BC is as Bad for Education as PC
Dennis O'Keeffe

A friend in the North of England rang a few days ago to tell me of a meeting she had just attended at her university. Her tale was familiar. Like meetings are occurring at universities all over the country. Hers was about how the academic staff's teaching and the students' learning can be improved. It is the wish, rather the ukase, of central educational officialdom, that all universities must engage in self surveillance in order to improve their performance. My friend's call left me pondering an important question.

Namely, where should modern free societies be seen at their most exemplary? A reasonable answer would surely be: in their universities. In higher education, beyond - we hope - the minatory controls necessary to primary and secondary schools, students and staff can seriously and freely investigate that which is the case - what used to be called "truth." Admittedly, in humanities and social science all too many academics pursue what they wish were the case, rather than the case itself. In principle, though, they can pursue truth and they can back this up by also looking for what is beautiful or morally binding on us. That, at any rate, is the general idea.

But can we university teachers be true to this general idea? I try, and so do my many friends working in universities. I am amazed at the hours and efforts so many colleagues devote to a not very well paid job. Unfortunately, up and down the country, sound university teaching is becoming ever more difficult, owing to the disastrous growth of bureaucratic centralism. (BC) This is Lenin's grisly gift to posterity. He devised for his country a Behemoth of proliferating rules and apparatchiks. It has left Russia and most former Communist countries in a condition of poisoned humiliation. Now a lesser strain of the malady is infecting Western education systems.

Perhaps the first big leap in British BC, in the case of education, back in the 1980s, happened because people like Margaret Thatcher thought, rightly, that education had lost its way. If she imagined that tightening up from the centre would put things right, she made a bad mistake. BC has never accompanied a decent politics or a respectable pattern of educational - or any other - activity.

BC is the theory and practice of ubiquitous rules for all contingencies, administered by centrally controlled bureaucrats. Its core principle is surveillance, its motivating apparatus fear. In this country we now have a sub-version of it, but a version all the same, applied to many indispensable services. Invariably the practice of BC is marked by the emergence - "development' is too positive a term - of a kind of anti-economy, a machine which guzzles resources without yielding any real output. In the jargon of macro-economics, for any given investment, there is little or no multiplier. This anti-economy means a vast flow of resources diverted into the surveillance procedures themselves.

For thirty years this ugly thing has been widening its grip and deepening its hold over all aspects of British education. At the heart of the battle is the ongoing divergence between the interests of bureaucrats and of academics. The former have now gained a marked ascendancy. In the 1980s the bureaucratic machine, then epitomised by the National Curriculum, gobbled up primary and secondary education, leaving most teachers in perpetuity underpaid and despised lower functionaries. The same is now happening in higher education. University teachers, scholarly or otherwise, are being made to pass through increasing numbers of rigid hoops. Bureaucratic intervention in the last decade has already hugely damaged university research. Now the QAA (Quality Assurance Agency) requires us to engage in "peer review," i.e. assess each other's teaching. A practice many of us are used to is to be drained of its spontaneity and merit by bureaucratisation. Worse is the insult to our intelligence when we are told that this process must be "non-judgmental." We will be asked to believe in non-judgmental death-sentences next.

True, there is BC and BC. We should not define the phenomenon in terms of its worst exemplars, namely the Holocaust, the Gulag and Cultural Revolution, though it is interesting to see many who cared nothing about Communism now complaining vociferously when they get a writ-small dose of the same.

Our fate is not truly dreadful. Go to Eastern Europe - say Romania - if you want to see teachers in a dreadful state in schools and universities alike, the shame and despair caused by Communism. We are protected by the free civil order and the market economy, expressions of our human nature and its medium freedom. Free enterprise supplies our material and the tax base whereby we live. We are still history's darlings really. Nevertheless this latest surveillance will make fife in our universities ever more unpleasant.

Of course, some academics have sinned. In social science, humanities and teacher education, they hang onto to their moribund progressive education and their multiculturalism. Too many academics confuse the various hate-cults with human liberation. This would not have mattered so much if opponents had been allowed a proper hearing. Now on top of closed, brain-dead ideologies, we are getting massive bureaucratic interference. BC will not fix any of our ills. Indeed it will subsume them, as the National Curriculum has subsumed them lower down. BC cannot work. OFSTED is a case in point. I admire Chris Woodhead's intelligence and courage. I despise those who have reviled him. But the small improvements alleged to have occurred in primary education -- secondary being obstinately unmoved - are a small prize to be set against millions of pounds' worth of extra expenditure and all that strife and grief. Coercion and fear are poor civilisational instruments compared to openness and competition.

Most people involved shy away from the truth. The writing is now on the wall for the state's near monopoly of educational arrangements. Only open debate and competition can restore intellectual pluralism. Only private finance can make good the massive shortfall in resources. Bureaucracy will make both problems worse. How can teachers, from Kindergarten to university, teach knowledge and morals when they are endlessly harassed and insulted by bureaucratic controls?

I remember Communist Poland in the 1980s. At a time when so many academics were proud of not buying South African apples, remarkably few people here seemed to care about the plight of this noble nation, so much worse than anything we have known. Yet the contrasts in their case ran the other way round to ours. Here in Britain, in 2000, our streets, shops, restaurants and private businesses, are freer places than the universities. In 1980s Poland, despotism was being cut down to size in college, and confined to its predatory position outside. The educational bureaucrats were defied, the ossified ideologies openly ridiculed. The Poles were moving academically in the right direction. We British today are moving in the wrong one. And are we not forgetting the lesson of the last century, that despotisms, far from softening when their victims take part in the proceedings, positively insist on this horrible involvement? God forbid that a real despotism should ever come to power in our country. It would find in education and elsewhere, an apparatus of potentially dehumanising control such as would bring a smile to the face of the frozen mummy if he could witness it.