Horner's Corner

Prominent  on even a full news day we get this report from the Sutton trust on unequal educational advantage. Essentially, the research is that  5 schools in the UK send as many students to Oxbridge as the ‘bottom 200′. The Trust add that even when similar A level results are achieved, its those 5 schools who do consistently better in getting people into the ‘elite universities’.

Cue a very weak discussion in the media around the usual issues: why is it that the ‘bottom 200′ do so much less well?  Oh: it must be because the 200 schools give less good subject advice, or it must be because the students have low aspirations (= it’s their own fault, poor dears, or the fault of the schools for not inculcating the right attitudes etc). Well, I suppose these things are a factor. And then we get the usual un-thought through twaddle about meritocracy as a goal (click here for more on why meritocracy isn’t desirable or achievable)

But let’s get real here. What do we think would really happen if (a) many more state pupils got the equivalent grades at ‘A’ level in the ‘right’ subjects; (b) of those students getting the equivalent grades, many more got to Oxbridge -say, as many from places with high free school dinner take up as those that come from the independent sector?

There would be a crisis. This is because the education system is designed to give positional advantage to the middle/upper middle class families who already  do so well out of it. It is accordingly set up to exclude most of the rest. If as many  state students got into Oxbridge as those from the private sector -or, perish the thought, more got in, the system would have to be recalibrated to ensure relative social advantage to the same lot who do so well out of it already. The oiks are getting 4 A* in the ‘right’ subjects? ok:complain about grade inflation  -invent a A** star subject that they’ll do less well at; or raise fees (actually, they’ve just done that), or open some new extra-elite universities as an alternative to the now less exclusive Oxbridge colleges (if you think that is unthinkable, Google the name ‘AC Grayling’). It’s ok if a few upwardly mobile students make it, but not too many. The key is to maintain the same relative advantage over the rest.

The point about our system is not who gets into the ‘top’ colleges, but who is excluded from them. And the same principle of exclusion underlies ‘Free’ Schools, Grammar schools, Academies, vocational v academic subjects and the rest (how many Cabinet ministers send their children to do BTECs? go on, guess). All this happens because we have a class system, and it’s that that makes all the chat about meritocracy quite empty. From the point of view of a certain class, the educational system works very well. The Sutton Trust, and the bulk of media commentators, are thus guilty of naivety at best, bad faith at worst. Or maybe the right word is ‘ideology’. Yes, that is the right word.

More on meritocracy here.

Things haven't changed as much as you might think..

…. the basic configuration of power relations in Britain has changed remarkably little across the last half-century. The route to power lies much where it always lay, while access to that softly carpeted and gently inclined path is scarcely more open today than it was in the 1950s. According to the report of the Panel on Fair Access to the Professions, published last year, ‘the typical doctor or lawyer of the future will today be growing up in a family that is better off than five in six of all families in the UK.’[†] Only 7 per cent of children are educated at private schools, but half of all professionals in Britain have been to one, a proportion that rises to 56 per cent for solicitors, 70 per cent for finance directors and 75 per cent for judges. The cost of sending a boy to Eton or Winchester is currently around £30,000 a year – that’s £50,000 of pre-tax income. Average annual pre-tax income in the UK stands at just over £25,000. The Institute for Fiscal Studies reports that 80 per cent of the population earns less than £35,000. Meanwhile, according to a study by the New Policy Institute and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, there are now 13.4 million people in Britain living in low-income households earning less than 60 per cent of the national average. For a couple with two children this translates into a net disposable income of £15,000 a year, once all benefits and allowances have been taken into account – half, then, the income needed to send a boy to Eton or Winchester for a year. Only 1 per cent of the population have annual gross incomes above £100,000. And this, of course, says nothing of inherited wealth.The Institute for Fiscal Studies concludes that education and skills – or rather their absence – are the ‘main drivers’ behind the rise in inequality in contemporary Britain. And what the figures indisputably make clear is that elite formation in our society is still powered by a small but formidable educational engine, fuelled by wealth that only a few possess, and since access to the elite means access to wealth, the cycle of elite formation is essentially self-sustaining and closed to outsiders.

[...]

Seven years after the end of the period covered by Family Britain, Granada Television screened the first of that extraordinary series called Seven Up, the original and most remarkable experiment in reality TV, in which 14 children from across all social classes were brought together for a day and interviewed about this experience and about their lives, for the cameras. The idea was that these 14 representative citizens of the future Britain would be revisited every seven years and interviewed again – which is what, more or less, has happened (there have so far been seven such programmes). The first programme is little short of astonishing for the insight it gives into the class structure of Britain in 1964. Although they are only seven years old, the degree of social differentiation in the children is extreme. The sense of radical disjunction between lives and fates is shocking, precisely because each of the children seems unique, while all have evidently already been moulded by the system. Being children, none of them has yet thought that they might be ‘ordinary’ and all are startlingly authentic, not least the three little posh boys. ‘I read the Financial Times,’ lisps one of these delicate angels, while another talks of his destined journey via Charterhouse to the City of London. They seem like little aliens, at the very least mere curiosities from an age long superseded. Yet, while watching them, I had to remind myself that they were actually slightly younger than I was in 1964, and that I too went to a school such as theirs, and that David Kynaston did too, and David Cameron and George Osborne. All of us will, of course, protest that, as Cameron likes to say, where we came from doesn’t matter, it’s where we are going that counts. And, in one sense, this is true. But in another it isn’t, which is why Gordon Brown’s quip about Eton struck such a nerve. Whatever we have become, our most impressionable and formative years were spent in the company of the elect, in a milieu that was continuous with the milieu in which the three little boys in Seven Up sit cosseted. Some of us grew up to write history books, some to review them. Others, to travel first class by train every morning from the Home Counties to the City to collect their bonuses. Yet others became politicians. They are about to form our next government.

via LRB · Nicholas Spice · Don’t Look Down.

Pierre Bourdieu said, perhaps not as famously as one would wish, that “public opinion” is an “artifact, pure and simple, the function of which is to dissemble that the state of opinion at any given moment is a system of forces and tensions and that nothing is more inadequate for representing the state of opinion than a percentage”. In particular, he charged that the manufacturers of public opinion in fact produce what they supposedly report: a consensus on what the problems are, what the appropriate questions are, how they should be framed, and so on. With that in mind, I give you this recent ABC/Washington post poll, which tells us that American class self-identification is roughly as follows: 39% say they are working class or worse off, 45% middle class, and 18% upper-middle class or better off. And where the poll does an important part of its work is in this question:

“Necessary elements” of a middle-class life

Being able to…

Own your own home – 80%

Save for the future – 78

Afford things you’d like to have – 77

Afford vacation travel – 71

Buy a new car – 67

This is a very leading question, and a considerable amount of thought must have gone into it, at least in its original formulation (I don’t know how long the question has been asked for, in this form). In a previous post, I mentioned research on American ‘class consciousness’ by Vanneman and Cannon, which pointed out that research on the American class structure was heavily shaped by the activities of the state in that field. In the post-WWII period, the US government funded and drove research which sought to create an understanding of class as status, based on certain patterns of consumption, income and education, rather than an antagonistic relationship centred on production. In that bowdlerised sociology, class is like a continuous ladder of prestige and status, which one might ascend or descend, rather than a conflict built into social relations.

It doesn’t actually matter if it was the state or private capital who decisively formulated these conventions, but the poll question cited above is undoubtedly shaped by them. Decades of thought – or doctrine – are embedded in this simple query. It assumes that there is such a thing as a “middle class life”, that it would have as its essential characteristics certain consumption patterns, and that the only real disagreement is over how important each element of consumption is. What’s interesting about these results is that many respondents appear to have defied the implicit bias in the poll, and defined themselves as, say, working class when their income would give them a reasonable chance of access to all of the “necessary elements” of a “middle class life”. The responses would suggest that there are layers of motivation and interest informing the interpretation of the questions, and thus the answers. Even with that, the poll did its job in that, like thousands of other polls framed in much the same way, it obtained a middle class majority.

“It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it” – George Carlin,

via LENIN’S TOMB.