PLANING AND EDUCATION

...But the fact that they do exist, and cater to a need, simply goes to show how inadequate any national educational planning always is to the needs of real people...

...Commonweal: 135...

...The other big appointments struggle has been over Paul Warnke as chief arms control negotiator...

...The heart of that matter seems to be the violent objection of the hawks on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee --and in the Senate at large--to having an arms control negotiator who believes in the possibility of arms control...

...FRANK GETLEIN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 FROM BRITAIN PLANNING AND EDUCATION Some weeks ago, prime minister James Callaghan began what he hoped would be a great national debate about education...

...He made his speech, symbolically but ironically, at Ruskin College, Oxford...

...This has been an agreed aim of the education service for the past thirty years...

...Callaghan should make his speech, about planning education in such a way as to ensure that the correct supply of students would go where they are most needed, at Ruskin College of all places...

...That's heresy...

...For a system that has already allowed itself to be open to that sort of manipulation (including, of course, the sort of manipulation implicit in the fraudulent Conservative advocacy of 'free choice' in education combined with 'free enterprise' in business) has ceased to be a properly educational system...

...I could read the movement of squirrels and birds though I could not read words I could infer from wings and limbs the time-hinged meaning of mobility...

...It was planned for a total roll of six hundred, but now has not mo.ny more than four hundred children...

...Thus, the absurdities of the situation abound...

...Strictly speaking, I suppose, in an ideally planned world where 'from each according to his ability and to each according to his need' was the operative principle of the normal educational system, from infant school to university or college, places like Ruskin College would not be necessary...

...Various answers are, I think, easily dismissed...

...I am not a demographrr~ and I would hesitate to say why people are today having far fewer babies, and having them later: but there can be little doubt that the pill and the legalization of abortion have had something to do with it...

...Another answer is that the crisis is simply a sign of the imminent breakup of the capitalist system: but again, although-that may be so, it is hard to see how this sort of problem would be solved (as distinct from being concealed) by 'state socialism,' supposing that to be the alternative...

...Educators have become part of what Illich calls the 'professional conspiracy': and until they cease to be manipulators themselves, they will continue to be manipulated in their turn, and the manipulation will continue to be futile...

...Orthodoxy is that we are forced to go into arms in a big way because the Russians have gone into arms in a big way...

...The whole process has been rather like having Hinky-Dink Henna and Bath House John Coughlin take over the cause of government reform in Chicago and begin by appointing a crowd of the old hacks and heelers as a committee for reform, with salaries, staff, limos and expenses...

...Again, it is a theological question only partially subject to journalistic or historical elucidation...

...One is that it is all due to excessive 'government interference' and that the Tories would have managed things much better...

...For example, at the Hereford College of Education, the new library was recently being finished at the very time when the closure decision was being made...

...On the contrary, in the past thirty years they have expanded greatly...

...It may be noted that Catholic schools are affected by the crisis just as much as others...

...To take just one example: the school in Birmingham at which my own wife has been teaching for the past eight years, now has only about two-thirds of the number of children starting at five which it had eight years ago...

...Indeed, to a large degree it is the Conservatives who are now demanding more educational planning, in order to ensure that people are directed towards what they conceive to be the national priority-namely, commerce and industry...

...The same story can be repeated all over the country...

...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 SR...

...If Turner brings that same kind of openness to reevaluation to the CIA, it could be the most important thing to happen to the Agency since its inception and an event of great value to the country...

...Just as social engineering through a reorganization of schools into 'comprehensives' has not produced the social egalitarianism claimed for it by some theorists (however right it may have been as an educational policy), so social engineering to solve our economic problems through manipulation of the education system will fail to produce the answer that is required...

...For two reasons, neither of which the planners of the sixties could, or did, take into account...

...ELLEN MURPHY LINES FRO/tl A PRIMITIVE Though I could not read words I could read oak trees...

...Warnke's gravest sin apparently was his expressed opinion in the past that possibly the Russians had gone into arms in a big way because they were afraid of the way we were going into arms, namely big...

...What lesson should we learn from all this mess...

...If the hawks were a little smarter than they are, they would profit from the switch they forced from Sorensen to Turner and be glad with what they've got in Wamke rather than risk someone even more dedicated to arms control...

...The causes of the present crisis lie far back: and I see no reason to suppose that edueatioiaal planning would be, or has been, any better under Conservative than under Labor governments...

...The point of the orthodox position is not to teach history but to justify ever-increasing arms budgets...

...An arms control man who thinks arms control is possible7 Horrors...

...In other words, Ruskin College is a monument to the failure of the mainstream' educational system to cope with the human problems of real people...

...the shades of meaning each stem shows...

...For he was speaking on the premises of an in4 March 1977:134 stitution that symbolized the failure of the planners of the past, and the probable failure of the planners of the future...

...The second reason is the drastic drop in the birth rate in the early 1970s...

...And, though Ruskin College and its sister institutions were begunat a time when the modern educational system, as part of the 'Welfare State,' had hardly emerged, it would be wrong to suppose that they became superfluous once the postwar Welfare State had been established...

...Yet if I could not read the knowledge words impart how could I shake my belief that the elm's death and the earth's quake reveal the same life-shattering grief the body feels at insults to the heart...

...At this writing, Wamke's ultimate approval seems a safe bet if not an absolute sure thing...

...BRIAN WICKER (Brian Wicker is Commonweal's regular correspondent in Great Britain...

...And I could study what the small seeds mean and learn directly all that grows from them...

...But the point is that, whatever the reasons, the planners have clearly made a big mistake...

...I could read the light-drawn rising of the vine and rose...

...In other colleges up and down the country, similar stories can be told of brand-new buildings and special installations of equipment being put on the scrap heap...

...The lesson I would learn is rather that there is something inherently wrong, both in principle and in practice, in trying to harness education to the cart of 'national need,' as distinct from people's needs...

...The fear is that the slightest ray of common sense on the subject, such as that provided by Warnke's question, may cause the whole night-blooming world of militaryindustrial largesse to wither and die, at least to cut back on the profits and perquisites on which hawks in the Senate and elsewhere have become rich men and mean to become richer still...

...For many of these colleges have been enormously expanded in the last ten years in order to cope with the expected need for more teachers, not only to keep pace with the increasing population but also to make possible the reduction of class sizes in state schools...

...Until now our arms control negotiations have resulted uniformly in one thing: more arms...

...I could know from these the meaning of roots and stability...

...What did happen was that two hostile segments of the population were thrown together, kicked, scratched and bit each other for a while but did come to realize each that the other was going to be around for a while, each that the other did contribute something to the Republic, each that the other employed methods which, while different, were not necessarily treasonous on that account...

...I regarded that as an extraordinary accomplishment in 1972, but the genius of it lay in Stansfield Turner's ability to get beyond his profession's conventional view of the press as the enemy and bring in that enemy to allow his students to learn what it was and how it worked...

...This has led, as everyone knows, to an overwhelmirig need to cut public expenditure and redirect it to productive industry...

...So it was ironic that Mr...

...Now Ruskin College is one of six institutions in Britain originally designed to cater for the casualties of the British educational system...

...But ironies multiply when or~e notices that he was also speaking at a moment when the government is preparing to close down another thirty or so colleges for the training of teachers...

...That is to say, it was begun as a place where those who had not had the chance to benefit from higher education at the normal time of their lives (i.e., straight from school) could rescue themselves in later life, by attending courses as full-time students, with maintenance grants, which would enable them either to go on to University or to find other niches in society suited to their innate abilities--abilities which had not been truly exercised or utilized earlier...

...The first is the economic crisis, which was foreseen by many a long time ago, but which was finally triggered off, I suppose, by the oil price rises of a year or two back...

...It's easy to understand why such an appointment should shock the hawks...

...not because their sums were wrong but rather because they were unable to foresee the factors which have brought about the present crisis...