QUESTION: WHEN ARE good parents bad citizens? Answer: When they do anything in their power to give their children the best education they can. That’s the message in a new report from the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission.
The Commission has discovered the previously hidden fact that many parents, but especially those with a decent education themselves and a bit of cash, are helping their children to do well at school, university and in the workplace by giving them encouragement and support.
This selfish behaviour, says the report, enables “opportunity hoarding”, and creates a “glass floor” below which their children cannot fall. Opportunity hoarding can “occur as a result of shared interests, hobbies, accent, cultural norms, through networks, social circles and personal recommendations, to name but a few.” So if you’re a professional of any sort and encourage your son or daughter to follow in your footsteps, you’re an opportunity hoarder. If you bring your children up to talk with Received Pronunciation, to hold a knife and fork properly, eat with their mouths closed, work hard, show self confidence and associate with people who aren’t going to end up in prison then you’re probably hoarding someone else’s opportunities.
You’ve probably already exploited your own education to give your children an “unfair advantage” by being in a “better position to make informed choices and able to exercise that choice sending [your] children to the best performing schools, thereby hoarding these school places at the expense of less-advantaged children.” You selfish bastards, how could you?
Not only that, but once you get your kids up there you make sure they don’t go plunging back through the wonks’ bauble called the glass floor. If your child is female, she’s already had to break through the glass bit from the other side, when it was a ceiling, so you and she will be all the more determined to convert it to a floor. Then she can do the same for her sons and daughters by giving them a good education and getting to know the right people.
Even Boris Johnson, who comes from a massive family of middle class opportunity hoarders, says we should be “smashing down” the barriers to social mobility.
SO YOU SEE, life above the glass ceiling is really a big class conspiracy designed to keep the lower orders, ie “the disadvantaged”, out. We can’t have that. Even Boris Johnson, who comes from a massive family of middle class opportunity hoarders, says we should be “smashing down” the barriers to social mobility.
It’s your social duty, therefore, to care more for other people’s children than your own. That way we can have a more fair and equal society. Equal potential all round. That’s why Comrade Corbyn is right: he says “Education is not about personal advancement but is a collective good that benefits our society and our economy,” and he should know, he wanted to make sure his son didn’t get any unfair advantage over the already disadvantaged by going to a class-obsessed, glass-floored, opportunity-hoarding grammar school.
Unlike Johnson, who’s rather vague on how we smash down the barriers, Corbyn is somewhat clearer: we need a “national education service”, which I take to mean a totally state-run system of comprehensives and the destruction of all private schooling.
Just remember all this when you sit down to consider which school is the best for little Samantha or the best university for Orlando; or whether you should pay for extra maths tuition for either of them. Your children are not your own and personal advancement is not the goal of their education. All hail the collective!
Where have I heard this kind of thing before? I remember now – The Communist Manifesto. I recommend it to Comrade Corbyn, he might find he is a Marxist after all.
