Education and equality
James McCarthy wonders why Quakers have private schools
My heart was gladdened when I read an article in the Guardian recently written jointly by Nicky Morgan (Conservative), Lucy Powell (Labour) and Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrat) calling for an end to grammar schools. I had been dismayed to hear of Theresa May’s call for more grammar schools. It was refreshing to find three senior politicians setting out a cross-party case for more equality in education.
Equality is now a core Quaker concern. We take part in a wide range of movements aimed at alleviating the effects of inequality (food banks and housing come to mind). Britain Yearly Meeting has spent the last three years considering our social witness; and the theme of the 2017 Swarthmore Lecture, to be given by Catherine West, is tackling poverty and promoting social justice. There is widespread interest in The Spirit Level, the book by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, which argues, based on a wide review of the evidence, that the more equal a society is the healthier and happier are its citizens.
Education has a huge effect on equality. Grammar schools are not just selective academically, but also socially. The authors of The Spirit Level are careful not to overstate their case. When they wish to compare inter-generational social mobility across societies, they find that data is only available from eight developed countries.
Nonetheless, they write that it is suggestive that ‘among the eight countries for which we have information about social mobility, public expenditure on education (elementary/primary and high/secondary schools) is strongly linked to the degree of income equality.’
Thus, in Norway, the most equal of the eight, 97.8 per cent of education spending comes from public funds; while in the least equal, the United States, the comparable figure is 68.2 per cent.
Why do Quakers have private schools? Historically, there were good reasons for the establishment of such places. But how do they sit with our testimonies today? Private schools are used by the wealthy to ensure their children enjoy the best possible education. In providing this, the schools prop up an unequal society. Their position as charities helps to ensure that they do this very effectively. The results are plain for all to see. Our society is deeply divided, and private education – which grew up, it could be argued, partly in order to sustain British dominion over the rest of the world – can claim much of the credit for this. ‘All the evidence is clear,’ say Nicky Morgan, Lucy Powell and Nick Clegg, ‘that grammar schools damage social mobility.’ How much more is this the case for private schools?
Quaker schools have tenuous links with the Religious Society of Friends. (Some, like Breckenbrough in Yorkshire, educate children with special needs, funded by public bodies; but this is a special case which is not part of my argument.) They have few pupils and fewer staff who are Quaker.
Some Quaker schools take large numbers of pupils from abroad. Presumably we believe that they justify the Quaker name because of their promotion of values like acceptance, compassion, social awareness, and a wide view of the task of learning. Some of these schools are very good at creating a tolerant atmosphere where pupils flourish and the community really does seem to care. Are these achievements not possible in state schools? And are they sufficient to counteract the harm done by Quaker schools’ bolstering of a system of selection that maintains privilege in a society that is outstandingly unjust in its allocation of resources? How long do we believe our schools can exist as Quaker institutions alongside a testimony to equality that increasingly, it seems, we wish to take seriously?
Comments
Has our friend considered that in a free society you can by goods (good things) including education? And in an equal society it should not be that some shall have the privilege of a university education, for which you need intellectual capacity as well as money. This suggests that you can have either a free society or an equal one (of sorts). These two values seem to be mutually exclusive.
By PETERHANCOCK on 8th June 2017 - 14:46
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