People's Republic of Neverland

Robb Johnson

Description

There once was a time when teachers and communities were able to exercise democratic control over their schools. Now that power has been taken away, both centralised and privatised, under the guise of “reform.” There is a forgotten history of the time before reform, and within it a bright horizon is visible, reachable only if educators and society at large can learn the lessons of the past.

Robb Johnson entered the classroom as a new teacher in the 1980s and has spent a lifetime alongside his pupils encouraging both creativity and a healthy distrust of authority. This book is both memoir and polemic, a celebration of children’s innate desire to learn, share, cooperate, and play, as well as a critique of bureaucratic interference. Johnson details how we ended up with the contemporary mass education systems and why they continually fail to give children what they need. Combining practical experience as a teacher with detailed pedagogical knowledge, and a characteristic playful style, Johnson is both court chronicler and jester, imparting information and creatively admonishing the self-important figureheads of the reform agenda.

This book considers how schools and education relate to the wider society in which they are located and how they relate to the particular needs and abilities of the people who experience them. It shows that schools and education are contested spaces that need to be reclaimed from the state, and turned into places where people can grow, not up, not old, but as individuals. It offers alternative ways of running classrooms, schools, and perhaps even society.

Sujets

• Austerity
• Society
• Alternative
• Infrastructure

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629638119
• Langue: English

Extrait

I have rarely read a book that is so embedded in what education is for, and therefore so able to direct the reader how to pursue these goals in practice and at all levels, so that the ways schools are structured add to the goodness of society.
-Marcelo Staricoff, co-author, with Alan Rees, of Start Thinking (Imaginative Minds 2005), fellow of the Chartered College of Teaching and a former head teacher
Robb Johnson s The People s Republic of Neverland: The Child versus the State shows the stark reality of the current situation for education. Education is at a crossroads, and this book comes at an important time, raising awareness and exposing the flaws in our current system. Read this, and then join the campaign to fight for a fairer, fully funded comprehensive education system!
-Louise Regan, former president of National Education Union
How cool is Mr Johnson? -Sarah
Coolest teacher ever! -Natasha
-Former students, Class of 1984
The UK s most consistently strong songwriter.
-Sean McChee, RnR
An English original.
-Robin Denselow, Guardian
One of Britain s most challenging songwriters.
-Colin Randall, Daily Telegraph
The real deal when it comes to songwriting.
-Mike Harding BBC Radio 2
The goal of the school system in most countries has generally had nothing to do with producing happy, creative, self-confident, autonomous children who will grow up to become happy, creative, self-confident, autonomous adults. Since schooling became mandatory in industrialized societies like the UK and the US, schools have been an ideological battleground between those who want to produce obedient workers and soldiers and those, like Robb Johnson, who would prefer to see a liberated humanity consisting of whole people, who are treated as such from birth, by their parents, by the schools and by all other social, political and economic institutions. This book is a brilliant crash course in the roots of the problem, the devastation wreaked since the post-Thatcher/post-Reagan austerity budgets and a return to Victorian ( family ) values and how we might address all of these complex challenges. And it is as captivating a read as any good memoir, because that s exactly what it is. Robb Johnson lived through-and taught through-the backlash, working as a teacher from 1980 until very recently.
-David Rovics, musician and author of Sing for Your Supper: A DIY Guide to Playing Music, Writing Songs, and Booking Your Own Gigs (PM Press 2008)
Praise for A Reasonable History of Impossible Demands , 5CD box set (PM Press 2016)
This stonking five-disc retrospective charts the development of one of this country s most important songwriters (no argument!) .This is one really essential purchase.
-David Kidman, fROOTS

The People s Republic of Neverland: The Child versus the State
Robb Johnson
This edition 2020 PM Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-62963-795-2 (print)
ISBN: 978-1-62963-811-9 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019946094
Cover by John Yates / www.stealworks.com
Interior design by briandesign
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Printed in the USA
Contents
Author s Note
Neverland-an Introductory Definition of Terms and Conditions
Prologue
PART ONE A BRIEF HISTORY OF MASS EDUCATION
Remote Control
Alternatives and Radicals
Workers Control
Stepney and Islington
Great Debates
Complete Control
PART TWO THE STATE OF STATE EDUCATION
Zealots and Their Hobby Horses
Goon Squads and Thought Policing
British Values
Social Mobility and Post-Society
PART THREE TEECHAS AND TEECHIN
A Conflicted Situation
Problems with Authority
PART FOUR THE CHILD
The Essential Anarchist
Socialisation and the Essential Anarchist
Wrong Questions and Wrong Answers
Playfulness
PART FIVE GOOD PRACTICE
A Brief Word about Best Practice
The Road to Neverland
Some Songs of Experience
The People s Republic of Neverland
The People s Republic of Neverland, Heston
The People s Republic of Neverland, East Berlin
The People s Republic of Neverland, Hanwell and Isleworth
The People s Republic of Neverland, Hounslow and Hollingdean
The Constant Elementals of Neverland
The People s Republic of Neverland and the REAL WORLD
PART SIX A LONG HARD LOOK IN THE LONG HARD MIRROR
A Memory of Water
PART SEVEN WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
Whose Schools? Our Schools
Alchemy, Trust and Politics
Educational Privilege and the Ruling Class: Unfit for Purpose
Sunflowers, Playgrounds and Schools
EPILOGUE
A Brief Character Sketch and a Recipe
How to Shape the Future with Play Dough
CODA
1: A Song of Infant Sorrow
2: Two Songs of Infant Joy
ENCORE
Never Trust a Neoliberal
Glossary
Selected Bibliography
Playlist
Notes
About the Author
Author s Note
This book was written and rewritten and rewritten again and again between 2016 and 2019. Partly this was because my friends at PM Press, Ramsey and James, insisted that too much bile and contemporary polemic were bad for both readability and enduring relevance-and they were right. Since the exhausted politics behind education reform car crashed and fell apart in the UK, we have seen a bewilderingly rapid shuffling of strategies of misdirection by the ruling class. Gove-previously remarkable for being far and away the most reviled reformist education minister and the one responsible for attempting to impose the most ludicrous hobby horses onto state schools-popped up during the Brexit campaign as an advocate of Leave , famously declaring that the British public had had enough of listening to experts, and, as if to demonstrate the importance of having people who don t know what they re talking about in charge, then resurfaced as minister responsible for coping with the chaos that would ensue if Britain exited the European Union without having negotiated an agreement. Which was, of course, made all the more likely when the British winner of the Donald Trump Lookalike Competition Boris Johnson became prime minister in 2019. However, amusing the antics of such barefaced buffoonery might be on one level, it is both difficult and pointless to try to keep up with the spectacle of the shuffle , pointless because it is essentially and apparently nothing more than endless distraction. Therefore, in one respect, this book has finally been rewritten so it reads as a historical record of a particular timespan. In 2019, the Labour Party was promising to end high stakes summative testing in primary schools and initiate a review of education with the intention of establishing a National Education Service, as well as talking about the importance of children enjoying access to creativity and the arts. Would this book become even more historical than polemical? Sadly not it seems, as the great British Public decided to vote for Getting Brexit Done rather than anything that threatened the greedy elite with the promise of some increased attention to issues of social justice. However, children will still arrive on this beautiful little planet with high expectations, and they will continue to deserve a much better experience of education than they have been subjected to here over the last thirty years thanks to the politics of reform , the neoliberal project that set out to assert complete and politicised state control over the state schools most of our children go to.
Neverland-an Introductory Definition of Terms and Conditions
For nearly 150 years, going to school has been the norm for children in Europe and on those parts of the planet historically determined by European imperialism. This book is primarily a reflection on schooling and education based on my experiences working as a teacher in state schools in England from 1980 to 2015. The significant characteristic of this historical period was the imposition of education reform . In this context, reform means the state asserting centralised control over all aspects of state education provision, guided by a combination of right-wing nostalgia and neoliberal free-market politics. As a result, state provision has favoured schooling rather than education, and the experience of the individual child is not valued as in any way central to the process.
This book looks at the background to the right s assertion of these values, contrasting them with the practical insights and understanding gained from my own working experience. This is not meant to be an academic study; the title is clearly indicative of a playful intent, as well as of a certain politics. This book is not about the never-never lands of the stupefying spectacle or the playpens of privilege and celebrity. This Neverland belongs to the people. Reform always freighted political intent, and this book does too, so if you lack the capacity to be angered that over four million children in the fifth or sixth richest nation state on the planet officially live in poverty and are unable to accept that this is clearly the consequence of government of the privileged, by the privileged, for the privileged-then probably this book isn t for you.
But if you are interested in education , rather than