The Global Education Mess

WE THINK THAT we have an education mess here in the United States with our education “blob” spending five percent of GDP every year in return for what? Rising mediocrity. In Britain, things are even worse because their public school system is a completely centralized, national government system, whereas in the United States the government education system is rather more decentralized with most of the money raised and spent at the state and local level.

Britain’s Prime Minister Blair is launching an education white paper to announce the government’s policy to abandon the gold standard of left-wing education policy, the “comprehensive” secondary schools set up in the 1960s to eliminate selection and streaming in secondary schools. The idea was to liquidate the dual system of college-prep “grammar” schools and vocational “secondary modern” schools. His government will introduce legislation to build a system of “self-governing independent state schools.”

It’s about time. As Alice Thomson observes, a funny thing has happened to Britain’s elite since the introduction of “comprehensive” schools a generation ago. It used to be that the political, cultural, and business elite had a lot of “grammar” school graduates. The grammar school was understood to be the way for a bright youngster to climb out of poverty. Margaret Thatcher, herself a grammar school graduate, “presided over a cabinet of grammar school boys.”

But now the British elites are dominated by graduates of private education. The Blair “Cabinet is full of them, though ministers don’t brag about it. Most forget to mention their schools in Who’s Who.” Somehow, the comprehensive school does not deliver children of modest means into the elite as the grammar schools used to do. Perhaps that is why Blair’s political aide Alistair Campbell called them “bog-standard.” (A “bog” is British schoolboy slang for the school toilets.)

Of course, facts means nothing. The British left believes in uniform one-size-fits-all education like a sacrament. Nobody should be allowed to escape the government education system. So if Tony Blair is really serious he could be in for a big battle—with his own party.

Now, what about doing something here in the United States about our disfunctional education system?

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