Education and inequality…

One of the problems with private education and the privatisation more broadly of education are the way in which they embed inequality. Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Analysis podcast this week Yale University Professor Jacob Hacker, also known as the person who coined the phrase predistribution, now very much in vogue with the British Labour Party, described in two short paragraphs precisely what the outcomes of this are…

Over the last generation as our society has become more unequal (both in the US and UK) we have seen essentially a privatisation of opportunity in the US. That is high income affluent citizens are pouring more and more money into their children from college education to early childhood intervention at the beginning and that means that inequality is becoming self-reproducing in these societies.

So what we have seen over the last generation is that in societies with higher inequality it looks as if inequality of opportunity has also increased.

It’s a very useful podcast on this topic. There’s the following.

…It is one thing to have a society where there’s a gap between rich and poor and there’s a high level of mobility but another to have a society in which it looks increasingly as if the rich are able to have advantages for themselves and their children and those who are not in the pinnacles of the economy are really shut out.

And his analysis of the broad outlines of the processes at work have dismal implications for the future.

He makes one other point that is worth reflecting on, particularly in this polity where so often the discussion revolves around the trope that primary education should get the focus and part of that necessitates increased fees or loans at third level.

As to the first contention he agrees, suggesting that pre-k (pre-kindergarten) and primary education is crucial. But, and this is an interesting twist, he follows that up immediately by suggesting that…

….college education… if the college degree is increasingly what the high school degree used to be, the entry ticket into the middle class [US definition of same], I can say confidently that we’re failing to uphold the ability of everyone to have access to that entry ticket.

The reasons for that failure?

Britain may be doing better but what I see in the US and I think we’re seeing more and more across the world is again that that prerequisite of opportunity is being privatised, more and more the cost of education being borne by loans, state universities in the US are incredibly cash-strapped.

He continues:

…so what we’re basically seeing is a stark disparity. The highest scoring students in the US from lower income families are less likely to complete college than the lowest scoring students from higher income families.

That is a genuinely worrying statistic.

Hacker’s position is centre left and he’s not at all coy about seeking to shore up the current dispensation, but his instincts are clearly leftwards with a strong emphasis on equality, workers rights and so on.

The question is what kind of a society do we want to live in? Do we want to live in a society where the very well off are cosmopolitans who can jet from one place to another whereas more and more middle class workers are constrained squeezed worried disenchanted, spectators at the game of democracy which is increasingly played out with big dollars and broken political institutions…

And while he places too much emphasis, in my reckoning, on civil society he’s some worrying thoughts about living in a post-labour (in the sense of labour unions) society and new forms, or rather the lack of them, of organising labour.

A lot to think about there.