He was sent to Gordonstoun in Scotland. His own sons William and Harry were sent to Eton. For ordinary parents this humanised the Royal Family, who became subject to the same anxieties and uncertainties of sending chil-dren to school as they did. Conversely, people sensed hypocrisy when Prime Minister Tony Blair bypassed the state system and sent his sons to the exclusive Catholic public school, Brompton Oratory.

In choosing a school, some parents also consider the availability of an ‘old school tie’ network, which may help their child to get a job and develop socially useful lifelong friendships. In Britain as elsewhere, those who have shared experiences during their formative years forge a common cultural bond which enables them to operate along co-operative and self-help lines. The most famous of such networks may be the grouping of old Etonians, Harrovians, and other public schoolboys, known as

‘the Establishment’. Girls’ schools offering access to this network would be Roedean, Benenden or Cheltenham Ladies College. Britain works on a system of contacts among people whose business, professional, sporting, and social lives produce a shared cultural milieu. This is evident in the number and social status of clubs nominally representing various interests but in practice simply enabling members to socialise, for example: Rotary or Round Table, golf, and sailing clubs. Cubs and Brownies, Scouts and Guides induct British children into this club mentality.

It has always been the case that pupils from single-sex schools have performed better than those at mixed ones – without the distractions of the opposite sex, so the argument goes. This has applied more to girls than to boys. Thus, in the 2001 GCSE tables the top nine schools nationally were girls’ schools. Recently moreover the trend in school and university educa-tion is that girls seem to be performing much better than boys. Various factors have contributed to their increased pre-eminence. Today more

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women in prominent jobs offer role models. Feminism has changed girls’

expectations and encouraged their ambition. A profound shift appears to be taking place where boys are ‘the weaker sex’, the ones who need encour-agement and the raising of their self-esteem. This is one of the problems being addressed by educators. The Labour government appears less doctri-naire than previous administrations. They are prepared to support grammar schools where appropriate rather than the comprehensives which Labour introduced in the 1960s. They are also prepared to borrow ideas from private schools and in extreme cases to allow failing inner city schools to be managed by private companies. However, they are also putting less money into education than the OECD average, by a full percentage point.

Spending per pupil in 1999, at £2,433 for those at primary schools and £3,823 for those at secondary schools, was lower than the OECD average of £2,880 and £3,869 respectively. A report by the National Skills Task Force in 2001 indicated that seven million adults in Britain are functionally illiterate, and this perhaps explains Labour’s emphasis on

‘education, education, education’, where attention will be directed mainly to schools.

An educational trend that some people see as disturbing is that recent governments have encouraged a shift at third level, from education to training. The word ‘education’ comes from the Latin educo meaning to lead out or develop qualities which are within. This is meant to produce the fully rounded individual with a healthy mind in a healthy body (mens sana in corpore sano). Critics suggest that because the majority of students are in the formative eighteen to twenty-two phase of their lives it is a mistake to concentrate solely on instruction, which implies pouring knowledge into them and ignores the stage of personal development that they have reached.

Training is to do with the supply of workers and is not concerned with the individual. Education, on the other hand, develops qualities and offers personal cultural fulfilment. Opponents, on the other hand, say that publicly funded education should be pragmatic and does have a duty to supply society’s need for skills – the piper is entitled to call the tune.

The university scene is more successful. According to figures from the OECD, in Britain in 1999 35.6 per cent of twenty-one-year-olds graduated from university. This is the highest percentage in Europe. Moreover in 2001 a report on graduate employment commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council found that more new UK graduates expressed satisfaction with their college courses than did their counterparts in Europe and Japan.

Government figures in 2000 showed that only 17 per cent of students in the UK leave universities without a qualification, the second lowest drop-out rate in the world (after Japan).

As regards the place held in British society and culture by universit-ies – they have always taken criticism from both the political left and right.

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The left sees them as elitist nurseries for the children of the bourgeoisie.

Conversely, the political right sees them as populist hotbeds of left-wing radicalism where the next generation is encouraged into the ways of socialism and opposition to authority. However, even when the lines of political division are being redrawn, university graduates (especially from Oxbridge) still dominate the political leadership of Britain. For example, Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher both went to Oxford, and almost two-thirds of the people appointed by Tony Blair to the Labour Cabinet since 1997 were educated at Oxford or Cambridge. (His initial 1997 ‘redbrick’

Cabinet was partly imposed on him by Labour MPs, who in opposition have the right to elect the top team.)

Despite sometimes rancorous debate, individuals still feel positive about education. A wide range of them, having had the experience of being in the school play, practising team sports such as hockey or soccer, or such extra curricular activities as chess or judo, develop and retain a shared sense of pride in their schools. Rivalry between schools is felt by children who are publicly labelled by the uniforms that most British schools make them wear. When they leave school, reports of their achievements will often indi-cate their schools – so, for example, members of the Oxford and Cambridge rugby teams have their colleges and schools listed thus: Carr, Kenneth:

Merton; St Anthony’s Comprehensive, Luton. Smith, John: Churchill;

Shrewsbury School. Students will often visit their old schools and join Old Girls or Boys Associations, which meet to arrange social functions.

Throughout their lives people who went to Eton, Harrow, or Winchester schools are referred to by others as Old Etonians, Old Harrovians, or Wykehamists (Winchester School was founded in the fourteenth century by Bishop William Wykeham). And they see themselves in this way also. Well into middle age someone will pride himself on being a public school boy.

Professor Richard Hoggart saw himself all his life as ‘a grammar school boy’. For Hoggart this implied someone who forever has to jump hurdles, which he places for himself, in order to retain a sense of self-worth.

Even primary schools have reunions, as people feel a need to re-experience the comradeship and spirit of community of their youth. No matter how old people are, school is where they acquired their first long-term friends, developed their social personalities, and gained a deep and lasting sense of communal identity.

Employment

Education and work are linked in that an individual’s success at school often determines the kind of job he or she goes on to do. The relationship is not always this straightforward, but often there is a connection between

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upward and downward trajectories at school and in the workplace. An important effect of the many divisions in British education – between state and private, Oxbridge and redbrick; vocational and academic – is that the workforce experiences ideas of stratification which have been superseded in many other countries. Thus the British workforce is distinguished by its divisions rather than its cohesiveness. Remuneration replicates social division. Process or factory workers have always received (weekly) wages, while predominantly middle-class managers have received (monthly) salaries. There are still quite separate ladders of achievement in numerous workplaces and it is almost impossible for people to cross from one to another despite the fact of John Major, somebody who did not attend uni-versity, let alone Oxbridge, exceptionally rising to become prime minister.

Further examples of the continuing stratified nature of Britain unfor-tunately abound. British company reports still append names to photos of directors while referring to technical processes beneath photos of workers.

The civil service is divided into administrative, executive, and clerical grades; industry into management and shop floor; banks into directors, managers, clerks, and cashiers. These divisions may not be in all cases watertight, but very few people at the top of British industry have risen from the bottom, and this both reflects and determines a British cultural identity based on the social and economic divisions which separate groups of people from one another.

Tables 2.1 and 2.2 show the distribution of workers between different industries and the national unemployment rate in recent years. From these figures it is tempting to suggest that the recent success of the Labour gov-ernment is entirely due to their control of this single problem. Conversely, should this trend reverse, Labour might be less likely to retain office.

Attitudes to work are determined culturally, and work in general has always had a low cultural profile. If we ‘read’ British society through litera-ture, we can see that most works of fiction for example either don’t refer to work or, if they do, denigrate it. In Jane Austen’s novels, people who are in trade are not quite respectable; the correct thing to do is to own land and to live off one’s rents. Neither Elizabeth Bennet’s Mr Darcy nor Emma Woodhouse’s Mr Knightley works for a living. Bulstrode in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2) is a banker and thus in a profession which is not yet entirely respectable. In Dickens’s novels people try to separate their public (working) selves from their private (domestic) lives in the belief that every-body wants to escape from work. Wemmick, the law clerk in Great Expectations (1860–1) pulls up a drawbridge when he goes back to his home where his ‘aged parent’ lives. Home is sacrosanct. Work is a necessary evil.

Work is rarely portrayed seriously or in detail in British films. Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and others of the 1950s New Wave cinema were seen as daring for approaching the subject of work at all in Saturday Night 1111

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and Sunday Morning (1960) and Room at the Top (1959). In fact, although there are some ‘documentary’ scenes from the factory floor in the former, the film concentrates on a love story. The same is true of David Lodge’s novel Nice Work (1988). Even ‘revolutionary’ drama such as Alan Bleasdale’s lauded television series Boys from the Blackstuff (1991), which shows how work is integral to a sense of both identity and culture, feels a need to portray workers as ‘cheeky chappies’ who avoid ‘hard graft’. On

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T A B L E 2 . 1 The workforce in Britain, 2001: %

Agriculture, forestry, & fishing 1.3

Manufacturing industries 16.1

Construction 4.8

Wholesale & retail 17.0

Hotels & catering 5.8

Transport & communications 6.1 Banking, finance, & insurance 4.1

Real estate/business 14.7

Education 7.9

Health & social work 10.5

Total no. of men in employment 12,356,000 Total no. of women in employment 11,985,00

Source: ‘Labour Market Trends’, National Statistics, Crown Copyright 2001

T A B L E 2 . 2 Unemployment in Britain, % of workforce

1980 5.1 1991 8.0

1981 8.1 1992 9.7

1982 9.5 1993 10.3

1983 10.4 1994 9.4

1984 10.6 1995 8.0

1985 10.9 1996 7.2

1986 11.1 1997 5.5

1987 10.0 1998 4.7

1988 8.0 1999 4.3

1989 6.2 2000 3.8

1990 5.8

Source: ‘Labour Market Trends’, National Statistics, Crown Copyright 2001

the other hand, Willy Russell’s popular escapist films Letter to Brezhnev (1985) and Shirley Valentine (1989) deal directly with work in and outside the home, and yet they offer their audiences a fantasy of escape from the tedium of work into romances with ‘exotic’ foreigners.

Unlike novels and films, television curiously, has produced a spate of series about work. They have accelerated beyond such hospital dramas as Casualty or rural veterinary practices such as All Creatures Great and Small to include the military (Soldiers), fire-fighting (London’s Burning), and many others. Television comedy series set in workplaces include The Brittas Empire, Drop the Dead Donkey, and Dinner Ladies, set in a leisure centre, an office, and a canteen respectively.

A film which offers a useful case-study because it did very well at the box office, and therefore may be seen to reflect popular British aspirations and values, is Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). The story pursues some friends around Britain and examines their social lives in the context of the ceremonial rituals of the title. The whole is placed in the context of an Anglo-American ‘special relationship,’ which is part shared cultural history and part wish-fulfilment designed to appeal to different agendas on both sides of the Atlantic. As in other films such as Remains of the Day (1994), A Handful of Dust (1988), or The Shooting Party (1984), it adds social comment to a familiar recipe of stately homes in a timeless, upstairs/

downstairs England peopled with fascinating eccentrics and nameless servants. This has been called a ‘Merchant/Ivory’ version of Britain (from the names of the director and producer who made Room With a View (1985) and Howards End (1992)). Four Weddings and a Funeral offers a version of Britain which contains a mixture of traditional and new clichés.

Bohemianism, the gay community and monarchy are all contained in the non-threatening framework of British compromise. Meanwhile there is absolutely no mention of work. The film comes from the same mould as Chariots of Fire (1981) and Another Country (1984), which ultimately praise the leisured Britain that they depict and steadfastly ignore the means of getting a living. In such pointedly socially divided worlds, work persists in its cultural representations as something the upper classes do not do and the working classes wish not to do.

To illustrate further British culture’s negative representation of work, we can look at one or two examples from Britpop. The 1995 Blur album is called The Great Escape. Its front cover has a picture of someone diving from a motorboat into a beautiful Mediterranean sea. Its back cover has the four members of the group dressed as urban professionals huddled around a computer. Here, as with most popular culture aimed at the country’s mass population, the dominant British view is that work is a treadmill from which people dream of escaping (Blur’s other album titles also suggest this: Leisure, Modern Life Is Rubbish, Parklife).

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The possibility of a life of leisure is also a fantasy indulged in every

The possibility of a life of leisure is also a fantasy indulged in every