VERSE
Murphy, Sr. Ellen
stitution that symbolized the failure of the planners of the past, and the probable failure of the planners of the future. But ironies multiply when or~e notices that he was also speaking at a...
...not because their sums were wrong but rather because they were unable to foresee the factors which have brought about the present crisis...
...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...
...BRIAN WICKER (Brian Wicker is Commonweal's regular correspondent in Great Britain...
...It was planned for a total roll of six hundred, but now has not mo.ny more than four hundred children...
...One is that it is all due to excessive 'government interference' and that the Tories would have managed things much better...
...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...
...The second reason is the drastic drop in the birth rate in the early 1970s...
...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...
...And I could study what the small seeds mean and learn directly all that grows from them...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 SR...
...This has been an agreed aim of the education service for the past thirty years...
...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...
...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...
...I could know from these the meaning of roots and stability...
...Various answers are, I think, easily dismissed...
...What lesson should we learn from all this mess...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...This has led, as everyone knows, to an overwhelmirig need to cut public expenditure and redirect it to productive industry...
...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...
...The same story can be repeated all over the country...
...It may be noted that Catholic schools are affected by the crisis just as much as others...
...I could read the light-drawn rising of the vine and rose...
...ELLEN MURPHY LINES FRO/tl A PRIMITIVE Though I could not read words I could read oak trees...
...Thus, the absurdities of the situation abound...
...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...
...For two reasons, neither of which the planners of the sixties could, or did, take into account...
...Commonweal: 135...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...But the point is that, whatever the reasons, the planners have clearly made a big mistake...
...the shades of meaning each stem shows...
...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...
...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...
Vol. 104 • March 1977 • No. 5
