Comprehensives aren’t working

The words ‘fair education’ have the same effect on me that the word ‘culture’ allegedly had on Dr Goebbels.

Yet these dread words dominate the almost universal hysteria in the press over Mrs May’s intention to create new grammar schools. That, according to the critics, is unfair. The fair system is one we have now: comprehensive schools cranking out comprehensively illiterate savages.

A survey of teenagers aged 16 to 19 in 23 developed countries placed our youngsters at 23 in literacy and 22 in numeracy, which wouldn’t exactly qualify our education as a rip-roaring success.

Moreover, England is the only Western country where those aged 55 to 65 showed better literacy and numeracy than those aged 16 to 24. This wouldn’t have anything to do with the introduction of comprehensives in the 1960s, would it?

Never mind the quality, feel the fairness. Nothing else matters.

But what if – and I fully expect the god of progress to smite me – we suggested that levelling (aka fairness) isn’t a legitimate purpose of education? What if we reminded ourselves of how those purposes were defined before the 1960s?

Education was then expected, first, to incorporate youngsters into our civilisation, second, to develop their minds and, third, to give them basic tools for survival in the economic rough-and-tumble.

Anyone whose mind isn’t poisoned by what Mrs May correctly identifies as ‘dogma and ideology’ must see how spectacularly British education is failing on all three counts.

Starting from the end, about 650,000 youngsters are officially unemployed, which figure, though bad enough, is misleading. It excludes those who do odd jobs and those who only work part-time. Include them, and our youth unemployment rate wouldn’t be far off the Euro-area average of 20.7 per cent – this in a considerably livelier economy.

As to the first two desiderata, the less said about them the better. Forget about the civilising effect of education or developing pupils’ minds, let’s just hope we’ll keep most youngsters off the bottle and out of prison.

Perhaps teaching teenagers to read, write and add up would be a good idea too, modest though this goal is. Such minimum requirements used to be met in elementary school, whereas now they look like a shining ideal for secondary schools to dream of.

But an ideal it’ll remain for as long as we put equality before quality – for as long as the word ‘fair’ is bandied about. As it was yesterday on Sky News, which I courageously watched for 15 minutes or so.

First I was regaled by an illiterate rant from Shadow Education Secretary Angela Rayner. For the country’s sake, I hope Miss Rayner will remain in the shadows, for the way she talks, lexically, grammatically and phonetically, suggests only cursory familiarity with the subject under her aegis.

One can understand that, having produced her first, illegitimate, child at age 16, Miss Rayner had no time to learn how to speak English properly. But she does know how to use ‘fair’ and all its cognates with commendable fluency. Grammar schools, she explained, are unfair because only bright children are admitted – and the educated classes have brighter children.

The sports reporter Jacquie Beltrao chimed in, and knowing a thing or two about sports ipso facto qualifies her to pontificate on such subjects to a vast audience. Middle-class families, she explained, will be able to afford tutors to prepare their offspring for 11-plus exams or their equivalents.

I’ve got news for Miss Beltrao: more cultured families don’t even have to hire tutors. Having books in the house, rather than crushed beer cans, already gives their children an unfair head start. There’s also another factor… hold on a second, let me make sure no one’s listening… children from such families tend to have higher IQs than children from, well, different families.

Everywhere one looks life is unfair: some children are brighter than others, some are more cultured, some are more curious about the world than about places to score drugs, some have ambitions beyond producing illegitimate children in their teens. That’s how life is, and schools should accommodate such unfairness rather than trying to eliminate it and produce generations of feral ignoramuses.

Mrs May is absolutely right in this undertaking, but I doubt it’ll succeed. In the face of fierce opposition from most teachers and their unions, to say nothing of our ‘liberal’ media, the project will be either scuppered or diluted beyond recognition.

Even if it survives unmolested, it’s impossible to have better schools without better teachers. Where will these come from, in sufficient numbers to make new grammar schools work?

Most of our teachers have gone through the same moron-spewing system of education. Then they topped it up at teachers’ training colleges, which are hatcheries of precisely the ‘dogma and ideology’ Mrs May deplores.

They may be well-equipped to teach pupils how to use condoms, which is a significant part of the curriculum. But they can’t possibly incorporate youngsters into a civilisation of which they themselves aren’t a part.

Hence we need a considerably more, as it were, comprehensive overhaul than what Mrs May has in mind. But hey, we have to start somewhere.