John White
It was supposed to be the best education around. That’s why, just as the Second World War was ending, we were overjoyed to hear I’d won a scholarship to the 400-year old school (which I shall not name), two bus journeys away from near our house in Romford.
Those who taught us in its ancient schoolroom with its deeply incised black desktops were mainly elderly men some of whom had been there since the early 1900s. Its new headmaster raised the school’s profile by inventing traditions – like renaming prefects “praepostors” and giving their highest rank, the “school praepostors”, blue gowns. I learnt little at the school beyond the grammars of three languages and the fact that all I was fit to do beyond it was to study yet more medieval history at university. The best lessons were with Mr Jacottet, my French teacher, who had been there only from 1919. What Jacko taught us about Racine was OK, but not a patch on stories of having to drink corpse water in the trenches of WW1.
After I joined the Institute of Education in the mid-1960s, I imagined that private schools would become archaic relics swept to one side by the comprehensive revolution. I did not foresee that, with the constant rise in inequalities of wealth and income since the 1980s, they would blossom into new life. Over the last three decades, far from withering on the margins, they have gradually become the apex of a new, hierarchical national school system, in which the lines between state and non-state provision have been deliberately blurred.
The first step took place in the period 1988 to 1992 with a) the creation of a common national examination system based on A levels and the newly-introduced GCSEs, and b) the arrival of league tables – in which private schools’ examination achievements could now be compared, locality by locality, with those of state schools.
The second step has been the rise of academies. Like maintained state schools, these are non-fee-paying; but like private schools, they are independent in governance and management and do not have to follow the national curriculum. These developments, reinforced by independent schools’ greater involvement in the state sector, e.g. in sponsoring academies, have woven private education into the national structure of education.
But the more this intention to make private schools seem taken-for-granted features of the landscape has been realised, the more the question arises: why should they remain autonomous in their aims and curricula and not be bound by the national aims and national curricula that maintained schools have to follow?
This raises a first deep issue of who should have the right to determine these matters, as well as a second deep issue of what such aims and curricula should be. There is no good reason why parents or teachers of private school students should make these decisions, since the latter have implications for the well-being or otherwise of our whole national community. These parents and teachers are only one small section of this community – and in a democracy, sectional interests, here as elsewhere on the principle of equality of respect, should not be allowed to prevail. The same applies, in fact, to education ministers who, since the national curriculum arrived in 1988, have imposed their own pet theories of what the aims and curricula of state schools should be on the nation. There is a strong case for bringing the aims of all schools – private, academy and maintained – under the aegis of an impartial national commission responsive to a wide range of grass-roots opinions and at arms-length from government.
What part my experience at the School 70 years ago has played in my antipathy to the private school system I don’t know. These days, at least, I hope its source is more objective. Like many others, I have been forcibly struck by data on ex-private-students’ domination of leadership roles in the law, the civil service, diplomacy, politics, journalism, medicine, business and other areas. It is hard to see this as compatible with the democratic value of equal respect for all citizens. For three reasons.
One is that networks of contacts across these élite positions may be used, perhaps unconsciously, to further the interests of people in their own social group. Another is that shared assumptions arising from a common background may cause them to use their power in ways that do not encourage democratic agency e.g. by treating those outside their circle – whose way of life is often a closed book to them – merely as passive recipients of their services. The third is that, their power being based on family wealth, these anti-democratic blemishes get reinforced across the generations.
This is why I broadly agree with the proposals in Francis Green and David Kynaston’s Engines of Privilege (2019) that this defect in the private system should be tackled both by restricting the proportion of students from private schools that universities accept, and by the kind of detailed measures they suggest to integrate them over time into the state system.
This will be a genuine kind of integration and much to the advantage of state school students – far from the deceptive form, described above, that leaves private schools at the top of a hierarchy with all their privileges intact.
John White is emeritus professor of philosophy of education at UCL Institute of Education. His interests are in the mind of the learner and in educational aims and curricula. Recent books include What Schools Are For and Why (2007), Exploring Well-being in Schools (2011), The Invention of the Secondary Curriculum (2011), An Aims-based Curriculum [with Michael Reiss] (2013), Who needs examinations? Climbing ladders and dodging snakes (2014), and What’s wrong with private education? (2015). The latter can be freely downloaded at https://www.ucl-ioe-press.com/ioe-content/uploads/2015/09/Whats-wrong-with-private-education.pdf
