'PARENTS DO not want their children taught positive images for gays'. Margaret Thatcher, explaining the Tories' education policies, was quick to go on the offensive in supporting programme.
* The Tory manifesto is clear. Education will be battered from nursery to further education. The Tories have prepared for this not just through government but, prior to that, through building a reactionary coalition which includes everyone from industrialists to heterosexist bigots. The consensuse for comprehensive education in the mid-seventies is being challenged and Labour is unprepared in mounting a serious defence of it - partly because it accepts the parameters laid down by the Tories. RAY SIROTKIN looks at the Tories education plans.
THE Tory argument is simple. The 101IC0 call for moral values' and hard work to be laugnt - inparents the sort they Inis means 'higher standards'. To achieve this rid itself those subjects deemed irrelevant. The Tories therefore call for a core curriculum — Labour does too. and there isn't in principal anything wrong with that. What lies behind this is a package to ensure that the education mould is very rigid and not to allow for regional needs or specific local policies. In particular anti-sexist anti-racist teaching will be removee Tragically, much of the left have dodged this question while the Tories have been on the offensive. Policy proposals for reorganising education.
which are not unrelated to their ideological ones equally horrendous.
Despite the limitations of Labour led authorities such as the ILEA who often their repressive educational moved then at present.
With ILEA particularly mind, the Tories will allow school management opt out _ot ine local education authority become 'indenendent'. in the case of inner London thev will allow boroughs to declare UDI from ILEA.
Once again the Tories plans combine attacking education with attacking the leans uns The Tories simply sallulla schools - which they do want, allowing the richer London boroughs such as the City of London, Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea to withdraw nel aes. I ney diso Have directly political tasks. The best way for the Tories to break up the Inner London peachers associaton (IL TA), the most powerful part of the NUT, is to deal with ILEA first.
The privatisation theme of the doesn't forget the under fives either hatcher would wish to see local education turn private SOUrCE where possible. This can on v mean a turther assault on the nursery end of the coucal ol chain the vatives to prepare for a new structure by which educaHON Can DesI Serve LIC le terests of the ruling class.
Effective local government, as the GLC abolition and rate capping indicated, was an optional • aspect of bourgeois rule. so are loca education authorities. The Tories have therefore decid ed to radically restructure local functions.
The tragedy for Labour is that it has joined in with the ideological offensive which the Tores have as a