John Connell: The Blog

A let­ter in today’s Observer about George Osborne’s finan­cial com­pe­tence caught my eye — the let­ter was in response to an arti­cle by Will Hut­ton in which he had assumed that Osborne really is seek­ing to rem­edy finan­cial inequal­ity in the coun­try but he just doesn’t have the eco­nomic com­pe­tence to make it hap­pen. The sen­ti­ment in the let­ter res­onated with my own thoughts, not just about Osborne, but about the whole Tory endeav­our in Gov­ern­ment at the moment, and espe­cially about Michael Gove’s assault on school­ing in Eng­land. Of Osborne, Gra­ham Aspinall, of Sheffield, wrote:

To credit Osborne merely with eco­nomic illit­er­acy, as Hut­ton and Blanch­flower et al do, is too char­i­ta­ble. He is a shrewd ide­o­logue and strate­gist. It’s not that he doesn’t under­stand the ruin he is inflict­ing on fam­i­lies. He knows what he’s doing; he just doesn’t care. Osborne is not an eco­nomic illit­er­ate; he’s worse – a moral illiterate.

Polly Toyn­bee has called the cur­rent admin­is­tra­tion:

…the most rightwing of all post­war governments…

I agree. And deep at the heart of this rightwing gov­ern­ment is a clever, seemingly-complex (but really not), unfail­ingly polite, well-read and media-savvy ide­o­logue who just hap­pens to be in charge of edu­ca­tion, appar­ently by his own choice. At least in Scot­land we have only to con­tend with an ego­tis­ti­cal incom­pe­tent as edu­ca­tion sec­re­tary; Eng­lish state school­ing, on the other hand, is now being sys­tem­at­i­cally under­mined and dis­man­tled by a man who thinks that his own life tale, that of some­one from hum­ble begin­nings made good by a rig­or­ous school­ing of a trad­tional kind, is the model that must serve everyone.

But that is only part of what Gove is about. Gove, like many of his rightwing friends in this Gov­ern­ment and beyond, accept whole­heart­edly the con­cept of an edu­ca­tion sys­tem as a race to the line, as the means by which the country’s elite is selected and trained, and as a sys­tem designed to weed out those who are not capa­ble (defined by cri­te­ria designed to serve the rightwing credo) of ben­e­fit­ing from any kind of aca­d­e­mic school­ing. Many will throw, and have thrown, the epi­thet of elit­ist at this crew, and will intend it as cen­sure. To Gove and his col­leagues, such name-callers are merely stat­ing the obvi­ous. They would call them­selves exactly the same, being merely descrip­tive of their phi­los­o­phy and inten­tions and values.

Michael Gove is a man with a mis­sion, and he is in a hurry to com­plete it. State school­ing in Eng­land has been, for many years now, a for­eign land when viewed over the fence from Scot­tish edu­ca­tion; soon, it will be more like view­ing the sur­face of Sat­urn, an exotic place beyond our easy ken and under­stand­ing, a sit­u­a­tion not lack­ing in irony given that Gove’s own school­ing hap­pened in Scotland.

Like war, for­mal edu­ca­tion is a con­tin­u­a­tion of pol­i­tics by other means — less direct, less con­trolled, less con­trol­lable, but no less pow­er­ful in its long term effects.

I wrote the above on this blog three years ago in a post that lamented the sheer cack-handedness of most Gov­ern­ment inter­fer­ence in edu­ca­tion (they call it policy-making) in Eng­land over the past 30 years. I should have empha­sised the uncon­trol­lable effects of this ‘policy-making’ much more than I did — a long suc­ces­sion of edu­ca­tion min­is­ters in West­min­ster over the past 3 decades have attempted to inflict their own vari­ants on social engi­neer­ing, and all of them have failed spec­tac­u­larly. Unfor­tu­nately, each inevitable fail­ure leaves a legacy of yet more dis­ar­ray behind it.

Simon Jenk­ins, writ­ing in today’s Guardian, agrees:

Account­abil­ity for England’s schools is now a total mess.

Jenk­ins takes aim at the lat­est ridicu­lous ‘league table’ to be imposed on England’s schools by Michael Gove. As he writes:

The crav­ing for uni­for­mity in pub­lic ser­vices has become a frenzy.…The belief that the crooked tim­ber of mankind can be beaten straight on a White­hall work­table is the great­est of all min­is­te­r­ial fallacies.

It reminds me of Campbell’s Law, first stated by Don­ald T. Camp­bell, the psy­chol­o­gist who pio­neered the study of human creativity:

The more any quan­ti­ta­tive social indi­ca­tor is used for social decision-making, the more sub­ject it will be to cor­rup­tion pres­sures and the more apt it will be to dis­tort and cor­rupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

Michael Gove might well be push­ing for a par­tic­u­lar ver­sion of his­tory to be imposed on England’s schools, but he is obvi­ously less than keen to learn history’s lessons himself.

Rocked in the cra­dle of power from birth so that its rhythms become sec­ond nature, these peo­ple imbibe their sense of enti­tle­ment with their mother’s milk. But the per­sonal tutors, pri­vate schools, the most expen­sive uni­ver­si­ties do not, some­how, suf­fice. As though the ben­e­fits of wealth were not enough, they appar­ently feel the need to game the very sys­tem they already control.

Gary Younge, in The Guardian, bril­liantly giv­ing the lie to any thought that we live in a meritocracy.