Is our children learning?

There are lots of things that confuse me: the conflict between quantum mechanics and general relativity, why people in Glasgow would wear flip-flops, the popularity of Lady Gaga, to name three.  But few things confuse me more than how people who call themselves leftwing — which, at its better moments, has equated to a concern for the most disadvantaged people in society — can express such complacency about the state of British comprehensive education.

There was a story on the BBC today about low teaching standards in Scottish schools: barely news in itself, but the reaction of the UCU spokesman was fascinating.  Here’s what Tony Axon had to say:

“People may complain about spelling and grammar but these days we sit at a computer which works out much of that for you. Are those skills really as important as they used to be?”

His jib would be a bit more cutting were he able to spell his job title (“reasearch officer”, sic) on his website, but we’ll leave that to one side. And perhaps he’s half right about spelling: it’s less important than it once was, as, thank God, is handwriting.  But this is absolutely not true of grammar: computers don’t work out any of that for you, and even if they did, that would still leave out spoken English.

Middle class people judge others on their grammar, as a glance at any Facebook group will show: it won’t take you long to find examples of bourgeois social networkers mocking populist proles for their dodgy use of syntax, orthography and whatnot.  Indeed grammar, and language generally, is one of the most powerful ways by which we categorise each other along class lines.  Orwell wrote that the left regularly shoots itself in the foot by using language that ordinary, working class people don’t understand.  I would go further and say that much of the discourse of the socio-academic-political complex is deliberately designed to exclude normal people (which is why bureaucrats hate the plain English campaign so much).

This does matter.  Look, for instance, at how privately educated Oxbridgers now dominate politics, law and journalism more than at any time for decades.  The grammar school generation who ran the country until fairly recently are now retiring, but are not being replaced by people who went to comprehensives.  To succeed in any of those incredibly demanding and competitive professions, a strong command of grammar is a non-negotiable prerequisite: it’s a depressing failure of imagination on the part of Mr Axon to take something as basic as that for granted.  I would suggest that the failure to teach grammar in comprehensives goes some way towards explaining the failure of comprehensive students to break into these professions.  In any job interview, potential employers will judge applicants who are able to express themselves in a manner the listener can understand (that is, by using something approaching standard grammar) more favourably than those who cannot.  Therefore, those who have been taught this skill at school have a major advantage over those who have not, regardless of all other abilities and exam results.

The statistic that should shame England is that, each year, more Etonian boys go to Oxbridge than do boys who qualify for free school dinners in every school in England.  Is this Eton’s fault?  No.  Is it Oxbridge’s?  I would say not, but for the sake of argument let’s say there’s something in that: let’s say that Etonians, having been taught to speak fluently and conduct themselves confidently in interviews, are favoured over state schoolchildren who haven’t been taught those skills.  Isn’t it therefore imperative, if we want to change this disgraceful state of affairs, that they are?

Scotland can’t feel too proud of itself either: our schools have the OECD’s third worst (only England and New Zealand are even worse; Honkers, Russia and Singapore are at the top) achievement gap in reading literacy between pupils.  The cosy, egalitarian consensus that exists about education in this country isn’t supported by the evidence.

The left’s refrain is that this all comes down to funding.  When I left school a decade ago, that was still true: the building was falling to bits and the teachers were underpaid (though a couple of them shouldn’t have been teaching at all).  Since then education spending has almost doubled in real terms, but Britain has slipped further down the international league tables for secondary education (the figures for the period after 2007 will be out next month).  That should show that we failed to get enough in return for the extra money.

The right’s refrain is to bring back grammar schools.  I’m not arguing for the return of the 11-plus, though by a child’s early teens it shouldn’t be impossible to work out what he’s good at, what he could be good at, and what he’ll never be good at (art and tech studies, in my case).  The familiar retort, “what about the four fifths left behind in secondary moderns?” seems a good enough argument against the old system; but it’s not a good enough argument in favour of the current one.

What is the current system?  If you’re rich, you send your children to private/public school.  If you’re rich and hypocritical, you move to a house in a nice enough neighbourhood to be in the catchment area of a good comprehensive, perhaps topped up by private tuition.  If you’re poor, you’re stuck with the lottery of the local comprehensive.  The status quo, then, with the full support of the leftwing establishment, is one where quality of education is very largely dependent on parental wealth.  The right failed comprehensives by a lack of investment, the left by failing to demand higher standards.  The result is a two-tier education system: which, absurdly, we are warned against creating by trying to change it.  What we have, then, is an unholy alliance between the traditional rightwing establishment, whose sons get to run the country, and the modern leftwing one, who are too wedded to the status quo to consider reforming it.

Thankfully, Mr Axon’s a bit behind the times.  The SNP government are determined to reform the comprehensive system, with a new and explicit emphasis on literacy and numeracy in the Curriculum for Excellence (whose name is really the worst thing about it): an acknowledgement that traditional teaching of English and maths has failed to deliver these.  Teachers are being asked to take more responsibility, and are being given more leeway to do so.  I fear that Labour, with the support of some of the unions, would backtrack on this necessary work were they to defeat the SNP in May.

In England, things are more complicated: but I would suggest that there would be less appetite for academies (probably the least bad bit of Blair’s legacy, though he almost managed to discredit the whole thing by association with creationists) and free schools (which might yet discredit themselves in the same way) if there was more acceptance of the need to reform comprehensives, which 90% of pupils still attend.  It seems reasonable to ask more of the teaching profession in return for more control over the classroom.

Education and work are the greatest tools we possess for social mobility: if we care about social mobility, we should demand more from our education system than previous governments have given us.  Grammar is inextricably part of this, and children who aren’t taught it at school or by their parents can’t be expected to learn it themselves: by denying them one of the most important tools of self-expression and of self-advancement, we condemn them to remain in the situation into which they were born.  I’ll leave the last words to John Humphrys:

“One problem was educationalists who, for example, decided that it was stupid to teach grammar because that was the tool of dead white males: “Let’s get rid of grammar and let them express themselves and change the emphasis from teaching to learning.” That turned out to be complete bollocks and we discovered that grammar didn’t restrict children, it liberated them. We stopped doing that and we’re only beginning to go back there now. I know this makes me sound like Colonel Bufton-Tufton.”

At the risk of also sounding like Colonel Bufton-Tufton: quite.

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