POLITICIANS HAVE BEEN bludgeoned by press and public as hypocrites for so long now, that it has become like water off a duck’s back to your average spin-meister on the green benches.
The latest to be accused of charlatanism is none other than Nick Clegg. This time it is over the education of his children (a popular vehicle for insult among politicians), who he is thinking of sending to be educated at a private school. Having himself been educated at Westminster, Mr Clegg sees no reason why his own children should not also share his ‘luck’ as he calls his own private education.
The trouble is that Mr Clegg is fond of making statements (like all of those from the same political class) which their personal lives contradict. Here is Mr Clegg sprouting off about equality in education; 'Right now there is a great rift in our education system between our best schools, most of which are private, and the schools ordinary families rely on. That is corrosive for our society and damaging to our economy.'
You can see that his critics have a point: for unless the Great and Good who, like Mr Clegg, believe in equality, subject their children to the failings of the comprehensive system as millions have to do, then hypocrite just about sums up Mr Clegg.
You can see that his critics have a point: for unless the Great and Good who, like Mr Clegg, believe in equality, subject their children to the failings of the comprehensive system as millions have to do, then hypocrite just about sums up Mr Clegg.
Our private schools give a superior education to our children than the comprehensives. If this were not the case, people like Nick Clegg would never consider them an option for their own children.
When talking of social mobility Mr Clegg uses figures to persuade us of his argument, an example of which is the fact that 70 per cent of High Court judges and 54 per cent of company chief executives were given a private education.
If this does not convince you of the excellence of the private education sector then what would? But Mr Clegg is not trying to persuade us of the private systems excellence but of its unfairness. It is, I assume, unfair because people like Mr Clegg can send his children to such institutions while the great majority lack means to do so.
If so he has several options to pursue. He can do what the previous Labour government did for the whole of its 13 year tenure in government and close even more Grammar schools out of a vindictiveness that only added to the inequalities of our state education system: or he can reinvigorate the state sector by re-introducing the grammar school as an integral part of the education system as it once was.
The grammar school helped those whose parents could not afford what Mr Clegg’s children will undoubtedly get - the finest education. The grammar school was an entry into such a world. It gave the educationally gifted from working class backgrounds the help up the academic ladder that Mr Clegg feels is no longer available to them.
THE SYSTEM OF the 11-plus was the great demon that post war Labour governments set about seeking to destroy; and with it many of our grammar schools. The streaming of ability into A, B, or C at the time was loaded in favour of middle class children. It was exemplified in my time at my junior school by the divvying up of streaming according social background. Remember, at that time, we had arrived from infant school where exams were never given, and so when we moved on to junior school there was no academic reference for streaming the pupils
At my particular Alma-Marta the A stream seemed over populated by children from the middle class areas of the catchment area of the school.
This was blatantly unfair because those picked for the A stream were to be coached to pass the 11 plus.
Streaming needed reform, but what it got was revolution in the form of Shirley Williams; yet another beneficiary of private education. Her early Alma-Marta was St. Paul’s Girls School, which, according to the Good School’s Guide, was for the ‘bright, talented, motivated and confident girl [it is an] exhilarating start to the big adventure’.
So exhilarated was Baroness Williams that she came up with the comprehensive system of education that has added to the blighting our society ever since. She systematically threw the good out with bad of the old system of selective education, and brought a dull and collectivised system into being – while persecuting the private schools, which forever afterward were to become the main targets of the socialist dumbing down that we remain infected with today.
Even under the old 11-plus, those who failed it were not forgotten. They had a whole array of options left to them. Apprenticeships, vocational training at technical colleges or polytechnics. Today these latter institutions have been turned into universities for fear of making their students feel in some way underprivileged or under appreciated.
DUMMING DOWN has been the preoccupation of the state sector in education. Politicians have set a new low in order to make every student feel good about themselves and, more importantly from a voting perspective, also their parents.
State education has been dumbed down by vote hungry politicians, and has been found wanting. The Comprehensive sector is a worthless enterprise with little academic credence left to it. Of course there are fine examples of schools within the state sector; if there were not there would be little left for the politicians to defend.
If Nick Clegg is serious about equality in education, then he must realise that it has its limits. We are all different. Educationally speaking, any system of education worth its salt must select the wheat from the chaff. The wheat being the brightest and deemed fit for academia and its mental disciplines. The chaff on the other hand, go where those who do not make the grade turn to.
For the so-called chaff, skilled and highly paid work awaits them. For those who cannot (like myself) make the intellectual grade; then opportunities await them that many of the so-called well educated cannot financially compete with.
The trouble is, that the real snobs are not the blue blood Tories, but the egalitarian leftists who believe they rightly know what is best for their children and it usually means the private sector, while serving up their egalitarian gruel by the bucketful to those now left without even a grammar school to help them up the educational ladder.
These people are not only hypocrites, but dangerous ones at that. By their social engineering of the education service, they have left both academics and businesses complaining about dumbing down, while at the same time students believe they have earned their A levels, and believe them to have had the same rigour attached to them, as at any time in our history.
Every August more and more students make the grade, and soon a 100 per cent pass rate will become the norm – what then for our overcrowded universities. There must not be losers in ‘modern’ liberal, egalitarian Britain, and this applies to every level of education, whether academically, or on school sports day.
WE HAD AN education system under the old 11 plus which was blatantly unfair in the 1950s; but could have been reformed. It did not need Labour’s cultural revolution which now undermines the legitimacy of exam results.
If I had had wealth and children, I would have sent them the best private schools from an early age. They would have been given the best chance in life that the best education in the world could buy.
Nick Clegg is right to send his children to a £30,000 per year private school. He should not feel that he has to justify himself. But because of his misguided loyalty to the comprehensive system, he will no doubt, as he loves his children and want the best for them, send them to a private school.
But being a liberal, he will, no doubt, suffer the pangs of conscience that being a member of such a club requires – but as the bard noted; ‘a conscience makes cowards of us all’.
No comments:
Post a Comment