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Education is Theft
The Salisbury Review — Winter 2004
www.salisbury-review.co.uk
Christie Davies
author of
The Strange Death of Moral Britain (2004)
published by Transaction
Publishers.
Education! Education! Education! Such is the
new squawk of New Labour. Education is a good thing. Everyone wants it.
Without it we will be unable to compete in the high tech industries of
tomorrow such as the inventing of new genetically modified crops and
animals, the construction of better, faster, and nano-state of the art
computers. weapons of almost mass destruction and sophisticated medical
treatment for unsophisticated sheiks. We will revert to the Old Labour world
of the 1970s and once again become hewers of coal and drawers of thread.
There is a weak link in the argument. Our
future does depend on our citizens acquiring a high level of knowledge and
skills and particularly in applied mathematics which is as vital to the
service sector as to manufacture; the alternative is death by rubbish in
rubbish out computer slickers. However, the New Labourist solution to this
real problem is their usual combination of incompetence and deceit. Their
education policy stands for old style Soviet economics with reckless inputs
of capital decided by five year plans without ever considering rates of
return or whether there is any market for what is being produced.
One key fallacy is that education is measured
by inputs not outputs, by years of schooling not by how much pupils know and
what they can do when they leave. If you look up international league tables
on comparative literacy Britain scores high with what is said to be 98 per
cent literacy. It obviously is not a true figure. Literacy figures for a
country are not based on how many people in a country have a proper
competence in reading and writing (output) but on what 'proportion of a
country's population over the age of 15 have had five or more years in
school'. Most of the British population have served the requisite sentence
in a building called a school to be classified as literate. Many of them
learned very little and a substantial proportion can sign their names only
at the end of a statement written out for them by a police officer. Only 2
per cent are illiterate.
There comes a point in the school career of many pupils where they have long
ceased to learn anything useful. Even in a school that on average achieves a
great deal, the marginal output of the school (the amount learned by its
least successful pupils) may well be zero. The New Labour answer to this is
to throw in more money, our money, and to go for endless bureaucratic
restructuring. It is exactly the same policy that Old Labour followed in the
1970s when it subsidised and reorganised failing industries. Bash Street
School is the new British Leyland. It is the equivalent of installing new
machinery in a mine where there are no workable seams of coal.
If we are going to use the absurd rhetoric of
'investing in people'; then we have to accept that some educational
'investments' can end up bringing in nothing at all just like any other
investment. Even for those pupils who do learn something, the rate of return
on the investment in their education may be so low that the money would be
better invested elsewhere. Indeed the rate of return on some pupils is
negative; not only do they learn nothing themselves but their very presence
in the school prevents the others from learning. By their stupidity and lack
of proper motivation they damage and destroy the ethos of the school as a
place of learning. The school has not failed them, it is they who have
brought failure to the school and destroyed the chances of their brighter
and more industrious peers. It is in this sense that their education is
theft, not only theft from the taxpayer but from their diligent and
intelligent contemporaries.
New Labour still pursues the policies of radical redistribution of its Old
Labour predecessor. Educational achievement has been redefined as a form of
'capital' to be controlled and reallocated by the state. The new socialistic
theorists see skilled, educated, cultured individuals as having accumulated
three kinds of capital that ought to be confiscated. First, there are the
skills and knowledge they have acquired that directly enhance their position
in the market place. In the Rawls-plug account of education the very effort
and self-denial an individual 'invests' in learning these, are depicted not
as an index of virtue but an accident of social position. We do not, it
would seem, exercise free-will when we set aside immediate pleasures for the
toil of learning but merely react robotically to the social pressures of our
associates. The second nonsensical and offensive prong to the argument is
that those who as youngsters sought to immerse themselves in forms of high
culture with no economic pay-off are described as amassing 'capital' in the
form of social reputation and networks of influential contacts. A youth
spent visiting medieval churches, extracting fossils from the Ordovician,
learning to identify the many types of hawk and moss, is, it would seem, a
mere greedy self-interested hoarding of social capital that assists social
mobility. Culture is reduced to useful chat that impresses interviewers;
another way of getting on. In consequence you are more likely to become a
fat cat University Vice Chancellor, a gong-worthy Treasury Satsuma or a
smoothly urbane manipulator of public relations than if you had spent your
formative years pigged out in front of television soap operas. Culture is
thus redefined as a mere trick for excluding others, a cynical zero-sum game
in which whatever the cultured person gains someone else loses.
The practice preceded the theory when grammar schools of proven worth were
axed to make way for schools of comprehensive dullness. This is what lay
behind the determination of the original begetter of New Labour, the foul
mouthed Tony Crosland, to get rid of every ***** grammar school. Everyone,
even the dimmer and the idle, became worse off and educational performance
is noticeably better in those remaining areas such as Kent that retained
grammar, technical and modem schools. What happened with comprehensivization
was exactly what had happened with old Labour economics. A policy of
stealing from the more successful in order to create equality resulted in
the destruction of the entire system.
It is time Britain had less education. One essential step is to lower the
school leaving age back to 14. Nothing worthwhile was achieved by raising it
and preventing bored teenagers from entering the labour force. The new
unwilling conscripts hate school and play truant. Education is not a right.
Rights are about the state refraining from coercion, in this case forcing
people to remain in school when they are quite old enough to decide to
leave. What kind of society have we become when a mother can be sent to jail
for twenty months for failing to send her six foot tall, fifteen year old
son to school? Why waste a good prison cell on her when she is not a threat
to the public just to satisfy the punitive prejudices of bureaucrats who
'send messages' as if they were faxes? Why are those parents whose children
do turn up at school but then stop the others from learning with their
violence and disruptiveness never jailed? Why is the enforcement of the
arbitrary and pointless regulations of a socialistic state more important
than the protection of individuals?
It is not true that there are no longer any jobs for 14 year old school
leavers to go to because of changes in the structure of the economy. There
are plenty of jobs at the bottom end of the service sector or the building
trades but they are done by illegal immigrants, cleaners from Sri Lanka,
pick and shovel wielders from the Ukraine, or catering staff from Thailand
or Algeria; just look around you next time you eat in a canteen or buy
clothes in a charity shop. Unemployment among school leavers is caused by
two disastrous New Labour policies, the minimum wage (now being extended to
teenagers) and an absence of restrictions on immigration. What kinds of jobs
would they have gone into at 16 anyway? There is plenty of physically
undemanding dead end work needing to be done and in any case thanks to
improved nutrition most 14 year olds today have the size, physical strength
and stamina of a sixteen year old in 1910. It is better that they do paid
labour than idle in school at the taxpayer's expense. The government has
implicitly admitted this by proposing that 14-16 year olds can spend two
days a week gaining 'work experience'. The best kind of work experience is
work. Less education would reduce levels of dependency, increase the size of
the workforce and off-set the effects of an ageing population. It makes more
sense to put a greater number of people into the labour force early when
they are young, strong and energetic than to compel them to work into their
dotage to secure a pension.
There is an added advantage to lowering the school leaving age. Those who
nonetheless choose to stay on in school after 14 but are seriously
disruptive or violent can be expelled. Not transferred to another school to
cause more trouble, not excluded to be taught at home at great expense to
the tax-payer but thrown out for good. Their theft of the other pupils'
chances would in this way be brought decisively to an end. What is not
sufficiently well known is that, other things being equal, the higher the
school leaving age the greater the level of violence in schools. In the
United States the highest levels of violence in schools did not occur in the
poorest and most deprived states where pupils could leave school at a. young
age but in Hawaii after their school leaving age there was raised to 18. The
powerful Japanese-American elite who run the state imposed this arbitrarily
high leaving age on Hawaii on the grounds that more education is a better
thing. Many of the young non-Japanese people in Hawaii did not agree and
showed their resentment in an entirely predictable way. In Britain we should
lower the leaving age to 14 and where appropriate, throw children out. It
will if anything lower the crime rate since work will replace truancy and
diminish the bored resentment of those trapped in school. We already have
gangs of unruly, untouchable youngsters who make their neighbours lives a
misery and whom the government is vainly trying to restrain with anti-social
behaviour orders. If the schools can not tame them, what is the point of
their going to school?
The nuisance pupils are not in any sense handicapped or mentally disturbed,
merely normal stupid people who choose not to learn and to obstruct the
learning of others. Both they and their parents are capable of making
choices and should be held responsible for them. The test of whether someone
wants to be educated or parents want their children to be educated is not
that they enrol at an institution nor even they attend, but that they
perform or support the performance of the tasks that are necessary to
acquire skills and knowledge. It is beyond the power of the state in a
democratic society to compel this kind o compliance but it is fully entitled
to withhold educational resources from those who refuse to comply.
We have no reason to feel sorry for those boys (on this point I am speaking
very largely about males) who choose not to be educated in this way. They do
not, to use a cant phrase, lack self-esteem. They have chosen the aggressive
pleasures of youth with the immediate rewards that these provide and they
have a high opinion of themselves because of their ability to assert their
dominance within this world. The best evidence for this is the very high
correlation between upward mobility and short-sightedness. Myopic young
males peer at books and computer screens and cannot throw stones with any
degree of accuracy. Their world is Microsoft Windows not broken windows. The
correlation between myopia and success is so high it leaps out of the
statistics on educational attainment but is never the subject of discussion
by educationalists because it does not lend itself to expensive social
engineering at the taxpayers' expense. Logically the egalitarians ought to
be agitating for the laser treatment of the eyes of the under-privileged on
the National Health Service to render them myopic with all the advantages in
life that this brings with it. 'Two eyes good, four eyes better' would make
a good Orwellian slogan.
Twenty-first century New Labourist ideas about education are rooted in a set
of anachronistic images. Whenever one says to their educationalists that
young people should go out to work at an earlier age they reply: 'You would
have little boys climbing up chimneys again to get carcinogenic soot on
their scrotums and blown to pieces by cannon balls or hacked down in an
unjust colonial war while beating tin drums; ten year old girls slaving in
damp cotton mills for sixteen hours a day and going blind sewing in
Whitechapel sweatshops.' It is this kind of irrelevant 'bad old days'
rhetoric that intimidates conservatives and inhibits them from demanding a
return to less education and less theft. For the Conservative Party to
guarantee that the ever expanding New Labour levels of educational spending
on schools will be continued is absurd. We need to recognize that as
presently constituted education is theft, theft from the taxpayer, theft
from those able to benefit from it and theft from future generations who
will inherit a dumbed down, unproductive and culturally diminished world. We
need less of it.
Christie Davies is the author of The Strange Death of Moral Britain
(2004) published by Transaction Publishers.
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