In recent conversations with headteachers, I have been struck by the feeling of so many of them that one of the most fundamental changes in their role in recent years is the way they have been increasingly propelled into the political arena. This is not to deny that heads have always had to be politicians, to some extent. If politics is taken to be the art of reaching decisions about contested values, then it is clear that heads, like all other managers, were always politicians by definition. The changes seem to be that not only are values more contested in the pluralist societies which most developed countries have now become, but crucially that the LEA (Local Education Authority) buffer between heads and the communities outside schools has diminished, if not disappeared, in some respects in recent years. Issues which heads could, in the past, refer to their LEAs, or at least declare to be the concern of the LEA rather than themselves, are reducing in number as the local management of schools (LMS) gathers pace, and as ‘opting out’ and ‘site-based management’ become more general. Decisions which, in the past, might have been the province of locally elected politicians and their officers in the LEAs are now firmly in the laps of school governors and their chief officer is the headteacher. In many schools, the governors have de facto delegated most of these ‘political’ decisions to the headteachers.
It is my contention that this process is likely to be far more difficult for heads than similar developments are for many managers outside education. Heads face a particular dilemma because in a number of significant ways the lessons of schools and the lessons of politics can diverge considerably. To take one of the more obvious points, one of the main purposes of education has traditionally been to show pupils how to search after truth. It is not usually expressed in such grandiose terms, but the introduction to scientific methods of investigation, and the inculcation of the ability to sift evidence, are just two examples of the ways in which teachers are attempting to develop pupils’ critical faculties so that they can learn to make judgements based as much as possible upon sense rather than nonsense. Furthermore, there is a general assumption that schools will attempt to create a moral climate in which, for example, honesty is held up as a virtue to pupils and deceit is, at the very least, discouraged.
Nick Tate (chief executive of the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority 1994–1997) is not the first to look to schools to teach moral commandments, although most teachers have always maintained that morality is caught rather than taught, which some would argue puts much greater pressure on teachers to live the moral life. ‘Walking the talk’ was an ideal concept familiar to teachers long before the management gurus coined the phrase. Many writers have argued that this has a cumulative effect upon the majority of teachers themselves who, if they are not comparatively morally good to start with, are actually made good, relative to those in many other occupations, by the nature of the work they undertake.
There is, however, a significant amount of writing about politics which argues that in this latter field, deceit is not only inevitable but actually essential. This was, of course, one of the central theses of Machiavelli’s work, and it is symptomatic of the generally unpalatable nature of his message over the centuries that the adjective Machiavellian has come to be attached to the more transparently devious and deceitful politicians, with the implicit assumption that there are others who are telling the truth. In a more recent body of writing, particularly in his book The Prevalence of Deceit from 1991, F.G. Bailey has provided a detailed and authoritative elaboration and development of the arguments of Machiavelli and others, and has reached the very well-argued conclusion that objective truth is unattainable in the practice of politics.
‘The very nature of political interaction pushes us back from any serious and sustained effort to ask questions and so find the kind of truth that goes into building bridges, controlling erosion, or even growing tomatoes. In that respect, politics brings about diseducation, discouraging thought and providing authorized, pre-processed answers. The scientific kind of enquiry—how means and ends relate to each other—is inappropriate exactly because politics concern contested values, not the means to attaining some accepted value. Politics, in other words, can never be like a natural science. Politicians, who are by definition contestants to make one or another value prevail, cannot avoid moral questions. Even when they take the trouble to find the “facts”, it is only so that they can better impose their own definitions of the right and the good.’ (Bailey op.cit. p. 128)
Following this line of argument, it is probably more apt to say that truth is the first casualty of politics, and that war in this respect as in others, is, following the dictum of Clausewitz, merely the continuation of politics by other means. Bailey goes further and supports the proposition that society requires for its survival the actual practice of deceit in politics. In our own recent history in the UK, there appears to be an increasing readiness on the part of the public in general to recognise that politicians are at best being ‘economical with the truth’ a good deal of the time. The Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister sitcoms were based largely on Talleyrand’s premise that speech was given to humans so that they could hide their thoughts, a thesis given added academic weight by Professor Aitchison in her 1996 Reith Lectures on ‘The Language Web’. The extension of the idea by the sitcom scriptwriters was that the Sir Humphrey Appleby civil servant character was actually more polished in his ability to disguise the truth under a cloak of words than were the politicians themselves.
