Books - The Aristocracy of Talent - Adrian Wooldridge, Michael Sandel, Private Schools

 ...It's so disturbing to learn in Adrian Wooldridge's superb new history of the subject, The Aristocracy of Talent, that we don't really live in one at all. Or if we do it is on that has been corrupted: Wooldridge prefers the term pluto-meritocracy...

Wooldridge's principal criticism of the modern West's "uneasy marriage between plutocracy and meritocracy" is that it enables the rich to use their wealth to buy educational privileges for their children, virtually guaranteeing them a place at the top of society and thereby perpetuating an "intellectual aristocracy" that risks becoming every bit as entrenched as the one the 10th Earl of Wemyss belonged to.

Merit
Francesco Guardi (1712-1793)
Photo Credit: Walker Art Gallery [ CC BY-NC]

If our society was ever truly meritocratic it was during the postwar years, when grammar schools and university scholarships hauled working-class kids out of their poor backgrounds and deposited them on the doorsteps of the professions. Alan Bennett, Michael Frayn and John Carey were beneficiaries of that system.

Today, state comprehensives are hopelessly out-competed by a ruthless and hyper-professional private school system which was modernised in the 1980s and works its pupils furiously hard, providing them with the most brilliant teachers and the most extraordinary amenities. At Eton, there is one teacher for every eight pupils as well as 24 laboratories, three theatres and a study centre in Florence.

New rungs have been added to the meritocratic ladder. The postgraduate qualifications and internships demanded by the most prestigious employers are almost impossible to get without family wealth to cover the extra years in education or the cost of living in one of the expensive cities where the world's most powerful companies are invariably located.

Having purchased their positions at the top of society, today's elite take their prestigious educations and careers as proof of moral and intellectual superiority. Once our upper class at least felt a sense of noblesse oblige towards their social inferiors. Today's elites imagine themselves to have competed their way to the top and disdain the stupidity and backwardness of the racist morons at the bottom.

The preening of the institutions where they study and work doesn't help. Goldman Sachs describes itself as "probably the most elite work-society ever to be assembled on the globe"; Harvard calls itself "a haven for the world's most ambitious scholars"...

Democracy, a system founded on the idea that all people are equal, doesn't make much intuitive sense to meritocrats accustomed to valuing people according to their academic and professional achievements. Richard Dawkins was not untypical of his class when he suggested that it was "unfair" to entrust a decision of "as great complexity" as the Brexit vote to "unqualified simpletons".

They needn't worry. Informal pressures are already infringing on the democratic representation of the less educated. Today 85 per cent of MPs have a degree, compared with 30 per cent of the population... Less than 100 years ago, most labour MPs were manual workers. Today only 3 per cent are. It seems we no longer consider such people competent to legislate...

Woolridge calls for private schools to offer half their places to poorer students and advocates the creation of a "highly variegated" school system consisting of technical and art schools as well as academically selective ones.

He also says we need a "moral revival" in our values to counteract our society's obsessive celebration of intelligence. He points out that many members of the cognitive elite (such as bankers and journalists) are generally despised by the ordinary public, who revere the caring professions instead...

(James Marriott, The Times, 2021)

Meritocracy - a sham and a scan then? Not much of a surprise there. Michael Sandel reinforces this idea.

Michael Sandel is a philosopher and professor at Harvard University Law School. His latest book is The Tyranny of Merit which argues that the liberal left's uncritical pursuit of meritocracy has left the working-classes humiliated and betrayed. He would like a politics centred on dignity and the common good.

...The Covid-19 pandemic, and in particular the new appreciation of the value of supposedly unskilled, low paid work, offers a starting point for renewal. 

Admiration
Walter Langley (1852-1922)
Photo Credit: Victoria Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND]

"This is a moment to begin a debate about the dignity of work; about the rewards of work both in terms of pay but also in terms of esteem. We now realise how deeply dependent we are, not just on doctors and nurses, but delivery workers, grocery store clerks, warehouse workers, lorry drivers, home healthcare providers and childcare workers, many of them in the gig economy. We call them key workers and yet these are oftentimes not the best paid or the most honoured workers."

There must be a radical re-evaluation of how contributions to the common good are judged and rewarded. The money to be earned in the City or on Wall Street, for example, is out of all proportion with the contribution of speculative finance to the real economy. A financial transactions tax would allow funds to be channelled  more equably. But for Sandel, the word "honour" is as important as the question of pay. There needs to be a redistribution of esteem as well as money, and more of it needs to go to the millions doing work that does not require a college degree.

"We need to rethink the role of universities as arbiters of opportunity," he says, "which is something we have come to take for granted. Credentialism has become the last acceptable prejudice. It would be a serious mistake to leave the issue of investment in vocational training and apprenticeships to the right. Greater investment is important not only to support the ability of people without an advanced degree to make a living. The public recognition it conveys can help shift attitudes towards a better appreciation of the contribution to the common good made by people who haven't been to university."

...For inspiration, he says, they could do worse than turn to one of his intellectual heroes, the English Christian socialist R H Tawney.

"Tawney argued that equality of opportunity was at best a partial ideal. His alternative was not an oppressive equality of results. It was a broad, democratic, 'equality of condition' that enables citizens of all walks of life to hold their heads up high and to consider themselves participants in a common venture. My book comes out of that tradition."

(Interview by Julian Coman, The Observer, 2020)

So  the respect and admiration we have for key workers and their contribution to 'the common good' should be manifested in the wages they receive. That is going to be impossible if the recent pay freeze of public sector pay comes into effect. Sandel's financial transaction tax could, if implemented, help enormously. But it's a huge 'if'. 

Why is it that in Germany, for example, apprenticeships are seen as of equal status as those attending university? Young school leavers who aren't university bound enter a three year apprenticeship programme. Half the time is spent on on the job training whilst the other half is spent in special trade schools.

Private Schools

The Incorrigible
John Burr (1831-1893)
Photo Credit: Manchester Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND]

...A net sum of £250,000 is often quoted to educate a pupil in the fast lane from nursery to university but a post-tax £400,000 seems more realistic.

Like much of middle-class Britain, I have anguished all my adult life about whether such a spend represents madness, or the most honourable investment we can make in our offspring's future. Only silly people deny that the system perpetuates class division. I see now, as I did not when I sent two sons to Eton, that the sense of entitlement inculcated by that brilliant institution harms British society, not only through its prime ministers.

...Many schools cite rising costs to justify higher fees: this year they face an increase in contributions to staff pensions. In truth, however, educational inflation is strongly driven by almost deranged competition to build theatres, arts centres, technology blocks.

Most parents, not to mention grandparents, would prefer to pay reduced fees for less ambitious facilities. That option, however, is seldom on offer. Parents are relentlessly harried to pay more to get more.

This is acceptable even welcome, to the very rich. But the squeeze grows relentlessly tighter on those who lack an offshore trust, do not have roubles or yuan to launder, who merely want some affordable education.

Jeremy Corbyn's call to guillotine private schools seemed pernicious. Yet nothing would do more to drag this country into the 21st century than improvement in state education.

...Grammar school opportunities are available only to a tiny minority with the right postcode as well as brains. The same can be said of good comprehensives and academies. For the rest, few middle class parents living in inner cities wish to expose their delicately nurtured little Georges and Charlottes to classroom jungles, if they can contrive to pay what might justly be characterised as protection money for a private alternative.

...It would be a denial of freedom to prevent people from choosing to spend their money in this way. (Private Education) There must come a moment in British politics, however, when some government has the courage and commitment to launch a crusade to raise school standards. This is the assured way to cause most of their private counterparts to die a natural death.

For now, however, the self-imposed middle-class martyrdom goes on: autumn fee cheques will have to clear any day now...

(Max Hastings, The Times, 2020)

Could not private schools become centres of excellence in an individual area - Maths, English, Science, Art, Music, Sport, Technology etc? Entrance would be determined by potential in that area and not by background or ability to pay. Fees would be means tested on a sliding scale. Chetham's School of Music in Manchester, for example, is a mainstream, independently funded junior and senior school. Admission is by audition. Parents who earn less than £20,000 a year pay £600 towards boarding fees and education. Parents who earn more than £196,000 pay the full fees. Everyone in between has to contribute on a sliding scale. 

Letters on the subject

...A successful pupil is a child who enjoys good mental and physical health, who eats well, sleeps safely, has a place to work, who is supported beyond the school gates and has stability and consistent care - love - in their lives. And, of course, goes to a well-resourced school where most pupils come to class happy, healthy and wanting to learn. That means spending more, and joining up spending on education with spending on health and social care, after-school care, secure and safe accommodation and access to affordable, healthy food, wherever the postcode.

I have no doubt that Hastings means well, but, please, save us from this muddle-headed hand-wringing, and instead focus imaginatively and courageously on those whose life chances won't be affected one iota by tinkering with the affordability of our politicians' alma maters.

(Adam Pettitt, Head, Highgate School, The Times, 2020)

*...(Max Hastings) solution of "a crusade to raise state school standards" so that "most of their private counterparts die a natural death" is probably unrealistic. More feasible would be a systematic attempt, through a mixture of means-tested bursaries and state-subsidised places, to change the social composition of the private schools themselves, so that they no longer entrench privilege and block social mobility as much as they do now.

(David Kynaston, Co-author, Engines of Privilege: Britain's Private School Problem, The Times)

*Sir, Not all boarding school fees are £35,000 a year. Fees at more than 30 excellent state boarding schools in England are about £12,000 a year. And many boarding parents use flexi or weekly boarding to suit their family needs and save on costs. Demand from international students remain high as they recognise that the UK's 500+ boarding schools are among the best in the world.

(Robin Fletcher, CEO, Boarding Schools' Association, The Times)

*Sir, Max Hastings is probably right that minor public schools will go to the wall. But that will leave the major public schools as a monopoly. There are easily enough professionals in the UK on seven-figure salaries to fill them but it will result in a further polarisation of society with a super-elite commanding all the top jobs.

(Charles Pugh, London SW10, The Times)