What a NUT!

Some readers may recall the name of Baljeet Ghale, the former president of the National Union of Teachers, who last year complained that the government's plans to teach a watered-down set of platitudes, under the general (and generally misleading) designation of "Britishness", were "racist". Well, Ms Ghale has now been replaced as NUT president by one Bill Greenshields, whose old school far-leftism makes Ghale's liberal-left talking points seem positively sane, rational, and benign:

The new head of Britain’s biggest teaching union has called for the private education system to be nationalised.

Bill Greenshields, incoming president of the National Union of Teachers (NUT), said such a move would improve state education and make it fairer.

"Fairer" = everyone receives an equally bad education.

The NUT, the most left-wing of the teaching unions...

Which really is saying something!

...has long been hostile to independent education and to Labour’s programme of setting up academies with private-sector sponsors to replace failing schools.

But Greenshields’s comments to the union’s annual conference in Manchester yesterday went one step further.

“Let’s consider our own direction of travel – from private to public, towards bringing all schools into the state sector,” he said. “Then we would soon see some urgent improvements in our state system.”

No, you wouldn't. The existence of private schools does not harm standards in the state sector. Rather, as I wrote when the writer Alan Bennett made similar remarks back in January, it is banning private schools which really would harm the education of millions of children. After all, since chippy little leftists like Greenshields and Bennett are correct in believing that most private schools offer a better education than most state schools, the inevitable consequence of 615,000 pupils being forced to leave their private school, and go instead to the local comp, would be that the majority of those 615,000 children would experience a lower standard of education than they are getting at the moment.
Of course, for crypto-communists like Greenshields, the quality of the education received by the children of the bourgeois capitalist oppressors is probably not a matter of any great concern. But transferring an extra 615,000 children into the state sector would also cause huge disruption to the many thousands of state schools which would find these extra pupils thrust upon them, which would hardly be to the advantage of any of the existing pupils (or, indeed, their teachers).

But what creatures like Greenshields really want is not an increase in standards. Instead, they simply want to assuage their own feelings of envious resentment, by dragging everyone else down into the gutter with them. And they attempt to conceal their resentment and bitterness, by slapping the label "fairness" upon it all, as if that makes harming the education of millions of children - not to mention restricting the right of parents to educate their children in whatever manner they see fit - perfectly alright.

I doubt that any government would be mad enough to actually do what Greenshields proposes. For a start, too many hypocritical champagne socialists (Diane Abbott, anyone?) have their own offspring privately educated. But what is worrying is that a huge number of teachers must surely share Greenshields's deranged views. After all, it was they who voted him into his position, not to mention Baljeet Ghale before him. Which surely begs the question, would you want these far-left NUTters teaching your kids?

Hat-tip: David Vance

Alan Bennett: Chippy little fascist

I read that the writer Alan Bennett has called on the government to ban independent schools. Speaking to Radio 4's Today programme, he explained that his opposition to such institutions began in 1951, when, at the age of seventeen, he attended an entrance exam at Cambridge:

It was the first time I ever came across boys from public school. They were so confident. We were timid grammar school boys but they were very much at ease.

They hogged the bread and slurped the soup - things were very much still rationed in those days.

They were just louts, but I also realised that they had been better taught than I had. I thought that was unfair when I was 17, and that view has never changed.

So, to sum up, Oiky Bennett had a chip on his shoulder as an unpolished teenager, and the passage of more than half a century has failed to remove it. I suppose that this might be mildly interesting to a psychologist, but it's not exactly a very sound or rational basis for policymaking.

The prime motivating force behind Bennett's opposition to public schools, and, I suspect, behind the opposition of a great many people to public schools, or grammar schools, or faith schools, or private healthcare for that matter, is envy, plain and simple. It is pure tall poppy syndrome, the desire to cut down anyone who is any way "privileged", not because their "privilege" actually does any tangible harm to anyone else, but simply because they are "privileged".
It is true that many state schools offer an education that is markedly poorer than that available at most public schools (although there are also many good comprehensives, and many appallingly bad minor public schools). But the weakness of many state schools is not caused by the existence of public schools, and closing down public schools will not actually improve the education of one state-educated child.

Rather, Alan Bennett, and other antiquated class warriors, would, if allowed to put their ridiculous ideas into practice, do considerable harm to the education of millions of children. Indeed, it appears that harming the education of the 615,000 children who are currently privately-educated is the primary, if not the sole, purpose behind attacks on fee-paying schools. After all, Alan Bennett wants to force those 615,000 children to move from public schools, which he believes offer a superior education, to state schools, which he says offer an inferior one. If this is not indicative of a desire to harm their education, then I don't know what is!
But if public schools really were abolished, then that would also harm the education of children who are already being educated in state schools. The cost and logistics of transferring an extra 615,000 children into the state sector would be enormous, and would strain the resources of many state schools, which are often already overstretched, beyond breaking point. How would this improve the education of any child?

The way to improve overall standards of education is not to attack those schools which are actually functioning well. That may perhaps be the path to ensuring that everyone has an equal education, but it would only be an equally bad one. If we want to ensure that as many children as possible have a good education - even if the exact quality varies from school to school - then the answer is to improve the state education system. Reintroducing grammar schools (which, lest we forget, were sufficiently effective that they allowed a working class boy like Alan Bennett to get into Cambridge, possibly in place of the bread-hogging toffs who left such a lasting impression upon him) would be a good start.

Of course, the other point that stands to be made is that, as the chief executive of the Independent Schools Council pointed out, it would be a gross infringement of parents' rights for the government to begin dictating precisely how and where they should educate their children. That Bennett seems prepared to totally disregard this is simply another indicator of the almost fascistic authoritarianism of many socialists, who, it seems, regard children as the property of the state, to be dealt with solely as the state wishes. I suppose that we should at least be grateful to him for demonstrating this, and also the extent to which socialism is so often little more than rationalised resentment.

Universities biased against the poor?

The universities secretary John Denham has complained that top universities are biased against state schools when it comes to admissions. As evidence for this, Denham pointed out that it is generally the case that the better a university is, the fewer of its students were educated at state schools.

However, while this is undoubtedly the case, Denham makes the classic leftist mistake (also made when discussing supposed racist or sexist discrimination) and assumes that inequality of outcome proves the existence of discrimination. In fact, in cases where widespread discrimination on the basis of background has been alleged it has almost always been the case that admissions tutors were engaging in "positive" discrimination against those from private schools, and sometimes also against those from high-performing state schools. And does anyone really believe that academics, who tend overwhelmingly to hold left-wing views, are deliberately refusing to offer candidates places based in whole or in part on the fact that they do not come from a well-off background?

What John Denham might like to consider is, that it is the poor quality of the education that many of those from the poorest backgrounds are receiving in state schools that lies behind their failure to achieve places at elite universities. The fact is, that while there are excellent state schools and appallingly bad private schools, state schools do tend, on average, to be worse (with the distinguished exception of grammar schools, which are usually better). Those that educate pupils from the poorest background are often the worst of all, in terms of both basic teaching quality, and school discipline. As such, it is almost certain that if you have two newborn babies of equal ability, and you send one off to the Dragon and Eton and the other off to a state primary where the children carry knives, and a secondary school where they carry guns and deal drugs, then the first one will perform at a substantially higher level in his exams. Doing something to genuinely increase the standard of education at state schools (as opposed to increasing the number of state school pupils passing increasingly easy exams) might be the answer that Denham is looking for, if he wants to reduce the disproportionate number of the privately-educated at our best universities. But, of course, doing something useful is the difficult option for a Labour politician; it is far easier to play at class warfare and blame someone else.