The Sixties

by Jenny Diski

  Forty years on there has been no remission in war and civil strife, no lessening of hunger in underdeveloped parts of the world. The Berlin Wall came down and the Velvet Revolution occurred in Prague in 1989 and the Russian empire collapsed. I watched it happening on television, as people from East Berlin dumped their undesirable Trabant cars and headed west to trade up, they believed, to BMWs. The first free election happened in South Africa in 1994 to the astonished delight of those who had been active against the apartheid regime for decades, but fifteen years on the wealth is still largely in the hands of whites and multinational companies, the townships remain, people are grumbling that the blacks are suffering from a ‘culture of resentment’ that is causing the South African economy to collapse. Wherever you look, over the past forty years, nationalism and capitalism have triumphed. The Russians developed an instant mafia to replace the Communist Party elites, and as I write, the current president of Russia has moved troops into Georgia and is talking about a new Cold War. Nothing has changed in the politics of the West, and the newly developing countries are clamouring to repeat the phantasm of ‘progress’ in spite of the likelihood that the planet is only a decade or two away from environmental collapse. It is almost astonishing how little has changed, except in the realm of technology. We have more toys to play with while big business and governments are almost indistinguishable (‘We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich,’ said Peter Mandelson, speaking for New Labour in 1998), and vie with each other only to keep taxes down. For a decade so notorious for its politically radical youth, it’s quite remarkable how little effect we had.

  There have, of course, been changes, politically and socially, some of them legislative, but I don’t think they have penetrated into the assumptions of the great majority of the human race. I can’t feel as positive even as David Widgery’s limited optimism about the long-term effect of the radicalism of the Sixties:

  We changed attitudes but not structure. We succeeded in changing attitudes profoundly but did not have the strength to change the economic and therefore political power structure fundamentally.16

  5

  PROJECTING THE FUTURE

  School teaches us that instruction produces learning. The existence of schools produces the demand for schooling. Once we have learned to need school, all our activities tend to take the shape of client relationships to other specialized institutions. Once the self-taught man or woman has been discredited, all nonprofessional activity is rendered suspect. In school we are taught that valuable learning is the result of attendance; that the value of learning increases with the amount of input; and, finally, that this value can be measured and documented by grades and certificates. In fact, learning is the human activity which least needs manipulation by others. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting.

  Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, 1971

  We started South Villas Comprehensive – later to be Freightliners Free School – in 1971 with eight pupils, seven from the same family, two teachers and the promise of $100. It was thought up on a Friday and opened for business in my two-roomed flat in North London the following Monday. It was an entirely pragmatic invention. An intervention. That Friday afternoon a woman knocked on my door. She introduced herself as the social worker of some local kids I had got to know who hung out in the streets and adventure playground nearby.

  ‘Allie B. says you’re training to be a teacher and that you’re interested in alternative education. The thing is that all the B. children are going to be split up and taken into care next week, for persistent truanting. Allie said you talked to her about free schools. If you started one for them I might be able to keep them out of local authority care and make a case for them to stay at home and together. But it needs to be up and running with a timetable and syllabus and something on paper by Monday, so I can show it to the case conference and get them to put the care order on hold.’

  In 1971, the dog days of the Sixties, it didn’t seem impossible to start a school over a weekend. I was training to be a teacher and I had just had an article published (my first) in a radical magazine called Children’s Rights about a teaching practice I’d done. I phoned Roger, the editor, and asked if he had any ideas. Energy was the thing. I never had much, but Roger was full of it. By Saturday afternoon we had promises from local people to teach weekly or twice-weekly sessions. We produced a timetable, with lessons on architecture by a local architect who would also double up as a maths teacher; art and pottery were promised from a nearby artist who knew a potter who had a studio. Woodwork was taken care of by a carpenter who had a workshop a few streets away. French would be taught by a local woman at home with small children. A dropout physics graduate we knew would do science and I would take care of English. Roger, with a degree in politics and history, would teach history and current affairs and there was a swimming pool close by for PE. A friend in California offered us 100 dollars a month to keep us going with outings, equipment and lunches while we sorted out funding, and my flat was available, as was the virtually derelict basement of the family council house the kids lived in just off Camden Square. Getting the basement ready, and planning, shopping for and preparing lunch every day, were part of the curriculum (home economics), and so was attending meetings to discuss the running of the school (current events – citizenship, we’d call it now). The day started at 10.30, giving the virtually unparented, bedtime-less kids a chance to get up – after I had battled with the total-freedom fraction of the by-now sizeable Free School Committee for any start time at all. At least, I insisted, the kids would be able to practise getting up if any of them ever wanted to hold down a job. Autocrat, they murmured. How many of them were committing time to the free school, aside from coming to meetings, I asked. Fascist, they muttered, but almost all of them faded away. Their time was almost entirely devoted to political meetings of one sort or another. Roger had just discovered that the editorial board of Children’s Rights, which consisted of a Reichian analyst and several of his patients, was more interested in the encouragement of active childhood sexuality than rights as such. He resigned, went on the dole (that, again) and became the school’s first full-time teacher.

  For some of the kids, it was a couple of years since they had been in school. Allie, the thirteen-year-old, had gone back once, but during registration the class teacher was so used to her not being there that she hadn’t bothered to call out her name, so Allie left before the first lesson and never went back. The two youngest children, aged seven and six, were just launching on their career of absenteeism, but the whole family, eleven in all, were in danger of being institutionalised. The police had a long-term plan for this criminal family, all of whom, even the youngest, regularly broke into the gentrified houses that had sprung up in the formerly working-class area and stole whatever electronic items appealed to them – while the little ones found chocolates, gorged themselves, and ground the surplus into the stripped and polished wooden floors. The two oldest brothers, aged sixteen and seventeen, were due in court the same week for attempted robbery of a post office, a plan that came to the attention of the law when they were caught with a sawn-off shotgun in a stolen van on their way to the job, because they were speeding. I thought at worst the free school might educate the younger kids to be more thoughtful criminals. We went to the local police station about getting the oldest boys bail. The sooner the whole family were locked up, the police told us, the better it would be for society (not so long afterwards, society would be declared non-existent, though this didn’t seem to improve relations between the radically impoverished and the wealthy).

  Both Mr and Mrs B. were alcoholics, usually out of work, and completely baffled by life. There was an almost new fridge without a door rusting in the garden. Mrs B had got it from social services, but just afterwards she heard about a newspaper report of a child who had climbed into a fridge and suffocated, because the door had locked behind
him and there was no way of opening it from the inside. Mrs B, in a moment of concerned parenthood, had taken the door off the fridge. When it turned out that the fridge no longer worked (because without a door it was no longer a fridge), she chucked it out into the garden. She didn’t show up in court the day the two older boys’ case came up. Roger and I went round early, but she was more or less unconscious from a night of drinking, and we couldn’t rouse her. The eldest boy was sentenced to prison, and the younger one was given yet another period of probation, on the condition that we kept an eye on him and he helped out with the younger kids in the free school. In fact, none of them minded much about going to prison or borstal. They quite liked the regular hours and meals, and being kept busy during the day in the kitchen or laundry or workshops.

  Roger besieged Camden Council, and I followed in his slipstream, marching through the corridors of the Town Hall and barging into offices, explaining that we were saving the local community an enormous amount of money by keeping the B. children and their friend out of care, and asking for a grant so that we could continue doing so. We weren’t arrested, not even thrown out. These days, of course, we wouldn’t have got past security at the front entrance. It was a lesson in persistence. After producing formal written proposals and making it clear that we weren’t going to go away, we met with the then Councillor Frank Dobson (later to be a minister in the New Labour government), who headed up the Education Committee. He saw our financial argument, if nothing else, and put the case to the Council. Finally, we were given an astonishingly large grant of £20,000 for the year (far more than we’d asked for), on condition that we based the school on the nearby, presently disused sixteen-acre freightliner site behind King’s Cross Station, and set up other useful social amenities along with the school – an old people’s lunch club, an evening youth club, and a women’s centre. While we were at it, we also started an urban farm – pigs, donkeys, goats, chickens – and sold manure to local gardeners. Suddenly we had an empire to run. Camden Local Education Authority sent its senior school inspector. The kids made him lunch, he sat in on the lessons, squeezed into Roger’s fifteen-year-old Morris 1000 with some of the kids to go to an exhibition, and two weeks later passed the school as ‘efficient’, meaning that it was on a par as a teaching establishment with school for the time being. All done through energy. But achieved because it was still the tail-end of the Sixties and it wasn’t impossible.

  It started to occur to me by the late Sixties, once getting stoned stopped feeling like I was doing something, that there was nothing more important to be involved in and to get right than the education of children. It still strikes me as true, though my belief in the possibility of its achievement is close to zero now. I wasn’t alone in the Sixties and early Seventies. Acknowledging the centrality of education to any improvement in society (that word again, its dying gasp) didn’t require an excess of hard thinking, and the idea of children’s rights caught on as other rights – gender, racial, social class – were demanded. If ever any group was unrepresented, powerless and without a concerted voice in society, it was children. The Children’s Rights movement allowed anyone to project. Even if we had never been a woman, black or working-class, we had all been children, and recalled that outraged helplessness at the adult world being arbitrary and unfair towards us. We had been children not so very long ago. It was easy to recollect how stifling and trivial much of our education had been, and how it failed to engage anyone without strong motivation or exceptional schooling: either of which usually meant having the good fortune to have access to resources most people lacked – books, money, parents who had benefited themselves from learning, or parents who had missed out on it and were therefore passionate about it for their children. If we hadn’t been sidelined by education, we knew most people had been. Those of us who had been to state schools had watched the sidelined ones slip away into no-hope streams; some of those who had been to private schools understood the extent of their privilege and suffered survivor guilt. We perceived the world as irrelevant and unjust to the majority, and the manifestation of irrelevance and injustice in the schools was closest to what most of us knew.

  Those who were students – at university, college, art school – tried out radical education on themselves to start with. In America there was far more student unrest much earlier than in the UK, centring around resistance to the Vietnam war. The brutality with which demonstrations were dealt with by the police and authorities was astonishing to those of us who watched. Four students died from bullet wounds at Kent State, and suddenly being a student didn’t seem to be simply a way of passing from childhood to adulthood with a period of blithe irresponsibility. The adults were killing their children, not just by sending them to war, but by shooting them for complaining about it. There was a general resentment of students around the world. It looked as if the grownups had got fed up with funding their young for a period of wildness. Perhaps there comes a point where the old simply resent the young and the fact the world will belong to them, rather than wanting to indulge them with what they had missed themselves. It does look at present as if the nostalgia my generation has for their Sixties is joined by our disapproval for the contemporary young – ‘You only care about money, career and status. When we were young...’ In the early Seventies, at any rate, it seemed that wildness was getting out of hand. Not just sex, drugs and rock and roll, but they were messing about in politics, too. The young were messing with the order of things, and on the old ones’ money. So they sent in the cops. This gave students in America, and by association, around the world the chance to take themselves seriously.

  They took over lecture halls and classrooms and refused to move. Sit-ins became teach-ins, and political speeches made room for an experimental pedagogy: students and some lecturers thought about sharing knowledge rather than having it poured into them to be regurgitated again during exams. The politics of education as well as the need for a political education caught fire and lit up the imagination as a way to shake the world into a better shape. The idea of voluntary learning grew into the thought that curricula should be as much the responsibility of the student as the teacher. The magisterial application of knowledge to the young was no longer self-evident. What this meant, of course, was an exponential growth of meetings and talk. The official educators and administrators were locked out, and the buildings were commandeered for lengthy debates in classrooms, lecture theatres and cafeterias among striking students about what should be learned, how it should be learned and who should teach it. At its best, it was a useful period of reassessment, but it was also a party, an avoidance, and a gift to the more dogmatic and pedantic students who differed from the authoritarian establishment only in their age and access to official power. There was much talk of cutting through the bullshit which was being taught in schools and colleges that had stopped pupils and students from thinking about what they were doing and why, and there was certainly also a good deal of bullshit talked. The accusations from establishment educators and politicians of self-indulgence were true, but that will and energy to look at the nature of what should be learned and how also represented the best of what the Sixties were about. The press berated the students for abusing the privilege of education and the grants they received from the society which they so disparaged, but this was exactly what the students should have been doing. When the young keep their heads down for fear of failing exams and not getting highly-paid jobs, they are not taking their privilege of learning seriously. For all that these were privileged people (all students are regarded as privileged, even by those who were once students themselves) in a time of full employment, in the Sixties the young at least risked those privileges to investigate what it was they were doing, rather than simply accept what they were told. Most dissenting students got back on the bourgeois straight and narrow, we are told, just as the majority of the radicals became card-carrying members of conventional society. But that doesn’t prove, as it is sometimes held to, that they were wrong-he
aded in their briefly wayward youth. The young have a job to do of frightening the grown-ups.