Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.
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Millburn report: a glimpse into the fuckwitted futility of government.
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Millburn report: a glimpse into the fuckwitted futility of government.
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"Education, education, education" the mantra went all those years ago. Nearly a generation of school-children have flown by. Billions and billions have been poured in to state education and supporting services to raise aspirations. And look what they've got...lower so called social mobility, a higher proportion of posh-schoolers taking up more and more of the professional and higher status and paid jobs and the university places to prepare them for it.
The trots are outraged. We must do more they say! More redistribution! Punish the wealthy more to pay for our failings they mean. Even so called liberals have been at it (he doesn't even want merit to play a part through selection in a free service it would appear). Even six-jobs Millburn's report "blames" those top professions for wanting only to take the best. Well I tell you what, when it comes time for my open heart surgery, I will want to be hacked up by the best, not someone who is there because they were put into some class-busting quota scheme.
Look, the state has had decades to get this right. Now it appears that despite the most sustained period of growth in "investment" in education it's all been proven a farce. You know, "investment" usually demands a return. Not this sort of let down.
It's time to privatize the school system. Completely. Clearly the state is utterly incompetent where it matters and only marginally better where they are "good" at it.
I've done the sums. One thing you may not know about me is that I am a closet educationalist. Having been through a private system that failed me academically but which gave me the best years of my life (and as a scholarship boy at that - my parents weren't wealthy) I've always wanted for everyone who could make use of such an experience to be able to do so.
I've done the sums. I could create a private school from scratch, building only the best in facilities, educational, recreational and residential, with tiny pupil teacher ratios (and paying teachers better too), charging top end public school fees for the most wealthy and taking only state level funding for the least well off and still have fully one third of the school effectively paying nothing and everyone else on a sliding scale. In fact, I could pay for half of it out of the annual budget for providing full time care places for difficult kids in the county.
I'm sure there are lots of people who have plotted their own ideas of alternatives to the child-farms we call state schools too. The problem is statists want to fail everyone at once or not at all. Your policies of no competition, no choice, centralized planning, all go into producing a one-size fits all system that is as reactive as the Exxon Valdez as it approaches the rocks when the course needs changing and now the leaks are showing.
Why do "we" ("the people") believe these schmucks when, like Tony Blair in 1997, they claim they can do something about all this to get our votes? Where is he today? Oh, that's right, the failure of his government has given him millions of pounds a year in consultancy and speech fees and possibly even the title and office of "President of the United States of Europe". The rewards of sin eh? Don't even pretend you care, Blair. This is what you politicians do - pretend you are uniquely qualified to bring happiness to everyone and from there you can only spectacularly fail. Morons. Don't pretend Brown gives a shit either - his policy of loose stool money in the early noughties has doubled the number of kids in temporary housing, priced out of your bubble boom and big bust economy.
Screw the lot of you. Leave. Now. Don't come back from your obscene fucking (some of you no doubt literally) vacations. Leave real people to create real wealth; allow real people to work for whatever they can get and with their dignity intact seek to better themselves in one of the many innovative different choices that will spring up in a revitalized education market. Don't patronize them with quotas to plaster over your screw-ups.
God, I'm angry. And sad. Sad for all the poor sods whose lives have been fucked over by trust in politicians. Red, Blue, Yellow or Green - you can offer no better. Just promises and aspirations. Well I'm sick to death of paying fifty per cent of our national income for your failed promises and tawdry aspirations. Leave. Us. Alone.
"To mitigate distress appearing needful for the production of the “greatest happiness,” the English people have sanctioned upwards of one hundred acts in Parliament having this end in view, each of them arising out of the failure or incompleteness of previous legislation. Men are nevertheless still discontented with the Poor Laws, and we are seemingly as far as ever from their satisfactory settlement." Herbert Spencer, over 150 years ago, and we still have not learned.
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Comments
Hear hear and hear. Being educated by the state is a bloody weird idea anyway, when you come to think of it. We've managed to ditch every other Victorian social and cultural anachronism - how has state schooling managed to outlive the antimacassar?
Of course it's another thing I didn't go into in my rant on Sunday over the costs of having a state. I assumed in that that all the services it would deliver would work, would do what they say, for all the costs it heaps on us.
At least failure in many ways in the private sector could potentially be remedied, instead of having smarmy Millburn ten years later blaming someone else.
Brilliant, rant-tastic post.
"Brilliant, rant-tastic post."
It had to be done. I am so angry at them thinking this is just another unfortunate result of policy that didn't work. It's cost billions and led nowhere, it's cost kids futures. I just no longer believe them any more. Any of them. The mere fact that they have chosen politics instead of something real, producing, yes, even public goods, is perilously close to disqualifying them from receiving a polite hearing from me at the moment.
Oh, incidentally, the plan I mentioned for an up to date top notch school facility will also give an index linked return to the people who invest in the physical facilities.
The ruling classes have managed to get the economy in a near final collapse; indulged in a prolonged spree of living off parliamentary expenses which has ruined the reputation of representative democracy in people's eyes; and made sure that their sons and daughters get all the best jobs.
Pretty good from a standing start; from off the back of post war consensus which was highly statist and interfering in the natural tendency of the rich to advance their own claims
.BTW by my calculations based on a deeply corrupting state education,the UK had no real party politics from the beginnings of the 30's to the mid 60's.All the disasters have arisen from the professional political class's efforts to row back from the post-war consensus which had arisen from a whole succession of National Governments..
Also BTW I should have pointed out earlier that all singing off the same hymn sheet is a desirable end: why should you want people to sing discordantly?
You tell 'em, Jock!
How come you're so polite and mild-mannered in person but in front of a keyboard you become a rabid monster?
Not true - I'm a rabid monster who is shy in public!
Besides, these are always fourth or fifth draft - by the time I have tried to replace as many f-words with useful adjectives that I can manage.
Some might think that f-words are useful adjectives.
David Cameron prefers p-words, however.
Well, I have to protest most strongly. Fill the world with smug, arrogant, complacent whining twonks who have no real experience of the world but want to change it anyway because it makes them feel important?
Now there ARE issues regarding education that need discussing. But filling the world with robotic corporate apologists is not one of them.
I know. That Alan Milburn is terrible, isn't he.
Well only in so far as he believes in hiving off the educational system to the lowest corporate bidder is a progressive. But that's simply being "ok yah" fashionable. You are simply "off message" with the current bourgeois panacea for all the world's ills if you don't support such ideas.
If it were given to charitable trusts I would have no issues, but making profit the sole basis of running a school leads to so many anti-learning, pro corner-cutting teaching methods as to render it futile and redundant.
But then the only real education is a self education anyway, the rest is so encumbered with bourgeois fads and fantasies that looking for real learning from any of its well turned out corporate serving drones is about as ludicrous as looking at Mr Coats as one of the "ordinary guys." Good old Gradgrind had the right idea. Knowledge is only as useful in so far as it can fill a fatcats swimming pool. Everything else is surplus to requirements.
Such a sad view of the world but that's what you get when mere beancounters are given megaphones and allowed to dictate social policy.
Please Tom. Don't feed him.
And this is a prime example. You would rather try and dismiss me as a "troll" than actually debate with me.Smug complacent arrogance.
Anyway back to your drugs now. I'm sure you are missing them.
Sorry, Jock, but Alan's comment that "making profit the sole basis of running a school leads to so many anti-learning, pro corner-cutting teaching methods as to render it futile and redundant" is not borne out by evidence.
For profit schools, and those run as charities (i.e. most private schools in England) have far better educational records than the state sector.
As for "self education," this is great, but most people can't afford to teach their children at home. If you mean actual self education, however, that's a very different issue.
I think if you look more closely at the issue. Private Schools perform better because they are selective. In order to remain profitable, they have to invest in enough young Tarquins that are likely to make the grade ie. tick all the right examination boxes so that their reputation for mass-producing Oxbridge fodder is not harmed.
But is this REALLY an education? From what I have observed from Oxbridge students, learning is not on their agendas, indeed people who are interested in anything aside from boozing shagging and cars usually end up finding friends outside the colleges. As long as they tick the right examination boxes at the end of the day and can go on their careerist path, that is all that matters. It is not about knowing things , it is the apparence of knowing things that matters. Besides, who needs learning when one has family contacts and pater's money in the bank to stave off any real need to strive for anything beyond the "means to a mortgage" mentality.
So market forces and real education are diametrically opposed from the start. The idea that private education spread universally would beneficial is pretty naive. As is the notion of "freedom of choice" in this regard. If freedom of choice was a reality (rather than a carefully constructed bourgeois economic fantasy) then choose Eton.
So I do realise how much most of you feel such profound gratitude to your alma maters and sing the school hymn every day before prep, but such sentimental fantasies really belong elsewhere.
I do mean autodidacticism as well.
As for the "evidence shows" assertion. Well, in my experience, the "evidence" can be garnered to prove any wild assertion you care to make. Holocaust deniers point to a mass of "evidence" to support their claims and Kinsey's evidence in regards to paedophilia proves that it is a harmless activity that has been unfairly criticised.
The usual practice these days would seem to be: make an assertion, back it up with selective evidence and push it out as empirical fact.
It obviously depends who has gathered the evidence, what interests they have in promoting such agendas (shareholders etc.) and who really benefits from their proposals. In this case the already loaded.
I know, Tom, most of what he comes out with falls into that category. But more than anything else, I don't think I have ever known anyone quite so fond of the ad hominem, so I don't want him encouraged, though I will not give him the satisfaction of attempting to prevent him post.
Well I am so sorry that people speaking their minds is so alien to you. Perhaps if more people you associated with were open and honest (rather than all cheesy grins, natty suits and daggers) it might not be quite a shock to you.
The point is, for years people on estates have had to listen to a lot of bullshit from self appointed middle class pundits trying to convince them that the sky is actually pink and that they are just too ignorant to notice the fact. Their genuine concerns and anxieties have been swept aside by grinning rictuses hoping to convince them that it was down to their ignorance and that as long as the economy runs alright and wealthy businessmen are allowed to rape, plunder and mutilate their basic employment rights etc. then all will be rosey in the garden.
I think a rebellion is well overdue. Simply because ideas sound cool over a glass of sherry at some dinner party or other doesn't make effective policy. Policy needs to be grounded in something other than what Hector and Chlamydia think is so cool after a couple of glasses of Pimm's.
It seems to me that the main reason political debate is so utterly bolloxed at the moment is that is about posture and spin and not about substance. It is about trying to score points rather than solid ethical grounding. It is about the best ways of appeasing greed and self centredness than building and bondin society together.
And because over-privileged twonks have been allowed to get away with reducing it to mere party games, alternatives like the BNP who actually are in touch with genuine anxieties over housing allocations etc. have gained ground.
So why don't you actually try shutting up and LISTENING for a while? You might regain some credibility and even LEARN something?
"I don't think I have ever known anyone quite so fond of the ad hominem"
What can you mean, Jock?
"Private Schools perform better because they are selective."
What about non-selective ones? Try looking beyond the UK for your evidence.
"do realise how much most of you feel such profound gratitude to your alma maters and sing the school hymn every day before prep, but such sentimental fantasies really belong elsewhere."
Attacking people only really works if you know something about them. Otherwise you just look ignorant, stupid and offensive.
"So why don't you actually try shutting up and LISTENING for a while?"
That's irony, right? I mean, you don't sound like you're exactly in listening mood!
"in my experience, the "evidence" can be garnered to prove any wild assertion you care to make"
Mmm... That pretty much damns the last 400 years of science. That Newton fellow must be kicking himself now.
Perhaps that explains the complete lack of any statements of fact from you.
Jock, I see your point!
So you hold that the evidence garnered to disprove the holocaust or Kinsey's findings are valid? Please explain why and how certain evidence is valid and others not. I think my analysis is pretty spot on. Find a cause, scout around for any two bit piece of evidence to support it, or fund scientists to find the evidence you want, or simply just spin us a line in PR. ("Cocaine and Heroin are non-addictive panaceas" was the corporate line befor that shit was criminalised).
I should look abroad over private education? Where to? America? Seems that's where most of your ideas are coming from despite their policies being those this country held a century ago. And why do you hold to the simplistic notion that one size fits all in these matters anyway? Do you really deny differing cultural factors between countries have a role to play and that a policy that may be good for one culture may not be good for another? I suggest you bone up on Montesquieu rather than continue to hold such a ludicrous position. You might also like to bone up on the social history of this country as well, where there is well over three hundred years of evidence to show that your ideas brought nothing but misery and degredation to the vast majority whilst the lucky few partied the night away. Of course, given the "wonders of private education", you would, of course, be familiar with all that already.
As for "statements of fact". There is only opinion. Yours is that dragging us all back two centuries (24 hour drinking? Check. Legalised Narcotics? Working on it. No Age Of Consent ? Well it was the same people who put an end to the others, that criminalised that so lets wait and see. David Riegel is working on that one rather well as we speak.) is positive. My opinion is that it is negative and regressive and is merely intended to ease bourgeois tax burdens than contribute positively to society as a whole.
As to Newton, well according to Einstein, he got his basic principles wrong anyway. So much for scienctific empiricism, eh?
But let's just run with this two glasses of Chardonnay and a slab of Gorgonzola idea of "non-selective" private schools. Are you going to level the playing field and insist that places like Eton et al abolish selection, or are you simply going to oblige these schools to compete with selective ones in the full knowledge that they will fail? If the former then I wish you luck, if the latter then that's rather an obscene idea. But what else can one expect from the Bourgeois Right?
"Good lord Rupert old bean. Fancy seeing you here? Cocaine."
"Thanks for the offer, Agammenmon old chap, but I'm supping on a particularly fine Burgundy at the moment and as you know its white wine with coke."
"Oh, how very chavvy of me. So what have you been doing?"
"Oh, just returned from a business trip to Bahrain. Managed to find out something which might boost the old economy a bit."
"Oh, really what?"
"They call it child labour. Apparently by filling the factories with 5year old kids they can up production whilst cutting down on Labour costs."
"Sounds a spiffing idea. But isn't it illegal over here?"
"Oh yes, another example of nanny statism. But what they do is make it voluntary rather than compulsory. The child has the right to choose whether to work or not. Of course, there would be financial incentives as well."
"Oh really? What?"
"Well avoiding starvation for a start, I mean if the parents combined income can be manipulated to come below subsistence level the little bastards would have to work in order the family are able to survive."
"Good lord that's incredible."
"Yes and very cost effective too. My beancounting buddies have assured me that the labour costs vs production rate make this idea a very real goer. It worked in the 18th century very well. Only those beastly Commies objected to it saying it was immoral and that kids should have a right to free education etc."
"Pah, typical Statist crap. They should support us through their labour, not be supported by us through our charity. That's the natural order of things. By the way my accountant has got some really handy tips on tax avoidance if your interested."
"Great, give me his number. It is hilarious the way we moan and gripe about our taxes and yet hardly ever pay them."
"Well tax paying is pretty chavvy you know. Still, great to see you again. See you in Monaco."
"I think my analysis is pretty spot on."
And there was me expecting you to say that you thought your analysis was way off the mark.
"I should look abroad over private education? Where to?"
Try that miracle of Social Democracy, Sweden. They have school choice, private education, a voucher system... Oh, and the highest literacy rate in the world.
"opinion. Yours is..."
Do you actually know my opinion on <i>any</i> of these issues? You criticise those who look for evidence to support their views. I prefer that to people like you who don't bother with evidence at all, but just formulate views and then stick to them.
I do like your little skit, though. Have you considered writing a play?
"I think my analysis is pretty spot on."
And there was me expecting you to say that you thought your analysis was way off the mark.
"I should look abroad over private education? Where to?"
Try that miracle of Social Democracy, Sweden. They have school choice, private education, a voucher system... Oh, and the highest literacy rate in the world.
"opinion. Yours is..."
Do you actually know my opinion on <i>any</i> of these issues? You criticise those who look for evidence to support their views. I prefer that to people like you who don't bother with evidence at all, but just formulate views and then stick to them.
I do like your little skit, though. Have you considered writing a play?
I think I can guess your opinions by your attitude.
The skit is pretty realistic isn't it? Based on the ideas of the great 19th century Liberal politician and cotton magnate Edward Baines, who held that the abolition of child labour through the Factory Act was an unwarrented state intrusion and that there was no real evidence to support the fact that child labour was harmful or in anyway conducive to exploitation, that those who opposed it were giving a totally false picture of factory conditions and all the rest of it. Sound familiar?
He also opposed universal suffrage but did vote to abolish Slavery. Presumably because it undercut his cotton prices?
It is incredible just how many people associate Liberalism with progress. It all boils down to profit in the end.
So why presuppose that what works in one culture will work in another?
"I think I can guess your opinions by your attitude."
Indeed.
There is a word for making assumptions about people without knowing anything about them.
That word is prejudice.
Oh, I think rational assumptions based on given evidence are quite valid. You are clearly more on Jock's wavelength than mine.
Again I ask why do you assume that what works in one culture will work in another? And is a "one size fits all" approach really the most enlightened?
I mean lets face it, a little while we were being told that a 24 hour drinking culture would have a profoundly civilising effect on the community. That was based on models in other countries as well. Didn't work out that way, did it? Oh, I forget, it wasn't meant to was it,it was simply a nice little fillip for the breweries.
It certainly showed up the pro-drugs activists for the hypocrites they are. Denouncing it as a class a drug on the one hand then voting for unlimited supplies at low prices on the other. But then what can one expect from the "prohibition doesn't work except it does" brigade.
The problem is that we can see through all the corporate serving spin you all insist on throwing out in order to justify modes of action you wish to see made law. Nobody believes you anymore.
A classic case in point. I've made no comments about drinking or drugs or prohibitoin but you make assumptions nonetheless.
Prejudiced, you see.
Here's some details concerning the child labour debate. Notice how many of your Liberal/Libertarian pals supported its continuance on the grounds that such legislation entailed State intervention:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/IRchild.htm
Now are you going to answer my point about the merits of imposing foreign cultural assumptions on our own or are you simply going to continue to play "offended Tory" with me.
I'll tell you what. I'll answer that one point and then I'll stop conversing with you because you are ignorant and rude and prejudiced (as for example, calling me a Tory, which is both inaccurate and insulting, like calling a Sri Lankan a "Paki").
Nobody is suggesting " imposing foreign cultural assumptions". I am suggesting that we can learn from other countries. We did not need to impose fascism in the UK to learn from the Italian and German experiences how bad it was. We did not need to try Communism in the UK to learn from the Russian and Chinese experiences.
Frankly, the assumption that Sweden is so alien that we cannot learn from Swedish experience is daft. Having lived in both countries I can tell you that they are similar enough that both could learn from practice in the other.
By comparrison, your suggestion that countries cannot learn from one another is silly, historically ignorant and isolationist.
Anyway. You are prejudiced and a bigot so I'm going to stop conversing with you, now.
Jock, you have my sympathies.
Pomposity can no further go. As can be seen from the child labour link, Libertarians and Tories agree on practically everything aside from immigration.
They both want public utilities put into private hands. They both worship Laissez Faire Capitalism to the point of insanity. Profit before people all the time.
In fact the only thing that stops Libertarians being Tories is their innate prejudices against Tories. This derives from the delusion that they are not bourgeois, but some kind of enlightened prole eager to drag the lesser chavs into their way of thinking.
Let's face it Libertarianism supports the power, not the prole. Ok, so Cobden did the Corn laws, but the rest of them supported child labour, opposed universal access to free education and the vote and did all they can to prevent the end of 24 hour drinking etc. If that isn't corporate serving Toryism, then its a pretty twisted form of Socialism isn't it? Libertarianism, for all its "radical" pretentions is the Establishment pretending to be against itself.
Which is why to be a working class libertarian is to be like a jew voting for National Socialism.
Mr Papworth, being unable to clarify any of the points I raised, retreated into trying to personalise the exchange. Instead of taking an objective view of my point about 24 hour drinking being one example of Libertarians attempting to foist a mythical reality onto society because they had observed cafe culture abroad, he got all hissy fitty and began to complain of being misrepresented. The discussion was veered from the topic into his personal feelings, totally irrelevant, but a nice diversionary tactic.
Of course Mr Papworth is in a cleft stick on the issue. He was either (as I suspect) privately educated and is thus passing prejudice-based judgements on something he has had no direct experience of himself. Or he was state educated and, by his intelligence, showing that the experience didn't do him much harm after all. His argument would therefore be redundant.
The point is that the anti-state card can be used to justify any course of action a state makes. If a state intervenes to prevent a masscre, it is in the wrong. If the state intervenes to ensure a fairer society for all, it is wrong. If the state intervenes to stop things like child labour, it is also wrong. You cannot win with such an ideology. Best consign it to oblivion.
And if you really need proof that Libertarians and Tories are exactly the same:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3717744.htm
An article about about the Swedish schools he was on about. Look which party has the top billing though.
Try that again:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3717744.stm
So (just for a laugh) let's examine the Swedish model a little:
Is it private? Not really, it is funded by the State. The main difference being that wheras pouring billions of pounds of taxpayers money into the whole system in order to improve standards for everybody is abhorrent, paying businessmen to construct a kind of educational Cutteslowe wall is money well spent.
Who does it benefit? One of those wonderful sleights of hand. It is INTENDED to benefit everybody, but only the bourgeois are responding to it. As money is being specially diverted away from the other state schools to cater for the specific needs of Oscar and Chlamydia, it is also being removed from the other schools. The eventual end of which (as indicated by the person running it in the article) will be their closure. Leaving all those people who have no issues with the system without access to educational facilities. But, hey, at least Oscar and Chlamydia will be alright so that's ok, isn't it?
Is it worth importing? Well one happy circumstance of the current eonomic crisis has been the closure of many of these bastions of Bourgeois bigotry and have forced lots of bourgeois kids to mix with the chavs (quel horreur!!) which is kind of the point of an education really, mixing with a variety of people from differing backgrounds.
Besides our own home grown private schools are of a totally different beast and pitching (officially, but not proving realistically) non selective schools into the morass of our hidebound traditions of feeder schools and believing they will last more than a second before going under is rather silly and unrealistic. It won't do anything to change the Oxbridge quotas as most of those are fed from pre-prep onwards.
But it does make a nice dinner party conversation so at least the bourgeois are kept happy in some way. Which is nice.