Parental Priorities.

In modern Britain, parents have some choice over which state school their child attends, and it troubles me when I read about the latest area of stress to which modern Britons subject themselves: parents obsessing manically over their school applications. It seems there are few lengths to which they won’t go in order to secure their offspring a place in a ‘better’ school, and there has been talk of prosecuting large numbers of them for giving false information or making fraudulent claims on the application form. Others will skin themselves to the bone to go one further and send their child to a fee-paying private school. Such is the mania for what is perceived as a ‘good education.’

I’m not denying the fact that a high level of education can be a useful tool in life, but I do think it needs to be put into perspective; and I think we need to be more broadminded in how we define the word education. Higher education, in particular, is the name of the game these days, even though we know that it is no guarantee of a person’s general capabilities or their qualities as a person. We also know that a great deal of what is taught as higher education bears little relevance to the inherent needs of the job market. It does for certain specialist career paths like the professions, but for most it is of little actual value. I strongly suspect that today’s drive for higher education has more to do with political expediency. We have created a society in which there are insufficient jobs to go round, and so the more we keep young people in education, the fewer there are being officially classed as ‘unemployed.’ I further suspect that the Machiavellian Tony Blair had this in mind when he made his famous ‘education, education, education’ speech: and it comes at a price.

We are creating a two-tier society, in which only those with degrees count. Those without formal qualifications are passed over as failures, even though many of them might well have qualities surpassing those of their paper-brandishing compatriots. So many jobs now require applicants to have a degree or a Higher National Diploma, when they used to ask for a modest attainment in secondary education, a suitable level of intelligence, and an aptitude for the job. Apart form the need to be computer literate, the core skills required by many jobs have hardly changed, and so the educational requirement is superfluous and self-important; we have simply devalued the currency of education. But having a good job is everything these days; it’s the only way that most people can expect to achieve a high standard of living. And therein lies the nub of the problem; the fact that modern culture increasingly encourages the view that worth is defined by what people have, rather than what they are. When parents cheat, lie and tear their hearts out to send their children to a ‘better’ school, they are pandering to that fact. What’s worse, they are conditioning their children to pander to it as well.

Parents have the power to change this. They can redefine education, and teach their children that worth is definable by a large range of criteria, not just the holding of a piece of paper. They can recognise that each child is an individual with his or her own needs and attributes, and help that child follow a life path geared to those needs and attributes rather than the dictates of the culture. Trying to force all children down an academic road is to allow oneself to be brainwashed by the god of materialism, and it is a form of child abuse.

I’m sure that many parents are well meaning in their attempts to secure what they see as an advantage for their children. Even so, I think they are misguided if they fail to see the wider implications of their actions. And I know from personal experience that some, maybe even many, parents are not guided by altruistic motives at all. There are plenty of parents who fail to understand the difference between parental guidance and parental control. Such sad individuals are simply unable to let the child take the lead in the matter of education, just as they are unable to let the child take the lead in anything. And there are others who have to see everything in terms of competition. They need to be able to say ‘my child attends a better school than yours.’ Do any of them realise, I wonder, the extent to which they are victimising their children? And if their offspring turns out to be strong-minded, and insists on taking their own road at some point, those same ‘caring’ parents feel a sense of betrayal. ‘We gave you everything money could buy,’ they say indignantly, ‘and this is how you repay us.’ Remember the classic Beatles track She’s Leaving Home? That song was written in 1966 or ’67. It was a perceptive and salutary injunction that long ago, and yet the young people who listened to it then have turned out even worse than their own parents.

I suppose all this further demonstrates the fact that people feel the need to follow the axioms dictated by the forces controlling the culture, and those forces dislike and discourage free thinking. It’s a subtle form of totalitarianism in which the children are the victims being trained to become the sheep of the next generation. I still hope that there will one day rise a generation of children who will lead us out of that syndrome.