Education For What - Road to the Middle Class

LONDON’S Economist published a handy chart this week to help eager parents game the British education system. The objective: to place your child in a “top university.” To get there you’ll have to pony up lots of cash: to pay for private schooling, to pay the premium of up to 20 percent on housing in the catchment area of a good school, or to pay for private tutoring. Prime Minister Tony Blair has done as well as anyone in gaming the system. His children attend a highly desired Catholic school and are topped up with private tutors from one of Britain’s most prestigious private schools.

The British government-run school system has been designed by left-wing egalitarians to prevent middle-class parents from “privileging” their children by giving them an education that other parents can’t afford. In short, they want to make it hard for professional parents to get their children into “top universities.”

At least the parents and the egalitarians agree on one point, the Vince Lombardian idea that getting into a “top university” is the only thing that matters. There’s only one question. What if they are wrong? Or for the conspiracy minded, what if they are deliberately misdirecting us? What if they are concentrating the minds of the reading public upon getting into a “top university” merely as a diversion?

After all, it’s no secret that many of the most remarkable people in the modern era never went close to a “top university.” John D. Rockefeller went to bookkeeping school. And Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard so he could start a business. Of course, that didn’t stop them later on from hiring the best and the brightest to staff and run their evil corporate monopolies.

It’s also no secret that boys are turning away from universities, and indeed, from schooling in general. Women already represent the majority of university graduates, and are expected to account for up to 60 percent of college graduates by the end of the decade. Conservative policy analysts have been warning for years that the liberal fixation on improving girls’ access to education is blind to the facts: girls thrive on the sit-down receptive school system, but boys hate it.

What do boys want? It’s a good question. Our western society has spent the last century pondering Freud’s worry about what women wanted. But it has always known never to ask that question of boys. We know what they want. They want to gang up with other boys and go around breaking things. Human society has understood since the dawn of time that the one thing needful is to put a stop to gangs of boys roaming around breaking things. But how?

It’s easy. Instead of leaving them to their natural gang-up instincts, we raise them to join teams and go around building things. As a sweetener, we have ordained that the first task in every building job is called: “Excavation and Demolition.”

Now that the sit-down education system has admitted defeat on the boy front and started tranquilizing the most boyish boys with drugs, it’s time to return to the good old ways. We must raise boys to join teams.

There’s a simple difference between a gang and a team. A gang is led by an adolescent. A team is led by an adult. That is what Robert Baden-Powell understood when he founded the Boy Scouts movement. He wanted to get at weedy cigarette-smoking ten-year-old punks before the gang did, and raise them to the culture of the team.

Notice how the left admires the culture of the gang: the revolutionary adolescent like Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the perpetually adolescent rock musician, the transgressive artist intent upon “challenging” society. On the other hand the right admires the culture of the team: Boy Scouts, athletic teams, armies, and corporations. Lee Harris in Civilization and Its Enemies has contrasted these two cultures. The signal success of the West, he wrote, has been its development of the culture of the team to fight the eternal gang of ruthless men.

A change in the culture of education from girly seats-on-chairs to manly adventurous teams couldn’t come too soon. While society has been wondering what women want, boys have found a new gang culture. It is called Halo, the major game available on Microsoft’s X-box video game console. In Halo II, available in stores this fall, a boy can create a virtual gang with any on-line boy in the world and then head out for a bit of shoot-em-up mayhem.

While our political masters busy themselves with controlling who gets into the “top universities” and counting how many historically marginalized students can fit on the head of a pin, we may be losing a whole generation of boys to virtual gangs. It’s up to us to figure out what to do. The Schoolmen are otherwise engaged.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

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“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

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