On the Neglect of Pedagogy in Educational Studies and its Consequences

This journal slipped into the world somewhere between the milkless reign of Margaret Thatcher at Waterloo and her capture of Smith Square.Before Volume 5 was through she had become Managing Director of UK Inc. and by Volume 10 the news was that all us piggies was going to market.Its early teens witnessed the elaboration of one of the more obvious and less endearing ideological planks of early Thatcherism, the insistence that "there is no alternative".In economic, defence, social, health and educational policy, most questions and problems were capable of solution only by reference to TINA, as it came to be called.It became clear some time ago that in educational matters, TINAocracy was to enjoy relatively unchecked progress.A moment's observation revealed that the unlovely fledgling -a cuckoo in manner and mode if ever there was one -was of certain and well known parentage.TINN was the mother of TINA, necessity was to put an end to invention, we were to be firmly directed to contemplate the calming properties of the notion that 'there is nothing new'.Put respectably, this might be seen as the shorthand version of the view that "a successful free society will always in a large measure be a tradition-bound society", that "the growth of civilisation rests largely on the individuals making the best use of whatever accidents they encounter" (Hayek, 1960, p. 61).In pragmatic political terms TINA out of TINN became the media-hyped auspice for the revolution of declining expectations concomitant with breaking the Enemy Within (otherwise known as the Trades Unions), held to be prerequisite to lowering inflation and heightening competition, and involving mass regional and, in some of them, near-total youth unemployment, coexisting with fiscal changes deliberately aimed at increasing the gap between haves and have-nots.