Fighting for a historic third term in government, Tony Blair drove to his constituency in Sedgefield and said that his three-pronged object of political desire remained ‘Education, Education, Education’, without using the by then much mocked word. Here is what he said:
Education has been, is and will be the driving mission of a New Labour Government: to give our children, all our children not just those at the top, the best start in life, the best chance to succeed.
The phrase helps us to see what Blair meant by the expansively superfluous original phrase. The meaning of education is herein defined for New Labour and for right-wing Labour MPs since – giving children, carefully coding that word to mean children across the range of social class in the UK, the ‘best start in life, the best chance to succeed’. That would became its equivalent in the present right wing Labour government of a mash-up of dreams of success, not unlike the American dream of the Fifties, and unregulated capitalism’s hunger for expansion at whatever cost and with whatever commodities that could raise economic demand this skewed system could dream up. Starmer’s ‘Growth, Growth, Growth’.
If education is reduced to the aims of a corrupt system, it isn’t (however often you repeat the word) really based on allowing children or adults access to more of the values of a meaningful life, but having more of the the thing that passes for happiness in capitalism – a life of having tokens that promise to buy meaning in life which it has power to buy only in sordid dreams, the monetary income rise and other accumulations of having. In fact such an aim remains a ‘dream’ in this project for most and a reality for a few, who even then cannot but keep accumulating. That is not success in life, whatever that is and however short of it we fall as individuals.
I was born in the period of lull after the Second World War and the first Labour Government, which had not yet cast off the aims of true change for amelioration of a cruel society bought on its terms – feeding its greed for growth through whatever means. Now the Labour Party says. ‘I promise you change when the capitalist economists tell us we can afford it as an add-on’. The education I got was that dream of an older society embodied in complex figures like Matthew Arnold – the products of privilege themselves who wanted that privilege made distributable without violent revolution to make it so,
Yet that ‘education’ has an objective, to spread, as Arnold called it, ‘Culture’ which he defined as the undefinable in life: ‘Sweetness and light’. It was to give access to:
the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically …
Now Arnold was no revolutionary. His aim at best was to justify slamming down political protest by showing there was another way, but his goals where those of ‘education’ as it would be constructed in thought at least after the Second World War:
There is a view [of culture] in which all the love of our neighbour, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for stopping human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing the sum of human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it—motives eminently such as are called social—come in as part of the grounds of culture, and the main and pre-eminent part. Culture is then properly described … as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection …
The idea of perfection as an inward condition of the mind and spirit is at variance with the mechanical and material civilisation in esteem with us … The idea of perfection as The idea of perfection as an harmonious expansion of human nature is at variance with our want of flexibility, with our inaptitude for seeing more than one side of a thing, with our intense energetic absorption in the particular pursuit we happen to be following … (1)
These are aspirations beyond and even counter to seeing education as a means to individual success in a competitive system. They deserve to be three objects, not one, that ‘you can’t live without’, because as objects they define the meaning of living as not not individual ‘having’ but aspiration to ‘a general expansion of the human family’. And that aspiration is Arnold insists “at variance with our strong individualism, our hatred of all limits to the unrestrained swing of the individual’s personality, our maxim of ‘every man for himself.’” Indeed, though unrealised since and not likely to be realised any time soon, we might yet see our giving up of that good thing the true meaning of ‘national growth’ at all costs – the Fascism it fosters and has no tools for countering since it can only ape its language in fear.
This is is a sad blog in truth. Hopeless.
With love
Steven xxxxxxxxxxxxx
______________________________________________________
(1) Arnold, Matthew. 1869. Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism. Oxford: Project Gutenberg.
Steve_Bamlett_blog 