Time for more economics teaching in schools

During a less than complimentary Twitter exchange yesterday about the qualifications needed to be Chancellor of the Exchequer (with the present incumbent providing the context) I made a serious point about the lack of economics teaching in schools, and rather surprisingly got a negative response; it would just mean pupils learning (I paraphrase) more of the neoliberal stuff being spouted by the political class.

I disagree.  I worry when I read that economics is in decline in schools (although there seems to have been a small recovery in the number of A-level candidates in the last few years), and that there are almost no newly-qualified economics teachers: an understanding of economics seems to me to be really important in a democracy in which the key political issues of the day are economic as well.  And I think it is wrong to assume that it must be neoliberal in nature.  Certainly as an A-level student in the late 1970s and as an undergraduate in the early 1980s I ingested a good deal of Keynsianism; but, more importantly, I learned about the fallibility of economics.  Richard Murphy, in The Courageous State, describes eloquently the disillusion that encountering academic economics produced, as he realised that what were being presented as iron laws of the market were actually based on axioms that were really little more than unsupported generalisations about human behaviour.  I had a similar experience; Murphy’s book aroused a strong feeling of sympathy.

Moreover, you do not need to have studied economics at a particularly advanced level to understand the fallibility of many of the economic propositions that neoliberal politicians proclaim as unchallengeable fact.  Much has been made recently of the Reinhart-Rogoff debacle, in which the argument that high deficits lead to reduced growth has been found to rely on dubious assumptions and unchecked spreadsheet data; but there are more obvious questions that need to be asked about markets and about choice.  For example, influential constructs like public choice theory  rest on assumptions that are really open to any non-specialist to challenge.

Most of all, the issue that Keynes raised – about how decisions in economic policy can be influenced by politicians, and that, far from the elegant inevitabilities of the cruder kind of market theory, economic policy is messy and human – need to be exposed.  Politicians get away far less with proclaiming that There Is No Alternative (or its more subtle contemporary variations about deficits and debt) when people understand a bit of basic economics; a well-functioning democracy is one in which no politician could get away with describing the deficit as “maxing out the nation’s credit card”.  People need to understand the basic concepts, in a way that the current business studies curriculum simply doesn’t achieve.  And I’d argue that it’s perfectly possible to grasp those concepts at GCSE level.

It is almost impossible to imagine the current government making an intelligent decision about the school curriculum.  But the point remains that, at its best, economics opens the mind.  It means that, as part of their general education, people are equipped with the tools to challenge what politicians and advocates of big money want to present as fact.  It’s not obvious that increasing taxes means people move abroad, or that cutting the public sector increases confidence; people need the equipment and the confidence to question these sorts of proposition and to understand that the issues are not clear cut, and that the propositions of the neoliberal (or any other) economic consensus often rely on debatable social and psychological assumptions.  And in that sense a proper study of economics is a pretty good foundation for aspects of life going well beyond economic policy.

Closure

It has been widely reported this week that one Leslie Carter, a former school chaplain, has pleaded guilty to a number of offences of indecency with boys dating back to 1957.   He will be sentenced on 19 October and the judge at Harrow Crown Court warned him to expect a custodial sentence.  It’s a case that has given rise to quite a bit of media interest since it’s one of the oldest abuse cases that has been successfully prosecuted.

I have been following the case with interest as I was a pupil at Quainton Hall School, the North London prep school where Carter taught, during the time he was there.

My clearest memory of that time is that everybody knew that Carter was unsafe around boys – the parents knew it and the boys certainly did.  It’s absolutely inconceivable that what would now be called the Senior Management Team didn’t know what was going on.  Indeed, Carter landed the post at the school after he had had to leave South Africa after incidents with boys there – the school at that stage was entirely in private hands, run by an elderly clergyman who was portrayed as something close to a saint while ruling with unchallenged and arbitrary authority –  and who knows what transpired when Carter was given that job.  Those who rail today about the bureaucracy of CRB checks and the like (not that they would have picked up Carter’s offences) might do well to reflect on the amateurism on display here.  But what does seem clear is that Carter was only able to carry out his activities because the school – at every level – was willing to look the other way.

Moreover, what one remembers from the time was how Carter’s activities permeated the school.  I wouldn’t necessary call it an atmosphere of fear, or even – to use the sort of language that tabloids deploy – of evil; but there was a perpetual underlying unease around Carter, an environment of edginess and caution and perpetual wariness.  This was a school, affiliated with the Shrine of Our Lady in Walsingham, whose ethos was one of a hot sweet Anglo-Catholicism in which the office of priest carried an authority and power that is difficult, forty years on in a secular environment, to describe – except to say that it was wielded in full in a way that did nothing to reduce the unease.  Carter held absolute authority in a school chapel in which a Caucasian wounded Christ glared down at us from a crucifix, and in which a blond, blue-eyed Caucasian Virgin Mary, sexless but with eyes full of pain at the sin of the boys she surveyed, stared out from an alcove.  Against this background Carter told us that the Jews had suffered their legitimate punishment over the centuries for crucifying Christ.  Original sin and the fundamental unworthiness of boys was dunned into us by a man who routinely took his favourites aside and interfered with them.

Looking at the School website, I see nothing but business as usual – a Prep School seeking to set off all the triggers that such schools do to lure parents through the door.  It would get Michael Gove purring with pleasure. The Christian ethos is adjusted to reflect the much greater ethnic diversity of the school – boys from Hindu and Muslim background as well as the many Jewish boys I recall from my time there.  I am sure that the school as it is now would have all the right processes in place to stop anything like this happening in future.  But private schools are masters of spin – never apologise, never explain.  No expression of regret – why should there be? The masters and governors of that time are retired or dead, the boys middle-aged with probably a sprinkling of grandparents among them.

I have thought quite a lot about apology.  I’ve in the past been a bit sceptical about closure and apologies – I’ve been inclined to think that it can be a false gesture.  But I feel in this case that the school should be prepared to apologise, and, yes, closure is needed. In many ways my contempt is far greater for the two headmasters of the time, the staff and the governors who, faced with this disgrace, retreated into silence and inaction, than for Carter himself.  Carter is what he is and should never have been allowed to enjoy the position he did; the headteachers and governors, in my view, put boys in his way through the moral delinquencies of rank-closing and selective ignorance and they bear their share of responsibility, especially if – as I suspect (I have of course no way of knowing) – deals were done within the Anglo-Catholic community to find Carter a safe berth.  Perhaps that’s unfair – and I appreciate I’d probably feel diffrerently had I been one of the victims who had lived for decades with the trauma and shame of what this man did.

But it seems to me that a full apology by the school’s Governors is needed, and now.  It remains to be seen whether an institution which, in the affair of Carter, appeared at the time to use piety to hide their moral compromises, has the courage to respond now.

England’s dreaming – narratives of nationhood

Royal Wedding day, and a lot of mixed emotions for this lefty republican – fury and boredom at the hype in the weeks leading up to it; ironic reflection at the way those two old English revolutionaries, John Milton and William Blake, had their words appropriated by the Royal pageantry (while the designer of Ms Middleton’s dress sought to channel William Morris); as an ex-chorister, excitement at the thrill of the musical performance in the Abbey; horrified by the misreading of history and the witless cliches as BBC presenters describe Victorian propagandist rituals as the products of a thousand years of history; as a socialist, repelled and fascinated by the interaction between people, media and monarchy; as a Green, touched by the conflict between the appropriateness and the absurdity of the trees in the Abbey.

And yet it seems to me that there are two narratives in play here. One is the officially sanctioned one – the pomp and pageantry, the rhetoric of nationhood, the belief that we are all in this together and that we are somehow empowered as a nation by the opportunity to wave flags and hold street parties. The other – one that is just as much part of British and more specifically English history – is that of an overweening state, in which we are subjects of the Crown and not citizens, and in which the police (or perhaps their political masters) sanction the arrest and detention of people who they think might want to protest against the established order. even while the ceremony is under way, Cameron’s government announces a further set of cuts to the NHS. And all this, without irony, in the same breath as we talk about British freedoms.

It’s not new. Christopher Hill in his great history of the English revolution, The World Turned Upside Down, reports the case of a woman who was hanged for declaring that she “would not give a fart for his grace of Canterbury”; now, a professor of anthropology is arrested for the grievous offence of planning dissenting street theatre;

Thirty years ago, when William Windsor’s parents married, I was an undergraduate at an ancient university, the first member of my family to have the chance of a university education, paid for entirely by the state. Now, university is a luxury for those who can afford to pay, or who are prepared to contemplate a life mired in debt. In a corner of my ancient university lurked the Bullingdon Club, mocked by me and my contemporaries as a decadent adolescent irritation staffed by a class in decline; now their network is at the heart of the political and economic establishment, taking the jobs, services and benefits of the most vulnerable to pay for the failures of their chums in the city.

In the ensuing years, divisions in society have got vastly wider, which is why the establishment needs this narrative of social unity and is so determined to clamp down on dissent that threatens it. In 1981 the anger was against Thatcher; the anger now is against a corrupt, overweening system with Royalty – perhaps surpising itself in the process – at its apex.

The patriotic, one-nation narrative is seductive in a world where uncertainties mount by the day. But it’s false, and a true patriot – one who eschews flag-waving and the repetition of stale monarchist formulae – must believe that Britain deserves better than this. This is the rhetoric of a failed society, one that is afraid to look itself in the mirror and relies on nostalgia for a society that never really existed; we’re being drawn back into a past in which rights we take for granted were yet to be won, and we need to wake up and stop the dreaming now.

There is an alternative English narrative; one of struggle for democracy and political rights, one to which those arrested on suspicion that they might think republican thoughts clearly belong, as do the activists who occupy banks and turn them into creches. Dreamers, perhaps, but more honest and closer to reality than those who dose their despair with gorgeous pageantry.

Sign of the times

I was hugely amused to see this sign in a window in central Brighton today:

Liberal Democrats probably not winning here

 

Private schools and the Tory culture of bullying

Yesterday, I blogged about Andrew Neil’s film Posh and Posher, which described the hold private schools have on our political culture.  Today, by way of an ironic counterpoint, the Independent describes how the Coalition is trying to hound the Chair of the Charities Commission, Dame Suzi Leather, out of her job for enforcing the rules around charitable status for private schools.

This is the latest instalment in a long-running saga in which regulators have been seeking to hold private schools to account for the huge tax benefits they enjoy as charities – effectively they can reclaim the tax paid by parents on their school fees.  Taken together with VAT exemption, it means that private schools enjoy massive subsidies from the taxpayer, to the point where the tax breaks per pupil at a top private school will be far more than the expenditure on educating a child at a state secondary.

At a time when education, like the rest of the public sector, is facing massive cuts which will inevitably hit the poorest hardest, the Tories and Liberal Democrats’ defence of this bung for the rich demonstrates the mendacity of the claim that “we’re all in this together”.

But the interesting thing here is the methodology.  It’s another demonstration that in the Tory Dem world, public servants – especially those with a high-profile – are regarded as fair game – cheered on, of course, by Britain’s tabloid yellow press.

Here’s another example, this time in local government.  Recently Baroness Eaton, chair of the Local Government Association, has hit back at what she describes as attacks by Central Government on Local Government:

Lady Eaton claimed the current financial situation ‘will challenge local authorities more than they have ever been challenged before’ but, she added: ‘I think it doesn’t help when ministers trivialise it by comparing councils with bankers.’

As for the attacks on chief executive pay, Lady Eaton said: ‘Certain politicians are peddling the view that top officers in local government are causing the financial problem.’

She claimed: ‘It’s dishonest to compare the salaries of officers and politicians.’ The comparison was further muddied because ‘they quote gross pay for the chief executives, and net for the prime minister’.

She defended staff over central government attacks over road gritting during the snow, claiming frontline workers did ‘a marvellous job’.

‘It gives staff a real feeling of not being valued, and we have a lot of hard-working individuals in local government.’

Unsurprisingly in this case the bully-in-chief is Local Government secretary Eric Pickles, who once joked that he would keep a revolver in his desk to shoot any Civil Servant who told him something he didn’t want to hear -  who has established quite a track record – witness his smearing of the head of the Electoral Commission, reputed to have cost the Government £50,000 in legal fees; his recent need to issue a humiliating policy after joining the EDL bandwagon against councils allegedly replacing Christmas with Winterval, or gloating that many of the thousands of staff sacked by Manchester City Council were doing “non-jobs”. 

Far from being a Government embracing a big society in which we’re all in it together, the Coalition seems to rejoice in bullying public servants who aren’t in a position to respond.  It’s a tactic learned on the playing fields of public schools, imitated by people like Pickles (no doubt determined to fit in with the Etonians around the cabinet table), and subsidised handsomely by ordinary taxpayers.