'Educational Apartheid?'

MY CURRENT READING matter for bus journeys is Violet Bonham Carter’s memoir of Winston Churchill. Lady Violet was a friend of Churchill and, as the daughter of Prime Minister Asquith, knew just about everybody who was anybody at the time.

Apart from having an insider’s view, she brings a good understanding of the issues and intrigues of what were turbulent political times. And she writes extremely well too. In those days people who did write, always wrote well.

I’ve reached the point where Churchill has left the Conservatives and thrown in his lot with the Liberals. His reward after a couple of years is a Cabinet post, namely President of the Board of Trade.

Lady Violet quotes extensively from a speech Churchill always considered one of his best. I particularly like this passage:

‘Socialism seeks to pull down wealth; Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty [I guess Toryism just wanted things to stay the same]. Socialism would destroy private interest; Liberalism would preserve them . . . by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue it from the trammels of privilege. Socialism assails the pre-eminence of the individual . . . Socialism exalts the rule; Liberalism exalts the man . . .’

THESE WORDS CHIMED with my reaction to an item on the increasingly tabloid Today Programme. The presenter talked of ‘educational apartheid’ in relation to a recent report by the Centre for Longitudinal Studies. Now, there’s a name that evokes navigation, but whether the CLS knows where it’s going is a moot point.

It has come up with the startling fact that children from ‘disadvantaged’ families get off to a worse educational start then those from ‘privileged’ backgrounds. It seems a bit vague on detail when defining ‘disadvantaged’, which can mean having ill-educated parents, or ‘poor’ parents, whatever that means.

It’s just the way these things are reported that irritates me. For example, this stark division between disadvantaged and privileged – ‘apartheid – as if there’s no gradation between the two. And no mention of the many exceptions, the father who wants his child to do well at school and not spend his life in a routine job; the mother who works to pay for piano lessons. And what about the families which are poor despite being well-educated?

What I dislike most of all, though, is the use of this word ‘privileged’. It’s a loaded word. We are conditioned to believe that privilege is unfair, as indeed it is in so many cases. But it is hardly unfair that one’s parents don’t have a lot of money. Unlucky maybe, but not unfair.

The expression ‘middle-class’ is bandied about more often these days, it seems to me, with all its negative connotations. I’ve never really understood why being middle-class is so despised. In fact, I’ve never really understood exactly what is meant by it. Is it money? So an illiterate plumber on a hundred grand a year qualifies but an unemployed graduate doesn’t? The type of job? So a librarian is in and a Premiership footballer isn’t? Education? Moral standards? Does believing in marital fidelity and opposing divorce make a Roman Catholic bricklayer middle-class? Does the fact that he is a Maoist make a brain surgeon working-class?

IT'S ALL NONSENSE. And so is the insidious campaign to make people feel guilty because they want to improve themselves and the lot of their families. The real division is not between those parents who are privileged and disadvantaged, but between those who care and those who don’t give a damn. People shouldn’t feel bad because they talk to their children as if they are intelligent beings, instead of telling the ‘little ****s to shut the **** up. They shouldn’t be seen as villains because they tell their children that porridge comes from oats or that Paris is the capital of France.

The guilt is on the heads of those who abuse their children with lack of discipline, lack of encouragement, and lack of ambition. Those are the sins which are visited on the children even to the seventh generation. And there’s not a thing the government can do about it.

And now I shall go to the pub and indulge in the appalling middle-class habit of drinking wine and, like a good bourgeois, do the Time crossword.