Brenda Bullock: Academic excellence is sacrificed for the disadvantaged
Oct 13 2008 By Brenda Bullock
It’s a sad irony that when reformers try to improve the life chances of those at the bottom of society, their well-meaning efforts so often come to nought, chiefly because they fail to understand what it is that people lower down the social scale than themselves need and want.
Politicians generally have no appreciation of the history, lives and mind-set of those we call “the disadvantaged” and so they tend to assume that all that is needed to create a homogeneous, classless society is to give the poor the same chances as they had themselves, but this is patently not the case.
In education, for example, the reformers have long since been convinced that if you give everybody the chance to do those hated badges of the middle-classes – O-levels, A-levels and university degrees – somehow society will be transformed.
It was a laudable aim but it was bound to fail. Having only one route to the top was never going to be enough. Firstly, you were bound to have huge numbers of children who were intellectually incapable of succeeding at the old highly academic O and A-levels and so these had to be made easier. Easier syllabuses, wider subject choice, frequent resists and the like, in an effort to make sure that there were enough students to fill all the places at all the newly created universities.
What nobody thought to ask, however, is just what the “disadvantaged” themselves wanted. Reformers were well aware that the key to social mobility has to lie in education, but they failed to realise that only offering one sort of career path to all (ie GCSE, A-level and university) would not lead to everyone gleefully accepting what was offered.
There were, of course, many who jumped at the chance to do GCSEs, but their lack of academic ability meant that they could only hope for a clutch of non-academic subject passes that inevitably narrowed their chances when seen against the achievements of their more academic peers.
The result of this unpalatable fact has been the creation of a two-tier university system, the better students having first choice of the best universities by virtue of their schools opting out of GCSEs and A-levels altogether and choosing harder exams that fit their students better for a university course.
Meanwhile, the lesser students, following unacademic courses at second-rate universities, continue to drop out at an alarming rate, currently 20 per cent.
And those faced with only one path to follow – that of a degree course – are dropping out in even greater numbers from universities and courses they had accepted through the clearing system, because their grades weren’t good enough for their first choice.
All this wicked waste of talent was caused by reformers failing to appreciate that the system that had served the middle-classes for generations - long, hard school career, university and economic independence delayed until the mid-20s – was completely alien to the working classes.
They had no history of this route to success, no taste for it and they didn’t want it, so being forced into it was bound to end in failure.
For centuries the working classes saw education as an inconvenient time between childhood and the world of work, which might begin at 12, 14, 15 or 16. Working class children, particularly boys, saw the kudos of bringing a wage into the home as a proof of manhood and they were not willing to wait until they were in their 20s to do it.
What they wanted was good training for work, a fact that has only recently been acknowledged. The pity of it is that the academic excellence of a system that was once the envy of the world has been sacrificed to give the disadvantaged what many of them didn’t want anyway.
