The spectator's Notes
CHARLES MOORE The grammar school row is proving not so much a Clause Four moment as a class war moment for the Tories — now it has produced a resignation. It is suggested that David Cameron's Old Etonians are indifferent to those struggling to better themselves, because they do not know what struggle means. The Cameronites imply that the grammar-school supporters are not really concerned with social mobility, but with good, free education for a thin layer of bright, middleclass children (their own). How strange that David Willetts, the party's education spokesman, should now be enlisted in the Etonian camp. When we were undergraduates together — he at Oxford, I at Cambridge, but we were (and are) friends — David was held up as the type of the grammar-school meritocrat — diligent, serious, ambitious, brainy, bespectacled. David and I would compare the different ethoses (is that the correct plural? David would know) by comparing our school songs. The Eton Boating Song is all about pleasure. It describes suppers of lobster and champagne (little boys drink it blind') in the hay-harvest meadows after rowing down to the picnic. King's Edward's, Birmingham, which David attended, thinks of higher things. 'Where the iron heart of England/ Beats beneath its sombre robe', its song begins, and goes on to declare: 'Here's no place for fop or idler,/ Those who made our city great/ Feared no hardship, shirked no labour,/ Smiled at death and conquered fate.' At its best, the Conservative culture combines these two strands of human character creatively — cavalier and roundhead fighting on the same side. At its worst, the mixture produces civil war.
After a fortnight of skirmishing, is there a chance of peace? I hope so, because I find myself in the rather weedy position of seeing right on both sides. The grammar-school party are rightly outraged by any hint that there is something antisocial about doing the best for one's own children. They are also right that selection on academic merit is the most certain way of producing a high quality of education for those selected. A friend of mine who teaches at a grammar school says that the bottom tier of those her school selects are quite frighteningly dim, so she dreads to think what unselective schools must be like. At her school, these weak ones undoubtedly pick up a great deal of knowledge from the prevailing high standards and the enthusiasm of most of the pupils. She doesn't see how this could be replicated without selection. But selection means losers as well as winners, and meritocrats never quite have the answer to the question, 'What will become of those of us (the majority) who don't have much merit?' The public schoolboys, out of their sense of unmerited good fortune, perhaps have a better feeling for this problem than the pulled-myself-up-by-myown-bootstraps people from grammar schools. \Wefts should never have implied that the virtue of a school should be judged by whether it improves social mobility: it should be judged on its intrinsic educational qualities. But he is right to seek ways of creating good schools which you don't have to be clever to get into.
The hardest part for politicians to talk about in all this is the fear of having one's children educated with human dross. Although we will all agree in principle how marvellous it is to mix pupils of all backgrounds, we will be much more circumspect where our own children are concerned. One or two children from troubled, 'deprived' families in the class will be a cause for self-congratulation, but more than one or two will be hell. Discipline problems make parents even more desperate than academic ones. So the doctrine of social inclusion for state schools has to contain within itself a semi-secret doctrine of exclusion if it is to work. Selection, of some kind, is essential if a school is to be allowed to have its own ethos. Public-school Tories should not attack selection. Grammar-school ones should not see it solely in academic terms. Both should strive for the most plural possible arrangements which would produce a truly conservative outcome — schools which teachers, not governments, run and parents choose.
e truth is that, when we talk about education, most of us are generalising wildly from what happened to us. On that basis, I offer my memory of attitudes at my village primary school in the 1960s. It was quite a good school, but most of the pupils did not sit the 11-plus. They did not want to do so because they would be separated, if they went to grammar school, from their friends. So the problem with the 11-plus was not (pace John Prescott) that it 'branded you a failure', but the fear that it would brand you a success.
ne final thought: has anyone asked how many people under the age of 40 have any idea what a grammar school is?
Wading through the total of 36 pages of booklets about recycling from our local council, one is struck by the sheer complication. No amount of babyish phraseology and pictures of a black child sitting in a green box (isn't this racist?) can conceal the fact that, if you were to take it seriously (which obviously you mustn't), you would spend hours getting it right There are, for example, seven different types of plastic of which only three can be recycled, so one has to distinguish between lowdensity polyethylene, high-density polyethylene, polyvinyl chloride and polypropylene. One must also strip labels off plastic bottles and wash out tins (with water already used for washing up). During the war Lord Beaverbrook invited everyone to give him their pots and pans to make aeroplanes. This made people feel that they were doing their bit, but the metal contributed proved useless. This fatuous wartime spirit is now being recycled.
T,ast week I stayed in Parham House in West Sussex. It is so beautiful and so interesting that it is said to be the only house in Simon Jenkins's England's Thousand Best Houses whose entry does not contain the word 'but'. I pass over, however, its Long Gallery, its Reynoldses and Stubbses, its Stuart needlework, its gardens (open weekend, 7-8 July) to note only one thing. In my bathroom I found two lavatory-paper holders. One contained ordinary soft paper and the other Bromo, elder cousin of Bronco — brown, hard and unwelcoming, although described by the manufacturers as 'So Soft So Strong' and 'made of materials that have been cooked under steam pressure for hours'. When Emma Barnard, who lives there with her husband James, inherited Parham in the 1990s, she discovered enormous supplies of Bromo in store. She did not want to waste it, but nor did she think that her guests would necessarily welcome it — hence my chance to choose. Almost, but not quite, like the famous choice between Alderney, Jersey and Guernsey cream available to guests at Waddesdon before the Great War.
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