The Secondary Technical School: A Usable Past? - Gary McCulloch

Originally published in 1989, Gary McCulloch’s work provided an elegant and pointed answer to the plea for more historical study in the curriculum domain. He focuses on a fascinating episode in the long history of vocationalism in Britain – the Secondary Technical School. In undertaking this historical scholarship, he has avowedly and specifically related this study to new developments in Thatcher’s Britain – notably the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative and the city technical colleges. He poses an important question: does earlier experiment of the Secondary Technical School provide us with a ‘usable past’ as we define policy in the present?

The book’s purpose was two-fold. First, it offers a full-length history of the technical schools in their own time and context. Second, it illuminates recent contemporary policy initiatives. The latter aim operates at the cutting edge of political hopefulness. Much of the policy formulation during the Thatcher period had shown a deliberate, almost wilful, ignorance of the history. Hence, in saying of the book, ‘the history … will have explanatory leverage on policy as developed over the past decade’, McCulloch strikes the most optimistic stance possible in the circumstances. But as in so many areas of cultural policy, we should not fall victim to top-down philistinism, or to fatalism. It is to McCulloch’s credit that his approach and his scholarship lead us firmly in the direction of policies based on historical understanding, not contemporary ignorance. Today it can be read in its historical context.