25 March 2013updated 19 Aug 2013 2:21pm

Not everyone who disagrees with Gove is a “wrecker” or an “enemy of promise”

The Education Secretary’s combative methods are going to result in bad policy. His them-and-us style is alienating the middle ground and polarising the debate.

By Jonn Elledge

You know who I hate? Children. Little bastards, with their snot and their questions and their boundless curiosity about the world. You know what I’d do, if it were up to me? I’d thwart them. Seriously, I’d thwart the bloody lot of them. I’d deprive them of vital general knowledge, not teach them to add up or spell, and we’ll see who’s laughing then, eh?

Except, obviously I don’t think that. Because no one thinks that. Until yesterday, I didn’t think it was even possible to un-self-consciously use the word “thwart” unless you were a character in The Lord of the Rings.

Our education secretary, though, thinks otherwise. In yesterday’s Mail on Sunday defence of his plans to reform the national curriculum, arguing that “millions of talented young people [are] being denied the opportunity to succeed… Far too many are having their potential thwarted by the Enemies of Promise.”

Who are these enemies, I hear you ask? They are the education establishment, a nebulous mixture of Marxist academics, lefty teachers unions, Brownite apologists and orcs, which is trying to block the coalition’s brave crusade to raise standards in our schools. “There are still a tiny minority of teachers,” Gove explains solemnly, “who see themselves as part of The Blob and have enlisted as Enemies Of Promise.” This is an actual sentence in an article credited to the secretary of state.

The trigger for this latest offensive against the dark forces on all sides was this letter in the Independent . Signed by 100 academics, it argues that the new curriculum is a bit on the narrow side, and will drive schools to prioritise rote-learning over critical thinking. Read after Gove’s response, the letter in question frankly comes as a bit of a disappointment.

I’m not a curriculum expert. My only experience of teaching was 18 months attempting to tutor a succession of teenage boys, all of whom sacked me, so I’m not going to attempt to defend either the new National Curriculum or its predecessor. For all I know the academics are talking rubbish, and Gove’s version is by far the superior (although the fact it features the heptarchy, which I’m fairly sure was debunked years ago, gives me some pause for thought).

So let’s leave aside who’s right, and consider the tone of the two pieces of writing. The academics’ letter is staid and considered, and while it’s clearly based on opinion as much as fact, the opinions in question are about policy, not about those who make it. Gove’s article, by contrast, is hysterical and combative and assumes that anyone who doesn’t agree with him is a subversive element that needs to be utterly crushed. In the Gove-ite view of the universe, you’re either with him or against him. It’s the sort of education policy document one might get from Pope Urban II.

Does this matter? If Gove is right – and I can’t say for certain that he’s not – then does the tone he uses to make his case really make any difference?

It does, for two reasons. The first is that it alienates the middle ground. There are those (I am one) who agree with Gove’s aims, but are unconvinced by his methods. Every time he lumps us all together as nothing more than a bunch of Trots, it makes us less willing to listen, and less content to offer the benefit of the doubt. In other words, Gove’s endless rhetoric about the implacable enemies of reform is creating the very monolithic establishment that he claims he’s out to destroy. Just consider the cognitive dissonance required to write the line “Stephen Twigg chose to side with the Marxists” to see what I mean.

But there’s a more important reason why the them-and-us routine is A Bad Thing: it leads to bad policy.

There are problems with a number of coalition schools policies. Questions over how you scale up good academy chains while clamping down on weak ones; over how to find buildings for new schools; over how we’re going to find a quarter of a million extra school places by this September. All these problems have been looming for a while.

So why have they not been addressed? Because, one suspects, that those who pointed them out were instantly dismissed as wreckers and enemies of promise. By questioning the government, they instantly showed themselves to be another part of the Blob. I can’t help but thinking that, if Gove was more open to criticism, he’d be more likely to spot when he’d made a mistake.