tim's experiment

There was a gloriously confusing piece on the op-ed page of Pravda last week, on the topic du jour, national education. Really this is not a very interesting topic. The government paid oodles of money to a bunch of left-wingers to produce a set of teaching notes which are propagandistic garbage. Ap0logists trying to wriggle round this obdurate core of fact often get themselves into undignified positions.

So to last week., The writer was a lady whose only claim to our attention, according to the little note at the end, was that she graduated from the London School of Economics. She trotted out the usual line that many countries have national education. Oddly enough we are never actually given any names in this connection, which leaves the reader with the suspicion that either there are not that many countries which have national education, or the countries which go in for this are places we might not wish to imitate, like North Korea. There is a dangerous area of ambiguity here, actually. In most countries children do pick up a lot of material which might, if you were anxious to make sure they didn’t miss any of it, be categorised as national education. It is a common complaint about history lessons that they concentrate on the home country and its immediate vicinity. Geography is a bit more cosmopolitan, but not much. Local field trips are easier. Literature classes tend naturally to focus on the national language and its authors. And so it goes on. I was not subjected to national education. We did, though, in the normal course of events, pick up a reasonable amount of Brit history, geography, etc, as well as such patriotic trappings as the origins of the national flag and the words of the national anthem. It doesn’t have to be a separate subject.

Actually, if I may digress for a moment, primary schools are not supposed to do separate subjects any more. The modern way is to have what is called a topic tree. Say the topic for this term is trees, so we have a trees tree. We will do the biology of trees, the economics of trees, literary references to trees, King Charles’s oak, the giant Sequoia and whatever else the teacher can think up. Perhaps each child will bring in a twig and make a model dug-out canoe. While this is going on the basics of reading, writing and counting will be painlessly absorbed as a fringe benefit. Or so the theory goes. One of my son’s teachers once told me that in her experience there were only two “topics” which worked: dinosaurs and ancient Egypt. They were always a great success. Others did not spark much interest. She had not tried trees. Anyway into this happy scene we are now going to insert a period devoted to a government-ordained syllabus. There will be no exam. Do I hear snoring?

Enough detours. The nub of last week’s article was that the nation was not the same thing as the state. This is a typical piece of sociological slight of hand, in which a well-known word is given an arbitrary new meaning, whose implications can then propel a small fleet of research outputs. Most of us know what a nation is. It is a political entity with a flag, a UN seat, a president (or monarch in old-fashioned examples), an army (Costa Rica excepted), a passport and a football team which appears at least in the preliminary stages of the World Cup. There is a school of sociological thought, however, which uses “nation” for smaller groupings distinguished by the possession of a distinctive language and culture. This enabled our writer to point out, rather unhelpfully, that Britain consisted of three “nations”: Scotland, England and Wales. Hong Kong was at present, she observed, a separate “nation” which did not regard itself as part of the Chinese “nation” and the purpose of national education was to remedy this.

This is the sort of thing which happens when you mess about with the language. The Chinese “nation” is a nation in the traditional sense, posessing flag, passport, president, UN seat etc. It is not a “nation” in the other sense, in which Hong Kong might well be a “nation”, having a distinctive culture and language. China the nation state also incorporates numerous “nations” in the trendy sociological sense with their own language and culture. Actually the people who use “nation” in the way we are invited to use it here generally do not believe that the “nations” they discover should be pressured or propagandized into submerging themselves in other “nations”, or in larger political entities. On the contrary they generally infer that the culture and language of the “nations” they identify should be preserved and protected, as variations on Gaelic are, with varying degrees of success, in the British Isles.

So I suspect the people at LSE would be rather surprised to find their ideas pressed into service to support the imposition of national education on Hong Kong schools. But if you’re desperate…

If there is a moral to be drawn from all this it is that the local left-wing fraternity should not be allowed to dabble in the education of those children fortunate enough to have escaped their school system. In order to achieve eminence in left-wing circles it is necessary to amputate the political balls and check them in at the Liaison Office in a jar. This leaves the victim in no condition to contribute to civic education for people who are still intact.