People in poorer parts of the world today may easily be the first in their family to have graduated from a secondary school. At the same time many children still never attend a primary school, let alone persevere through what is considered in rich countries to be a basic education. And university education is rare. In contrast, the affluent world is characterised by long-standing and ever-improving compulsory primary and secondary education for all children, with rates of university access rising almost continuously. Despite this, many young people are not presented as well educated in most affluent nations, but as failing to reach official targets. This chapter brings together evidence which shows how particular groups are increasingly seen as ‘not fit’ for advanced education, as being limited in their abilities, as requiring less of an education than the supposedly more gifted and talented.
The amassing of riches in affluent countries, the riches which allowed so much to be spent on education, has not resulted in an increased sense of satisfaction in terms of how young people are being taught and are learning. Instead, it has allowed an education system to be created which now expresses ever-increasing anxiety over how pupils perform, in which it has become common to divide up groups of children by so-called ability at younger and younger ages to try to coach them to reach ‘appropriate’ targets. This has a cumulative effect, with adolescents becoming more anxious as a result. Despite the abandonment of the former grammar school system in Britain, children are still being divided among and within schools. This is also evident in the US, but in Britain it is more covert. Parents have been moving home in order to get their children into their chosen state school, they may pretend to be religious to gain access to faith schools, and slightly more of them were paying for private education by 2007 than had done so before. As more resources are concentrated on a minority the (perceived) capabilities of the majority are implicitly criticised.
In this chapter evidence is brought together to show how myths of inherent difference have been sustained and reinforced by placing a minority on pedestals for others to look up to. Such attitudes vary in degree among affluent nations but accelerated in intensity during the 1950s (to be later temporarily reversed in the 1960s and 1970s). In the 1950s, in countries like Britain, the state enthusiastically sponsored the division of children into types, with the amounts spent per head on grammar school children being much higher than on those at the alternative secondary moderns. Such segregationist policies are still pursued with most determination in the more unequal rich countries. More equitable countries, and the more equitable parts of unequal countries (such as Scotland and Wales in Britain), have pushed back most against this tide of elitism since it rose so high in the 1950s.
Elitism in education can be considered a new injustice because, until very recently, too few children even in affluent countries were educated for any length of time. All are now at risk of being labelled as ‘inadequate’ despite the fact that the resources are there to teach them, of being told that they are simply not up to learning what the world now demands of them. Those who are elevated also suffer.
All will fail at some hurdle in an education system where examination has become so dominant. To give an example I am very familiar with, in universities, professors, using elitist rhetoric, try to tell others that the world is complicated and only they are able to understand or make sense of it; they will let you see a glimpse, they say, if you listen, but you cannot expect to understand; it takes years of immersion in academia, they claim; complex words and notions are essential, and they see understandable accounts as ‘one-dimensional’.1
Occasionally there is no alternative to a complex account of how part of the world appears to work, but often a complex account is simply a muddled account. Professors often say that an aspect of the world is too complex for them to describe clearly because they themselves cannot describe it in a clear way, not because it cannot be described clearly. Suggesting such widespread complexity justifies the existence of academia because elitism forces those it puts on pedestals to pretend to greatness, but if you talk to academics it thankfully becomes clear that most are, to some extent, aware of this pretence. They are aware, like the Wizard of Oz, of how humdrum they really are.
People are remarkably equal in ability. However, if you spend some time looking you can find a few people, especially in politics, celebrity (now a field of work) or business, who appear to truly believe they are especially gifted, that they are a gift to others who should be grateful for their talents and who should reward them appropriately. These people are just as much victims of elitism as those who are told they are, in effect, congenitally stupid, fit for little but taking orders and performing menial toil despite having been required to spend over a decade in school. Under elitism education is less about learning and more about dividing people, sorting out the supposed wheat from the chaff and conferring high status upon a minority.
The old evil of ignorance harmed poorer people in particular because they could not read and write and were thus easily controlled, finding it harder to organise and to understand what was going on (especially before radio broadcasts). What differentiates most clearly the new social injustice of elitism from the old evil of ignorance is that elitism damages people from the very top to the very bottom of society, rather than just being an affliction of the poor. Those at the top suffer because the less affluent and the poor have their abilities denounced to such an extent that fewer people end up becoming qualified in ways that would also improve the lives of the rich. For example, if more people were taught well enough to become medical researchers then conditions that the rich may die of could be made less painful, or perhaps even cured, prolonging their lives. If more are taught badly at school, because it is labourers and servants that the rich think they lack, then cures for illnesses may not be discovered as quickly.
The British education system has been described as ‘learning to labour’ for good reason. But it is, however, the poorest who are still most clearly damaged by elitism, by the shame that comes with being told that their ability borders on illiteracy, that there is something wrong with them because of who they are, that they are poor because they have inadequate ability to be anything else.
Although nobody officially labels a seventh of children as ‘delinquent’, they might just as well because that is the stigmatising effect of the modern labels that are applied to children seen as the ‘least able’. A century ago delinquency was an obsession and thought to lead to criminality; education was the proffered antidote. However, it was not lack of education that caused criminality in the young, at least not a lack of the mind-numbing rote-and-rule learning that so commonly used to be offered as education; it was most often necessity. Today it is money for drugs rather than food, as the nature of the need has changed, but old labels such as ‘delinquent’ are retained in the popular press, and a new form of what can still best be described as ‘delinquency’ has arisen.
Increased educational provision that has been increasingly unequally distributed has led to the rise of this new elitism. Where once there had been the castle on the hill and the poor at the gates, the castle grounds were then subdivided into sections, places up and down the hill, neatly ordered by some supposed merit. And today an even neater ordering of people has been achieved – to demarcate social position and occupation all now have numbers and scores, exam passes, credit ratings, postcodes and loyalty cards, rather than simply titles and surnames.
Scoring all individuals in affluent societies is a very recent affair. Giving all children numbers and grades throughout their schooling and yet more grades afterwards (at university or college) was simply not affordable before the Second World War in even the most affluent of countries. It was a luxury confined to the old grammar schools and universities. At that time, most children would simply be given a certificate when they left school to say that they had attended. This system changed when compulsory secondary education for all swept the affluent world following the war, although with the belief that all could be educated came the caveat that most of those who believed this did not see all the children that they were about to allow through to secondary school as equal in potential ability.
Some of the best evidence of policy makers seeing different groups of children as so very different comes from the work of educational economists. Half a century ago the rich countries created a club, the OECD, effectively a rich country club which is now dominated by economists. It was partly the rise in power of economists belonging to clubs like the OECD which resulted in elitism growing, and through which the beliefs of elitism were spread. That club published the figures used to draw Figure 1 (below), figures that suggest that one in seven children growing up in one particular rich country today (the Netherlands) have either no or very limited knowledge.2
We used to see the fate of children as being governed by chance, with perhaps even the day of their birth influencing their future life. Rewriting the old rhyme, the OECD would say of children today (in the Netherlands) that they can be divided into seven differently sized groups by their supposed talents and future prospects:
The educational ode of the OECD*
Monday’s child has limited knowledge,
Tuesday’s child won’t go to college,
Wednesday’s child is a simple soul,
Thursday’s child has far to go,
Friday’s child can reflect on her actions,
Saturday’s child integrates explanations,
But the child that is born on the Sabbath day
Has critical insight and so gets the most say.
The OECD economists and writers do not put it as crudely as this, however. It is through their publications (from which come the labels that follow)3 that they say in effect that there is now a place where a seventh of children are labelled as failures by the time they reach their 15th birthday.
Using OECD data, if we divide children into seven unequally sized groups by the days of the week and start with those most lowly ordered, then the first group are Monday’s children (from Figure 3.1, 11%+2%=13%). They are those who have been tested and found to have, at most, only ‘very limited knowledge’. Tuesday’s children (21%) are deemed to have acquired only ‘barely adequate knowledge’ to get by in life. Wednesday’s and Thursday’s children (27%) are labelled as being just up to coping with ‘simple concepts’. Friday’s and Saturday’s children (26%) are assessed as having what is called ‘effective knowledge’, enough to be able to reflect on their actions using scientific evidence, perhaps even to bring some of that evidence together, to integrate it. The remaining children (11%+2%=13%), one in every seven again, are found by the testers to be able to do more than that, to be able to use well-‘developed inquiry abilities’, to link knowledge appropriately and to bring ‘critical insights’ to situations. But although these children may appear to be thinking along the lines that those setting the tests think is appropriate, even they are not all destined for greatness. According to the testers they will usually not become truly ‘advanced thinkers’. It is just one in seven of the Sabbath children (100%÷7÷7=2%) who is found to be truly special. Only this child, the seventh born of the seventh born, will (it is decreed) clearly and consistently demonstrate ‘advanced scientific thinking and reasoning’, will be able to demonstrate a willingness to use scientific understanding ‘in support of recommendations and decisions that centre on personal, socioeconomic, or global situations’.4 This child and the few like them, it is implied, are destined to be our future leaders.
Figure 1 shows the proportions of children in the Netherlands assigned to each ability label from ‘none’ clockwise round to ‘advanced’. The Netherlands is a place you might not have realised had brought up over 60% of its children to have only a simple, barely adequate, limited education, or even no effective education at all (according to OECD statistics).
Notes: ‘None’ implies possessing no knowledge as far as can be measured. ‘Limited’ implies possessing very limited knowledge. ‘Barely’ stands for barely possessing adequate knowledge in the minds of the assessors. ‘Simple’ means understanding only simple concepts. ‘Effective’ is a little less damning. ‘Developed’ is better again; but only ‘advanced’ pupils are found to be capable, it is said, of the kind of thinking that might include ‘critical insight’.
Source: OECD (2007) The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), OECD’s latest PISA study of learning skills among 15-year-olds, Paris: OECD, derived from figures in table 1, p 20
The OECD, an organisation of economists (note not teachers), now tells countries how well or badly educated their children are. And it is according to these economists that the Netherlands is the country which best approximates to the 1:1:2:2:1 distribution of children having what is called limited, barely adequate, simple, effective and developed knowledge, by having reached the OECD’s international testing levels 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 respectively. This is not how children in the Netherlands actually are, nor how they appear to any group but the OECD;it is not how the majority of their parents think of them; it is not even how their teachers, school inspectors or government rank them;but it is how the children of the Netherlands, and all other children in the richer countries of the world, have slowly come to be seen by thosall othere who carry out these large-scale official international comparisons. Large-scale international comparisons can be great studies, but should not be used to propagate elitist beliefs.
Given this damning description of their children it may surprise you to learn that the Netherlands fare particularly well compared with other countries. Only half a dozen countries out of over 50 surveyed did significantly better when last compared (in 2006). More children in the UK were awarded the more damning levels of 1, 2 and 3 - ‘limited’, ‘barely adequate’ and ‘simple’. In the US both Monday’s and Tuesday’s children were found to be limited, and only half of Sunday’s children were ‘developed’ – just half the Netherlands’ proportion.
Do the best of the richest countries in the world really only educate just under a seventh (13%) of their children to a good level, and just a seventh of those (2%) to a level where they show real promise? Are just 2% of children able, as the OECD definition puts it, to ‘use scientific knowledge and develop arguments in support of recommendations and decisions that centre on personal, socioeconomic, or global situations’? In Finland and New Zealand this ‘genius strand’ is apparently 4%, in the UK and Australia 3%, in Germany and the Netherlands 2%, in the US and Sweden 1%, and in Portugal and Italy it is nearer to 0%. These are children who, according to the educational economists, show real promise. They are the children who have been trained in techniques so as to be able to answer exam questions in the ways the examiners who operate under what are called ‘orthodox economic beliefs’ would most like them to be answered. The proportions are so low because the international tests are set so that the results are distributed around a ‘bell curve’. This is a bell curve with smoothly tapering tails, cut off (internationally and intentionally) so that 1.3% are labelled genii and 5.2% as know-nothings (see Figure 2 on page 47 below).
Economists use the results of their international comparative exercises for the purpose of making claims, such as ‘… having a larger number of schools that compete for students was associated with better results’.4 Many of the people who work for organisations such as the OECD feel they have a duty to suggest that competition between countries, schools and pupils is good, and to encourage it as much as they can.
According to this way of thinking, science education, which is usually extended to include technology, engineering, maths and (quietly) economics,5 is the most important education of all. Supporting such science education, its promotion and grading in these ways, is seen as working in support of recommendations and decisions that centre on best improving personal, socioeconomic and global situations to engineer the best of all possible worlds. This imagined world is a utopia with all benefiting from increased competition, from being labelled by their apparent competencies. This is a world where it is imagined that the good of the many is most enhanced by promoting the ability of the few.
Although the OECD tables, and almost all other similar performance tables, are presented explicitly as being helpful to those towards the bottom of their leagues, as being produced to help pull up those at the bottom, this is rarely what they achieve. Educational gaps have not narrowed in most places where such tables have been drawn up. This is partly because they suggest how little hope most have of ever being really competent; ‘leave competency to the top 2%’ is the implicit message, for, unless you are in the top seventh, you cannot hope to have a chance of succeeding, where success means to lead. Even when standards improve and most level 1 children are replaced by level 2, level 2 by 3, and so on, the knowledge which is judged to matter will also have changed and become ever more complex. If we accept this thinking, the bell curves will be forever with us.
This bell curve thinking (Figure 2, page 47) suggests that right across the rich world children are distributed by skill in such a way that there is a tiny tail of truly gifted young people, and a bulk of know-nothings, or limited, or barely able or just simple young people. It is no great jump from this to thinking that, given the narrative of a shortage of truly gifted children, then as young working adults those children will be able to name their price and will respond well to high financial reward. In contrast, the less able are so numerous they will need to be cajoled to work. These masses of children, the large majority, will not be up to doing any interesting work, and to get people to do uninteresting work requires the threat of suffering. This argument quickly turns then to suggest that they will respond best to financial rewards sufficiently low as to force them to labour. It is best to keep them occupied through hours of drudgery, it has been argued, admittedly more vocally in the past than now.
But what of those in between, of Friday’s and Saturday’s children, with effective but not well-developed knowledge – what is to be done with them? Offer them a little more, an average wage for work, a wage that is not so demeaning, and then expect them to stand between the rest of weekday children and those of the Sabbath, a place half way up the hill. Give them enough money for a rest now and again, one big holiday a year, money to run a couple of cars, enough to be able to struggle to help their children get a mortgage (the middle-class aspiration to be allowed to have a great debt).
But surely (you might think) there are some groups of children who are simply born less able than others, or made so by the way they have been brought up in their earlier years? Most commonly these are infants starved of oxygen in the womb or during birth, denied basic nutrients during infancy. Such privations occur early on in the lives of many of the world’s poorest children. But this physical damage, mostly preventable and due in most cases to absolute poverty, now rarely occurs in North America, affluent East Asia or Western Europe. When serious neglect does occur the results are so obvious in the outcomes for the children that they clearly stand out. The only recent European group of children treated systematically in this way were babies given almost no human contact, semi-starved and confined to their cots in Romanian orphanages. They have been found to have had their fate damaged irreparably. Medical scanning discovered that a part of their brain did not fully develop during the first few years of their lives, and their story is now often told as potential evidence of how vital human nurturing is to development.6
Two generations earlier than the Romanian orphanages, from Germany and Austria, come some of the most telling stories of the effects that different kinds of nurturing can have on later behaviour. There are worse things you can do to children than neglect them. It is worth remembering the wartime carnage that resulted in the creation of the institutions for international solidarity. We easily now forget where the idea that there should be economic cooperation in place of competition came from. The most studied single small groups of individuals were those who came to run Germany from the mid-1930s through to the end of the Second World War. To understand why the word ‘co-operation’ remains in the title of the OECD, it is worth looking back at the Nazis (and their elitist and eugenicist beliefs) when we consider what we have created in the long period of reconstruction after that carnage.
The childhood upbringings of the men who later became leading members of the Nazi party have been reconstructed and studied as carefully as possible. Those studies found that as children these men were usually brought up with much discipline, very strictly and often with cruelty. They were not born Nazis – the national social environment and their home environment both had to be particularly warped to make them so. Warped in the other direction, it has been found, were the typical home environments of those equally rare German and Austrian children who grew up at the same time and in the same places but went on to rescue Jewish people from the Nazi regime. Their national social environment was identical. Their home environment also tended to revolve around high standards, but standards about caring for others; the home was rarely strict and as far as we know, never cruel. It was ‘… virtually the exact opposite of the upbringing of the leading Nazis’.7 Further studies have found that many of the rescuers discovered that they had no choice but to help, it having been instilled in them from an early age. ‘They would not be able to go on living if they failed to defend the lives of others.’8
Across Europe in the 1940s there were too few rescuers, and most Jews targeted for persecution were killed. The fact that people in mainland Europe9 were largely complicit in the killing, and are still reluctant to accept this truth, is claimed as part of the reason for current silences about ‘race’; it remains ‘… an embarrassment’.10 However, out of that war came a desire to cooperate better internationally.
The OECD, later so widely criticised as a rich country club, was not set up to preserve privilege, reinforce stereotypes and encourage hierarchy. Originally called the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC), it was established to administer US and Canadian aid to war-ravaged Europe. That thinking changed in the 1950s, and it was renamed the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 1961. Its remit gradually gravitated towards concentrating on what was called improving efficiency, honing market systems, expanding free trade and encouraging competition (much more than cooperation). By 2008 the OECD was being described in at least one textbook as a ‘… crude, lumbering think-tank of the most wealthy nations, bulldozing over human dignity without pause for thought. Its tracks, crushed into the barren dereliction left behind, spell “global free market”’.11 The organisation describes its future a little differently, as ‘… looking ahead to a post-industrial age in which it aims to tightly weave OECD economies into a yet more prosperous and increasingly knowledge-based world economy’.12
The knowledge base that the OECD refers to is a particular kind of knowledge that comes from a particular way of valuing people, of seeing the world, a way that came to dominate the thinking of those appointed to high office in the rich world by the start of the 21st century. From the late 1970s onwards, if you did not think in this particular way you would be quite unlikely to be appointed to work for bodies such as the OECD, or to rise high within any government in an unequal affluent nation, even less likely to do well in business. This way of thinking sees money as bringing dignity, sees children as being of greatly varying abilities and sees its own educational testers as knowing all the correct answers to its battery of questions, which include questions for which there is clearly no international agreement over the correct answers.13 It is not hard to devise a set of questions and a marking scheme that results in those you test appearing to be distributed along a bell curve. But to do this, you have to construct the world as being like this in your mind. It is not revealed as such by observation.
What observation reveals is that ever since we have been trying to measure ‘intelligence’ we have found it has been rising dramatically.14 This is true across almost all countries in which we have tried to measure it.15 This means that the average child in 1900 measured by today’s standards would appear to be an imbecile, ‘mentally retarded’ (the term used in the past), a ‘virtual automaton’.16 When we measure our intelligence in this way it appears so much greater than our parents’ that you would think they would have marvelled at how clever their children were (but they didn’t).17 What this actually means is that in affluent countries over the course of the last century we have become better educated in the kind of scientific thinking which scores highly in intelligence tests. More of us have been brought up in small households and therefore given more attention. We have been better fed and clothed. Parenting did improve in general, but we were also expected to compete more and perform better at those particular tasks measured by intelligence tests.
If our grandparents had been the ‘imbeciles’ their test results would (by today’s standards) now suggest, they would not have been able to cooperate to survive. Although today’s young people have been trained to think in abstract ways and to solve theoretical problems on the spot (it would be surprising if they could not, given how many now go on to university), there are other things they cannot do which their grandparents could. Their grandparents could get by easily without air conditioning and central heating, and many grew their own food, while their grandchildren often do not know how to mend things and do more practical work. Our grandparents might not have had as much ‘critical acumen’ on average, but they were not exposed to the kind of mental pollution that dulls acumen such as television advertising, with all the misleading messages it imparts. Observation tells us that intelligence merely reflects environment and is only one small part of what it means to be clever. Despite this, ‘critical acumen’, the one small highly malleable part of thinking that has become so much more common over the course of recent generations, has mistakenly come to be seen both as all important and as unequally distributed within just one generation.
A new way of thinking, a theory, was needed to describe a world in which just a few would be destined to have minds capable of leading the rest and in which all could be ordered along a scale of ability. That new way of thinking has come to be called ‘IQism’. This is a belief in the validity of the intelligence quotient (IQ), and in the related testing of children resulting in their being described as having ability strung along a series of remarkably similar-looking bell curves, as shown in Figure 2. The merits of thinking of intelligence as having a quotient came out of wartime thinking and were pushed forward fastest in the 1950s when many young children and teenagers were put through intelligence tests. In Britain almost all 11-year-olds were subjected to testing (the ‘11 plus’), which included similar ‘intelligence’ tests, to determine which kind of secondary school they would be sent to. Although such sorting of children is no longer so blatantly undertaken, the beliefs that led to this discrimination against the majority are now the mainstream beliefs of those who currently make recommendations over how affluent economies are run. And, just as we no longer divide children so crudely by subjecting them to just one test, the educational economists are now careful not to draw graphs of the figures they publish – this would present a miserable picture of the futures of those for whom the bell curves toll. There are no histograms of these results in the OECD report in which the data used here are presented.
If children had a particular upper limit to their intellectual abilities, an IQ, and that limit was distributed along a bell curve, then it would be fair to ascribe each to a particular level, to suggest that perhaps in some countries children were not quite performing at the levels they could be. But is it really true that in no country do more than 4% of children show signs of being truly able?18
Almost identical curves could be drawn for different countries if human ability were greatly limited, such as those curves shown in Figure 2. This figure is drawn from the key findings of the 2007 OECD report, which includes six graphs. None of those graphs show a single bell curve. Figure 2 reveals how the OECD economists think ability is distributed among its member countries, and in three particular places. It is possible that the OECD economists were themselves reluctant to draw the graph because they knew it would rightly arouse suspicion. However, it is far from easy to guess at motive. What it is possible, if extremely tedious, to do is to read the technical manual and find hidden, after 144 pages of equations and procedures, the fact that those releasing this data, when calibrating the results (adjusting the scores before release), ‘… assumed that students have been sampled from a multivariate normal distribution’.19 Given this assumption, almost no matter how the students had ‘performed’, the curves in Figure 2 would have been bell shaped. The data were made to fit the curve.
Source: Data given in OECD (2007) The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), OECD’s latest PISA study of learning skills among 15-year-olds, Paris: OECD, derived from figures in table 1, p 20
There is very little room under a bell curve to be at the top. Bell-curved distributions suggest that, at best, if most were destined to have their abilities lifted the vast majority (even if improved) would remain ‘limited’, or barely ‘adequate’, or just able to understand ‘simple things’. The implication of ability being strung out like this is that even following educational gain, the many would always have to be governed by the few, the elite, ‘the advanced’. If this testing is producing scores with any kind of validity concerning underlying ability, then only a very few children will ever grow up to understand what is going on. If this is not the case, if there is not just a tiny minority of truly able children, then to describe children in this way, and to offer prescriptions given such a description (and the subsequent outcomes), is deeply unjust.
Those people who believe in IQ have been thinking and writing about it for less than a century. It is not an old idea. The concept was first proposed in 1912 with the German name Intelligenz-Quotient, derived from testing that occurred just a few years earlier in 1905 in France, but testing that did not, initially, assume a limit. The concept of assuming a limit to children’s intellectual potential was subsequently developed by those with a taste for testing. The assumption was that intellectual ability was limited physically, like height. Different children would grow to different heights, which tended to be related to their parents’ heights, but also to the wider social environment which influenced their nutrition, their exercise and their well-being.
The idea that intellectual ability is distributed like height was proposed within just a few years of the bell curve itself first being described mathematically. It is now easy to see how it could have been imagined, why the idea of IQ and the concept of its hereditability came to flourish. Most people who were told of the idea were also told that their IQ was high. People who propagated the idea thought that their IQs were even higher. People enjoy flattery – it makes us feel safe and valued. But, tragically, in the round, the concept of IQ made no individuals actually safer or more valued for who they really were. Great evils of genocide were carried out under IQism (and related beliefs). But as those evils become memories, as the stories of early elitism are forgotten, as the old-fashioned social evil of illiteracy is largely overcome in affluent nations, IQism is growing again as an ideological source for injustice.
Those recognised as making progress in the study of education suggest that thinking is as much like height as singing is like weight. You can think on your own, but you are best learning to think with others. Education does not unfold from within but is almost all ‘… induction from without’.20 There are no real ‘know-nothings’; they could not function. Children are not limited, or barely able, or simple. We are all occasionally stupid, especially when we have not had enough sleep, or feel anxious and ‘don’t think’.
If you use singing as a metaphor for education, we are similarly all capable of singing or not singing, singing better or worse. What is seen as good singing is remarkably culturally specific, varying greatly by time and place. Work hard at your singing in a particular time and place, and people will say you sing well if you sing as you are supposed to. It is possible to rank singing, to grade it and to believe that some singing is truly awful and other singing exquisite, but the truth of that is as much in the culture and ears of the listener as it is in the vocal cords of the performer. Someone has almost certainly been silly enough to propose that human beings have singing limits which are distributed along a bell-shaped curve.21 After all is said, despite the fact that we are all capable of being stupid, the bell-curve-of-singing idea did not catch on. We are not as vain about how good we are at yodelling in the shower as we are about being told we are especially clever. We can all sing, we can all be stupid, we can all be clever, we can learn without limits.
It is only recently that it has been possible to make the claim that almost all children in rich countries are capable of learning without limits. The same was not true of many of their parents and of even fewer of their grandparents. And the same is not true of almost a tenth of children worldwide, some 200 million five-year-olds. These children are the real ‘failures’, failing to develop all their basic cognitive functions due to iodine or iron deficiency, or malnutrition in general leading to stunting of the brain as well as the body, and/or having received inadequate stimulation from others when very young.22 Children need to be well fed and cared for both to learn to think well and to be physically able enough to think well, just as they do to be able to sing well. But well fed and loved, there is no subsequent physical limiting factor other than what is around them. If you grow up in a community where people do not sing, it is unlikely that you will sing. If you grow up where singing is the norm, you are likely to partake.
Much of what we do now our recent ancestors never did. They did not drive cars, work on computers; few practised the violin, and hardly any played football, so why do we talk of a violinist or a footballer having innate talent? Human beings did not slowly evolve in a world where those whose keyboard skills were not quite up to scratch were a little less successful at mating than the more nimble fingered. We learn all these things; we were not born to them, but we are born elastic enough to learn. How we subsequently perform in tests almost entirely reflects the environment we grew up in, not differences in the structures of our brains.23 However, there remains a widespread misconception that ability, and especially particular abilities, are innate, that they unfold from within, and are distributed very unevenly, with just a few being truly talented, having been given a gift and having the potential to unfold that gift within them, hence the term ‘gifted’.
The misconception of the existence of the gifted grew out of beliefs that talents were bestowed by the gods, who each originally had their own special gifts, of speed, art or drinking (in the case of Dionysus). This misconception was useful for explaining away the odd serf who could not be suppressed in ancient times or the few poor boys who rose in rank a century ago. But then that skewed distribution of envisaged talent was reshaped as bell curved. The results of IQ tests were made into a bell-curved graph by design, but people were told (what turned out to be) the lie that the curve somehow emerged naturally.24 Apply an IQ test to a population for which that test was not designed specifically, and most people will either do very badly or very well at that test, rather than perform in a way that produces a ‘bell curve’ distribution. Tests have to be designed and calibrated to result in such an outcome. The bell curve as a general description of the population became popular as more were required to rise in subsequent decades to fill social functions that had not existed in such abundance before: engine operator, teacher, tester. Today educators are arguing to change the shape of the perceived curve of ability again, to have the vast majority of results skewed to the right, put in the region marked ‘success’, as all begin to appear so equally able. The conclusions of those currently arguing against the idea of there being especially gifted children make clear how ‘… categorizing some children as innately talented is discriminatory ... unfair ... wasteful … [and] unjustified…’.25 It contributes to the injustice whereby social inequality persists.
Although we are now almost all fed well enough not to have our cognitive capabilities limited physically through the effects of malnutrition on the brain, and more and more children are better nurtured and cared for as infants in affluent countries, and although we are now rich enough to afford for almost all to be allowed to learn in ways our parents and grandparents were mostly not allowed, we hold back from giving all children that encouragement and, instead, tell most from a very early age that they are not up to the level of ‘the best in the class’, and never can be. We do this in numerous ways, including where we make children sit at school, usually on a table sorted by ability if primary school teachers are following Ofsted guidance. Within our families all our children are special, but outside the family cocoon they are quickly ranked, told that to sing they need to enter talent shows that only a tiny proportion can win, told that to learn they need to work harder than the rest and, more importantly, that they need to be ‘gifted’ if they are to do very well.
It is now commonly said that children need to be ‘gifted’, to become Sunday’s well-developed ‘level 5’ child. They need to be ‘especially gifted’ to be that seventh of a seventh who reach ‘level 6’, and it is harder still to win a rung on the places stacked above that scale. Most are told that even if they work hard they can at best only expect to rise one level or two, to hope to be simple rather than know-nothings, or to have effective knowledge, to be a useful cog in a machine, rather than just being a ‘simpleton’ (if you do particularly well). Aspiring to more than one grade above your lot in life is seen as fanciful. Arguing that there is not a mass of largely limited children out there is portrayed as misguided fancy by the elitists. Most say this quietly, but I have collected some of their musings here, and I give many examples later in this book to demonstrate this; occasionally a few actually say what they think in public: ‘“Middle-class children have better genes”, says former schools chief, “... and we just have to accept it”’.26 Such public outbursts are not the isolated musings of a few discredited former schools’ inspectors or other mavericks. Instead they reveal what is generally believed by the kinds of people who run governments that appoint such people to be schools’ inspectors. It is just that elitist politicians tend to have more sense than to tell their electorate that they believe most of them to be so limited in ability.
You might think that what the OECD educationalists are doing is trying to move societies from extreme inequality in education, through a bell curve of current outcome, to a world of much greater equality. However, the envisaged distribution of ability is not progressively changing shape from left-skewed, to bell-shaped, to right-skewed uniformly across the affluent world. In countries such as the Netherlands, Finland, Japan and Canada people choose to teach more children what they need to know to reach higher levels. In those countries it is less common to present a story of children having innate differences. In other countries, such as the UK, Portugal, Mexico and the US, more are allowed to learn very little, and children are more often talked about as coming from ‘different stock’.27 The position of each country on the scale of how elitist their education systems are has also varied over time.
How different groups are treated differently within countries at different times can be monitored by looking at changes in IQ test results. This evidence shows that these tests measure how well children have been taught in order to pass tests. So the generation you are born into matters in determining IQ. Intelligence tests have nothing to do with anything innate. Take two identical twins separated at birth and you will find that their physical similarities alone are enough for them to be similarly treated in their schools, given in effect similar environments to each other, in a way that accounts for almost all later similarities in how they perform in IQ tests. If both are tall and good-looking, for instance, they are more likely to become more confident, receive a little more attention from their teachers, a little more praise at their performance from their adoptive parents, a little more tolerance from their peers; they will tend to do better at school. These effects have been shown to be enough by themselves to account for the findings in studies of identical twins who have been separated at birth, but usually brought up in the same country, and who follow such similar trajectories. The trajectories also tend to be so similar because, of course, the twins are brought up over exactly the same time span.28
In the US the ‘IQ’ gap between black and white Americans fell from the 1940s to the 1970s, but rose subsequently back to the 1940s levels of inequality by the start of the 21st century. This move away from elitism and then back occurred in tandem with how the social position and relative deprivation of black versus white Americans changed.29 From the 1940s to the 1970s black Americans won progressively higher status, won the right to be integrated more into what had become normal economic expectations; wages equalised a little. Then, from the 1970s onwards, the wage gap grew; segregation increased again; civil rights victories were transformed into mass incarceration of young black men. No other country locks up as many of its own people as the US. In 1940 10 times fewer were locked up in jail in the US as now, and 70% of the two million now imprisoned are black.30 This huge rise in imprisonment in the US, and its acceptance as normal because of who is now most often imprisoned, is perhaps the starkest outcome of the growth of elitism in any single rich country.
Treating a few people as especially able inevitably entails treating others as especially unable. If you treat people like dirt you can watch them become more stupid before your eyes, or at least through their answers to your multiple choice questions in public examinations. From the 1970s onwards poor Americans, and especially poor black Americans, were progressively treated more and more like dirt. Literally just a few were allowed to sing.31 To a lesser extent similar trends occurred in many other parts of the affluent world, in all those rich countries in which income inequalities grew. And they grew most where IQism became most accepted.
IQism can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you believe that only a few children are especially able, then you concentrate your resources on those children and subsequently they will tend to appear to do well. They will certainly pass your tests, as the tests are designed for a certain number to pass, and the children you selected will have been chosen and then taught to pass such tests. Young people respond well to praise to learn, and get smarter when they learn as a result. They respond badly to disrespect, which reduces their motivation to learn, so they perform badly in tests. People, and especially children, crave recognition and respect. Telling children they rank low in a class is a way of telling them that they have not earned respect. Children are not particularly discerning about what they are taught. They will try to do well at IQ tests if you train them to try to do well at IQ tests. However, almost everyone wants to fit in, to be praised, not to rank towards the bottom, not to be seen as a liability, as those at the bottom are seen.
There is a river in New Zealand called the Rakaia that is spanned by a suspension bridge of novel design. (A photograph of it is included on page ii.) There is a notice by the bridge that tells its history and that of the ford that existed before the bridge. The river is wide and fierce, draining water from the Southern Alps. The notice says that before the bridge was built, the Maori would cross the river in groups, each group holding a long pole placed horizontally on the surface of the water so that the weakest would not be swept off their feet. The notice was written by the people who came after the Maori, who knew how to build a bridge of iron supported from beneath, but who did not understand why a group of people would cross a river with a pole. It was in fact not to protect the weakest, but to protect the entire group. Any individual trying to ford a fast-flowing river draining glacial waters runs a great risk. If you hold onto a long horizontal pole with others, you are at much lower risk. The concept of ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’ was a concept that took shape in places and times when it was better understood that all benefited as a result. When crossing a freezing river with a pole, you need as many others holding onto that pole with you as can fit.
All children are different. They grow up to be adults with differing idiosyncrasies, traits (often mistaken as talents or natural endowments) both peculiar to them and peculiar to the types of societies they are raised in. Some will turn out to be considered great singers, others to sing well in choirs, if brought up where it is normal to sing. Some of these idiosyncrasies are related to physical features – taller people may have held on better to that pole, for example. Because of what was allowed at the time, and not any genetic trait, it will almost certainly have been a man, but it will not necessarily have been an especially tall man, who grew up to think of suspending a bridge across the Rakaia. Almost every adult who thinks of building a suspension bridge was a child who had seen it done before, and almost none of the children who have never seen a bridge made that way will work out how to do so without prompting by someone who has. No one had the ‘unique’ idea in the first place. Or, to put it another way, every slight change that was made, from the earliest tree-trunk bridge to the latest design, was ‘unique’, as are all our thoughts. We are, none of us, superhuman. We are not like the gods with their gifts. We can all be stupid. We hold onto the pole to cross the river having faith in the strength of others. This is a much safer way to proceed than having a few carried by others who are not joined together. If, in the short term, you value being dry above solidarity or if you are led to believe that you are destined to carry others who are your superiors, then all are at greater risk of drowning.
Before we had suspension bridges many people drowned crossing rivers. And many also died in the process of building the bridges. Suspension bridges were first built using huge amounts of manual labour to dig out the ironstone needed, and the coal to forge the iron, to construct the girders and rivet everything in place. Almost everything was originally made by hand, and even the job of constructing each rivet, as in Adam Smith’s idealised pin factory, was initially done by dividing the process into as many small processes as possible and then giving responsibility for a particular part of the work, the flattening of the head of the rivet, say, to a particular man, woman or child labourer.
When pin factories were first created they initially mostly employed adult men – it did not take much schooling to teach a man how to squash a hot rivet in a vice so that its head was flattened. It took even less schooling to teach the woman who fed him at night how to cook the extremely limited rations available to those who first worked in factories. But it took a little more schooling to teach the foreman in charge of the factory how to fill in ledgers to process orders. It took even more schooling to train the engineer who decided just how many rivets were needed to make the bridge safe. If you look at the bridge currently spanning the gorge of the Rakaia River you will see that whoever made that decision erred on the side of caution – there tend to be a lot of rivets in old bridges. A lot of rivets meant a lot of rivet makers. If reasonably fed, then rivet makers and their wives made many children, little future rivet makers, almost none of whom, living in the towns where rivets were made, grew their own food, and so there were a great many new hungry mouths to feed and not enough time or people to spare to teach most of the little ones, who, after all, were destined to make yet more rivets for yet more bridges. But incrementally a surplus of wealth was amassed and a small part of that surplus was used to build schools, especially in the countries to where most of the surplus came, such as Britain.
Slowly a little more time was found, won and forged out of lives of great drudgery. Women gained a little power, managed to say ‘no’ a little more, and have six children each rather than eight. By 1850 in a country like Britain, most children attended some kind of school, often just Sunday school. By the 1870s it became law that all children should attend school until the age of 10; that age was ratcheted up steadily until the 1970s, after which there was a hiatus. By the 1970s women in Britain were having on average two children with the help both of the pill and of not insignificant liberation (just a century earlier people had been imprisoned for teaching about condoms). Educational equality rose, ignorance was slowly abated, and (as fertility fell) there were fewer children to teach and it was increasingly felt that there was more to teach to all of them. But that trend of increased equality came to an end in the 1970s as 1950s elitism began to outweigh earlier progress. The latter half of Figure 3 shows, as far as university entry is concerned, a curtailing of hope and opportunity as the belief that we did not all inherently have the same potential gained sustenance from arguments over IQ and aspects of intellectual ‘potential’. Mostly recently, however, as the very final years in the figure show, those elitist arguments have been partly lost concerning school-leaving age in at least one unequal rich country – all will now be in education until the age of 18 in Britain, although whether all, if not in the ‘top streams’, will be thought educable till then and treated with respect in schools is a battle still being fought.
Increased elitism might tolerate raising the school-leaving age to 18, but it is not commensurate with providing more education for all after that. In contrast to the recent acceleration in school-leaving age, the rapid rise in university entry that peaked around the late 1960s is now decelerating, and decelerated most quickly in the most recent decade, as Figure 3 makes clear. Any further increases in school-leaving age would require compulsory university attendance, as tertiary education would be provided for all, just as secondary education was to current students’ grandparents. Comprehensive universities would be as different to current universities as comprehensive schools are to grammar schools. Such a thing is hard to imagine today, but no harder than it was to imagine compulsory secondary school attendance just one lifetime ago, and a welfare state to go with it. That welfare state was first created in New Zealand.
Sources: BBC (2007) ‘School leaving age set to be 18’, report, 12 January; Meikle, J. (2007) ‘Education dropouts at 16 will face sanctions’, The Guardian, 23 March; Timmins, N. (2001) The five giants: A biography of the welfare state (new edn), London: HarperCollins, pp 2, 73, 198 and 200); and for latest official estimates, see Higher Education Funding Council for England website on widening participation of local areas: www.hefce.ac.uk/Widen/polar/
Eventually all the great gorges had been spanned, even as far south in the world as the Rakaia River. Roads were built, agriculture further mechanised. Food was preserved, chilled, shipped abroad; mouths in Europe were fed; money from Europe was returned (with ‘interest’); within just a decade of the first IQ test being christened on the other side of the planet. Rivet making was automated. The requirement for all children in rich countries to attend an elementary school until the age of 14 was finally fully enforced, occurring less than the length of a human lifetime ago (see Figure 3). That requirement was extended to compulsory secondary education for girls as well as boys, in all affluent nations.
In early 1950s Britain, young mouths were still being fed by rations even though the war had ended. It was then that IQ tests were initially used to decide, to ‘ration’, which kind of secondary school children would be allowed to go to. Although food and education were not directly related, the ideas of how you could rationally plan the allocation of both had arisen during wartime. For education the future rationing of what were then scarce resources (graduate teachers) was based on how those children performed on one day with pen and paper at a desk around the time of their 11th birthday. For some involved the intention was altruistic, to secure the best for the ‘brightest’ of whatever background, but the result was gross injustice. Similar injustices occurred in most other newly affluent nations. These injustices were resisted, seen as segregation by ‘race’ in the US, and by social class in Britain, and within just another couple of decades almost all children went to their nearest school, with no continuing distinction between grammar or secondary modern.
The phenomenon of almost all children going to their nearest secondary school, to the same school as their neighbours’ children, had occurred hardly anywhere in the world before the 1970s. When all local children go to the same neighbourhood state school it is called a ‘comprehensive’ school because it has to provide a comprehensive education for all. The main alternatives to comprehensive schools are selective schools where most children are selected to go to a school for rejects (called ‘secondary moderns’ in Britain) and only a few are allowed to go to schools for those not rejected by a test (‘grammar schools’). Before there was a change to the system, three quarters of children would typically be sent to schools for ‘rejects’, those secondary moderns. In Britain in 1965, 8% of all children of secondary school age attended a comprehensive school, 12% in 1966, 40% in 1970, 50% in 1973, 80% by 1977 and 83% by 1981.32
It was under the Conservative administration led by Margaret Thatcher that the final cull of over a third of the 315 remaining grammar schools still functioning in 1979 was undertaken, with 130 becoming comprehensives by 1982.33 However, the Conservative government then introduced ‘assisted places’ in 1979, the scheme whereby they began to sponsor a small group of select children chosen by private schools. And so, just at the time when it looked as if divisive state education was ending, the state itself sponsored an increase in division, which was the first major increase in private school entry in Britain in decades. Britain was not alone in seeing such elitism rise.
In 1979 Britain was following events that had first had their immediate impact elsewhere. In California, where Ronald Reagan was governor until 1975 (later becoming US president in 1980), private school entry first rose rapidly after years of decline. Between 1975 and 1982, in just seven years, the proportion of children attending private schools in California rose, from 8.5% to 11.6%.34 This occurred when, as a result of Ronald Reagan’s failure to fund properly the poorest of schools before he lost office, the state reduced the funding of all maintained schools to a level near that of the lowest funded school, following a Californian Supreme Court ruling of 1976. The ruling stated that it was unconstitutional to fund state schools variably between areas in relation to the levels of local property taxes. Before the court ruling, state schools in affluent areas were better funded than state schools in poorer parts of California, just as before the abolition of almost all selective grammar schools in Britain, affluent parents whose children were much more likely to attend such schools had seen much higher state funding of their children’s education compared with that of the majority. In both the US and Britain the advent of much greater educational equality was accompanied by a significant growth in the numbers of parents choosing to pay so that their children would not have to be taught alongside certain others, nor given the same resources as those others.
The rise in private school places occurred with the fall in grammar school places in Britain, and was much greater in the US with the equalising down of state education resources in California. In Britain the greatest concentration of private school expansion occurred in and on the outskirts of the most affluent cities such as London, Oxford and Bristol – not where local schools did worse, but where a higher proportion of parents had higher incomes. Educational inequalities had been reduced to a historic minimum by the 1970s in the US, just as income inequalities had. In education this trend was turned around by the reaction to the notorious35 Serrano verses Priest California court cases of 1971, 1976 and 1977. Similarly in Britain half of all school children were attending non-selective secondary schools by 1973: again, educational inequalities fell fastest when income inequalities were most narrow. These were crucial years where issues of equality between rich and poor were being fought over worldwide as well as between local schools. Internationally, poorer countries that controlled the supply of oil worked together to raise the price of oil dramatically in that same turbulent year (during the October Yom Kippur war). International inequalities in wealth fell to their lowest recorded levels; worldwide inequalities in health reached a minimum a few years later.36 Within Britain and the US such health and wealth inequalities had reached their lowest recorded levels a little earlier, around the start of the 1970s.37 This was a wonderful time for people in affluent countries, who had never had it so good. Wages had never been as high; even the US minimum wage was at what would later turn out to be its historic maximum.38
Before the jobs went at the end of the decade, before insecurity rose, it was a great time to be ordinary, or to be average, or even above average, but the early 1970s were a disconcerting time if you were affluent. Inflation was high; if you were well off enough to have savings then those savings were being eroded. People began to realise that their children were not going to be as cushioned as they were by so much relative wealth, by going to different schools. When politicians said that they were going to eradicate the evil of ignorance by educating all children in Britain, or that they were going to have a ‘Great Society’ in the US, they did not mention that this would reduce the apparent advantages of some children. Equal rights for black children, a level playing field for poor children – these can be seen as threats as more compete in a race where proportionately fewer and fewer can win.
In 2009 the OECD revealed (through its routine statistical publications) that Britain diverted a larger share of its school education spending (23%) to a tiny proportion of privately educated children (7%) than did almost any other rich nation. That inequality had been much less 30 years earlier.
It is not hard for most people to know that they are not very special. Even affluent people, if they are not delusional, know in their heart of hearts that they are not very special; most know that they are members of what some call the ‘lucky sperm club’, born to the right parents in their turn, or just lucky, or perhaps both lucky and a little ruthless. However, you don’t carry on winning in races that have fewer and fewer winners if you don’t have a high opinion of yourself. Only those who maintain the strongest of narcissistic tendencies are sure that they became affluent because they were more able. A few of those who couple such tendencies with eugenicist beliefs think that their children will be likely to inherit their supposed acumen and do well in whatever circumstances they face. The rest, the vast majority of the rich, who are not cocksure, had a choice when equality appeared on the horizon. They could throw in their lot with the masses, send their children to the local school, see their comparative wealth evaporate with inflation and join the party, or they could try to defend their corner, pay for their children to be segregated from others, look for better ways to maintain their advantages than leaving their savings to the ravages of inflation, vote and fund into power politicians who shared their concerns, and encourage others to vote for them too. They encouraged others to vote by playing on their fears, through making donations to right-wing parties’ advertising campaigns (see Section 5.1). They convinced enough voters that the centre-left had been a shambles in both the US and the UK. The opposition to the right-wing parties was too weak, campaign funding too low, and in 1979 in Britain and 1980 in the US the right wing won.
Although not as rare as the wartime rescuers of the 1940s, the effective left-wing idealists of the 1970s were too few and far between, although there were more of these idealists in some countries than in others. In Sweden, Norway and Finland left-wing idealists won, but society also held together in Japan, Germany, Austria, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and France, in Spain after Franco, in Canada, to an extent in Greece (once the generals were overthrown), in Switzerland and in Ireland. It was principally in the US, but also in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, Portugal and Singapore, that those who were rich had the greatest fears, and the greatest influence. It was there that the political parties and idealists of the rich fared best. There, more than elsewhere, most who had riches and other advantages looked to hold on to them. They donated money to right-wing political parties and helped them become powerful again. They donated because they were afraid of greater equality; not because they believed that most people would benefit from their actions by becoming more equal, but because they thought that the greater good would be achieved by promoting inequality. By behaving in this way they began to sponsor a renewed elitism.
One effect of right-wing parties winning power was that they attacked trade unions. And as unions declined in strength, left-wing parties were forced to look for other sources of finance. Having seen the power of funding politics, the affluent could then be cajoled to begin to sponsor formerly left-wing and middle-of-the-road political parties and to influence them, not least to give more consideration to the interests of the rich, and because they knew right-wing parties could not carry on winning throughout the 1990s. The rich spent their money in these ways, with their donations becoming ever more effective from the early 1960s onwards.39 In hindsight it is not hard to see how the Democrats in the US and later New Labour in Britain began similarly to rely so completely on the sponsorship of a few rich individuals and businesses. Once it became common for the affluent to seek to influence politicians with money, and occasionally to receive political honours from them as a result, there was no need to limit financial sponsorship to just the right wing. In those few very unequal affluent countries where the self-serving mantra of ‘because you’re worth it’ was repeated most often, part of what it meant to be in the elite came more and more from the 1970s onwards to be seen as someone who gave money to ‘good’ causes, charities to help animals or the poor, to political parties who do the same ‘good’ works, while not altering the status quo, not reducing inequality. Inequality can be made politically popular.
In the southern states of the US the ending of slavery brought the fear of equality. Initially this was translated politically into votes for the Democratic Party and the suppression of civil rights there through to at least the 1960s, including the right for children to go to the same school as their neighbours. In South Africa in the late 1940s apartheid was introduced with popular political support from poorer whites who felt threatened as other former African colonies were beginning to claim their freedom from white rule.40 Again, segregation began at school. When Nelson Mandela was put on trial in 1963, and facing a possible death sentence, in his concluding court statement he defined, as an equality worth fighting for, the right of children to be treated equally in education and for them to be taught that Africans and Europeans were equal and merited equal attention. At that time the South African government spent 12 times as much on educating each European child as on each African child. Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990. In that year children in inner-city schools in the US, such as those in Chicago, were having half as much spent on their state secondary education as children in the more affluent suburbs to the north, and 12 times less than was spent on the most elite private school education. By 2003 almost nine out of ten of those inner-city children were black or Hispanic, and inequalities in state school spending in America had risen four-fold. Inequalities rose even further if private schools are also considered, and were still growing by 2006 as private school fees rose quickly (at the extreme exponentially) while the numbers of private school places increased much more slowly.41
Admissions to private schools rose slowly and steadily in countries like the US and the UK from the 1970s onwards. They rose slowly because few could afford the ever-rising fees and because some held out against segregating their children. They rose steadily because despite the cost and inconvenience of having to drive children past the schools to which they could have gone, parents’ fears rose at a greater rate. Rising inequalities in incomes between families from the 1970s onwards have tended to accompany increased use of private educational provision in those countries where income inequalities have increased. Rising income inequalities also increase fear for children’s futures as it is easier to be seen as failing in a country where more are paid less. It is much harder to appear to succeed where only a few are paid more.
Just as anti-colonialism and the abolition of slavery fostered unforeseen new injustices, the success of civil rights for black children in the US and working-class children in Europe in the 1960s fostered the rise of new injustices of elitism, increased educational apartheid and the creation of different kinds of schools for children seen increasingly as different, who might otherwise have been taught together. By 2002 in many inner-city state schools in the US a new militaristic curriculum was being introduced, a curriculum of fear, according to a leading magazine of the affluent, Harpers. Not a single noise is tolerated in these schools; Nazi-style salutes are used to greet teachers; specific children are specified as ‘best workers’ and, according to a headmaster administering the ‘rote-and-drill curricula’ in one Chicago school, the aim is to turn these children into tax-paying automata who will ‘never burglarize your home…’.42 In 2009 President Barack Obama promoted Arne Duncan, the man who had been responsible for education policy in Chicago at this time, to be put in charge of education policy for the nation. He may have learned from what are now widely regarded as mistakes, or he may propagate them across the country, transforming ‘schools from a public investment to a private good, answerable not to the demands and values of a democratic society but to the imperatives of the market place’.43
In Britain children placed towards the bottom of the increasingly elitist education hierarchy are not ‘rote-and-drill’ conditioned so explicitly but are instead now ‘garaged’, kept quiet in classes that do not stretch them by teachers who understandably have little hope for them. These children and young adults are made to retake examinations at ages 16–19 to keep them in the system and in education, but they are not being educated. The elitist beliefs that have been spread are that if just a few children are gifted, but most are destined for a banal future, then providing the majority with education in art, music, languages, history, even athletics, can be viewed as profligate, while such things are presented as essential for the able minority.
It is not that progress was reversed in the 1970s but that, as has so often happened before, with every two steps taken forward towards greater justice, one step is taken backwards. Ending formal slavery in the southern US saw formal segregation established, an injustice far more minor than slavery, but one that came to be seen as equally great. As the end of direct colonial rule was achieved across Africa, apartheid was established in the south, once again more minor, but colonialism at home, within a country. As segregation of children between state secondary schools in Britain was abolished during the 1970s, in the South East there was a boom in the private sector, in newly segregated ‘independent’ schooling. Thus as each great injustice was overcome, a more minor injustice was erected in its place, to be overcome again in turn as was segregation after slavery, as was apartheid after colonialism, as elitism probably will be after the latest British school reorganisation (based on renewed IQist beliefs) is abolished. In every case what had been considered normal behaviour came to be considered abhorrent: slave holding, suggesting Africans were not capable of self-rule, proposing separate but far from equal lives. Separate lives are hard to justify, from the black woman forced to sit at the back of the bus to the children who are told that the only place for them is in a sink school. Separation is not very palatable once carefully considered,.
By 2007, in some parts of the UK there were hopeful signs of a move away from seeing children as units of production to be repeatedly tested, but the English school system had become a market system where schools competed for money and children. The introduction of 57 varieties of state school saw to that, as did the expanding of private schools, which saw their intake rise to 7% while the children in these schools took one quarter of all advanced level examinations and gained over half the places in the ‘top’ universities.44 Almost all the rest of elite places in these universities go to children in the better funded of the 57 varieties of state school, or those who had some other advantage at home. Elitist systems claim to be meritocracies, but in such systems almost no one gets to where they are placed on merit, not when we are all so inherently equal. In more equitable societies numerous ‘… studies reveal the overwhelming educational and socializing value of integrated schooling for children of all backgrounds’.45
Every injustice can be paired with a human failing. The failing that pairs best with elitism, given its 1950s’ apogee, is chauvinism. This is typically a prejudiced belief in the inherent superiority of men, in particular a small selected group of men. To see chauvinism in action when it comes to elitism, all you need do is look to the top, and at the top in the field of education is the Nobel prize (although not all Nobel prizes concern education, most do). Out of almost 800 people awarded Nobel laureates by the end of 2008, only 35 of them were women, a staggeringly low 4%! Overall, more were given for work in medicine to men and women jointly than for work in any other single subject. In medicine, teamwork often involving subordination is more common, thus a significant handful of women were included among the medical laureates. Physics has lower but similar numbers of prize winners compared with medicine, but only two women have ever been awarded the Nobel prize for physics. While chemistry is fractionally more welcoming, literature is much more female-friendly, with women being awarded almost a tenth of all the prizes handed out. But given how many women are authors today, is there really only one great woman author for every 10 men? Peace is similarly seen as more of a female domain – women were possibly even in the majority as members of some of the 20 organisations awarded the peace prize over the years. But they were in a small minority of actual named winners. Prizes are very much a macho domain, as Figure 4 shows.
We know most people in the world are labelled as in some way ‘stupid’ or ‘backward’, ‘limited’ or having only ‘simple’ ability when tested by international examination (see ‘world’ histogram in Figure 2, page 47 above). What is less well known is that those not labelled ‘stupid’ have to live out lies which increase in magnitude the more elevated their status. At the top are placed mythical supermen, those of such genius, talent or potential as to require special nurturing, an education set aside. Within this set they are arranged into another pyramid, and so on, up until only a few handfuls are identified and lauded. Until the most recent generation this elite education has almost always been set aside for men. In the rare cases that women were recognised as having contributed, they were often initially written out of the story, as in the now notorious case of Rosalind Franklin who contributed to discovering the shape of the double helix within which genes are carried. Rosalind was not recognised when the Nobel prize was awarded to James Watson and Francis Crick.46
Notes: Marie Curie is split between physics and chemistry; John Bardeen and Fred Sanger are counted only once. The five prizes awarded to women and the eight to men in 2009 are shown in parentheses. The economics prize included here is the special prize awarded by the Sveriges Riksbank (see page 69).
Source: http://nobelprize.org/index.html
Nobel prizes in science are the ultimate way of putting people on pedestals and provide wonderful examples of inherent equality when it comes to our universal predisposition to be stupid. In his later years James Watson provided the press with a series of astounding examples of this, for instance saying, it is claimed, that he had hoped everyone was equal but that ‘… people who have to deal with black employees find this not true’.47 This is no one-off case of prejudice among prize winners. Around the time that Watson was being given his laureate for double helix identification, a physics laureate of a few years earlier, William Shockley, was advocating injecting girls with a sterilising capsule that could later be activated if they were subsequently deemed to be substandard in intelligence, in order to prevent reproduction.48 Francis Crick’s own controversial support for the oddly named ‘positive eugenics’ was also well recorded by 2003, if not so widely known and reported in the popular press.49
James Watson’s work was mainly undertaken at the University of Cambridge and William Shockley ended up working at Stanford University in California. Perhaps we should not be surprised that men with backgrounds in the sciences who were educated and closeted in such places as Cambridge or Stanford should come to hold the view that so many not like them are inferior. Why should someone who examines things down microscopes or who studies x-rays know much about people? Surely, you might think, those who might have been awarded a Nobel prize in social sciences, the arts or the humanities might be a little more enlightened, and so the academics in these areas often appear to be, but perhaps only because in these fields there are no such prizes and so no such prize holders to be put on pedestals from which to confidently pontificate.50
Telling someone that they are very able at one thing, such as passing a test or winning a prize, can easily make them think they are more likely to be right about other things, such as the morality of sterilising women. Fortunately, at least in order for this experiment in putting people on pedestals to continue, one social science was later treated differently and the results were telling. In 1969 the Sveriges Riksbank, Sweden’s central bank, created a special prize in economics. Over the subsequent 40 years up to 2008 all the 60-odd prizes, some joint, were, without exception, given to men (although in 2009 one was awarded to the first woman, Elinor OstrØm; see page 88).
Maybe only men are able to be good economists, and maybe there is such a thing as a good economist, one especially able to understand the monetary workings of society, to uncover the truth as to how there is some underlying logic to resource allocation by individual decision making other than the obvious. Maybe just a chosen few are able to glimpse these truths and reveal them to the small minority of the most able of the rest of us, the masses who are barely able to understand. Alternatively, maybe we have had here a group of men awarding each other prizes if they fitted in. Evidence that the latter is the case, and that these men are no more able or less stupid than other people, abounds.51 Table 3 shows the subjects in which, up to 2008, a few women had been welcome and those in which almost none, or none at all (in the case of economics), were recognised as achieving greatness.
It is not just through the statements of a few on issues of how they deal with their black employees that we know that prize winners are so flawed. When you begin to search you find that top economists are often involved in what from a distance appear as childish spats with one another.52 Given the passing of a few years their theories often do not look very clever, do not appear to apply well to today’s world, or they appear to be simply the next logical step in a line of thinking that is, as a whole, too complex to be the work of just one mind, no matter how beautiful.
Some of the worst consequences of elitism in education are seen in what happens to those deemed to be the elite. In New York City, one of the twin hearts of the world financial system, live some of the richest people on earth. By 2008 the most affluent paid around US$25,000 a year per child for a pre-school place in an exclusive nursery.53 Such pre-schooling is thought to lead to what looks like exam success in each year that follows. The children sent to nurseries like this are far more likely than any other children to end up as college students in the Ivy League universities, those universities that pay the highest salaries, partly to be able to employ the most Nobel laureates. Does this mean that these children will also exhibit great intellectual abilities? (George Bush the Second attended both Yale and Harvard.) Or will they appear a little more like especially spoilt (but cajoled)American adolescents who have been given little choice over their upbringing, who suffer from being repeatedly told how gifted they are, and from believing the people who tell them this?
| Medicine | Physics | Chemistry | Literature | Peace | Economics | Total | ||
| Observed | ||||||||
| Men | 184 | 180 | 149 | 94 | 84 | 62 | 753 | |
| Women | 8 | 1.5 | 2.5 | 11 | 12 | 0 | 35 | |
| Total | 192 | 181.5 | 151.5 | 105 | 96 | 62 | 788 | |
| Expected | Men | 183.5 | 173.4 | 144.8 | 100.3 | 91.7 | 59.2 | 753 |
| Women | 8.5 | 8.1 | 6.7 | 4.7 | 4.3 | 2.8 | 35 | |
| Total | 192 | 181.5 | 151.5 | 105 | 96 | 62 | 788 | |
| (O-E) | Men | 0.5 | 6.6 | 4.2 | –6.3 | –7.7 | 2.8 | 0.0 |
| Women | –0.5 | –6.6 | –4.2 | 6.3 | 7.7 | –2.8 | 0.0 | |
| Total | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | |
| (O-E)²/E | Men | 0.0015 | 0.2482 | 0.1235 | 0.4001 | 0.6524 | 0.1280 | 1.55 |
| Women | 0.0327 | 5.3407 | 2.6579 | 8.6087 | 14.0354 | 2.7538 | 33.43 | |
| Total | 0.03 | 5.59 | 2.78 | 9.01 | 14.69 | 2.88 | 34.98 |
Notes: The prizes awarded in 2009 were so very unusual in distribution that they are not included here. For source of data and the 2009 distribution see Figure 4. Strictly speaking in statistical strictures too few women have been awarded the prize over the course of the last century for this simple goodness-of-fit test to be applied, as in three categories fewer than five women would be expected to have been awarded a prize. The sum of the squared differences each divided by that expected number is 34.98. The numbers of degrees of freedom are sexes less 1 multiplied by subjects less 1, or (2–1)*(6–1)=5. On five degrees of freedom a value of 20.515 is statistically significant at p=0.001. This is an approximate test as cell sizes are small. Nevertheless it would appear that sex and subject are far from independent (literature and peace above the average, physics, chemistry and economics below, while medicine awards prizes at the average rate). For an exact test see note 59.
Examination upon examination, exclusive school after exclusive school and then exclusive university, all the time being told you are special. And the only way out is down. Given this type of an education it is hard not to come to believe you are special, hard not to start to look down on the ‘little people’, hard to understand that you are not so clever. That initial US$25,000 down-payment may be followed by up to a million dollars’ worth of ‘investment’ in each child of the super-rich as their way is paid through school and exclusive college. Fees, designer clothes, exclusive cars and the cash and credit cards needed to stay on the social circuit all increase in cost far faster than average commodities. An elite education tends to be a very expensive education.
Rising inequalities in income and wealth within the US were followed closely by increases in inequalities in educational outcome over the course of the last quarter-century.54 Rich children appeared to be doing much better, a large part of that rise in educational inequality being their apparent advancement rather than increased illiteracy among the poor. However, what the affluent were becoming better at was passing examinations, not necessarily learning. Similarly, in Britain, it has only been from about the start of the last quarter-century that the most exclusive private boarding schools took conditioning their young ladies and gentlemen to pass examinations seriously. Before then, if they did not become scholars, access through old boys’ networks to jobs in the City of London, or to high-ranking positions in the armed forces was still common, and the girls simply had to marry well. As the poor were being given access to comprehensive secondary education, and a chance, as compared with the no-chance future of being sent to a secondary modern, that led to the very richest of all being forced to ‘swot’. They did not become wiser or cleverer as a result, just more able to pass a particular examination on a particular day, aided by a little more help each year from their tutors with the coursework.
People who have taught the children of the higher classes at the universities they go to see the result of the growth in elitism. These children have been educationally force-fed enough facts to obtain strings of A grades, but they are no more genii than anyone else. There is a tragedy in making young people pretend to superhuman mental abilities which neither they nor anyone else possess. To justify their situation they have to swallow and repeat the lie being told more and more often that only a few are especially able and that those few are disproportionately found among these high social classes. The pill is sweetened by living in a context where much of the assumption and perception of social status is taken for granted. High private school fees are paid as much to ensure this context as to secure high grades and a place in a prestigious university. The most prestigious universities of all, with their ivy and towers, also provide a comfortable sheltered context to continue to believe that you are especially able. Why else would you be there, you might ask.
In recent years, in the more unequal of affluent countries like Britain and the US, it has become a little more common for the elite to suggest among themselves that children born to working-class or black parents simply have less natural ability than those born to higher-class or white parents.55 The people who tend to say this are not being particularly original; they are just a little more boldly and openly echoing claims made commonly, if discreetly, by the class they were born into or (in a few cases) have joined. They often go on to quietly suggest that children of different class backgrounds tend to do better or worse in school on account of some ‘… complex interplay of sociocultural and genetic factors’.56 It may sound subtle to include the words ‘complex’ and ‘sociocultural’, but once ‘genetic factors’ are brought into the equation all subtlety is lost. ‘Genetic factors’ could be used to defend arguments that women are inherently less able than men, black people in essence less able than white. Slip ‘genetic factors’ into your argument and you cross a line.
The best evidence we have that genetic factors influence school results is that there is more chance of your star sign or month of birth influencing your mental abilities than there is of your genes so doing.57 In contrast, it is the country and century you are born into, how you are raised and how much is spent on your schooling which all actually matter. Star signs matter slightly in that they indicate when in the year you were born and hence how physically developed you were when you first entered school. It does not matter whether you were born on a Monday; it matters only a little whether you are a Capricorn; and ‘the IQ gene’ does not exist. Sadly, it is belief in things like the IQ gene or equivalent that results in teachers being asked around the rich world to identify children who may become especially ‘gifted and talented’.58 We may well be born with varying ‘idiosyncrasies’, blue eyes or brown eyes, distinct chins or no chins, but these no more imply that the upper classes have superior genes than that Sunday’s children are more likely to be born ‘bonny and blithe, and good and gay’.
Putting people on pedestals is not always dangerous as long as those placed there are greatly embarrassed by the process. Researchers have found that different children can grow up to be differently able in ways other than through the fiction of inherent intelligence. Some children grow up to be adults who appear far more able to help others in a crisis, the most celebrated of these adults in recent European history being those very few who helped rescue and shelter Jewish people in occupied Europe. It is worth repeating that when the rescuers’ backgrounds were looked into it was commonly found that their parents had set high standards for them as children, high standards as to how they should view others, and their parents did not treat them as if there were limits to their abilities, nor did they tell them that others were limited. If you see others as inherently inferior then inequality will always be with you. Childhood upbringings akin to those of the rescuers are now much more common than they were in the 1920s and 1930s. Far fewer young adults would blithely obey orders and fight for their countries now than agreed to then. However, it is still just as possible to train people to follow orders now. There is no inevitability to progress. But it is harder to cajole those who have been taught, while young, that others are equal and deserving of respect to behave in a way they find abhorrent. And it is just as hard to convince those brought up to think of themselves as superior that there is no natural unlevel playing field of inherent ability.
The way in which women currently are and previously have been treated provides clear testament to the arbitrary nature of discrimination based on presumption of inherent difference. The development of gender roles also highlights how progress is far from inevitable. Figure 5 suggests that had you been observing the Nobel prizes tally in 1950 you might have felt (optimistically) that by the end of the century a quarter of prizes would have been won by women, or even half if you hoped for a little acceleration reflecting the rapid promotion of women into secondary education, universities and beyond. However, by the end of the 1950s you would have been shocked to find that not a single prize had been awarded to a woman that decade. Had you lived to September 2009, you would be perhaps saddened to find that the 1940s tally of 8% had never been matched again – even though 35 women were awarded Nobel prizes by the start of 2009, this was still less than 5% overall.
The awarding of no Nobel prizes to women in the 1950s did not occur by chance; it is too unlikely an event for that.59 It also did not occur from conspiracy; it is too glaring an outcome for that. Conspiracy between the committees would have ensured at least one single woman selected during this decade, as a token gesture. Women had been given prizes in every previous decade so it did not occur because of how few women had been in ‘top jobs’. It occurred because those who awarded the prizes and made the initial nominations were reflecting the times they were living through. The prizes had begun to matter greatly, not for their cash value, but for the prestige that they carried and the message that their awarding gave. Women were still nominated during the 1950s, of course. For the peace prize, nominations included educationalist Maria Montessori in 1951, birth control campaigner Margaret Sanger in both 1953 and 1955, and Helen Keller in 1954 for her work on disability and ability. As I write, only nominations for the peace prize up to 1955 can easily be accessed online, and these show that although a few women were nominated, such as those three, increasingly it was men, especially anti-communists, who were pushed forward, nominations flooding in on their behalf from groups of various members of parliament who appeared to lobby the peace prize awarding committees most effectively. Other committees appear to have been even more strongly influenced by their times: Winston Churchill was awarded the prize for literature in 1953, Ernest Hemingway in 1954, and Boris Pasternak in 1958.
Source: http://nobelprize.org/index.html; note that since the 1950s almost all the prizes for women have been in literature or peace, and only a few in medicine. Note that 2009 and 2010 have not been included. See page 88 for the remarkable story of 2009.
We easily forget that as soon as the Second World War ended, a new cold war started. In affluent countries this became a war on enemies imagined to be within, on communists and their sympathisers. We similarly easily forget that with the great steps taken forward to secure basic social security, education, housing, employment and healthcare for most in the 1940s and early 1950s came the counter-force of a renewed interest in being elitist. The two were connected. It was, after all, communists who most loudly proclaimed the virtues of various equalities. That no woman was awarded any of the highest of international prizes between 1947 and 1966 was because of the social changes at that time, not due to any lack of achievement.
Fear of communism was first seriously fuelled when the 1917 revolution in Russia could not be overcome by foreign invasion and did not collapse in on itself, nor transform quickly enough back to market competition. Before it became clear that other ways of organising societies were possible, there appeared to be less at stake, no obvious route through which greater equality might quickly come and no need to defend unequal societies by claiming that those at the top were of greater ability. Although arguments that inequality was natural began in the gilded age, the alternative of communism in practice added a great impetus to those who would argue that different people were destined for different futures because they were of differing ability. In 1922 it was said (by Walter Lippmann, an oft-quoted early advocate of testing) that if it became thought that these ‘ability’ tests measured anything like intelligence, and revealed predestined ability, then it would be a thousand times better if both the testers and their tests were ‘sunk at sea and lost without trace’.60 The opposite transpired; the tests did come to be seen as revealing predestined ability. Testing became all-pervasive in education in affluent countries.
Testing became all-pervasive partly as a defence of privilege in response to greater equality being won by the poor in affluent nations, and partly because of the perceived threat from poorer nations, from communism and from former colonies winning independence. It is clear today that latent inequalities in individual talent did not and do not exist and thus that categorising some children as innately talented discriminates on an essentially racist basis.61 But to understand the fear that leads to such renewed and expansive racism requires an understanding of the erosion of status position which was felt by those who had been placed at the peaks of society following the Second World War.
After the Second World War the worldwide testing industry took off with a vengeance. There was no great legacy of mass testing and labelling of children around ages 11 or 15 before then. Only since the war have most children still been in school at 15, and then only in affluent countries. Mass testing of children is a symptom of affluence. It is an unintended by-product of riches, where to be seen as insufficiently clever, insufficiently scientific, is to err. Today’s children’s parents were taught to try to ensure they were not innumerate, their grandparents were taught to ensure they were not illiterate. Future children and grandchildren will in turn face different hurdles, but will not necessarily be strung up along a bell curve as today’s children are by our current obsession to test.
As described earlier, the bell curve of supposed ability came to be used most perniciously in countries like Britain as a model immediately after the Second World War. Children were tested at age 11 and had their future roles, through future ‘choice’ of schools, allocated on the basis of that test result. The tests had taken 40 years to develop from their French origins at the start of the century. It took a further 40 years for the tests to be removed from the lives of most young children, so that by the early 1980s most were going to the same schools as others in their neighbourhood and had not had their futures predetermined by one test. For most this was the ending of a kind of racism in education, of institutionalised ignorance. A few still went to selective schools, including private schools, but until the late 1980s that proportion was dropping.
The tide turned back towards elitism during the 1980s. To continue with the British example, in the very early 1980s in England the number of selective secondary (grammar) schools was cut to its minimum of just under 200 by 1982,62 but the Conservative government that made that final cut had plans for new educational apartheids. These plans were far more subtle than the 1940s plan for each large town to have one selective grammar school for those deemed able, and several secondary moderns for those deemed less able. The new plans were to create a market in education, an economic curve, a continuum of supply differentiated by quality to cater for an imagined distribution of demand for education, from those whose needs were seen as least to those who, it was claimed, merited most attention. Every child was now to be educated,63 but some educated in very different ways from others. Most crass were the assisted places introduced to subsidise the private school fees of children with especially pushy parents but with fewer financial resources. Much more subtle was the introduction of school league tables.
It took until the early 1990s for league tables to be introduced across Britain and in similar countries. These tables created a market for state school places with parents paying through their house price to access more selective state schools. Before owner-occupation had reached its early 1980s peak a spatial market in education could not easily operate in this way. Then, as higher and higher proportions of young adult incomes were spent on housing, a spiral of spatial educational discrimination set in. The same occurred in the US, but with even more emphasis on private provision in universities. The result there was that, from 1980 to the turn of the millennium, ‘… public expenditure on prisons increased six times as fast as public expenditure on education, and a number of states have now reached a point where they are spending as much public money on prisons as on higher education’.64 This change in provision resulted in more prisoners than college students coming from many residential areas in states such as California. Americans put up with this because they had been taught to be optimistic. Very few people look at their new-born baby boy and say that he’ll probably have been in prison at least once by the time he is 30. Many people look and hope he’ll go to college. If few go to college from the area where they live, then they hope, they dream, he’ll be the one, their baby will be the exception. A watered-down version of these dreams led parents in many of the few parts of England where the couple of hundred overtly selective state schools remain to vote in recent years to keep selective state schooling, a majority locally believing that their children were in the top fifth of some ability range consisting of all state-educated children who lived nearby.
To believe that your children are in the top fifth requires first to believe that there is a top fifth. At any one time you can subject a group of children to testing and a fifth can be singled out as doing best. That fifth will be slightly more likely than their peers to rank in the top fifth in any other related test, but that does not mean that there is an actual top fifth that is waiting to be identified. The higher the correlations between different tests, the more the same children come to be selected in that top fifth under different test regimes. The more this happens, the more they will have been coached to perform well, the more likely they will be to live in a society that takes the idea of such testing seriously, a society, from government to classroom, that implicitly accepts the idea of inherent differences in ability. It is the smallest of steps from that position to accept that what you think is inherent is inherited. From putting prize winners on pedestals to putting whole populations in prisons, how we treat each other reveals how we see each other. We no longer view it as acceptable to make black people sit together at the back of the bus, but we still think it acceptable to sit ‘slow’ children together at the back of the class. IQism has become the current dominant unquestioned underlying belief of most educational policy makers in the more unequal of affluent nations.65 Thinking that you and your children are special and are likely to climb to the top is a very dangerous way to think. The steeper the slope to the top, the fewer the places on the pinnacle, the more likely your dreams are to be dashed. The result of taking such thinking to an extreme means that in a majority of schools in the US where a minority of pupils are white, armed police are now permanently stationed in the school. Schools in poorer areas of the US now routinely identify and exclude students they see as being on the ‘criminal justice track’66 (meaning on the way to prison). By doing this they cause these children to start along a route that makes such predictions a near certainty.
Britain and similar countries follow in North America’s wake in penal and education policy, and are not as far behind as you might think. Over the course of a decade, around the start of this century, the rate of imprisoning children in Britain increased ten-fold, despite no significant increase in criminality.67 Increased permanent exclusion from ever more competitive schools contributed. Most adults imprisoned are barely out of childhood; their biggest mistake is not their crime, but having been born at the wrong time, to the wrong family, in the wrong place, in the wrong country. There is nothing inherently evil within North Americans that means they are much more likely to commit crimes than any other group of people in the world. The overall US incarceration rate has become so high that worldwide it is on a par only with the imprisonment that followed the criminal actions of Rwandans during the genocide there.68 The US imprisons more of its own people than any other country because of what it has become. Because of the extent of the elitism that has taken hold in the US, people are finally waking up to realise that the American dream is only a dream, a dream of a memory. That elitism now raises a few dozen young celebrities to stardom, a few hundred young entrepreneurs to riches, and projects a few thousand young people sent to Ivy League colleges to totter high on unstable pedestals while condemning millions of other children to criminal alternatives.
In education what was previously seen as fair, or at least fair enough for each generation, becomes unjust, from slavery being justified, to denying votes to the poor, preventing equal rights for women, discriminating over disability – all become unpalatable. But the extension of freedoms also triggers counteractions. On a small scale at first and only at the very pinnacles of power, the witch hunts for communists and the macho politics of the 1950s reflected the fact that more powerful people were feeling a little more out of control. By the 1960s across Europe and especially in North America that feeling was spreading. In the 1970s people who generally thought of themselves as affluent became yet more frightened of what they saw as threats from within. They did not have quite enough of the advantages which they thought were due to them, and to their children. Poor countries appeared to be gaining more power as oil and all other prices rose; poor people were being given more and more. There was a reaction. In the subsequent decades the affluent ensured indirectly through their political gains that almost every additional university place, especially in the more prestigious institutions, was offered first to their offspring. They did this not through conspiracy but by individually working to secure advantages that they had taken for granted in the past, securing their children college places in a way that might not have been necessary in earlier years. But, once all the university places were filled, once all their children went to college, what next? Do you begin to think of paying for postgraduate education for your children? Perhaps buying them PhDs? Or is it easier to talk about maintaining standards and voting for and funding political parties who support those universities that want to charge more and exclude more from entering their hallowed halls? You can even begin to see how your child’s position of relative advantage can be maintained if you argue for more prisons to house other people’s children once they grow up, rather than seeing other people’s children as like yours. But great problems can arise from placing offspring on pedestals. This occurs most frequently when they fail to perform as expected.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the rich did not talk about those of their children who did not succeed on their terms, as that might be embarrassing. A misinformed few might even have thought that such talk would reflect badly on their genes. Instead they voted for and funded politicians who had an agenda that implicitly included limiting additional access to universities to exclude the poor, minimising subsidised access to ‘elite’ universities, cutting affirmative action (also called ‘positive discrimination’). This was no conspiracy. It was simply referred to as ‘practical politics’. Governments claimed that their policies were slightly widening access, even as it actually narrowed. They may even have thought that access was widening, as the overall numbers going to university increased and the numbers from poorer areas also rose. However, initially almost all the extra places taken up in universities in countries like Britain were taken up by more affluent children, especially, and more enduringly, in the more elite universities.69 More obtusely, the affluent tended to be opposed to those who would raise their taxes to fund educational changes to lower the barriers to others’ children. Did their own children thank them for this? Occasionally in those years you might have heard a young adult say how grateful they were for the ‘sacrifices’ their parents had made in sending them to a fee-paying school, but you heard such stories less and less over time as it became more obvious that being able to afford to make such a ‘sacrifice’ was hardly a state of privation. It also became more and more obvious that, as the establishment you got to began again to depend more on how rich your parents were, or how unethically they were willing to behave (‘entrepreneurially’, making as much money as they could), such ‘a privilege’ was becoming less of a thing to boast about.
In the more unequal affluent nations educational discrimination rose during the 1980s and 1990s, but just as the rich children of the 1960s had not appeared particularly grateful to their parents or respectful of their views, so again privileged children did not necessarily embrace the elitism that their parents had fostered. The age of elitism did not produce a particularly happy nor knowledgeable generation of affluent young people despite all the money spent on their learning. Being taught that for most of your life you will have to compete to keep your place, that beneath you is a seething mass of competitors a little less deserving than you but just waiting to take your place, is hardly comforting. Being taught that if you fall at any point it is your fault, and that it will reflect badly on your family, does not provide a good environment in which to learn. Being taught that you learn in order to secure your social position is no education. The affluent could no longer learn more by studying further under such conditions, but became obliged to ‘swot’, to appear to study, to send their children to study, to justify their even more exalted future positions. They were no longer becoming more content as a result of greater wealth because they already had enough for their needs. Nor were they becoming more engaged in their work, but were working to maintain and increase their wealth. As they lived ever longer lives they lived into extreme frailty at rates that had been rare before. They were not made happier by additional material possessions, because you can only drive one car at a time, sleep in one bed, wear one set of clothes.
There comes a time when enough is enough, when you no longer feel driven to maintain your comparative advantage by holding others down, by denying others education, inclusion, respect, health and happiness. Injustice begins with education, its denial, its mutation, its mutilation. Good, fair, just education is not provided in societies where the accepted belief is that different children have different capacities, where it is presumed that most people are always destined to struggle, and that each has a low limit to what they can be expected to achieve. At times such assumptions are made explicit, such as in the official proposals to change English education law in 2005 in which it was claimed that ‘we must make sure that every pupil – gifted and talented, struggling or just average – reaches the limits of their capability’.70 In England the idea that different children have different limits has for so long been part of the social landscape that, despite the best efforts and advice, it still underlies key thinking.
English policy makers were often brought up on childhood stories written by authors during the dying days of the empire where a hierarchy of characters was presented to the minds of young readers, often with subservient ones being depicted as animals. The stoats and the weasels in the book Wind in the Willows had limits and needed to be kept in their places; so, too, with the great ordering of creatures in the Narnia Chronicles; and it was the unruly subservient class getting above its station in life that threatened to wreck ‘the Shire’ and the natural order of a fictitious world (looking remarkably like Europe) in Lord of the Rings. Thus in the most fictional of children’s fantasy tales in hierarchical societies, hierarchy is defended, suggested as being under threat and in need of reinforcement. The same can be said of old stories of trains and tank engines with ‘bolshie’ buses and pliant (female) trucks, or of cabals of privileged ‘famous fives’, or ‘secret sevens’ rounding up criminals from the lower orders. But these are old stories. The new stories are different.
Children’s stories and the stories we tell our children are changing. They might still contain fantastic animals that speak, and echoes of the society in which they are written, but less and less do they so overtly defend hierarchy. For younger children the typical plot of illustrated stories now concerns such issues as how sharing makes you happier (Rainbow Fish). Underdogs are increasingly being portrayed as eventual victors (Harry Potter); hierarchy and authority as bad (His Dark Materials). The villain in children’s stories became by 2007 the banker figure of ‘… a businessman in a grey suit who never smiled and told lies all the time’.71 The settings might still be gothic boarding schools, Oxford colleges or imaginary lands, but the tales within those settings are no longer the same. With imaginations differently fired, and underlying assumptions not so strongly set, tomorrow’s policy makers are likely to think quite differently.
Already in the US there are the beginnings of a ‘detracking movement’, advocating not grouping children into classes and sets by ‘ability’, not sitting the ‘slow’ ones together in class. There are subversive cartoons undermining what have been only recently promoted as traditional US values of selfishness. Even the pre-school children’s book Rainbow Fish has been turned into a 26-episode series which has been shown on the Home Box Office television channel since the year 2000 (causing many cries of socialist subversion!). As the counter-culture grows there is also more formal rebellion. In Britain calls not to set children into school classes grouped by ability are becoming clearer, not to have gifted and talented ghettos which in turn simply end up being reflected by a more distinct set of bottom sets in schools for those destined for criminality.72 In 2006 official but concealed education statistics were leaked to the press revealing that, on average, a black school child in Britain was five times less likely to be officially registered as either ‘gifted’ or ‘talented’ compared with a white school child.73 The labelling was a stupid idea, but often stupid ideas have had to have been played out for the stupidity to be fully recognised. If children in Britain were not so badly educated, and those categorised as ‘the top’ did not so often grow up to become such elitist adults, then ideas such as the official targeting of the so-called gifted would be laughed off long before becoming policy.
In the US the ‘no child left behind’ policy of testing children repeatedly, including those who speak Spanish as a first language being tested (and humiliated) in English, is increasingly drawing criticism for its inherent racism. The results of such testing demoralise the majority and stoke up arrogance in a minority, while everyday interactions at home and school can reinforce these unfortunate outcomes. We also have only very recently come to learn that there are alternative strategies which could have fortunate outcomes as long as children are able to feel confident that they can succeed:
We learn best in stimulating environments when we feel sure we can succeed. When we feel happy or confident our brains benefit from the release of dopamine, the reward chemical, which also helps with memory, attention and problem solving. We also benefit from serotonin which improves mood, and from adrenaline which helps us to perform at our best. When we feel threatened, helpless and stressed, our bodies are flooded by the hormone cortisol which inhibits our thinking and memory. So inequalities, in society and in our schools, have a direct effect on our brains, on our learning and educational achievement.74
Aspects of this kind of thinking are slowly creeping into policy, but only just getting in through the cracks not policed by those who favour inequality, or, as it is more often called, competition. Just two years after the Education Act that talked of children having limits, in the British government’s Children’s Plan of 2007 a recommendation appeared that group setting of children be abolished (hidden on page 69 of the plan). Everywhere there are signs of dissent. The higher up the hierarchy you travel the more such dissent is hidden, but it is there.
A key government adviser in Britain, Jonathan Adair Turner, was recently asked to tackle the issues of either drugs or pensions. He said that his belief was that drugs should be decriminalised – so he was given the pensions remit, and then the problem of climate change to solve!75 His background was in banking, as was that of most key advisers to British governments recently. Banking had become the most celebrated occupation and so it was thought he could understand anything, such as drugs, or pensions, or climate. But, as Adair demonstrates, even with bankers it is becoming harder to identify people to give these posts to who can be guaranteed to sing sweetly from a set-belief hymn sheet.
Elitism is partly sustained because people are unlikely to seek high office, or feel able to remain there, if they do not have a high view of themselves and of their abilities. But it is also sustained because we tolerate such arrogance, and accept so readily the idea of there being just a few great minds, of there being just a few who should aspire to great positions of power, who are able to advise, lead and lecture. We rarely question why we have so few positions of great power, so few judges, ministers and other leaders. But, if you took every top post and created two jobs, each on half the salary, you would do a great deal to reduce privilege. It is harder to lord it over others when your pay is made more similar to theirs.
The social evil of ignorance was the old injustice of too few receiving even the most basic education in affluent countries. The injustice of widespread elitism is revealed through the production today of a surfeit, an excess, of many more apparent qualifications bestowed on those who already have most. This leads to others’ abilities being often now labelled as inadequate to excuse growing inequality in many aspects of life.
But there is hope. In 2005 Larry Summers, economist and then president of Harvard University, stated that part of the gender gap in academic appointments could well be due to differences in innate aptitude, with women simply being less able than men.76 Within a year he was forced to resign. Those at the very top of our elite hierarchies are now more likely to be taken to task for their failings than has ever before been the case. All that is required to overcome elitism in education is not to believe in the myths of superhuman ability, not to be in awe of those who are placed on pedestals. All that is required is to argue that we all deserve a little more education and we should not concentrate resources on just a few. It was difficult initially to suggest that all children had a right to education, and then that all should have that right extended through to their late teenage years. Both of these propositions were said to be impossible to achieve and unwarranted, until the point at which they were achieved.
If we are to stop such elitism we need universal tertiary education. Universities in rich countries must be more comprehensive in their outlook and behaviour, must teach across the board, not concentrating on a few antiquated subjects, and teach at the ages when people want to learn. We could start to argue for slow learning in place of the fast ‘get-qualification-quick’ education marketplace of today: more rights to learn again later in life, and no special credit given for chalking up qualifications in ever greater numbers, ever more quickly.
One day, in the near future, most likely when all children and young adults in affluent countries are given the right by law to be educated up to the age of 21, a declaration will be made. It will be announced that for the first time in human history, not as a result of pandemic, famine or plague, but simply because of what we have become and how we now behave, the number of human beings on the planet has fallen. On that day people will still squabble about what kind of education they are to receive and who receives most, but we will no longer consign six out of every seven children to categories of failure, and consign six out of every seven who are seen to be good to positions where they play purely supporting roles to their ‘genius’ betters. It is unlikely we will again allow so few to stand so high above the rest, as we did in the 20th century.
Outside the rich world, children will become more precious simply because their numbers are declining. Almost all children will routinely complete their secondary school education. The world will be a little more equal, partly because it cannot get much more unequal, but also because the vast majority of those who lose out from growing inequality can no longer be presumed to be ignorant, and be ignored. But the 21st century will be no utopia. There will still be Nobel prizes and women will be awarded far less than half of them; there will be sexism and racism, prejudice, bigotry and pomposity, but a little less of each, and all a little less tolerated. Change can occur suddenly and unexpectedly. From 1900 to 2008 only 12 women had ever been awarded a Nobel prize in science. But, as I was correcting the proofs of this text, in 2009 three women, one based in Hong Kong, were awarded science prizes, along with a male scientist of Indian origin; a woman writer from Germany won the literature prize and, least remarkably of all in this changing context, Barack Obama was awarded the peace prize for deeds yet to be done. In just one week in October 2009 the prize-giving committees upturned a century of predictability. The change to Figure 5 (page 75) takes the first decade of the 21st century from being mediocre to off-the-scale: 9% of prize winners in the decade being female once that week in 2009 is included, the highest ever proportion, with women receiving a third of all the prizes in that one year. Then, on Monday, 12 October 2009, as if to confirm that the times really were changing, the economics committee awarded one of their prizes, for the first time ever, to a woman, Elinor Ostrøm.
All manner of other trinkets and tokens will be awarded in future, and there is nothing wrong in that. It is not hard to stamp more medals, to print more certificates. Many primary school children in rich countries already receive hundreds of prizes a year telling them ‘well done’ for all forms of achievements. It is not hard to imagine our schools changing to encourage children more and test them less. And when will these things come about? Although they make no claims about school-leaving age, success, failure, prizes or inequality, those who come together in the UN do prophesy one part of this story with growing certainty. The year in which the day will dawn with one less human being than the day before will be some time around 2052.77 This will be simply because we have learnt to have fewer babies, not due to the public actions of an elite, but through billions of private and very personal decisions, made mainly by the group which has been treated as stupid for longest: women. Human population growth has been curtailed by the billions of decisions of mostly poor and only very cheaply educated women, not by any elite group. These women learnt that they held the power among themselves. Even in China fertility was falling rapidly before the state introduced compulsion.78
We become more able through learning, and we learn collectively. That is how we have come to control our numbers. It is through learning together that we will come to understand that if performing at a uniform level in tests of a particular kind of logic were an important trait for humans to possess then we would almost all possess it, just as we almost all have binocular vision and an opposable thumb.79 There is so much more that is vital to being human, to working together, than being good at tests that simply involve manipulating numbers. There are no important genetic differences in ability which elitists can use to justify their elitism. The sun did not shine differently or the soil vary from place to place in a way that made it imperative that some groups of humans became better suited to later solving Sudoku puzzles than others. We are all human, but no one is superhuman. We work and live better if we are together rather than divided by caste, class or classroom. All this we are still learning.
All children have ability, not potential, capacity or capability. We can learn without limits, given the right to a good education based on access rather than segregation. The coming battle in affluent countries will concern access to universal comprehensive tertiary education. The coming battle worldwide will focus on the right to be seen as equally able. These battles will be fought against elitism.
* by author (aged 41½)