Seven months of Hell

Following today’s disruption of the Oxford v Cambridge boat race by one Trenton Oldfield swimming in the Thames, the President of the Oxford University Boat Club tweeted angrily:

Finally to Trenton Oldfield: my team went through seven months of hell, this was the culmination of our careers and you took it from us.

Hell? What right have you got to talk about Hell?  After all, you chose this path.  And your careers are far from over – your more lucrative, privileged course through life has barely begun.  Within twenty minutes’ cycle ride of your University, you will find single mothers who have had a fifth of their income removed by this coalition; disabled people who have undergone the humiliation of inquisition by ATOS just to keep their benefits; young people forced to do unpaid labour in supermarkets, eliminating their dignity and taking jobs from their peers. Young people dependent on EMA to stay in education, who have lost that and their prospect of employment too.  And in the suburbs of Oxford you will find quietly desperate people, often elderly who saved for a decent sufficiency in their old age, only to have it removed by the gambling habits of your erstwhile peers, now drawing their bonuses in the city. And even in quiet corners of your own university you will find desperate people, self-medicating against depression and breakdown.

You are part of the elite of one of the most privileged university communities on the planet.  A university that, should you choose to do so, will allow you to move smoothly into privileged, well-paid employment without the need to contemplate the hell of the world that is the reality for those around you who do not enjoy your privilege.  People who may be every bit as clever or skilled as you are but perhaps have not had your advantages. But of course, in your youthful arrogance, they are invisible to you.  And your path to further privilege, let’s face it, will not exactly be obstructed by your participation in that totemic establishment event, the Boat Race.

I hold no brief for Trenton Oldfield or his beliefs.  But before you talk about hell, learn to look around you.  Your hell, such as it was, was a hell of choice directed towards a defined end.  The hells in which your invisible peers live are no such thing.

And, perhaps, one day, you will realise that there are bigger, better, more important things than two boatfuls of students racing on a river. Welcome to adulthood.

The Curse of PPE

There has been quite a lot of debate recently about how the British political class is dominated by Oxbridge.  And I read quite often  – especially on Twitter – comments along the lines of “If Cameron has a first in PPE at Oxford, how come he’s so ignorant about …” or “If Cameron got a First in PPE it doesn’t say much for the Oxbridge system …”

It’s an understandable sentiment.  The Oxford degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics has long been seen as the prime qualification for a career in British party politics.  As it happens, thirty years ago I was reading PPE at Oxford; the more I reflect on the course I pursued the more it seems to be a key part of the British political malaise.

To be fair, a glance at the Oxford University website suggests that the course has broadened a bit since then. However, the course structure I followed is likely to have been what those at the peak of the British political elite will have read, and on reflection what characterises the course from those days is how little you could get away with learning.

In the 1980s the core politics course was all about institutions in Britain, the US and France and British political history; philosophy was about the British empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, Hume) with a cursory nod towards logical positivism, and moral philosophy; economics was a bit of theory and the organisation of the British economy.  If you were doing all three subjects, these subjects accounted for six out of your eight final papers.

The implication was that you could get a First in PPE without reading a word of Marx or Kant or Plato, or studying any politics of developing nations (or the economics of development), or without reading any continental philosophy apart from Descartes, or without doing any political or sociological theory, or studying philosophical method (a series of worries about the basis of economic theory led me to do an optional paper in social scientific theory – I think in my year the number of entrants in this fascinating and fundamental area barely reached double figures).  Of course for those who wanted to do something more rigorous and worthwhile there was a big range of options, but the fact remained that you could get away with doing what with hindsight looks very much like the sort of broad-based and superficial curriculum that resembles one of those general-studies A level courses that Russell Group universities are quick to point out don’t really count. And it’s a consensual and safe curriculum – it’s one that enables the ambitious but intellectually incurious to spend three years without having their assumptions really challenged.

And not just with hindsight – I had a vacation job working alongside a colleague who was studying philosophy at what was then Staffordshire Polytechnic, and it very quickly emerged that she was doing a more rigorous, stimulating and comprehensive course than I was at Oxford. And I recall the raised eyebrows when, having been awarded a College prize in Philosophy in my final year, I chose to spend the book tokens that came with it on, inter alia, a copy of Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies – a key political and philosophical text of the twentieth century, but one that Oxford ignored. My own experience is that such understanding of politics and economics as I possess now derives overwhelmingly from my reading since leaving Oxford, not what I learned there.

In other words, PPE – certainly as it was when the current British political class was studying it – is not remotely a gold standard for intellectual rigour.  Oxbridge is itself a problem – it remains a reminder that the hierarchy of academic achievement in Britain is every bit as much about class and privilege as it is about academic ability, continuing to draw on a minority of the intensively-coached privileged for a proportion of its intake that has remained broadly unchanged in thirty years.  But the idea that PPE gives one the intellectual grounding to deal with the problems facing our society seems to me to be entirely false.

And a society with the depth and nature of the problems that we have cannot afford to indulge in this sort of lazy intellectual idolatry.

Could do better

I’ve been reading with some interest the recent claims that state schools are failing pupils applying for top universities – and the associated claims that Oxbridge is taking state school pupils in significant numbers.  It seems to me that there are a number of points worth exploring here.

Pious hopes

Top of any pious hope league is the suggestion by Education Minister Bill Rammell, who argues that state schools need to push their pupils more and to coach them properly.  Rammell’s comments are, of course, unaccompanied by any thoughts on resources.  There’s nothing about matching the tens of thousands of pounds per annum that rich parents pay to buy the near-personal tuition of A-level students in the private sector, and of course there’s New Labour’s traditional silence on the vast sums of public money being pumped into the private school trough through charitable status and VAT exemption; and nothing about the fact that these children come from homes where they are strongly (if occasionally somewhat misguidedly) motivated and economically advantaged.

It’s the same old lie that unites New Labour and the tabloid press – where one section of society does better than another because it enjoys huge advantages, blame the disadvantaged for being losers.

Evidence-based?

But Rammell’s comments look quite rational compared with those of Chief Executive of the Independent Schools’ Council, Chris Parry, as reported in the Daily Telegraph.  School bullies from disadvantaged backgrounds were running riot in state schools, denying the studious the opportunity to gain their Oxbridge prize.  Now you don’t need a public school and Oxbridge education to realise that this article is a shameless sales pitch – an evidence-free rant designed to play on the fears of the middle classes.  I’m not going to dismiss school bullying, because I’ve been there (except that the bullying I experienced was in an elite prep school, but that’s another story) and I’m certainly not going to deny that we live in a profoundly anti-intellectual culture in Britain.  And, yes, the public schools and even Oxbridge are implicated in that too.

The day when I for one will take any comment from the private school sector about social deprivation seriously is when I see some evidence that this sector has any experience in dealing with it.  State education has to cater for everyone; private schools, awash with public subsidy through charitable status, can quietly remove anyone whose face doesn’t fit.  I used to be a primary school governor; I remember time and time again that our school had to deal with children who had been thrown out of private schools, often with very minor learning difficulties that a competent teacher could have spotted and remedied; but teachers in private schools simply weren’t good enough to spot the problem and by the time they came to us, the children had fallen further and further behind and had had their confidence destroyed by the hothouse atmosphere in the school.  Motes and beams, Rear-Admiral Parry.

A corrective to the Rear-Admiral’s poisonous sales pitch might be this article by Jenni Russell in today’s Guardian, which points to some of the realities of the widening social gaps in New Labour’s Britain.  The fact is that the real failure, after eleven years of Labour government, is that education in Britain is still fundamentally about class.  When Bill Rammell and his ilk have the honesty – one might say the guts – to tackle that, things might just change.