A government-sponsored study recommends expanding reverse discrimination in university admissions.
According to Dr Claire Crawford, pupils coming from comprehensives should receive preferential treatment over those from selective schools.
Moreover, the worse the comprehensive the more preferential should be the treatment of its graduates. After all, good schools enjoy the unfair advantage of what Dr Crawford calls “teaching effect”.
In a language well-nigh incomprehensible this side of a loony bin, the study insists that universities “may wish to consider lowering their entry requirements for pupils from non-selective or low-value-added state schools (relative to pupils from selective or high-value-added state schools, or independent schools) in order to equalise the potential of students being admitted from these different types of school.”
Cutting through the gibberish, one could sum up the proposal in simple English: pupils of selective schools are better-educated because their teachers are better. This riles our class warriors because they detect a deficit of equality.
Hence the mad idea of equalising “the potential of all students”. Inasmuch as one can discern any sense there, this means that cleverer and better-educated youngsters must be pulled down to the level of their cultural and intellectual inferiors. That failing, they ought to be kept out of universities altogether.
In other words these educational subversives wish to wreak on our universities the same disaster they’ve already wreaked on our schools – all in the name of equality.
The study authors grudgingly accept that most universities are already adopting such discriminatory policies. However, “more could be done” to make higher education even more meaningless than it is now.
It’s refreshing to observe that we still have a seemingly endless supply of home-grown social engineers. Perhaps that’s why we have to import so many mechanical engineers from China, India, Eastern Europe or wherever else they don’t stress equality over quality.
Equality is perhaps the most pernicious of all myths, and its destructive potential has been demonstrated in all places where it has been taken seriously. It was in the name of equality that various tyrannical states (democratic or otherwise) have destroyed their economies, education, medical care – and, at their extreme, millions of people.
In democratic tyrannies, all egalitarians other than militant socialists magnanimously acknowledge that equality of result is an indigestible pie in the sky. However, they insist that equality of opportunity is a goal that’s both desirable and achievable. In fact, it’s more or less the other way around.
Equality of result can indeed be achieved by enforced levelling downwards (the only direction in which it’s ever realistic to level).
It’s possible to confiscate all property and pay citizens barely enough to keep them alive (this was more or less achieved in the country where I grew up).
It’s possible to put in place the kind of dumbed-down schools that’ll make everybody equally ignorant (this has been more or less achieved in the country where I grew old).
It’s possible to provide the kind of equal healthcare for all that has little to do with either health or caring (both countries have achieved this).
What’s absolutely impossible is to guarantee equality of opportunity anywhere but in prison.
A child with two parents will have better opportunities to get on in life than a child raised by one parent.
A boy who grows up surrounded by books will have a greater opportunity to get ahead intellectually than his coeval who grows up surrounded by discarded syringes and crushed beer cans.
A girl who goes to a good private school will have greater opportunities in life than one who attends a local comprehensive (closing private schools down, an idea so dear to our egalitarians, wouldn’t work: middle-class parents will find a way of supplementing their daughter’s education either abroad or at home).
A young businessman who inherits a fortune will have a better opportunity of earning a greater fortune than someone who has to start from scratch (again, confiscatory inheritance laws will fail: as with all unjust regulations, people will either find a way around them or flee).
Human potential, Dr Crawford, can’t be equalised. But it can be destroyed, and following the recommendations of your study would surely do just that.
One never tires of admiring the contortionist dexterity with which this lot tie themselves in knots trying to reconcile their conflicting pieties. Much of this enviable flexibility comes from the knack at lying they all share.
First they claim an all-out commitment to meritocracy – meaning that people should get ahead in life on the basis of personal attainment rather than, say, birth. But then they call for overriding meritocracy by favouring a different kind of birth.
No moral difference is immediately apparent, though the destructive potential is there for all to see.
In the same vein, the Milibandits keep bellyaching about the so-called crisis in our standards of living. And sure enough, this complaint is easy to make.
Since no absolute criterion for standards of living can possibly exist, they could always be higher. Even though ours are stratospheric by any historical comparison, who wouldn’t like to live a bit better?
So how are we to go about achieving our soaring aspirations? Never mind that, comes the egalitarians’ answer.
What really matters isn’t the standard of living but equality. With barely a year left before the general election, the sharpest burr under our class warriors’ blanket is the disparity of wealth between the South, where people tend to work, and the North, where people tend to favour state handouts.
To correct this glaring inequity, in a recently leaked document the Milibandits are proposing to hit every freeholder in the south of England with extortionist taxes.
This is aimed not only at homeowners but, in a commendable show of even-handedness, especially at the owners of retail outlets: high-street shops, groceries, fishmongers, off-licences.
One doesn’t have to be a Nobel economist to realise that the shops will be certain to pass the extra costs on to consumers. So how does this tally with the Milibandits’ unflinching commitment to raising our standards of living?
It doesn’t, and asking these egalitarians to explain their reasoning would be pointless. When ideology speaks, reason falls silent.
What matters to this lot is gaining power, and they sense that an appeal to the egalitarian instincts of the British public, thoroughly corrupted by decades of Marxist propaganda, will represent a welcome shortcut. For the sake of our country, let’s hope they’re wrong.