Let's fight for a new age of academic freedom

Friday March 4, 2011

The struggle to free schools from government control is meeting bitter resistance from vested interests, helped by political opportunists. But it’s a battle that must be won, argues Tom Miers.

Government intervention in society is not a one way street. Just as you think the ‘something must be done’ brigade is triumphant, the absurdities of state control become so manifest in one part of society or another that momentum swings in the other direction.

Take education, for example. Over the last three decades there has been a slow, dawning realisation among the political class that all is not well in our state schools. It’s taken a while, but at last things are beginning to change for the better.

Starting with the Major government, and then inch by inch through the Blair years, and now more rapidly under the Coalition, the government in England is letting schools go. At one stage or another all the main political parties have taken their turn at the wheel, which means that there’s a good chance this process has legs.

In essence, state schools are being turned independent, though still funded by the taxpayer. We have even seen some private schools joining the state sector because they have little to lose now except their fees.

The effect of this is potentially revolutionary as schools become accountable not to the state but to the people who use them – parents and pupils. So there is every prospect that the curriculum and professional ethos of schools will begin to reflect the values of society rather than those of the political elite.

Something similar is happening in higher education. While universities have always been nominally independent, their reliance on government funding for both research and student teaching meant that they had to toe the line.

But for very different reasons that in the schools sector, universities are also being set free. Government can no longer afford to finance them competitively, and so is allowing them to raise income from fees and encouraging them to build up their philanthropic endowments.

Both trends will mean less state control over education, and this holds the prospect of greater intellectual diversity and freedom. Government will have less power to steer the research agendas of universities towards approved subject areas and conclusions. And less leeway to engineer the school curriculum to influence the minds of the young on pet issues such as the environment, lifestyles, gender issues and so on.

For those who cherish a free society these developments are potentially very exciting. Education in the modern world is as powerful a tool for setting the intellectual agenda as control of the church was in the Middle Ages.

Yet even now the forces of conservatism are marshalling their forces. The struggle to free schools from government control is meeting bitter resistance from vested interests, helped by political opportunists. And we can never underestimate the innate instinct for government to regulate and interfere. The battle is far from won.

Tom Miers is an independent public policy consultant and commissioning editor of The Free Society. His latest book, Democracy and the Fall of the West, is available from Amazon and Imprint Academic