Gove is gone, but the Gove era endures

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/15/gove-education-secretary-reshuffle

Version 0 of 1.

So Michael Gove is going home. He is returning to the place where he is most comfortable, rubbing shoulders with the people who, in the words of Noam Chomsky, “manufacture consent”. He leaves behind an education system bulging on the branch waiting for the owners of giant corporations and education companies to pick parts of it off and gobble them up. Our children are already in schools working off multinational media companies’ digital worksheets disguised as “innovative learning” where strange disembodied voices say “fromage” and the students write “cheese”. And this is what Gove and pals call “content-led education”.

Thanks to Gove, this kind of education has no need for qualified teachers. Students will need no more than a minder to check the student in question is glued to a tablet. And this is called removing the “vested interests” of trade unions, those wicked people who think that teaching needs some kind of professional training.

Meanwhile, Gove peddled the myth that he was “raising standards”. Francis Maude gave the game away on the day of the strike. When John Humphrys pointed out that people’s pay had been cut, Maude explained that this was keeping Britain “competitive”. And Gove cracked how you deliver generations of young people into the low-wage economy – by telling them that they can all pass the tougher exams, then failing them so that they end up blaming themselves for having failed – just in the right frame of mind to accept lower pay that “keeps us competitive” and the Conservative paymasters richer.