CENTREPIECE
The donnish, hesitant barbarism of Sir Keith Joseph
COLIN WELCH
hen Mr Enoch Powell in Parlia- ment the other day accused Sir Keith Joseph of barbarism, the effect was of some graceful, sad, defenceless animal brought down by an incredibly long and accurate spear throw. Was ever barbarian so incongruously diffident, charming, don- nish and polite, so rueful and hesitant? Of Sir Keith you could say, as Grillparzer said of the Habsburgs, that it is his curse to move too late, to stop half-way, to take half-measures hesitatingly. Was ever barbarian so fatalistic? Listen to him be- wailing Labour's 'downright wickedness' in abolishing direct grant schools. Does he restore them? Does he, like a new Edward VI, found dozens more? He would 'like to'; but his hands fall limply to his side. Listen to him wishing vainly, shoulders shrugged, that we here could achieve the excellent academic results got in Ulster schools. Ulster has retained selection and grammar schools. Why doesn't he restore them here? Selection he doesn't even favour any more, if he ever did. Listen to him replying to Mr Powell that, 'for better or worse, higher education is paid for by public funds'. From all we know of his unofficial views, it must to him be 'for worse'. Does he think then about student loans, or tax remissions for gifts and endowments? Who knows?
It is as if on taking office he were invaded by alien spirits who force him to act against all his better inclinations — at Housing to build horrible tower blocks, at Health to create new layers of useless bureaucracy, at Industry to spend, spend and spend again, at Education to deny to parents the power he promised them to choose their children's schools. He has expressed his intense dislike of 'a world in which the government has anything to do with what people decide to do'. Yet he has done nothing to rid himself of the pre- sumptuous powers which condemn many parents to watch impotently as their chil- dren are ruined by bad teachers, many on strike, and bad company in vandalised schools not of their choice. He errs and strays like a lost sheep. He then repents, as he will repent what he is doing now to higher education.
Mr Powell made grimly clear what he meant by barbarism in the context: it is `to attempt to evaluate the content of higher education in terms of economic perform- ance or to set a value in the consequence of higher education in terms of monetary cost benefit analysis'. Sir Keith thought himself protected by being 'entirely justified', and quoted Lord Hailsham, of all people, to the effect that Mr Powell lives in cloud- cuckoo-land — a realm to which none of the three may be total strangers. But the shaft went home.
Barbarism is indeed of two sorts, strong and weak, so to speak. They have in common an inability to understand or properly to value what civilisation spreads before them. Strong barbarism destroys, lays waste, burns, rapes and pillages. Weak barbarism is less unmistakable. It surveys civilisation with an innocent wonder, like mystified savages watching a surveyor at work with his theodolite, or perhaps with a misplaced respect or envy, as of poor fools who, seeing the rich drinking champagne, think one becomes rich by drinking cham- pagne. In Sir Keith in office (thought not out of it) there is little of the strong barbarism, more of the weak, a fact which causes some to acquit him of barbarism altogether.
It is this weak barbarism which causes his apparent inability fully to understand what higher education is about or for. It further causes him to over-emphasise some of the links between higher education and prosperity, and to under-emphasise others. It causes him gravely to underestimate the worth and contribution of the arts and humanities. This he denies. If he bids higher education to 'contribute more effec- tively to the improvement of the perform- ance of the economy', this is 'not because the government places a low value on the general cultural benefits of education and research or on the study of the humanities'. It is simply because, he says, unless econo- mic performance improves, we shan't be able to afford what we most value, 'includ- ing education for pleasure and general culture and the financing of scholarship and research as an end in itself. That there is some truth in this gloomy view cannot be denied. Yet there is a vague tone of disparagement in terms like 'education for pleasure' and 'general culture benefits', as if they were sinful luxuries rather than necessities. This disparagement may be subconscious, but it is confirmed in other remarks by which Sir Keith seeks to defend
his positon. These reveal a naive belief in the unaided power of technology, science and engineering to make us prosper. Mr Maxton, a Labour MP, attributed our economic decline to our failure to invest in higher education. Sir Keith gently cor- rected this (at best) half-truth with another: no, it was due to our failure to provide technical education in our schools and higher education.
Now, when our relative economic de- cline first became apparent round the turn of the century, we could have transformed all our schools and universities into purely banausic institutions, teaching only what is regarded by the uneducated as useful. Would we be richer or poorer as a result? My guess is, infinitely poorer. Prosperity depends not exclusively or even primarily on technology, which can be imported, bought, hired or, especially by Russia, stolen. We here pay for the instruction of technologists we can't use; via the brain drain, other countries use what we have paid for. We impoverish ourselves, enrich others..
In an extraordinary passage in a recent interview, Sir Keith mused on his decision to have more engineers. 'It conflicts with the salary evidence,' he concedes. 'Where there is a shortage, high salaries are gener- ally a signal of it. Yet engineers' salaries are low. . . Oh, dear. If salaries are higher elsewhere, his engineers will go there. If not, they will rot here, like the unemployed bio-chemists produced by a previous fad.
Sir Keith is striving gamely to produce Mrs Thatcher's enterprise society from the wrong end, pushing as it were on a string. He aims to produce what it might need if it existed (or might not need: the pace of what Schumpeter called 'creative destruc- tion' is now so fast that prediction is difficult). The enterprise society, however, doesn't yet exist and, with public spending and taxation at their present high and rising levels, is never likely to.
In truth, without an appropriate polity, clerisy and economy to guide, use and reward them, and to guard the freedom they need, technologists are as useless as an electric shaver to a frog. As Mr Eric Heffer pointed out to Sir Keith (a man without higher education addressing a fel- low of All Souls'!), man does not live by bread alone. Indeed he does not; and those who strive, as in communist countries, to live by bread alone will soon lack bread too, as well as everything else.
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