Clive Davis

UP AND DOWN THE LADDER

Michael Winerip's essay on all those hyper-talented, hot-house kids who won't get into Harvard makes a wonderfully touching read. The fact that Winerip is a blue-collar boy made good gives his views special weight:

What kind of kid doesn’t get into Harvard? Well, there was the charming boy I interviewed with 1560 SATs. He did cancer research in the summer; played two instruments in three orchestras; and composed his own music. He redid the computer system for his student paper, loved to cook and was writing his own cookbook. One of his specialties was snapper poached in tea and served with noodle cake. At his age, when I got hungry, I made myself peanut butter and jam on white bread and got into Harvard.

Of course, evolution is not the same as progress...I see these kids — and watch my own applying to college — and as evolved as they are, I wouldn’t change places with them for anything. They’re under such pressure.

Who deserves to win, who deserves to fail? Driving home on Sunday night, I just managed to catch the first part of Anne McElvoy's radio series on the promises and pitfalls of meritocracy. Going to Oxford from a state school in the north set her thinking about the way the class system squanders talent.

Also worth checking: Madeleine Bunting's article on the 50th anniversary of that milestone in sociology Family and Kinship in East London. Critics and admirers weigh in.

CLASSROOM WARRIOR

Lampl long ago abandoned hope that he could win over new Labour. But would the Conservatives... buy his vision? Don't underestimate Lampl's talent for making the political weather. He's done it ever since he returned to his native Britain from the US in the mid-1990s. Unknown, then, he has since become the confidant of cabinet ministers and one of the most influential figures in British education.

From a profile of Sir Peter Lampl, an ex-grammar school boy committed to transforming the education system. I suppose this next quote makes the Sutton Trust founder another member of the "chippy" set:

Above all, he has a very American belief in meritocracy. "When I came back from the States," he recalls, "I went to a reunion at Reigate and discovered that it was now all fee-paying. I went to dinner at my old college, Corpus Christi, which used to have lots of ordinary Welsh kids, many of them my best friends. I was told they weren't coming through any more."

That was what led him to his first big educational venture. The ancient universities had traditionally waited for applicants to come to them, but Lampl bankrolled an Oxford summer school, with 64 of the brightest from state schools that had never previously sent anybody there. As one ally in the project put it, "he kept out the Volvo crowd" and insisted that none of the students' parents should be university graduates or even professional people. "They had been terrified of Oxford," Lampl recalls, "and this demystified it for them. Sixteen of them got places. I said to myself: boy, this is really working."

One footnote: I interviewed Lampl some years ago, when he was on the verge, as I recall, of putting his young children through school. His wife wanted them to go private, he hoped to use the state system. It sounds as if his wife won the argument:

He confesses, unsurprisingly, that all his three children attend fee-charging schools. "Everyone in my street sends their kids to independent schools. We'd be doing something very different otherwise. I'd love to send my kids to a socially diverse school, but such a thing is incredibly difficult to find."

Hypocrisy? No, sounds to me more like realism.

TO READ OR NOT TO READ?

Susan Hill, the writer, recently set out a reasonable, unpatronising case for not teaching all teenagers the classics. But would any sane school librarian turn down a free gift of three hundred classics from the Everyman Library? Quite a few have, in fact:

A letter from one expressed "dismay and sadness at the waste of money these books are ... even an Ofsted inspector asked me why I hadn't binned them. The paper jackets are ugly and unattractive, and the binding is dull and boring ... what is needed is the familiar paperback format with attractive jackets and abridged editions" ran another...

Most alarming, perhaps, was the pronouncement from one school that "the language in all but a few of them is beyond the comprehension of most of the students we see ... The harsh reality of our secondary schools is that children just don't have the skills to tackle such complex ideas in the written format."

One librarian is given the chance to answer back in the piece. ("Kids love action and adventure. They want books that excite them and are current.") She means well, but I wouldn't want to be one of her pupils.

THE OLD DAYS

Chris Dillow's memories of the Militant Tendency are a lot more positive than mine. I first came across the entryists when I was a 16 year-old member of the near-moribund branch of the Labour Party Young Socialists in my home town. Even to my unworldly eyes, it was obvious that the two Militant organizers who ran our weekly circus, muttering all the while about the need to build "cadres", regarded themselves as part of a wholly separate organization to the Labour Party. And even I could see that their talk about empowering the workers was a well-meaning mirage; real power, in their ideal world, would lie with the elect few. Although the clincher for me, really, was that the duo reminded me an awful lot of the crankier members of my Mum's former congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses. When I saw more of the Militant leaders later on TV, that impression just deepened.

BTW, I ought to have replied to James Hamilton's query about my response to Chris's forthright post on private schools. James rightly makes the point that it's unfair to look down on people just because they've been privately educated. Absolutely. I don't disagree. Public school Hooray Henrys are a different matter altogether, so part of me still sides with Chris. Besides, two of my sons have spent time in the private system, so I'm in no position to throw stones. (My wife and I decided it was worth bankrupting ourselves because we had both been to uninspiring comprehensives.)

DON'T TEACH THEM THE CLASSICS

The original reason I dropped in to author Susan Hill's blog just now was that I was trying to find something she'd said recently about W.H. Auden's centenary.  (She's so worried his work is neglected that she's thinking of hiring herself out at parties to recite As I Walked Out One Evening.)  Then I began browsing her thoughts on government plans to require younger teens to study George Eliot and Co:

I do wish the Education Secretary would spend a day with me going down my e-mails from desperate middle to lower grade 14 year olds. They are trying. They really are. And they are reading "I'm the King of the Castle" and "The Woman in Black", for heaven`s sake - not difficult reads. Not Dickens. Not George Eliot...  These young people are not natural readers. They have probably found learning to read at all hard work. They certainly do not come from a background where parents and friends read. And however they write to me, they are sincerely wanting help. They mean well (mostly.) If they are struggling with me, heaven help them and their teachers if they are forced to read Eliot and Dickens. Shakespeare is bad enough. I have no idea why they are being forced through him either...

A friend of mine teaches 14-16 year old bottom set Comprehensive boys angling. As a hobby. He is brilliant at it and they love it. One boy asked if he had any angling magazines and Chris took him some. He read his way through them, finger under the line, mouthing the words, glued to them because he was passionately interested in the subject. He said he had never read anything - ANYTHING - that he had enjoyed and found interesting until these magazines. Chris has now taken him some angling books and he is immersed in them. But he asked him what he did read and he said nothing, reading was so awful at school. What were they reading in class ? "Romeo and Juliet". Do you wonder if boys roam the streets ?

Please, please read the rest. Even if you don't agree with what she has to say, she's asking important questions about the meaning of education.

I.Q. REVISITED

Charles Murray returns to the intelligence debate. Not being bright enough to interpret all those figures that he deploys, I'll pass by in silence.

PS: Maybe Chris Dillow will get to grips with the issue before too long.

VOCAB

Some of the words that have cropped up in my son's latest 11-plus practice test: ire, ode, taupe, rowan, balk. He's nine. At his age I'd have been stumped, too.

Should anyone be practising for the exam in any case? No. But then, everyone gets coached. Everyone who can afford it, that is. I admit to being a total hypocrite on this one. I don't believe there was such a thing as 11-plus tutoring when I was a child. If there had been, my mother wouldn't have been able to afford it. Now I'm giving my son an edge over kids like me. How ironic.

NO SPIES ON CAMPUS

Snooping in the universities? A.C. Grayling says press stories about calls for surveillance of Islamists are simply overblown:

   So what is new about Ruth Kelly's remark that universities must inform the police if they responsibly suspect the commission or planning of crimes? Well, as it happens, there is indeed something new about it - namely, the way that media sensationalisation has translated the previous sentence into "universities have been told to spy on student extremists".

If Mrs Kelly or anyone else was really demanding that universities should spy - literally spy: that is, bug, open letters, snoop, keep surveillance upon - members of its student body, that would be a scandal.

NOTEBOOK

I knew everything about my friends' political and religious opinions, their love affairs, finances, homes, families, their taste in food and clothes and drink, but would have thought it indelicate to inquire what school they were reading. English literature was for women and foreigners, a new, disreputable school called Modern Greats (now dubbed P.P.E.) was for "publicists and politicians". Classical Mods and Greats was still pre-eminent in esteem; next to them Modern History and Law and Theology. Mathematicians were respected but were thought to be out of their proper milieu; they should have been at Cambridge. There was said to be a laboratory somewhere beyond Keble, but I never met anyone who dabbled there.

Evelyn Waugh, A Little Learning.

NOTEBOOK

[Roy] Jenkins is far too honest a critic to let either university - especially his own - get away completely free of stricture. Thus, in reporting that Balliol and All Souls ran the empire virtually unaided, he adds, devastatingly: "It is a little difficult not to comment that the main direction in which they ran it is into the ground." He confesses, too that Oxford, "though a crucial guardian" of "humanistic learning", is at its worst, "glib and flippant" - a university based on talking, rather than listening, "which has kept Britain well supplied with those good at the chattering occupations, such as defending the criminal classes, conducting television panels, and governing the country."

Walter Ellis, The Oxbridge Conspiracy.