by John Bald, Conservative Home
Michael Gove’s comments on Hilary Cremin’s Rewilding Education are the most critical I’ve ever read about a book.
Her lumping together of the enlightenment, modernism, post-modernism and capitalism in order to condemn the lot show that she has not thought seriously about any of them.
As Gove says, the book is full of “toxic nonsense…idiocies” that would get her a failing grade in a first-year essay, but that is really her point. Western education is rotten to the core, and its criteria, dating from the discoveries of the enlightenment, are the reason for it. Judge and be damned.
She is not the first to think this.
Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning drew the ire and contempt of the romantic William Blake, and the use of grading and marks was roundly condemned in the 60s in Illich’s Deschooling Society. She also has some valid points, notably that there is far too much stress in the system, and that an over-emphasis on detail can prevent us from seeing the big picture. But is this blurting outburst the thinking that the Education Faculty of a leading world university should be accepting, let alone promoting? And is it what the Cambridge Education Faculty actually does, or is Professor Cremin, like Dr Arday, “an aberration”, who expects to be believed without critical examination?
A former professor referred me to its Ofsted report of 2024 , shortly after Cremin’s promotion. It describes something different, and better. The first paragraph sums it up –
Revenge of the Blob: good teachers are under siege by Michael Gove, Spectator