Michael Gove: The Man Who Wants to Steal Childhood

The first of Michael Gove’s education reforms will soon be introduced. ^The traditional six-week school summer holidays will no longer be set by the state, but instead be the remit of individual headmasters. While there is nothing wrong with this shift of authority in itself, Gove’s intentions, based on comments he made earlier this year about the UK’s need to compete with China, are woefully clear. Gove is hoping that headmasters will opt to dramatically shorten school holidays and make children work for longer.

For those of you who missed them, here are Gove’s comments:
  "We've noticed in Hong Kong and Singapore and other East Asian nations that expectations of mathematical knowledge or of scientific knowledge at every stage are more demanding than in this country,
  "In order to reach those levels of achievement a higher level of effort is expected on behalf of students, parents and teachers. School days are longer, school holidays are shorter. The expectation is that to succeed, hard work is at the heart of everything.
  "If you look at the length of the school day in England, the length of the summer holiday … then we are fighting or actually running in this global race in a way that ensures that we start with a significant handicap.”

Gove is probably counting on league table competition and a need to meet targets giving headmasters the incentive they need to reduce school holidays. The government saves face, having never explicitly ordered the reduction of school holidays, and the educators take the blame. It’s all so very Machiavellian, and it says a lot about the character of ‘New Conservatives’, that while everybody else is finally accepting the importance of work-life balance and family interaction, they instead are saying we need to work harder – as hard as the most industrious and work-centric cultures in the world. They are comparing our country’s economic performance to East Asia and using this to justify taking away our children’s free time.

The motivations behind this are plain to see. In fact, Gove isn’t even trying to hide them. Our country is falling behind in the global economy. The solution to this is obviously to take away children’s holidays and make them spend so much time in school that they hardly see their parents. I mean, problem solved automatically, surely, and it’s the lesser of two evils, right? Well, no. And while anybody with an ounce of sanity can see that this wouldn’t solve anything and would make every child in the country miserable for no reason, Michael Gove lives in New Conservative land, where the best option is always the one that spreads the misery as widely as possible in a desperate, ill-conceived attempt to improve the economy.

He says this will make life ‘easier’ (whatever that means) for parents. Presumably, this means removing scheduling conflicts between job shifts and school hours. There are many ways they could achieve this. They could bring in regulations to give employees greater control over their working hours, encourage employers to offer more flexible and varied shift patterns, and encourage the growth of job-share programmes. They could increase minimum wage, thereby driving down working hours. As always, they opted for the approach that penalises the workers, is best for corporations and hurts those who are most innocent and vulnerable. Their true goal is to remove any reasons people may have for not working full time, no matter how justified those reasons are.

The truth is, the Conservatives can see that Britain’s economy is failing and need another scapegoat. They’ve already gotten as much blood as possible out of the stone of unemployment. Now the target is schools and children, the former for not getting better results, the latter for not studying hard enough. What the Conservatives are wilfully ignoring, is that this country is already experiencing a brain drain, and record levels of underemployment and overqualification, because our economy is not catered towards utilizing academic skills. The lesson we should be taking from East Asia is this: our culture is too individualised, too focussed on profit above all else. East Asian companies recognise that what’s good for society is good for the economy, and what’s good for the masses is good for business. They are far more willing to invest in academic and creative pursuits, and in social and technological advances that will benefit society as a whole and lead to innovations that can later be financially exploited. British corporations are focussed on the short term tangible profits. British businesses want drones, service sector workers, and cold callers and PA’s. The British government is not interested in ensuring poor students can afford to stay on in education. Increasing the standards of our schools is not going to change any of that. It will only produce more disenfranchised young people who have academic skills that nobody wants, or which they cannot fully pursue because of our lack of funding for professional qualifications.

This is not China. We have a different work ethic, a different culture, different lifestyle, different culture, different economy. China’s strict work ethic may be very productive and efficient, but it has its obvious drawbacks. Even if increasing school hours and reducing holidays really would help the economy, which I doubt very much, is it really worth the sacrifice? There is more to life than work and money, particularly for children, but I wouldn’t waste any breath trying to get the Conservatives to understand that.