Sentimental education

Finding a title for my recently published book on education, We Should Know Better, turned out to be a problem. My failure to alight on one disturbed me and reminded me of the famous French dictum: Ce qui se con?oit bien s'?nonce clairement, et les mots pour le dire arrivent ais?ment. In other words, if I could not think up a title quickly it must be because I had not understood, or had inadequately conceptualised, my own book. In which case God help the readers, if any.

As the deadline drew near, I sat down with my wife and ran, once again, through the possibilities. The Thick Men of Europe was one, but I had already used the phrase in an article. Anyway the publishers were not keen. Too jokey, they thought, and too negative. And too few would get the joke. A footnote to the title about the state of late 19th century Turkey would be a poor start to the book. The mere search for a title raised questions about the extent of our common culture, which was comforting to the extent that it seemed to validate the titleless book.

Bridging the Great Divide was another possibility. That at least had the advantage of pointing to the book's dominant theme: that while we have a segregated system of education, based on cash and social position, our schools are condemned to overall mediocrity. I had tried it on a journalist, whose response was that it would have booksellers reaching for the lowest shelves in their dimmest of basements. Moreover the word "education" had to be in the title. Journalists, I was assured, spent their lives dreaming up headlines with the word "education," on account of how people were increasingly worried about it.



If I was reluctant to have education in the title, my real fear was that no one would so much as glance at, let alone buy, a book on the subject written by an MP, such is the level of respect for the views of MPs on education, or anything else. MPs' books are successful in inverse proportion to their seriousness. Sex on the floor of the House, yes please; lesbianism on the terrace, more please, but a book by a politician on public policy? To the Groucho Marx acid test "would I buy a book written by someone like myself?" the answer was, no way, sunshine. We live, someone must have remarked, in a post-political society. As an imminent post-politician I believe I have got the message. Already my publishers had agreed, a trifle too eagerly it seemed to me, with my suggestion that those baleful initials MP should be left off the cover and hidden away on the fly-leaf.

Despairing of my efforts, someone at Fourth Estate came up with We Should Know Better. At first I was unimpressed. It sounded finger-wagging, a moralising pun so thin as to defy discernment. Yet, when I market tested it on the journalist who had scoffed at my previous efforts, I was encouraged to snap it up. Slowly We Should Know Better grew on me. As a statement of fact, it was beyond reproach. No one could object to a pun no one would notice. And as it is supposed to be a bit of a lapel-tugging book, encouraging the thinking of thoughts about the consequences of educational apartheid that are normally kept well under the counter, even in the best stocked minds, why not have a gentle admonition in the title? I also liked the implication that Britain is not just any old country and should know better than to tolerate an educational system based from top to bottom on social rather than educational imperatives.

Finally I liked the title's positive tone, as the book is supposed to provide practical solutions rather than merely bemoan an already well bemoaned state of affairs. Once we stared the apartheid problem in the face, I argue, rather than dancing around it blindfold, chanting our evasive gentilities ("not all private schools are good and not all state schools are bad," "all the comprehensives need is more resources"), Britain has it in itself to become a world class educator. So I settled gratefully for We Should Know Better. Someone at Fourth Estate, a disciple of deconstruction perhaps, had understood the book better than the author-a poor, scribbling wretch who, as Roland Barthes has taught us, is purely incidental to the text.

Having nothing to do with his own book puts the author in a privileged position when it comes to criticism. An author must be permitted to have views on a book he is supposed not to have written. If he did not really write it, he is surely allowed to defend it, or, should a bout of remorse have intervened since publication, take a hand in its demolition. If I were taking an axe to my own book, I would pull the old English trick of Wildean inversion: anyone who suggests that we have a problem of class in education is merely showing himself to be obsessed by class. The author (I would continue) has missed the whole point about what is happening in Britain: the relentless progress of classlessness, which seems to be what the author himself wants.

In defence of myself (the non-author, being a free agent, is allowed to switch sides at whim), I would point out that I do not like classlessness. In fact I am allergic to classlessness, with its reverse priggishness (dressing down for all occasions), its pomposities of the ordinary (pop music criticism), its prolier-than-thou pieties. When Graham Greene once said that he would prefer to live in the Soviet Union than in the US, I never believed him. But when I say that I would prefer to live in the 18th century rather than in the type of classless society in prospect in Britain, I believe myself, most sincerely.

Certainly class in contemporary British education appears more muted than ever before. But that is illusion. Classlessness in Britain is the opposite of what it claims. It is not freedom from social caste, a tardy liberation, but class consciousness erected into a system more rigorous, intrusive and unforgiving than any that has gone before. Egalitarianism inflects our every utterance and mode of behaviour. De Tocqueville had it right. He it was who warned against the "courtier" spirit in democracy that impels us to bend the knee more abjectly before mass taste than we had ever done before an absolute monarch. In our state schools, the "courtier" spirit, inverted for 20th century use, is reflected in the low aspirations of our education system. Ninety-two per cent of state secondary schools are comprehensives of one sort or another. The schools exist in large measure as a reaction to elitism, and are therefore class phenomena themselves. Educationists speak openly about the social and academic effectiveness of schools, in that order. In this sense, the comprehensives fail what might be called the Confucius test. If a judge is not judicious, then despite the trappings of office, he is not a judge. If a school does not aim to educate then it is not a school, but something else; in the British case, a social laboratory. Not unnaturally, more than ever of those with the means to do so are buying their way out of the laboratory.

The problem emerges most clearly in primary schools. Here we find a horrible sugary concoction: one part classlessness to one part warm feeling. The mixture of American scientism and sentimentalism (John Dewey's concept of the child as sun god, round whom everything revolves) with English social emotion has proved a potent brew. A glance into state primaries, those little Edens of amateur learning, melts the heart, and with it the critical faculties. English primary school methods have exercised a romantic hold over teachers and parents, with a devastating effect on primary standards, as we are now discovering through national testing, and possibly over modes of juvenile behaviour. Anyone who thinks this is reactionary nonsense should listen attentively to New Labour's pronouncements on primary schools.

In contemplating the results of these pernicious policies, it is important to remember how we came to adopt them. Agreeable though it would be to believe it, the blame cannot be wholly ascribed to the left wing progressives of the 1960s. It is frequently overlooked that the Plowden report which institutionalised the new primary philosophy was not initiated by romantic leftists but by a Tory education minister of the paternalist type, Sir Edward Boyle. He it was who appointed Lady Plowden; anyone less socially or intellectually equipped to question the new orthodoxy is hard to imagine. Had the Tories' own children been involved, the report might well have been more prudent in its conclusions. As it was the "elite" -in this case Sir Edward, Anthony Crosland and the great and good Lady Plowden-came together from all political angles to foist a mistaken philosophy on generations of state schooled children, while the private sector remained largely untouched.

In Britain, experiments in education are carried out on other people's children. Whether in the primary or secondary sector (and remember the role of the Conservatives in wiping out grammar schools) the result has been to widen the gap in attainment between state and independent schools. In the case of primaries, as it dawned on the middle classes that their cosiness was bought at the cost of low attainment, the shift to prep schools gathered pace in the 1980s. This does not mean that other factors, such as higher class sizes in state schools, were nor present as well, but the essential reason for our primary failures has been philosophical, rather than financial.

So what is to be done to improve standards for all, more than the government is doing? A persuasive answer is: nothing. After all, party rhetoric aside, there is general agreement that there have been advances in our schools-testing, the national curriculum, greater priority for science and technology. It is also comforting to find New Labour criticising long hallowed practice in both the comprehensive and primary schools, while forbearing to criticise the best chief inspector of schools we have had in decades, Christopher Woodhead, for being too right wing, when, as Tony Blair recognises, he is merely being commonsensical. Another, deeper reason for leaving things to evolve on current lines is that, in the end, it is not governments which have the greatest influence on what happens in our schools. It is the LEAs, the teachers, the parents, the employers, the media, and finally something vast and intangible called the expectations a society has of itself.

Without getting too Spenglerian about it, if we are living at the high tide of democracy, and advanced, commercialised mass societies are doomed to cultural mediocrity for the many, what is the point in railing against the inevitable? Why spend too much money or emotional energy on the education of a generation weaned on Neighbours, who enjoy Neighbours, and whose preferred cultural activity will always be to watch the Neighbours of the future?

Seen from this perspective, the British system of educational apartheid makes sense. It becomes not a backward, but an advanced state of affairs, by which islands of excellence are maintained for social and cultural elites, and for those with the money and ambition to aspire to that condition, to the benefit of society as a whole. Global economics, we are told, will inevitably widen the gap between rich and poor, even if everyone benefits to an extent. A global media market seems likely to push culture in the same direction. Should we not simply sit back and be thankful that our private schools are still there, maintaining their higher expectations and results? If 68 per cent of all A grades in GCSE physics are won by the 7 per cent of independent school pupils, why get excited about it? If you do, before you know it, you risk finding yourself immersed in that most sterile of pastimes, the English class game.

One difficulty with such an analysis is that it is highly self-serving for the elite. The worse things are at the bottom of the education system, the easier it is for those at the top. The result is often overpromoted mediocrity and under-used talent, which, despite some progress, could still stand as a definition of many of our educational, cultural and social ills. It is also an analysis that is grounded in defeatism. With its present system of schooling, Britain can look forward to a perfectly adequate future, which is to say a slow subsidence relative to others. We do not face anything approaching ruin, merely a low wage, low tech, low brow society. If the global economic value of the son of a former rickshaw puller in Shanghai is inching ever closer to that of an undereducated and underskilled adolescent in Manchester, then Manchester is destined to sink further than it has: from being the greatest commercial centre of the world to one of the least prosperous and important. Its GNP per head is already lower than that of Hong Kong, as indeed are its A level results in maths and physics.

So there is every incentive to do something more than is being done at present, on the assumption that we are interested in excellence rather than adequacy. Going to the root of our educational problems would be a novel place to start. And if you take the view, as I do, that Britain will continue to suffer from that most debilitating disease of low expectations as long as the educational head is severed from its body, the place to go is clear enough.

if private schools disappeared by magic, the result would be a cultural revolution in state education, instigated and sustained by the upper middle classes. For the first time in memory, there would be serious thinking, at all levels of society, followed by determined action. At once there would be more money, smaller classes, fewer crumbling buildings, and nurseries for all. The entire educational edifice, from teachers to civil servants and politicians involved in education would undergo a quantum leap in quality. Even educational theorists, instead of being viewed as exponents of intellectual grunge, would become men and women of a higher type, as revered as brain surgeons. The flattened, homogenised shape of our schools would be replaced with more dynamic structures, open to all, and there would be more scientific and technological education, bringing a breakthrough in the old search for "parity of esteem."

For the moment, this is fantasy. Nor does anyone in their senses want to abolish private schools, even if that were a legally viable option. The problem is not how to do away with the best schools in the country, but how to open them up to the best pupils, to make them part of the national educational endeavour, and to involve the most articulate and influential people in society in the educational well-being of the remaining 93 per cent. With will and imagination, it can be done. At present the right lacks the will, and the left the imagination.

To summarise the recommendations in my book: British education must be seen as a whole, not as two separate sectors. Two things are needed if we are ever to have a first rate system of public instruction: the desegregation of the system, and an increase of resources combined with a change of education philosophy in the state sector. The first will tend to promote the second, by educational trickle-down, as it were, but desegregation alone will not be sufficient to secure a cultural change of the necessary magnitude in thousands of schools. Conversely, the likelihood of those changes being effected while the apartheid system remains in force is minimal. The two policies are therefore mutually dependent.

Desegregation could be achieved over time on a voluntary basis. All independent day schools of sufficient academic quality would be invited to join a new sector of education, known as the open sector of independent schools. Admission of pupils to this sector would be by aptitude, potential, and examination. The financial and academic autonomy of the schools would be guaranteed by charter. Given their costs, and the probability of a largish number of places being won by pupils of the "fee-paying classes," it would be necessary to charge a range of fees, not dissimilar to the scale on which university maintenance fees become payable by parents. There would be no comparison with the assisted places scheme (APS), where pupils have to show they are poor enough to be awarded a place. Here, every qualified pupil would be entitled to entry as of right, not of charity. The APS would be abolished, the savings going towards the cost of the open sector.

Initially the ex-direct grant schools, which form about a third of the private secondary system, and which until their abolition in 1976, were a bridge between the state and private sectors, would be most interested in a change of status. Manchester Grammar has already indicated as much, only to be turned down by a timorous government and opposition. A domino effect could take place over time, as ex-direct grant schools, drawing on all the talents, reduced other private schools to secondary academic status. Displaced members of the fee-paying classes, whose children were not admitted, would be welcome to resort to less good independent schools, or state schools. Either way they would be likely to show a greater interest in standards in the state sector.

Concurrently, a new deal would take place in state education: the reform of teaching methods and structures in exchange for greater investment and higher pay. No change of culture, no more money. A 10 per cent rise in salaries, nursery schools for all, a far larger investment in technical education, especially in inner cities, and the broadening of A levels, without dilution, would be the bones of the reform. The cost, together with that of desegregation, would be in the order of ?5 billion a year. The government of the day would need the courage and conviction to explain the need for sacrifice and the potential benefits. The necessary funds could come from abolishing mortgage tax relief (currently ?3 billion), and taxing child benefit (yielding ?1.25 billion).

I can think of 100 objections to my own proposals, and have tried to answer the majority in my book. Yes, it would mean replacing one elite by another, but an elite of talent and diligence is surely preferable to the social variety. "Anti-elitists" who oppose the kind of change I suggest have a simple question to answer: how do you propose to rid the country of the kind of segregation in education you so loudly deplore, given that abolition is a myth, that no private school worth its salt is going to cross the line to become a comprehensive, and that the notion that state schools can rival private schools in quality provided they are given similar resources is intellectual escapism? I am not saying that my solution is the only one which stands a chance of working, and would be interested to hear any realistic alternative.

no book or article on education is complete without an anecdote. Mine concerns my daughter, who aged six was in a bilingual French/English school in the US while I enjoyed a sabbatical at Harvard. Examining her work we noticed a glaring discrepancy. The English work was slovenly in the extreme, scrawled across the page, ill spelt and uncorrected. Nevertheless the work earned a soupily smiling face at the top of the page (Dewey's sun child again!) drawn by her soupily smiling teacher. Her French work was immaculate: beautifully written, proper adjectival endings-a small miracle. Any mistakes were crossed out and had to be learnt by the next lesson. I defy any educationist, given the two texts, to identify that they had been done by the same girl. When we asked her about it, her reaction was simple: they want me to do it right, I do it right. If they don't care how I do it, neither do I. I like to think that the same is true of British education: we can get it right if we want to.

To revert to my role of author as self-critic, why did I bother to write this book? My own party are unlikely to seize on its recommendations, and although Tony Blair has shown interest in its ideas, Labour is hamstrung by its old-fashioned objection to selection (an objection not shared by RH Tawney, the apostle of equality). In so far as the book is noticed, I expect to be damned by right and left in equal measure, although perhaps more vehemently by those gentlemen of the right who will sense that their most treasured possession, educational privilege, is under attack: "You toucha my car I smasha your face!" The ultimate answer, I suppose, to why I wrote the book is the sheer tedium induced by the conventional debate on education, which I believe to stem from collective hypocrisy on a grand scale. Having written it, this author at least has modest hopes that a residue of its argument may be left in a few minds. n