Nick Hillman, HEPI’s Director, takes a look at three thought-provoking books covering education that were published this year.
All must have prizes – Mania by Lionel Shriver
The novel Mania by Lionel Shriver imagines a world in which twenty-first century US life came to be the opposite of a meritocracy. Words like ‘dumb’ and ‘stupid’ and ‘dopey’ are banned. The term ‘brain-vain’ takes root, as an insult for those who won’t accept the new mantra of Mental Parity, which regards everyone as equally wise.
This new Weltanschauung infects the UK too. Leave beats Remain 9:1, after Remainers offend the new sensibilities by portraying departing the EU as stupid. Meanwhile, Russia and China continue with ‘smartist policies’, strengthening their power.
When it comes to higher education, Mental Parity means a free-for-all for students, whose opposition to IQ tests is shown by their IQuit badges. Meanwhile, academics must walk on eggshells, avoiding numerous texts and tailoring their language appropriately. The Age of Enlightenment is rewritten as the Age of Arrogance.
The main character, an academic called Pearson, complains that, in this alternative world, ‘the purpose of university is to test the faculty and not the students.’ The collapse in standards pleases the lazy but applications from ambitious international students plummet, leaving universities in financial peril.
Pearson intentionally walks into trouble by assigning Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot to her students and later telling them, ‘We’re retards! Mental Parity is retarded, and everyone who’s gone along with it is retarded, and that includes me’. Her life thereafter spins out of control. She loses her job, her marriage, her home, her reputation and one of her children. Her two older children, who like their mother cannot abide the new strictures, initially go into hiding but re-emerge later living in a pro-intellectual commune.
The main sub-plot, which serves to knit the story together, is about the break up of Pearson’s relationship with her best friend, Emory, a naïve and easily swayed journalist. Emory blows with the wind – initially sceptical of Mental Parity, she then becomes a firm advocate in her role as a CNN presenter. Later, she reconciles herself to what comes after Mental Parity. It’s all a bit reminiscent of the way the artist Jacques-Louis David won the confidence first of the Bourbons, then Robespierre, then Napoleon.
At the end of the book, set in the second half of the 2020s, the whole edifice comes crashing down, prompted by the triumph of ignorance leading to products, including vaccines, that actively harm. Meritocracy takes root once again. But Pearson is not much happier than before as IQ tests come to dominate like never before, with results appearing for example in the corner of every credit card and even becoming a factor in determining whether people can vote or stand for public office. The critique of this new world is reminiscent of Michael Young’s 1958 book, The Rise of the Meritocracy.
Pearson also comes to believe the new situation pays too little notice to students’ backgrounds, including those who suffered thanks to the low quality of schooling during the Mental Parity mania. (Are there lessons for those who suffered during COVID here?)
The new society, we are told, has even started to ‘milk genetically intelligent men like cows.’ Given the new era is so far from perfect, Pearson concludes, ‘The more I face into the prevailing winds, the more I feel like myself.’ (Perhaps that might make for a good think-tank motto one day?!)
Reviews of the book suggest it has been welcomed on the right and condemned on the left, as with pretty much anything by Lionel Shriver. But its critiques of both meritocracy and the opposite of meritocracy make this a more interesting and thought-provoking book than this binary split suggests, even if the words do not always leap off the page – making it at times a fascinating read more than an enjoyable one.
Ending ‘the absurdity of current practice’ – Exam Nation by Sammy Wright
Exam Nation: why our obsession with grades fails everyone and a better way to think about school by Sammy Wright recounts a journey through the system of compulsory education. The author, who is a headteacher (and English teacher) in Sunderland and who sat on the Social Mobility Commission from 2018 to 2021, has travelled around the country asking pupils in different types of secondary education what school is for and various related questions.
Wright mixes the answers, which are typically career focused, with his own experiences and then concludes the current set up of state schools doesn’t help enough pupils realise their full potential. The book will doubtless be on Professor Becky Francis’s Christmas list, as all the main themes discussed at length are highly relevant to the Curriculum and Assessment Review, which she is currently overseeing.
The chapters are interesting in a meandering sort of way – it’s perhaps a book to read over the break with a mince pie and a glass of mulled wine by your side. But the author doesn’t always know how to interpret what he is told and the policy conclusions squeezed in to the last few pages come across as a little bizarre.
For example, Wright, who was privately educated, pushes two ideas that seem (at least to me) in tension with one another, namely that (i) grammar schools must be abolished to avoid ‘creeping segregation’ and (ii) that independent schools should be left alone because ‘They are a valid part of the landscape.’
Perhaps it’s possible to reconcile such seemingly irreconcilable ideas – after all, Wright is far from the first person to hold these stances simultaneously. But as there is only one sentence on the former (closing grammars) and one short paragraph on the latter (protecting private schools), I was left scratching my head.
Wright also recommends a new exam (known as a Passport) to replace GCSEs. This would be taken a year earlier than GCSEs (in Year 10), with a wholly unexamined year replacing the current Year 11, slotting in between the Passport and starting A-Levels or apprenticeships or other options. The goal of this untested – and untesting – year is, we are told, to stop ‘the absurdity of current practice’, such as the fact that ‘changing A-level choices means an extra year at school’. In other words, everyone should have a year where anything goes because a small proportion of people currently make sub-optimal choices and others aren’t quite sure yet what they want to do. I wasn’t convinced but, more importantly, I doubt the Treasury will be.
Wright is a fan of all-through schools and even argues ‘All schools should have fully funded programmes for working with children and families’ from birth up to age 21. He sees schools at their best when they are so rooted in their communities that they become an extension of the family as well as of social services. So schools should provide even for young people not yet of school age as well as for adults above school age.
If schools have tended to be places where you face a clear break when you leave and where former pupils who hang around after leaving are seen as a little odd, in this new model everyone would be encouraged to stick around. It sounds horrendous to me, as it seems to envisage school as an institution you cannot wholly escape until you reach your 20s, by which time the next stage of your life should have fully begun.
Perhaps it is only natural for schools to want to extend their reach as the birthrate falls and perhaps extending kidulthood would benefit some, but I worry it would infantilise more. It is already too hard for young adults to take flight and, even if Wright is trying to help them, I’m not sure we should be looking for new ways to pull them back.
By assuming we should all be associated with just one institution for the first two-and-a-bit decades of our lives, Wright’s model also tries to minimise those crucial transition points that give young people a chance to reinvent themselves, to change direction, to forge new relationships, to settle with a new tribe and so on. Don’t people sometimes need to be given choices and allowed to go their own way? As adults, we can change jobs, even professions, so why should younger people be pressured to follow a single track throughout their entire period of compulsory education and beyond?
The book ends with a plea to kill Key Stage 2 SATs and to replace them with an unspecified new assessment that would have a ‘modicum of joy in the construction of the test.’ Joy is always good, but I spent six years on the Board of the National Foundation for Educational Research, which specialises in tests for primary school pupils, and I think even their happiest experts might struggle to work out how to inject joy into them.
The data from this proposed new assessment would ‘be held anonymously’, as ‘there’s no reason for it to be to linked to specific children.’ Nonetheless, despite this breaking of the link between the data and individuals, the new test would concurrently have the effect of ‘forcing schools to look at the child’. It is quite possible I’m being unfair or missing something, but I’d have understood this radical and vague idea better if it too had been given more room to breathe than the nine lines of text it gets.
So, in the end, despite the author’s evident enthusiasm for getting the best from all pupils, it’s a frustrating book that provides much food for thought but few robust answers. Nonetheless, it does provide a fascinating zigzagging trot through the state of state-funded schools throughout England today. And Wright’s passion for education left me thinking I wish he was one of my own kids’ teachers, which is perhaps the highest accolade anyone can give a teacher.
Avoiding diversity – Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell is a long-time observer of higher education, particularly when it comes to critiquing university league tables. In his new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point, he returns to the topic that made him famous: the point where things change, where they tip over from one situation to another. This time, Gladwell has developed that idea by focusing on the ‘Magic Third’.
If you want to change an organisation’s culture, it is not enough to have just 10% or even 20% of people who personify the difference; instead, the changemakers need to approach one-third. So for example, it is very hard to be the only woman on a company Board of nine people; you are likely to stand out but also to be simultaneously invisible in terms of impact (as others will take credit for your ideas), and you’ll need to outperform to get a look in. But if there are three women, say, you can go from having a disproportionately low impact to a disproportionately high one. That is the idea of the Magic Third.
Once a group reaches one-third, Gladwell shows, it can quickly disrupt any preceding monoculture and even quickly become the dominant influence. This reality can prompt people to act defensively by setting limits on trends once they are underway. Gladwell’s uncomfortable historical examples include communities setting limits on the presence of different ethnic groups to block any one group displacing another – for example, in a single neighbourhood. (Look up Lawrence Tract, named after a Black Stanford student, to find out more about this.)
What’s this got to do with higher education you may well ask. Gladwell includes a chapter on the Harvard Women’s Rugby Team, which he says exists only as a direct result of another uncomfortable historical fact: the limits Harvard put on the number of Jewish students in the interwar period. These limits were designed not to shut out all Jewish students, but to limit their number so that the proportion stayed a long way below one-third. As a result, Harvard came to rely on ‘more subjective criteria’ than exam results to shape the student body: ‘The admissions office was given broad leeway to decide who did or did not get in.’
Or to put it another way, Harvard adopted ‘under-the-table admissions games with athletes, legacies and donors’ kids.’
These practices came to affect all groups. At Caltech, which didn’t try the same tactics to control who gets in, the proportion of people with Asian heritage in the student body gradually rose to around one-half, while ‘The proportion of Asians at Harvard stayed basically the same for years. In fact, the proportion of everyone at Harvard stayed basically the same.’
All this, according to Gladwell, explains the emergence of Harvard’s Women’s Rugby Team. The sport, Gladwell says, was ‘tailor-made for a little bit of extra social engineering.’ The team was ‘upper-middle-class’ and ‘overwhelmingly white.’ So finding female rugby players was an acceptable form of affirmative action even as others failed key legal tests:
instead of admitting underprivileged students with lower academic credentials, athletic affirmative action admits privileged students with lower academic credentials. It is only the first kind of affirmative action, however, that universities were unwilling to defend. And only the first kind it was considered so controversial that it ended up before the Supreme Court.
For me, the story also confirms a general truth in university admissions: if you alter the rules of the game, the upper-middle class will generally tweak their behaviour to ensure they continue to thrive. (This is one reason why I’m not keen on student number caps, as they guarantee university entrance is a zero-sum game, which can boost the most powerful relative to others.)
Perhaps, if Gladwell is right, then Harvard’s wiliness here is something UK policymakers and regulators should recall as they continue to prepare the package of reforms outlined in Bridget Phillipson’s recent letter to vice-chancellors. That says, ‘We will expect our higher education providers to: Play a stronger role in expanding access and improving outcomes for disadvantaged students.’
In fact, we should all perhaps spend any idle moments over the festive break thinking about how best to respond to, shape and deliver the Secretary of State’s five-point plan that could well dominate higher education policy in the first half of 2025.
Merry Christmas!