Another voice
Warm, helpless laughter
Auberon Waugh
A class at one of our surviving teacher training colleges in the South of England was recently treated to a lecture by the deputy headmaster of a local comprehensive school on the virtues of unstreamed, mixed-ability schooling. I was not present at the lecture and can only report it second hand, as it was reported to me. For that reason, I do not propose to identify the teacher training college, the schools, the town or the deputy headmaster, whom 1 will call Mr MoffatPotts after a brilliant, handsome and much-admired teacher at my own prep school whom 1 have not seen for nearly thirty years and who may well have been gathered to his eternal rest. You never meet • people in later life with names like the ones you meet at school. In my elder son's house, the morning toll-call reads: `Dible"; Doble'; 'Edmed'; 'Exton', or so he says. One relies so much on what other people tell one to know what is going on in the world nowadays, when the newspapers are full of preposterous lies about how Britain is booming, how Mr Healey has worked an economic miracle, how our women of all ages are now freely available for sexual intercourse etc, etc.
To read the newspapers, as I say, you would suppose that younger teachers and teacher-trainees were solidly and immutably persuaded of the virtues of the comprehensive system, that only a few elderly fuddy-duddies in the National Association of Schoolmasters now opposedit. Many, if not most, of these younger teachers, you would think, are Marxists, if not actually terrorists in disguise, and all have as their main purpose in life the destruction of formal .education in favour of agitprop and urban guerrilla training.
Since starting to take an interest in educational trends about seven years ago, I have become convinced that this is a misleading picture. Marxists are a small and increasingly despised minority; only they and an older generation of former secondary modern teachers, many now approaching retirement, continue to trot out the arguments in favour of mixed-ability schooling. They are supported, it is true, by a handful of National Union of Teachers apparatchiks and by an army of education directors, but the drift, which is towards the unstructured plasticine play-group rather than towards SWP indoctrination sessions, is no longer dictated by ideology so much as by the despair (and timidity and idleness) of teachers confronted by the products of this earlier, discredited ideology. The result, of course, is the same: a generation which divides into semi-literate social workers on the one hand and almost totally illiterate social welfare fodder on the other. At least the division is less sharp than before, and individuals can wander between the two groups without attracting much notice. Perhaps sloth, cowardice and despair are no more admirable, as attributes, than ideological error, but my point at this stage is that ideology is on the wane.
Which brings us back to the lecture given by Mr Moffat-Potts (not the real one, God bring him to eternal light) at an unnamed teacher training college in an unnamed town last week. Having dwelt upon the glorious benefits of unstreamed, mixedability schooling — how a cross-pollination of talents is achieved, how tests on rats in California have proved that gifted children actually do better when surrounded by stupider, rougher, hostile and resentful children from another background, how children of so-called inferior ability blossom like orchids — Mr Moffat-Potts (whom God preserve) went on to deplore the fact that children of the few 'educationally aware' parents in his catchment area were invariably sent to another, streamed comprehensive school at the other end of town.
When asked why this was so, he blamed the local education authority: parents were still allowed an element of choice between schools as a result of assurances given during the local elections which preceded reorganisation. When asked why 'educationally aware' parents exercised this freedom of choice, which involved a lengthy journey across the town, rather than take advantage of the neighbourhood school, the blameless and beautiful Mr Moffat-Potts replied (according to my informant) that he supposed it was because the ofher school had better exam results.
Of course, this artificial and deleterious emphasis on exam results should not be allowed to distort the aims of real education, he said. The class sat polite and attentive. Cross-pollination must be the aim of real education, of course. But what exactly were his exam results? It is at this point that I can only suppose my informant misheard the answer. At any rate, according to my only source of information, Mr Moffat-Potts replied that so far he had not been able to achieve a rate of less than sixty per cent of those who left his 1,000-pupil, unstreamed, mixed-ability comprehensive school without either CSE or GCE '0' Level passes.
Whatever the figure he produced — and I personally can't accept sixty per cent since I thought that CSE was specially designed to be almost impossible to fail — it produced a roar of laughter from the class. Some fell off their chairs, others managed to remain sea ted. Mr Moffat-Potts replied tetchily that all this was going to change. Not only had expensive and elaborate equipment been imported which would produce better exam results like eggs from battery chickens, but under a new examination system everybody who attended his school would be awarded something called CSE Mode Three which would ensure a hundred per cent CSE rate, thereby confirming the excellence of mixed-ability schooling and providing further ammunition for its apologists.
But my purpose in drawing attention to this episode is not to illustrate yet again the intellectual evasions and rank dishonesty which are necessary to any system built on a structure of 'unstable beliefs'; Soviet and Chinese societies already provide a far more massive monument than anything our educational ideologues can hope to achieve. My purpose is to draw attention to how these intellectual evasions were received: not by reasoned counter-argument, still less with indignation or anger, simply with warm, helpless laughter.
It is a commonplace of the times to remark how intelligent opinion in Britain is moving to the right or, as we who have been there all along prefer, is coming to its senses at last. Mark Boxer has shown us two Hampstead schoolchildren, one saying to the other: 'My Daddy has moved further to the right than your Daddy', so plainly the trend is established. The reasons for it are too obvious to dwell on. Nobody who is not a lunatic or a member of the trade union apparat wants to live in a country ruled by Moss Evans or Jack Jones or Clive Jenkins or, for that matter, any of the other Evanses, Joneses and Jenkinses who are waiting in the wings. They have already taken over the Church of England — my 1972 Crockford lists 294 Revd Joneses, 191 Revd Evanses and 50 Revd Jenkinses, not to mention two Revd Jones-Evanses. Nobody in his senses, as I say, wants these furtive, weasel-faced men to take over the whole country.
Similarly, nobody with the least benevolence towards his children really wishes to see them beaten up or their education sabotaged by the brutish, spoiled and discontented products of our welfare state. Similarly again, it has been gratifying to note how only the most dedicated pseuds, insulated by the most prodigious conceit in their superior intelligence and sensitivity, have been able to struggle across the pans asinorum of Carl Andre's 'Bricks' to affirm the continued relevance of everything the despised philistines have lumped together under the general label of Modern Art.
But the result of this shift, this comingto-our-senses, has not been to produce a counter-ideology, or even any articulate resistance to the old, discredited ideologies. Instead, as I say, the reaction to the continuing triumph of these discredited ideologies is one of warm, helpless laughter. None of us will lift a finger to prevent Moss Evans — or any other Evans — coming t° power, but we reserve the right to laugh at him when he gets there,
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