Can Government Deliver On Education - Road to the Middle Class

TONY BLAIR, everyone’s darling, has resigned as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and now Gordon Brown has been appointed by the Queen to serve as his successor. Everyone is full of advice, of course.

Anatole Kaletsky advises him to concentrate on education.

If Mr Brown really wants to show that he can think afresh and that he is in touch with the concerns of ordinary voters he should recognise that the people of Britain are far more worried about the daily disappointments of their children’s education – not to mention the physical threats they face on the way to school, as they run the gauntlet of outlaw gangs increasingly addicted to violence

Britain is the home of the “bog-standard” comprehensive school. If you don’t know exactly what that means, you can still guess.

But can a centralized government education system ever deliver? Well, we shall see.

The welfare state is something like 100 years old and in Britain and the United States centralized government education is about 150 years old. And it shows.

The great promise made by the academic middle class a century ago for its education and welfare state project was that they, the educated and the experts, could make government actually do something to help people. Don’t trust those dangerous businessmen, they said. They don’t care about people. But we do. Trust us, they said.

And the academic middle class believed themselves. Yes, they could make government into something it had never been. They could make it deliver.

Let’s face it. Government is really a patronage and clientage game, always was, always will be. As long as politicians stick to rewarding their friends and punishing their enemies they know what they are doing. But when it comes to actually running something, like education or welfare, or immigration (and yes, immigration is just as screwed up in Britain as it is here) government seems to be a complete disaster.

Therein lies our opportunity. We conservatives should recognize that there is a real possibility that we are entering an end game on government education.

You can put all the funding you like into education (and we have) but it really doesn’t matter. That’s because it really doesn’t matter if the principals and the teachers in a government education system do their job. They still get paid and the politicians pay more attention to them than to the voters.

Expect the concept of government education to be tested to destruction in the next twenty years. Then we should be ready to grab the chance to do some real reform.

Because we conservatives care about kids.

After all, there’s a difference between conservatives and liberals. Conservatives have more children.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

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