The education lottery

It's easy to criticise Johann Hari - but that doesn't mean it isn't worth doing. On this occasion, however, he has something resembling a good point when he says that most 'comprehensive schools' are anything but:

"[W]e have almost no comprehensive schools left. The children of the wealthy are educated in successful schools that select by mortgage price. The children of the poor are ring-fenced away in warehouse schools, where they mostly falter and fail. Because there isn't much academic selection, this system is called "comprehensive" - but only because because we have defined comprehensives down, accepting as a comp any school which doesn't have the 11-plus."

What he says is, I think much more the case in England rather than Scotland (there is no 11-plus here) but in general he's right: we don't really have very many comprehensive schools, certainly not in our cities; what we have instead is neighbourhood schools. If you live in a shit neighbourhood, your kids will go to shit schools and if you live in a good neighbourhood, chances are the schools will be much better too. Negative exceptions include Glasgow where even if you live in a good neighbourhood, your kids will still go to a shit school where they run the risk of having me as their teacher - but in general I think the pattern holds.

Johann is also right, I think, in discerning behind the hostility towards the Brighton school lottery a desire to insulate postcode selection against any element of chance:

"The parents in the most plush catchment areas will fight like lionesses to preserve their privilege, and the national Labour leadership will be queasy about taking them on with measures that look like a shift to the left. So it's up to the rest of us to lobby our councils to make sure Brighton is not only a burning beacon of real educational opportunity, but the start of a nationwide bushfire."

Indeed. But before attempting to initiate the 'brushfire', could we perhaps consider a couple of points?

One is, if the lottery principle was extended and this by chance produced a set of school placement results that were even more class-stratified than they are now, would anyone be happy with, or even accept, the results? I doubt it.

The other is, could we not give up quite so easily on the idea that, rather than devising mechanisms whereby people are given equal opportunities to escape shit schools, it just might be possible to make our shit schools less shit? I do appreciate this quaint notion will be insufficiently profound for the erudite minds on the pro-choice or pro-grammar school left of today.

The personalisation of politics

It gets a bit much sometimes, doesn't it? Like with the news that apparently our Gordy had his teeth drilled without anaesthetic:

"Mr Brown made the apparently painful decision because he did not want his mouth to freeze up just hours before he was due to deliver a speech.

The root canal work was carried out by Mervyn Druain of Belsize Park, London.

He told The Sun newspaper that Mr Brown had been "perfectly relaxed" and "did not flinch or grimace at any stage"."

He did this to avoid the old dentist face because, one assumes, he thought it would be a bit embarrassing to be caught on camera dribbling whilst outlining his plan for more press-ups for immigrants.

Assuming the sultans of spin had a hand in this story, you're left wondering what the fuck is the subtext here? Vote for Gordon because he has a lower threshold for pain or something?

Well I've got an alternative take. I've had root canal treatment. It's not fun. I would therefore take the idea that making some stupid speech is worth experiencing this without anaesthetic as evidence that you've went done gone lost your damn mind, ok?



Gordon Brown: possibly a mentalist.

Hand-wringing about 'chavs'

John Harris argues that the demonisation of 'chavs' has reached 'epidemic levels' and takes this as evidence that we are increasingly American in outlook - this being our very own version of the Yank expression 'white trash':

"What that says about modern Britain seems pretty straightforward. How else to understand it than as more evidence of our embrace of an increasingly American social model, in which there is opportunity for all - apart from the undeserving rump too feckless to seize it? In short, we've finally acquired our own equivalent of that dread term "white trash"."

There may be something in this. I personally hate the Americanism 'loser', a painfully simple term used to denote one who loses economically. And if there's anything more depressing than imagining what a 'meritocracy' would look like, it's having a conversation with unsympathetic human beings who imagine we live in one now.

On the other hand, methinks Mr Harris wrings his hands too much because while expressions like 'chav' or 'underclass' may be relatively new, in Britain the attitudes behind them certainly are not.

The Victorians distinguished between the 'deserving' and the 'undeserving' poor. William Booth used the expression 'residium' in much the same way people use 'underclass' today and in case anyone thinks only hard-faced capitalists or muscular Christians made this distinction, it should be remembered that it was Marx that distinguished between the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat and that of the latter he took a rather dim view of.

Whereas I wonder if it isn't John Harris's view that is the novelty in social history because whereas before Marxists railed against the injustice of capitalism, this didn't stop them from condemning bad behaviour, whereas today I think most leftists lack the confidence, worried, perhaps, of attracting that dread epithet - conservative. Take this for example, where Harris describes pupils' responses to his mother writing the word 'chav' on a white board:

"Chavs, the students said, are in the habit of "causing trouble, hanging round the streets, drinking and taking drugs". They are "working class, they live in council houses". Their parents "don't care, and they don't work"."

Hmmm, I'm sure the class in question was fairly obnoxious, unsympathetic, and lacked imagination for the plight of those less fortunate than themselves. But hey, they're teenagers. And the fact remains that we do have a problem in many of our cities with young people hanging around, causing trouble and taking drugs. Object to the terms 'chav', 'neds', the use of 'working class' in this context (you should, since it's obviously being used inaccurately) if you will but I don't quite get this contemporary notion that you demonstrate your liberal credentials by pretending this isn't happening.

Germans in space

From the Times:

"Germany is planning to land an unmanned rocket on the moon in an ambitious revival of a dream that has haunted the country since the 1930s."

There's a number of references in the article to Germans planning to lay their beach-towels on the moon - which is rather unkind. And inaccurate, surely? [stereotype] For should they succeed in this enterprise, they'd be uncharacteristically late, would they not? [/stereotype]

Teachers and bureaucracy

Teachers frequently complain about the amount of paperwork they have to do. I reckon they shouldn't so much for two reasons:

a) I don't think many of my colleagues appreciate that today most people have to fill in stupid forms where they say what they are going to do, then do it, and then fill in more stupid forms describing what they have just done. It has something to do with 'management' and 'accountability', apparently. Call me old-fashioned if you must but personally I'd like the people responsible for dreaming up this shit to be accountable to a firing squad.

b) They should adopt my ingenious bureaucracy-busting strategy - which is simply not to do it. Instead file tedious documents in the cylindrical repository next to your desk.

Amongst the drawbacks of this strategy is you get into trouble for this sort of behaviour, especially when dealing with people with professional authority over you who choose the memo over conversation as the default mode of communication - even though you see them face to face every goddam day.

But I would sill commend this policy to you, because for the unambitious its advantages outweigh the disadvantages.