In July 2013, Mike Russell, then Secretary of State for Education and Lifelong Learning in the Scottish Government, speech New Lanark is an 18th century cotton-spinning mill village that is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In the early 1800s, under the ownership of Welsh philanthropist and social reformer Robert Owen, New Lanark became an epitome of utopian socialism, and 2013 marked the 200th anniversary of the publication of his essay on 'Utopian Socialism'.A new perspective on society'
Owen's vision of utopian socialism was based on the premise that “children may be trained to acquire any language, any feelings, any beliefs, or any physical habits or manners, so long as they are not contrary to human nature.” He argued that “these principles… direct the rulers of every state to establish rational plans for the education and general formation of the characters of their people. These plans must be devised to train the child from early childhood in good habits of every kind…” Much of it seems to follow the educational teachings of the Swiss educator and reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Pestalozzi, in turn, adopted the ideas of the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote that “if you make your people good by training, all else will follow.”
Furthermore, Owen stated that children “may be formed in groups, and may assume any human character; and though these compounds, like all other products of nature, are of infinite variety, they are nevertheless endowed with the property of plasticity, which, by perseverance under wise supervision, may ultimately be moulded into the image of rational wishes and desires themselves.” But the question is, who is doing the “supervision,” and what do they consider to be “rational” in terms of wishes and desires?
All of this bears a striking resemblance to the SNP government's 'Doing the Right Thing for Every Child' (GIRFEC) approach, the cornerstone of which is a 'designated person' system in which every child in Scotland from pre-birth to the age of 18 is assigned a state guardian to oversee the child's care. happinessThe designated person system was ultimately determined to be illegal. UK Supreme Court Last year, the Scottish Government announced that minorFine-tuning”
“New Lanark may not be a sacred place, but it is no less spiritual,” Mr Russell said in a 2013 speech, reflecting Scotland's ruling SNP's worship of the utilitarian utopian idea.
Education was at the heart of Owen's vision and that of the Scottish Government. Mike Russell pointed out that education was devolved to the Scottish Government and argued that “our system is working very well… by any measure we look at we are improving in international rankings and good things are happening in our schools.” But that did not fully reflect reality.
According to the 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Scotland has fallen from 11th to 23rd in reading, 11th to 24th in mathematics, and 10th to 19th in science since 2006. John Swinney, Scotland's Deputy First Minister and Minister for Education and Skills, said: “These results highlight the need for fundamental reform of Scotland's education system.”
It is precisely this “radical reform” that should ring alarm bells for families across Scotland.
The Robert Owen Centre for Education Reform at the University of Glasgow was opened in 2013 by Mike Russell and aims to “promote fairer education systems through theory-driven applied research underpinned by a commitment to the principles of social justice and lifelong learning”.
In parallel, Mike Russell announced the new Robert Owen Prize, created to honour social reformers. The award, presented personally by Scottish Ministers, was announced as a realisation of New Lanark's vision for education to recognise outstanding educators from around the world. Dr Avis Glaze of Canada was the inaugural recipient of the Robert Owen Prize that same year. Coincidentally or not, Dr Glaze is now one of ten members of the Scottish Government's new Council of International Education Advisors (ICEA). ICEA was set up in 2016 to “advise the Scottish Government on education reform”. Education Priorities”
The other nine members include Professor Chris Chapman, who “founded the Robert Owen Centre for Reform in Education”, Professor Graham Donaldson, a former recipient of the Robert Owen Prize, Dr Pasi Sahlberg, the second recipient of the Robert Owen Prize in 2014, and Professor Hargreaves, who received the prize shortly after the Council met for the first time last year.
Came to light Earlier this month it was reported that ICEA members had enjoyed the luxuries of a five-star hotel at Scottish taxpayers' expense during their first meeting in 2016. Scots Skeptics Forum) released information showing not only the £36,000 spent on accommodation, flights and entertainment for the two days by ICEA's 10 members, but also that the council has “friendly and respectful relationships” with ministers. ICEA's members come from all over the world, and “several have worked closely with the Scottish Government and its agencies in the past or present”.
Indeed, Sceptical Scot paints a very worrying picture, saying this is not so much “external scrutinisers bringing a wide variety of challenging perspectives, but rather a team of influential consultants with strong shared values, some of whom have already played a role in the development of Scotland's current system. This has implications for how what they say will be interpreted.”
The second meeting of the Council was held on 27th and 28th February. The minutes of the first meeting record that Professor Hargreaves suggested that it should be held in New Lanark. He also floated the idea that there should be a public presentation by the four Robert Owen Prize winners in the evening. The meeting was eventually held in Edinburgh and was attended by both the Deputy First Minister and the Prime Minister.
Earlier this month, Scotland's teaching unions “reacted with alarm” to news that the Scottish Government had held secret meetings with teaching unions. Hometown Foundationis a Scottish registered charity established in January 2009, in partnership with the New Lanark Trust, another registered charity established in 1974 with the aim of restoring and revitalising the former cotton mill village of New Lanark as a place to live and work.
Home Town’s stated objectives include promoting education through “cooperative schools” – schools that are “wholly owned by parents and funded by the government” – a false statement that gives parents educational freedom, but in reality ties them down in a state of subservience under the purse strings of the central government.
According to the Hometown Foundation, it has already supported parent and teacher groups to prepare and submit business plans for so-called state-funded autonomous schools to the Scottish government. However, the Hometown Foundation recently publicly expressed its frustration with the Scottish government's inaction on its proposals over the past two years. The Scottish government may have viewed the Hometown Foundation as an unnecessary middleman in the implementation of co-operative socialist reforms in education, as it is much easier and more manageable to contact schools directly from the central government.
There is no doubt that Robert Owen and his utopian socialist ideas resonated with the SNP government. Institute for Personality Development Founded on 1 January 1816 in New Lanark, this “new system”, like GIRFEC and the designated persons legislation, was a universal provision based on the principle of prevention, improving “health” and promoting “happiness”. He recognised the challenge of radically changing people and acknowledged that “we will act consistently and steadily on this system, although it may be unknown to you”. This is strikingly similar to the intentions of the Scottish Government, as revealed in the minutes of the now defunct GIRFEC Implementation Committee, which states that “it was a conscious decision to focus first on embedding GIRFEC in professional practice before raising awareness among the general public”.
Owen's Institute for Character Formation was “devised to provide a means for the incorporation of children at an early age, as soon as they could walk,” in order to prevent them from “acquiring bad habits.”
Robert Owen's new vision of society was not concerned with the individual needs of each individual worker, but rather, like GIRFEC and Named Person, was an attempt to mold groups, especially young people, to conform to the behavioral, moral and civic expectations of dominant management, such as factory owners or central governments.
It remains to be seen what the outcome of this “radical reform” of the education system will be. Recently, Education Secretary John Swinney announced that he would postpone his plans for education reform. Given the SNP government's apparent infatuation with the New Lanark model, one cannot help but wonder if we will see a further entrenchment of “practical utopianism” in society, where the state, as a paternalistic factory owner, only seeks to free people from a “state of darkness” and the “prejudices taught to them in childhood” through a process of social engineering carried out in secret.
This is not education, this is GIRFEC style submission.
