Tall tales and ripping yarns
As we approach the general election, Britain is as unequal as it
has been for at least 40 years. Why, with plenty of resources to go around, does inequality persist, and what can education do to challenge it, asks DANNY DORLING
despair is inevitable.
economic crash, there are plenty of resources to go around, we need to think hard about why inequality persists so much more strongly in Britain than anywhere else in Europe. The cause, I want to suggest, is a set of deep-rooted, hidden and unacknowledged beliefs, each unjustified yet passed off as an unfortunate fact of life; natural, innocent and long-standing. The five social evils identified by Beveridge at the dawn of the British welfare state (ignorance, want, idleness, squalor and disease) are gradually being eradicated. But social injustices are being recreated and renewed, supported by five new groups of unjust beliefs. I suggest that the five tenets of injustice today are: elitism is efficient, exclusion is necessary, prejudice is natural, greed is good and
One way to begin to understand the English education system is to read some of the stories written for children during the dying days of empire. Young readers were presented with a hierarchy of characters, with the subservient ones often depicted as animals, and ‘lower’ animals in particular. The stoats and the weasels in Wind in the Willows had limits to their abilities and needed to be kept in their place; so too with the great ordering of creatures in the Narnia chronicles; and it was the unruly subservient class getting above its station that threatened to wreck ‘the Shire’ and the natural order of a fictitious world in Lord of the Rings. Reading some of the submissions made to the HE funding review reminded me of these stories.
Bedtime stories In the bedtime stories read to children during the 1950s and 1960s hierarchy was constantly defended. It was portrayed as being under threat, in need of reinforcement. The same can be said of older stories of trains and tank engines with ‘bolshie’ buses and ‘faithful’ (female) coaches, or of cabals of privileged ‘famous fives’ or ‘secret sevens’ rounding up criminals from the ‘lower orders’. In these stories folk from the lower orders could not be expected to benefit from access to education; they needed more controlling, less learning. The message was that privilege, spending and effort should be concentrated on the few capable of ‘real promise’, a
fortunate number presumably identified through personal academic interview at age 17 by thousands of middle-aged tutors given the task of grilling late adolescent children. This kind of a fantasy world can only be sustained by enough people coming to believe they are superior, and that others are inferior to them. The awarding of the vast majority of education funding to a few requires a belief that elitism is efficient (and, by implication, that exclusion is necessary). This belief has to be sustained, not just within the ivory towers of elite universities, but down through the hierarchy of red-brick-and- concrete institutions, through ex-polytechnics and into further education colleges and state schools, where the most brilliant educators often still see it as a great achievement to get just one of their students ‘into Oxbridge’. In most countries in the world that have universities, it is your local university you aspire to attend, and, increasingly, most students now do. In Britain more people are excluded from the norms of society by having too few resources to take part in normal activities than in almost any other OECD nation, more even than in Israel. It is only in the United States, Portugal and Singapore that income inequality ratios are higher. In the remaining 21 of the world’s 25 richest countries income inequalities are lower. And in most of those more equitable countries education provision is more equitably applied, less condescending in approach and far less elitist in structure.
APRIL 2010 ADULTS LEARNING 17
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