Big question

Well, a big question for me, anyhow: what prompted my parents, police officers who (day and night) lived and breathed the local community, to send me not to the local school but to a small independent school in North Nottinghamshire? Yes, true, it was at least North Notts, but my parents were Yorkshire born and bred, and from a very different position from the public school tradition. Also, as far as I can recall, we did not know any people from public schools, apart from the family lawyer. I guess I have always reflected on the fact that a fee-paying independent school is hardly in tune with my family’s background. My parents are not snobbish and not in the least interested in the family going up-market. Perhaps my parents lived the social pressures in the local community and sensed that this was not what they wanted for their son. Certainly, the whole reason I have been as fortunate as I have is because my parents got me out of the failing state schools (and they were failing state schools in the 1990s) of South Yorkshire. I have no doubt that this has been the key to my life. For a long time, and though during my time at University it often elicited gasps of horror from my dad, I was not comfortable with this. I reflexively dismissed private schools as elitist: a cause of inequality; institutions so pernicious that they should be abolished (and this is one of the major reasons I did Teach First, which I think probably encouraged my already half-formed distaste for a certain kind of public school self-satisfaction). I have, before now, found that politically incorrect, but I feel certain that most of the kids in my neighbourhood back home had much more intelligence than me, but did not have the advantage of a good education. Due to the failure of the public schools central state model, they haven’t had the opportunity to develop their minds and study at University, for example. I wonder where I would be if I’d have gone to Doncaster Academy in its comprehensive heyday? Although I’m still (hypocritically) liable to take sideswipes at private schools, I am no longer quite so complacent in my thinking about the state education system in the UK. This is something Niall Ferguson talks about in his final Reith Lecture on civil society--he too, a beneficiary of private education. Ferguson’s thesis goes even further, arguing that it is not a case of the developing world, especially Asia, transforming themselves politically and economically; rather, it is due to the degeneration of Western institutions and their quality. He sees these are two quite separate phenomena. That is, he argues, it’s not because China is growing more rapidly that we are managing our affairs less well; rather, the biggest threat to Western civilisation is complacency. And, I have to say, regardless of Ferguson’s political and ideological position, he is right in warning against thinking that our schools, legal and political systems are fine.