I see that Ms Platell has been using her column in the Daily Hate to pour scorn over Jacqui Smith this week. Particularly she has been labelling her performance as looking like a ‘bog standard comprehensive teacher’. I’ll gloss over the fact that Platell is more concerned with it looking like that than that than about that actually being the case, and move onto the insult itself and how it ties in with the rest of her column.
It just proves that basic snobbery is at the root of the views of a large core of Conservatives in the media and in politics. She is not writing about the education system, so this is not a reasoned argument about the best way to educate kids. She has not chosen to have that discussion. She is simply using the term to denote the kind of person any self-respecting Daily Mail reader should despise. Why should they despise them? The answer is here and in the rest of her column. If she has links to comprehensive schools, she may have become contaminated by the great unwashed, in fact she may even have once been one of them.
Now I am a product of the comprehensive system. By contrast, my mother grew up 30 years before me, passed her 11 plus and was sent on a scholarship to a fee-paying girls school. We both grew up in the same city and were both bright. We got almost exactly the same grades at A-level, and have roughly the same ultimate level of education. But the process of getting there was very different, and is still important.
I mixed with people from all sorts of backgrounds from across the city.My mother mixed with rich girls who had all the accessories you were required to buy in order to mark you out from the scholarship girls, and who participated in the special Prayer’s for the continuation of their way of life following the election of Labour in 1964. I did a wide range of subjects, and while I ended up doing arts subjects I still understand enough science to get by in discussion of it. My mother was forced to choose one or the other at an early stage. Most importantly, I enjoyed school.
Now I accept that comprehensives can’t be the answer to every problem, and in a sense the argument about them has moved on to one of pure delivery rather than the ideology behind them, which is fine by me. But what worries me more is that the experimental nature of comprehensive schooling is repellent to modern conservatives not because of the academic outcomes, but because of the mixing of people and distaste for the people who have to attend them. They all too often fall into the trap of disliking a policy because of a dislike for the people involved, rather than the outcomes in social terms. Perhaps those of us in progressive politics need to be less shy about pointing this out.
