These ‘balanced and tried views’ were much in evidence in the Labour Government’s Green Paper, Educaiion in Schools, published in July 1977. It contained, for example, the suggestion that there should be national agree- ment on curriculum content, with a core of essential subjects:
... it is clear that the time has come to try to establish generally accepted principles for the composition of the secondary curriculum for all pupils . .. there is a need to investigate the part which might be played by a ‘protected’ or ‘core’ element of the curriculum common to all schools.
Education in Schools also urged the Department of Education and Science
to be less reticent about intervening in matters traditionally left to the ‘professionals’:
It would not be compatible with the duties of the Secretaries of State ... or with their accountability to Parliament, to abdicate from leadership on educational issues which have become a matter of lively public concern. There was to be a greater involvement of the commercial sector in policy committees; a core curriculum should be able to ‘offer reassurances to employers’ as well as to teachers and parents. Above all, schools were to be. diverted from the egalitarian pursuit of that legacy of Renaissance human-
ΪΗΙΪΙ, the well-rounded citizen, to ‘education for investment, education for
efficiency’,22 or in other words, to the preparation of pupils for an effective
place in the service of the economy.
Amidst all this concern for economic relevance, it should be remembered Hint thd relationship between av nation’s economic performance and its (duration »ynlein remains unpinvcn; sunn· economists have even argued 36
Education and Dramatic Art
that education policy has no appreciable effect whatever on the operation of the economy.23 Nevertheless, from the mid-1970s, it was against predictions
of economic demand that education policy was increasingly measured. This necessarily entailed attacks on the institutions within the service most identified with the old progressive ideal. In 1977, for example, the Schools Council was forced to change its constitution to reduce the representation of
teachers. Even the Department of Education and Science itself was not considered sufficiently free from the taint of the 1960s settlement. From its creation in 1974, the Manpower Services Commission (MSC) (directly answerable to the Secretary of State for Employment) became an agency of growing importance in the delivery of education policy. The implications of the new utilitarianism for subjects like drama which had floated into the curriculum on a tide of progressive ideas were potentially very grave. By the early 1980s there is evidence of attempts from within the field to reach an accommodation with the changing political climate. Indeed, it is possible that the growing advocacy of Heathcote’s theories of dramatic pedagogy could be interpreted as a generalised, almost subliminal, acknow- ledgement of the changing political context. The reinstatement of the teacher as the key motivating figure in the lesson, for example, which was being widely advertised as the model for good practice by the 1980s, could be interpreted as an attempt to disassociate educational drama from what Cox and Dyson had called the ‘excesses of laissez-faire permissivism’ with which it had for long been identified. The coloured lights and noisy disorder of the 1960s drama lesson must surely have embodied all that the new idealogues most mistrusted and sought to eradicate.
Paradoxically, it was the influence of the MSC and its associated enterprises which was to offer educational drama a role within the new ‘realism’. Through the MSC, the Government sought to by-pass the established structures of the old consensus and the teachers who still subscribed to its ideals. There was a concerted attempt not simply to adjust the balance of the post-sixtcen curriculum, but to inculcate young people, particularly
working-class young people, with the values, attitudes and disciplines appropriate for a shrinking labour market. Thus, taking a priority over training in specific trades, was the acquisition of general social dispositions suitable lor members of the new ‘flexible’ work force, a menu of what came to be euphemistically known as ‘life and social skills’, or simply, ‘life skills’.
Life skills mean problem-solving behaviours appropriately and responsibly used in the management of personal affairs. Appropriate use requires an individual to adapt the behaviours to time and place. Itrx/innsililr use requires maturity, or accountability. And as behaviours used in I he
management of personal affairs, life skills apply to five areas of
Events on the Public Stage 37
life responsibility identified as self, family, leisure, community and job.24
Among the drama-in-education community, favourable readings of this agenda were quick to interpret it as offering opportunities for the licensed maintenance of the child-centred premises of progressivism. For many drama teachers, the presence of words like ‘appropriate’, ‘personal’ and ‘self was enough to signify an identification with the values of individual development and awareness to which they could happily subscribe. By then they had at their disposal a set of dramatic practices sufficiently morally emasculated for questions about the nature of the individual development and awareness not to arise. As a consequence, the ‘life skills’ project had not
been long in schools before aggrieved drama specialists were protesting that its tutors and organisers were poaching on their methodological territory, as this letter indicates:
Anyone au-fail with the aims and activities of Educational Drama will of course realise that this ‘new’ area (Life skills) is in fact based on these same aims and objectives eg. social awareness, confidence, ability to reason etc. using role-play, simulations and discussion groups ... we as drama teachers have been ‘teaching’ these ‘lifcskills’ now for many years ... I feel the ordinary drama teacher is now finding that his specialised field is in fact being ‘taken over’ by various members of the profession, who I presume feel qualified and confident enough to engage in these activities after one or two training weekends.”J
Other practitioners began to declare themselves ready and able to participate in the ‘life skills’ movement. In 1983, for example, Kathy Joyce,
contributing to a series of articles entitled ‘Drama and the Lifeskills Trend’ (which included a piece by the Director of Understanding British Industry) saw school drama techniques being used to look at ‘different strategies for behaviour, coping, surviving or succeeding’.2fi In similar vein, David Mor-
ton, Adviser for Drama in Leeds, predicted that in future society would ‘need an increasingly versatile workforce able to respond to rapidly chang- ing needs’, and that drama would have a significant part to play in
developing the ‘self-reliance and small-scale entrepreneurial skills that will allow young people to create work’.*-‘ The following year, the editor of London Drama was worried that more energy might be spent ‘defending
drama as a subject than in positively examining the ^ims and objectives of the new ΟΟΙίΠββ’,20 while a contributor to the same journal urged teachers
to face up
• I 1 ΠΙ ΙΙΜΙΙΙ1Ι11Ι « ‘Hi π II
38
Education and Dramatic Art
to the fact that ‘not only youngsters but professional adults also must be prepared to adapt to the demands of the changed market place’:
... if you want to survive in the new regime you will have to start teaching youngsters the self presentation skills involved in convincing an employer of their worth, of dealing with irate customers, or even how to sell
encyclopedias.29
It is clear that having identified a place as a service agency in the less amenable post-Ruskin world of education, there were plenty of drama specialists who lost little sleep while taking what opportunities arose to market their practices across a whole range of training schemes and voca- tional initiatives. David Davis’s was almost a lone voice warning against the indiscriminate embrace of ‘life skills’. Tn a fiery article he castigated the ‘deference’ which he saw ‘at the centre of MSC social and life skills courses’, and which, in his view, characterised the ‘hidden curriculum of society at large’.
It aims to socialise young people in an ‘acceptable’ way, i.e. it programmes them to accept and deal with unemployment under the guise of preparing them for employment ... there is no place for drama on schemes which help prepare youth to survive under capitalism as unemployed individuals, who will not cause trouble ... I think educators should be opposed to all MSC courses, particularly YTS, and campaign against them through their union organisations and should not be involved with using ‘drama’ [role-play] for deference.30
However, as we shall sec, the conceptual structures of drama-in-education had no means of taking this, or any other prognosis based on political or cultural premises, onboard. Progressivism itself lacked any political or historical dimension, and drama teachers schooled in that tradition were too used to limiting their methodological vision to the inner world of sensation and feeling to be able to grasp the implications of these new realities in significant numbers. And after all, had not ‘Dorothy’ herself involved her post-graduate students in industrial management training courses?
Unfortunately, history was not to reward kindly the simple opportunism which turned a deaf ear to Davis’s counsel and instead sought to locate drama-in-education in the programmes of the new educational ascendancy.