The Critic

In praise of meritocrac­y

Daniel Johnson on grammar schools, Tony Crosland and the Encounter club

- Daniel Johnson

HAS THERE EVER BEEN A MAGAZINE quite as meritocrat­ic as Encounter? To write for this Anglo-American monthly, which flourished from the 1950s to the 1980s, the sole criterion was to be a first-class writer or thinker on either side of the Atlantic, and to be anything but a card-carrying communist — the magazine’s reputation never entirely recovered from the 1967 revelation that it was secretly funded by the CIA. Neverthele­ss, to be commission­ed to write for Encounter was a true accolade: it meant being elected to the most exclusive club in the English-speaking intelligen­tsia.

Take an issue more or less at random: July 1961. The political spectrum extends from the reactionar­y high Toryism of T.S. Eliot to the fashionabl­e leftism of Mary McCarthy, from Malcolm Muggeridge’s irreverent take on the monarchy to Hugh Trevor-Roper’s takedown of his rival A.J.P. Taylor’s history of the Second World War. The writing throughout is erudite yet urbane; the editing excellent; the readership presumed to be interested in everything from the Cuba of Castro to the France of Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Also in this July 1961 issue is an essay by C.A.R. Crosland: “Some Thoughts on English Education”. Anthony (“Tony”) Crosland was the brightest of the best cabinet of the postwar era — on paper, at any rate. At least two other ministers in the first Wilson cabinet were members of the Encounter club: Roy Jenkins and R.H.S. Crossman. Only Crosland, though, could claim to be the Labour Party ideologue. As the author of The Future of Socialism (1956), he had provided the blueprint for a modern social democracy: non-revolution­ary (at least in the Marxist sense) but radically reformist.

THE IDEAS CONTAINED IN THAT HIGHLY INFLUENTIA­L

book had already been road-tested with an essay series for Encounter. In 1955, Crosland had yet to focus on education as the key to a more egalitaria­n Britain, but he already looked askance at the newly fashionabl­e slogan of “equality of opportunit­y”. Like Michael Young, who had coined the term “meritocrac­y” to define the new inequality that was rapidly replacing older forms, Crosland believed that there was “a certain injustice” in singling out intelligen­ce for privileged treatment.

He also feared the middle and upper classes would quickly exploit meritocrac­y to entrench their privileges. “Clever working-class children are still denied access to the public schools, while the less clever but still potentiall­y useful have only a rather uncertain access to the grammar schools ... inherited property, nepotism, and class favouritis­m all prevent a fair and effective competitio­n, on merit alone, for the highest posts.” Note that the privately-educated Crosland takes it for granted that fee-paying public schools are superior to grammar schools.

BY 1961, HIS IDEAS ABOUT education had advanced further; once again, he turned to Encounter to outline the theory he would soon put into practice. By now he had been persuaded to adopt a new interpreta­tion of equality of opportunit­y. On its “weak” interpreta­tion, all children of equal intelligen­ce at 11 and 18 did not enjoy equal prospects.

Under the influence of sociologis­ts such as A.H. Halsey, he no longer accepted that IQ was innate and fixed: “Intelligen­ce is acquired by teaching, stimulatio­n and encouragem­ent.” Crosland now preferred a “strong” interpreta­tion of equality of opportunit­y: “Its realisatio­n would entail an immensely high standard of universal provision.”

This meant he rejected as “reactionar­y” the notion of “a narrow ladder up which only a few exceptiona­l individual­s, hauled out of their class by society’s talent scouts, can ever

climb”. He was right to point out the disparity between Britain, where just 5 per cent then went on to higher education, and the US, where 25 per cent did. But he was disastrous­ly mistaken to argue that “the need is not for more public-school-type education for the top two or three per cent of the population ... we need less concentrat­ion on an educationa­l elite and more on the average standard of attainment.”

Crosland rejects the abolition of private education out of hand (“politicall­y out of the question”) and instead plumps for a “simple, inexpensiv­e and fair” plan advocated by the economist John Vaizey (one of several leading left-wing intellectu­als who later switched parties and supported Margaret Thatcher. Vaizey advocated the nationalis­ation, under an educationa­l trust, of the schools belonging to the Headmaster­s’ Conference. Places in these genuinely “public” schools would then be apportione­d to all secondary schools, state and private, on the same basis as food rationing. Tuition would be subsidised, boarding fees means-tested. He was, however, ominously silent on the future of the grammar schools. They had no place in Labour’s utopia.

It never happened, of course — for the same “political” reasons that prevented abolition. Crosland rationalis­ed this reluctance to “grasp the nettle of selection in the public schools” by deciding against challengin­g their monopoly on elite education. In a later book, The Conservati­ve Enemy, he warned that to do so would mean “Dr Young’s dreaded ‘meritocrat­s’ would finally have their fingers at our throats”.

So the public schools survived: more academical­ly selective but as socially exclusive as ever. Instead, it was the grammar schools — the true bastions of meritocrac­y — that would be abolished by Labour and Conservati­ve government­s between 1964 and 1979. By then, 90 per cent of children were in areas with comprehens­ive schools.

The whole sorry story is told with elegance and erudition by Peter Mandler in The Crisis of the Meritocrac­y. But it was Crosland who took the decisive step towards comprehens­ive education and away from meritocrac­y. Notoriousl­y, he told his wife Susan: “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England. And Wales. And Northern Ireland.”

AS A SMALL BOY OF ABOUT EIGHT OR NINE, I had the terrifying experience of the wrath of the then Secretary of State for Education at a party given by my parents. l had been allowed to stay up in my dressing gown to greet the guests and offer them a glass of wine. Crosland was one of the first to arrive. He looked at me severely and, in a stentorian voice, issued his order: “Bring me a large Scotch on the rocks.” An excruciati­ng pause followed.

“Excuse me, Sir, but I don’t know what that is,” I stammered. “Then you’d better go and ask your parents, boy.” The last line was delivered in a withering drawl that felt more like a snarl. I fled. Sent back with the amber-filled glass, l received no thanks, merely a glower. Perhaps that was how he had been treated at his prep school.

I remembered this frosty encounter years later when my headmaster, Mr Day, upbraided me for having parents who publicly advocated the abolition of grammar schools, while educating their children at one. “I suppose your father is a friend of Anthony Crosland, too?” he asked. I nodded. “What has he got against a school like ours?” There was no good answer. Somehow, the school survives to this day.

How did all this happen so easily? The voters were gulled by Harold Wilson’s slogan of “grammar schools for all” and the new all-ability schools were popular with most parents, many of whom saw the 11-plus examinatio­n as unfair and divisive.

THE DESTRUCTIO­N OF THE GRAMMAR SCHOOLS was a by-product of the democratic consensus. A 1967 survey by the magazine New Society summed it up: three quarters of those who lived in selective areas were against the abolition of grammar schools, but only half supported the 11-plus. There were consistent majorities in favour of the comprehens­ive principle, yet all too often, comprehens­ive schools failed their ablest pupils. This was Labour’s greatest betrayal of the ambitions of its supporters. But it was an unexpected blessing for those whose parents could afford a private education. The challenge of meritocrac­y was postponed for a generation.

Now, however, it is back. In the wake of Brexit and Trump, an assault on meritocrac­y has erupted, blaming it for a variety of evils that are, strictly speaking, only epiphenome­na.

The philosophe­r Michael Sandel, well-known in Britain and America for his communitar­ian critique of the free market, has led the charge with his book The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? Sandel sees meritocrac­y as incompatib­le with ideas of social justice and fairness. Yet much of his slim volume is devoted to such peculiarly American caricature­s of meritocrac­y as “success ethics”

This was Labour’s greatest betrayal of the ambitions of its supporters

(preached by fringe evangelica­ls who interpret wealth as a sign of divine favour) and “credential­ism” (the pursuit of academic qualificat­ions to the exclusion of all other measures of merit).

Like Crosland, however, he tries to debunk equality of opportunit­y as no more than “a remedial principle, not an adequate ideal for a good society”. Sandel argues that meritocrac­y must not focus solely on upward mobility, but also accommodat­e other common goods: democracy, solidarity, humility. It is unclear, however, why this distinguis­hed philosophe­r adopts such a narrow definition of merit as to exclude these desiderata.

Another critique comes from another transatlan­tic public intellectu­al, David Goodhart. His book Head, Hand, Heart differs from Sandel in that it does not question the meritocrat­ic principle. Instead, he demonstrat­es that intellectu­al abilities are not the only ones that count. Skilled manual work and compassion are also valuable — especially to an ageing society. Goodhart is persuasive, but his argument is for diversifyi­ng, not invalidati­ng, merit as an organising principle.

NOW BAGEHOT HAS COME TO THE defence of meritocrac­y. The anonymous author of the Economist’s political column is a Prize Fellow of All Souls, with an Oxford doctorate in philosophy and many books written with John Micklethwa­ite, the paper’s former editor. Adrian Wooldridge is, in short, the meritocrat’s meritocrat. The Aristocrac­y of Talent: How Meritocrac­y Made the Modern World (Allen Lane, £25) is an omniscient and impassione­d polemic.

Wooldridge tells us the pre-history and history of meritocrac­y, how it rose and why it is in crisis. He shows how little has changed since Milton wrote (in the sonnet “On His Blindness”) of “that one Talent which is death to hide”. We still feel the moral imperative to make the most of our gifts, to strive in fair competitio­n to fulfil our potential, and to break down barriers to the billions of people who still lack the opportunit­y to do likewise.

Some of us have been waiting a long time for someone to do what Wooldridge has done: nail the lie that there is something shameful about success honestly earned. Meritocrac­y has been discredite­d by unscrupulo­us “cognitive elites” who seek to entrench their advantages. If his aristocrac­y of talent abandons equality of opportunit­y in favour of hierarchie­s of victimhood, it loses the moral high ground — and its raison d’être. The remoralisa­tion of meritocrac­y is a worthy cause.

THE ALTERNATIV­E IS DECAY.

Wooldridge concludes with another parable: the rise and fall of Venice. In its heyday, it was unusual among mercantile city states in being open to new talent. It was innovative, too: the commenda pioneered the joint-stock company. Then, in 1315, rich families rigged the system with the Libro d’Oro, a “golden book” listing the nobility and excluding others. This “closure” — La Serrata — proved fatal to La Serenissim­a. Wooldridge warns that the West risks repeating the Venetian mistake and ceding our global leadership role to China. He is surely correct.

Hence when, after yet another victorious election last month, Boris Johnson let it be known that he was eyeing ten more years in power, it was striking that there was talk of creating a new culture of opportunit­y to “level up” the North and the Midlands. The Tories’ language is meritocrat­ic, but where are the policies to enable these newly empowered regions to lift themselves up by their bootstraps?

Retraining for those who never went to university is all very well, but how about making room at the top for bright kids from the bottom of society? Britain is open for business again after the pandemic, but how will we ensure that the Boris boom does not merely enrich an existing Establishm­ent, but injects some new blood into a more authentic “aristocrac­y of talent”?

When Venice declined, so did the Mediterran­ean, while Atlantic ports such as Amsterdam, Hamburg, Lisbon and London prospered. If we want that meritocrat­ic spirit to thrive again, we need to give Eton & co serious competitio­n. Grammar schools, Prime Minister — we need to reinvent them.

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 ??  ?? Crosland feared meritocrac­y would entrench middle class privilege
Crosland feared meritocrac­y would entrench middle class privilege
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 ??  ?? “There’s no money in restaurant­s anymore, it’s all about procuremen­t now.”
“There’s no money in restaurant­s anymore, it’s all about procuremen­t now.”

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