09.09.2009

Intrusive and authoritarian

We fight for a world in which sex is genuinely free and equal, writes Eddie Ford

Invariably, when capitalism runs into crisis - like with the present global credit crunch - we see a crackdown on the working class. So wages and working conditions, for example, come under attack. However, the tightening of the screw often extends into other, ‘non-economic’, or ideological areas, such as a drive towards more general authoritarian control. This often takes the form of a moral panics.

Or perhaps we should now say ‘codes of conduct’? Hence the General Teaching Council has drawn up a new, revised code of conduct which places great emphasis on teachers upholding and maintaining “public trust” in their profession outside the school gates. Apparently this requires teachers to adhere to, and reinforce, their “traditional role” as “pillars of society” - acting as “role models” for pupils inside and outside the classroom. Thus, according to the eighth principle of the code, teaching staff must “maintain reasonable standards in their own behaviour”, thereby enabling them to “maintain an effective learning environment” and defend public “confidence in the profession” (www.gtce.org.uk).

Therefore under the new code, members of the public have the right to make allegations of “professional misconduct” against teachers directly to the GTC itself - although it is to be expected that they should first “exhaust” the school’s complaints procedure before going nuclear. Meanwhile teachers dismissed for breaching the code could be summoned to a GTC disciplinary hearing and then be promptly struck off the teaching register. Hardly reassuringly, the GTC has claimed that teachers would only “fall foul” of the code if their behaviour fell “seriously below acceptable standards” - in no way, we are told, is it meant to “catch out” teachers who engage in a spot of weekend drinking and partying.

In response, the National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers has launched a 10,000-strong petition calling for the scrapping of the new code of conduct, and has sent a poster to every state school in England urging staff to mount an ‘anti-code’ campaign. NASUWT general secretary Chris Keates said the union was “deeply concerned” about the underlying content and implications of the beefed-up code. For Keates it is “unnecessarily long”, “littered with pious statements” and “riddled” with “vague statements” - all of which are “open to wide interpretation” and “abuse”, hence potentially jeopardising the careers and jobs of all teachers and head teachers. Yes, says Keates, “teachers and head teachers must of course behave in a professional manner”, but the rewritten GTC code - which actually “conflicts with contractual provisions” - has “unreasonable expectations” about the way teachers should conduct themselves, and at the end of the day it patently “intrudes” into their private lives (The Daily Telegraph September 4).

Typically, of course, the prim and proper Daily Mail interpreted the NASUWT’s protests as teachers having a collective “moan” that the new conduct code will “stop them getting drunk at weekends” (September 4) - a moralistic sentiment shared by The Daily Telegraph, which presented the union as objecting to the code on the grounds that it could “theoretically” stop its members from getting blitzed over the weekend (September 4).

Our righteous reactionaries, it is worth noting, have also had much fun making comparisons between the stance of the NASUWT and the Channel 4 TV series, Teachers - set in the fictional Summerdown Comprehensive secondary school. In this drama, nominated for six Baftas between 2002 and 2004, teachers were almost invariably portrayed as spending virtually all their non-classroom time frantically boozing, smoking, partying, raving and screwing (especially the latter - like rabbits, which perhaps accounted for the show’s great popularity). Naturally, the guardians of morality hated it, believing that it belittled and demeaned the noble teaching profession - though it is not too fanciful to suspect that the hedonistic lifestyle presented in Teachers probably acted more like an extended recruitment video than put off potentially good teachers.

The left should fully support the NASUWT, and others, in their objections to the GTC’s code of conduct - which, in some respects, amounts to a narks’ charter, and beyond doubt gives another weapon to the bosses. As one geography teacher put it, the code is “practically demanding sainthood” - otherwise you might get the sack on the grounds of imperfectability. Clearly, such a code would effectively amount to a policing operation - just massively adding to the stress that so many teachers already feel on a daily, grinding basis. In that sense, the GTC’s proposed strictures are part of an authoritarian trend towards greater social control, to be achieved through typically bureaucratic means - codes of conduct and the rest, all designed to further regiment and dragoon an increasingly atomised workforce.

Communists would also argue that such measures should be seen in a wider context - that is, as part of the dominant consensus against meaningful rights for youth and young adults. A forbidding consensus, which fundamentally disapproves of teachers really socialising with their pupils and students, since instead they must - and should - be projecting themselves as rather aloof and joyless “role models” for the poor little darlings. After all, so the reactionary folklore goes, youth cannot possibly think or act independently for themselves - they must always require and need top-down guidance from their masters and betters. Whether they be teachers, lecturers, professors, parents, policemen or BBC presenters.

But the reality, of course, is that teachers and pupils do socialise together - even if it is, for the main, on certain officially ‘approved’ and sanctified occasions. For instance, after a sporting event or the school play. Sometimes, maybe, on these events alcohol will be consumed in the presence of pupils - god forbid. However, for communists all such activities can only be a healthy development, as it encourages cross-generational solidarity and hence undermines hierarchical and oppressive power structures - which provide the foundations for bourgeois educational institutions, from the primary school to the postgraduate university department.

Of course, contrary to how it might seem, it should be emphasised that we are not advocating drunkenness and debauchery - whatever the likes of the Daily Mail might think. Indeed, we should be for the responsible use, as opposed to abuse, of a substance - a powerful drug - like alcohol. Furthermore, we have no peculiar or inherent ideological objection to people aspiring to act as “role models” - teachers, parents, musicians, artists, actors, etc. Far from it, in fact. Rather, what we communists oppose is the promotion of “role models” when it acts as a cover, or Trojan horse, for a whole set of authoritarian and patriarchal assumptions and beliefs. Like, obviously, the idea of the teacher as the embodiment of official society’s (supposed) moral rectitude.

Youth empowerment

This brings us back to Teachers. In series two, the newly qualified Penny Neville - played by Tamzin Malleson - has a sexual relationship with a pupil. Naturally, this caused quite a stir at the time - with accusations about promoting or excusing so-called ‘paedophilia’. Such sanctimonious outrage, of course, is predicated on the notion that any sort of sexual involvement (momentarily or long-standing) between a teacher and a pupil/student - or ‘inter-generational’ sex in general - must therefore be an intrinsically perverse or exploitative arrangement.

This is irrational nonsense, which aims to deny the incredible complexity and diversity of human sexuality - squeezing it into a ‘one size fits all’ mould where all sex and sexuality is reduced to the repressive ‘norm’ of lifelong heterosexual monogamy - and no deviations, please. A natural consequence of adopting such a constrictive framework (and one which is totally ahistorical, as it so happens) is the refusal to recognise that young teenagers possess sexual urges and desires - let alone that they should feel or harbour sexual feelings towards each other or even adults, such as teachers.

So last week’s edition of the Weekly Worker featured a letter from the Partisan Defence Committee, an organisation which works “in accordance with the political views of the Spartacist League” (www.partisandefense.org). The PDC “demands the immediate dropping of all charges against the 26-year-old music teacher Helen Goddard, a victim of the government’s anti-sex witch-hunt”. It also describes the Sex Offenders Register as a “witch-hunter’s charter” and states that the current age of consent laws are an “invasion of privacy” - when instead, the PDC goes on to say, the “guiding principles in these matters should be that of mutual effective consent” (September 3).

The CPGB fully supports the demand that all criminal charges against Goddard should be dropped, who is due to be sentenced on September 21 in Southwark crown court under the Sexual Offences Act 2003 for having sex with a 15-year-old female pupil - and could face a possible jail sentence of up to 14 years, not to mention the near life-destroying fact of being placed on the Sex Offenders Register.

By all and every account, the sex between Goddard - popularly known as the ‘Jazz Lady’ to her students at the £13,000-a-year City of London School for Girls - and her pupil was totally consensual. Indeed, Goddard herself has declared that she is being “punished for falling in love” and her pupil/lover too says she is in love - telling the court that she hopes her relationship with Goddard will continue after she reaches 16 years of age. Not that any of this, of course, impacted on the moralistic crusade being run by The Sun, which luridly - and inhumanely - ranted on about how a “public school trumpet mistress faces jail after admitting a lesbian fling with a 15-year-old pupil” (September 9).

Not be outdone though, the Daily Mail piles in by rhetorically asking why a “softly spoken” and “devout Christian” like Goddard, “with a glittering career ahead”, should “throw it away” by having a lesbian affair with a 15-year-old pupil - though it cannot help cruelly adding that the music teacher’s professions of love show a “naivety that some will say beggars belief” (August 22).

One has to agree with the PDC, and the Spartacist League, that the age of consent laws should be abolished - they are not only arbitrary, but give the state powers to interfere in, and potentially criminalise, what should be purely personal and private matters. However, it is worth asking whether or not the question is as straightforward as the PDC implies. Trying to establish what is “effective consent” is complicated by the alienated social-political relations that so palpably exist under capitalism. In other words, there are flagrantly unequal power relations involved between teachers and students, inmates and wardens, bosses and workers, and so on. Which means that there is an ever present danger of favouritism and corruption - like securing sexual favours in return for grades or extra visiting hours.

Therefore, communists propose that there be alternative legislation to cover sexual misconduct and abuse, based on both effective consent and the empowerment of youth. We fight for a world in which sex, just as with all other relations between people in all the manifold spheres of social life, is genuinely free and equal - devoid of any economic or social constraints, and where, in the words of Frederick Engels, there will be “no other motive left except mutual inclination”.