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Academia Parenting Politics

The Greater Good (2)

September 3, 2008 33 Comments

Arabella Weir, whose leftist credentials have previously been noted, today shares her wisdom on parenting and education:

Assuming you have any choice at all, picking their first school is also an alarmingly revealing moment for anyone who considers themselves to be a good, responsible citizen.

Weir’s definition of a “good, responsible citizen” will become apparent in due course.

It is a time when you find yourself assaulted by all sorts of terrors, nerves and unanswerable questions, most of which are so unedifying you cannot believe you are thinking them. Suddenly you forget about everyone else; it is all about your baby and only your baby.

Some might think of that as where ideology collides with actual parenting.

When it was our turn to decide, my husband and I were in the happy financial position of being able to consider private schools. We did not contemplate that option for long. Neither of us was educated privately…

Actually, Ms Weir attended the hardly-rough-and-tumble Camden School for Girls, a voluntary aided school, whose alumnae include Emma Thompson and Eva Germaine Rimington Taylor. Arabella is, lest we forget, the daughter of former British ambassador Sir Michael Weir and not short of a bob.

…and most of the least socially and emotionally capable people I know went to posh schools. 

State schooling is, one might suppose, entirely free of disabling and alienating effects, being as it is so ideologically sound.

For us, then, it was a choice between the two local state primaries equidistant from our house. One is regarded as the Shangri-la of primaries, principally because it has an extraordinarily low number of disadvantaged kids despite being opposite a massive council estate. The other is much more representative of the area’s demographic. We chose the latter because we liked the school and because it felt like the right thing to do.

Here, the “right thing to do” has a sacrificial air and seems to mean trading educational opportunity – say, in terms of motivation, class size and a culture of learning – for an approved and “representative” social mix, i.e. one which involves mingling conspicuously with those deemed “disadvantaged”. Thus one’s leftist credentials can be seen by passers-by. Is this really about doing the right thing? Or is it just a matter of admiring one’s own socialist credibility?

Four years ago, following an unlucky combination of events, including the then headteacher’s departure, some disruptive building works and a fairly poor Ofsted report, the middle-class parents began to leave like rats from a sinking ship. At the very moment the school community was in greatest need of applied, dedicated parents and the enormous benefit their presence would contribute to halting the school’s further decline, they left.

For shame. Parents must make sacrifices, you hear? Not for their own children, of course, or for their peace of mind, but for the Greater Good.

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Written by: David

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In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.