I have argued, recently, in The Lawrence Stenhouse Lecture at the British Educational Research Association, that one of the problems of new market triumphalism is overreach in a number of areas. Most notably, the new marketeers have, I believe, overreached themselves in the attempt to direct and diminish professional agents, whether they are doctors, social workers or teachers. Professional groups are vital agents in delivering professional services, and their missions need to be sensitively and seriously negotiated and defined. Triumphalist overreach leads to systematic professional under-performance, when change forces act with external force but internal ignorance.

Again, let me provide an example. Lessons from history are instructive but must be read with the warning that past historical experiences are, themselves, embedded in different political and social contexts. Nonetheless, the example comes from an early period of triumphalism in English schooling. The British State had recently developed a national system of ‘state schools’ and, in the period 1892-95, began to demand that teachers were prescribed a syllabus and paid according to their success in teaching it. It was, in short, an instance of controlling schools and teachers as a ‘symbolic action’, to show who was boss and to insist on a particular and closely defined form of schooling. E.G.A. Holmes (1912) has given his contemporary opinion of what happened, and it illuminates some of the dangers of external change forces acting with internal context insensitivity:

The State, in prescribing a syllabus, which was to be followed, in all the subjects of instruction, by all the schools in the country, without regard to local or personal considerations, was guilty of one capital offence. It did all the thinking for the teacher. It told him in precise detail what he was to do each year in each ‘Standard’, how he was to handle each subject, and how far he was to go in it; what width of ground he was to cover; what amount of knowledge, what degree of accuracy was required for a ‘pass’. In other words, it provided him with his ideals, his general conceptions, his more immediate aims, his schemes of work; and if it did not control his methods in all their details, it gave him (by implication) hints and suggestions with regard to these on which he was not slow to act; for it told him that the work done in each class and each subject would be tested at the end of each year by a careful examination of each individual child; and it was inevitable that in his endeavor to adapt his teaching to the type of question by which his experience of the yearly examination led him to expect, he should gradually deliver himself, mind and soul, into the hands of the officials of the Department - the officials at Whitehall who framed the yearly syllabus, and the officials in the various districts who examined on it.

What the Department did to the teacher, it compelled him to do to the child. The teacher who is the slave of another’s will, cannot carry out his instructions except by making his pupils the slaves of his own will. The teacher, who has been deprived by his superiors of freedom, initiative, and responsibility, cannot carry out his instructions except by depriving his pupils of the same vital qualities. The teacher, who in response to the deadly pressure of a cast-iron system, has become a creature of habit and routine, cannot carry out his instructions except by making his pupils as helpless and puppet-like as himself. But it is not only because mechanical obedience is fatal, in the long run, to mental and spiritual growth that the regulation of elementary or any other grade of education by a uniform syllabus is to be deprecated. It is also because a uniform syllabus is, in the nature of things, a bad syllabus. (pp. 103-4)