Schools in the streets: John MacBeath

In The Play Ethic book's education chapter, I quoted with approval the ideas of Ivan Illich, whose Deschooling Society and Tools for Conviviality - when I encountered them, almost 20 years too late, in the early oughties - seemed amazingly prescient. His vision of an education liberated from schools and into cities - using computer technology to turn offices, parks, factories, museums into opportunities for learning - is becoming credible again, as the internet (and children's literacy in it) shakes up existing models of schooling. 

The de-schooling option has always interested me, as an answer to how to educate 'players' instead of 'workers' - that is, enterprising, adaptable, mobile, energetic pupils. Perhaps unleash them on the city or town, get them engaging with public space and specific problems, than keep them in the crowd-control corralls that too many schools are.

However it was lovely to read today, in the Guardian's education section, of how Illich (and his Scottish - and equally radical - contemporary, A.S.Neill) has affected the seemingly most establishment figures. John MacBeath is the head of Educational Leadership at Cambridge University, and the shaper of self-inspection schemes for the English educational ministry Ofstead. All very solid. But McBeath (as befits his bearded lefty image) has a wild seventies past:

MacBeath visited the celebrated School Without Walls in Philadelphia. "The kids were being educated on the parkway, in hospitals, shops, any place where you could learn. They were 14 and 15 and, hearing the way they talked about how the city worked, local government and politics, I thought, boy, oh boy, they were getting an education they would never have got inside the classroom."

MacBeath started his own free school in Barrowfield, a working-class area of east Glasgow, close to Celtic football ground and then notorious for gang warfare. With surprising encouragement from the Scottish inspectorate, he rented premises above a local taxi firm. "Our kids didn't come 9am to 4pm. They drifted in about 10.30, but they'd be there till 10 or 11 at night, and they'd

The school inevitably got flak, particularly from neighbouring heads, and before each of his college lectures, MacBeath's departmental head would announce that the views expressed in them had nothing to do with the college. The experiment came to an end when the children decided a boy should be banned from the next trip for stealing. While everyone else was gone, he burned the building down.

Would Macbeath have sent his own two daughters there? He hesitates. "In my more idealistic moments, I would have said yes. In greater maturity, I would say the prime reason parents choose a school is the other children who go there. Many of the kids at Barrowfield were on the verge of criminality, their language wasn't good, they smoked like chimneys and they probably did a little bit of drinking as well."

Relevant last question there. I've met quite a few rueful old radicals in my consulting journeys through the public services in the last few years - most of them trading loon-panted tales of guerrilla educating or social care among themselves at the end of a night's drinking, than something they draw on for their current managerial careers. But MacBeath seems to be different:

He is now moving back to the thinking that inspired Barrowfield. He has concluded that schools make a difference only at the margin, which he puts - that precision again - at "between 9% and 15%". He continues: "If you're bright and do your homework, and surf the net intelligently, and have supportive parents, school's fine, school's enough. But some kids, as one head said to me recently, go home to hell. That's why schools now have breakfast clubs, extended hours, summer schools and so on. I'd like to go further."

MacBeath's eyes gleam as he talks of reviving the half-forgotten Children's University (started in Birmingham in 1994). "We are looking at airports, docks, museums, art galleries, theatres, football clubs, racecourses as places where children can go and do 10-week modules and get credits."

So the de-schooling movement, albeit older and wiser, lives again.

But it's worth noting here that de-schooling becomes an option again, as a response to the domestic chaos and turmoil that too many children face. Is it right that educationalists seek to extend their service throughout society, providing safe havens for children's learning, as an answer to them "going home to hell"? 

At least it's a positive and supporting vision from Professor MacBeath. But play isn't enough, if you don't address the basic nurturing and social conditions that make it really function as a form of development. Not just a "play ethic", but a "care ethic" too. Or: education, education, education can't make all the difference. Politics, politics, politics is needed also.