It is a truth universally acknowledged that one should never start by saying ‘it is a truth universally acknowledged’. Yet no other phrase could better introduce the First Law of Modernity:
Large-scale government programmes always produce results different from those intended. The likelihood of such results being opposite to those intended is directly proportional to the zeal put into the implementation of said programmes.
Few programmes have ever been implemented more zealously than the systematic effort to turn British education from the envy of the world into its laughingstock. The rot set in in 1965, when Tony Crossland, Labour Education Secretary, announced, ‘If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every f****** grammar school…’
Next to the determination to win the Battle of Britain, this was the only sentiment I can think of that has ever drawn cross-party consensus. The subsequent two generations of politicians have achieved the task set in such a forthright fashion, and the sainted Margaret Thatcher, when still Education Secretary, shut down more grammar schools than any of her Labour colleagues.
Grammar schools, and the Tripartite system in general, were based not on any ideology but on a simple empirical observation that holds true all over the world: only about 25 percent of all children are academically inclined or capable. Yet 100 percent of the children should leave school equipped to handle life’s challenges as best they can – be it as future barristers or mechanics.
Conversely, comprehensive schools that replaced the old grammar and secondary modern schools were based on an ideological, which is to say false, premise. Their architects proceeded from the assumption that equality was an end both desirable and achievable.
This was a pie in the sky, and the pie was rancid. True equality can only exist in heaven; in earth, people are created unequal in strength, intelligence, character – well, in everything. Earthly inequality is thus a natural order of things, and it can only be distorted by unnatural means. Even then it won’t disappear; it’ll be replaced by a worse type of inequality or else camouflaged by demagoguery.
An important thing to remember is that downwards isn’t just the only possible direction of levelling but, for its champions, the only desirable one. To Burke ‘compulsory equalisations,’ could only mean ‘equal want, equal wretchedness, equal beggary.’ To modern egalitarians they are the shining beacon.
Now Michael Gove laments the entirely predictable, nay inevitable, results of the egalitarian hurricane that has swept away any semblance of decent education in Britain’s state schools. He has noticed with his eagle eye that most walks of life, including, amazingly, pop ‘music’ and some sports, are dominated by alumni of public schools.
What do you expect? A domination by comprehensively educated school-leavers who can’t read, write or add up? If comprehensives taught such skills, some pupils would master them better than others, thus defeating the founding purpose of these ‘schools’. It’s much better to make sure everyone is equally illiterate. This underlying sentiment, supposedly based on the desire to increase social mobility, is guaranteed to eliminate it, enshrining for a lifetime the conditions to which a child is born.
‘We live in a profoundly unequal society,’ laments Mr Gove. Truer words have never been spoken. In fact, they are so true that I’d like him to produce an example of a single equal society in the 5,000 years of recorded history. I, on the other hand, can offer many recent or current examples of countries where an attempt to create such a society resulted in the worst butchery the world has ever seen.
‘When more Etonians make it to Oxbridge than boys and girls on benefit, then we know we are not making the most of all our nation’s talents,’ says Mr Gove. One gets the impression he shares Tony ‘Anthony’ Blair’s aspiration that half of all Britons should have a university education – something guaranteed to reduce universities to the intellectual level of inner-city comprehensives.
I don’t have the same access to data as Gove has, so I’m not going to challenge the counterintuitive proposition that children on benefit are the secure depositories of ‘our nation’s talents’. But if they are, then such talents would come to the fore more readily if ‘benefits’ weren’t available, and the children saw before them the example of their parents working hard to earn a living. And if we had state grammar schools able and willing to spot those talents and to create conditions in which they could thrive.
‘For those of us who believe in social justice, this stratification and segregation are morally indefensible,’ thunders Gove. He ought to know better than to use hackneyed non-words designed to conceal hackneyed non-thoughts.
In real language, social justice would mean giving everyone his due. If such justice operated in Britain, half of her population, betrayed and brutalised by egalitarians, would starve to death. For Gove and other with-it politicians, ‘social justice’ means further promotion of the same harebrained philosophy that has destroyed our education in the first place. If that’s justice, give me injustice any day.
What’s even more galling is that one senses that Gove knows all this. Given a free hand, he’d probably wish to do a Crossland on the comprehensives and replace them with the old system, the one that in the distant past made Britain one the best-educated nations in the world. But even to hint at such a desideratum would be as ‘politically inexpedient’ as any other sane policy.
That’s why he’ll continue to treat the cough rather than the lung cancer, he’ll continue to mitigate the symptoms of what he probably knows to be a systemic flaw. Systemic flaws, Mr Gove, are eliminated by changing the system. Not tweaking it cosmetically to the accompaniment of meaningless twaddle.