THE PROB LEMS OF EDUCATION ARE NOT GE NE TIC 339from the practical contexts of local producers, prac ti tion ers, and resi-
dents. Th ey can be presented to school students such as to require
thought, knowledge, research, and practical action in the detached con-
text of a school or college. Th e news agent may have a delivery organ-
ization prob lem, the regional council a reporting prob lem, the plastics
factory a chemistry prob lem, the steelworks some physics prob lems, the
health center a health education prob lem, the shirt factory a design prob-
lem, the farmer all kinds of botanical and zoological prob lems, and so on.
All the aims and objectives of any accepted curriculum could be
worked out in such contexts. Teachers would have the far more challeng-
ing task of scaling the prob lem to a suitable level, identifying curriculum
objectives in them, and then organ izing the resources to achieve them.
In addition, parents, communities, and business man ag ers would need to
have much greater sense of responsibility for what goes on in their local
schools. And at least some parts of workplaces would need to be safe for
students to visit, move around in, and learn. Th is would not only help
develop abstract concepts in a grounded way, but also engender economic
sense, a sense of worthwhileness about activities in schools, as well as
civic identity and responsibility.
Above all, such schemes would help avoid the semi- enforced digestion
of prepackaged, “dead” skills and knowledge. Th ey would transform the
curriculum from the slog of motivation and per sis tence it largely is and
that currently does so much damage to people’s real potentials.
Meanwhile, the myth of our age— the idea that school per for mance is
a mea sure of children’s true learning potential— must be purged. Parents
should protest against it and its subversive social function. Th ey should
refuse to engage with a game that is cheating most of our children of their
self- belief and their learning potentials, while creating the in equality
that politicians pretend to be mystifi ed about.
Th ere will be much re sis tance to such ideas. Th ey threaten the current
ideology of individual diff erences in potential. However, human history is
replete with cases in which envisaged constraints on potential have been
overcome by lift ing the ideology that defi nes it. I need only mention the
recoveries from slavery, the sudden discovery of abilities of women to run
economic production in times of war, and advances of work ing- class organ-
izations in times of extreme oppression. Indeed, without potential in pre-
cisely that form, there would, quite simply, have been no human history.
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