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It’s fair enough that in considering the future of education in the late 1960s, the Observer Magazine hadn’t reckoned on the deleterious effects of increasing social inequality, a pandemic or Michael Gove, but its predictions do seem naively utopian in retrospect (‘Shape of Schools to Come’, 2 July 1967).
Spilling out of the leather satchel (yes, kids, this was before the rucksack invasion of the 1980s) were a tape reel and headphones – some of the ‘futuristic’ elements considered. (Let’s gloss over the provenance of the mouse crawling over it.) A picture of an English class, ‘1967-style’, was captioned: ‘These children aren’t just running. They’re thinking about running – the physical sensations; emotional situations which involved running – exhilaration, panic.’ I well remember panic — mostly in PE during rugby lessons.
Virginia Makins spoke to teachers hoping to change things. In a lesson on commerce, some got their pupils to ‘tape interviews with store managers’, and in class ‘besides learning shorthand and typing, they play business games… Then each girl spends a few days working in a real office in Hull.’ It wasn’t stated whether the latter was punishment or reward.
Meanwhile, the teachers conducted important fieldwork. One progressive inspector said: ‘We got groups of teachers together on three-day courses and we simply went out and had exciting experiences – watching V-bomber exercises at night; a tour of the nightlife of Wakefield, talking to people in pubs.’
There’s a casually alarming picture of ‘the science centre’ where ‘big-scale projects, like dismantling jet engines, can be done on the outdoor patio’.
There were no projections about the future of exams – though given the recent A-level algorithm omnishambles, nothing they could have predicted would have been anywhere near as outlandish.
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