SOCIAL JUSTICE OR EXCELLENCE? BRITISH CHOICES IN EDUCATION
Litt, Edgar
In Britain today, Labour ministers carry on the "long revolution" for social justice in the face of a downward economic spiral. The British Labour party unites evangelical,...
...The fate of the "public schools"—Labour's strategy is to neutralize, not nationalize, them—and of the two different sorts of state schools are issues that separate Labour from Margaret Thatcher's Conservative party, and, to a lesser extent, from Jeremy Thorpe's Liberal party...
...They are aware of the little time and few resources for American-style task forces on educational innovation...
...The sum of these budget decisions was to transfer the equivalent of 50 million uninflated American dollars from the universities to the rest of British education...
...Many American colleges are simply not universities in the British sense of the word, and our drop-out rates are much higher than those in Britain where governmental student grants sustain the select minority...
...Though the D.E.S...
...American equivalents of the British tripartite system are our prestigious private schools (Choate, Andover...
...The cathedral town, then, is a suitable site for universities devoted to high intellectual standards and an antivocational ethos...
...So far, the power of these constituencies within the Labour party has frustrated D.E.S...
...British universities have never been working-class institutions...
...Capital improvements in excess of £ 50,000 for education must now be authorized by the Department of Education and Science, unless a local authority chooses the painful course of requesting increased local taxes...
...The core of Labour's education policy is the comprehensive school designed to provide quality education regardless of social class background (only 30 percent of British youth complete secondary school, a decade ago a mere 15 percent...
...So the progeny of Lord Robbins were located in the cathedral towns of York and Bristol, rather than in the urban sprawl of Greater London and the West Midlands...
...This judgment is not supported by evidence regarding university expansion after the Robbins Report when, despite forebodings about leveling among senior British academics, the number of "A" Level (university qualified) students increased by about 20 percent...
...Against this stands Labour's commitment to educating a self-governing citizenry of productive men and women in times of economic distress It is ironic to observe these ministerial "Cavaliers" (sophisticated intellectuals au courant in the world of ideas) execute "Roundhead" policies—bricks and mortar for the comprehensives, programs in industrial design for the Polytechnics, concern with the education of the least skilled and literate everywhere...
...Imagine that the presidents of the leading public and private American universities, from Harvard to Berkeley, decided to give 5 percent of their combined budgets to the public schools...
...The D.E.S...
...The binary policy states that there will be two higher education systems at degree level...
...plans to merge the direct-grant and comprehensives into a unified state-maintained system...
...E. A. stands for Local Education Authority about 20 million, or 5 percent of their combined budget during 1974-1975...
...British university graduates, regardless of class origins, are not attracted to industry and commerce in significant numbers...
...The key men in the public higher education sector are Polytechnic directors, and the key actors in the comprehensive program are the headmasters of the statemaintained secondary schools...
...The thrust is toward making employment in the public sector more attractive than in the universities...
...Nevertheless, the shape of the future was clear by the late 1960s...
...Everton is one of the best teams of English First Division Football...
...Gone is the Eleven-Plus examination, that bulwark of educational discrimination by class origins...
...Recent Education ministers— Tony Crossland (Labour), Edward Boyle (Conservative), and Reginald Prentice (Labour)—have enlarged the department's staff so that it can deal effectively with the "money men" in Treasury and with educational pressure groups...
...428...
...The belief that worker incentives are critical to economic productivity is central to Labor's Industrial Relations Act and the partnership between the private and public economies...
...Here the children of senior civil servants and university professors go to university...
...Both groups received an 11 percent salary increase —in constant pounds—during 1975, while professors at the apex of British universities were suffering a net 3 percent salary decrease, in constant pounds...
...The redistribution of research and development support is further evidence of Labour's education policy...
...Elizabeth House and the Everton Strategy LABOR'S EFFORTS are directed toward holding on to hard-won social gains in a deteriorating economy—the so-called Everton Strategy...
...Still, contemporary concern about the decline of British "high culture" is a valid consideration...
...Postsecondary reorganization involves efforts to merge the patchquilt of Polytechnics, colleges of education, and colleges of further education coexisting within a single local authority...
...The university expansion did increase opportunities for clever working-class youngsters within the stratified confines of British society...
...The "heritage" is one shaped by generous support for speculative scientific investigation, characterized in the past by a pursuit of scientific problems without regard to short-term payoffs...
...Consolidating these institutions into a unified public higher educational unit within each region and city more closely resembles a continental model than the historic pluralism of central-local co-determination within the United Kingdom...
...The hallmarks of British science have been original discoveries, a pattern that still yields Nobel Prizes in such specialties as astronomy and merited membership in the Royal Society to medical researchers without any university affiliations...
...Two Cultures and One Budget THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION in British edu cation unfolds through the "three Rs"—resources, reorganization, and research...
...It is Labour's policy to fall back on the essentials of its program and support the comprehensive and public higher educational sectors...
...Caught between the comprehensives and the "public schools" are the direct grant schools, such as Manchester Grammar, which are partially state-supported and of high academic quality...
...Everton's strategy is simply not to lose...
...When comparable indices of...
...Labour's higher education policy is guided by the "binary principle," enunciated by former Education Minister Tony Crossland...
...If the choice is between an adult literacy program and an expensive physics project, then I wish our scientists luck in Brussels or in Washington," observes a senior D.E.S...
...But while social reform often benefits the professional class, that is to say, the sons and daughters of the reformers, more than professional self-interest is involved...
...is cut off from the centers of govemmental activity, physically separated from Whitehall across the Thames, its ministers reshape political power...
...Now a state-maintained, comprehensive system receives vast sums of public money, while the ancient "public schools" must rely on private support...
...A second-class economic power cannot afford the costs of university and research expansion, and modem mass education...
...In such cities as Leeds and Manchester, direct-grant schools have become the centers of excellence and the gateway to universities and the professions...
...One need not romanticize the old clhss-biased educational system to regret the erosion of an erudite culture...
...Increasingly, Cabinet ministers distribute so-called science and research funds...
...Labour ministers, such as Michael Foote (Employment), Anthony Wedgewood Benn (formerly at Industry), and Peter Shore (Trade) used active "research units" to infuse funds into trade union projects, worker's economic cooperatives, adult education programs, and vocational training...
...and our high-quality suburban systems (Newton, Alexandria, Santa Barbara) that are largely supported by property taxes of upper-middle-class residents...
...is using its increased power to make the comprehensive schools the sole alternative to the expensive and exclusive "public schools...
...This means a long-term effort to merge comprehensives with direct-grant 426 schools, a move resisted by middle-class supporters of the latter...
...Under the leadership of Reginald Prentice, education's share of the 1974 budget increased by 4 percent despite the economic situation...
...The comprehensive school is the socialist equivalent of the old "public schools" in selecting the one in six students who will enroll in the higher educational system...
...During the 1960s, the demand for university places pushed expansion in the autonomous sector...
...Imagine further that the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare reorganized community and state colleges into unified institutions...
...The Robbins Report urged university expansion and became one of the few official reports in British history to be implemented immediately by the government...
...They, too, will play for a tie in the autumn of social-class politics— and for an unspectacular but inexorable movement toward equality...
...social class and the quality of academic institutions are considered, the percentages of university graduates from working-class backgrounds in Britain and America are about the same...
...These are mighty accomplishments set against the backdrop of an "Upstairs-Downstairs" society in which 5 percent of the population control 70 percent of private wealth, and in which schooling at Eton and Cambridge remain key paths to elite status...
...British intellectual quality has always depended upon the fruits of the university tutorial, the solid curriculum of the sixth form, and mature scientific research and scholarship...
...Reorganization is the second way of changing British education...
...Although centers of basic research support remain influential in the interlocking realm of the Social Science Research Council, Science Research Council, and the Royal Society, the drift is from open-ended cultural and scientific support to programmatic research designed to rescue a beleaguered political economy...
...About 200 miles south of Lancashire, the Department of Education and Science occupies Elizabeth House, a plate-glass building adjoining Victoria Station, South of the Thames...
...No White Paper or Cabinet decision dictated this shift in resources commiting Elizabeth House to a long-range "Everton Strategy" in the persuasive language of pounds and shillings...
...It is this improbable chemistry that has reshaped British education...
...Cpmplete this improbable scenario with a significant transfer of research funds, for instance from projects sponsored by the National Science Foundation to projects sponsored by the AFL–CIO, and you approximate the changes in British education...
...The British Labour party unites evangelical, workingclass sentiment ("The Red Flag Holds the People's Blood," delegates sing at every party conference) with an Oxford-dominated Cabinet...
...plans, and direct "research grants" to trade unions at the workplace compensate for the absence of a completed sixth-form education among the majority of adult workers...
...Another set of budgetary commitments reinforced D.E.S...
...official...
...is not a working-class institution, but Labour party ministers pursue the "Everton Strategy" with the tenacity of any "Scouser" on a Liverpool football pitch...
...Cynics point out that universities were expanded in order to satisfy the growing professional class whose sons and daughters could not study at Oxford or Cambridge, and who sought an education that was updated but similarly prestigious...
...427 Above all, the idea of a British university, now that concentration in a single subject has been discarded, is carried forth by broadgauged graduates at home in the community of scholars and public affairs...
...Support of adult education and vocational courses are designed primarily for a smaller group who drop out after completing their secondary education...
...These policies complement D.E.S...
...policy...
...While the public higher educational sector and the comprehensive system also felt the inflationary spiral, during 1973-1975, an additional 23 million pounds was made available to Local Educational Authorities for use in schools and Polytechnics...
...Those who have seen the inside both of the lawyer's chambers and of coal mines will not suppose that of the inhabitants of those places of gloom the former are more constantly inspired by the humanities than are the latter, or that conveyancing is in itself a more liberal art than hewing...
...A dozen new univer424 sities were opened, and the university student population doubled within a decade...
...Our entire educational budget," observes an L.E.A...
...We are supporting these programs by living on the capital of our intellectual heritage," says a scholar with Labour party attachments...
...Let R. H. Tawny, the architect of Labour's commitment to educational justice, have the last word: If persons whose work is different require different kinds of professional instruction, that is no reason why one should be excluded from the common heritage of civilization of which the other is made free by a university education...
...The continued decline of England's political economy and the Labour government's use of education on behalf of the urban, working-class majority presented a dilemma regarding universities and basic research...
...When theoretical physicists complain of meager support, and when mathematicians speak of the drought in basic medical research, it is reasonable to conclude that there is warranted concern in the "invisible college" at the frontiers of British science...
...The Labour government includes men and women who recall the class humiliation of an Eleven-Plus examination, the social differences between Eton or Winchester and Stoke Common School or Birmingham Comprehensive, and those upperclass voices heard not too long ago across the table at Cambridge or in an Oxford seminar...
...English universities suffered a net loss of *L...
...our regular public school systems...
...Everton often plays for a tie, and unspectacular play is compensated by team success during the ordeal of a nine-month season...
...The number of sixth-form (American high school) graduates doubled between 1963 and 1973, as did the number of full-time students in higher education...
...an autonomous sector of universities centrally funded through that ingenious conduit, the University Grants Committee, and a public sector of postsecondary vocational institutions (Polytechnics, Colleges of Education, Colleges of Further Education) jointly funded by central and local governments...
...Today, big-time soccer combines money, passion, and skilled workingclass players with the determination portrayed by Richard Harris in the movie The Sporting Life...
...They are highly selective, shaped by a history of academic tradition and social realities in a society where 70 percent of the labor force are skilled, semiskilled, or unskilled workers...
...The judgment of a cultivated and socially humane Conservative party spokesman on education and culture is clear enough: In the name of class justice, they [the Labour party] level down every sign of intellectual creativity...
...The die has been cast toward both a unified comprehensive system below, and a unified public sector above...
...Socialists, their advisers, and civil servants are determined not to lose the hard-won gains of the "long revolution...
...Religious strife with crosstown rival Liverpool has subsided since the days when Evertonians upheld Irish-Catholic honor, and Liverpudlians stood for EnglishProtestant virtue...
...The Department of Education and Science now contributes to the L. E. A.'s 65 percent of all funds available to nonuniversity education, an increase of 15 percent in London's share (for example) within three years...
...The drift in British educational policy thus poses a fundamental choice between "excellence" and "social justice...
...It would be amusing to watch these Oxford graduates play "Working Class" were the consequences not so tragic...
...The D.E.S...
...Teams are awarded two points for each win, one point for each tie, and no points for each loss...
...University dons and science investigators worry that British intellectual capital will be expended on behalf of stop-gap projects that don't deal with the roots of national economic problems...
...official in Yorkshire, "could be spent on new buildings 425 and modern equipment...
...The salaries now awarded to Polytechnic directors and secondary school headmasters often equal those of the vice-chancellor (in effect, "The President") of British universities...
Vol. 23 • September 1976 • No. 4
