The trouble with student vanguardism
SOME of the kids bricking the plate glass windows at Tory HQ yesterday will be the sons and daughters of those of us who engaged in similar argy-bargy in the miners’ strike and the campaign against the poll tax. The small minority of extremists – as we liked to be known in those days, of [...]
Welcome to Dave’s transport caff (and free school)
POOR old Fraser Nelson seems genuinely mystified. The editor of The Spectator did ‘Any Questions’ on Radio Four last weekend, and it turns out that the audience was somewhat sceptical on the central plank of Tory/Lib Dem education policy. ‘When I said that free schools would give the poor the choice that only the rich [...]
That’s the thing about Eton
IT IS terribly bad form for a chap to come over all chippy about his education. Frankly, that’s the sort of stuff one would expect from a provincial Grammar School boy, and not a journalist, novelist and historian of the stature of Guy Walters. Nevertheless, the Old Etonian has devoted a post on the Daily Telegraph-sponsored [...]
Lord Browne review: why not free education?
FROM my first day as a five-year-old at Avenue Road Infants’ School to my final postgraduate seminar at the London School of Economics, my education was free all the way. Not only that, but for the last five years of it, I was accorded state support at a level comparable to a low-wage job. That [...]
Simon Schama: Michael Gove’s history man
THE Coalition has declared war on educational inequality, Michael Gove told the Tory conference yesterday. But its decisions to scrap Labour’s schools rebuilding scheme and pass the socially divisive Academies Act can only increase it. The education secretary’s insistence that young teachers are his ‘heroes and heroines’ was cringe-inducing, and I could have lived without [...]
Ed Balls: not Hendrik Verwoerd reincarnate
THE idea that opposition to academy schools is tantamount to fascism is a suggestion so evidently preposterous to the point of derangement that one is forced to ask how it can credibly surface in a widely-read newspaper. Yet such is the contention in an article on the Wall Street Journal website. Someone having nicked the [...]
Niall Ferguson and the history curriculum
WHAT schoolboy could fail to be entertained by tales of how Edward II died after having a red hot poker stuck up his arse, and why Britain went to war with Spain because some bloke had his ear cut off? History was by some distance my favourite subject at school. I could probably still draw [...]
How to democratise Oxbridge
ACTUALLY I do have a problem with the term ‘Oxbridge Mafia’. It is just so unfair to the Cosa Nostra, which at least welcomes working class applicants and is sufficiently discreet to ensure that members keep schtum about their adherence. By contrast, the graduates of our elite universities flaunt their education for all to see, and [...]
The brazen cheek of brazen elitism
FOR AN Old Etonian to promise a ‘brazenly elitist’ approach to state education – as Tory leader David Cameron has done this week – is nothing if not brazenly cheeky. It’s a nice catchphrase of course, chiming as it does with the popular perception that something is wrong with the system, and that sex-crazed pothead [...]
Faith schools: welcome to Hizb ut Tahrir Junior High
WHAT’S to stop a bunch of North London Trot parents scraping two million quid together and sponsoring a secondary school with, as the jargon has it, a distinctive ethos? I have asked this question, semi-seriously, of people with a better understanding of New Labour educational policy than I can personally claim. As far as they [...]
