Just a quick post, for the time being, on the latest education proposals.
Jonathan has collected a variety of views that are hostile to/unconvinced about the changes here, and I’m sure more critical articles will appear over the next few days.
The idea that it is those middle-class Labour politicians who have had the benefit (oops, there’s a point conceded already, I think) of a private education who are now, after all these years, pushing them onto the rest of us, having had a pretty cushy life as a result, is hardly credible. The view always used to be that non-State-educated Labour politicians were the most hostile to private education and to grammar schools, and could therefore be given a booting for wanting to “pull the ladder up”. Tony Crosland (”I will smash every f***ing grammar school in the country”) went to Highgate School and Oxford. And as for Tony Benn…
Our Cramlington councillor is prepared to put an alternative view. It’s more optimistic, less cynical, and doesn’t rely on the use of “Christian” as a euphemism for “Dangerous/Creationist/George W. Bush”. So, all in all, I find it attractive. Some extracts:
We won’t win the argument for secular, liberal education by prescribing from the centre that all schools must be that way. It hasn’t been tried for over one hundred years, and in all likelihood it would just encourage religious division. Instead we need to make clear the advantages as we see them of a liberal secular education. Bluntly, we have to win the argument, instead of relying on parliament to make laws that enshrine our beliefs in law.
The debate around schools reform, and how willing we all are to get up and argue for what we believe in, rather than rely on the party in government to do it for us, is a microcosm of the challenges facing the parliamentary left in the UK for a generation to come. We might not want to spend more time in debates, and campaigning for secular schools, or schools that aren’t the plaything of powerful vested interests, but since those voices are already being heard its our job to raise ours.
The spectre of the “11 plus” still looms from the 1960s, alongside the memory that failing it meant you’d blown your one chance at climbing out of manual, dead-end employment. Would the return of selection in this day of age really have the same social affects in Blair’s slick, mobile Britain? I loathe the private education gravy-train with a passion, but since when did selection, per se, mean you only have one chance to climb, and that being shown not to be “academic” condemned you to inferior treatment? Why shouldn’t these measures be combined with policies that took from the most academically capable to help those at the bottom of the education scale, for whom life is going to be a struggle, with or without money behind them?
If I get time, I’ll post some more thoughts later. I had worked on a piece about school vouchers and thr risk of ghettoisation, but I can’t find it now – I always work on scraps of paper, many of these finding their way into the recycling bin before their time.