Physician, heal thyself.

Not enough educational brain-washing for you, I think, especially in the PC tyranny of basic biology and and primary school English. If you’re really worried about resisting this new species of migrant and avoiding the fate of the doe doe, I suggest you might find night school more helpful than voting for Nazis.

What a load of dribble, you speak with as if you are above the working class, they vote BNP because it is the only party talking sence. Education means you have had plenty of brain washing, doing the right thing by voting BNP means you have a desire to protect your own species, this is darwins law, the suvival of the fittest, not the suvival of ones own income by speaking every political corect word you can think of so you can be seen to be doing the right thing, but realy you are following the doe doe to exstinction. now contemplate others views instead of forcing yours point on others.

The more usual complaint is that fee-paying schools like Eton equip their pupils with the education, values, social skills, and personal connections which enable them to get to the better universities and from there to the better paid jobs – in fact, only 7% of pupils attend fee-paying schools – that’s “non-maintained” schools in official jargon.

Strange, that. Now the complaint is that maintained schools as a category don’t equip working-class lads with the special kinds of education that they need to succeed. Perhaps but in the current situation some 43% of young people are going from schools into higher education and very sensibly so as the unemployment rate for graduates is lower than for non-graduates and the employment rate higher. Also, most graduates attract better lifetime earnings compared with non-graduates. Jobs for unskilled manual workers are vanishing fast and new factor is this:

“WOMEN university students now outnumber men across all subject areas, from engineering to medicine and law to physical sciences.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2356965.html

We have come a long way since Daniel Defoe wrote this in 1719:

“I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous customs in the world, considering us as a civilized and a Christian country, that we deny the advantages of learning to women. We reproach the sex every day with folly and impertinence; while I am confident, had they the advantages of education equal to us, they would be guilty of less than ourselves.”
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1719defoe-women.html

Eight years into the future, half of all GPs in Britain will be women.

The prevailing male macho culture about it being smart to be dumb like well-paid footballers is what is doing the huge damage to the aspirations and job prospects of working class lads.

Btw Orwell was just describing the prevailing values he found in 1936 when he was researching poverty in the north of England for the book that was to become: The Road to Wigan Pier (1937).

Schools are designed by middle class White people, their teaching methods are designed around their needs and values, and the net result is that they reinforce and reproduce existing inequalities.

It is not for the working class – White or otherwise – to reorganize themselves to fit the needs of the educational establishment, it is up to the educational establishment to accommodate the needs and values of the working class.

C’mon. Labour has been in government since 1997, doubtless inspired by Blair’s slogan: Education, Education, Education.

The fact is that some local education authorities (LEAs) do consistently well in league tables while others perform badly. The London borough where I live – which hasn’t had a Conservative controlled council in 20+ years – is consistently placed at or close to the top of the LEAs in England. As noted above, local affluence is only average by London standards.

OTOH some LEAs arrived at the recipe decades ago that maintaining poor standards of schooling is an effective means of entrenching Labour control of the local council by the tried and tested formula:

poor schooling => uncertain local job prospects => vote Labour

Not wishing to having to take issue with a conservative who says sensible things about immigration (always glad to come across such a rare thing), but I want to take up some of what has been said about minority groups and education here. (I’m a teacher in a multi-ethnic primary London primary school)

“Yes, and they won’t start doing well until their parents start giving them encouragement at home… the sort of encouragement that Chinese and Bangladeshi kids get, and so did most of the white middle-class readers of this blog.”

Cultural factors can be important, but I don’t think they are the main factor in educational success at all. The ethnic groups that perform well or badly usually do so according to their class – the social status they brought with them from their own country.

Talking about Asian success is a good example. People descended from Indian civil servants have indeed performed well in Britian, achieving in professions that reflect their social position in India. Those descended from rural villages in Pakistan much, much less well, again reflecting the social status they brought with them. The issue is not aspirational culture – it’s class.

“The culture has to change, you can’t just keep blaming schools when kids are only in school for a small proportion of their waking lives and most of the time are at home plumped in front of the TV and being ignored by their parents rather than being encouraged to read and study and generally aspire to better their lot in life.”

Well without wishing to point the blame on, say, me, (children do actually spend a great deal of time in school) I’m interested in how you think this actually works. How do parents with little money change this culture (even assuming your description of that culture is fair – which it isn’t in many cases).

I mean what are you proposing working-class parents do here? It sounds fair to criticise prioritising TV watching over reading until you consider the economic side. TVs, including Sky etc, are not that expensive especially given what you can get out of them. Books, on the other hand, are very expensive, especially specialist study books. You could, like I did, prioritise books even on a very low income – if you don’t mind a semi-monastic life. I can well imagine why others don’t.

There are libraries – for those who have good libraries in their local area. Bad luck for those who don’t.

Then there is the large matter of creating aspiration among a generation who can see that their parents’ and grandparent’s dreams ended in failure and the collapse of the economic security they thought they had. Or can see their parents struggling to look after them while holding down one or two stressful, unfulfilling, demeaning, low-status jobs regardless of their youthful aspirations of sucess in Britain. Harder than you think.

As someone who works with low-income children and their parents, though, I could point out that many, many of them do not dump childen in front of their TVs and do in fact have a work ethic and hope for their children to do well in school. Some of them are actually very, very aggressive in attempting to force their children into academic success, something which is also unhelpful. In the end though, macroeconomics is what forbids upward class mobility, and tragically, encouragement from mums and dads usually does not trump this.

In the face of depressing experience, a parent that doesn’t bother isn’t making an entirely irrational choice.

I think the majority of immigrants hold my values (family-oriented, hard-working, refusing to submit to state “help”, privately charitable, focused on education and scornful of the excesses of “feminism” and “liberalism”) than many natives. I don’t agree with the religious beliefs that so many of them have as I am an atheist. But if we teach them the benefits of secular democracy and they teach us the value of respect and hard work, then we’ve had a good exchange.

Now then, Scratch, perhaps you can regale us all with an explanation of how children are going to start being academically and otherwise successful if their parents refuse to put the work in. Because it can’t be economic factors, if penniless immigrants manage to succeed despite being even more materially disadvantaged.

Perhaps you could explain what you think motivates BNP voters and whether you think their “analysis” of the situation is correct.

“The time was when I used to lament over quite imaginary pictures of lads of fourteen dragged protesting from their lessons and set to work at dismal jobs. It seemed to me dreadful that the doom of a ‘job’ should descend upon anyone at fourteen. Of course I know now that there is not one working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will leave school. He wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on ridiculous rubbish like history and geography. To the working class, the notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly.”
http://www.george-orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/6.html

In places, not too much has changed since Orwell wrote that.

Do you wonder that it angers me when these people vilify immigrants, such as my wife, who are in no way responsible for their problems? Does it really surprise you so much that I take it personally, and is it so hard to accept the fact that kids who aren’t supported at home are going to do badly at school, so that has to change before any success will happen?

I heartily commend this sea of bile to fans of entitlement, unexamined assumptions and the bourgeois art of snide elision.

Even by post-left standards it’s a doozie.

One reason was that according to the 2001 census, the resident population of Barnsley was 99.1% white:
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001/profiles/00CC-A.asp

The second reason relates to this account by George Orwell of a public meeting of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) held in Barnsley on 16 March 1936 where Oswald Mosley spoke [history note: Mosley founded the BUF in 1932 - he had been a cabinet minister in Ramsay Macdonald's Labour government until he resigned in 1930 saying the government was doing too little to tackle unemployment]:

“Last night to hear Mosley speak at the Public Hall, which is in structure a theatre. It was quite full – about 700 people I should say. About 100 Blackshirts on duty, with two or three exceptions weedy looking specimens, and girls selling Action etc. Mosley spoke for an hour and a half and to my dismay seemed to have the meeting mainly with him. He was booed at the start but loudly clapped at the end. Several men who tried to interject with questions were thrown out . . . one with quite unnecessary violence. . . . M. is a very good speaker. His speech was the usual clap-trap – Empire free trade, down with the Jew and the foreigner, higher wages and shorter hours all round etc. After the preliminary booing the (mainly) working class audience was easily bamboozled by M speaking as it were from a Socialist angle, condemning the treachery of successive governments towards the workers. The blame for everything was put upon mysterious international gangs of Jews who were said to be financing, among other things the British Labour Party and the Soviet. . . . M. kept extolling Italy and Germany but when questioned about concentration camps etc always replied ‘We have no foreign models; what happens in Germany need not happen here.’ . . . ”
[source: George Orwell: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol. 1 An Age Like This 1920-1940; Penguin Books, p. 230]

Note this key section: “the working class audience was easily bamboozled by M speaking as it were from a Socialist angle.”

The culture has to change, you can’t just keep blaming schools when kids are only in school for a small proportion of their waking lives and most of the time are at home plumped in front of the TV and being ignored by their parents rather than being encouraged to read and study and generally aspire to better their lot in life.

Do you wonder that it angers me when these people vilify immigrants, such as my wife, who are in no way responsible for their problems? Does it really surprise you so much that I take it personally, and is it so hard to accept the fact that kids who aren’t supported at home are going to do badly at school, so that has to change before any success will happen?

I wish it were quite that straight forward. Where we converge, I guess, is that BNP support mostly comes from the white working class with poor education attainment – which is the section of the indigenous population most challenged in the competition for jobs, especially when unemployment is rising:

“As a group, white working class boys are falling further behind their black and Asian classmates in public examinations. White British boys from poor families perform worse at GCSE than almost any other racial group. Official figures show that only 24% of those entitled to free school meals gained five or more good GCSEs last year, compared with 65% of the poorest Chinese boys and 48% of poor Indian and Bangladeshi boys.”
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/mike_ion/2007/01/the_bnp_and_the_white_boys.html

“Government figures show only 15% of white working class boys in England got five good GCSEs including maths and English last year. . . Poorer pupils from Indian and Chinese backgrounds fared much better – with 36% and 52% making that grade respectively.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7220683.stm

Support for the BNP wasn’t just high in Havering and Dagenham in London.

“Barnsley voters turn their backs on Labour over ‘foreigners’: In what was the heart of the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire, one in six people voted for the British National Party in the European elections.” [The Times, 9 June]
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/elections/article6458595.ece

Btw I don’t live in posh-Boris land or in Ken-jolly land but there’s not much support for the BNP around where I live but then there are two state-funded boys schools within walking distance which achieved better A-level results than Eton last summer.

You can’t change anyones mind unless they trust you.

Why should they trust you?

Most people would probably trust a used car dealer, or even a tabloid journalist, before they trusted a political activist.

@43 I’m arguing *against* the proposition that high minority populations cause poor performance by white kids, on the basis that there’s no evidence for it. On the second part, quite – it’s a hard one to sell, which doesn’t stop it from being true.

“How we get that message out to BNP voters is another question”

What, the message that we elitist liberals think they’re all condemned by their crap schools to being “fuckwits”? If I were the target of this I’d probably feel a whole lot more sympathetic to the BNP by the time I’d finished reading…

Who can say with confidence that Britain will never find itself in such a predicament?

*raises hand*

Seriously, I’ve family-based rights to settle in at least three other countries; plus I’ve point-based rights to get into at least four other ‘traditional emigré Brit’ countries. If I thought there was the slightest frigging chance the UK would end up in that situation, I’d get the relevant passports on the off-chance.

But if you look at real demographic data, rather than Mad Mel columns, there’s no chance in the slightest of anything along those lines happening, so meh. Congrats on your lower-middle-class status and education and all; you may have refuted my view that only the casually ignorant rather than the willfully stupid support the BNP.

Bob – BNP support ranges from 2.5% in Islington to 13% in Havering (remembered from yesterday rather than looked up, but not far wrong), so the suggestion that there aren’t significant group of Londoners motivated by xenophobic concerns is wrong. In Ken-land, it’s all jolly; in posh Boris-land, it’s all jolly; in working class Boris-land, the Nazis are as popular as anywhere else in the country.