Educating Hurricane Emma

PERSONAL COLUMN AUBERON WAUGH

The first half of this year is going to reveal a great bulge in the birth-rate of the profes- sional and upper middle classes, comparable to the Munich babies of 1939 and the Victory babies of 1946. This statement is not prompted by any intensive research, but by the fact that nearly every young married woman of my acquaintance is producing a child this spring.

When a team of sociologists from Keele eventually gets round to investigating the

phenomenon, I think they may discover that

its explanation lies in the Pill. The bulge is at present restricted to the upper middle and professional classes because they, being the most adventurous and best-informed section of the community, were the first to adopt the Pill.

Few wives are prepared to risk its use for more than three years at a stretch for the good reason that a stream of well-informed Luddite propaganda constantly assures them that, if they do, they will grow moustaches, change sex, develop a cancer or an arterial embolism or just quietly die. And having accustomed them-

selves to the Pill, very few are prepared to return to those-traditional methods of contra-

ception _which they learned on their mother's knee, or in church, or at school. So, making a virtue of necessity, they usually telephone the vicar who married them •and call it Emma.

If I am right in my diagnosis, Hurricane Emma will eventually spread to all classes in all the developed countries, so the final result of the Pill will be a significant increase in the number of babies born. Not everyone will agree, but this seems to me a cause for cele- bration. Perhaps it is my religious upbringing, or perhaps a natural hatred for those who

appoint themselves the spokesmen of our housing problem, but I can't help feeling that the more people from the developed countries there are around, the better the prospects for our blighted planet.

Similarly, in the present phenomenon, I can't help feeling that the more children born into

the professional and upper middle classes, the better the prospects for our rapidly sickening island. I exclude the upper or rentier classes

from all this because they constitute an--even smaller minority than the one to which I happen to belong. And it doesn't seem to me to matter much what they do. It is the educa- tion of all those cherubic little babies of the salary-earning class which worries me to death, because the first action of their nice, pragmatic parents after the christening will be to enrol them at a public school. I wonder if they know what they are doing. The sum needed to educate three children simultaneously nowadays is unlikely to be less than £2,000 a year. If this is to represent only a third of the parents' after-tax income, they Will need to earn more than £40,000 a year.

In fact, it is liable to represent more than two thirds of their net income, leaving the £4,500 a year salaried man with little more than the wage of a semi-skilled industrial worker to live on. I know that various inStitance schemes can stagger the payments and reap some tax con-

cessions, but I also know that few salaried parents who blithely sign the entrance forms are in any position to take advantage of them. With house mortgage, life insurance and car payments (a car is nearly always necessary, and they don't last long), nearly all young married couples of the salary-earning class are already living substantially above their incomes.

The professional classes have maintained their children at public schools since the war either by dissipating their pathetic capital holdings or by denying themselves every benefit of their earning ability. To what pur- pose? So that their children can in turn make the same sacrifices and enjoy an identical standard of living? 'Of course, it makes no commercial or practical sense at all, and can only be justified where education is regarded as the sumtnum bonum, possessing a quasi- religious excellence of its own. Only teachers really believe that.

Many young marrieds who enter their children for a public school hope that they will have been nationalised, but no change in the present system which any government is likely to make will be to their advantage.

The Conservatives were in power for thirteen years, and it is hard to escape the conclusion that if they had had the smallest intention of enacting an elementary piece of social justice and allowing school fees to be deducted from gross income for tax purposes, they would have done it by the time they left office.

The idea that the Socialists will do any- thing to help us is, of course, inherently ridiculous. If they nationalised the public schools they would, in effect, be paying £60 million a year into the pockets of the middle classes. Far more likely they will intro- duce a means test on the same lines as univer- sity student grants, with the result of creating a strong disincentive for the middle classes to educate what is indisputably the country's most educable material.

The only people who will do any good for the middle classes are the middle classes them- selves, and so long as they listen to the Con- servative party boring on about freedom of choice as a basic, inalienable right, they will be slow to accept that they have no freedom of choice in the matter. The new generation of Emmas and Ruperts must go to socialism for its schooling.

I cannot see that this is a terrible shame. Although there can be little doubt that public schools—even the less academically distin- guished ones—provide a better education than anything available at the average grammar or comprehensive school, it seems to me that education is one of the most overrated com- modities on the market. Education now divides into two streams: a self-perpetuating process of great tedium but, magnificently, no social relevance whereby teachers train children to become teachers to train children to become teachers (there is an unwholesome seepage from this process of teachers who become Labour politicians, art critics, economic pundits and general planners, but they are still basically teachers); and a second process whereby most of us leave school with certain basic qualifica- tions or disqualifications which are thought to be useful in determining our subsequent careers.

Society may yet catch up with this second use, but I must have applied for at least twenty jobs since leaving university—from teaching delinquent five-year-olds in Copenhagen to a Post of Responsibility in the Foreign Office —and only once have I been asked whether I possess a university degree, let alone the string of 'A' and '0' levels which must have cost my poor father some £3,000 after tax. Qualifications are necessary in scientific and teaching fields, but these are seldom the most remunerative.

I am not impressed by any of the usual arguments deployed against the public schools —that they foster inequality, social divisions and homosexuality. In the first two instances, anything which is socially divisive, like un- restricted Commonwealth immigration, and which protects us from the incipient 'em Volk, em Reich, em n Fiihree of socialism is surely to be encouraged. Homosexuality can add enormous spirtual impetus to religion; and, any- way, cui mato? In fact, I have nothing against the public schools at all, and am convinced that the humane education they used to pro- vide contributed much towards a gentler, saner civilisation than we are ever likely to see again. But so far as the professional and salary-earn- ing classes are concerned, they are no longer a luxury we can afford.

Once that decision has been made, practical and moral issues resolve themselves with brilliant clarity. In the first place, all education other than the most rudimentary is nowadays useless, and superior education can be harm- ful. In the second place, it is both feckless and immoral of us to subsidise (by relieving the

local authority of its obligation to educate our children) a system which deprives us, through vindictive taxation, of the fruits of our superior abilities or greater industriousness. Finally, for those who have already allowed their morality to be socialised, it is not in the nation's interest (sorry, the community's in- terest) that all its more intelligent and success- ful members should be constrained by educa- tional handicaps from breeding large families while those of inferior ability are encouraged to let rip. At present, it is often only by inten- sive and sedulous breeding that a family of the working class can get itself into a modern council house, while it is only by iron self- restraint that a family of the middle class can get itself into a run-down terrace property somewhere east of Camberwell.

We must welcome the spring which bring us its unprecedented crop of highly intelligent, versatile and humane babies. Only when our children can spell 'all right' as one word, and think that 'pristine' means 'lucid,' will they be able to compete with the new generation of John Osbornes, Dennis Potters, David Frosts and Harold Wilsons on equal terms, uncowed by guilty memories of how we used to treat than in the early days of the Industrial Revolution.