Comprehensively Wrong
or
Grange Hill versus Social Mobility
BBC DVD cover
We do not recommend
anyone buy it
The broadcast image normalises the image broadcast, which is
to say that it makes that image into a norm to deviate from which is to be
deviant. That applies across practically all the fields on which there is any
broadcasting at all; and is particularly noticeable when applied to the ways in
which social norms have developed; and to the narrowing of political
possibilities to some minor variations on a common theme. We have just had
another sham election between barely distinguishable regime parties offering
various shades of more of the same: All were agreed that the cultural
revolution must advance rather than be reversed (gay, transgender and
reproductive 'rights' at home and abroad). Public spending under Comrade
Brezhnev was slightly too high, but more must be spent on health care and
education, over 90% of both of which should be supplied within the public
sector. We need a State broadcaster to propagandise the planet. Rigid planning
control must be maintained.
Can Catholics now only
vote for the Democratic Unionist Party?
The honourable exception to some of this, and the only
electorally significant party for which a Catholic can vote in good conscience,
is the late Dr. Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party, which is pro-life, opposed
to gay marriage, and anti-BBC, but otherwise accepts the modern socialist
State.
Grammar schools, the
media, and Alan Bennett's apologia for pederasty The History Boys
Of course, there are always policy differences between
parties; they differ from one day to the next, and from election to election.
One such difference this year was over grammar schools. There are many
arguments supported by statistics both for and against such schools, and I do
not propose to rehearse them here. Instead, I would note that the grammar
school, which was a standard feature of urban education for a couple of
decades, and remains a part of public sector schooling in several areas, failed
to endear itself to broadcasters. This resulted in its dropping out of sight;
and to its being thought of as an historical experiment or, where it survives,
as an anachronism. It is true that there have been various TV or radio dramas
in which the 11+ examination featured; there have also been occasional
broadcast plays set in grammar schools, most recently adaptations of Alan
Bennett's apologia for pederasty The History Boys, but they have never been the
setting for popular programmes broadcast on a regular basis. The reason is
quite simply that they are not dramatic institutions; they lack either the
colour of the independent schools depicted in adaptations of well-known and
much-loved children's classics by Frank Richards or Elinor Brent-Dyer, or the
breadth of casting possibilities and the potential for 'gritty realism' (i.e.
sex and drugs and rock'n'roll) of the comprehensive. The object of drama is to
present the dramatic; the common round, the daily task, is irrelevant to it; in
the continuing drama forms of the series and serial there is no further or
higher purpose in narrative or moral terms (although strands within the
narrative may work themselves out to some purpose or other), there is simply a
passing stream of incidents to engage the interest of the viewers or listeners.
That makes it inevitable that the behaviour of the characters (which is equally
inevitably copied by child viewers) is of the worst and most extreme kind the
writers can imagine. The everyday and unremarkable are excluded, and grammar
schools are nothing if not everyday and unremarkable.
Should the State be
involved in schooling at all?
This talk of grammars and comprehensives is, however,
somewhat beside the point when the question should be whether and why the State
should involve itself in schooling at all. The Church teaches that, if
necessary, the State may have schools of its own: “In the first place, it
pertains to the State, in view of the common good, to promote in various ways
the education and instruction of youth. It should begin by encouraging and
assisting, of its own accord, the initiative and activity of the Church and the
family, whose successes in this field have been clearly demonstrated by history
and experience – It should, moreover, supplement their work whenever this falls
short of what is necessary, even by means of its own schools and institutions”
(Divini Illius Magistri 46). The State
school should clearly be a rare expedient introduced only where home and Church
schooling fail, and other civil society solutions such as commercial or
charitable provision prove inadequate. Pius XI wrote at a time when public
provision was already widespread, and high levels of taxation were firmly
established in many countries, and his further comments on the need for the
State to give financial aid to the several schools demanded by families of
various religions should be read in that light.
Ideally, a limited tax base should pay limited taxes to meet
the necessary purposes of Government, leaving ordinary families sufficient
funds to pay modest school fees, which many schools – certainly Catholic
schools – would wish to make means-related, as is commonly the case in the
parochial schools of America. There is no reason whatever why the State should
run schools in a developed country, and every reason why it should not – we
have seen the national curriculum used repeatedly to advance atheistic
materialism and moral depravity, and to create a sense of dependency by shaping
expectations of an omnicompetent, interventionist government. There is also the
question of social mobility, which is a phrase of which we have heard a good
deal over the last decade or two, invariably in the context of discussing its
absence. The two main causes of that absence are the lack of early years
support, and the divide sometimes referred to as 'educational apartheid',
between the independent and maintained sectors. The abolition of the State
school would address both problems by allowing resources to be targetted where
they are truly needed, which is to say that the most disadvantaged families
should be helped to escape the conditions in which they have been trapped by
the socialist model of government.
By Prayer Crusader St Philip Howard
