In a way, September is the real New Year, not the futile dead zone of early January, or even the Spring. The first crisp clear autumn morning of the year, which always makes my blood flow faster, usually means a return to welcome routine after many months when the world was half asleep. I’ve been away or otherwise engaged for much of the last six weeks or so, the trains have been half-empty and the streets wonderfully clear of traffic. But what passes for normality is now back, with all the same crises and problems as before, unresolved. And I’m a little late in responding to comments this week because I spent Sunday and Monday in Ireland, coming down from Belfast to Dublin on one of my favourite train rides, the Enterprise, which in less than three hours takes you from one world to another, and crosses Britain’s only land border, as well as passing through some of the loveliest countryside anywhere in these islands. As I said to my Dublin host, the two cities are still immensely different, but the differences are not the same as those which existed when I first made that journey 30 years ago. In those days, Dublin was probably the most Edwardian place in our archipelago (making a phone call was a cumbersome business usually involving the operator) whereas Belfast was a city in the midst of war. Now both cities have been utterly transformed by money, and I’m not sure whether hostility to the Roman Catholic church is now stronger in the North among militant protestants, or in the South among former Catholics.
Now, to your comments. As always, I shall set out trying to answer them all, and will inevitably fail. Let me stress, though, that I do read them all. If yours isn’t singled out for comment, it may be because I feel I’ve dealt with the matter elsewhere, or because it’s not central to the debate. But I have read it.
Mr Oliver wantas to know why I think his training was ‘Marxist’ or ‘radical’ as if these words were interchangeable. I don’t think they are. And I don’t think I said his training was ‘Marxist’. If I did, where did I do so? I do think it very likely that it was radical, but that is because I am an educational conservative.
I would doubt, for instance, that any of those who trained him would reject, as I do, the idea of ‘child-centred’ or ‘discovery ‘ learning. I suspect they would regard as reactionary and outmoded my belief that:
Children should sit in ordered rows facing the teacher(this very much includes primary schools) chant times tables relentlessly until they know them by heart (learning by rote’, as the radicals contemptuously say); be taught customary English measures (the ones they’ll really use all their lives) as they were taught times tables; be taught to read using synthetic phonics and nothing but synthetic phonics; made to take dictation, have their spelling corrected when it is wrong; made to do repeated exercises in addition, subtraction and multiplication, made to do bad work again; taught factual geography – names, locations, capitals, populations, principal rivers, mountains, industries and produce etc of the countries of the world, starting with their own, rather than propaganda about global warming; taught the principles and essential scriptures of the Christian religion, not as an anthropological curiosity but as the established and living religion of this country (those whose parents do not wish this can opt out) reinforced with a daily assembly of a predominantly Christian character (opt-outs again available) ; taught narrative history of their own country, not confused with conflicting ‘sources’ dealing with disconnected episodes usually chosen for politically correct reasons or overlaid with futile attempts at empathy with the peoples of the past.
Now, if this is how he has been taught to teach, then I withdraw my suggestion that his training was supervised by radicals. But I suspect the sort of teaching he (and his trainers) regard as normal is what I would regard as an authority-free egalitarian catastrophe. For of course all the things I mention above require not merely a belief in the authority of adults, but a belief in the existence of a body of knowledge worth passing on, and in our right and duty to do so.
I have no doubt that many of those radicals have been influenced by Marxist teachings and movements, some consciously, some not. Marxist are all for deconstructing educational order in the societies they wish to undermine, and all for rigour, authority and so forth in the societies they have taken over. Many of our educational problems result from the fact that this country has been in a permanent cultural upheaval, heavily influenced by Gramscian ideas of cultural hegemony, for half a century. But other intellectual currents, notably Deweyism, are also involved.
I am as usual baffled by Tim Lemon, writing once more from his fastness on one of the moons of Jupiter. He thinks Mr Blair trashed British comprehensives. I suspect he may be relying on that extraordinarily unreliable measure, the OECD PISA survey, in which ‘evidence’ is gathered in entirely different ways in different countries , but is then presented as if it is comparable. Mr Blair certainly did little or nothing to improve Britain’s state schools, and he knew how bad they were, hence his use of the London Oratory rather than the secondary schools near his Islington home. But then since the comprehensive experiment was launched in 1965, the one sure method of curing the disease has been the one course nobody will take – a return to selection by ability. I might add that a lowering of the absurdly high compulsory school leaving age, allowing the non-academic to start work earlier, would also be a pretty good idea.
Mr Robinson comments : ‘During the golden age of selective education from 1945 to 1965 Britain was comprehensively economically thrashed by its main economic competitors . Whatever its merits that system was not able to deliver the goods economically.’
Firstly, I am not sure this is true. Britain’s economic performance in the immediate post war era was pretty good, in terms of exports, and we managed to survive as a major manufacturing country, despite the abuse of Marshall Aid to found a lavish welfare state, and the heavy burden of Cold War military spending. We did begin to fall behind as the rest of the world retooled.
Secondly, quite how this can be blamed on the actions and behaviour of boys and girls who entered grammar schools between 1945 and 1965 I am not sure. Someone who was 11 years old in 1945 would have been 31 in 1965, nowhere near the levers of political or economic power, and a very short way up the rungs of any of the old professional ladders. What I do remember from this era was the worry about the ‘Brain Drain’, especially of scientists and engineers, to the USA, whose high schools were simply not producing people of the quality turned out by the British education system. You don’t hear much about that now.
The failure of Britain as an economic power results much more from policy decisions taken by men educated before the war (such people as Harold Wilson, Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas Home, Roy Jenkins, Denis Healey and Ted Heath, most of whom were at Oxford before 1939). In their cases, I don’t think the quality of their schooling can be blamed, so much as the persistence of various wrong ideas.
In answer to Mr Gray, the new grammar schools would, as they did before 1965, push private school products out of Oxford and Cambridge. They would just have to go elsewhere. Accurate figures for the high and rising numbers of state school entrants reaching Oxbridge before the comprehensive revolution *with no special provisions made to help them* are given in my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’. It is my belief that if Crosland’s measures had never gone through, and if Scotland had not engaged in comparable vandalism of its fine state academies, many British private schools would by now have gone out of business, or partially entered the state system as Direct Grant schools. Those who genuinely oppose educational privilege should surely therefore support selection. Odd that they don’t.
Of course people are right to be concerned for those who don’t get into grammar schools. But the idea that they are damaged by the existence of grammar schools, or that they benefit from their abolition, is simply false. These are two separate questions. I am very interested in proper technical education, and wish the money squandered on futile new ‘universities’ had been applied to this end. A tougher problem is what to do about those in the middle, neither academic nor technical. I recognise the difficulty. I just don’t accept that it is solved or even eased by the comprehensive system. By the way, it is silly to summarise my view as ‘all comprehensives are bad’. Any classification of a school must be comparative. Also many officially comprehensive schools are in fact nothing of the kind, and are reasonably good as a result. Comprehensives tend to be better , the more they defy the comprehensive ideal. That is because this ideal is political, not educational. . These better comprehensives would be far better in an openly selective system with more demanding examinations
I will end my comments on the selection issue by saying how very grateful I am to Mr Embery for his contribution. Regular readers here will know that Mr Embery and I rarely agree on anything. His clear-eyed account of the real state of affairs in the schools suffered by the children of the poor is therefore specially valuable, as it is not advanced to serve any cause, simply stated as the truth that it is. What he says has been confirmed to me many times by serving and retired teachers who often fear to speak out because of concern for their jobs or pensions.
The Twin Towers
A comment on the 11th September has wandered on to the education thread, but is a good starting point for one part of the argument.
Mr Crawford writes: ‘it looks rather silly to complain that Israel (the only military superpower in the Middle East) is too small to give away any territory.’
This is a nonsequitur. Military power and territory are two different things. Even the most enormous military power cannot provide defence in depth, nor can it protect a country against (for instance ) rocket attacks from closely neighbouring territory. Were the West bank to be a sovereign state, it would be perfectly possible for its inhabitants to rain missiles on many Israeli cities and on the country’s only international airport. As has been quite clear from the moronic Israeli attacks on Gaza, retaliation and incursion are poor defences against such things. It is also worth noting how the heavily entrenched forces of Hezbollah were able to inflict a defeat on Israel in the recent clashes on the Lebanese border. Israel is well-armed against a conventional invasion(though it lacks defence in depth, as I say) and well-equipped against a nuclear threat. But against many forms of disproportionate warfare it is stumbling, muscle-bound and inept. I might add that it has lost the propaganda war in advance. And that the Arab and Muslim nations taken together – especially Egypt, Iran and Saudi Arabia, are not far short of military superpower status themselves. And they have much more territory.
He adds :’ The Palestinian people have no homeland! They, alongside the Kurds, are the largest dispossessed peoples remaining in the world.’
Is it in fact correct to equate the Palestinians, a nationality largely invented for propaganda purposes, with the Kurds, a wholly distinct language and culture in existence for centuries? I should say it was questionable. Palestinians are Arabs. They speak Arabic, have an Arab heritage and are predominantly Muslim (In fact Christian Arabs in the region are often treated quite badly by the Palestinian authority, as I have myself witnessed in the area round Bethlehem. That is why they are emigrating in large numbers) . They have in the past attempted to settle in Arab countries, and have often done so successfully but have on occasion been driven out (notably from Kuwait) for political reasons, or denied proper citizenship and rights by their Arab brethren. Compare them with other victims of the many hideous and bloody mass expulsions of the 20th century.
Turks and Greeks who were victims of the great population exchange of the 1920s have settled successfully as citizens in Greece and Turkey
Indian Muslims expelled from their ancestral homes in the 1947 partition have settled as citizens in Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs who were expelled from their ancestral homes in Pakistan have settled in India.
Germans expelled from their ancestral homes in East Prussia, Poland and the Czech lands under the Potsdam agreement in the 1940s have settled successfully as citizens in Germany.
Greek and Turkish Cypriots driven from their ancestral homes in the partition and Turkish invasion of 1974 have settled successfully as citizens in their new homelands.
And hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from their ancestral homes in Arab and Muslim countries after 1948 have settled as citizens of Israel.
I accept that none of these population movements has been free of problems, and stress that none excuses the horrific brutality of the population exchanges themselves. But it does seem striking that alone of all these events, all many decades ago, this one remains unresolved, and the victims, their children and grandchildren, of the expulsions of 1948, remain in political limbo and in physical squalor – despite the enormous wealth of the oil-rich Arab world.
As for the question of having no homeland, it is in fact the case that the original Palestine Mandate (whose inhabitants can presumably be called ‘Palestinians’) included the whole of what is now Jordan, designated, by the Sanremo accords for ‘close Jewish settlement’. So again, is this statement technically correct? The history of land title in this area is endlessly complex, and most dogmatic statements made about it, don’t work. Until 1918, it was a mess of Sanjaks and Vilayets of the Ottoman Empire (which had acquired it by force long ago) . It was then seized by Britain by force. Later the UN-approved state of Israel then seized more land by force. So did the emirate of TransJordan, which conquered the West Bank in 1948 But I have little doubt that, had the Arab armies of 1948 won their war, it would have been the Jews who would have been the refugees(as indeed they were elsewhere in the Middle East at that time).
He asks :’ Why does everyone think the Jewish people uniquely deserve a homeland (which I agree they do)’
Everyone doesn’t think this. Many Jews are very much against it, for varying reasons (some think the restoration of Israel is blasphemous, some think Jews should assimilate in the countries of their birth). Nor would it be in any way ‘unique’. On the contrary, practically everyone wants a homeland these days. Scores of new nations have been created since World War Two, often at the expense of minorities within them (see Africa above all). The thing that is unique about Jews is that so many people have an irrational and occasionally murderous hatred for them, as people – not on grounds of religion, or any outward characteristics, but because they are Jews. It was the most concentrated expression of this feeling so far, in the modern, scientific, advanced, civilised 20th century which convinced a lot of Jews that Zionism, previously reviled as an eccentric folly, might have a point. They’d ignored the Russian pogroms and the Dreyfus affair, and the casual Judophobia of much of Europe. But the Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht took things a little further.
‘but the Palestinians and the Kurds do not?’
I don’t know about the Kurds. It appears that for the moment, George W.Bush has given them a semi-official homeland in Iraq, though I wonder how long that will last. As for the Palestinians, see above.
‘And comparing surrender to the might of Hitler's Third Reich with attempts to give self-determination to the impoverished and powerless Palestinians (first evicted from their homes by Jewish settlers half a century ago, and still being evicted from their homes today, in a slow-motion version of that earlier mass cleansing) just makes you look silly.’
First, that’s not the comparison I made. I compared the behaviour of the European and North American powers in the face of aggressive demands, in 1938 and now. Secondly, Israel does not just confront the local Arab population, but also the entire armed might of the oil-rich Arab world. It is propaganda genius on the part of the Arab world to have managed to portray the conflict in this way.
He adds ‘ Apart from the fact that, as I said in my earlier post, Israel is only being asked to give up land it is holding illegally in the first place.’
Must I do this again? The question of the rightful ownership of the West Bank is not actually clear, unless you think it should be returned to the Ottomans, who at least held it for hundreds of years. I personally think Israel made a grave mistake by occupying it, as a reasonably friendly Kingdom of Jordan on its Eastern frontier was a better defence by far than the current arrangements. But people who go on about illegal occupation must be asked to be consistent in their condemnations, or be suspected of partiality. Jordan occupied the west bank illegally from 1948 to 1967, and nobody cared a bit. If the Arab world’s demands stopped at the pre-1967 border, that would be all well and good. But those of us old enough to remember 1966 can tell you that the Arab world did not love (or recognise) the pre-1967 border when it was there, and launched frequent attacks across it. Nor did they love the Jewish state envisaged in the 1947 UN Partition Plan (much smaller than the present state of Israel) . They loved it so little that they invaded it. Nor did they love the 1937 Peel Commission partition plan (with an even smaller Jewish territory than in 1947).
To this day, maps of the area used in Arab schools, displayed on Arab TV stations, used in Arab history books, and pinned on the walls of Arab politicians do not show the existence of Israel at all. And significant parts of the Palestinian movement never have recognised ( and at this rate never will recognise) recognised Israel’s right to exist.
I don’t believe I said anything about ‘rights’ beyond a right to exist as a Jewish state. But there is plenty of evidence that the Arab world feels there is no need to give unequivocal recognition to that right. And I am not surprised, given the confused and weak approach of the powers who are supposed to guarantee the stability of the world’s national borders (who went, for instance, to war to restore Kuwait, without making any attempt in the interim to suggest that Saddam should be content with a portion of Kuwaiti territory, or that Kuwait should buy peace with him by conceding such a thing).
I repeat here a response I placed on the comment thread to various contributions:
‘Mr Search raises an interesting point about the process through which George W.Bush began to *consider* support for a 'Palestinian' state. The absolutely fascinating and astonishingly furious letter which he received from the Saudi King a very short time before the 11th September attacks is indeed very important - and please note that it was almost exclusively devoted to the subject of American support for Israel. Likewise the enraged treatment of Israeli ( and American) delegates to the UN conference on 'racism' at Durban, which immediately preceded the 11th September.
But would that decision (in normal times a very tricky one for which the American nation and Congress would have had to be very carefully prepared) have been made with such speed and with so little fuss in other circumstances? Indeed, would it have in fact have been made at all?
The anti-Israel lobby go on endlessly about America's special relationship with Israel. They spend a lot less time examining its even more special relationship with Saudi Arabia. In my view the Bush administration inclined much more towards Riyadh than towards Jerusalem. That can also be said of the previous Buish administration, which sought to humble Israel at the Madrid conference.
The reason for the September 11 attacks was (as is obvious to anyone who knows the region) primarily Arab and Muslim fury at the USA's alliance with Israel (the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, also ended by George W.Bush, was a secondary but significant reason stated by those involved).
However, *and this is crucial* it has never, to my knowledge, been referred to as the reason for the attacks by any major US political figure, nor by the 9/11 Commission (for reasons explored by the authors of 'the 11th Day' and noted by me). That is why I make such a production out of pointing this out, something I am criticised for elsewhere.
The official explanation, adopted by the entire neo-conservative and liberal interventionist choir, has always been that the attack was motivated by 'Hatred for Our Way of Life'. 'Islamism' etc, and that it was the work of a specific organisation called 'Al Qaeda' with these priorities. One effect of this has been the swelling of 'Al Qaeda' from a nebulous concept into a vast bogey overshadowing the entire world, whose hand was seen behind every terrrorist act . This is obviously misleading, but is still clung to by many people who ought to know better. Why? Because the alternative (and correct) explanation has such worrying diploimatic and political consequences for so many people and countries.
This explanation suited the neo-cons and liberal interventionists who wished to make anti-Islamic points by attacking the Taleban in Afghanistan (almost wholly irrelevant to the issue) and who wished to spread 'democracy' to the Middle East by attacking Iraq.
It suited Saudi Arabia, from whose shores most of the murderers had come (and whose other connections with the 11th September are, I believe, explored in the 28 censored pages from the Congressional report on 9/11) .
And it suited the Palestinian movement, which initially badly underestimated the wounded fury of the people (as opposed to the government) of the USA. Had the American people identified the Manhattan massacre with the 'Palestinian' cause, there would never again have been any chance of a US intervention on behalf of their cause in world diplomacy. This is another reason why the US government might not have wanted to stress the 'Palestinian' aspect of the matter. It wanted to be free to negotiate more 'Land for Peace' deals with the PA.
It also appeared to suit supporters of the US-Israel alliance, who thought that the USA would abandon its support for them if it became clear that this was the price America would now pay for that support. My own view is that this was a short-sighted mistake. That is why I say what I say.
Mr Search says that the 9/11 Commission report mentions Khaled Sheikh Mohammed’s animus towards Israel. Yes, but it does not in its general conclusions about the crime state the obvious and blatant fact that the entire attack was motivated by an desire to punish the USA for its support of Israel. Instead we are diverted into the nebulous ‘Al Qaeda and the meaningless ‘war on terror’, which has followed - and got us worse than nowhere, because it is a wholly mistaken approach. Nor has the US government acted (in public at least) as though this was the case (see my charting of its less-publicised actions, in ‘The Cameron Delusion’, the chapter ‘A comfortable hotel on the road to Damascus’ attacking the neo-conservative/liberal interventionist view of the event) . It is not to be mentioned, for reasons I explore above.
Mr Crosland rightly raises the rather belated claims of responsibility from Bin Laden and KSM. Perhaps Bin Laden’s involvement was more marginal than has been believed, but it eventually suited him (as it suited the US government) to accept that he was the principal author. KSM was, I believe, repeatedly tortured. That casts some doubt on his testimony.
