A tiny percentage of people get to
enjoy a disproportionate share of the wealth created by everyone's
work. A vast number are dragged along, over or under the breadline
depending on this week's shifts. And they're the lucky ones, who have
received the miracle of private sector job creation; two and a half
million people have no job at all. There's general agreement from
people Right and Left that both inequality and unemployment are
serious problems, so why are our attempts to solve them so
ineffective?
The big ideas we have are higher taxes,
or lower ones, for the rich; job guarantees, training, slashed
benefits for the poor. These are solutions that apply only to adults.
We go to work on the problems of inequality and unemployment at the
precise point we stop teaching people what society is, and what to
expect from it. What are these teachings, and can they explain why
the problems we experience as adults are so intractable?
What looms largest over school, from
the teachers' and the students' perspectives, is that some kids are
really good at it, and others are really bad. Most people find
themselves in the middle but the message is just as significant: some
people are better than you, others are worse. The 1% probably didn't
go to your school but the justification for their existence did.
Society has a top and a bottom.
Our idea of improving education is not
to challenge this idea but to entrench it. Michael Gove recentlyboasted of a 'historic period' in state education, because there are
fewer schools where over 40% of children fail to get Cs in English
and Maths and more children are taking the academically respectable
subjects of the English Baccalaureate. So there's nothing wrong with
the hierarchy, as long as a respectable percentage of poor children
reach a middle class level of academic achievement, and are then
taught how to act middle class.
The Left's big counter punch to thisnarrative comes from the baby botherers. They say that
schools struggle valiantly but arrive too late to stop poor children
becoming unemployable adults. Lack of early years intervention leaves
our heroic teachers trying to salvage irreparably damaged goods.
Let's say we went all in on this and invested billions in the National Child
Rearing Service, giving every kid a structured, word-rich infancy,
what then? We line them up, as equals, on the school starting line
and say may the best man win? Is that fairness? Lack of language
skills is only catastrophic for later earning potential because
school is obsessively concerned with them and no others. This plan
treats school, an organisation 100% in our control, as fixed and
tries to change the way millions of families raise their children to
better fit in with it. That's crazy, no?
Evil twin of our failure to solve the
problems of inequality and unemployment is our submissive reaction to
that failure. We have the choice to force change, either through the
ballot box or Parliament Square. We've done neither, and it could be
because passivity is something else we were taught at school. All our
work there was set and judged by those in authority. We spent our
school days doing what we were told. After school, if we were good we got to spend more time doing activities supervised by adults. If we were bad we were put in detention to learn to obey.
A question for lovers of liberty. If
you want your child to reap the social benefits of going to school, but without suffering the stigma and shame of being branded 'low ability' are you free to choose this? Is there a Free School
where you can send your child to learn freely what interests them,
free of judgement?
Equality from the Beginning is a
decentralised revolution. We don't aim, like the revolutions of the
past, to change the personnel of the powerful. We aim to redistribute
power from the top to the bottom. The revolution won't happen through
a general election or a mass uprising, it happens when your local
school adopts a curriculum in which all find a path to success and
none are labelled inferior. Inequality is a problem we're failing to
fix as adults, it's time to try equality from the beginning.
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