I’ve recently come across Adam Boxer’s blog post on being a ‘lefty’ in politics and a ‘trad’ in teaching. He complains that there is a “consistent and widespread conflation of traditional education with right wing politics” – a conflation that is not warranted. Indeed, Boxer stresses that he is a traditional teacher precisely because he is left-wing:
I believe that everyone, regardless of their background, should be able to access society at any level. I believe that a highly effective way to achieve that is by transmitting the cultural goods of society; its finest discourse and mores. I also believe that our cultural and intellectual goods are the right of all citizens, whatever their backgrounds.
Boxer goes on to claim that politics and teaching methods are not related. His left-wing views, he argues, have not changed since employing progressive approaches as a lefty NQT. However, he has come to the realisation that the best way to educate for social equality – i.e. “level the field and to pass on society’s goods” – is to teach as a traditionalist. The assertion that traditional teaching methods and left-wing views are compatible deserves scrutiny.
Boxer’s use of progressive and then traditional methods reminds me of the most advanced left-wing government in history. The Russian Revolution unleashed a period of unparalleled experimentation and creativity, promoting progressive education in an attempt to raise the cultural level of the population. It was a time of hope in the capacity of humans to improve themselves and build a better society. The aim of education was to inculcate a sense of agency in students so they could play an active role in the new developments. That all changed with the rise of Stalin. He viewed education as a means of achieving popular compliance for his brutal five-year plans. To achieve that compliance he returned schools to the traditional methods of the repressive Tsarist regime.
Both the revolutionaries of the new Soviet state and the bureaucrats of Stalin’s regime would have considered themselves left-wing. However, they had different aims for education. The progressives wanted to harness the creative agency of the population to participate in building a new society; the traditionalists wanted to force the population to submit to hardship and misery. The label ‘left-wing’ is, therefore, misleading. It is the aim of education that is at the heart of the debate between progressives and traditionalists.
Let’s turn then to Boxer’s aim. Maybe it is acceptable for traditional teaching to reinforce messages of compliance, teacher authority and student passivity if ‘disadvantaged’ students from ‘poorer’ backgrounds gain, as Boxer puts it, access to society at any level.
To achieve that access, Boxer argues that teachers have to transmit the finest cultural goods of society. The problem with this formulation is that it requires the ‘disadvantaged’ to deny their own culture because, as Marx and Engels said in The German Ideology, ‘finest’ is defined by the rulers of society:
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.
In calling for the assimilation of all children into the dominant culture, Boxer is, in reality, advocating the abandonment of any alternative culture. Working class children must disregard their forebears’ history of struggle; migrants must disavow their parents’ cultural heritage. This makes Boxer’s prescription wholly undemocratic.
Not only can we say that traditionalist teaching methods force students to comply, but we can also say that traditionalists aim for compliance with the dominant culture of the rich and powerful. In my view, the traditionalists’ approach and aim are the antithesis of what the left should stand for.
Progressive educators engage with students’ experiences and cultures as well as teaching students about the “intellectual goods” of the dominant culture. Such an approach is left-wing because it aims for a society in which the ‘disadvantaged’ have agency and in which all cultures are acknowledged and valued.
Progressive Teacher 