Inequality in Education

by SIR RICHARD LIVINGSTONE

1

THIS is the age of a great social change. As a hundred and fifty years ago, in our own British fashion, we adapted to our needs and national genius the lessons of the French Revolution without bloodshed or civil war, so today we are doing in a humane way what Russia did in a ruthless way, and bringing in the century of the common man, by a revolution which inflicts a minimum of hardship and in principle is accepted by the great majority of the nation.

One of the commonest watchwords in this movement is equality. Naturally enough. For a salient feature of the age that we are leaving behind was inequality. We are still perhaps too much under its shadow to realize the extraordinary injustice of educational (to mention no other) inequality in the nineteenth century: it will hardly be credible to the future that before this century — and, indeed, in its early years — it was practically impossible for boys in the working classes, however

able, to reach the universities, though they were open to any boy from well-to-do homes who had enough wits to pass an elementary entrance test. In education, though not in the courts of justice, there was one law for the rich and another for the poor. A major task of this generation has been to attack in this field, as well as elsewhere, what is not merely inequality but injustice.

The first difficulty in our way is that equality in a full sense is obviously impossible to secure. Nature sees to that by the inequality with which she allots health and brains, strength of body, of mind, and of character; and these inequalities are deepened by the difference of home from home — one child has wise, affectionate, and unselfish parents, another’s life is unhelped or hindered or poisoned from the cradle by the weaknesses of the family into which he is born, and sometimes by the misfortune that he is born into no family at all.

Let me turn to another obvious inequality. We may remodel our habits and institutions to redress inequalities, but, as no one can escape entirely from his heredity, so no nation can escape entirely from its past. Things might be easier if we had a clean slate, but our slate is an old one; there is a great deal of writing on it and some of it is too valuable to rub out, even if erasure were possible. Take two examples. There is the boarding school, the best training-ground for citizenship in the world, and appreciated abroad if sometimes undervalued at home; but, owing to its expense, it is an institution for the few. Even if you made it possible by grants of money — as I believe that in time we shall — to recruit its pupils strictly by merit, it would cost too much to extend its opportunities to all. And even among boarding schools there are obvious inequalities — of tradition, of beauty of site and buildings.

The same inequalities appear between the older and the newer universities. I do not underrate the great work which the newer universities have done for the country — I have seen it at first hand — or their immense importance for the future. But, even if they are equipped with halls of residence and a tutorial system, you cannot give them the Bodleian and New College or Trinity and King’s; still less can you create there in a moment the traditions and buildings which are the slow growth of seven hundred years of history. Nor can you send more than a minority to Oxford and Cambridge. Inequality besets us on every side. If we were a nation of pedants, we should raze the boarding schools and the old universities to the ground and build afresh on a foundation of equality. But, even then, the ground would begin to subside here and rise there and again we should be defeated by inequality. Such are the difficulties against which we struggle, the limitations to complete success.

But our efforts after equality are exposed to dangers as well as to difficulties, and it is of these that I now wish to speak. It is natural and right that equality should be a watchword of today. But it is a dangerous word. J. S. Mill’s famous book on Liberty was published in 1859: today we need a new Mill to write a clear-sighted and balanced analysis and estimate of equality. For there is an obvious danger that, having leaned excessively to one side, we shall now by reaction lean with equal excess to the other. (Human beings rarely walk in the center of the road; they reel drunkenly from the ditch on one side to the ditch on the other.) The risk is greater because political power has passed to those who, having suffered from the inequality of the past, may naturally have their attention concentrated so exclusively on removing an evil which they know at first hand that they overlook other problems and perils.

2

IF WE wish to achieve success, two things are necessary: we must realize the limitations to equality, or we shall expose ourselves to the miscarriages and disappointments which attend all attempts to achieve the impossible; and — even more essential — we must remember that there is something no less important than equality. Of this I shall speak later.

Meanwhile, let me turn to some of the dangers which beset our campaign. It is evidently dangerous to say that things are equal which are not equal; to pretend, in the supposed interest of “democracy” and “social purpose,” that things which are quite different are the same. Thus, in order to raise the status of technical training, it is sometimes urged that it, no less than the humanities, can give a cultural education and that correspondingly the study of the humanities is no less vocational than is a course in carpentry or engineering. It is pointed out that “the classical curriculum in the form of the grammar-school tradition” served to train such professional classes as clergy, schoolmasters, lawyers, and that “the classical humanist tradition was deliberately given as an appropriate training for a vocation — that of rulers.”

From this undoubted truth, the ardent reformer sometimes proceeds to the conclusion that technical and humanistic studies are equally cultural and equally vocational, and that it is of little or no importance which we pursue. But he overlooks two important differences between humanistic and technical education. First, the vocational element in the one is much stronger than in the other. No doubt in a sense reading Homer or Virgil or Dante or Racine, or writing Latin prose, or studying higher mathematics or the Middle Ages does, or may, make a man fitter to be a lawyer or a civil servant. But it has much less bearing on and is far less deliberately directed to the student’s future occupation than the study of carpentry or of engineering. How many teachers or pupils in the humanistic studies ever think of the usefulness of these subjects to the future King’s Counsel or the Principal Secretary in a Government office, or of anything but the studies themselves, or, alas! the examination attached to them?

It is very different with technical education, whose bearing on the pupil’s future vocation is inevitably in sight at every turn. Technical studies are clearly vocational, and to a far greater degree than humanistic studies. Not that technical studies are not cultural at the same time; the training of eye and hand to their perfection is cultural, this kind of culture is of great importance, and one of the main educational advances of recent years is the recognition of its value. But it is a wholly different cultural training from one which introduces the pupil to the great masters of thought and imagination, helps him towards seeing the world through their eyes, and gives him at least a glimpse of the highest levels reached by the human mind; and it will not help education to confuse the two, or to fancy that one can replace the other or is in any way equivalent to it. Yet one sees the temptation to think so.

There are of necessity various types of education. There is a danger that some will be more highly regarded than others. Therefore, to avoid any sense of inferiority, let us tell ourselves that they are really all much the same and so secure “parity of esteem. ” That is the temptation. If we yield to it, we are suffering from a disease well known to psychiatrists and best avoided. I call this selfdeception for plausible motives; but, when we are tempted to it, we should do well to remember Bishop Butler’s words: “Things are what they are and their consequences will be what they will be. Why, then, should we wish to be deceived?”

I pass to a quite different and much more serious example of the tendency to cover up inequalities by ignoring them: the present Burnham Scale. The rates which it fixes for teachers in elementary schools are on the whole equitable but the maximum (£585) for secondary teachers (other than headmasters) is quite inadequate. One can recognize the service to education done by the institution of the Scale and the improvement in salaries due to its recent remodeling, and yet feel that, if it is left as it is, it will deal higher secondary education a blow which will be disastrous to it and to the nation. The quality of teaching in our best secondary schools has been in the past one of the strong features in our national system. It has been as high as that in any country in the world. This is due to various causes, but above all to the intellectual quality of the teachers.

Hitherto, the secondary school has competed for staff not unsuccessfully with the attractions of the civil service and the professions. In the future, as industry and commerce increasingly offer careers to graduates, it will have to face still more competition. It is essential that it should compete successfully. For to teach a sixth form requires high intellectual ability. The master is teaching the ablest boys in the school at a critical stage of their development; his brains should not be inferior to theirs. That means that, as far as possible, he should be the sort of person who in the university gets a first or good second class.

Now, to get such people you must compete, as I have said, with the attractions of the civil service, medicine, business, and other professions and careers. And to compete you must offer a salary not wholly out of touch with that which can be earned by able men in these occupations. Otherwise, you will find your sixth forms tend to be taught, partly by the small class for whom teaching is the only life worth living, partly by the rejects of better-paid careers. I believe the same holds true in the United States: the salaries are inadequate for those who ought to teach. The maximum salary payable to a secondary schoolmaster under the present Burnham Scale is not a salary either attractive or adequate to people of high intellectual ability.

It is no argument to say that the work of the nursery or elementary school is as important as that of the secondary teacher, and therefore that much difference of salary is out of place. The premise of the argument is ambiguous and the conclusion false. Of course all teaching work is important. It is also true in a hospital that the nurse’s work is of the utmost importance; but no one proposes paying the doctors and surgeons at the same scale as nurses. The plain fact is that it is more difficult to be a good doctor than a good nurse; fewer people are capable of the work; and, in order to secure them, as well as for other reasons, they are better paid.

So, too, without the least derogation to the importance of other teachers, it is easier to find first-rate elementary teachers than first-rate teachers of a sixth form. To do the latter work successfully demands not only more knowledge but more intellectual ability than to teach elementary classes. For sixth-form teaching you want the best brains you can get; and to get them you need to offer salaries not so wholly out of keeping with those offered to first-rate ability by the civil service and medicine and other occupations. Otherwise, the quality of the higher stages of secondary education will fall. We shall indeed have equality, but equality at a low level.

3

THERE is still another danger which attends our aim to create a democratic culture. We wish to get rid of the division of Britain into Disraeli’s “two nations,” to destroy the suspicions, jealousies, tensions, and injustices which privilege creates; to override differences of status and occupation by a common sympathy; to make the nation a band, if not of brothers, at least of first cousins. “Do not,” Plato asks, “the worst evils in a state arise from anything that tends to tear it asunder and destroy its unity? And is anything better than whatever tends to bind it together and make it one?” We wish to banish the sundering forces and make the binding ones supreme. We ought to be content with nothing less than this, and education is the chief instrument for achieving it. This ideal has given birth to the idea of the multilateral school and the common school, and probably is dimly at the bottom of the notion that different kinds of education should be called by different names.

But here, too, there are grave dangers. For instance, we risk making great mistakes if we judge studies, not on their own merits, but on their supposed congruity or incongruity with a common culture. May I venture to criticize an honored name to whom education and teachers owe much? Sir Fred Clarke, in his book, Education and Social Change, insists that the classical curriculum must “Jose its place of predominance” because of its irrelevance to what he calls a “common culture.”

I will not stress the inaccuracy of the notion that the classics hold a predominant place in higher education, further than to remark that in the Higher Certificate Examination in 1940 (the last year for which I happen to have the figures) less than one fifth of the candidates offered Latin and less than one seventeenth offered Greek. I will not ask whether the study of the people which gave birth to liberal democracy, which came far nearer to a civilized democracy than either we or America have yet got, and in whose literature is written the finest description of its ideal, is irrelevant to the education of a democratic people.

But I wish very strongly to object to such a criterion for settling the place of Latin and Greek or any other subject in education. There is only one proper criterion; not whether the majority of the nation or of its secondary-school pupils can or will learn them, but whether they afford, or do not afford, the best education for those fit to learn them. If Greek and Latin are among the great things of the world, give them to as many people as are capable of receiving them; if they are not, get rid of them. But do not reduce their place in education because they are studies which only a minority can master.

In the so-called common school, I see a similar risk of sacrificing the first-rate and accepting the lower intellectual and cultural levels in the supposed interests of a democratic civilization. When I use the phrase “common school,” I have in mind a secondary school on the lines of the American public school, containing pupils following courses in the different types of secondary education. Now there are aspects of American education which one cannot admire too much — notably its determination to spread higher education widely and to leave no class untouched by it. Here they have done much better than we.

But in other respects American education is decidedly inferior to our own; and one point in which it is inferior is in its secondary school. The attempt to introduce a common school on American lines seems to me an example of the enthusiasm with which human beings are apt to embrace the errors of their neighbors because they know little about them. It is Aladdin’s error: the new lamp, of which we know little, looks so beautiful.

If you wish to read criticism of the American public school by an American, you will find one in the Carnegie Foundation Report for 1927 on “The Quality of the Educational Process in the United States and Europe.” The writer compares secondary education in the United States, Britain, France, and Germany, and comes to the conclusion that, in respect of quality, the American system is the least satisfactory of all. Briefly, his complaints of it are that the American schools tend to be too big; that they are “sentimentally inclusive” and not, like secondary schools in Europe, “rigidly selective”; that much of the teaching staff is inferior in quality; and that the curriculum consists of a variety of subjects not properly integrated. I would draw attention to the fact that some of our reformers are anxious to introduce at least three of these four defects into our system: the multilateral school runs to excessive size; the common school turns its back on rigid selection and may be described as “sentimentally inclusive”; while the existing Burnham Scale tends to a lower intellectual quality in the secondary-school teacher.

You will find similar criticisms of the American public school in one of the first-rate books on education, Dr. Abraham Flexner’s Universities — American, English, German. Dr. Flexner does not spare the defects in the British system, but he is even severer upon his own country. When he speaks of the forces which “make for standardization and uniformity at a relatively low spiritual level” we recognize a danger of our own democracy. When he says that the English undergraduate is “undeniably more mature, better trained, more highly selected, and even so a year younger than his American counterpart,” we have an important testimony to our secondary system. And the following words of Professor I. L. Kandel, of Teachers College, Columbia University, quoted by Flexner, are a warning against the multilateral school. “Foreign countries have well-defined notions of what constitutes secondary education and we ought to take the trouble to understand why this type of education is separated from vocational and technical education. The attempt to include in one institution every type of educational activity for adolescent pupils accounts for the failure to attain thoroughness in any one of them.”

I said earlier that, if we are to make a democratic civilization, we must remember the need for something no less important than equality. That something is quality: and by quality I mean the first-rate — in thought, imagination, knowledge, and action. In Matthew Arnold’s words — and he criticized the inequality of his age trenchantly — we ought to know the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespective of practice, politics, and everything of the kind, and to value knowledge and thought as they approach this best, without the intrusion of any other considerations whatever. This, he continues, is an “instinct for which there is little original sympathy in the practical English Nature.” But it is necessary that we should have sympathy with it, and equalitarians are apt to ignore the need. Apart from character and conduct (the most important field of all) where the first-rate can be achieved by all, it is only within the reach of a minority.

4

YET the value and virtue of national life depend largely on that minority developing to the full their natural gifts, reaching out to and achieving the first-rate. The more of the first-rate a nation has in art, thought, and action — in its thinkers and scientists, its artists, architects and musicians, its statesmen and administrators — the richer will be its life. Harmony is a greater thing than unison. Ignore quality, neglect it, fail to encourage and sustain it, and the whole people will suffer. Democracy at the level of average tastes and abilities of a people is democracy at a low level: you can see it in the films and the popular newspapers of today. It is easy to attain but not worth attaining: it may silence criticism and complacently applaud itself, but it has no value to the contemporary world and no significance for the future. This is the kind of democracy that, unless we take care, we may create, but it is not the kind that we ought to create.

No, let us give our abler pupils the fullest chance to develop their gifts and not keep them back because they are abler than the average, or “ blanket intellectual differences under the same general formula.” If we do this, we shall only substitute a fresh kind of injustice for the old and commit, in a new form, our old sin — that of denying human beings the chance to make the best of their capacities. If we do not give full opportunity to those “minds that give promise of making larger return in their contribution to the common welfare,” we shall do an injustice to the abler pupil and we shall impoverish the nation, and by setting up a false ideal of democracy we shall discredit democracy itself.

But, it will be objected, shall we not then be creating an elite? To that I should reply in Napoleon’s words, “Aristocracy always exists. Destroy it in the nobility, and it removes itself immediately to the rich and powerful houses of the middle class. Destroy it in these, and it survives and takes refuge with the leaders of the workshops and the people.” And education fosters aristocracy in the sense in which Napoleon used the word. So far from leveling and equalizing, it develops inequalities. As Ruskin said in Time and Tide: —

The law about education which is sorrowfullest to vulgar pride is this: that, as our work proceeds, every hour throws us farther behind the greater men with whom we began on equal terms. Two children go to school hand in hand, and spell for half-an-hour over the same page. Through all their lives, never shall they spell from the same page more. One is presently a page ahead — two pages, ten pages — and evermore, though each toils equally, the interval enlarges: at birth, nothing; at death, infinite.

You cannot help it. You can indeed cramp or even maim ability, but you cannot destroy it — and if you could, it would be disastrous for the nation. A wise country makes the most of all the ability that it possesses — it is a limited quantity — and helps it to reach its full stature, so that it may serve the common good. The strength of this country in the past has largely been that, through the high quality of its secondary and university education, it has made the most of some of its ability; its weakness is that it did not give the opportunities of higher education to ability outside a limited class, and that it did very little for the education of the mass of the people.

But, it will be objected, if you have an elite, a natural (not an artificial) aristocracy, will you not get privilege, a divided nation, arrogance in those who have rich endowments of intellect, a sense of inferiority in those who have not — the very evils which we are anxious to prevent?

To this, I would reply that these evils are not to be eradicated by multilateral or by common schools or by diminishing classical studies. Group all your pupils in a single school and (if he is that sort of person) the athlete will still look down on the unathletic, the clever boy despise the stupid. Snobbery is not expelled by artificial means; the diseases of human nature cannot be cured by superficial treatment. We must cut deeper to extirpate them.

There is only one cure: to develop humility in the snob, and self-respect both in him and in his victim. Then you will have a real change of heart, and that is what we need; and to do this is surely within the power and duty of the teacher. The whole process of education is a natural training in humility: the more we learn, the more conscious we must be of our ignorance; and if our temperament still remains arrogant, we may sometimes chasten ourselves by reflecting what heavenly spirits must think of the struggling virtues and limping intelligence of the best man or woman and wonder whether we are good enough to despise others. In any case, one lesson which should be planted in the mind of every child is respect for human beings as human beings. It will have the strongest roots if it grows from the belief that all men and women are made in the image of God.

Self-respect is, perhaps, a more difficult virtue. It is not the same as self-satisfaction, still less as conceit or pride. Fortunately, it is common, and in certain occupations it seems automatic. One can see an example of it every time we travel by train. The porters, guards, and inspectors have no feelings of inferiority or suspicions that the passengers may regard them as inferior. Such ideas do not occur to their minds. I suppose the explanation is that they know their work and do it, in the main, conscientiously. No doubt it helps that they are members of a great service and have a certain measure of authority and the duty of helping others. Gardening is another occupation of which self-respect is a general mark — again, because the gardener knows his work and generally does it well, not primarily for the sake of his pay but for its own sake. One could, of course, multiply examples.

In short, I am inclined to think that the roots of self-respect lie in work done to the best of a man’s abilities; and this achievement lies within the power of all. If so, having trained their pupils to respect human beings as human beings, teachers should also train them in the habit of concentrating on doing well the work which comes to their hand, without looking over their shoulders to see whether their neighbors are admiring or despising them. Ruskin has summed the matter up in a few words which are worth remembering when there is talk of “parity of esteem”: —

All professions should be liberal, and there should be less pride felt in peculiarity of employment and more in excellence of achievement.