Statistics are culpable entities; they infuse in us guilt and in turn stand guilty as the representation of the misdemeanours of our society and policies. In turn statistics can be powerful tools wielded by vested interests to cajole us into change so that we may reach other statistical goals, and then, should we ever reach the targets, we should presumably feel better about ourselves and our society. Yet these modern gods of bureaucracies are as powerless as the ancient gods of legend and lore, for when they are dissolved, statistics dissemble into you and I, into the individuals that constitute our society, indeed, into irreducibles. And I and you are not, we would assuredly assert, mere numbers. Statistics are abstracts, more often than not the figment of fervent imagination manipulating the data to ‘prove’ how many angels ought to fit on the government’s pinheads – or in this case how many pinheads into the country’s universities.

According to the priests of statistics, there is a problem with our higher education institutions: not enough children from disadvantaged backgrounds are making it through to the higher echelons of learning and hence society’s top jobs. It does not really matter who proclaims this thesis – it emerges from various corners of our polity from time to time. In essence, an appeal is made for the Oliver Twists of the world, the capable children whose random birth has placed them in deleterious environments from which they are highly unlikely to break away; it is an appeal to our ethical sensibilities that the intellectually impoverished communities are reached down to by the patronage of the great educational establishments to pull out of their midst the children with potential.

This is more than a statistical concern – it is a concern that drives right back to the ancient core of Western public education: Plato’s Republic. In the Republic, Plato presented an influential vision of the state and society in which each citizen is allotted the position that best fits abilities. Plato did not play with statistics, but indubitably statisticians play with Plato’s recipe for the well-ordered state. According to his dialogue, the best state is divided into three tiers – the workers, the guardians, and the intellectuals; vestiges of the vision remain in modern educational policies that provide different paths for children – the vocational, the academic, and the path to power. The first two are most apparent in the divide that exists between ‘further’ education and ‘higher’ education; the third though is more historically contingent on family, political party, powerful connections, patronage from the establishment (of whatever political hue), and personal ambition. But underlying Plato’s ambition was the more radical claim that birth was irrelevant to educational ability: children’s skills and abilities and hence potential are gradually disclosed to their teachers who are charged with placing them in their appropriate levels and so their political and social destinies. So it may pass that a cobbler’s son may become a philosopher king, or a guardian’s daughter a housemaid. The Platonic well-ordered state was furthered by Aristotle, who agreed in principle with the stratified society – but rejected Plato’s egalitarian radicalism that the poor and women ought to be allowed to rise to their potential, for, according to this well-patronized thinker, some are born to rule over others: birth creates something other than potential, it creates birthright – it is mete that a King’s son should rule and that a cobbler’s son should cobble.

The tension between the two ancient philosophers, whom I have grossly parodied, is palpable in most of our educational debates. The contrived debate between ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ reflects the two positions. Statisticians tend to err towards the Platonic vision that society ought to reflect a political blueprint (stat-istics, incidentally is derived from ‘state’ which says a lot about their meaning and purpose); they are less likely to regard data with a conservative eye and an Aristotelian disposition to maintaining the status quo. Indeed, it would hardly be worth the effort to enthuse over the latest statistics, for they would effectively be meaningless. They are only meaningful to those who would change society according to their own imagination. And so our latest Platonists present the call to secure more children from the disadvantaged groups, because we are failing the vision that children’s potential is not governed by their birth.

Two methods present themselves in such debates, one ostensibly reasonable the other quite fatuous. The first is that earlier intervention into the educational culture of all families provides the best method by which to guarantee a greater flourishing of the child’s abilities as he or she proceeds through the school system. If, the argument goes, children begin learning an appropriate curriculum prior to formal school entrance, they tend to do better than those who do not enjoy the privilege of early learning.  This again echoes Plato’s prescription – families are a terrible obstacle to their child’s true educational potential, so the state must intervene to teach parents and/or to remove children from the pernicious influence to which parents may be disposed. Plato wanted children separated from birth and brought up communally by the state, a ploy that incidentally severs the natural bond between mother and child and thereby creates an artificial dependency on the state from the beginning. The psychological damage done from cutting the natural bond between parent and child, however, can be intense and manifold; the West has struggled to enforce a Platonic vision of life and education and the harm to culture and life is obvious, yet the more the state intervenes and the more chaos and pain it creates the more powers it demands to effect its ideals.

The second policy, which truly belies the inanity that often characterizes statistically based policies, is to enforce directly or indirectly social strata quotas on educational institutions. If there is a perceived dearth of undergraduates from families who have never sent any children to university before, then the number must be rectified by ensuring a higher intake. A target is then created – naturally, it will be made up and thereby in turn will create ludicrous results. Should the target be 35%, we should weep for those falling into the 36th percentile, as we should for those who may be more intellectually able who find themselves displaced in the scramble for places by their less intellectually inclined peers. We should similarly be concerned for the momentous shift in the quality of education that would accompany a policy of greater inclusion: resources drained from research budgets to cater for study skill centres. Cynically thinking, there will be those who would cherish the opportunity to flourish on increasingly dumbed-down campuses – including the shops, clubs, and pubs who would delight in the growing markets for non-educational auxiliary services around such ‘unis’.  There is also the arbitrariness of deciding what constitutes a university-deprived background: the implied policy would be to count immediate parents and perhaps grandparents, but any genealogical researcher could foresee the problems with that. Firstly, the number of ancestors geometrically increases through time so that, for instance, four generations prior to you are sixteen people whose education would have to be verified; after all the presence of one great-great grandparent who made it to Oxford may be sufficient to have a trickling influence on descendants’ ambitions. If we still harken the words of Plato, we may indeed hear and try to emulate the ambitions and successes of our ancestors. Secondly, idiocy of the policy is illustrated if we imagine it being applied to other areas of life: no one in my family has ever been a professional football player, even though football is a persistent passion – should my son thereby be permitted access and leverage to ensure he fills a quota? Or what of the establishment itself – none of us has ever been entitled by Royalty, so perhaps a knighthood should be cast our way to even the score a little. Educationalists may throw their hands up and proclaim that a child’s education is of a much more important category that does not deserve comparison; but arguably, a title or a footballer’s status may confer greater benefits than a degree in tourism. And naturally access to Parliament should be extended to the deprived, a policy which would certainly run counter to the traces of Aristotelian thinking that subtly pervades corridors of power. A satirical comment perhaps, but satire does elucidate much that may be askew in our thinking.

The desire to encourage opportunity amongst the underrepresented can be also construed as a patronage reminiscent of the Lord of the manor extending a hand to the local poor. It acts to divide and further enhances a presumed dependency – that the poorer or less educated are supposed to be grateful for the condescension, a ploy that we should all have the confidence and sense of self-esteem to reject. Quotas, subsidies, or plain bussing are inherently demeaning of the human spirit, as are the statistical charades paraded to justify others of good or ill intentions who act to deprive some to help others.
Ethically, historically, and pedagogically, the best way to help any one is to let them help themselves; and that is best secured by ignoring the statistics, removing the artifices that constrain our children’s progress in school such as the national curriculum and league tables, but most importantly by casting educational initiatives back into the hands of families.
Rarely does freedom get a mention in education policy recommendations, or in many walks of British life these days. Yet it is from our own struggles, as John Stuart Mill recommended, that we learn best to appreciate freedom, and in turn to raise our ambitions for the better life whatever the route we forge: it is better to err on our own idiosyncratic path than to be marshalled down mass-procured motorways. What those of us who have emerged from ‘educationally deprived’ backgrounds desire, is not handouts or leg-ups but the freedom to secure our own opportunities as we see fit. That may disgruntle social engineers but we never asked to have our lives planned for us and God help us if we do.

Dr Alexander Moseley (alex [@] classical-foundations.com)

www.intelligentparenting.co.uk

Please acknowledge source and author if you link this article. Thanks Alex