think of my children

From Nick Cohen’s column today:

That Britain is becoming an aristocracy of wealth is undeniable. The simplest measure was devised by Jo Blandon and her colleagues at the London School of Economics. You might assume that a child born in 1958, when Harold Macmillan ran the country and stuffed his cabinet with dukes, would have been far more hamstrung by his class origins than a child born at the end of the swinging Sixties in 1970. Not a bit of it. The LSE found that on average a boy born to a well-to-do family in 1958 earned 17.5 per cent more than a boy born to a family on half the income. The son of an equivalent Mr and Mrs Moneybags born 1970 will be earning today 25 per cent more than his contemporary from the wrong side of the tracks. Far from decreasing, class advantage has grown.

Followed by a ringing cry to re-institute grammar schools. Oh lordy, what it must be like to be a London liberal lefty with a kid rising five. The problem with this is that there’s no evidence within it to indicate that education is responsible for that shift in incomes. Wouldn’t the above have something to do with the fact that the incomes at the top of the scae have risen much more quickly than those lower down? To the kind of economy we’ve had for the last twenty five years?

What’s interesting about the article as a whole is that it typifies a particular dilemma of a particular group of individuals, which is then re-cast as a national issue by the fact that a large number of them work in the media. Specifically, the issue is of gentrification. The young and liberal move into funky, down at heel areas, become parents, and then start looking round at the local schools. There’s no way their kids are going to contribute to the local, funky, down at heel ambience. So they proceed to genteely slitting each other’s throats in the manner described here.

If you are rich and have a bright child, he will go private and although he will have to pass exams, he won't face competition from children whose parents can't afford the fees. If you are rich and have a dunce, you select by house price and move into the catchment area of a good school or get your nanny to drive your child to a good school in another borough or lie to vicars and send your child to a good church school. Again, you know your child won't face competition from brighter children whose parents can't afford to buy houses in the right area or don't have the knowledge to play the system. The result is that in the inner cities we don't have comprehensives but a universal system of secondary moderns.

What’s really working itself out here isn’t a plea for rising social mobility for the poor, but an acute perceived danger of falling social mobility for the kids of the gentrifying classes. But you can’t look at education as a whole through this lens. The fact is that most people don’t live in inner cities, over 90% of the population use state schooling and that most do so in an uncomplicated and straightforward way, ie they send their kids to the local school. The point is here that though most comprehensive education is mediocre then, in the grammar school –secondary modern system, most education was set up to be deliberately second rate. If you reinstate grammar schools across the country then you’re condemning huge swathes of middling people to inferior education for their kids than they get now. And after all, large numbers of inner city kids wouldn’t get into grammar schools either. They’re meant to be exclusive. Nick’s kids, of course, may have a better chance.

Comments

[Blimpish]

As you might imagine, I don't have a problem with the idea - but it doesn't much matter. Grammar schools belong to a bygone age, when people accepted being sorted. The reason why Nick Cohen (and, sorta, me) might favour selective education - that it involves selection by merit rather than property price - is precisely why the upper-middle-classes wouldn't allow it to happen. As soon as one of their children were sent to the Secondary Modern, they'll become activists for a new Comprehensive revolution.

That's the same reason why the Tories' policy on tuition fees (no fees but fewer places) would've come undone in practice - try telling the middle classes that Fabian or Jemima isn't clever enough.

Re his original point, about aristocracies of wealth and declining social mobility, and your suggestion that this has most to do "with the kind of economy we’ve had for the last twenty five years": yes and no. The Thatcher reforms might've accelerated the trend, but that's all. Widening economic inequality is a natural consequence of the end of other, social and political, inequalities and the rise of meritocracy.

There's also something here that tends to get lost on the Left in discussions about social mobility these days - it isn't equality, at all. A society with equal opportunity is one where some people are going to be at the bottom, for their whole life, according to their knowledge and their effort. They won't even be able to take solace that this is their 'station' and that they shall inherit the earth; only that they were the losers in the ratrace.

[dearieme]

How egalitarian we are, according to his figures. If my parents earned 100% more than yours, I should expect to end up earning only 17.5% or 25% more than you. Well done us. Trebles all round.

[Jayanne]

"There's also something here that tends to get lost on the Left in discussions about social mobility these days - it isn't equality, at all."

These days, perhaps, though I doubt it. But I accept that critical discussions about equality of opportunity, from a left viewpoint, may take place largely within academia. What may have vanished from "the Left" is an understanding that abolishing grammar schools without also abolishing public schools is a near-fatal error.

Incidentally, "selection by merit" is impossible.