Have you ever judged a restaurant by the people that eat there, not by the food or the service? Or rated a book because the other readers had a rough childhood?
This is the idea behind the latest school league tables. Along with exam results, the class, ethnicity and gender of the pupils were considered. And so four excellent grammar schools came in the country's worst 100 schools because their intake was too middle class. The wicked lunacy of these criteria - judge an institution not by its standards, but by its clientele - isn't shocking any more because it's so familiar.
“Wicked lunacy”? Taking into account the scale of the task as well as the end result?
The quality of a book manifestly doesn’t depend on the backgrounds of its other readers; and I’m pretty sure we all do partly judge a restaurant by our fellow diners. If a place that serves food I like gets a lot of stag and hen parties in, I’ll probably stay away.
But imagine two surgeons: one treats ingrown toenails, with a patient survival rate of 90%; the other treats gunshot wounds, with a patient survival rate of 85%. Which surgeon is better – the one with the higher rate, or the one doing the harder task?
It’s an enduring and cosy delusion among fans of (overt or de facto) socially selective schooling that the “standards” of such an “institution” are somehow independent of its “clientele”. The schools themselves certainly know this: that’s why they select. The parents know it, too: that’s why the ones who’ve paid top dollar for their catchment areas are angry about the new admission lotteries.
Baudelaire said: “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist” (it was borrowed by ‘The Usual Suspects’). The greatest trick of conservative politics is to present itself as not political at all: contentious ideology becomes common sense while disagreement becomes leftist propaganda, political correctness and overbearing statism. Further strengthening the already strong is nothing more than respecting the natural order of things, while strengthening the weak is a dangerous top-down project of upheaval.
Thus the view that it’s “social engineering” to require state schools to be more socially egalitarian in their admissions. Well, actually, I agree that it is; in fact, it’s social engineering to even have a system of state schools providing universal education regardless of ability to pay. And a good thing, too.
But it’s also social engineering – and in a bad way – to argue that the better-run schools in the state system should only be open to a certain class of applicant. It’s not the default, naturally just setting of society for taxpayers to fund educational gated communities for the well-to-do.
A policy of favouring the already advantaged is as much an ideological stance as one of favouring the disadvantaged.