ANOTHER VOICE
Perhaps it is time we started worrying about the old age pensioners
AUBERON WAUGH
C Ihave seen the future and it works,' wrote the great American thinker, Lincoln
Steffens, to a friend in 1919 on his first visit to Moscow after the Revolution. The experience changed his whole outlook on life, and he remained a committed revolu- tionary until the day of his death 17 years later. By then more astute observers were in a position to decide that the socialist future did not work after all, athough I find it extraordinary how otherwise intelligent people like Neil Ascherson managed to persuade themselves that there was still hope for it even up to the beginning of this year: wages might be low behind the Iron Curtain but so were rents and transport, and the health service was free. Never mind that accommodation meant five fami- lies to a flat with one kitchen and a lavatory shared with three other flats; never mind that travel, although cheap, was effectively forbidden; or that the health service was unable to provide hospitals with running water, or bandages or aspirins, let alone sophisticated drugs or equipment. There was a whole litany of explanation: the Soviet Union had suffered appalling dam- age in the war, without the benefit of Marshall Aid after it; Stalin had perverted the true course of socialism; the cost of defending .socialism's gains was bound to delay things— in fact, that was capitalism's game, to prevent the realisation of social- ism; there had been terrible crop failures; criminal embezzlement had still to be contained. . . .
Then came Chernobyl, and after a few days the elaborate structure of state secre- cy seemed to break down. With the arrival of glasnost, it was more or less admitted that the whole idea of socialism had been a dreadful mistake — something which any of us could have told them, after a little thought, 70 years earlier.
Throughout that protracted interval Enoch Powell once drew attention to the extraordinary time it takes for a new idea to find acceptance in politics — the future has largely been a socialist preoccupation. I exclude such technological futurists as the great Adrian Berry, although I should guess that it might be the socialist miasma attaching to futurism which explains how little attention we pay to them. Those of us who were not tempted by the socialist apple tended to see the future in terms only of our own survival in a day-to-day struggle against the material and spiritual encroach-
ments of the state and its ghastly apolog- ists.
Now that socialism has been discredited, except among the armies of its employees and a few intellectual fossils, it seems to me we have a certain obligation to look to the future and try to see where we are heading. I do not think we need worry ourselves excessively about how the socialist econo- mies of Eastern Europe will face the adjustments ahead. That is their problem. We read of 1,500 censors of the press formerly employed by Glavlit, the central board of censorship in the Soviet Union, now looking for jobs. Unless they choose to come here and work for solicitors in the vastly expanding libel industry, I have no suggestion to make. My preoccupation is with how Britain, or more particularly southern England, is likely to shape in the non-socialist future, and I fear it involves pursuing this already tedious subject into the even more tedious field of education.
It seems to me there are two possible models for our future development, one to be found in the East, in Japan, the other to be found in the West, in the continent of South America. The extreme difference in their approach to the problems of educa- tion may be summarised on the one hand by the recent story of the 15-year-old Tokyo schoolgirl who was a second late for the school bell and had the gate slammed shut in her face, crushing her skull and killing her — 'I have given guidance that pupils should not be late,' explained her headmaster; and on the other hand by the fact that in the streets of Rio de Janeiro, according to the Sunday Times, they now shoot children as vermin. Street children are held responsible for most of the crime which upsets the tourists, so self-appointed pest officers now shoot them down at the rate of one or two a day. In other parts of the continent, they are content to let them live in the sewers, but Brazil would appear to be the pace-setter of the West in its confrontation with the problems of indisci- pline among the young.
Last Saturday's Independent Magazine had a charming account of a meeting 'There's rhyme, but not much reason.'
between the writer, Anthony Daniels, and a 16-year-old Colombian youth to whom he gave a lift in Bogota. The youth had left school at 11, was not aware that England was across the sea, and had never even heard of Simon Bolivar. There were 11 brothers and sisters in his family, now reduced to five: four died in childhood, one was killed by the police, one murdered by five vigilantes who thought he was implicated in a robbery.
Of the two capitalist models it seems plain to me that we are heading for the South American rather than the Japanese example. The exact decline in standards of literacy is never likely to be admitted by the Department of Education, which has designed the GCSE examination to give a false impression that standards are rising when in fact they are in decline. Results of a recent poll which showed a dramatic deterioration in the spelling of 16-year-olds between 1984 and 1989 may well be put in a convenient drawer and forgotten, but the Department itself abounds with evidence to the same effect. Last Tuesday Mr John MacGregor revealed that he often had to send back letters to be retyped because of spelling mistakes made in the office of the Secretary of State. The Mail on Sunday pointed out this week that a press release from the Schools Examination and Assess- ment Council — quis custodiet? — scored one 'Assessmant' and one 'Chen A recent leading article in the Literary Review drew attention to the amazing illiteracy of the circulars issuing from the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, Sir Patrick Neill, in support of the Campaign for Oxford.
If only one in fotir school-leavers can now spell the vital word 'committee', and fewer than half can spell 'permanent', it is reasonable to suppose that their teachers are similarly incapable. Spelling may be beyond them, but where grammar is con- cerned they do not even try. No grammar is taught in our schools, and there is no standard English grammar to teach it from.
I offered to write one for the last Secretary of State, taking the great Lancelot Oliphant as my model, but he did not bother to reply. Perhaps grammar is thought insufficiently non-sexist or multi- cultural in his accursed Department. Soon we will have to decide what we are going to do with the new generation of unemploy- ables on whom the future of so many pensioners will depend.
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