ninme

Better to know your place than not but still be stuck there.

Telegraph – There’s no way up<br/> Social mobility has ground to a halt in modern Britain and grammar schools are part of the problem, not the solution, claims David Cameron. But what has really gone wrong, and can we fix it, asks Alasdair Palmer

…[in 1966] a society obsessed with the class structure, and one’s place within it. And while modern Britain is different in many ways from its 1960s forebear, some things have changed more than others.

The class boundaries may be less well-defined, and the age of deference has long since passed, but few would argue that Britons are any less obsessed with status now than they were then. Less well-known is the fact that it has actually become harder for people from the lower end of the social and income scale to climb the ladder. The truth is that social mobility in Britain was higher in 1966 than it is in 2007.

This has become one of the defining issues of modern politics: how to create a society that recognises, develops and rewards talent and ability, regardless of an individual’s background. This was the reason last week that David Willetts, the Shadow Secretary of State for Education, announced that the Conservatives would abandon their commitment to increasing the number of grammar schools, sparking a furious row in the process.

Grammar schools have long had totemic significance for Tories. They have been identified with giving intellectually gifted children from poor families the opportunity to escape their impoverished heritage. So when Mr Willetts insisted that the Conservatives would not commit themselves to introducing more grammar schools, it was as surprising as it was unsettling to many traditional Tory voters. Why did he do it?

The main reason he gave was that the Conservative priority is to increase social mobility. Grammar schools, Mr Willetts claimed, are not effective in achieving that goal. In fact, he said, rather than selecting children on their ability to benefit from a high level of education, the few grammar schools that still exist entrench “social advantage”. They reinforce middle-class privilege, because the children who end up going to them are overwhelmingly from middle-class homes.

In his speech last week, David Willetts defined social mobility as the chances that a child born to parents in the bottom fifth of the population, as measured by income, would move out of that group and into the top fifth.

In other words, the only kind of social mobility the Conservative Party of Britain will support is that where the lower class moves up and the middle class moves down. You’d think that the institutions of premier league football and Big Brother would be enough for the lower classes, but any system in which the middle class moves up is a system which must be abandoned, and quickly.

It is not a conclusion usually associated with the Conservative Party. To reach it, Mr Willetts had to make two assumptions. One is that intelligence is randomly distributed throughout the population, so that you would expect it to be no more or less likely for a highly intelligent child to be born to middle-class parents than it is for a highly intelligent child to be born to parents who are in the bottom 20 per cent.

You know, that maybe used to be true, especially when a lot of “lower class” maybe meant “peasants”, but once you change the agricultural economy to the point where the “peasants” are integrated into society and introduce social mobility to it, then people are going to start naturally selecting, making the “lower class” much more permanent. So perhaps the class system is actually better for the poor? At any rate, maybe this is where the 25% of Britons who don’t believe in evolution are lurking, inside government.

Another assumption is that the best explanation for the relative lack of achievement from those born to families in the bottom 20 per cent is prejudice or discrimination from the privileged classes, who conspire to ensure that those who are not part of their group will find it almost impossible to break into it.

“About 50 per cent of the variation in intelligence between individuals is inherited. But the cultural and motivational background intelligent parents provide is at least as important as the genes they bestow. The brain is in some ways like a muscle: it responds to being used. The greater stimulation that a child gets from growing up in a home where his or her parents value education and intellectual pursuits has an enormously significant effect on that child’s intellectual development.”

That means that the mere fact that more children from middle-class homes get into grammar schools, and not many children from the poorest homes do, is not, by itself, evidence that our schools are “entrenching social advantage”. It is distinctly possible that the pattern has a different explanation: families are entrenching social advantage, and the schools merely reflect the pattern set up by families.

David Green, who runs the think-tank Civitas and has researched family breakdown, believes that the disintegration of the family is one of the main causes of diminishing social mobility. “Family breakdown is a major cause of poverty,” he says. “In the poorest 20 per cent, you will find a very large number of single-parent families, which overwhelmingly means women with small children. Those children start off with disadvantages which it is very hard for outside agencies to remedy.

“In the late 1950s and 1960s, many fathers who were in the bottom 20 per cent were very eager that their sons should not follow their own trajectory. Divorce was still relatively rare and most children were raised in two-parent families. Bright children from poor families did not have as their male role models, as they do today, older boys who despise education, think it is cool to disrupt it, and who believe that crime and benefits are the only way to get on.”…

That in turn means that there is no reason to expect the education system to be able to rectify the enormous disadvantages which usually come with being born into the poorest 20 per cent of the population. The best that can be done is to provide the exceptional children from poor backgrounds with the opportunity to develop their talents – which is what grammar schools can do, not least because they remove bright children from their disruptive peers, and comprehensives usually cannot, precisely because they do not separate those who want to learn from those who do not.

It is not an inspiring political message: indeed, it sounds like a depressing excuse for the complacent protection of privilege, which may be why the Tories have rejected it.

Mmmph. From yesterday:

Telegraph – Cameron’s novel take on winning elections. By Simon Heffer

Have you noticed a paradox about our next prime minister, Gordon Brown, and the man who expects to succeed him, Dave Cameron? If not, let me help. Mr Brown takes the view that it is good to win general elections. To do so, he gives millions of people reasons to vote for him. For a start, he gives the best part of three quarters of a million of them new jobs on the public payroll. He taxes heavily people who don’t vote for him, so that he can shower money on those who do. This may be verging on the corrupt, but it is perfectly legal and, in the murky world of politics, perfectly sensible too.

Dave, we are told, also thinks it is good to win general elections. He has a different and courageously novel way of trying to do so. He gives millions of people who might normally be keen to vote for him increasingly good reasons not to do so. There was a glowing example of this strategy this week, when he sent out his bizarre education spokesman, David Willetts, to tell the public that the Tories no longer thought grammar schools were a good idea.

As you sit at your breakfast tables reading this, you can probably still hear the cries of outrage from the shires. Not only are grammar schools brilliant, but they also have a permanent place in the hearts of Tory voters. Tories believe in “getting on”. Grammar schools are the best way ever invented of “getting on”. They have, for generations of clever children whose fathers (unlike Dave’s) were not stockbrokers, provided the ladder to prosperity and success. There was a time – not very long ago, actually – when the Tories wanted “a grammar school in every town”, precisely for this reason. Mr Willetts, whose opinions have changed over the years according to what his masters dictate, supported this line. Not any more.

Interesting.

A couple elections ago, here in Washington, or maybe it was a King County thing, there was some talk about putting more money into programs to help underachieving kids. I’m sure they were going to raise taxes to do so, and judging from experience, they probably succeeded. At any rate, some bright young things did try to raise their voices and suggest, very meekly, that perhaps since they were the ones putting so much work and effort into their education, and doing so well at it, that perhaps they might appreciate a little money going towards the encouragement of their talents.

People who run schools, I’ll never understand them.