Honorary Editor

It was that temporary Bolshevik Leon Trotsky who developed the principle of `permanent revolution', a principle that perhaps characterizes the recent history of education in (south) Britain more than does, say, principles traditionally associated with the Conservative or Labour parties. As this editorial is being written, changes are being made to primary school education, and the long-awaited details of the post-Dearing reorganizing of post-16 education are yet to hit the overful bookshelves and filing cabinets of school heads and examination board officials.

But something unique has happened recently which might have surprised even Trotsky. The Secretary of State for Education has set up targets for primary school pupils' attainment and threatened (or promised) to resign if they are not met within the lifetime of our newly elected parliament. Of course, if Mr Blunkett is still in a position to resign at that stage he will have been the longest serving Secretary of State since time immemorial. But we should not carp: this is truly a revolutionary idea. Not the promise to resign - although this idea is not so fashionable now as it once was. The revolutionary idea is that a major change to an educational process is actually being made that carries with it a predicted and testable outcome. By contrast, when school physics was refreshed a generation ago by the introduction of Nuffield courses at both pre- and post-16 stages, no `targets' were set. I and many other physics teachers certainly preferred teaching these to teaching their predecessor syllabuses, and might even dare to assert that the pupils liked them too. But we still don't really know whether or not they learned more - or even better - physics.

Very little happened as far as the outside world was concerned: the usual fraction of students gave up physics at the usual ages, and those who were examined didn't really get a better reward for their more up-to-date and more enjoyably learned physics. The same fraction of candidates passed at O- and A-level, with much the same distribution of grades. But then at least, amongst other things, we may claim to have produced happier and more knowledgeable failures. Mr Blunkett's revolutionary idea should be extended so that any major educational change must be capable of evaluation. The customers/victims should actually be shown to have benefited - more of them should do better!

It is a regrettable fact of history that most revolutions have resulted in tears before bedtime, however bright the following dawn. One problem with revolutions, as Maxim Gorky often pointed out, is that `inside every revolutionary there is a gendarme'. It is one thing to specify a target, another to direct in detail how every child and teacher in the land should achieve it. The latter is very difficult to manage, and when patience inevitably runs out there is likely to be a tendency towards gendarmerie. The control structure begins to dominate the educational one, and the means of control become more important than the ends. Rigidity replaces creativity, fossilization replaces evolution, and the energies and skills of practitioners may be devoted more to conforming passively with or ingeniously evading the constraints of a rule-bound system. There were signs that this effect exists and has been growing, but happily these signs have been detected by the `gendarmerie' and recognized as being deleterious. Government agencies are now consulting, seriously, with practitioners and such organizations as the IoP. It may well be that when the magic number 2000 arrives there will be a well-designed, self-organizing and self-monitoring National Curriculum that will engage the hearts as well as develop the minds of the young.