The CAN-DO TEACHERS

To the lay observer – I’m so lay, I don’t even have kids of my own to concern me – this year’s conference of the National Union of Teachers seems to have been hearteningly assertive. Delegates voted on a number of propositions that, in past decades, would have had the Tory press foaming at the mouth even more than it did this week. That press reports frequently misrepresent what the teachers discussed and voted upon is only to be expected.

One course of action they certainly did determine to pursue was the withdrawal of labour if their pay claim is not recognized and if their working conditions are not attended to. Those who taught me half a century ago would be amazed at the kind of aggression, brutality, presumption and indifference that teachers routinely suffer in classrooms today right across the education system. Indeed, the ignorance and captiousness of parents, who are apt to support their darlings against the wisdom of the teachers, has become one of the worst aspects of trying to instil basic skills into unsocialized kids who rule the roost at home.

In a day or two, we shall know whether a union-wide ballot has won support for a one-day strike on April 24th, the first walkout by teachers since 1986. The NUT wants a ten per cent pay increase, the government has offered 2.45 per cent, with further rises of 2.3 per cent next year and the year after. The NUT says that this is effectively below the inflation rate and hence a pay cut in real terms. They have a point.

I have always deplored the line taken by successive governments that key workers should never go on strike. If they’re so key, pay them properly. Don’t oblige them to give up their vocation and leave the profession because they can’t afford to get on the housing ladder or care for their own kids. Don’t tell them it’s immoral or illegal for them to down tools and then take advantage of the power you’ve taken from them by keeping them underpaid. Teachers, nurses, paramedics, police officers, prison warders, social workers and military service personnel should be paid just as well as city slickers and sports and television so-called celebrities, than whom they are considerably more valuable. These keys workers should make common cause. A general strike of public sector workers would not only bring down the government, it would put future governments on notice that pay for public service is a national scandal that has to be addressed as a matter of urgency.

Of course, teachers do not necessarily offer a warm embrace to every kind of fellow toiler. Much was made of a supposed vote at the NUT conference to ban military recruitment in schools. That wasn’t of course what the NUT motion stated. The majority was for supporting any teacher declining to join in recruitment “based on misleading propaganda”, a proposition so unexceptionable it was hardly worth debating. Needless to say, the chasm between what is understood by the notion of “misleading propaganda” and what the Ministry of Defence calls “raising awareness” may be traversed by a squad of semiological foot soldiers simply marking time. One man’s lie is another’s truth. Perhaps the answer is for every school visit by a military spokesperson to be accompanied by a pacifist or some other sceptic articulate enough to ask the warrior the pertinent questions about training, bullying, Deepcut barracks, initiation ceremonies, military justice, equipment, conditions while on active service and aftercare for those injured and/or traumatized.

Another NUT vote was to be on the proposition that faith schools be abolished but the item sadly fell off the agenda. What a good motion, though. General Secretary Steve Sinnott said that abolition was not the union’s policy but that he favoured a limit. I favour total abolition. Teaching is about opening minds. Supernatural superstition is about closing them. If you are “instructed” in the Bible or the Q’ran or the Talmud every day, you’re not receiving a rounded education.

The conference did debate religion in schools. It did not, as some newspapers suggested, vote to throw open every British school to every mad mullah who wants to recruit suicide bombers. The NUT broadly favours a notion of teachers from different religions visiting schools to explain what their faith has to offer. A spokesman from the National Secular Society warned, reasonably enough, that “it will be the zealots who will be imposing their will on everyone else”. I would propose a makeweight for such visits similar to the one I proposed for the military, a voice to articulate the rational objections to supernatural fantasies that schoolkids generally do not have the knowledge or confidence to challenge.

The growing militancy of the teachers is a good indication that they are beginning to express their own worth again in the face of being taken for granted by the government and the press. Government is always about priorities and possibilities. If it’s possible for the government to afford to keep troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s possible to afford to pay public service workers a living wage. Yup, it’s really that simple.