Should We Abolish Private Schools?
Labour’s conference commitment to abolish fee-paying schools has opened up a controversial debate. What should we think of it?
The case for private school abolition is premised upon two central ideas. First, a notion of equality and social collaboration that states citizens, during their most formative years, should not be segregated according to their parents incomes. That society does better when its constituent elements understand, mix and identify with one another is eminently reasonable. Education, being a compulsory institution that all citizens must interact with, holds dramatic power in this regard. Our young years are when our ideas and characters are formed. Private schools, though, by dividing up the rich from the rest of us at the root, unconsciously (and, in the most elite institutions, consciously) reproduce class division through structuring who one knows, how one conducts themselves, and how their tastes are shaped. These subtle markers police class boundaries, signalling who is worth knowing or employing, and who is not. Such division manifests the two-dimensional caricatures of toffs and chavs, both unable to see the humanity of the other.
Second is the meritocratic ideal that holds that these divisions, along with the credentialism of the hallowed private school label, and the superior resources employed by them, concentrates later life opportunities at the top of the income distribution. The composition of top social positions is disproportiantely filled by private alumni. This is not an accident. Nor is it because they are uniquely intelligent. It is because of networks, cultural signifiers, and better educational resources bought through wealth. If one believes in the principle of equal opportunity – that we should all get the same chance in life, no matter our racial, gender or class backgrounds – it is a stark injustice that wealthy parents can buy superior opportunities for their children.
In sum, the argument hinges on two counts: (I) that social division is reproduced and exacerbated by educational apartheid – one school for the rich, another for the rest of us; and (ii) that it is an affront to the meritocratic ideal for parents to buy access to top positions for their children.
OBJECTIONS AND CAVEATS
We should begin here with a much needed clarification. Antipathy to the institution of private education does not extend to the parents and children who have benefited from such a system. The students are not all uncompassionate toffs. And there is nothing morally suspect in parents trying to give their children the best chance in life. Everyone does it. Such individual moralising ignores the context within which people make their decisions, at once offending those who we need on side and failing to actually accomplish the objective. You are not going to solve the issue by insulting the upper classes, hoping for a spontaneous bourgeois boycott of private schooling. Rather, principled objection is to be directed at the social structures which shape people’s choices, not the individuals making those choices themselves.
Onto counter-objections: Why not just improve the standards of comprehensive schools? This makes intuitive sense. If it is the fact that equality of opportunity is distorted by the superior quality of private education, why not just improve the quality of public education to close the gap? Part of the reason not to be persuaded by this is because it fails to account of the multifaceted nature of the critique; that it’s not just about the material resources purchased, but the cultural and social ones in its exclusion of the working class. It’s not simply smaller class sizes and bigger rugby pitches bought in private schooling, but the elite networks and elite signifiers, too. Insulation from poorer children and the coterminous concentration of successful interpersonal links and cultural affluence is a very precious thing in a status-obsessed society built upon who you know, how you act, and how much money is in your pocket. As one journalist put it, wealthy parents are ‘paying for their child to mix with the right kind of kids’. It is this more subtle stratification – this severe narrowing of people’s life experience and the social corrosion that follows – that cannot be broken, whether or not comprehensives had the educational resources necessary to compete.
A further reason to doubt this is because of the real benefit integration would provide for the funding and attention paid to public schools. As Danny Dorling notes in his book Inequality and the 1%, if the very richest have no stake in public education because their children are insulated from it, then they are less likely to pay for the necessary tax rises needed to properly develop its resources. If the children of bankers and executives had to attend the same schools as the rest of us, we might be surprised to see how rapidly standards develop. And not just from financial assistance. Pushy upper-middle class parents might be exactly what is needed to compel the education department into action.
Two more challenges could be marshalled against abolition: that (I) this is a dangerous affront to private property, and (II) that it is a terrifying restriction of freedom. As I understand it, Labour will essentially nationalise private schools, purchasing their assets from the current holders. This is not illegal. It respects private property and compensates its previous owners. This is how the NHS was constructed. It’s how land is freed for big construction projects like HS2. It’s also how Labour will return water, Royal Mail, rail and energy into public hands. It is really quite normal.
On (II), a lot of commentators have struck back against the proposal as a huge overstep by the state on the freedom of parents. It is not. First, because parents will still be free to home school, and alternative schooling – so long as it is not bought – will continue. Second, because such discourse only considers the freedom of wealthy parents, entirely neglecting the freedom of the 93% of parents whose kids can not partake in the opportunities of private schooling because it is simply unaffordable. Market relations are a form of unfreedom because they exclude those who cannot pay. Kids in deprived comprehensive schools skip around the perimeter of opulent private school compounds. They are not free to enter, to enjoy and be nurtured by those resources; the verdant playing fields, dilletantish music halls, and magnificent theatres. If they tried, they would be asked to move. If they stubbornly resisted, they would be forcefully removed. Such liberty. The point being that freedom, in this case, is zero-sum. Freedom of wealthy parents to purchase opportunity is necessarily also the unfreedom of poorer parents to be denied that opportunity. To give everyone access to those resources, then, is to expand net freedom. Sometimes – and this is a theme that recurs again and again in radical politics – the expansion of liberty for some requires the dilution of others. The liberty of the Monarch to wield autocratic rule was abolished as the liberty of the people to wield democratic rule emerged. The liberty of slave-owners to own slaves vanished as the liberty of blacks to personal autonomy was secured. To be clear, I am not drawing an analogy between the moral content of these examples and private schooling; that would be absurd. It is only a technical point as to the propensity of someone’s freedom to be diluted as the corollary to the expansion of many others, and therefore the net freedom of society.
In a society which truly believes in ideals of equality, social cohesion and meritocracy, private schooling should not exist. This is not a claim about the moral content of the parents and children that choose to engage in such a system, but about the failure of our social institutions to realise an egalitarian ideal. The assets of such institutions should be integrated into the public sector, and previously excluded children should be able to enjoy their beauty and excellence. Property rights will be respected in this process, and freedom will be augmented, not diminished.
Doing so will not solve all the problems with schooling, nor all the problems with social inequality. But it is a start. As the social historian David Kynaston astutely concluded in his Long Read on the subject, the abolition of private schools is not a sufficient condition for equality of opportunity, but it certainly is a necessary one.
