18.12.2014

Social mobility, my arse

Recent propaganda in favour of grammar schools is nonsense, says Micky Coulter

It is an interminable feature of mainstream media discussion of education that, at some point, the subject of grammar schools will arise, or it will otherwise be shoehorned into the news cycle at any vaguely appropriate moment: exam results, reports on stagnant social mobility, house prices in school catchment areas and so on. For the right, the loss of most grammar schools in the UK over the period 1965-75, beginning with the issue of ‘circular 10/65’ (which initiated the process of transforming most such institutions into comprehensive schools) and ending with the Education Act 1976 (which largely completed the process), was a disaster, and it is commonplace for them to make nostalgic appeals as part of an argument for their return. The reintroduction of grammar schools, you see, would be very good for ‘social mobility’ and most of all for the working class.

Such claims stand up so little to scrutiny that even figures on the right disagree - The Daily Telegraph has prominently featured anti-grammar views in its opinion pages (one such piece is entitled ‘Grammar schools and the myth of social mobility’¹), whereas rightwing social democrats will often adopt the opposite position and demand their return (‘We got it wrong on grammar schools’, reads the headline over an article by James Bloodworth on The Independent website²). Thus the views of properly modern reactionaries (and contrarian, ‘modernising’ social democrats) cannot simply be assumed on the matter, despite the predictable biases still holding, on average, over the left-right split. But the views of the reactionaries of nostalgia, however, such as the UK Independence Party, are far more predictable.

For Ukip, grammar schools are far more part of an overall vision of ‘the good old days’ before those dastardly ‘metropolitan elites’ went and ruined everything. Therefore their support for such schools as official policy is far more undiluted, far more ideological and irrational, and driven by a rose-tinted, petty bourgeois vision of a fictitious past, which appears more authentic and more certain than the present. This past was, of course, far more brutal than the vision of long summers, foaming beer, penny licks, women knowing their place, and so on than Ukip tends to present both to itself and to the outside world, but this is neither here nor there for them and their supporters.

For what it is worth, Nigel Farage has declared that his party wants to see “a grammar school in every town” and, as is typical of the party of fake anti-elitism, this is presented as the best way for ‘bright’ working class children to fulfil their potential, and to lift themselves securely into a prosperous, middle class life, and occasionally even reach the capitalist class proper. This is the ‘social mobility’ argument - ‘social mobility’ being something very important that we do not have enough of. There has been much fretting in the bourgeois press that there may even be a crisis of social mobility! Indeed, such arguments form the cornerstone of the case presented by the open supporters of selective education - obviously, arguments for the segregation of children according to class background simply cannot be made, and we doubt if even many of the supporters of grammar schools think of themselves as advocating such a system. The arguments regarding social mobility thus appeal to left and right, and are made by both, but they are both spurious and dangerous.

In the first place, it is simply stupid to suppose that the principal problem with the capitalist mode of production is that it is hard for working class children to grow up to manage FTSE 100 companies, and that all would be well with the world if only this was the case. The same argument can and is also made in various other ways - if only enough women were in business, if only there were more Asian faces on company boards, and so on. Poverty in the face of unimaginable wealth, exhausting working hours, unemployment, climate change, imperialism and war - all these are just ‘technical’ malfunctions of capitalism, just like the ‘technical’ difficulties of getting working class people into the corridors of economic and political power. This is the liberal ideology of meritocracy.

In the second place the historical association of grammar schools with social mobility is also false. To the extent that social mobility was higher during the post-war period, this was the result of the massive expansion of the world economy and the full employment witnessed in industrial countries, thanks to the post-war capitalist boom. It was the historically unusually high demand for labour post-1945 that pulled many workers up from the shop floor into administration and management, regardless of whether it was a ‘secondary modern’, comprehensive or grammar school that they attended - though in all cases the effect was amplified, the further up you went. The ending of the boom preceded the decline in social mobility that has continued as a trend to the present day, and is universal across the most developed capitalist countries, regardless of the education system.

The dangerous part of the argument is that grammar schools are manifestly intended to achieve a split in the working class which divides it against itself, which functions as a means of ideological incorporation for a lucky few, which further divides mental from manual labour and which represents an attempt to solidify and stratify the working class under an educational regime, in addition to the various degrees of intra-class differentiation and polarisation that occur as a matter of course in the labour force. Today, it is dubious whether such a system corresponds to the actual needs of capital any more, hence it has been picked up so vigorously by the nostalgia reactionaries of Ukip, while the reintroduction of grammar schools is opposed by most mainstream politicians, Tories included. But might part of this be down to other reasons?

The social background of the pupils in the remaining grammar schools is overwhelmingly middle class, as it was during the time in which they formed a much larger part of a clearly stratified education system. Thus one might have expected that the abolition, in large part, of grammar schools would have negatively affected and angered the middle classes to such an extent that any party seeking their support would have to include in its programme a policy for their reintroduction. But this is not the case.

What is the case, as noted by Bloodworth, is that the middle class and better-off elements of the working class have managed perfectly well to secure a higher standard of education for their offspring without grammar schools through the system of house price premiums in the locality of ‘good’ state schools. Thus the poorer sections of the working class are de facto excluded from the best state schools, which obtain their results not as a product of ‘super teachers’ with inhuman teaching powers, but precisely because of the accumulation of children with literate, supportive parents (‘pushy’ and ‘helicopter’ parents included), who are reasonably comfortably off.

It turns out that capitalism is, unless one strives to overturn it completely, a bit like a game of whack-a-mole, and its problems and contradictions will simply be displaced somewhere else following the introduction of reform palliatives. For Bloodworth - and, in its own confused way, for Ukip - this is actually a reason to bring grammar schools back, but for communists such an outcome is hardly surprising and points to the need for a more thoroughgoing social transformation - one which creates a world fit for all children to live in and an education process fit for all of them.

Instead of juggling with the contradictions of capitalism, the aim must be to supersede them once and for all.

Notes

1. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timwigmore/100220161/grammar-schools-and-the-myth-of-social-mobility.

2. http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/with-rates-of-social-mobility-stagnant-its-time-to-admit-we-got-it-wrong-on-grammar-schools-8448381.html.