One of the possible reasons people are put off voting - a key obsession here at X Marks The Box - is the way in which the vocabulary politicians use (or are forced to use) seems so at odds with that used by the rest of us.
Nicholas Winterton's rant about second-class carriages, in which he totally fails to get that most people don't have another option, is just one recent example of this. It's symptomatic of a deeper malaise.
One of the most frequent manifestations of this is politicians' abuse of the word "choice", which could all too frequently be replaced with the word "money" to give a clearer idea of what they actually mean.
"Choice" in education is a prime example. Politicians of all colours are guilty of spouting forth on this one. I might choose whether to have tea or coffee, or whether to have a Rich Tea biscuit or a Garibaldi. I don't "choose" my children's school in the same way.
Parental "choice" has proven to be an absolute nightmare, putting so much pressure on more popular schools that they are forced to use mobile classrooms to accommodate the overspill, and leaving the less "reputable" ones (to use odious estate-agent-speak) with tumbleweeds blowing between the rows of empty desks.
Most parents don't want "choice". Often they are presented with a good school, a mediocre school and a failing school, and the good school is already so over-subscribed that it has to turn away children with siblings there, or it is too far away by public transport to be a realistic option. Surely parents just want the school on their doorstep to be a good one. It's not rocket science. Indeed, X Marks the Box wonders whatever happened to just going to the school you live nearest to. This was what used to happen in the 1970s and 1980s - before the advent of the dreaded exam league tables, a blunt tool loathed by parents, children and teachers alike and loved only, it seems, by politicians.
What's depressing is how readily the electorate buys into this politician-speak, doesn't challenge it and even adopts it by stealth. Only this week, debaters on a well-known parenting site were resurrecting the allegation that "vitriol" is thrown at the children of those who have exercised the "choice" to use private education. This surely misses the point that it is not the children who are the target of the vitriol, but the smugly middle-class assumption that this expensive option is available to everyone?...
1 comment:
The underlying principle of all this seems to be an attempt to ascribe Darwinian principles of selection and differential reproduction to human invented organizations and institutions within society. Is it really appropriate to think of institutions as engaging in a competitive struggle for survival, and what can biological reproduction and extinction be mapped onto?
There seem to be some competing forces here. If schools can be analogized to individuals within a species there needs to be a sufficient population size in order to support variation and selection (parental choice) to take place, but this would seem to be at odds with traditional notions of efficient production, since evolution relies upon overproduction.
In other words, in order for choice to be applied successfully there needs to be a sufficiently large pool of options from which to choose. Efficiency would act in the opposite direction, tending to reduce the available choices down to only the most minimal set. In the ultimately efficient system there would be no choice possible, because every decision would be the optimal one.
Probably the biggest question would be one of what happens to "failed" schools. In the Darwinian paradigm they might be seeded from schools deemed more successful, perhaps with teachers from the successful schools moving into the failed ones in a manner intended to represent rebirth (reproduction of individuals with more favorable characteristics).
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