Another voice

Bakke to Bakke

Auberon Waugh

At a time of year when many of us —or many of those who are not already too old to have children at school — are gloomily awaiting their children's school reports, it is as well to remind ourselves that there are many reasons why children do badly in exams.

Idleness, stupidity, bloody-mindedness, bad teaching or lack of rapport with a

particular teacher are only the most obvious. Others might be ill-health or lack of opportunity to study at home. Nobody can seriously doubt that the child coming from a crowded, non-academic home is at a disadvantage where homework is con cerned. Indeed, this amazing insight has just been confirmed in a long and expensive survey sponsored jointly by the Department of Health and Social Security, the Home Office and the Bernard Van Leer Foundation. Goodness knows how much the

research cost, but the report is available from Routledge at £5.90: Parents and Children in the Inner City by Harriett Wilson and G.W. Herbert.

Children from the poorest backgrounds (the 'severely disadvantaged') are among the most backward readers, least able to cope with school and most likely to be labelled as maladjusted, we learn. Who would have guessed it? All that remains to be decided is what should be done about this interesting truth, or whether we should simply study it in silent wonder. These same children, who will fare less well than others in any intelligence test which has yet been devised, will tend to marry into the same level of attainment and breed children of similarly inferior ability unless We — Ms Wilson, G.W. Herbert and I —can do something about it. Apart from forbidding such people to breed, or enforcing a system of selective breeding whereby those with a particularly low intelligence quotient are forbidden to mate fruitfully with any but those from a particularly high range of intelligence, the problem — if it is a problem — Seems to me insoluble. And I rather fear that such personal restrictions, even when imposed for the best reasons, would generate more resentment than the educational handicap they seek to replace. Perhaps there has been a decline in discipline in schools, but the threat of castration as a punishment for bad exam results strikes me as taking reaction too far.

Ms Wilson and G.W. Herbert, however, are in no doubt, 'Equality of opportunity is one of the basic principles of the democratic state. To make this a reality, it is essential to eliminate poverty,' they say. Poverty, they explain, 'arises in a social system in which low wages, inadequate welfare provisions, a chronic shortage of housing and unem

ployment are allowed to exist.'

So all we have to do is abolish low wages, increase welfare provisions, build more houses and give everybody a job, whether

he wants it or not, and then, perhaps, these

disadvantaged kiddies will start doing bet ter in their exams. I wonder if they are right.

Poor housing conditions are, after all, only one of the many possible reasons why schoolchildren do badly. My elder son, whose housing conditions are really not to blame, does very badly indeed in almost any exam he is set. I am not, of course, denying that there may be many excellent reasons for introducing all these social reforms, but I wonder whether education is one of them —whether the same people who did badly in exams when they were poor might not do just as badly after poverty had been abolished. The underlying question is how Ms Wilson and G.W. Herbert can be certain such people are stupid and inadequate because they are poor, rather than being poor because they are stupid and inadequate, as one might otherwise suppose. If the second explanation is the truer one, then the only solution must be to take children away from their parents and swap them with children from a better background, or put all children in identically mixed state nurseries with no streaming for natural ability. Then we might have achieved the ideal of absolute equality of opportunity, but without much gain, I would have thought, in the sum of human happiness.

Neither Ms Wilson nor G.W. Herbert advances this drastic step — largely, I imagine, because they realise that it would be extremely unpopular, whereas a call for higher wages,better welfare provisions, more housing and jobs for all can be relied upon to raise a cheer from less reflective citizens. All that can be done, effectively, to promote equality of opportunity in education is to play around with variations on the policy of 'positive discrimination', or 'reverse discrimination', as, it is known in America.

The most interesting thing about this policy — to lavish the greatest resources on those least able to profit from them — is not so much that it is an educational absurdity as that it is bitterly unpopular. Those who feel themselves discriminated against resent it enormously, while those who might be expected to innefit are not commensurately grateful. This has been admirably demonstrated in America, where the Alan Bakke case before the Supreme Court (of a white Californian discriminated against in favour of a negro for a university place) threatens to break up the historic alliance between

Jews and blacks over Civil Rights. It is true that negro pressure groups are backing the University of California, feeling that neg. roes are owed preferential treatment to compensate for historical injustices, but for once the Jewish groups, who have rather more recent historic injustices to bear in mind, are taking the opposite side and reverting to those genuinely liberal loyalties which Were the hallmark of Jewish intellectualism before the arrival of Marx and before, of course, the European holocaust. It has taken a long time for a revival of this awareness, that the Jewish genius flourishes best in a liberal rather than a socialist or egalitarian society. It was inevitable, I suppose, that the long-awaited cowl' terblast to Victims of Yalta should finallY surface on the Sunday Times leader page: 'Myth of the Yalta "victims" ', written by a Polish Jew, Reuben Ainsztein, a member of the Sunday Times staff. Mr Ainsztein lost most of his family in the holocaust, which, he may feel, gives him the moral whip-hand to make the preposterous case that it was quite right to repatriate two million Soviet citizens whether they liked it or not because only 1,800,000 of them were innocent of crimes against the Jews and other perse. cuted people. Only the guilty ones objected to going back, he asserts, because none? the others knew what fate awaited them — fact they were pleased to be returned to the Soviet tyranny. Nor did the British and Americans know what would happen to them, he says.

Never mind that this simply isn't true. What is undoubtedly true is that elements among the Vlasovites and Western Ukrainian volunteers were foremost among the murderers of the Jews, as Anatoli Kur netsov describes in Babi Yar. But I wonder whether Mr Ainsztein has paused to reflect on the continuing phenomenon of Soviet anti-semitism. He does not have to subscribe to my own admittedly rather fanciful theory, that the Soviet establishment IS exacting late revenge for Karl Marx who visited the whole disgusting and absurd system on them. A little reflection should convince him that any authoritarian society — as, socialism is bound to be — has the seeds nt anti-sem itism built into it and anY egalitarian ideology is bound to be esPe" cially inimical to his own people. But the lesson of `positive' or 'reverse discrimination should spread further than the Jews. The attraction which socialism holds for the liberal intelligentsia has always been founded on a number of misunderstandings and absurdities —that equality could be achieved painlessly, or vol untarily, or, once achieved, would be maintaMed by a general purification of the human spirit. But the chief error was alwaYs to suppose that equality was a natural state from which, poor banished children of Eve, we have fallen or been exiled. The more it is applied, the more we can see it as hideouslY unnatural and artificial. If the doctrine achieves nothing else, it should help clear the national head a little.