Education for Tomorrow 131

EDUCATION for TOMORROW FOR THE DEFENCE OF STATE EDUCATION

RUSSIAN REVOLUTION CENTENARY EDITION ‘Socialism is the normal human society, its chief and basic principle lies in the simple concept of the community of all people for the good of all’ – Anatoli Lunacharsky, the first People’s Commissar for Education,

AUTUMN 2017

ISSUE 131 1

£1.00

EDUCATION for TOMORROW

SUBSCRIPTION RATES UK and international electronic £4.

To order, send your details to the Editor by email. Payment may be made by PayPal on the website, or you can pay by cheque, posted to the Editor.

Editor Martin Brown 226 Woodland Gardens Isleworth TW7 6LT Tel: 020 3255 3113

UK print £7 per annum (4 issues) For costing for multiple copies contact the Editor (if you are already receiving these you will be informed when your subscription is due for renewal)

anmar.brown@btopenworld.com

Please post me the next four issues of EDUCATION for TOMORROW I enclose cheque/P.O. for £7.00 Name..................................................

Address............................................... ............................................................ ............................................................

Post to: The Editor (EfT) 226 Woodland Gardens, Isleworth, TW7 6LT

Editorial Board Anne Brown, Martin Brown, Tony Farsky, Gawain Little, Diane Randall, Hank Roberts.

EDUCATION for TOMORROW is produced by people involved with education of like mind most of the time and certainly on all vital matters of education and politics.

It does not claim to represent the views of any one political party of the working class. Nonetheless its aim is at all times to speak in the interests of all working people.

Fully involved in the struggle for peace and socialism it aims to publicise workers’ achievements and to counter misinformation about past and existing struggles to build socialism.

It is to promote the aims of the organised labour movement in Britain; with common schooling for ALL our children (i.e. a good local state school for every child - truly comprehensive and democratically accountable) together with everything necessary to make this possible, in terms of provision of buildings and equipment, and staff properly trained and properly paid. We therefore support the campaign for one union for all education workers as a step towards achieving this goal.

Our columns are open to all who share these aims - even though they may at times disagree with particular articles and want to say so, and why!

Posted individual copies cost £2

Contents Editorial – 3 One union – where next? – 4 Home news– 6 Books on Russian Revolution – 8

ISSN 2066-9145

Vygotsky – 11

Website: www.educationfortomorrow.org.uk Published by the EDUCATION for TOMORROW Collective and printed by the People’s Press Printing Society.

Lunacharsky– 13 Brian Simon – 14

Cover picture: Young Pioneer poster. Caption reads:‘A Pioneer is a friend to children of all the nations of the world’

International – 16

2

Editorial

October 1917 – a first for workers One of the aims of this journal is ‘to publicise workers’ achievements and to counter misinformation about past and existing struggles to build socialism.’ So it is entirely fitting that we mark the centenary of the Russian Revolution when, for the first time in history, workers seized state power and began the historic task of building a socialist state. They had learned the lessons of the Paris Commune that lasted 70 days, and built a system that survived for over 70 years.

For the new government, education was a priority. In their book, Soviet Communism – a New Civilisation, the British Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb reported: ‘Four days after its seizure of power, the Bolshevik Government formulated, in a decree by A.V. Lunacharsky, a remarkable long-term programme of educational reconstruction, evidently inspired by Lenin himself, which attracted no attention whatever in the western world’.

They also reported that by 1935 children were being taught in more than 80 different home languages.

The initial explosion of creativity unleashed by the Revolution was reported on by, amongst others, the journalist (and later novelist) Arthur Ransome. In 1919 he reported that where there had been six universities there were now 16 and that attendance was open to all and free. State funds were used to provide free school meals and free clothes and shoes for the children who needed them. Colleges were set up for workers and he reported, ‘the workmen crowd these courses … one course, for example, is attended by a thousand men in spite of the appalling cold of the lecture room’.

Public libraries and book stalls mushroomed.

Throughout the existence of the Soviet Union free education was available to all from nursery to university level (where students received free tuition and grants for living expenses). All schools were comprehensive and co-educational. Corporal punishment was banned from the start. Violence towards children was condemned by theory, disapproved of by public opinion and forbidden by law. Close home-school relations were promoted as essential as families were regarded as the ‘primary cell of socialist society’.

Co-operation, responsibility and self-discipline were promoted

rather than competition and individualism.

It was not a perfect society, but ‘work in progress’. It had overthrown bourgeois property, the free market, and the capitalist state and replaced them with collective property, central planning and a workers’ state. It achieved an unprecedented level of equality, security, health care, housing, education employment and culture for all its citizens, in particular working people of factory and farm.

In the 1920s and 30s the Soviet Union went from semi-feudal backwardness to become an advanced industrial nation. In the 1940s it destroyed the Nazi war machine and rebuilt its economy after the devastation of war. In the 1950s it developed an atom bomb and forced the West into a cold war stalemate. In the 1960s it was the first society to put a man into space. Right up until the late 1980s it supported, materially and morally national liberation movements all over the world Arguments rage on the Left about the causes of its demise. Part of the cause can be found in corruption of an elite who saw their interests as separate from the workers.

Tony Benn’s Diaries have a revealing entry for May 1969. On a ministerial visit to the Soviet Union and at a dinner with Soviet officials he asked his neighbour at the table who happened to be the Minister for Higher Education about the new special schools for gifted children ‘I am very sceptical about special schools for gifted children, because I think they are really for the children of gifted parents,’ was the reply.

For Soviet citizens, for workers throughout the world and all others who believe that ‘another world is possible’ its demise was a catastrophe. It offered an alternative to capitalist exploitation, colonialism and imperialism. Without it the world has become a far more unstable and dangerous place.

What has become obvious is that capitalism has no future. Greed, poverty, ignorance, violence and injustice are what makes it work. As Lunacharsky, the first People’s Commissar for Education, pointed out: ‘Socialism is the normal human society, its chief and basic principle lies in the simple concept of the community of all people for the good of all’

3

One Education Union – Where do we go next?

Keynote speech at the Unify AGM Progress towards unity has been slow – sometimes depressingly so. It has been more than 10 years since the AUT/NATFHE merger into the University and College Union pointed the way forward. But, this year, we have taken an even more gigantic stride with the ground breaking NUT/ATL merger into the National Education Union. The next step is obvious – to merge the two mergers and bring together UCU and NEU, then to extend the hand of unity to others.

As I know from bitter experience, the secret of a successful merger is not too difficult to discover – don’t hang about, just get on with it! In particular, avoid long courtships and well intentioned half way houses. As a senior officer of AUT, I was involved in two: -The ill fated AUT/NATFHE Confederation which lacked proper decision making arrangements, leading both unions to irritate the hell out of each other at interminable and inconclusive meetings and delayed a necessary merger by years.

-The AUT/ATL Partnership which lacked a clear purpose and petered out – rather than fell apart – due to lack of interest.

approaching one million dominating one of our major public services - A potentially powerful force politically as well as industrially – something which is of crucial importance following the enactment of the latest round of anti-trade union legislation which leaves unions hamstrung by legal constraints not experienced since the days of the Combination Acts -!

A united Education Union with the intellectual capacity, political influence and industrial clout to spearhead the fight for a new and positive legal framework for trade unions (as described by the Institute of Employment Rights) which can place real collective bargaining at the centre of our social and economic life.

From a UCU perspective, a merger with NEU would take forward the achievements of the AUT/ NATFHE merger. This created, more or less, a single Higher Education union in the UK including the whole of the sector apart from the small post 92 sector in Scotland which continues to be represented by our friends in EIS. But the creation of UCU did not bring the same degree of unity to Further Education where significant numbers in England, Wales and N. Ireland are represented by ATL and NUT and some by NASUWT. A wider merger would achieve for UCU members in FE the same degree of unity that has been achieved in HE. There are potentially ‘negative’ reasons for UCU to consider merger as well and it would be a high risk strategy for UCU to try to stand aloof from the unification process. Outside a merged union, UCU would risk losing potential members, particularly in FE, who may well consider membership of a much larger NEU to be a more attractive option.

I am glad to say that UCU has taken the first step towards a larger merger. In May of this year the UCU Annual Congress passed a motion endorsing the ‘message of one strong union for all education’ and resolving to ‘explore further the

Mergers, like all other partnerships, are facilitated if the parties like each other. But this is a desirable rather than an essential criterion. The AUT/ NATFHE merger was more a marriage made in hell rather than one made in heaven! Serious talks started just after both unions had been through a bruising industrial dispute plagued by inter union disunity and acrimony.

The leadership of both unions, including myself, decided that this must never be allowed to happen again and that the only way to secure effective unity in action was through merger and joint decision making.

Of course, there must be positive as well as negative reasons for merger. Quite simply, the case for one education union is so overwhelming and unanswerable that it barely needs to be stated: -A union with a potential membership 4

possibility of a further merger with….(NEU)….to create one strong and united voice for workers in the UK education profession.’ This was precisely the point of departure for negotiations leading to the AUT/NATFHE merger – exploration without prior commitment. I am confident that, as with the previous merger, a process of objective exploration will lead UCU and NEU to the inescapable conclusion that unity is the best option.

This exploration will, of course, progress more smoothly and rapidly if we can take immediate steps to cement an environment of trust and mutual respect between the potential partners.

This could be achieved by the conclusion of a quick, interim agreement to regulate relationships between the two unions while more detailed negotiations get underway. This, among other things, could include a series of common sense mutual commitments: - To avoid competitive recruitment - To respect existing spheres of influence - To acknowledge that particular occupational groups (HE and FE members of UCU, for example) would retain the right to sectoral autonomy - To guarantee that existing arrangements for representation and decision making in the nations and regions will be retained and enhanced if necessary in line with any future constitutional changes.

In addition, we must resolve to exercise more care in our use of language and, in particular, to recognise that words like ‘nation’ and ‘national’ can mean quite different things to people in different parts of the UK. In similar vein, we must recognise the reality that it is highly unlikely that the Educational Institute of Scotland will ever become part of any new, UK wide, unitary union. This is the case for historic reasons and also because the unique constitutional basis of the EIS, rooted in a Charter which gives the Institute rights and privileges not shared by other unions. The relationship with EIS should be as close as possible and this should not pose serious problems for either UCU or NEU. Both they and their predecessor unions have always been able to work amicably with EIS. This leads me to the last and, possible, the biggest issue – the next step after the next step – that of drawing the NAS/UWT into a new, merged union. Regrettably it seems unlikely that this will happen in the immediate future. But we can begin to prepare the way for it – if only by bending over backwards to prevent further division.

In particular, we must avoid being drawn into any public slanging match and the creation of an ‘us and them’ mentality. NEU must also resist any temptation to engage in an aggressive recruitment war. There is, in any case, no need for them to do so. NEU will quickly establish itself as, overwhelmingly, the largest school teaching union.

It will equally quickly establish itself as the union of unity and strength in the eyes of new entrants to the profession who will vote for unity by voting with their feet! I have little doubt that this will encourage future leaders of NAS/UWT to choose the path to unity as well. It is, after all, not so long ago that the previous General Secretary of NAS/ UWT, Eamon O’Kane, was one of the most outspoken champions of teacher unity and “one education union”. It is only a matter of time before NAS/UWT is once again drawn into the process of unification.

In my view, the next steps to unity are clear: - Interim arrangements between UCU and NEU to facilitate exploration of merger followed by the creation of a new multi sector union, possibly called simply The Education Union, which respects the best traditions of sectoral, national and regional autonomy within the existing unions - Maximum unity with EIS, perhaps within some formal federal or other innovative constitutional framework - An absolute refusal to be drawn into any sectarian conflict with NAS/UWT accompanied by a welcoming ‘open door’ policy for the future.

We are closer to ‘one education union’ now than we have ever been. We’re getting there.

Alan Carr (in a personal capacity) July 2017 Alan Carr is one of the Honorary Presidents of Unify, the campaign for one education union.

He spent the bulk of his working life at the Open University from which he retired in 2012.

He has been a member of AUT/UCU since 1975 and has held a number of senior positions in the Unions including President, AUT, 2001 – 2003 Treasurer, AUT, 2003 – 2006 Treasurer, UCU, 2006 - 2013

5

JUAC pointed out that 86 per cent of schools contained asbestos and deaths from mesothelioma were increasing. In 2014, 17 teachers aged 74 and under died of mesothelioma, but the total number of support staff deaths was not known. Children are at an increased risk of developing mesothelioma in later life, because of exposure to asbestos at school. It has been estimated that 200 – 300 former pupils were dying each year as adults because of exposure at school during the 1960s and 1970s.

Freedom of Information Data obtained from local authorities indicated that at the current rate of funding it would take another 50 years for potentially dangerous schools to be demolished and only 25 per cent had received funding for repair, maintenance and demolition between 2010 and 2017. Recent Freedom of Information requests to all local authorities in England and Wales had revealed that over £10 million had been paid in compensation to former school staff and pupils as a result of asbestos exposure. The FOI requests also reveal a disparity in how asbestos in schools was being managed, as some LAs said that they did not hold the information, despite being the legal duty holder. JUAC is currently repeating the FOI exercise with Multi Academy Trusts to establish a national picture of which schools contained asbestos, which the DfE had so far failed to do.

Campaigning works – extra £1.3 billion for schools Education Secretary, Justine Greening, has announced that the Government will make available an additional £1.3 billion for schools across 2018-19 and 2019-20, in addition to the schools budget set at Spending Review 2015. This funding is across the next two years as the Government goes ahead with its transition to the National Funding Formula. Spending plans for years beyond 2019-20 will be set out in a future Spending Review.

In her statement to the House of Commons, Ms Greening referred to the Government’s consultation on fair funding from last December which had generated 25,000 responses. The Government would respond to that in September, but in the meantime she announced that the extra money would allow the Government to do several things. It will increase the basic amount that every pupil will attract in 2018-19 and 2019-20. For the next two years this will mean up to three per cent gains a year per pupil for underfunded schools, and a half per cent a year per pupil cash increase for every school. The money will also protect funding for pupils with additional needs.

Dr Mary Bousted, general secretary of ATL, said: ‘After one of the most successful joint union campaigns we are heartened that the Government is reallocating some money from the free schools budget to maintained schools who were faced with unsustainable cuts. However, this is not a long term solution to the schools funding crisis. School budgets are already squeezed to the bone and children’s education is suffering. Schools need the money now so they can provide the teaching and support all their pupils need to reach their potential.’

JUAC is calling on the Governments in England, Scotland and Wales to: • Undertake a national audit of asbestos in schools.

• Set out a long-term strategy for the removal of asbestos from all schools.

• Ensure that the Health and Safety Executive had the funding it needed to routinely inspect schools.

Following the 2017 Labour Party Manifesto pledge to remove asbestos from all schools, JUAC has called on all parties to confirm their commitment to protecting children and school staff from the hidden killer. Kevin Courtney, NUT General Secretary, said that the continuing presence of asbestos in schools was a national disgrace, which was putting the health of staff and children at risk.

Dr Mary Bousted, ATL General Secretary, said it was shameful that the Government continued to ignore the simple fact that as long as asbestos remained in school buildings children and staff were at risk of entirely preventable illnesses.

Chris Keates, General Secretary of the NASUWT said that the fact that over 70 per cent of schools still contained the lethal substance was unacceptable.

Joint union statement on asbestos in schools The first national conference addressing the issue of how to protect children and staff from the dangers of asbestos in schools and colleges was held in July, near Birmingham. The conference was organised by the Joint Union Asbestos Committee(JUAC), a non-party political campaign which aims to protect children and staff in schools by promoting awareness of the dangers of asbestos and the need for improved management.

6

Unions call on government to strengthen fire safety in schools

Tories are ‘heading for free schools U-turn’

MINISTERS are considering axing plans for hundreds of free schools as they try to plug a gap in the education budget, it was revealed yesterday.The government is struggling to keep a Tory general election manifesto pledge to increase the education budget by £4 billion, forcing ministers into yet another policy U-turn.They had promised to build at least 100 new free schools each year.

NUT general secretary Kevin Courtney welcomed the news, though he said it was ‘not before time … The NUT has argued since its inception that the free schools programme is an expensive and irrational way to provide the new school places we so desperately need.’

Mr Courtney argued that the free schools programme was ‘driven by ideology, not evidence,’ causing damage and disruption to local schools that are unable to balance precarious budgets. The free schools budget has been slashed from £2.3bn in 2015-16 to £1.3bn in the current financial year.

A Department for Education spokesman said: ‘The free schools programme is a key component of the government’s work to raise standards, increase parental choice and provide the new school places that we know we will need in the years ahead.’

The Government has finally caved in to pressure not to weaken current fire safety advice to schools. But the NUT, FBU and ATL are insisting that simply announcing the retention of the current Building Bulletin 100 guidance did not go far enough as much more needed to be done to address all the issues that had come to the fore since the Grenfell Tower fire.

The unions warned that current guidance was being ignored in the rush to build new schools as cheaply as possible. They pointed out that while Building Bulletin 100 stated that all new schools should have sprinklers fitted, except in a few low risk schools, since 2010 only 35 per cent of new schools had been fitted with sprinklers.

The unions stressed that the issue of flammable cladding on school buildings also needed to be urgently examined. While Building Bulletin 100 discouraged its use, the unions argued that they had little confidence that its provisions had been adhered to since 2010, given the poor record on sprinkler installation. In a letter to Justine Greening, the unions called on the Government to: !• Confirm that it had abandoned attempts to weaken fire safety advice for schools and that it would not proceed with the revised Building Bulletin. !• Introduce legislation to require sprinklers to be fitted to all new schools as the current system based on an “expectation” that that would happen had failed. !• Review all schools built since 2010 without sprinklers to determine whether they should have been built without sprinklers on the basis of risk, and provide supporting evidence for each decision. !• Ensure that all decisions about sprinkler installation were centrally monitored. !

• Instigate urgent checks by qualified and competent assessors on all required and recommended fire safety measures including the suitability of the cladding used on school buildings, set out a timetable for the removal of all combustible cladding and ensure that combustible cladding was never again used on school buildings.

Morning Star, 12/7/20

Education Journal, 4/7/2017

7

The five best and the five worst books on the Russian Revolution The best and first book on the Russian Revolution of 1917 was written ... in 1871. The Civil War in France was the official analysis of the defeated Paris Commune by the General Council of the First International. In it Karl Marx examined the experiences of the insurgents in seizing power in the face of bourgeois collapse, in establishing a pioneering proletarian state machine and in their heroic defence and tragic defeat. Reflections on the experience of the Paris Commune opened up a theoretical and practical fault line in the international working class movement. The 1871 text stated with great clarity that: ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes’.

This lesson, however, was imperfectly understood even by the most militant and committed of revolutionaries, and came to be expressed in a pedestrian ‘orthodox’ marxism which assumed that the prospects for a socialist revolution could be fitted into a kind of predictable matrix in which the full development of the capitalist system was a necessary condition.

Lenin arrived back from exile on 3 April 1917 and immediately laid down, in concise style, his April Theses which called for the seizure of power by the working people, specifically that the peasants should take over the land and the workers the factories. Lenin was in a minority of thirteen to two on the Bolshevik central committee but quickly won over the key organisers and leaders, chief among them Jacob Sverdlov and Joseph Stalin along with Alexandra Kollantai and Grigorii Zinoviev.

This was not the end of the controversy but it started a process which, in the course of the ebb and flow of events, crystallised the Bolshevik approach to power – ‘Peace, Bread and Land’ – which enabled them to win over, in a matter of of months, the key sections of the urban workers, the

most advanced peasants and the soldiers at the front and in the garrisons.

Ten Days that Shook the World is the classic account of the Revolution by eyewitness American revolutionary John Reed. An exemplar of committed reportage it was written in a fortnight after his return from Russia (and an interrogation by the US authorities). Drawing on his notes, documents and materials the book has all the strengths and weaknesses of hurried participant journalism.

Reed’s record of these have a compelling authority but – as a foreigner and with inadequate knowledge of Russian – he naturally gave prominence to the best known names and leading public personalities. Despite the book attracting criticism from many differing ideological standpoints Lenin’s recommendation for me is enough: ‘With the greatest interest and with never slackening attention I read John Reed's book, Ten Days that Shook the World.

Unreservedly do I recommend it to the workers of the world. Here is a book which I should like to see published in millions of copies and translated into all languages. It gives a truthful and most vivid exposition of the events so significant to the comprehension of what really is the Proletarian Revolution and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

These problems are widely discussed, but before one can accept or reject these ideas, he must understand the full significance of his decision. John Reed's book will undoubtedly help to clear this question, which is the fundamental problem of the international labor movement.’

Andrew Rothstein’s History of the USSR has a broader compass then the revolution per se. With characteristic thoroughness and detail it describes

8

and explains – to a post Second World War audience – both the course of the revolution and the tumultuous decades of Civil War and foreign intervention, socialist construction and the defeat of fascism.

Written at the height of the Cold War, when Rothstein himself was a victim of the anti communist purge in Britain, the book defends the broad, popular and democratic character of the October Revolution against the hostile host of anticommunist accounts that sought to weaken support for socialism and working class power in the British working class movement and among the British people.

Rothstein was perhaps the best qualified person in Britain to defend the Russian Revolution.

His parents were political exiles from Tsarist Russia. From childhood he knew Lenin who visited their house whilst in London editing the underground Bolshevik newspaper Iskra. His father, Theodore, linked the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party to the British Social Democratic Federation (SDF) which later became the British Socialist Party and subsequently the main element in the Communist party. In the Great War Rothstein led a mutiny against orders to embark to Russia. Chucked out of Oxford University on the intervention of the Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, he became a key figure in the British communist movement and worked for the Soviet government as a press officer in its British mission.

My fourth book on the significance of the Russian Revolution was written in 1970 by an American educator. Urie Bronfenbremmer was born in April 1917 in Moscow but a few years later his family moved to the USA His book Two Worlds of Childhood is a comparative study of the Soviet and US systems of education. Bronfenbremmer was a developmental psychologist and a key figure in the research and policy programme that led to Head Start in the USA. The book, with exemplary objectivity, examines the collective ethos of Soviet society and the ways in which the Soviet child, in the family, social and school worlds is encouraged to develop in a harmonious and productive relationship with her and his peers, adults and wider society. In contrast the child in the USA is shaped by a social environment characterised by exposure to a pervasive television and advertising culture in which peer group norms shape a disconnection with adult society and open a pathway to anti

social activity.

Tellingly Bronfenbremmer focuses on how US children absorb the dominant social values which position teachers: ‘Teachers who are poorly paid, treated as subordinates, and given little freedom and autonomy by the school administration cannot help but reflect their true position and reduce their influence in the pupil's eyes.’

In a crowded field undoubtedly the worst book written about the Russian Revolution is A People’s Tragedy by Orlando Figes. Figes is a clever bloke, he knows an enormous amount and is keen to let us know it. His scholarship is wide-ranging but not so exacting as to preclude unforced errors and crude distortions while his detail is overwhelming and in parts irrelevant to any sustained analytical drive.

His standpoint is that of a reactionary big head who deplores the consequences of the revolution but cannot bring himself to apply the transparently ‘moral’ standard of judgement he deploys towards the revolutionaries (in insurrection and in government) to the host of reactionary counter revolutionaries and foreign interventionists, imperialist invaders and Russian despots whose resistance to the people’s will led to so much bloodshed.

He applies – in an ungainly and forced manner – the literary convention of telling parts of his story through the actions of a range of intermediate characters. But unlike the best of socialist realist fiction, the lives of his characters, even if ‘real’, do not convincingly signify grander historical truths or bring us psychological insight.

Figes is an arrogant prat and it shows. (He copped for substantial damages after he infamously posted anonymised and hostile reviews on Amazon of books by his academic rivals, laid the blame on his wife and, when exposed – in a variation on the ‘big boys did and ran away’ – claimed he was traumatised by researching the crimes of Stalin.)

Russia: From Workers’ State to State Capitalism by Chris Harman is a concise application to the Russian revolution of the ‘state capitalist’ doctrine that underlies the theoretical approach of the Socialist Workers Party. The factor that links Figes consciously counter-revolutionary standpoint to the subjectively ‘revolutionary’ approach of Harman is a failure to account convincingly for the human, economic and political effects of the counter revolution. Harman, at least, considers these issues from a critical standpoint

9

but, faced with the undoubted human cost of defending state power in unfavourable circumstances tries, in a mechanical way, even if with considerable familiarity with the texts of the time, to fit the course of events into the SWP’s crude schema.

Where (right-wing) social democrats dogmatically insisted that a revolution in Russia be impossible because the country had not developed to the full a capitalist economy ‘ripe for change’, the deviant Trotskyite theory that the SWP makes its own sees the post-insurrectionary obstacles to Soviet power as rendering socialism impossible. Thus the theory that what existed in the USSR was a variant of capitalism because it was not perfect socialism.In both cases the failure is at the level of philosophy – a failure of dialectical thought. In both cases reality failed to conform to an idealmodel. The Russian Revolution was neither pristine nor perfect. It was a hugely messy process that cannot be comprehended if the vital tools of historical and dialectical materialism are abandoned to dogma.

Dealing honestly with the nature of the counter revolution and the inevitable consequences of defending soviet power must be the foundation of any credible account of the Russian Revolution and it in this respect – and not only this – that Robert Service fails. His book, The Last of Tsars…

Nicholas II and the Russian Revolution spares no effort in whipping up sympathy for Nicholas whose regime impoverished millions of peasants, banged up, exiled and massacred all opposition and despatched millions to die in a war in which his soldiers were poorly equipped and inadequately armed.

Service presents himself as an impartial and objective historian able to see the negative aspects of Nicholas and the perverse consequences of his policies. He accepts that the Tsar was a violently anti-semitic nationalist, but nevertheless regales us with mountainous detail about the conditions under which the Romanov family were accommodated and unending anecdotes about his various noble acts. It seems that at one point in their detention – whilst civil war and foreign intervention was tearing the country apart – they had to reduce the number of servants caring for them. In the service of this hagiography Service treats the Bolsheviks with an unscholarly lack of

detail and analysis and a parade of ill-informed prejudice about their conduct and character.

Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed is in a special category of its own. The book is of course, an exercise in self justification – written at a point when life itself was proving him wrong on the central proposition that the revolution was betrayed. Bizarrely, Trotsky spends a good part of the book extolling the material achievements of the Soviet Union and the benefits it socialist construction brought to millions. The oddest thing about the book is that its main protagonist – Trotsky himself – appears only in the third person. It is a beguiling book, partly because he is such a powerful writer but his ego is such that even when his insights are compelling and his predictions reflect reality as it developed they remain curiously unconvincing.

If The Revolution Betrayed is an exercise in vanity, Trotsky’s unfinished biography, Stalin partners egomania with paranoia. Of course, the paranoia was justified. A Comintern agent assassinated Trotsky before he could finish the book.

Nevertheless, the book is truly awful.

One university history teacher I know gives first year undergraduates anonymised excerpts from the text and invites them to detail the authors’ ideological standpoint. Confronted with Trotsky’s unmediated intellectual snobbery, Occidental prejudice, racism and cosmopolitan contempt for working people and provincials they invariably characterise him as reactionary. Perhaps this is what explains Trotsky's perverse attraction to sections of the petit bourgeoisie.

Trotsky is so outraged that he was bested by this ‘lazy Oriental’, unable or unwilling to learn ‘foreign; ie European languages, and clearly so undistinguished compared to his biographer that the book descends into farce.

An icepick wielded in Stalin’s service terminated Trotsky’s life before he would be compelled to measure his estimate that the Soviet regime faced imminent collapse against the reality of the Nazi defeat which rather negated the Trotskyist notion of the impossibility of ‘Socialism in One country’ by extending it to a third of the world.

Thus the revolution delivers us a bonus. The best books illuminate, the worst amuse.

Nick Wright 10

A Marxist understanding of human development In 1917, as revolution gathered pace in Russia, a young student, Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky, graduated from law school at Moscow University.

Having originally enrolled in medical school at the insistence of his parents, but simultaneously enrolling in Shaniavsky University to study history, philosophy and social science, his real passion, Vygotsky was to become on of the most important figures in Soviet, and international, psychology and education.

After seven years teaching literature and lecturing at a local teaching college, Vygotsky was invited to serve as a research fellow at the Moscow Institute of Psychology and published his PhD thesis on The Psychology of Art a year later, in 1925. Vygotsky retained his interest in literature and art and sought to situate his understanding of psychology within a wider understanding of humanities and social sciences, informed by an underlying philosophical approach – as Vygotsky argued, ‘The unity of consciousness and the interrelation of all psychological functions were it is true accepted by all… But this unity of consciousness was usually take as a postulate, rather than a subject of study.’ This led him towards an investigation of the development of the higher psychological functions, in particular language comprehension and learning, and their development from elementary psychological processes.

Vygotsky’s contribution to the development of education rests on his application of dialectical materialism to the problems of psychology. As Cole and Scribner write in the introduction to Mind in Society, a selection of Vygotsky’s writings: ‘Vygotsky saw in the methods and principles of dialectical materialism a solution to key scientific paradoxes facing his contemporaries. A central tenet of this method is that all phenomena be studied as processes in motion and in change. In terms of the subject matter of psychology, the scientists task is to reconstruct the origin and course of development of behaviour and consciousness. Not only does every phenomenon have its history, but this history is characterised by changes both qualitative (changes in form and structure

and basic characteristics) and quantitative.

Vygotsky applied this line of reasoning to explain the development of elementary psychological processes into complex ones.’

In his most famous work, Thought and Language, Vygotsky sets out to discover the relationship between these two complex psychological processes and their development in the child. In a process that mirrors that employed by Marx in Capital, where he begins with an analysis of the commodity as the smallest unit of capitalist production, Vygotsky begins with the ‘word meaning’, which he describes as, ‘the unit of verbal thought that is further unanalysable and yet retains the properties of the whole’.

Vygotsky’s approach is grounded in a Marxist understanding of human development as essentially social in nature and his experimental work backs this up. In contrast to others (notably Piaget), who had previously argued that language was simply a product of human thought and that speech itself had no impact on the development of consciousness, which was essentially an individual biological process mediated through the child’s own actions, Vygotsky argues that thought and language develop in parallel and converge at a key point, leading to the structuring of thought processes through the internalisation of verbal thought.

This understanding of the social nature of the development of intellectual functions and of consciousness has significant implications for education. It refocuses the concept of education away from either the simple provision of opportunities for the child to ‘grow’, which is the logical endpoint of a Piagetian approach, or the knowledge-based vessel-filling approach which is all too prevalent in current education policy and discourse. It is in the very interaction of the child with others, especially those more culturally developed (parents, teachers, older siblings) that our understanding and thought processes develop.

As Wood suggests, ‘For Vygotsky, then, cooperatively achieved success lies at the foundations of learning and development ‘.

This links directly to another key theory, and practical tool, Vygotsky contributed to the 11

development of education – the theory of the Zone of Proximal Development. According to this idea, the area in which each individual child is best prepared to learn in any subject is in the space between what they can currently do independently and what they can do with some level of adult support. This suggests that, in assessing children’s learning and developing next steps in the process, we need to look not just at what they can do unaided but also what they can do collaboratively or with a level of adult support.

By implication, it also suggests that children showing the same level of development unaided may have different, larger or smaller, zones of proximal development depending on what they can do with some support, and therefore may progress at different rates. Similarly, each child may progress at different rates in different subjects and different areas within each subject, even if they seem to be at roughly the same level of development across the board. Thirdly, children at different levels of current development may well benefit from exposure to the same material and may progress to the same level at roughly the same time, depending on their zone of proximal development and the progress they make through it. This has huge implications for the models of linear development and narrow testing of unaided ‘performance’ which still dominate assessment in Britain and many other countries, and form a backbone to the GERM. Vygotsky’s ideas, whilst some of them are now fundamental to what we do as teachers, remain challenging today and his work is certainly worth a re-read by practicing teacher and educationalist alike, as an example of a revolutionary approach to psychology and to education.

Anatoli Lunacharsky ‘A universally respected ambassador of Soviet thought and art outside his country’ The importance that the Bolsheviks attached to education is illustrated by the appointment of the brilliant and inspired Anatoli Lunacharsky as the first People’s Commissar for Education. He was was born in Poltava, Ukraine, in 1875, into the family of a liberally inclined civil servant. When he was fifteen he joined an illegal Marxist study-circle in Kiev.

His political views prevented him from studying in Moscow University and he was obliged to continue his education abroad at Zurich University, where he studied philosophy and natural science. While there he developed a close friendship with the revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches.

In 1896 Lunacharsky returned to Russia and joined the illegal Social Democratic Labour Party but was soon arrested and sentenced to internal exile in Siberia. External exile followed where he joined the editorial staff of Bolshevik newspapers, returning to Russia at the start of the 1905 Russian Revolution. When the Revolution failed he was again arrested but managed to escape and once again went abroad. He returned to Russia after the February 1917 Revolution and was credited with winning the Petrograd intelligentsia for the October Revolution.

In November, 1917, Vladimir Lenin appointed Lunacharsky as the Government's Commissar for Education and Enlightenment. His brief was to transform the Russian education system into a vehicle that would give workers and peasants the skills and knowledge to govern. He also introduced a system for subsidizing the arts.

Another innovation was Workers' Faculties that provided intensive and accelerated courses to train technicians and administrators from the working class and the peasantry.

Lunacharsky was also responsible for the Soviet Government's campaign against adult

Gawain Little NUT Executive member and Chair, NUT Professional Unity Committee, in a personal capacity

12

illiteracy. In 1917 over 65 per cent of the adult population were illiterate but by the time Lunacharsky left office it was virtually zero.

In 1930 Lunacharsky and Maxim Litvinov represented the Soviet Union at the League of Nations in Geneva. He was appointed ambassador to Spain in 1933 but died before he could take up his post.

He was a man of encyclopaedic knowledge, who spoke eleven languages, a talented scholar, a playwright, writer on literature, music, theatre, art, architecture, ethics, aesthetics and many other areas of thought and culture. He played a most important part in propaganda for socialist culture outside the country, being described by Romain Rolland as ‘A universally respected ambassador of Soviet thought and art outside his country’.

Speaking at the AllRussia Congress on Education, held within a year of the Revolution, he stressed the need for the workers and peasants to be given the education that give them the capacity to govern as the ruling class: ‘Comrades, it is for us axiomatic that the struggle of the people for their freedom and well being proceeds along three lines. The people can account itself victorious, as having gained the full power of the people, when it is in possession of the means of production and in possession of knowledge. any of these conditions is insufficient without the other. This is understood not only by us, but by any more or less consistent democrat, and in the United States of America, for example, when they had gained their independence, their very first president noted that if the people did not have a sufficient scope of knowledge at command, then democracy would not be free …

When there came … the October Revolution, the peasantry and the proletariat came forward without any skill in government, being as far removed from this as can be imagined … Now the power of the state has but one task: to give the people, as quickly

as possible, the greatest possible amount of knowledge, to cope with the gigantic role which the Revolution has prepared for the people. Previously teachers did not speak out full-voiced; they were afraid of the ministers, thinking that if they did they would be hounded out …’

In a lecture ‘On the Class School’ given in 1920 at the Sverdlov University he emphasised that all children from whatever background should attend the same comprehensive coeducational school; ‘In a class society everything the state does has a strictly class character … what can we, as socialists, offer instead of this class school? … every boy and every girl, whatever family he or she is born into, goes to one and the same first class, to the unified labour school …

He promoted the understanding that children learn through play: ‘Play is a method of selfeducation. ‘Schoolroom’ teaching ignores this fact, it says: a child wants to run about – make him sit still; a child wants to make things himself, to occupy himself with something intersting – sit him down to his Latin! In a word it is a struggle against a child’s very nature. We take exactly the opposite standpoint … when children dance, sing, cut things out mould material into shapes, they are learning …’

Another feature of Soviet schools that was initiated

by Luncharsky was the importance of linking the school to human labour. A decree of 1918 declared that: ‘the principle of productive labour should underlie the whole educational system: the teaching in the schools must bear a polytechnical character’.

Source: Anatoli Lunacharsky, On Education – Selected Articles and Speeches, Progress Publishers, 1981

13

Brian Simon Ideologist of the comprehensive school movement inspired by Soviet socialism Brian Simon made a massive contribution to the struggle for comprehensive secondary education in England and Wales. Born in 1915, he came from a privileged background and was sent to public school. At Cambridge University he joined the Communist Party. In his autobiography, A Life in Education he wrote: ‘students shifted to the left because the actual conditions of their lives and the problems confronting them forced them steadily though hesitatingly, to a revolutionary position …’

After military service in the Second World War, he taught in schools in Manchester which caused him to question streaming and intelligence testing which: ‘legitimised the highly selective system emerging up and down the country’ and led to the view ‘that human development depended primarily on the child’s education and upbringing; that it was not finally determined by innate genetic endowment …’

In 1953, as a lecturer in Education at Leicester University, he published Intelligence Testing and the Comprehensive School which made an huge impact, not just in Britain, but internationally. He was invited to visit Moscow and the book was published in Russian. His friendship with developmental psychologist Alexander Luria led to Luria’s important book Speech and the Development of Mental Processes in the Child being translated into English and the ideas of Vygotsky being introduced to a wider audience.

In his introduction to Intelligence, Psychology and Education (Lawrence & Wishart, 1971) he wrote: ‘In the USSR the primary education task during this century has been the eradication of illiteracy, and the establishment of a system of schools to raise the educational standards of whole populations, some of which had no written language. Approached by way of the doctrine of “intelligence” the problem would have appeared insoluble, or the way would have been open, for an attitude similar to that in some quarters in America today where it has been suggested

that a whole race – one cruelly oppressed for centuries – may be inherently defective intellectually; black means stupid by comparison with white. This represents an extension of the view long canvassed by psychometrists in this country – as a result of applying particular types of test and analysing results in a particular way – i.e. that by comparison with the English middle class, the English working class is inherently lacking in intellectual powers, or mentally unequipped to profit from anything much more than elementary instruction. In fact in the 1930s mental measurement was quite extensively used in the USSR, particularly in the cities.

Confident of the efficacy of their instruments of measurement, psychometrists began to dictate to teachers in the schools – much as they were doing in this country in the late 1940s and 1950s. Use of tests inevitably led to discrimination against working-class children and this controverted the policy of creating a unified school system directed to raising standards all round, as an essential aspect of the change from a backward and imperialist to an industrialised and socialist economy.

Accordingly testing was eliminated from the schools as early as 1936 and psychologists consciously turned their attention to investigating the learning process and ways of facilitating it.’

Obituary When Simon died in 2002, writer and former comprehensive headteacher Chris Searle wrote an obituary for him that was printed in this journal.

Here is an extract: ‘Simon was the great ideologist of the comprehensive education movement, and that may well be his greatest legacy. With other fighting educationalists like his co-operators Caroline Benn 14

and Clyde Chitty, he gave an idea both reason and structure and made it an irresistible force.

Throughout the sixties and seventies- even with Margaret Thatcher at the Tory helm, comprehensive schools grew in numbers and efficacy - much of that was due to the rational foundation that Simon and other educationalists gave to the new system.

‘Another substantial and lasting achievement is his demolition of the bogus ideas and research of Sir Cyril Burt, the other falsifying psychometrists and 'the hegemony of mental testing' that ruled post-war education in Britain and propped up eleven-plus selection. The notion that each child had an inherited, immutable 'intelligence quotient' that defined his or her educability was a noxious doctrine that false prophets like Jenson, Eysenck and latterly the American authors of the insidious 'Bell Curve' converted into racism and barbaric argumentation for the genetic intellectual inferiority of black people.

‘Simon's lucid and liberating scholarship took apart Burt and his cohorts – read The IQ controversy: the case of Cyril Burt in his potent collection of essays Does Education Matter?

(Lawrence & Wishart, 1985) to see the power of his analysis.

‘Into the eighties and nineties Simon was still campaigning hard – particularly against the socalled Education Reform Act, passed by the Thatcher government in 1988. This act, carried through by Secretary of State Kenneth Baker was, and has proven to be, a disaster for British education. For it laid the foundation for the marketisation of schools and led directly to the imposition of the narrow, chauvinistic and prescriptive ' National Curriculum' which put a stranglehold around teacher creativity and bound classroom work to centralised and licensed knowledge advocated by the state. As Simon put it himself in his deeply insightful What future for Education?: Why a national curriculum? “Because in the search for hierarchy and new means of control, the national curriculum provides, as it were, statutory articulated tramlines along which all schools must operate.”

‘Everyone has their heroes, and Brian Simon stood high as one of mine, and was too for many other teachers of my generation. The scope of his four- volume Studies in the History of Education is massive, and imperative reading for anyone who wants to understand how education both works

and fails across British schools. Detailed and beautifully written in his characteristically crystalline style, there is no better way of understanding the provenance so of our present problems in education than a reading of this precious work. It will last for as long as there are schools in Britain.

‘His incisive critique of the Baker Act and its profoundly damaging consequences, Bending the Rules was published in 1988, during the same year as the passage of the Bill. Simon's accurate prognostications of its effects are there to read now - it was a tragedy that more teachers and activists did not act upon them at the time Simon made them. He quoted a Department for Education and Science mandarin who expressed his anxiety that many comprehensive schools were becoming so successful that they were an appetite for higher education which could not be satisfied; hence as the official declared, “there has to be selection, because we are beginning to create aspirations which society cannot match”.

‘Which kind of society? The class-bound, race-bound and exclusive society still upheld by New Labour. The kind of society irreconcilable with Simon's ideas and aspirations. For he saw shortly before his death, new, more mystified forms of selection being advocated to keep a divided educational system alive and thriving. More and more examinations to limit creative and divergent classroom work, more and more surveillance of teachers and centralised, officious control over the curriculum. New types of school ostensibly to 'diversify' but in fact to create complex new hierarchies in opposition to the unifying structures of comprehensive education.

‘As he wrote in his last published essay Promoting Comprehensive Education in the 21st Century (2001) “The enemy (if that is the right word) is not the traditional, or the wild, Tory right.

It is the Labour leadership itself, which has the power to make changes but appears to be acting in the opposite direction, actually giving new currency to, and repeating the arguments of the discredited Tory right”. ‘

His legacy Let’s fight to get the present Labour leadership to have the opportunity, sooner rather than later, to undo this damage and create the truly comprehensive system that Brian Simon and his colleagues and comrades fought so hard to win.

15

International Education Minister Janet Museveni closed its chain of 63 schools for failing basic educational and sanitation standards, putting pupils’ health at risk. The USowned firm employs unqualified teachers to read scripted lessons off a tablet computer in tin-shack buildings.

BIA also operates in Kenya, with 100,000 pupils, Nigeria and India. Its financial backers include Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Ebay’s Pierre Omidyar, the Dutch Foreign Ministry and — formerly — Britain’s Department for International Development.

Liberia Teachers warn against school privatisation Expanding primary school privatisation in Liberia will have ‘grave’ consequences, a new report by teachers’ unions warns.

Global union federation Education International released a scathing report into Education Minister George We r n e r ’ s Partnership Schools for Liberia (PSL) scheme in the capital Monrovia last month.

PSL has already seen 93 primary and nursery schools outsourced to eight companies over the last year — including Bridge International Academies (BIA), the shack-school outfit bankrolled by world’s richest man Bill Gates. Another 107 are set to be added this autumn, despite a string of failings in the first cohort of schools, exposed by the National Teachers Association of Liberia (NTAL).

Classes were hugely overcrowded and promised subsidised school dinners were never provided, leading to a high dropout rate. In a recent article, NTAL president Mary Mulbah wrote that Liberia had been turned into a ‘battleground’ over private education for the poor. She said the conflict was between ‘those who see for-profit “charter” schools as the solution to the problems that plague public education across the world, and those of us who point to under-investment and poor management as the true culprits.’

Teachers at one BIA school said they had been paying their NTAL dues but were threatened with the sack after they complained about low wages. Mr Werner announced the PSL scheme last April. BIA was originally contracted to run all 93 schools, but it was reduced to 25 following protests over anti-corruption laws.

PSL was described as a ‘pilot’ scheme to be independently reviewed before the start of the new school year.

But the Education International report, by the University of Wisconsin in the US, found a ‘striking lack of transparency and independent evidence in the development of the PSL project.’ It ‘puts increased power in undemocratic, private institutions, that make decisions with little community input and accountability.’

BIA hit the headlines last year after Ugandan

https://www.ei-ie.

Cuba The 10th Cuban Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, The 10th Cuban Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, saw a range of activities held in different parts of the island during May. This year it was dedicated to the prevention of bullying and harassment on the basis of sexual and gender identities in school spaces.

Speaking during a press conference, Dr. Mariela Castro Espín, director of the National Center for Sex Education (Cenesex), noted that it is a question of promoting a change of mentality and attitude among people who exclude, reject and isolate those with nonheteronormative sexual orientations or gender identities.

Under the theme: ‘For Schools without Homophobia and Transphobia: I Include Myself,’ this 10th edition of the event will address an issue that has been identified in social, legal and medical sciences research in Cuba. ‘We are not engaged in this battle because it is a huge problem, but because it is a problem, and therefore it must be made visible. The biggest obstacle is that there is not enough awareness that these issues exist, nor the knowledge to identify at what point this type of phenomena are expressed and their various manifestations, from the most explicit to the most subtle. Today it is a challenge for Cuban institutions to further these types of studies,’ the Cenesex director explained.

http://en.granma.cu

16