Developing Education: Gove or Gramsci?

For those against Michael Gove’s plans to turn education in the UK back thirty years, there has been good news: he admitted that scrapping the GCSEs was perhaps one step too far. However, he is still the education minister, still with the same designs on the system, so it’s worth paying some critical attention to where those designs come from. In trying to justify to the move, Gove proclaimed that the two biggest influences on his philosophy of education were Jade Goody (because she left a trust fund to be spent on education for her children) and Antonio Gramsci (because he apparently lauded a conservative and classical education). Here, I will explore further this ‘connection’ with Gramsci.

Gove attempted to embark on what should have been a fairly routine process for the contemporary right – that of co-opting the language of the left. However, Gove took this too far and started invoking a thinker he simply doesn’t understand. For example, Gove stated that Gramsci supported a ‘popular working class intellectualism’, against the ‘romantic approach of more naturalistic, informal learning’. Gove seems to be referring to Gramsci’s concepts of organic and traditional intellectuals respectively – intellectuals born of, and representing, their class, and intellectuals who appear ‘disinterested’ and pursue knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Yet this learning is not informal. It takes place for both intellectuals in various educational environments, from the school to the workplace. An organic intellectual does not simply appear, she is a product of the class system.

In his speech Gove states that in private schools, as opposed to comprehensives, children learn using ‘traditional’ methods. On this foundation ‘those children then move to schools like Eton and Westminster – where the medieval cloisters connect seamlessly to the corridors of power’.

Unfortunately for Gove, this is the exemplar of what Gramsci rails against. If only Gove had continued reading his Gramsci, if only he had read the other works in the Prison Notebooks, and had understood the context of those works, maybe he would have seen his error.

For example, in the translator’s introduction to the chapter On Education(found in the Prison Notebooks), we find a discussion of Gramsci’s use of devices that disguise the past system as the future in order to criticise the present – done so that his letters would pass the prison censors (Hoare in Gramsci, 1971: 24).

This highlights that you cannot simply cherry pick a passage from Gramsci and use it to serve your own ends. To take from Gramsci you need to appropriate and develop, with an appreciation of multiple contexts. However, let us for a second assume that Gove and Gramsci are essentially the same paradigm shifting radicals. If Gove is correct in his reading, and if this is the way to go, it would be right to bring back traditional O Levels and A Levels, because of their perceived rigorous standards. This would open up the world of classically trained, private education to the masses. But, of course, not everyone is cut out for O Levels and A Levels (and nor should we force them to be). In that case, we would have to have some other form of education, perhapssuch as the General Certificte of Education (the qualification one sat if they were deemed not capable enough for O Levels). Gifted pupils will flourish in the ‘corridors of power’ while the less academically inclined will flounder. This should not sound particularly new to anyone. It is the old formula of the secondary modern versus the grammar school, versus the public school; the poly, versus the Redbrick, versus the ‘ancient’ university.

Gramsci himself states that’the fundamental division into classical and vocational (professional) schools was a rational formula: the vocational school for the instrumental classes, the classical school for the dominant classes and the intellectuals’ (Gramsci, 1971: 26).

In other words, the schooling system is an element of the state within which is able to perpetuate class divides fairly easily. The instrumental classes will do all the hard labour, the dominant classes and intellectuals will pursue culture and high society. Its description as a ‘rational formula’ does not make it desirable, at least not for a Marxist like Gramsci. Furthermore, the issue of organic and traditional intellectuals cannot be distanced from the problem of ideology. Classical education, as it exists in a two-tier system, trains people for a life of high culture and privilege. The vocational school trains people for a life of labour and servitude. Therefore Gove’s system works to perpetuate the attitudes of subaltern classes regarding ‘classical’ education – that it is boring, has no worth, or no applicability in the ‘real’ world.

Gramsci is very much for expanding this idea of ‘classical’ education to all, as should we. However, it must be done in a truly comprehensive system – something Gramsci argues for himself. If it is not, it simply works to the uphold privilege and current power divides we see and feel each day, particularly in the face of austerity cuts.

This should also be treated as a systematic (and perhaps ideological) project, rather than an organic evolution in society and culture. Gramsci lamented the drive to abolish ‘every type of schooling that is “disinterested” (not serving immediate interests) or “formative”’, and the replacement of this system with that of ‘specialised vocational schools, in which the pupil’s destiny and future activity are determined in advance.’ (Gramsci, 1971: 27) Instead, Gramsci urges a universal, comprehensive and classical future education to facilitate the realisation of our critique – our ability to think critically, and to critique social, political and economic structures.

If anything, Gove’s proposals threatened to further entrench social divides not only through restricting opportunities for the more economically and socially vulnerable in society, but by actively socialising people, making them ‘learn’ these divides. It is the hallmark of one of the elements of Gramsci’s idea of hegemony – all-encompassing rule via coercion and consent. Such an education system breeds consent, and makes the class system ‘common sense’. For Gramsci to uphold a system that helps perpetuate this hegemony would contradict directly his critique of state and society; such a move would be wholly counter intuitive. taking Gramsci so literally, Gove becomes the exemplar of Gramsci’s critique.

Written by Matt Donoghue
Matt Donoghue is a Lecturer in Social and Political Change at Oxford Brookes University

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