Class war rages on: Lord Adonis, the former Labour schools minister, thinks it’s ‘seriously disabling for pupils attending fee-paying schools that they see so little of society.’
It’s not only the poor rich tots who suffer. For this ‘segmentation of the professional classes, systematically, from the rest of society by means of education’ has been ‘debilitating for social cohesion and national, social and economic success’.
One is at a loss whether to single out the sheer effrontery of this statement or its stupidity. Professional classes are by definition ‘segmented’ from the rest of society by education. That’s why they are professional.
Actually, Lord Adonis, educated at a boarding school and Oxford, is living proof that private education has its failings. Had it been more successful in his case, he’d be able to figure out that it’s precisely the Labour-sponsored destruction of grammar schools that made expensive public schools the only way for parents to educate their children properly.
The comprehensive hellholes the lefties have created, while doubtless keeping pupils in touch with ‘society’, complete with drugs, violence and pornography, fail to teach them to read and write – never mind more involved disciplines.
In the old system, grammar and public schools made about 25 percent of the people well-educated and the rest competent. Moreover, public schools, facing as they did stiff competition from free grammars, kept their fees affordably low.
Aggressive educational subversion championed by Lord Adonis and his fellow lefties proceeded from the same egalitarian impulse that’s destroying not only our schools but also our medicine. The objective was not excellence but equality, and that aim has been gloriously achieved: practically the whole population is now equally, uniformly ignorant.
When some responsible parents, pinching at every turn, denying themselves not only luxuries but also necessities, manage to pay the king’s ransom demanded by public schools, there is Lord Adonis, accusing them of detachment from society.
Let me tell you, if I had a child of school age today, I’d do everything I could to make sure he’s far removed from the cesspit the likes of Lord Adonis have created. And as far as he’s concerned, the cesspit isn’t sufficiently full yet – he thinks public schools ought to be nationalised.
In fact, he probably thinks that everything should be nationalised – he is a Labour peer after all. Does Lord Adonis believe that Lord Adonis ought to be nationalised as well?
One almost wishes one could pinch one’s nostrils and stop inhaling long enough to vote for Dave, just to keep this lot out of power. Not much of a choice, that.
Lord Adonis’s lament is strong on subversive sentiment but weak on logic. He obviously defines society as an entity circumscribed by the lower classes. To add a personal note, and don’t call me a solipsist, neither I nor my friends then qualify as society members.
Let’s see. My wife is a pianist, I’m a writer, our friends include musicians, doctors, writers, doctor-writers, priests, academics, lawyers, bankers – not a member of Adonis-defined society in the lot.
Yet I bet that every day each one of us comes into contact with more ‘society members’ than they ever do with any of us. That means it’s they who are ‘segmented’, not us. Stands to reason, doesn’t it?
Lord Adonis advocates ‘a one-nation society’, which to him means a single-class one, with himself presumably soaring above it all. Well, since we’ve identified the true source of our lamentable disunity, I have a counter-proposal aimed at addressing this outrage.
Rather than nationalising all private schools, we should privatise all state ones. The nation will then come together, and the same pupils who currently can’t sign their name will be able to write learned essays on the Dorian mode and Fermat’s theorem. Sorted.
Before you toss a slipper at your computer screen, I hasten to say that I’m not being entirely serious. What’s deeply disturbing is that Lord Adonis thinks he is.