Can Government Deliver On Education - Road to the Middle Class

TONY BLAIR, everyone’s darling, has resigned as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and now Gordon Brown has been appointed by the Queen to serve as his successor. Everyone is full of advice, of course.

Anatole Kaletsky advises him to concentrate on education.

If Mr Brown really wants to show that he can think afresh and that he is in touch with the concerns of ordinary voters he should recognise that the people of Britain are far more worried about the daily disappointments of their children’s education – not to mention the physical threats they face on the way to school, as they run the gauntlet of outlaw gangs increasingly addicted to violence

Britain is the home of the “bog-standard” comprehensive school. If you don’t know exactly what that means, you can still guess.

But can a centralized government education system ever deliver? Well, we shall see.

The welfare state is something like 100 years old and in Britain and the United States centralized government education is about 150 years old. And it shows.

The great promise made by the academic middle class a century ago for its education and welfare state project was that they, the educated and the experts, could make government actually do something to help people. Don’t trust those dangerous businessmen, they said. They don’t care about people. But we do. Trust us, they said.

And the academic middle class believed themselves. Yes, they could make government into something it had never been. They could make it deliver.

Let’s face it. Government is really a patronage and clientage game, always was, always will be. As long as politicians stick to rewarding their friends and punishing their enemies they know what they are doing. But when it comes to actually running something, like education or welfare, or immigration (and yes, immigration is just as screwed up in Britain as it is here) government seems to be a complete disaster.

Therein lies our opportunity. We conservatives should recognize that there is a real possibility that we are entering an end game on government education.

You can put all the funding you like into education (and we have) but it really doesn’t matter. That’s because it really doesn’t matter if the principals and the teachers in a government education system do their job. They still get paid and the politicians pay more attention to them than to the voters.

Expect the concept of government education to be tested to destruction in the next twenty years. Then we should be ready to grab the chance to do some real reform.

Because we conservatives care about kids.

After all, there’s a difference between conservatives and liberals. Conservatives have more children.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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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

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

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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