British private schools have started to crack, under the onslaught of a >20 percent increase in costs, VAT now being applied to fees, combined with a recent rise in employers' National Insurance.
As I predicted, it's the smaller private schools at the margin which are suffering the most, and are the first to go to the wall. I'm sure Eton, Harrow and Winchester will manage somehow. So it's the poorer members of the middle class who are being punished. The very rich will be okay. Perhaps because they have (figuratively) made a 'deal' with the left-wing hegemony? It might help to explain the politics of figures such as Etonian David Cameron and Wykehamist Rishi Sunak.
Hatred of the middle class has been 'legitimised', using ideology that was invented by Karl Marx, spread by his disciples, and which is now being disseminated to vast numbers via the university system. Maybe that's why New Labour were so keen to get more young people to go to college.
Most of the current Cabinet went to comprehensive schools. Were their spirits nearly crushed there? Making them want to take it out, not on state education, but on the private education they missed out on? It's one of the paradoxes of leftism in a mixed economy – and a reason why its influence has a tendency to rise over time – that the suffering it causes often leads its victims to blame, not leftism, but capitalism, ironically leading to more ammunition for leftism. It's one of those negative feedback loops.
Contemporary state education inculcates collectivist values.* So private schools remain a small but potent threat to il-liberal hegemony. A person tends to emerge from them not brainwashed to believe in collectivism, or that he/she (and any other individual) is insignificant in relation to the collective.
Many among the Left call private schools "out of touch". Out of touch with what? Leftist ideology, which has become hegemonic among educational, academic and cultural institutions? But why should every school reflect the dominant values? Isn't it one of the central tenets of left-wing thought (the academic kind at any rate) that it's virtuous to be oppositional to, or at least divergent from, the dominant ideology?
It's worth bearing in mind that state provision is not an essential element of universal education. There are private schools whose fees are lower (or were, before they were subjected to Labour's penalties) than the average government spend per state school pupil. Vouchers would be consistent with universal education. But socialists, which includes most humanities professors and teaching unions, have usually rejected the idea of a voucher system. It would leave too little power in their hands – power to boss people about in the name of fairness and equality.
• A reader has queried my suggestion that discussion of transgender, and other topics to do with gender, sexuality or race, should be "banned from universities". What about conversations in the cafeteria? And how am I proposing such a ban would be enforced?
My suggestion only applies to formal discussions: papers, books, lectures, talks. Obviously individuals on campus would go on exploring those topics informally among themselves – ideally, without the current policing by university authorities.
If an individual wants to complain they are being treated disrespectfully – for whatever reason – they should be able to complain. But I don't see any reason for having special rules for this in respect of gender/sexuality/ethnicity, any more than I see a need for special laws for crimes that have a gender/sexuality/ethnicity aspect to them, or for laws against so-called 'hate speech'. (Before New Labour brought in such laws, there was already legislation against incitement to violence. I don't see why punishment should vary according to whether anti-minority motivation was alleged to be involved.)
As to how a 'ban' would be implemented, I'm certainly not advocating legal restrictions on what universities can or can't teach, or what speakers may or may not be invited – let alone having rules that certain types of speaker must be invited for the sake of creating legally required 'balance'. I think that universities should themselves recognise the absurdity of hosting formal debate and research on topics for which some possible perspectives are prohibited. It's universities themselves who should be adopting internal policies on the issue.
Of course that's very unlikely to happen. It would entail at least partial acknowledgment that much of the 'research' and 'debate' done under the banner of the humanities so far has been carried out to serve an agenda. Also, acknowledgment that much of the rest of the research and debate is tainted, as a result of having been conducted in an environment of agenda-serving institutionalised bias. An agenda is still an agenda, however much it's ostensibly aimed at a 'virtuous' end result.
* 'Critical Theory', in this case inspired by nutty French professor Louis Althusser (1918-1990), claims that modern state schools disseminate capitalist, not collectivist, ideology. This is either ironic, or hypocritical, depending on what you think the underlying motivation of Critical Theorists is.
Image source: Daily Telegraph