reward ‘success’ massively, and punish those seen as losers, is, thankfully, receding; for most of us at least. All around there are signs of dissent. The higher up the hierarchy you travel the more they are hidden, but they are there, even in the later pages of official government documents. They are to be found even in the upper echelons of English society, among the lords and barons. Even among bankers it is becoming hard to identify people to confer top posts upon who are squeaky clean, who believe that drugs should be illegal (Lord Turner didn’t, so he wasn’t given that brief) and that banking is a socially useful activity. And when it comes to singing from a set-belief hymn sheet it is becoming harder and harder to find a reliable congregation to sing along with you. The big marquees are becoming harder to fill with reliable members of the ‘great and the good’. People are not robots, after all. The supporters of injustice are being opposed and social movements to challenge their views are gathering momentum.
Nevertheless, despite the emergence of
more progressive ideas, elitism and inequality continue to condemn the large majority of people to mediocrity. Where extreme inequalities are allowed and encouraged to rise untrammelled, and prejudice towards the ‘lower orders’ threatens to become, once again, the norm, there is only going to be one
result: growing despair. Most children are still not read a book most nights. Many continue to fail under an elitist system of education which sorts, sifts and segregates from an early age, and puts many off education or ambition for life. We now read books of social solidarity to our offspring because we fear so much for their futures, much more than we did in the fifties, sixties or seventies.
Inequality harms us all. It dulls the mind and damages society. We have to learn as adults how to curtail the stupidity that has come to dominate much political thinking in the most unequal of rich countries, like Britain. We need to remember that it is not just the acceptance of these beliefs by a few that perpetuates inequality and injustice in lands of plenty, but the reluctance of many others to confront them. It’s important that we, as educators, challenge these beliefs and encourage others to do so, and that, as parents, we give our children the tools they need to build something better. We cannot rely on our elite to do it, because they know so little.
Danny Dorling is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Sheffield. His latest book, Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists, is published by The Policy Press this month.
danny.dorling@
sheffield.ac.uk.
‘Toffs and toughs’
This picture, taken by Jimmy Sime outside Lord’s in 1937, has been used to illustrate the gulf between Britain’s rich and poor for 70 years. First used in the News Chronicle under the headline ‘Every Picture Tells a Story’, perhaps its most famous use occurred in the January 1941 ‘Plan for Britain’ issue of Picture Post, where it illustrated A.D. Lindsay’s contribution on the English education system.
Lindsay argued for the reform of an education system divided along lines of social class, in terms not so very different to those invoked by campaigners today. After the war much of what was argued for in Picture Post came to pass, including the establishment of the NHS, and the gap between rich and poor narrowed, but as inequality grew sharply during the 1980s news editors began once again to turn to it.
As Ian Jack argues in a fine article in a recent number of Intelligent Life magazine, the boys in the picture, popularly – but not particularly accurately – caricatured as ‘toffs and toughs’, seem ‘doomed for ever to represent a continuing social tragedy’.
APRIL 2010 ADULTS LEARNING 19
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