At a lecture given to the Socialist Students of Austria in 1967, the philosopher and social critic Theodor Adorno warned of a dangerous tendency that lurked in the bourgeois democratic societies. This lecture was transcribed and posthumously released as a short book called Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism, and in it he had a few words which are indellibly relevant for us all today:
And one must warn them about the cult of a so-called order that does not answer to reason, especially the concept of discipline, which is presented as an end in itself, without anyone asking "Discipline for what?"
Theodor Adorno (2020), Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism, p.18
At the time of the lecture, Adorno was concerned about the rise of the neofascist National Democratic Party in his native West Germany, and sought to address the question of what fascism is and how to fight it. For Adorno, fascism was not a simply a unique pathology for which there is a simple remedy, but rather an all-pervading feature of modern bourgeois society that persists in its culture and institutions. Whether or not you agree with his definition of fascism, it is undeniable that aspects of fascism as defined by Adorno are alive and well.
The focus of this post is what Adorno referred to as the "cult of order" that fetishises discipline, and in Britain there is arguably no better example of that than the discourse around Katharine Birbalsingh, the conservative founder and head teacher of the Michaela Community School in Wembley Park, London. Already well-known for her conservative views and authoritarian teaching methods, she was recently the subject of an ITV documentary entitled Britain's Strictest Headmistress, a moniker that Birbalsingh eagerly embraces for herself.
While she has been widely derided by much of the teaching profession for her controversial methods, she has become something of a folk hero for conservatives not simply because of her disciplinarian methods, but because she echoes their own views and thereby validating them by having them come from a perspective of "professional" expertise. For example, she seems to believe without a shred of irony that schools will stop teaching Shakespeare to children, she thinks "patriotic songs" such as I Vow to Thee My Country should be sung in school assemblies to instil patriotic feeling in teenagers, she has claimed that children of colour are using the "race card" in disputes with teachers, advising parents to automatically assume their children are lying when they say their teachers are racist, claimed "woke cutlure" is "making children into revolutionaries", and said that Black Lives Matter encourages violence. More recently, she made classically sexist remarks about how girls "dislike hard maths", and that's supposed to be why they aren't pursuing A-Level Physics enough.
It's no wonder that conservatives love her. I could make an innuendo about how they yearn for a right-wing dominatrix to step on their balls for Queen and country, but that would be rather missing the point. The reason they adore her is because she is enacting their cultural agenda of "personal responsibility" and "good old-fashioned discipline" in the classroom. The Conservative former MEP Daniel Hannan praised her for "defying the educational blob" which supposedly encourages "victimhood" and promotes "identity politics". Her 2016 book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers, in effect a manifesto for her school's teaching approach, was endorsed by the late arch-conservative intellectual Roger Scruton. Liz Truss, the Tory Minster for Women and Equalities (who for some reason is also the Foreign Secretary, another job she is presently bungling), appointed her to chair of the Social Mobility Comission and praised her for "expecting high standards and not indulging the soft bigotry of low expectations".
With such high praise coming from conservatives, we must now devote our attention to what it is she is actually doing, and it is here that you see the authoritarian nature of how conservatives want to teach your children. At Michaela Community School, students are given detentions not only for failing to complete their homework, but also for not brining their own pencil or ruler, not having a pencil case, turning in homework that is deemed incomplete or scrappy, reacting to a teacher's instruction by sulking, tutting or rolling your eyes, turning around in class a lot, or even for making funny faces in the corridor. In other words, this school punishes children for being children, especially if they're poor. The school also trains children as if they were in the army or if they were dogs. Birbalsingh makes children walk to class in silence (a black line in the middle of the corridor ensures that they walk in single file formation), teachers drill instructions into the children in a rapid-fire military fashion, and when children do stand to speak in class they appear to be expected to speak as if they are trainee soldiers.
To anyone who isn't drunk on the heady brew of right-wing reaction, all of this looks and sounds like an authoritarian nightmare. Imagine being a parent and having your children come back from school and telling you of the awful regime their teachers put them through. If you have a shred of empathy, your natural reaction is going to be "that's awful", and you'd confront the teacher over it. Instead, the reaction of much of the media, even centre-left outlets like The New Statesman, seems to be that her methods aren't so bad after all because they "work". Work for what exactly? Well if the aim of education is to educate children and give them an understand of the world that can be applied in real life, then there is no evidence that Birbalsingh's methods actually work. If however you view that the aim of education is to create children capable of taking orders and regurgitating factoids, then I will grant her that it certainly is working in that department.
Clearly, the difference between my thinking and that of Birbalsignh and the pliant commentariat that butters her up to feebly avoid the wrath of the right is that I don't think the purpose of education should be to turn kids into uncritical worker drones. Not only are Birbalsingh's methods immoral, ghoulish and barbaric, they are also devoid of any practical necessity. Yet if you criticise Birbalsingh's approach, you will quickly be reminded by her white knights on the Internet that children need discipline, and it is at this point that you have to ask "discipline for what?".
I have a feeling that if I were to ask that question, however, I would get no answer other than mockery from people who think I'm some sort of social justice warrior just because I don't want to treat children like the cast of Full Metal Jacket. The truth is that Birbalsingh's supporters would never respond to any sort of rational inquiry in good faith. They have constructed for themselves an alternative reality in which state schools across Britain have descended to Jubilee levels of anarchy and lawlessness thanks to wishy-washy liberals imposing low standards. It doesn't matter that other schools in Britain have employed similar teaching methods. As long as schools aren't loudly advertising their adherence to "traditional values", conservatives always feel the need to assume that educational standards are in decline so that they can press for yet more authoritarian teaching practices.
It's all very grotesque. The fact that so many people in this country actually demand that more schools are run like Michaela Community School is a sad and morbid indictment of our authoritarian attitude to education. We often bemoan the fact that scores of people live in ignorance, but it is no accident that most people are ignorant because the education system has failed to educate them. Instead of seeking to nurture a genuine understanding of the world in our young, we punish them for the slightest spark of genuine creativity or independent thought. Instead of wanting to teach them to think for themselves, we demand ever more discipline so that they do not think for themselves and instead are little more than robots.
To cater to our national fetish, there is a near endless supply of hucksters offering the easy answer of "tough love", of which Birbalsingh is surely not the first. Nearly two decades ago the reality TV show Supernanny hit our TV screens, with its star "supernanny" Jo Frost advocating for parents to shame their children into submission with the "naughty corner". The show was a huge hit, garnering nearly 5 million views in the first series and remaining one of Channel 4's most popular shows. It was eventually revealed by Roger Graef, one of the network's board members, that the show's producers engineered the tantrums and forced the children to cry, but unfortunately those revelations didn't stop people from turning up to watch the show and letting it feed them narratives on how to raise children which the producers surely knew were bullshit.
If you want proof that this sort of approach is axiomatically aligned with the right, just look at how quickly Birbalsingh was embraced by the Tories even shortly after they got elected. She had first emerged to national prominence at the 2010 Conservative Party Conference, wherein she vocally supported the education reforms proposed by the then-new Education Secretary Michael Gove, which have since led to a significant increase in teachers leaving the profession, an increase in teaching assistants being made redundant, staggering increases in class sizes, and tests so absurdly challenging that children as young as six were now suffering mental health issues because of it. In true authoritarian fashion, those who questioned these reforms and linked them to negative outcomes were either fired or demonised as "enemies of promise" in much the same way Birbalsingh does to her critics now. Since establishing her own school, she has had the privilege of getting handshakes with government ministers and even being appointed chair of the government's Social Mobility Comission.
As irrational as this cult-like insistence on disciplinarian parenting and teaching may seem, the outward irrationality of it ultimately serves to hide the real reason it is so fervently promoted by the right. The reason is that it serves a very particular function, namely to obfuscate the real problems with the education system. The problem with schools is not that they are the wild west, they evidently aren't, but rather that we are approaching education from the completely wrong angle. We have already tried treating children like unruly animals that need to be tamed, we have already tried drilling meaningless, distorted facts into them that they will never be able to apply in real life, we have already tried giving children dreams and then turning those same dreams into pulp before their eyes, yet it never really dawns on us that this isn't an approach to education that actually works. Every time the reality of our education system stares us in the face, we pretend to be shocked, point the finger and students or teachers to try and think about anything other than the system, and then quickly forget about it.
It doesn't even have to be this way. There is a alternative approach to education that is being done in Finnish schools and which actually works. Now Finland is hardly what I would call a socialist country, but here you see a method of schooling that is not about just making the kids into unthinking drones. Everything about school life is different and I would say better in these schools. In Finland, children do not have to start formal education until the age of seven, while all classes past the age of 16 are optional. There is no standardised testing except for a national exam at the end of the high school year. The school day starts later and ends earlier. Class sizes are smaller with an average group size of roughly 19 pupils (compared to around 25 in the UK), and the students get consistent lessons from the same teacher for years, by which point the teachers understand how to teach to their students' individual needs. Finnish students get less homework than any other country in the OECD, and after school tutoring is rare. Class sessions are longer, but there are plenty of break sessions. Detentions and exclusions are rare, and best of all the schools are a non-competitive environment, as shown by the absence of league tables and national best school lists.
In general, the schools have a more relaxed approach to education, with preschool in particular emphasising creative play over academic preparation. So free are the children that there aren't even any school uniforms, whereas here we impose strict dress codes on the kids and except them to dress like corporate salarymen, and this dress code changes when you get to sixth form as if to underscore the idea that some students are better than others. Compare that to Finland, where students freely and playfully address the teachers by their first name. But it's not only the culture of Finnish schools that's dramatically better. Structurally it is a more equal system. In Finland, private schools have been abolished and charging tuition fees has been outlawed. Grammar schools, that elitist ideological obsession of the Tories, have also been abolished. Unlike in Britain where our Tory government and even the Welsh Labour government have voted against giving children free school meals, Finnish children are universally provided with free school meals without any hand-wringing over who pays for it. The Finnish system also devolves power to teachers and even students to direct a programme of learning, and instead of national school inspections (for example Ofsted), a system of self-assessment is used to evaluate teachers.
Speaking of the teachers, our system tends to give teachers the short shrift, with our teachers being paid less here than in any other advanced capitalist country. In contrast, Finnish teachers are well-paid, and they enjoy a good relationship with parents. Parents can also rest assured that their children will be looked after by competent educators, as all teachers in Finland are required to have a master's degree before entering the profession.
In the eyes of someone who had been taught that the approach favoured by Birbalsingh and other disciplinarians is the only one that works, all of the ideas I have presented would be dismissed as pie-in-the-sky lefty nonsense. To everyone else who actually pays attention, it looks like the Finnish model is working. For years, the Finnish education system has been described as one of the best in the world, with the World Economic Forum declaring it the best. It has become something of an annual tradition for international delegations of teachers to visit Finnish schools to see how they work for themselves. So successful is the Finnish system that it has even been protected by nominally right-wing governments. During the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party openly supported the Finnish model and sought to implement it here in Britain, including the abolition of Ofsted and private schools. Thanks to the provision of psychological counselling, individualised guidance and easy access to healthcare, Finnish children are also mentally healthier and happier than the stress-addled children of Britain.
The differences between our system and the Finnish one could not be starker. It is the difference between a system like ours which does not prioritise the happiness and wellbeing of children, and a system like Finland's that does. If we claim to care about educating and looking after our children, we should consider that the problems schools face cannot simply be blamed on students or teachers, but rather the system itself. The Birbalsingh phenomenon, aside from being an expression of our national cult of order, is simply an attempt to distract us from the reality of the need for systemic change by offering the fantasy of Victorian discipline and probity. For as long as we continue to be enraptured by the siren song of strict headmistresses and supernannies, our children will continue to suffer under the weight of our astounding idiocy.
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