Nick Clegg, perhaps beginning to realize that the coalition’s tough love policies are increasingly seen as weighing on the former half of the balance, has come out with one of his periodic working-class hero routines in the form of a clattering at the gates of Oxbridge. On the matter of substance here, I stop at nothing short than the abolition of private secondary-schooling altogether. Following Bourdieu’s work in the Béarn, I don’t think that private-schooling’s advantage in sending pupils on to élite education comes from its ability in teaching pupils in how to think, but from its remarkable proficiency in teaching pupils in how to be pupil-like. The private-school is nothing more than a series of gussed-up manners-and-catechism classes that train young aristocrats how to be polite and comely, skills which in turn are rewarded in the loving eyes of university admissions directors. I imagine Clegg’s poll numbers will have to fall even farther, though, before he becomes interested in following me up in this proposal.
But there’s another issue I’d like to take up here: evident in the aforelinked Economist post, and in the wider British dialogue on education, is the amazing branding feat that Oxbridge has accomplished for itself. In England, élite education and Oxbridge are synonymous. There is nothing like it at home. Of course, we have the Ivy League, and within that the peculiar icon of Harvard. But Harvard hardly holds a steady kingship over the ranking tables. And, what’s more, a broad and shallow fan of eminently respectable schools surrounds the core—from the “Little Ivies” to the “Public Ivies” to a broad swathe of competitive and highly-desirable liberal-arts schools. And there is a wide distribution of research strengths—for example, Harvard ranks a mere 20th in its social science research budget. By contrast, in England, Oxbridge occupies a rarefied emotional and statistical place as the best-of-the-best. It is, I think, an unhealthy environment for the rest of the universities, which find themselves constantly clambering over each other in an unseemly race to be … third best. Nottingham, for instance, loves to quote whenever it can the Times Higher Education report that labeled it “a prime alternative to Oxbridge.” It’s like a group of high-school girls from which two have been established as the very hottest, and the rest are quick to point out that they are really almost just as hot as those two.
Why not, then, spend the political energy that might be spent on recalibrating Oxbridge’s admission policies instead on dimming Oxbridge’s comparative lustre? By this I don’t mean doing anything to blight those two schools, but rather to dump investment and resources into other schools to bring them up to—and perhaps beyond—the precious Oxbridge standard. If the best research positions and fellowships and departmental facilities are found not at Oxbridge but elsewhere through the university system, mightn’t that do much more to shake up Britain’s stiffened arteries of privilege, power, and class transfer?
http://viewshed.matinic.us/2011/02/08/118/