This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Matthew Arnold wrote, “The aged Barbarian will, upon this, mumble to us his story how the battle of Waterloo was won in the playing-fields of Eton. Alas! disasters have been prepared in those playing-fields as well as victories; disasters due to inadequate mental training — to want of application, knowledge, intelligence, lucidity.”

Arnold was one of the greatest educational and social reformers of the Victorian age, a gifted philosopher, journalist and poet who spent 30 years as an inspector and improver of schools. He understood how the character of the ruling classes, and thus the character of their rule, followed from the strengths and weaknesses of their education.

It was Arnold, who against much institutional and cultural resistance, foresaw that a national system of education, supported by the state, would be necessary to meet the needs and aspirations of a rising middle class. We stand at the far end of that process, and in a very different world to the one Arnold recognised.

The development of a national education system on a European model, one which would usefully compete with and complement the great mediaeval public schools and universities, has come to pass. But many of the troubles and morbidities that Arnold identified — the philistinism of the English elite, and the materialism of our middle classes — have returned with a vengeance. Others have returned in new, unimaginable forms, with the religious divisions of his day replaced with ethnic and religious sectarianism imported from the developing world.

Labour’s lacklustre ideas

Labour’s approach to education, so far, is surprisingly unreforming. Their manifesto frames it as a route to economic opportunity, via acquiring marketable “skills”, or as a direct means of poverty relief and state-run childcare, with much-heralded breakfast clubs, drop-in centres and government nurseries.

All this is to be funded, in part, through the removal of tax relief from those grand old public schools that Arnold wrote about. Much emphasis is placed on equality of opportunity, with the manifesto describing “breaking the pernicious link between background and success” as a “defining mission for Labour”. Little seems to have changed in Labour thinking on this subject in the past 30 years. Yet for all New Labour’s investments in the public sector and education, income inequality actually worsened slightly during their time in office.

A Labour party with no new vision, one wedded to the deeply irrational idea that education can entirely eliminate familial advantage, seems doomed to make the same mistakes and see the same outcomes. Welcome elements — such as a commitment to expanding the arts in state schools, and more emphasis on vocational training — will not be enough if Labour cannot change its fundamental approach.

One of the basic mistakes made by a Labour party that has given up on much past radicalism — abandoning the idea of planning in the economy, or of substantially regulating wages at the top of the income scale — is to divert its radical aspirations into those spheres that remain to it. If the free market must be left alone, then only two routes remain. On the one hand they can set substantial taxes, especially on wealth and property, and redistribute those resources via welfare and public services. This approach, though popular amongst many on the Left, is unpopular with voters and alarming to the markets.

That leaves Labour with one last lever: education. The thinking is that opportunities can be entirely equalised if only educational “resources” are the same for every child. The tax on public schools is a sop to this strategy, and can be seen as a small but substantial step towards what more radical voices urge — actual abolition of private education. This pseudo-socialism of equality of opportunity, urged by many left liberals, would use a combination of mandatory state education and high inheritance tax to minimise familial advantage. Each child would sink or swim according to their talents; wealth would be distributed by merit in each generation, rather than passed on and hoarded.

Talents are nurtured without concern for marketability; scholars are inducted into centuries-old traditions and habits

It is a vision with substantial appeal to an otherwise pragmatic cabinet. Already hailed by some as “the most working-class cabinet of all time”, this is, crucially, a group of people who, largely, grew up in working-class households, rather than being employed in working-class jobs. They see social mobility as the solution to poverty and inequality. But it’s a mistaken strategy. Not only can it never remove the overall problem of the growing gulf between the wealthiest and the poorest, it is also likely to worsen the quality of education itself.

The redistributional approach to learning strips it of its significance and poorly serves the needs of the communities it educates. It treats education as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. The Labour manifesto mentions the importance of culture, yet only in connection to the “creative industries”. Whilst material advantages may flow from education, even these very advantages depend on the higher aims once inherent in traditional education.

Against educational utilitarianism

The economic advantages enjoyed by public school pupils in the “creative industries” only exist because theatre, sport, art and music are taught widely and idealistically as refinements of character and personally enriching pursuits.

One reason people pay the premium price for private education — even when it is not academically superior to the best nearby state schools and with the risk of being discriminated against by university admissions policies — is the great wealth of resources it lavishes in other areas. Talents are nurtured without concern for marketability; scholars are inducted into centuries-old traditions and habits. Self-confidence is built upon the grandeur of the institutions into which they are welcomed.

One of the elements that made grammar schools so effective was their capacity to assume many of these characteristics of elite public school education, with their formality, rituals and emphasis on extracurriculars as well as a demanding academic education that included Latin and Greek.

For some, like journalist Peter Hitchens, grammar schools will be a drum eternally beaten in defiance of our current educational woes. The failures of comprehensivisation are hard to dispute, and anyone looking for evidence has a test case in the form of Northern Ireland, where its unreformed grammar school system regularly outperforms Britain’s state sector.

But was the magic of grammar schools in their selective nature, or in their ethos and traditional character? Comprehensivisation did more than just get rid of the eleven-plus; it “modernised” schooling, sweeping away gowns, high tables, mortarboards, house systems and the teaching of ancient languages. Yet there were many alternatives ignored in the process. In America, schooling is non-selective, but there is a very high degree of internal streaming, with gifted programmes pushing the most able students to a far higher level of academic achievement and intellectual independence by the time they leave school, a difference evident to anyone faced with the starkly unflattering contrast between energetic and curious American students and often surly British undergraduates.

Equally, comprehensive schools don’t have to bring back the eleven-plus, or relentlessly focus on exams and marketability, to produce exceptional talents and enrich lives. Take David Bowie, a working class boy with burgeoning talents, but little discipline and a tendency to get into fights. He was a poor fit for the fusty grammar school system and failed the eleven-plus. But he ended up at an institution that suited him far better — the magnificently eccentric Bromley Technical School. Christopher Sandford wrote of it that:

it was, by the time David arrived in 1958, as rich in arcane ritual as any [English] public school. There were houses named after eighteenth-century statesmen like Pitt and Wilberforce. There was a uniform and an elaborate system of rewards and punishments. There was also an accent on languages, science and particularly design, where a collegiate atmosphere flourished under the tutorship of Owen Frampton. In David’s account, Frampton led through force of personality, not intellect; his colleagues at Bromley Tech were famous for neither and yielded the school’s most gifted pupils to the arts.

In one sense, Bowie was a total academic failure, leaving school at 16 with a single O-level in art. But his school nurtured his creative gifts and, perhaps most importantly, didn’t try too hard to suppress his increasingly wild eccentricities, a period of adolescent experimentation that so easily might have been crushed by a less tolerant institution.

Selling 100 million records is one hell of a contribution to those “creative industries”, but would an education devoted to maximising the economic opportunities of pupils have done anything to help bring it about? It’s a persistent problem in any school, but even more so in the world of national curricula, mass education and formalised assessment. An educational approach that works for most pupils still lets some down, occasionally very badly. Some of those most failed by the education system are also the most talented, independent and creative.

A real reforming agenda

Labour and the Left in general are far too obsessed with education as a utilitarian levelling device and far too little concerned with the nurturing of individuals. Equality, when imposed on wildly varying characters and situations, brings unfairness. Justice, in its classical sense, involves giving to each person according to their needs and nature.

Labour’s approach asks the wrong questions of the current system. Taxing independent schools is meant as an attack on concentrations of private advantage, yet fails to see that these schools’ more fundamental failure is that they are no longer effective instruments of elite formation that induct privileged young people into public service.

Education and social mobility cannot, definitionally, correct economic inequality. One cannot infinitely expand the numbers of lawyers and doctors at the expense of retail, manufacturing and logistics workers. What education can do, however, is politically and culturally empower ordinary people by giving them the fruits of our culture and history, equipping them for better wages and conditions. Elite education, meanwhile, has the potential to form a virtuous and effective elite inculcated in an ethic of public service and dedicated to defending the common good.

Neither of these aims is currently being achieved. Ignorance of British history, literature, religion and culture is widespread amongst comprehensive school pupils. Those who attend elite public schools and universities have a superficial (though increasingly poor) grasp of these things, but seem to be taught individualistic self-advancement instead of a sense of duty or belonging.

Labour is right about this much — public schools have lost their public character. Not only have they become a luxury product purchased by a self-serving elite; increasingly they lack even a national character, as the children of foreign oligarchs are taught the lessons of smooth self-promotion and unearned confidence.

With a breakdown in both mass and elite education, there has never been a more urgent need for creative thinking and radical reform. If the Labour party is serious about putting public service ahead of past dogma, it can achieve something here.

Merely taxing elite schools will only accelerate the trend towards the international, commercial and individualistic capture of our public schools. The more radical move would be mutualisation or nationalisation. Institutions such as Eton, Harrow, St Paul’s, Rugby and Westminster are older than the British state itself, their resources dating to mediaeval endowments, meant for the sake of the moral and spiritual good of the nation as a whole. Rather than surrendering them to private gain, or recklessly abolishing them, we should reclaim them for their original purpose.

Like the grammar schools of old, elite public schools could be directed, either through regulation of their charitable status or by direct state ownership, to take on only the best and brightest, instead of those who can pay the fee, with a far higher fixed number of places dedicated to poorer pupils. As opposed to a club of wealthy pupils wallowing in their collective privilege, we might see a far more sober and public-spirited community of young scholars who understand they have been selected to serve the country, not advance their own careers.

In the education system in general, a total revolution is needed. The drastic narrowing of minds involved in our early specialisations must be reversed, with a broad curriculum including the sciences continuing, as it does in the United States, up until 18. As in America, this breadth of learning must continue into university.

Extracurricular activities must take up a far larger part of school life, resources and energy. Technical education, with prestigious and dedicated schools and colleges, especially in critical industrial areas, must have the same status as academic institutions, but without losing a broad curriculum and a creative, humanistic atmosphere.

The most important break with the current system is an end to the exhausting ratchet of examination. Assessment should be continuous, but internally designed to reflect the teaching of the school, with a SATs-style exam at 16, testing general skills; and a more specialised exam at 18, again on an American or European model.

The national curriculum must be considerably loosened in some areas, but tightened in others, with a mandatory requirement to teach the great books tradition, including classics of English literature and the Bible, and to offer instruction in local history and culture, as well as attending to the spiritual and moral education of young people.

Education was once the great national strength of Britain, and it can be again, if only those who govern us have the imagination and ambition to renew it. But it must aspire to more than material gain and individual advantage, and rediscover as its object Arnold’s “high, white star of Truth”.