Perhaps because of our lack of a good education, we in Britain look far too often to the United States for models of how we might better educate. When it comes to the expansion of adult facilities, the United States spends far more on its prisons than its universities. It is not a good model. In Britain, educational apartheid is sustained by the belief that prejudice is natural; that some people are inherently less deserving and less able to do well in education or at work than others. A little training might be allowed, to offset the social and economic costs of poor basic literacy and numeracy, but it is vocational training, and not a broad, general education, that is mostly offered. ‘Proper’ education is for the few who, in time, will come to look after the interests of the many. They must almost think they were ‘born to lead’, these few. It’s hardly surprising that they should come to believe in the natural superiority of their talents to those of the less fortunate majority of people. Indeed, it is difficult to seek power if you do not believe you are especially able. True, we might have to pay them much more to secure their attention later in life, but, still, it is us (they think), the everyday folk, who should be grateful.


The elite believe that their ambition and achievement (and, ultimately, their greed) promote economic growth, and that escalating economic inequality (and the reckless borrowing and mounting debt that results) is a price worth paying for this. This is all wrong. The idea that greed is good is wrong. The idea that the best most of us can aim for is a life the lucky few would despair of is wrong (the rise in depression and anxiety in places with wide inequalities suggests that despair is the normal response to these conditions). Most of us know it is all wrong. Sadly, the same is not true of many of those in power, those damaged enough by being selected out in various ways, at 11 or 17 (or in a very few cases later), to have come not only to believe in but also to defend elitism. Children’s stories and the stories we tell our children are changing. They might still contain fantastic animals that speak, and echoes of the society in which they are written, but less and less do they so overtly defend hierarchy. For younger children the typical plot of illustrated stories now concerns such issues as how sharing makes you happier (Rainbow Fish) and why patience, imagination and negotiation is good (Charlie and Lola). In contemporary children’s fiction the heroes do not appear as ginger-beer swilling boarding school children sticking up for old England, but far more often as the offspring of more ordinary folk. Underdogs are increasingly being portrayed as eventual victors (Harry Potter), while hierarchy and authority are almost always now bad (Dark Materials). Part of the fun of being a good contemporary children’s writer appears to be in trying to take the new moralising just that


18 ADULTS LEARNING APRIL 2010


extra step further. Andy Stanton’s Mr Gum and the Biscuit


Billionaire was ahead of the times when published in 2007, in presenting one of the villains as ‘a businessman in a grey suit who never smiled and told lies all the time’. Not all businessmen are liars, many are good at smiling, but during the boom years of New Labour we came to rely on businessmen (and a few businesswomen) far too much to determine all kinds of policy. Somewhere between 1997 and 2007 banking became the most celebrated of occupations in Britain. It was thought bankers could turn their hands to anything, understand anything, whether education, skills, drugs, pensions or climate change. Take Baron Alex Leitch, for example, a former investment banker chosen to conduct the Government’s review of the skills system, or Baron Adair Turner of Ecchinswell (the one who recently admitted that banking was full of socially useless activity), the ex- banker who was given the pensions remit, and then the problem of climate change, before being made chairman of the Financial Services Authority.


‘Independent’ review Alternatively, look at who sits on the so called ‘Independent Review of Higher Education and Student Finance’. The review is led by a former group chief executive of British Petroleum whose career includes spells as non-executive director at Intel, DaimlerChrysler AG, Goldman Sachs and SmithKline Beecham. Its members comprise the head of McKinsey’s Global Education Practice; the CEO of the consultancy Enlight- enment Economics; the vice-chancellor of the University of Birmingham and former chief executive of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (also Honorary Fellow of both St Peter’s College, Oxford, and Keble College, Oxford); a former Director of Advanced Engineering at Rolls-Royce, now vice chancellor of Aston University; the group chief executive of Standard Chartered PLC; and, perhaps most appropriately, a UK board member of the Big Lottery Fund. Elitism is partly sustained because people


are unlikely to seek high office, or feel able to remain there, if they do not have an unusually high view of themselves and their abilities. But it is also sustained because we tolerate such arrogance, and accept so readily the idea of there being just a few great minds; of there being just a few individuals who should aspire to great positions of power, who are able to advise, lead and lecture. We rarely question why we have so few positions of great power, so few judges, so few executives, so few ‘leaders’. Why is an ‘independent’ commission made up of just seven people advising all of us on the future direction of funding for higher education and students in Britain? If you took every top post and created two jobs, each on half the salary, you would do a great deal to reduce privilege.


The social evil of ignorance was the old injustice of too few receiving even the most basic of educations in affluent countries. The injustice of widespread elitism is revealed through the product of a surfeit of qualifications bestowed on those who already have most. This leads to others’ abilities being labelled ‘inadequate’, a widespread excuse given for the growing inequality.


Destined to rule Believing that you are superior, destined to rule, and that others should know their place and accept your orders, requires a particularly nasty kind of self-confidence. If you have been taught since childhood that most other people are not quite like you, if the heroes of your bedtime stories were children who wore jackets and ties, and bossed the lower orders around, then it may be hard for you to really see most other people as fully human. If you were a child of the 1970s and believed all this you never really fitted in anyway. The businessmen (and those few women) may have been in charge since 1979/1997, the Etonians may be returning, but their subjects are not the same kind of people anymore. The fantasy world of those in power, peopled by a few ‘great people’ and the rest, is being steadily undermined. We should thank children’s writers for their part in that reassessment. Aspects of better ways of thinking are


creeping into policy, not just because the more careful of scientists are finding that we are all born with remarkably equal ability and inability, but also because their findings are falling on many more receptive eyes and ears than there ever were before. Still, many of these findings are only just getting in through the cracks not policed by those who favour inequality – or, as they more often call it, competition. Just two years after the passing of an ‘Education’ Act that described children as having limits, the Government’s 2007 children’s plan included a recommendation that group setting of children be abolished (hidden on page 69). Within the citadel of Sanctuary Buildings,


where the Department for Children Schools and Families is headquartered, there are parents who read the new stories to their children, wishing for a better world to come, and going against the grain of 57 varieties of school for some supposed 57 varieties of children. They might call it choice, but it is simply competition. And, as every good contemporary children’s writer knows, competition is not good. Competition is what you could not escape in the classroom, it is the worst of your childhood memories, and, very often, the reason you are fearful of going back into learning as an adult. It is about judging, putting down, placing a few on pedestals and knocking down the rest. It is about losers and ‘lessers’ and it is not a good human way to work.


The mantra that we must compete harder,


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