The “Michael Gove mystery” is how the same politician can
be so loathed and so admired at the same time. The answer to the mystery lies
in the educational apartheid between the private and state sectors, which has
far greater importance in the UK than in any other country in Europe.
In the UK, 7% of children attend private schools and 93%
attend state schools. However the products of private schools go on to dominate
those parts of society that have power and influence over the rest.
Gove is widely loathed by those who work in state schools
and by those whose children and grandchildren go to those schools. Yesterday,
normally moderate head teachers passed a motion of no confidence and heckled
him.
The state education system Gove took over in 2010 was not
perfect but it was certainly not broken as it had been in 1997 after the last
Tory government. Gove has pushed through
a raft of harmful policies, which I have mostly written about before. He has
pushed much of the state system into near-crisis.
Gove has denigrated, bullied and blustered. He has relied
on a tiny coterie of advisers and tends not to engage in rational argument with
those who oppose him but rather to subject them to ad hominem attacks by calling them “Trotskyites” or “the enemies of
promise” or the like, in a chilling echo of the tactics of Senator Joe
McCarthy.
But yet, Gove is admired and regarded as a leading
contender for the leadership of a post-Cameron Tory party. He is viewed as one
of the few political stars in the Cabinet.
Gove’s perceived success reveals much about power in the
UK. The elite – that is to say the “people who matter” - do not use the state
education system and often do not know well anyone who does. They are full of
admiration for Gove.
It is a deeply held belief for many who use the private education
system that the state system is self-evidently inferior (they do not consider
that the private system’s “success” might be primarily due to the fact that the
playing field is not level but has been sharply tipped in its favour). 90% of
the press is right wing and carries frequent articles running down the state
system written by journalists who don’t use it, for editors who don’t use it,
employed by proprietors who don’t use it. The BBC and the Guardian do not
provide much balance. Their editors and commentators tend to be members of the
7% private school elite too.
Our educational apartheid causes immeasurable harm to our
country. Our elite are profoundly ignorant of the system that educates 93% of
the population. One consequence of that is they have no idea how disastrous a
minister Michael Gove is. They may just make him leader.
No. 310
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