Another voice

Winning the caucus race

Auberon Waugh

When the Prime Minister, with his stirring call for higher standards in education, launched the Great Education Debate, I decided to keep quiet on the subject. There seemed something undignified in the idea that the press would launch itself into a frenzied debate on any subject the moment it was told to do so. Moreover. I suspected the crafty old stoker was pulling a fast one; sure enough, just as everybody has run out of anything to say on the subject and the Public is bored stiff with it, we learn the Government plans to close down another thirty teacher-training colleges in addition to the twenty already closed. Because education does not have a high priority in modern trade union philosophy, the Government is more or less abandoning its ambitious plan to educate the lower classes. All that remains to be seen is whether the unions can prevent anyone else being educated too.

The greatest sorrow and frustration of the working class predicament, or so it has Often seemed to me, is not that they mind Other people being richer than they are; What they really resent is any suggestion that other people may be superior to them. The attack on the living standards of the middle class, pursued with a vindictiveness Which cannot be explained by any possible benefit accruing to workers' through redistribution, should be seen as an attack on the environment which is thought to breed and Maintain this superiority.

Which might be thought to lend a special edge to the second Great Debate which has emerged from the ruins of the first, on the comparative influences of heredity and environment in determining intelligence. For those who have missed it I should explain that the Sunday Times has found some dim and partisan professor who is prepared to swear that heredity (or original capability) Plays no part at all in determining intelligence, that any evidence to the contrary is .unscrupulously cooked if not perjured, and in any case hopelessly unscientific. Nearly everybody who has entered the debate so far has felt bound to make a declaration of personal preference, but I have no strong feelings on the matter: Such first-hand evidence as I have to offer would appear to be contradictory: Peter Jay is universally acknowledged to be the cleverest roan in Britain, if not the world, and his father on the few occasions I have met him nas always struck me as appallingly stupid. 11700k what poor Randolph produced. On he other hand it is a known hazard in the , etc' of adoption that working-class babies taken into middle-class homes are liable to grow up lazier, stupider, more brutal and

more dishonest than their middle-class contemporaries, and nothing in my personal observation contradicts this. For my own part, I keep an open mind on where exactly the balance lies.

Why then must we all pretend to be certain beyond reasonable doubt that the lower classes are potentially as intelligent as we are?

The only sensible reason for maintaining the fallacy that all human intelligence is determined by environment lies in the hope that if we can convince the leaders of proletarian thought that their comparative stupidity is in no way congenital or inherited they might desist from their attempts to end all education in this country.

The objection to this policy is that whereas these people may not have the good fortune to be quite as intelligent as we are, they are not complete fools either, and they are most unlikely to be taken in by it. Their hatred of education is intuitive. Education is a tool of oppression, a means of making them feel inferior.

The present outcome of workers' power in this field would appear to turn education into a Caucus Race where, as the Dodo wisely observed, 'Everybody has won and all must have prizes.' In time it will occur to the Government that it could save an enormous amount of money (at present £.6,000 million a year if the Prime Minister is to be believed, which, of course, he isn't) by awarding the requisite number of university degrees, '0' and 'A' levels to everybody at birth—with specially high grades, perhaps, for the children of trade unionists. Appointments to the best jobs would then be made on presentation of the applicant's family tree.

To a certain extent I suppose this already occurs. One may marvel at the extraordinary coincidence that two Dimbleby brothers now address the television screens from which their father was so tragically dragged eleven years ago. Whatever explains their presence, I don't think they arrived as the result of competitive examination. Others may wonder that I adorn the pages of the Spectator in direct line of descent from a father and grandfather who did the same. The new inheritors may be sons of notable trade unionists, but at least we can comfort ourselves there will be no damned merit in it.

The rest of us must simply struggle to keep up our standards while the Caucus Race is run. It was with quiet sorrow that I read in a Times leader on the origins of intelligence: 'without denying the possibility of the human mind having a spiritual dimension, it is clear that the human brain is a physical object which operates by physical processes.'

To explain why this is such a pig of a sentence, perhaps one should parse the two words 'denying' and 'having.' The latter is plainly a gerund which should be preceded by a possessive—'the human mind's having,' but the sentence still stinks. Counsel for the defence will argue that 'denying' is also a gerund, and in French, the gerundial infinitive—'sans nier'—would certainly cover it. But in English it reads horribly like a norninativus pendens, where 'without' is not a preposition governing a noun so much as an adverb—like 'not'— governing a participle. Anacoluthon or acoluthon (yes, I looked that one up in my Liddell and Scott), it is a filthy construction. Bend over, Master Mogg.

And while we argue over such weighty matters—no doubt a hundred readers will be able to point to graver infelicities in my non prose—we learn from a child psychologist in Staffordshire that a majority of fourth-year boys in eight comprehensive schools there are unable to multiply six by eight, nine by seven or twelve by eleven. Only eight out of 240 eleven-year-olds entering a LEA comprehensive could subtract £4.471 from £.13.24. What fun we shall have in the future!

In an effort to confuse parents and obscure what is happening in education, teachers have introduced an entirely new system of mathematics. We can only learn about it in the colour supplements of the Sunday newspapers, which I seldom read in any case for fear of catching cancer from them. But the final result would appear to be that few government-educated children can do the simplest sums, just as few can construct the simplest sentence, or even understand a simple passage of English prose. It is in this context that one should judge the churches' craven efforts to reduce their liturgy to the language of the Clapham omnibus, as Bishop Montefiore enthusiastically describes it.

If I were to ask a couple on the top of the Clapham omnibus, I do not think they would recognise that I was referring to sexual intercourse,' he says, referring to a proposed passage in the new marriage service. Why does he bother with words at all ? Doesn't he know how to stick his tongue out and leer suggestively ? Or there are things to be done with his fingers to make his meaning clear.

But the most encouraging aspect in the whole field of education is the way the nation has decided it no longer believes in science or wants to study it. According to the Prime Minister (who is not, of course, necessarily to be believed) there are now 30,000 places for students in science and engineering at our universities and polytechnics which have not been taken up. This must represent our British equivalent of the great religious revival in the United States which has seen the dreadful Carter into the White House. It is the one kindly light which I can spot amid the encircling gloom.