Education. In
wartime, educational reform must necessarily be promise rather than
performance. At the moment we are not in a position to raise the
school-leaving age or increase the teaching staffs of the elementary
schools. But there are certain immediate steps that we could take
towards a democratic educational system. We could start by abolishing
the autonomy of the public schools and the older universities and
flooding them with State-aided pupils chosen simply on grounds of
ability. At present, public-school education is partly a training in
class prejudice and partly a sort of tax that the middle classes pay
to the upper class in return for the right to enter certain
professions. It is true that that state of affairs is altering. The
middle classes have begun to rebel against the expensiveness of
education, and the war will bankrupt the majority of the public
schools if it continues for another year or two. The evacuation is
also producing certain minor changes. But there is a danger that some
of the older schools, which will be able to weather the financial
storm longest, will survive in some form or another as festering
centres of snobbery. As for the 10,000 ‘private’ schools that
England possesses, the vast majority of them deserve nothing except
suppression. They are simply commercial undertakings, and in many
cases their educational level is actually lower than that of the
elementary schools. They merely exist because of a widespread idea
that there is something disgraceful in being educated by the public
authorities. The State could quell this idea by declaring itself
responsible for all education,
even if at the start this were no more than a gesture. We need
gestures as well as actions. It is all too obvious that our talk of
‘defending democracy’ is nonsense while it is a mere accident of
birth that decides whether a gifted child shall or shall not get the
education it deserves.
