Another voice

The silent generation

Auberon Waugh On Friday night I went to the school concert of Kingston St Mary RC Primary School. The programme was rich and varied, including a sizeable chunk of A Midsummer Night's Dream,. violin and recorder interludes, plays written and acted by the children with a part for every child in the class, songs in English and French. There is not room here to review every item, but the one which impressed me most was a French play written and acted by Class One, aged between ten and eleven. Entitled Le Chateau de Falaise it was a satirical account of an alleged incident from the class's visit to France last year : the master in charge of the expedition, handsome and popular Mr Rodney Parish, is shown ordering a bottle of champagne in a café and becoming distinctly tired and emotional as he consumes it. The plot was not a particularly complicated one, but the French dialogue was funny, the French accents were excellent and the whole production marked by an ebullience which would probably have reminded Mr Kenneth Tynan of the beer cellars he roamed as a lad of five or six in the sad, lost days of the Weimar Republic, if he had been present.

In the event he wasn't, thank God. The Kingston St Mary annualschool concert is one of fhose areas of our national life which do not come under his scrutiny—or, indeed, the scrutiny of many people outside a small corner of west Somerset. But it exists nevertheless, and I have no doubt that many hundreds, if not thousands, of similar events are now taking place around the English countryside, miles away from the great education debate about declining examination standards, declining intellectual vitality, illiterate or half-witted teachers, political indoctrination, uncontrollable vandalism and all the other features of the English system which come up for discussion as soon as anybody presses the button marked 'Education'.

The evening was rounded off, as always, by a little homily to the parents from the school's headmistress, Mrs Jane Tarr. Mrs Tarr is an old friend who has had the charge of all four of my children, and is one of the few living human beings for whom I have a totally unqualified admiration. When she retires in a few years' time, it will be a black day for education. Her school has ninetytwo pupils, averaging slightly over thirty to the class. She points out it was physically impossible for her small staff to listen to all the children's reading, and implored parents to take their children through it. If possible she said—as, indeed, she has said every year for as long as I can remember—parents should read to their children, but above all they should talk to them, since this is the only way children learn a reasonable vocabulary. Children, she pointed out, spend one-ninth of their time at school, eight-ninths at home.

Of course, when these bright, happy children I saw gabbling to each other in French leave her care, most of them will go into the newly comprehensivised Somerset machine, and no doubt many of them will emerge as the listless, wet, ignorant, silent and incurious welfare fodder we see hanging around our university campuses, usually sucking their thumbs and reading Beano or puzzling over Socialist Worker. My reason for drawing attention to the Kingston St Mary school concert is to point out that areas of vitality survive even in the present system and there is no need to accept that what we are witnessing in education is the result of some irreversible biological decline of the Anglo-Saxon races.

Nor, when we reflect on Mrs Tarr's interesting statistic, that schoolchildren at day schools spend one-ninth of their time at school, eight-ninths at home, can we honestly decide that the degeneration of our young people into these shuffling, inarticulate oafs (who seem amazed by any suggestion that they may be capable of talking) has been achieved by left-wing infiltrators into the teaching profession. Schools simply. can't have that degree of influence over their pupils. It is one of the disadvantages of television that it does not encourage anyone (apart from a few rare and beautiful spirits) to talk back to it. It turns life into a spectator entertainment, something to be gaped at wordlessly between mouthfuls of peppermint-flavoured potato crisps. But television is not peculiar to England. Other countries do not suffer from speechless goofy people —in France the generation of eighteen-totwenty-five-year-olds strikes me as being particularly voluble—and I do not think that television can be blamed for this distressing phenomenon.

In fact, I am afraid that at least part of the true explanation may be painfully boring. If goofiness generally sets in, as I believe it does, around the age of eighteen, is confined to particular sections of society (I am not talking about the ageless and inalienable goofiness of the working class as compared to those of greater intellectual potential) and most particularly to students, is more prevalent in England, America and Scandinavia than anywhere else and is especially noticeable among children of the better-off, then the explanation which emerges may be one of blinding banality—cannabis.

If I am right, then there is comfort in the thought that goofiness is a temporary phenomenon and one which flows at any rate to a certain extent from the operation of free choice. But its effect, as I may have hinted, is to proletarianise large sections of the middle class (and the intellectual cream of the working class) by making them appear more stupid than they need appear. And this brings us back to the great education debate with which we began. Why proletarianise?

The arguments of the anti-elitists, as put forward by the education correspondent of

the New Statesman, Mr Peter Wilby, for

instance, are so grotesquely spurious that they would not occupy the mind of an intelligent person for a moment if it were not apparent that anti-elitism is going to prevail within the state system. But it is not going to prevail as the result of Mr Wilby's argu

ments. They should be seen as a post hoc justification, or a desperate last attempt by

Hampstead to jump on the proletarian bandwagon. The left has always divided into its educated and proletarian wings. So long as the voice of the educated left-wingers was heard, the Labour Party tradition of both self-education and WEA lectures survived.

Since then, the proletarian wing has quite simply come out on top. Education no longer brings more money or more respect in a society where lorry-drivers, dockers or earth-shifters can earn twice or three times as much as teachers or junior doctors. The long-smouldering resentment of the working class against education and everything it stands for has now broken out into hatred and contempt at a time when the working class calls the tune in national affairs.

And that, I am convinced, is the reason for our present situation. The crowning proof that I am right seems to me that the

New Statesman, which should, above all, be the voice of the eduqated left, has joined the proletarian camp, or is pathetically trying to do so with its talk of 'rigid and arbitrary divisions between the able and the less able' . . . 'educational backwoodsmen who . . . propagate atavistic slogans such as'• "academic standards"' who must be told 'firmly and finally that schools are not for the production of elites'.

The emptiness of this rhetoric is demonstrated by the simple fact that education is no longer profitable. What has happened is that the working class has taken over and in its arrogance decreed that there should be no more education. Which is not, I should have thought, a matter for rejoicing among educated people.