http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/comment/articles/2010-10/11/gq-comment-tony-parsons-state-private-grammar-schools-education

but anyways — i don’t want to hijack your blog and i mostly agree with you, perhaps i am more skeptical about the role of rationality here.

As a first step on a (political) definition, I’d highlight that pragmatism doesn’t mean doing what is easiest to do, but means judging ideas and policies based on what they actually involve in practice. So, for example, PFI schemes are not pragmatic, even though they are politically easy to achieve (both the Labour party and the Conservatives are more or less in favour of privatisation, and the corporate media likewise), and you can show that in practice they are inefficient and unjust in many ways. That’s enough to make a pragmatic case against them.

so my problem with the notion of pragmatic is that it is not abstractly defined. what is possible is conditioned by ideas. you might even say that the current labour party is what happens when the left becomes pragmatic. i’m pretty sure that is how they see themselves.

I agree on (a), although I guess that often the choice is being made when the child is much younger.

I have to confess I have mixed feelings on symbolic actions. Take voting for example: on the one hand it really makes no difference for a particular individual if they vote or not – it won’t change anything (except in the highly improbable case that the election is decided by one vote). However, if everyone thought like that nobody would vote and then would have a big effect. So maybe the symbolic act means the necessity of a slight private irrationality in support of a public rationality? But I haven’t sorted that out in my head. What is the trade-off here? How much private irrationality should people be expected to indulge in? What is reasonable / possible?

In any case, it’s true that the existence of private schools allow the state schools to be worse as you say, but this doesn’t seem to be related to the rest of your point in (b) about symbolic acts. The whole point is whether or not it’s acceptable to send your children to private school even though you think private schools ought to be abolished.

I agree that the offsetting your schooling emissions idea is not good on reflection, although possibly not for the same reasons as you. Rather, I just think that that money could probably be better spent elsewhere. Ultimately, I think it’s possible to be political, to be radical even, based purely on pragmatic reasoning. Perhaps we could go further and say that ceding the pragmatist point of view to the political right may actually doom the left, because most people are basically pragmatic and not ideological?

Point (c) is interesting. Basically you’re saying that there is an extra signalling mechanism that I hadn’t considered: that the politician in question wants / is happy to have their children grow up amongst the haves, sharing their preconceptions / etc. In other words, it tells you something about what they want their children to be, and not just about what advantages they want their children to have. That’s a fair point, and I’d say it was definitely something that’s worth taking into account then, but still not enough to justify the instant rejection of anyone who has sent their children to private school.

3 comments.

(a) a perspective i feel is hardly ever given voice in this discussion is that of the `child’. when my mother and sister moved back to london (she was 16), my sister refused point blank to go to a private school for 6th form. she went to state school, albeit one that was not particularly nearby, and everything went very well and it’s clear now that this was a good decision. i wonder what diane abbot’s children think.

(b) of the arguments you discuss, it seems clear the most serious is symbolic, which perhaps you don’t give enough space. unlike many other things a parent might or might not do in support of a child, the choice of schooling also has a public dimension and is a political act (even for non-politicians). independently of other circumstances, sending a child to a private school legitimises the existence of such schools, ultimately allowing state schools to be worse because the (upper?) middle class will opt out.

the idea that you can `offset your schooling emissions’ via charities precisely misses this symbolic dimension, by reducing the role of a parent to that of a concerned consumer, rather than a political actor. i might say that it is this disappearance of politics (in the uk/us at least) that means that we are all screwed.

(c) a dimension you don’t mention: what is the function of schools? while intellectual development is clearly one, is there a better place where people might actually enter into (potentially genuine) contact with people from significantly different backgrounds? some people on the left might give particular weight to this second function of schools and might want their representatives to share this vision. i.e. one might ask does why does diane abbot want her children to grow up already emotionally embedded within the jet set (even if they maintain their presumed leftwing politics intellectually speaking).

the concern that society is drifting (back?) into two very disconnected units related only by the fact that one groups hires the labour of the others is real and reasonable. the concern that even supposed left politicians are (increasingly) under a sort of imaginative and intellectual slavery of the point of view of the `haves’ is also rather reasonable. a choice of school has a political dimension that may suggest where the parent politician stands on these two issues.