Higher education, lowered

Send out for the men in white coats. The government – and I promise I’m not putting you on – wants 70 per cent of school leavers to go into higher education.

I admire Starmer’s self-restraint. I’m sure his egalitarian loins ached for 100 per cent, but he manfully decided to postpone that objective until his second term. But even his present aim is guaranteed to destroy what John Henry Newman called “the idea of a university” in his eponymous book.

To be fair to Sir Keir, it was Tony Blair who laid the groundwork for this madness when he set his sights on 50 per cent. Now his Labour heirs proudly announce that the shining ideal has been realised. But they are lying.

Half of school leavers don’t go to universities. They go to jumped-up trade schools, most of them former polytechnics, that were misnamed for nefarious, which is to say egalitarian, purposes.

The government is quite open about this: it shines the light of its vision on all and sundry, with no bushel to hide under anywhere in sight. The idea, as proudly declared, is to boost the number of students from poorer backgrounds from 30 to 50 per cent by 2035.

The words “regardless of aptitude” weren’t mentioned, but they can be confidently assumed. Basing university admission on individual attainments would go against the socialist vision of class struggle.

People mean nothing as individuals; it’s only as members of warring classes that they have any value. And our socialist government is prepared to debauch the very idea of higher education even further to give the poorer classes a leg up in their struggle against… what exactly?

If you have to ask, you aren’t a socialist. Your ears aren’t attuned to the UHF vibes of Marxist echoes reverberating somewhere in the firmament.

Let me spell it out so that even socialists can understand: if 70 per cent of all school leavers go to university, zero percent of school leavers will do so. Universities qua universities won’t exist. We might as well refer to elementary schools as universities, which would get us close to 100 per cent.

Champions of this madcap bloating to bursting insist that, without the benefit of higher education, it’s hard to make a living in our capitalist rough-and-tumble. That’s nonsense even on its own puny terms – unless our £80,000-a-year train drivers all have advanced university degrees.

Conversely, I’d like to see statistics on the number of those who do hold such degrees and yet are flipping burgers for a living. There’s truth to the old joke: “What do you say to a PhD in classic philosophy? I’ll have fries with that.”

But even assuming that our socialist utilitarians have a point and degree holders do learn some marketable skills, that’s not what universities are for. I’d suggest we listen to Newman whose 1852 book spells it out beautifully.

Newman despised academic utilitarianism. Universities were to him places where thinkers come together to pursue intellectual and no other ends. Universities, he argued, should teach students “to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyse”.

As a result, students will acquire a “perfection of the intellect … the clear, calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all things”. As I recall, Newman didn’t attach any number to the percentage of school leavers who had the requisite abilities to indulge in such pursuits.

Seventy per cent? Fifty? You can hear Cardinal Newman laughing in his Oxford grave.

I can’t estimate that proportion with any hope of accuracy. Suffice it to say that in 1950 only 3.4 per cent of young Britons were in higher education.

As a lifelong champion of progress, I’m generously prepared to accept, against every bit of available evidence, that since then we’ve got three times as intelligent and academically gifted. So let’s say that 10 per cent would be a realistic assessment of school leavers intellectually equipped to go into higher education. But that’s 10 – not 70 and not even 50.

You might say that Newman’s ideas were fine for his time (1801-1890), but they are out of sync with the cultural and economic realities of the 21^st century. These days youngsters can’t eschew the utilitarian aspect of education; they can’t afford the luxury of wasting several years on studying subjects of no practical value.

I disagree. I think the ability “to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyse” can then be profitably applied to any field that catches a graduate’s fancy. Moreover, this realisation didn’t become extinct 100 years ago.

Until very recently, a widespread path to riches was for a youngster to go to university and study subjects known since time immemorial to develop the faculties Newman highlighted. Arts, philosophy, theology, history, classics, that sort of thing.

The graduate would then get a ground-level position with a City firm, learn on the job and start getting seven-digit bonuses within a few years. His “clear, calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all things” would be not only useful in his work, but indeed essential to it.

At this point, I have to return to my recurrent theme I’ve stated a thousand times if I’ve done so once. Our governing socialists understand all I’ve written so far as well as I do – possibly even better because some of them went to British universities with which I’m familiar only tangentially.

Hence they are aware that, by putting quantity before quality, they’ll destroy what little is left of our real universities – and they won’t even improve the lives of the poorer classes in any appreciable way. However, if you tried to argue with them along such lines, they’d look at you with a blank expression of ennui.

You’d be missing the point, like someone who advocates a vegan diet speaking to a cannibal. The inner imperative of socialism isn’t to improve any institutions or people’s lives. It’s to destroy whatever little is left of Western tradition.

The oldest British university, Oxford, was founded in 1096, the second-oldest, Cambridge, in 1209. Western academic tradition doesn’t get much older than that, which is a sufficient reason for socialists to loathe it. And anything they loathe, they try to destroy.

This is the only realistic way of assessing all Labour policies, including educational ones. Oh well, if you believe Joseph de Maistre, the British people got the government they deserve.