Someone put a flyer through our door the other day for what was essentially a cramming centre. Their advertised achievement was a boy getting a 'C' in maths in year 5. I don't know what year that is in old money, but I'm guessing it's earlier than one normally gets a GCSE. My instant question is why do it? What do you hope to gain? I did my GCSE maths a year early, which simply allowed me to take three years to do my A-level maths. Obviously that wasn't what my teachers had in mind, but they clearly hadn't reckoned on my exceptional capacity for laziness. Ultimately though, the only reason one would ever do an exam early is to be able to say you did it early (see, even 20 years on, I can't resist), but at what cost? At the cost of actually enjoying the only childhood you'll ever have? I'm not saying that happened to me because it was just one exam one year early and I didn't do any extra classes. However if you're going to extra school after school all the time just to pass exams earlier, just to get through education faster, what then? You get to join the workforce earlier whilst you're younger and more malleable; whilst it's easier to indoctrinate you into the corporate mindset. Of course as an employer in such a situation, most of the heavy lifting has already been done for you. There seems to be a bit of a craze at the moment for emulating the success of Chinese education, which has generated hundreds of millions of citizens willing to be locked into the special version of capitalism that their masters have created for them. We may look east pityingly, sorry for all the freedoms that they don't enjoy, but the culture we think of as oppressing the Chinese is simply a vaguely reorganised version of the corporate structure that every modern multinational aspires to: one where the citizens/workers put the good of the country/company above their own personal wellbeing. Of course we all think we're too smart for that, we have a contract with our company, and we can walk away whenever we want, but how would we pay the mortgage if we just quit our jobs, how would we reach that perfect life that sits just beyond our grasp if we don't work for it? It's not just compulsion and coercion though, most companies work very hard at getting their employees to buy into their collective message, an idea that (they hope) goes beyond the basic premise that the company's continued profitability ensures continued employment. Companies want their employees to think of them as an organisation with a higher purpose, one for which it is worth going the extra mile. Ideally this sense of higher purpose should be coupled with a general sense of the generosity of the employer.
At a recent company evening event, a colleague ponted out that 15 years ago, such an event would have started at lunchtime and taken up the afternoon, to which I responded that in those days he probably wasn't allowed to wear his own clothes every Friday. To my mild astonishment he accepted this as an entirely reasonable exchange, which is interesting given that it's not even true: he can't wear his own clothes on a Friday, not if they're shorts or a football top, or the sleeves are too short, etc, etc. Yet this colleague and so many others like him are seemingly happy to accept that a real terms wage cut is OK if they are allowed to wear a clearly defined set of slightly different clothes one day a week. My issues with 'dress down' days are well known and, I think, entirely justified. 'Dress down' days are the thin end of the corporate bullshit wedge; it is your employer playing make believe at meeting you halfway, whilst still actually dictating every aspect of your working life. They wheel out hundreds of similar ways to 'improve' your happiness at work in the hope that you will ignore the two most obvious ways of acheieving this goal: make you work less and pay you more. The make believe is that there is some higher purpose to your work; that in some way, by continually increasing the profits you make for your employer, the company will reach some never entirely defined corporate nirvana. Of course there can be no actual end point, just an unsustainable ever increasing margin. Regimes such as the one that controls China have an equally nebulous higher purpose. For better or for worse the government that we have ended up with in the western democracies exists largely to administer the state broadly in the interests of the population. In China the government administers the country in the interest of some increasingly I'll-defined ideal, disseminating power through the corporations that it owns. In the west governments have largely ceded power over people's lives to the large corporations, who lack merely their own entirely compliant justice system (and to be fair, when they need one, they just hire it off the nearest government) to fully emulate the politburo of the Chinese communist party.
The mantra of modern politicians is that they don't want to do anything that could be bad for business, but what if what is good for business is bad for your citizens? What if educating children to be 'fit for the workplace' means grinding away at their souls until they'll accept any old corporate bullshit unquestioningly?
Education is important, far too important to be left in the hands of those who think it is just a way of churning out compliant worker drones. When you push your children because you want them to have a better life, maybe take a moment to think about what would constitute a better life. Everyone wants the best for their children, but we really need to consider whether a system of education so favoured by corporate vested interests can be best for any individual. Next time you hear someone extolling the virtues of a Chinese-style education system, think about how having everything else Chinese-style has worked out for you.
