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From time to time a single book comes along which radically changesthe way that one looks at education. James Tooley’sReclaiming Educa-tion is not such a book for me, though this is the way it is hyped by thepublisher. “Drawing on his global research, James Tooley shows that thereis an alternative to poor quality and wasteful inefficiency in education,and that education can be radically transformed to guarantee freedom andhigher standards”, trills the cover blurb, but I was not convinced of such a‘guarantee’.

Education has been conducted by private individuals for centuries. Inclassical times Protagoras was able to charge wealthy Athenians 10,000drachmas for teaching the sons of the wealthy such invaluable skills asoratory. Tooley’s book aims to ‘reclaim’ education from the state andrestore it to the market place. Like all radical arguments, therefore, it hasa certain initial appeal. Only the narrow-minded dare reject fresh ideas outof hand.

It could also be seen as a book of its time and the author is keen toplace it amongst other ‘millennial’ works and “take up their challenge” ashe puts it. The dawn of a new century and millennium invites scepticismabout the old. The late 1990s were characterised, in many countries, by abizarrefin de siècleeffect. Some governments appeared to take leave oftheir senses where education was concerned, so it is hardly surprising thatat least one author will try to write the state out of his script and proposesomething different.

Reclaiming Educationis unusual for a number of reasons. It is writtenby a philosopher who supports profit making. Not that there is anythingwrong with this, nor have all philosophers eschewed money, for Schopen-hauer, who advocated asceticism, liked dining in the best restaurants; butphilosophers are not normally renowned for thinking in such materialterms. Tooley’s willingness to address financial issues is refreshing.

The opening section of the book is entitled ‘A Global and HistoricalWake-up Call’, thereby suggesting that we are all asleep. My objectionto this is that I think Tooley is operating in a dream world, not the restof humanity. The book begins as it means to go on, with a series of boldassertions, like “New global and historical evidence has provided us withradical new ways of thinking about the way education is provided for insociety” and “This book lays out an agenda for reclaiming education fromthe state. It shows how all the supposed justifications for state interven-tion in education melt away in the face of this new evidence and newarguments”.

Would that it were so simple. Phrases like “the tyranny of schooling”and “it is time for the people to reassert themselves” become taken for

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granted in the book, suggesting that the overthrow of state education is arelatively straightforward and obvious matter.

Many well known radical ideas were launched in this kind of boldlyassertive argot. “L’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers” (Manis born free, and everywhere he is in chains), wrote Rousseau inDu contratsocial; “Die Religion . . . ist das Opium des Volkes” (Religion. . . is theopium of the people), proclaimed Marx in the introduction of his critiqueof Hegel’sPhilosophy of Right. Even more simply: “J’accuse” (I accuse)was the heading of Emile Zola’s open letter to the President of Franceabout the Dreyfus affair in 1898.

Academic discourse is usually much more limp by comparison, fullof weasel words and phrases like ‘problematic’ and ‘tend to’, rather than‘must do’ or ‘eradicate’. Tooley’s choice of writing style is an importantfeature of the book. It is elegantly penned and generally readable, apartfrom sections detailing private schemes of education, which read more likea furniture catalogue. It is also self-consciously populist, however, makingextensive use of abbreviated conversational forms, such as ‘aren’t’, ‘I’ll’and ‘we’d’ and often beginning sentences and paragraphs with a conjunc-tion. In one single paragraph alone there are five sentences starting withconjunctions: “But there is. . .”, “So we all have. . .”, “So I talk . . .”, “Andthis always. . .”, “But one of the key questions. . .”.

Again there is nothing wrong with writing in this manner and critics ofconventional academic books might say, with some justification, that theirvery dreariness and remoteness of language alienates them from a widerpublic. My point is that the literary style employed is part of a seductivestyle of argument which does not always stand up to scrutiny, yet whichsounds like conversational common sense.

One of the strangest dreamlike features of the book is an invented focusgroup of which the author is supposed to be a member. He justifies thisdevice by likening it to Plato’s construction of an imaginary debate aboutwhether or not virtue could be taught, calling it a philosopher’s ‘trick ofthe trade’. The resulting non-existent focus group forms the scaffoldingaround which the whole book is constructed, for each chapter describes a‘session’ of this chimera.

The advantage to the author, of course, is that he can construct anykind of personality, conversation or event he chooses, because the focusgroup sessions never actually took place in the real world. In this particularfocus group the chairman, ‘Jack’, is a strangely unreal character. Perhapshe does exist and I have led a sheltered life, but does anyone say thingslike, “Your views are important to us. Your views matter. But the issueswe will discuss are of global importance, and have global dimensions. I

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know the world is watching us. But that’s enough of me talking! Let’s getto know each other?” If I had ever been to a focus group chaired by theunconvincing ‘Jack’, I would have quit soon after the start and telephonedthe emergency services for the people in white coats.

Departing from some of the more suffocating academic traditions canbe refreshing, but I was alarmed by another device used by the author.He quotes Professor Richard Pring, with several omissions, including areference to the fact that Pring was referring to Michael Oakshotte: “. . .

the formation of the intellect is a demanding task. It cannot, in the main,happen incidentally. . . Such excellence requires. . . space and time setapart, free from the distractions of the immediate and the relevant. . .

Indeed, educational settings ideally should be like monasteries”.There is nothing wrong with quoting someone else, but Tooley then

goes on to say, “Actually, Professor Pring wrote ‘schools’ instead of‘educational settings’. I chose to purge those words because they weren’tessential to his argument”. I hope that ‘purging’ someone else’s text doesnot become a legitimate device in academic writing.

All of these points raise questions about the nature of Tooley’s evidencefor seeking to demolish state education. It is endemic in polemical textsthat writers are selective in what they cite for and against their case. Tooleytends to compare what he sees as the best of private initiatives with theworst of state schooling, like failure in the London borough of Hackney.

The reverse would have also been illuminating: comparing the best ofstate schooling with the failures of private provision. There have beennumerous failures, including some disastrous experiments with perform-ance contracting, when some charlatans merely coached students in thetests that eventually were to determine their remuneration, instead ofteaching them to read. Although the best private schools are indeed excel-lent, the worst are horrendous. It was at a private field centre that severalstudents died in the Lyme Bay canoe tragedy in England, as many safetyprecautions had not been taken, and Parliament had to take action toregulate such places.

The ‘global research’ hyped by Tooley’s publisher consists of a briskand somewhat uncritical tour of places said to be providing high qualityprivate education. I have come across pretty appalling private provision insome of the same places, but these do not find a place in the book. The‘session’ on choice is awash with companies and acronyms, as the brandname is all: “For example, any visitor to South Africa cannot fail to bestruck by the ubiquity of advertisements for courses offered by Damelinand other Educor subsidiaries”; “a visitor to Brazil will soon come acrossbillboard advertising for UNIP-Objetivo, COC or Pitágoras”; “in India, the

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brand name NIIT is everywhere; “COC has its own publicity department– PubliCOC – which plans and implements its media strategies, developsadvertisements and supports other developments of its brand name”.

More worrying is Tooley’s attitude to information and communicationstechnology, which seems very ambivalent to this reader. At the beginningof the book he appears sceptical, later on he is quoting with approvalprivate institutions that use state of the art ICT. One of the ways that profitscan be made from education is to use fewer teachers and more ICT, yetno-one who has actually taught classes would be overly convinced. Theassumption that ICT is self-motivating is a bold one.

The issue of profit motive is tackled through a fictitious set of parableswritten by a fictitious character at Tooley’s fictitious focus group. Ateacher, V, sets up extra classes for deprived children in her own home onSaturdays. This goes well so she opens a day school, then several more andeventually raises capital, makes a profit. Meanwhile evil businessman Wtries the same game, exploits everybody, but then realises that if he wantsto expand globally he will have to be a good boy. Competition makes himclean and saintly. Simple really. I wonder why the world of business doesnot always serve the consumer in such a wonderfully efficient way.

Tooley is also ambivalent about the nineteenth century. He often quotesit with approval, mentioning benefactors who gave large sums to univer-sities, but seems not to notice that these benefactions only produced aminute university population. Ironically it is actually state education thathas brought higher education to one third of the age group in Britain.When the Conservative government tried to persuade businesses to paythe costs of its flagship City Technology Colleges, introduced by the 1988Education Act the result was a disaster. Fewer than twenty were built anda tiny number of sponsors provided, typically, one million pounds towardsa ten million pound building, the government having to pay the rest.

This is indeed a radical book and the author is well intentioned. Itis important to have challenges to orthodoxy and, as the millenniumdawned, even politicians were being urged to ‘think the unthinkable’,though many went into a blind panic at the mere possibility. Tooley has hadthe courage to make a bold set of statements. Some of what he says is worththinking about, for there is indeed a place for private initiatives in educa-tion. Over the years it has often been individualistic private school headswho pioneered teaching science to girls, introduced physical education, ordevised humane ways of educating the whole child.

What Tooley is proposing, however, is a dismantling of state educa-tion, in my view on the flimsiest of evidence. In order to strengthen hiscase against it, he does not acknowledge the credit due to state provision,

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choosing only to see its failings. Moreover, he bases his arguments on aseries of real events and phenomena which are worthy of attention, thoughnot necessarily as foolproof as he would have us believe, but uses too manyhypothetical and imagined devices to have persuaded this reader at anyrate, who only found them irritating. Much of his polemic simply mademe want to improve state provision more, rather than abandon it. A littleof it was persuasive, the rest was interesting, often amusing, but about asreal as the fortunately fictitious ‘Jack’.

TEG WRAGG

School of EducationUniversity of ExeterHeavitree RoadExeter, UKEX1 2LUE-mail: t.wragg@exeter.ac.uk

“I T’ S (AN) INTELLIGENT LIFE JIM , BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT”

When faced with another alien life form in another galaxy far away fromEarth, Bones, the ship’s doctor on the Starship USS Enterprise, inevitablyturns to Captain James Kirk and says compassionately, “It’s intelligentlife Jim, but not as we know it”. Kirk’s task in each episode of StarTrek, the vintage ’70s science fiction television series, involves workingwith the humanist Bones and the rational big-eared Vulcan, Mr Spock, tofind a solution to a remarkably familiar problem. Both Spock and Bonesoffer possible alternate knowledges and practices for dealing with thealien ‘other’. Captain Kirk, as the ultimate modernist, must mediate thebinary of scientific rationality and humanism, at the same time as playinginto/against the micropolitical power-knowledge relations of human/aliendominance/marginality (Pritchard, 1998). Would that James Tooley weremore like James Kirk! In his manifesto for ‘reclaiming’ education fromthe state, Tooley portrays himself as a Captain Jim, a working class idealistwho has ‘seen the light’ and now manages to combine his passion for socialjustice with a rational free market libertarianism. This simple modernisttale fails to disguise that the central ‘I’ in the narrative is a single-mindedSpock-like simulacrum, living in what can only be described as a paralleluniverse.

Indeed, Tooley himself introduces that notion. He creates a micro-world inside his text – a fictional focus group of heterogeneous childrenwho discuss the future of education and schooling with a stubborn, state