Claimocracy and the dismantling of public education
Posted on 16/02/2023
Ten years on from Michael Gove’s notorious ‘Enemies of Promise’ article which derided the work of education researchers, Helen Gunter — in a guest blog post — considers how the rise of government by assertion erodes democracy.
On 23rd March 2013 100 professors of education were labelled by Michael Gove in an article in the Daily Mail as: “The new Enemies of Promise” and “The Blob”, who do not value education but instead “they seem to be more interested in valuing Marxism, revering jargon and fighting excellence”. I was one of the 100 professors who a few days earlier (19th March 2013) had signed a letter in The Independent, where the opening statement said:
We are warning of the dangers posed by Michael Gove’s new National Curriculum which could severely erode educational standards. The proposed curriculum consists of endless lists of spellings, facts and rules. This mountain of data will not develop children’s ability to think, including problem-solving, critical understanding and creativity.
The letter made statements that were evidence-based in regard to the independent primary research conducted by the signatories, and Gove made statements that illustrate a claimocracy, or rule by assertion using simplifications, fictions and mimicry.
Gove simplifies independent research in order to make the case for “Marxists”. Notably he selectively misrepresents and derides signatories of the letter. The core to Gove’s claim is that his policies are about ensuring “millions of our poorest children… acquire the stock of knowledge” necessary to function in the modern world. Smearing researchers in this way is not new, and it is part of a wider attack on debates through hyperbolic (Johnson and ‘Get Brexit Done’) and racist (Braverman and ‘Cultural Marxism’) slogans.
Gove presents the fiction of “Enemies of Promise” through a fabulist mythology that researchers “are a set of politically motivated individuals” that “thwart” the learning potential of children in disadvantaged communities who need spelling tests and times tables. Gove has appropriated social justice as actually meaning individualizing justice (e.g. he mis-uses the case of Jade Goody), where he fails to examine how austerity is wrecking public education services.
Gove’s puerile tantrum about “Marxists” and “Enemies of Promise” was performed in front of his receptive Daily Mail audience, who would be ready to mimic the claim about “The Blob” who operate by “stealth” and “drew gifted young teachers away from their vocation and instead directed them towards ideologically driven theory”. A few years later Gove ventriloquized his ongoing derision of experts, where UK government civil servants have been labelled “The Blob” because it is claimed they have repeatedly obstructed Brexit.
The tenth anniversary of the letter and article prompts reflection about the degeneration of education policy as public policy. Notably UK governments engage in governing by assertion, where democratic values and practices are being scorned in ways that enable the dismantling public services. Following Levitsky and Ziblatt’s analysis of How Democracies Die, the four warning signs are in evidence (pages 21-22), where we should be concerned when a politician:
- “rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game” – Gove does that by denying plurality in debate and evidence;
- “denies the legitimacy of opponents” – Gove does that by censuring researchers as a national security issue;
- “tolerates or encourages violence” – Gove does that by presenting himself as the victim of revolutionary aggressors who must be fought and defeated because “it’s a battle in which you have to take sides”;
- “indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents” – Gove does that by celebrating the removal of teachers, schools, and the curriculum from democratic structures and cultures.
Levitsky and Ziblatt go onto identify how words are being used in a way that “in the past we would have regarded as dangerously politically deviant” (p203). They associate this with the erosion of the accepted rules of the game, whereby “norms are the soft guardrails of democracy” (p203), and Gove’s response to the letter shows that he was in the process of rewriting the rules of the game: who plays, how and why. Denunciation of educational experts has a long history (e.g. John Patten), and has continued in the post-Gove decade, whereby the claim continues to be made that there is evidence to support Academies when research evidence shows otherwise. Hence as researchers we need to be mindful not only about cuts in research funding and the precarity of contracts, but also how our work is automatically positioned as oppositional to policy. So, in following Arendt’s examination of dark times, our job is not just to do research but to provide some “illumination” about the context in which it takes place, and how intellectual activism matters in a democracy.
Biography:
Helen M Gunter is Professor Emerita in The Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester, UK. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and recipient of the BELMAS Distinguished Service Award 2016. Her research focuses on the political sociology of knowledge production in the field of education policy. Her most recent book is: A Political Sociology of Education Policy (2023, Policy Press). With Belinda Hughes she has written about claimocracy, academisation and MATification in Forum 64/3.