Charles Moore
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The hardest part for politicians to talk about in all this is the fear of having one’s children educated with human dross. Although we will all agree in principle how marvellous it is to mix pupils of all backgrounds, we will be much more circumspect where our own children are concerned. One or two children from troubled, ‘deprived’ families in the class will be a cause for self-congratulation, but more than one or two will be hell. Discipline problems make parents even more desperate than academic ones. So the doctrine of social inclusion for state schools has to contain within itself a semi-secret doctrine of exclusion if it is to work. Selection, of some kind, is essential if a school is to be allowed to have its own ethos. Public-school Tories should not attack selection. Grammar-school ones should not see it solely in academic terms. Both should strive for the most plural possible arrangements which would produce a truly conservative outcome — schools which teachers, not governments, run and parents choose.
The truth is that, when we talk about education, most of us are generalising wildly from what happened to us. On that basis, I offer my memory of attitudes at my village primary school in the 1960s. It was quite a good school, but most of the pupils did not sit the 11-plus. They did not want to do so because they would be separated, if they went to grammar school, from their friends. So the problem with the ll-plus was not (pace John Prescott) that it ‘branded you a failure’, but the fear that it would brand you a success.
One final thought: has anyone asked how many people under the age of 40 have any idea what a grammar school is?
Wading through the total of 36 pages of booklets about recycling from our local council, one is struck by the sheer complication. No amount of babyish phraseology and pictures of a black child sitting in a green box (isn’t this racist?) can conceal the fact that, if you were to take it seriously (which obviously you mustn’t), you would spend hours getting it right. There are, for example, seven different types of plastic of which only three can be recycled, so one has to distinguish between low-density polyethylene, high-density polyethylene, polyvinyl chloride and polypropylene. One must also strip labels off plastic bottles and wash out tins (with water already used for washing up). During the war Lord Beaverbrook invited everyone to give him their pots and pans to make aeroplanes. This made people feel that they were doing their bit, but the metal contributed proved useless. This fatuous wartime spirit is now being recycled.
Last week I stayed in Parham House in West Sussex. It is so beautiful and so interesting that it is said to be the only house in Simon Jenkins’s England’s Thousand Best Houses whose entry does not contain the word ‘but’. I pass over, however, its Long Gallery, its Reynoldses and Stubbses, its Stuart needlework, its gardens (open weekend, 7-8 July) to note only one thing. In my bathroom I found two lavatory-paper holders. One contained ordinary soft paper and the other Bromo, elder cousin of Bronco — brown, hard and unwelcoming, although described by the manufacturers as ‘So Soft So Strong’ and ‘made of materials that have been cooked under steam pressure for hours’. When Emma Barnard, who lives there with her husband James, inherited Parham in the 1990s, she discovered enormous supplies of Bromo in store. She did not want to waste it, but nor did she think that her guests would necessarily welcome it — hence my chance to choose. Almost, but not quite, like the famous choice between Alderney, Jersey and Guernsey cream available to guests at Waddesdon before the Great War.
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