Tag Archives: Observer

School Wars: round up of the reaction so far…………

  Check our some of the reviews/interviews and book related features of the past few weeks. 

Andy Beckett in the Guardian:http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/sep/01/school-wars-melissa-benn-review

Anthony Seldon in the Observer; http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/sep/04/school-wars-education-benn-review

Phil Beadle in the Independent: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/school-wars-the-battle-for-britains-education-by-melissa-benn-2351229.html

Francis Beckett in The New Statesman: http://www.newstatesman.com/non-fiction/2011/09/education-benn-labour-children

Neil Fletcher in The Camden New Journal: http://www.camdennewjournal.com/reviews/books/2011/sep/books-review-school-wars-battle-britains-education-melissa-benn

Lucy Sherriff interview in Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/08/27/melissa-benn-free-schools-and-education_n_938872.html

Terry Wrigley in Socialist Review: http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=11793

Sadie Robinson interview in Socialist Worker: http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=26186

Samira Shackle in The New Statesman: http://www.newstatesman.com/education/2011/10/school-wilshaw-mossbourne

Compass website, comment piece: http://www.compassonline.org.uk/news/item.asp?n=13796

Book related pieces in The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/melissabenn

Coming up: interviews and features in: Marianne ( French magazine), Epigram ( Bristol University student newspaper), The Richmond magazine, Red Pepper,  and Utdanning ( Norway’s chief educational journal)  and The Lady magazine. …

Latest writing

THE CRISIS OF THE MERITOCRACY

The crisis of the meritocracy: Britain’s transition to mass education since the Second World War

PETER MANDLER, 2020

Oxford: Oxford University Press

361pp, hardback, £25, ISBN 9780198840145

Cambridge historian Peter Mandler has a fundamentally optimistic story to tell about the growth of universal education in Britain over the last seventy years and one can sense his stubborn resistance to any more sceptical interpretation on almost every page of this dense and impressive history. Since the close of the ‘people’s war’ in 1945, Mandler argues, we have witnessed the rise of mass education, initially at secondary level, and more recently in higher education where participation rates currently nudge New Labour’s much vaunted promise of 50 per cent. Contrary to established narratives that have put this development down to economic growth or significant pieces of legislation, Mandler identifies the expansion of educational opportunity as the result of a constantly shifting interplay of demand and supply that has reinforced ‘the deepening compact between the individual citizen and the state which came with formal democracy and the idea of equal citizenship’. Education continues to be seen by the public as one of the ‘decencies’ of life’; hence the inexorable rise in demand for what Mandler often refers to as ‘more and better’.

In short, the people (sort of) did it themselves.

On the face of it, this is an attractive proposition, yet one that is oddly tricky to grapple with, given the mass of contradictory or partial information available to us concerning what the ‘people’ have wanted at any given historical moment or, indeed, who exactly the people are. Mandler deliberately employs ‘a promiscuous array of methods and sources’, sifting through realms of evidence from official publications, interviews, academic studies, pollsters’ findings and demographic surveys in an attempt to clarify the complex relationship between government policy, public demand and social change. This promiscuity encourages him to prosecute his subsidiary critique of the alleged tendency of academic disciplines to work in unhelpful silos. Economists and social scientists, he charges, have paid scant attention to educational expansion while educationists and political historians tend to ‘chop up long-term trends into short political segments’ with many on the left falling into a ‘declinist narrative’ in which the failures of a ‘divided’ Labour party feature heavily as a reason for a lack of genuine progress (an analysis Mandler anyway rejects). But we shall return to the problem of we whingeing progressives in a moment.…

Latest news & events

A Cold War Tragedy

Melissa will be in conversation with Anne Sebba about her new book, ‘Ethel Rosenberg – A Cold War Tragedy.’

Weds 15th September 2021, 5-6pm, in the Robert Graves Tent at the Wimbledon Book Festival.

More information here.

 …

Melissa Benn