Institutional Incomprehension: How Modern Education Fails at the Margins

 Relevant Quotes:

Education, Education, Education! 

(Tony Blair)

 

Educational achievement is THE route to better jobs. 

(Practically everyone who tries to sell modern education to the marginalised.)

Now brothers are kindred but hard times betray,

and so we stumbled on the old changing way.

We never agreed to divide our tin,

and when you're out of love with your brother, 

your hard times begin.

(Richard Thompson, "The Old Changing Way" (song lyric))

What this is all about:

This morning, the UK Parliament's Education Select Committee published a report blaming the term "white privilege" for the undeniable fact that poorer white pupils do relatively badly in British schools. It is also apparent from their figures that Afro-Caribbean pupils also do quite badly compared to British Asian pupils or British African pupils. The committee is basically saying that poor educational achievement is not really a colour issue, but perhaps something less superficial. Most of the reaction to this report has, of course, been entirely woke superficial Tory-bashing. But that's not to say that the committee have really thought long enough or deeply enough to have the real answers.

The Harsh Truth:

The BBC report on the Parliamentary report makes it painfully obvious that low educational achievement by poor white (and almost certainly also Afro-Caribbean) pupils and students is caused by an instinctive rejection of the sales message of modern education encapsulated by the first two quotes, above. Even the BBC is unable to comprehend exactly why this is so, but in comprehending at least that it is so, they are somewhat ahead of the politicians.

Modern Education is being sold to us on an entirely materialistic basis, aimed solely at our self-interest and our self-gratification. Even if people aspire to be educated so as to join some caring or public-spirited profession, the necessary qualifications are sold to us on the basis that the will "allow you to fulfill your dream." You are not even allowed to do good to others without a broad streak of self-interest. And the reason Modern Education is sold to us on this basis is quite simply that it has nothing else to offer. Nothing is allowed to be objectively good or bad, so Modern Education cannot be sold on the basis that it is good in and of itself. Classical Education could be and was sold on the basis that it was good in and of itself, but whether it really was is perhaps a matter for debate and it's not the point which needs to be grasped here: the materialistic self-interest sales-pitch for Modern Education is not selling to the marginalised and we need to understand why it is being rejected. And this bring us to the third quote, above.

If you have grown up in serious disadvantage or oppression, and even more so if your family has had to live with disadvantage and oppression for generations, that third quote is a statement of your deepest knowledge: your primary survival instinct. "If you're out of love with your brother, your hard times begin." Some people in disadvantaged communities may reject this ethic and join criminal gangs in consequence. These are not the survivors: they are the ones that kill others; the ones who get killed. You survive oppression by sticking with those close to you and those like you, you survive by brotherly love. And if you are doing that, then a Blairite sales pitch for higher education that seems to be telling you to break free of those around you and leave them behind, sounds unwise if not wholly evil. (And so does the Marxist message that you can break free of oppression by turning the tables and becoming the oppressor. A boot on the other foot is still a boot in someone's face.)

The marginalised are not rejecting education because they are misinformed, deranged, deluded, dull, ignorant or stupid, but because the fact that they have virtually nothing of material value enables them to make non-materialistic judgements. "I'll stick with my mates." or "my Dad or Uncle will get me a job" or even "I don't really want to be quite like that Tony Blair." 

Learning used to be something of intangible and almost unlimited worth and during and after the Reformation it was highly prized by the poor: it was often literally true that a ploughboy would know more about the Bible than a Bishop. Education should be something of unlimited worth! But in the past few generations the intelligentsia, whose crass stupidity made George Orwell despair of them, have reduced education to nothing more than a tool for climbing the greasy pole.

Education needs to get back to being the kind of learning that has value irrespective of any self-interest or immediate material outcome.

Like rooks and ravens, human beings are born to learn, all their days. We do not learn solely to get a better job and have a career, but to make a better job of our whole lives and not just at our place of employment. By learning we enjoy what's around us more because we understand what's happening: if it is good we can take quiet pleasure in that and if it is not good, we can change it. We learn to make better decisions, we learn to take better care of others. We even learn just for the sake of learning. We learn to recognise when we are being helped and when we are being bullied and manipulated. We learn to do justice as well as to seek justice for ourselves. And all of this learning is inconvenient to those who would manipulate us. But if we can achieve an education system that genuinely prizes learning for its own sake, there is hope for us. We can exchange manipulation for free and steady progress towards what is objectively good. And if we persist for long enough, fewer and fewer people will be marginalised: learning will be accepted because it will be seen to be good.