Chipping away at class war, one student at a time
Every nation has its own obsessions, its own story. Canada is still getting to know its young self while its provinces quarrel like children. Americans think their story is the American Dream — it died decades ago — but their obsession with race born of slavery belies that. And Britain has what it has always had, a class war.
These things can paralyze a country.
Alan Rusbridger, former editor of the Guardian, ran an immensely influential leftwing newspaper in a nation that was cut into slices of social cake with every wingism catered to. There are papers for the posh right and left, tabloid right and left, hard right proletariat, Communist, Labour, and the Financial Times for the rich and their hopefuls.
What they have in common is an obsession with class, whether openly stated or coded. No remark, no headline, no photo even of an anodyne living room in the Guardian’s House and Garden pages can escape classridden comment. From dish placement (“what an absolute load of clutter”) to a chair (“mass-produced individualism”) to a couch (“nice for those who can afford it”), the paper is slated for getting too good for the likes of its readers and too patronizing. It never pleases.
The Guardian always makes strenuous efforts at inclusion and fairness though it’s not clear that it helps. This might though. Rusbridger is working on a fascinating new concept, the Foundation Year at Lady Margaret Hall, a college in Oxford University, for working-class students rather than the offspring of the rich.
The idea was suggested to him in an Irish pub by the provost at Trinity College Dublin, where it has long been on offer.
It gives students a year of breathing space to get used to perceived walls of class, money, accent and attitude rather than being plunged right in. I am profoundly interested in the Foundation Year and talked to Rusbridger about it this week for one main reason. British students get 13 years of schooling before university. For some reason Canada only gives them 12.
That means that the year in which Canadian teenagers prepare for independent life, intensive learning and growing up has been hacked off. It’s bad for everyone but particularly so for low-income students who need one more year of help.
Rusbridger and LMH choose particular students. “Their grades are not great but when I look at their life and what they’ve overcome, actually their grades are rather miraculous. If somebody has been living in a hostel because of something in their family background and they haven’t had internet in the evenings and still gets an AAB (average) grade, that’s a miracle.”
He describes another student: “One had no formal education until he was 10 because he was an Afghan Sikh who arrived in England at 151⁄ having come through 17 different countries to escape, taught himself English, again got AAB, what an astonishing achievement. That guy is going to be brilliant.”
There is no chance that Oxford, one of the world’s best universities, would accept a student with average grades. But the Foundation Year students take a core course in writing, study skills and communication. That means learning about academic writing, original thought and constructing arguments, then research skills, working in groups and managing time well, followed by learning persuasive speech, debating and writing for different audiences.
These are things that more fortunate students already knew years before. The Foundation Year offers 32 hours of teaching each week plus individual study. They have free run of the university and, crucially, will be able to socialize with regular students.
It goes unsaid that they will come to feel the social confidence that is the hallmark of students who were set from birth to study at Oxford, Cambridge and elsewhere. What the theorist Lynsey Hanley calls the “silent symbols” of class will matter less. In residence, a student’s family home is not judged. The style is casual so their clothing will fit in. They are fully funded; money will not be a constant ache.
I think of Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance, a poor kid who went to Ohio State and then to Yale law, who attended a dinner with law firm recruiters. “Something’s wrong with that water,” he told a server as he spat it out. He had not known what San Pellegrino sparkling water was.
The Foundation Year will prepare them for the best education possible. Rusbridger says there were 60 applicants in the first year in 2016 but 600 this year. Cambridge too is planning a Transition Year. If this sounds minor, imagine if it were applied generally. Perhaps a more socially mobile and fair-minded Conservative cabinet would not have served up a Brexit referendum or imposed a cruel and disastrous austerity that whipped up hatred in the nation.
“I think change is in the air,” says Rusbridger. He has concluded that the world, hitherto run vertically from the top, has become a horizontal one where digital communication has given everyone a voice.
Eventually, if they’re educated voices, the world may wish to listen to something new.