Toby Young has a point
Toby Young has a point | Anthony Seldon | Comment is free | The Guardian
|
Quote:
|
Toby Young's free school is officially opened next week by Boris Johnson in west London. One of the core aims, Young tells us, is to instil in boys and girls from ordinary backgrounds the same edge that public school toffs have. When the hapless Young arrived at Oxford from his northern grammar school, he was bowled over by the likes of Boris and David Cameron. They may not have had better A Levels than him, nor been smarter academically than their state school colleagues: but they had an assurance that contemporaries from humbler backgrounds altogether lacked.
So Young wants to inculcate that same mindset into his own charges. He's particularly starstruck by Eton, the alma mater of both Boris and David Cameron. The school has a practice known as "oiling", which is learning how to win friends and influence others, and how to clamber over them to get what you want. It's a mixture of ambition, self-confidence and bloody-mindedness, and he wants it to go viral throughout his school.
This ambition will nauseate many on the left who see in Eton, and in schools like it, only the perpetuation of a self-regarding and uncaring oligarchy. Such schools, it believes, sums up all that is wrong in Britain today. The idea that this culture is being applied to non-privileged children is abhorrent. One can understand the concern. Few sights are more stomach-churning than public school bankers sucking the blood out of businesses by day and quaffing Bollinger in elitist watering-holes at night. Though public schools have changed in the last twenty-five years, the smell of arrogance and inward-lookingness still hovers over some.
But Young is right to emphasise the importance of character. It puts the finger precisely on what is still going wrong in state schools. While the best are matching the independent sector on academic performance and in league tables, the all-round education they are offering often falls far short.
This only becomes apparent when the young leave the schools and move to university and beyond. They find they lack the confidence and roundedness that is an integral part of the lives of the independent school student. The left has tended to eschew character-building as a rightwing obsession, redolent of empire and all that is wrong with the class system. For some years, however, thoughtful people on the centre-left, like Richard Reeves, formerly of thinktank Demos and now Nick Clegg's special adviser, have been talking about the need to develop character among all our young, with schools at the heart of this. He draws on the example of the scout movement, whose founder, Robert Baden-Powell, described it as a "character factory", designed to instil determination and resilience in all young people, regardless of class. The popularity of the scout movement one hundred years on, reflects the hunger that persists for this richer kind of education.
State schools have become even more exam factories than they were 30 years ago, when Young was a student. Through no fault of the teachers – the relentless pressure of league tables has dictated schools sacrifice so much of the education of the whole child for the sake of exam grades. The way to address the problem of factory schools is to institute some of Baden-Powell's mentality. Doing so would truly level the playing field. And this is the exciting point. Development of character in young people is not at the cost of academic performance: instead, evidence shows it boosts exam results.
Character in public schools is formed far less from breeding and connections than by a whole variety of methods which should become available to all. It is built in ways that some on the left find distasteful, and they'd better get over it. Competitive sport is vital: it teaches resilience, teamwork and trust. Leadership training and mentoring should become widespread in schools. Young people should be given tough challenges, mental as well as physical – it will mean some will fail, just like sport means some will lose. That's life, but it's how people learn.
Cadet training, so much reviled by those who know nothing about it, will teach even the most disadvantaged young person every bit as much about mental strength as the Eton wall game. Hikes and gruelling expeditions should not be the domain just of the posh. Boarding, free of charge, should become much more prevalent throughout the state sector and is being considered seriously by government. Wellington Academy in Wiltshire, which we sponsor, opens with boarding this term. The experience of living side by side with fellow students, and in conditions of relative deprivation, is profoundly character-building. For those young people whose home lives are not conducive to their academic or emotional progress, boarding should become an automatic choice.
Kneejerk reactions to Young should be avoided. Penetrate beneath the flannel, and there are real lessons to be learned that could improve the life chances of all – above all, those with the least.
|
Leadership training: making loud arseholes into even louder arseholes.
I'd generally agree that state school kids would be more successful if they had all the character building business that you get at public schools, but I don't believe that 5-a-side and camping in Wales are going to cut it. Public schools build character through misery, basically by letting kids know from an early age that the world is a shitty place that's out to get you and your job is to survive it, by teamwork or personality or whatever.
__________________
Standard disclaimer: the disgusting statements contained in this post are the views of the poster, and unless specified do not represent the views of the moderators or the site's owners.
|
Linear Mode
