Inequality and Mr Short
TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN
I found Mr Short's outburst in addressing the National Union of Teachers both interesting and hopeful. Mr Short has already signalised himself by natural, if foolish, threats to get local authorities to cut off the grants of rebel- lious students, and indeed he described the rebellious students in terms with which I do not totally disagree, but I think need not have been used. I take his speech to the National Union of Teachers as symptomatic, both of a panic in our government and of a sudden panic over the nature of society as it is developing today. Mr Short, who must know better, was addressing the NUT as if the delegates of the union represented the whole teaching body or as if the creation of a united teaching body, the equivalent of the General Medical Council, was practical politics.
Mr Short seems to be both indignant and muddled. Thus he approaches the publiCh- tion of the 'Black Paper' attacking most current English theories on education as if it were a new edition of Mein Kanipf. I received an advance copy of this manifesto from my old friend and former colleague Kingsley Amis. I read it and liked some parts of it, disliked other parts of it, and decided that other parts could be safely ignored.
But to Mr Short the Black Paper is 'one of the blackest days for education in the last century.' 1 do not quite see what Mr Short means by the last century : does be mean the nineteenth centyry or does he mean the century between 1869 and 1969? Perhaps be means since the establishment of the school boards by the Forster Act in the first Gladstone govern- ment and the later adoption of compulsory free education. But I am not bound to find meanings for Mr Short; I am only concerned with what he said. Even if I disagreed with everything in the Black Paper, I could think of mahy catastrophes far more serious than its publication.
It would be flattering the British public to think that controversial pamphlets of this kind costing quite a lot (I got mine for nothing) really touch the great heart or head of the people. But that they should touch and hurt and alarm Mr Short is not surprising. I assume that his whole life has been earnestly and admirably devoted to improving the edu- cation of what the Americans call 'the under- privileged.' This was, and indeed is, one of the most useful forms of activity that Mr Short and most other people could indulge in. Our educational system is far from perfect, and I mean far from perfect at the top as well as at the bottom, and men like Mr Short who have 'scorned delights and lived laborious days' have a natural vested interest in the general acceptance of the importance of their work. After all, Sherlock Holmes held the new board schools of London to be 'light houses.'
What, in fact, is Mr Short so alarmed about? He is alarmed about the attack on equality. The first great attacker of the English passion for inequality was Matthew Arnold (Winches- ter and Balliol). But Matthew Arnold, in attacking inequality, was not preaching smug- ness and a passion for compulsory mediocrity. I do not in the least believe that the framers of our new educational schemes want medi- ocrity, but they may achieve it, and 1 do not think they show enough appreciation of the desirability of encouraging the non-mediocrity of boys and girls, and making it easy for them to display their superior talents.
think the most foolish part of Mr Short's rather hysterical outburst was his attack on Lord Snow. Lord Snow, addressing a totally Jewish audience, pointed out, or any rate asserted, the possibly intrinsic superiority of Jewish genes as part of their intellectual equip- ment. Whether it is necessary to tell Jews that they are intellectually superior I doubt. I hardly ever meet any Jews who doubt this. But Mr Short is angered and alarmed at the thought that there are any such things as superior genes (intellectually superior : he would not deny that some boys are taller than others, run better, swim better, and, if it matters, play cricket bet- ter). That these hereditary differences exist and have consequences in intellectual matters is a theory up with which he will not put.
In his outburst, Mr Short accuses Lord Snow of being like Dr Goebbels. Lord Snow is not a bit like Dr Goebbels. For one thing.
Dr Goebbels was an effective orator, and Lord -Se6w is not an effective orator. Also, up to
the end, Dr Goebbels had very great political talents, and Lord Snow has demonstrated how easy it is to get lost in the corridors of power
when he moved from fiction into fact. But Lord Snow is an intelligent and humane man, and he has some respect for the possibility that genetic differences matter a great deal. Of course, theories of this kind can be used, and will be used, to justify the ugly racist pre- judices to which Mr Enoch Powell caters. Of course, they will be used very dangerously in the United States. They may be used in England to revive that attitude satirised by Punch nearly a century ago as 'There's a foreigner; let's heave a brick at him.' But to dismiss as blasphemy, heresy, lies, Hitlerism, the possible results of superior intellectual heredity is perhaps good enough for the National Union of Teachers, but not good enough coming from the Minister of Educa- tion and Science.
Mr Short is still alarmed at the political cost of student riots, and I think he is right in being so alarmed. Professor Max Beloff's alarm at the fact that so many of the student rebel leaders have Jewish names is also not a foolish reaction. (1 am not quite so confident as Lord Snow is that one can identify Jewish names.) But perhaps the National Union of Teachers, perhaps Mr Short. perhaps the Uni- versity Grants Committee, ought to be con- sidering an argument put forward some months ago by my High Tory brother Colm. He has argued, with great force, that the part of the education system which most needs sympathy and help is the education of small children, roughly from the beginning of the compulsory school age (or earlier) up to ten or so. It is in this period that children from 'under- privileged' homes tend to fall behind. The failure to learn to read quickly and confidently, to `figure,' as the Americans put it, to get com- mand of the minimum techniques necessary for living in this technological and highly literate world, ought to be the first charge on the attention and resources of any Minister of Education. Otherwise the gap between the people who come from literate homes and those who do not will get greater and will never, in fact, be closed.
And just one last parting shot. The grievances of some of the young teachers at the elemen- tary stage seem to be justifiable. They have a very important job and they are not well enough paid. They compare their 'take home pay' with that of some groups of privileged workers who owe their bargaining power to the fact that they have an artificial monopoly of what are not necessarily very difficult crafts. The late R. H. Tawney said, 'Socialism is about equality.' Maybe: but trade unionism seems to be about differentials. If I were an elemen- tary school teacher and contemplated the vast indignation of the London tally clerks at the possibility that the dockers might get better paid than they are, 1 might be inclined to think that Mr Short could find some more relevant use for his time than talking non- sense about Lord Snow and the authors of the Black Paper.
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