A Defence of Private Schools

By Angus Kennedy

Kevin Rooney wants to start a fight to ban private schools (1)(2). To give every child
an Eton. To storm the Bastilles of private education and appropriate them in the
name of social justice. To abolish them, and then invade them. Rooney seems to
have a real love-hate relationship with private education. Arguing that all children ‘are
born with the potential to achieve great things’ he wants to remove the inequalities of
personal wealth that gives only one child in many the educational opportunities they
all deserve. While I support the idea that a society can and should strive to provide a
truly excellent Eton-standard education for all, I draw back at the idea of banning
private schools in particular and, more broadly, at the view that inequalities of wealth
are the real problem we face today: especially with respect to education.

Firstly, I should put my cards on the table and say that I was privately educated in
secondary school. Thanks to the sacrifice of a single mother working for a charity, I
got to learn Latin and Greek at school—and go to Oxford to study classics.
Supporting an inspiring slogan like ‘Etons for all’, however, should not be couched in
terms of arguing for ‘equality of opportunity’ for children with respect to education.
Right now, this can have no substance other than effectively calling on the state to
intervene to override, to alleviate, to apologise for, the normal operation of the
market. At a time when the tendency of the state is towards increasing intervention
into our basic freedoms, attacking the limitations of the market may not be as
progressive as it sounds.

When Rooney argues for putting ‘higher quality of education for the wealthy’
on the table, this can only play out one way: removing it from the wealthy.
Which is to deny the right of some people to set up a business (or in many
cases a charity) that charges a fee for services—in this case, a high quality
education. It means denying other adults the right to spend their money on
such services. It is not clear why they should lose the freedom to spend and
consume as they see fit. Because they are being selfish? Failing in civic
responsibility, is the state to take them over its knee? In the name of ‘equality’, the
right to exchange goods freely in the marketplace—the fundamental bedrock of
equality in a capitalist society—is to be abolished. So why stop there? Private music
teachers? Go whistle. Private language tutors? Au revoir. Private health-care? Join
the waiting list.

This is the equality politics of ‘that’s not fair’. In a society so anti-consumption, so

accepting of the limits to growth, the cry of why cannot I have what he has—
aspirational on the face of it—is no sooner uttered than it turns into the envious whine
of if ‘I cannot have it, then neither will he.’ This is—beneath the stirring rhetoric—a
tacit acceptance of our society’s failure to provide excellent universal education for
all. It does not speak to raising up the level of education to the best examples we
have on offer. It does not offer us all more Etons. In fact, it serves to undermine our
equality before the law.

You do not have to believe that private schools are right and good to be
opposed to calls for the state to ban them. That is, to dismantle private
institutions and remove their freedom to choose which pupils to take. This is to
attack fundamental freedoms (of association, or not to associate) which are
based on the ability to discriminate: we will only take children who are Catholic
or Muslim; or wealthy; or good at rugby; or, indeed, on their merit. These are all
legitimate criteria for a private institution. It is that ability to discriminate that makes
private schools independent in a powerful sense. One of the good things about
private schools is their independence from more than minimal state interference.
They are normally free of Ofsted inspections, for example, one of the most
destructive elements of contemporary education. They do not have to follow the
national curriculum. They are free to educate as they see fit, they are free to exclude
pupils as they see fit, they are free to reject worthless qualifications as they see fit.
They are judged on their results by the market and trust me that—whatever the
limitations and they are many—of the market, they are as nothing compared to those
of Ofsted. The market at least reflects in some sense our social relations, and has
more humanity in it than the mentality of government box-ticking.

We should also be aware that banning private schools would tie in nicely into a
lot of policy circle initiatives gaining influence at the moment. When James
Purnell MP, director of the Open Left Project, says that ‘Labour has sometimes
been too hands off with the market and too hands on with the state’, he is
seeking to intervene against market outcomes that he does not like, yes, but he
is also giving up on the ability of the market to deliver higher incomes and
prosperity for us all—in the context of a complete absence of any alternative to
the market. In this context, that means: Labour has poured resources into state
education and the only reason it can think of that they are not delivering the
results is because some 7% of rich kids are so distorting the playing field that
they deserve to be handicapped for a change.

As independent institutions, private schools, much like the Catholic Church, are a
grave source of concern for those who monitor and graph inequality. They appear as
dinosaur bastions, unacceptably elitist throwbacks, who stubbornly insist on old-
fashioned teaching instead of child-centered learning. They are seen as exclusive,
discriminatory, hierarchical, and old-fashioned. Such language is used to present
attacks on independent institutions in the name of the excluded ‘victims’ of their
unacceptable prejudice. But we are not made victims by not going to public school.
Nor would the Chinese and Indian students who increasingly attend them be better
off were they denied entry. Rather, the continued existence of independent schools
teaching an elite education is precisely what gives rise to Rooney’s desire to have
Etons for all. To ban them would be to remove that possibility, that thing to aspire to,
that itch to get in and raise yourself up to the level of those elites.
I would have more sympathy with the argument if it were turned on its head. Let us
make state schools more independent. Fund them by all means, do stop them from
discriminating on entrance, but let the state be hands off. Increase the numbers of
teachers. Introduce a high-minded liberal knowledge-centred curriculum. Invade and
abolish Ofsted. That would seem more in the right direction than what can only be in
reality a cynical effort to paper over real differences in wealth and privilege in our
society with the language of ‘equality of opportunity’.

Equality of opportunity is not the same thing as equality of condition—having the

same level of access to resources—and neither does it target privilege. Rather, it
seeks to locate social problems in the socially-excluded who are then given
‘opportunities’ to help themselves. This is what Labour now refers to as “active
equality”: giving people “power to shape the outcomes they seek”. That those
outcomes may represent inequalities is then justified as a reward for their talent.
Thereby entrenching inequalities. Focusing in on the talent and potential of every
child is both discriminatory against the privileged children and secondly
narrows the definition of equality down to just being a reward for talent.

There is a more important argument to be had about education today than trying to
reignite a class war against the toffs. The report of the Sutton Trust stating that the
children of the poorest families fall behind a full year by the time they are five may not
be as sensationalist as the claims of Iain Duncan Smith that the brain sizes of
deprived nursery children are “three times smaller than they should be”. Both,
however, represent the same set of assumptions so prevalent at the moment, which
holds that deprived children are almost irretrievably damaged long before they reach
primary school. It is, the implication is, the fault of their parents for not sufficiently
aping middle-class behaviour. Not that they are financially deprived so much as they
are emotionally deprived: their families are apparently short on cocoa, cuddles, and
very hungry caterpillars at bedtime. Being working class these days seems more of a
qualitative than a quantitative failing.

This is the ground on which we should fight for a better education system. Reject out
of hand the idea that parents, or teachers, are failing their children. Argue that we are
capable of improving education through building a better system with more resources
for all. Reject the idea that quantitative improvements matter less than the tender
ministrations of state therapists or behaviour management neuro-psychology gurus.
Do not accept the limitations of the way things are now and seek to lessen the impact
—that is to shut off the possibility of dreaming great dreams. Game changing goes
out the window in favour of making the present more bearable.

There is an argument for not settling for what we have. Letting our dissatisfaction
look for ways to create the genuinely and radically new. And that would mean really
aspiring to a great education for all.
 Is Technology Making Us Smarter or Dumber?

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By Rob Clowes

It is possible to imagine that human nature, the human intellect, emotions and
feelings are completely independent of our technologies; that we are essentially
ahistorical beings with one constant human nature that has remained the same
throughout history or even pre-history? Sometimes evolutionary psychologists—
those who belief human nature was fixed on the Pleistocene Savannah—talk this
way. I think this is demonstrably wrong.

Consider ancient technologies, for example: cooking. When ancient hunter-

gatherers discovered that firing their meat would not only make it tastier but
could make their food easier to digest, it had a number of knock-on effects. It
made parts of an animal carcass that were previously inedible edible, and also
made it possible to preserve food longer. But this was not only a culinary but a
cognitive success. Why? Because the amount of time our ancestors had to spend
finding, hunting, and butchering their food, and thus maintain life, could be reduced
making time available to invest in other activities such as thinking. Thanks to cooking,
new time became available to prehistoric humans to plan, to consider, and invent
other even more liberating technologies—or even to fritter away drawing bison and
mammoth on the walls of caves.

Another ancient cognitive technology, writing, was first invented perhaps five to six
thousand years ago around the fertile crescent, probably developing from ‘counting
tokens’ which it is thought were used to keep track of agricultural stores from as early
as 7000 BC. Over the following millennia, the widespread (and unforeseen)
uses of writing allowed some societies to develop not just entirely new forms
of civilization and culture, but new modes of cognition. Writing is a cognitive
technology if anything is. Writing (and reading) allowed us to develop new and
latent cognitive abilities as—especially in Ancient Greece—thought moved from
something that was of the moment to something which could be recorded and then
brought to mind later. Thanks to writing, it became possible to stabilize thoughts,
more effectively share thoughts, and especially criticize thoughts, both of ourselves
and others. Writing also fostered the ability to produce and follow long chains of
argument that could be criticized and expanded in an iterative way. All this helped
draw out the timescale of thought from seconds and minutes, to week and years, to
eternity (it is possible to read Plato’s dialogues today or even listen to it on your iPod,
and thus commune with the ancients). Writing allowed us to ever more effectively
redirect and reinvent our cognitive abilities. Many think a particular inwardness of
mind we take for granted today and certain forms of imaginative projection were only
really made possible by writing.

So cognitive technologies—I have given two examples—have freed up tremendous

cognitive power by giving us the time and the leisure to turn our minds away from the
brute exigencies of life and toward more liberating things as well as tools to extend,
restructure, and amplify certain modes of thinking. Writing especially, by offering
human beings new facility to shape and mold our cognitive abilities, changed the
nature of human beings. We became in a novel sense, self creators.

But this raises a question: if technology can do all this to change the way we think for
the better, might it not similarly work for ill? According to Nicholas Carr, author of
“The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and
Remember” (2010), the internet is such a technology. It may appear as a
technology to help us find information we need and increasingly to connect
with others but, it actually functions as an engine of distraction, geared up not
to help us find what we need to know or maintain a train of thought, but to
distract, dissipate, and frustrate us. Moreover, by encouraging distraction, it
undermines our abilities to deeply engage with knowledge and encourages us to be
shallower and less fully developed human beings. Let us look at some of his
examples.

Take hypertext: research appears to show that if you read the very same text
off a screen using hypertext rather than from a book, you will read slower,
more forgetfully, and you will have a poorer sense of the overall meaning of
whatever you were reading. Indeed, reading through web-browsers, you are also
unlikely to finish reading a whole article at all but to have jumped off to do something
else such as check email, or play a game.

The superficial and distracted style of reading this engenders is only amplified
by the modern tabbed browser, which encourages us to open many windows
to track what we think we might be interested in. Opening tabs may feel like it
helps us keep track of other avenues we may follow-up later, yet research suggests
most of us never read most of the tabs we open or read no more than a few lines
from each. Indeed, we often forget whatever we were looking for in the first place.

Or take what is now a fundamental technology of the internet: Google Search.

Google tends to trump any other research technology we might use to locate
information because it is just so useful. And yet it has a number of structural failings.
It is highly selective of some sources over others and often they are not the most
reliable; it also leaves information that we might be interested in out of returned
search results and is fairly easy to bias by the unscrupulous. Some of the prominent
results it produces are merely sponsored content that conduct the unwary to
whatever distractions advertisers have paid for. It customizes itself to our apparent
interests and thereby creates a sort of bubble around us, filtering out much of that
which we might want to know about. Indeed, Google increasingly uses profiling
information to try to guess what its users might want to see based on their search
history, thus creating a sort of individualized pre-filtered bubble around them. This
‘service’ is something most of its users are unaware of and may have unfortunate
effects in eventually filtering our relevant information, which just does not accord with
a user’s history up until now (see: Pariser, 2011).

Carr claims these are essential problems, because Google’s basic financial model
works by distracting us from whatever it was we thought we were looking for to
whatever it may be that Google advertisers would like to pay for. Google Search,
Carr claims, has this tendency toward distraction written into its DNA. It is inherently
an engine of distraction. In short, Carr represents the internet as a dissipater of
knowledge that is ultimately poised to undermine the autonomy of our minds.

I think you can argue with all of Carr’s claims but not necessarily on the grounds that
the research is wrong or that he mischaracterizes current internet technologies. He
does tend to miss much of the context in which the trends he point to have evolved in
the world beyond the screen. On a technical level, it now appears that hypertext is
not best used simply translating an existing text, and it often is distracting when
attempting to read an article in depth, and much less good at facilitating
understanding and recall than the hype would suggest (Rouet, 1996). This is one
reason many millions of readers now choose to print off articles or increasingly use e-
paper devices like Kindle to read offline. Nevertheless, hypertext is still a brilliant way
to connect articles together and it seems to be more a job for designers to work out
how to do this without distracting the reader.

Search technology as currently constituted does build in all manners of biases but it
is really only the problem it is because so few people understand how it works and
many seem to believe it is far more reliable and comprehensive than it really is. It is
mainly the idea that it is infallible and the only source that makes us vulnerable to it.
Some attempts to teach students more systematically about how these resources
work might counteract some of the worst trends (although see Bartlett & Miller, 2011,
for how this is perhaps not happening in schools just now). Most readers are of
course more skeptical than they are given credit for here as elsewhere.

What Carr elides is that what we are really talking about the particular form the
technology is taking now, and that form is in motion. Reading done through a web-
browser on a screen most likely will be less in depth and less distracted when
compared to reading from a traditional book. But the internet does add a tremendous
amount to the speed of the research process and particularly finding things to read.
Shallow browsing, if that is all the reading we do, could certainly would be
intellectually incapacitating, but this misses what many of us do with the internet.
Many of us use to the internet to find things to read that we use in other ways later.
Moreover, it is surely significantly that these technologies from iPhones or android
devices, to Facebook, to Google search are all highly customizable and open to
different patterns of use. For example, the market for apps make mobile devices
highly customizable in ways that no previous technology has been. Internet
technology in particular is open to us because we keep remaking it to do the things
we need, rather than what it was necessarily designed for. We remake it or can insist
others do so, or there is always potential for software designers to step in and
reshape the technology into something we might find even more useful. One does
not have to be a wild optimist to think we may eventually overcome some of the
difficulties to which Carr draws our attention. It is difficult to see why these should be
regarded as essential problems.

And then there is the flipside of the internet´s capacity to distract: the amount of
cognitive time that the internet frees up for collaboration, Clay Shirky calls this The
Cognitive Surplus (2010). One of the most interesting aspects of a technology like
Wikipedia is that it is built from tiny fragments of time which the technology allows to
be composed into something—its many flaws acknowledged—which is free and
fundamentally useful.

Really there is nothing essential about search, or browser technology, the mobile
internet, or even the shape of the commercial funding of the internet that undermines
the way we think, our sense of self, or the sorts of being we are. It may be the
technology is currently embedded in a certain commercial culture and indeed with a
culture of knowledge which is detrimental to the development of deep thinking, but
even if this is the case, there are so many trends in our societues which count
against the development of knowledge for its own sake that we can hardly be
surprised if these are reflected and perhaps amplified by certain elements of internet
technology. These are all things that individuals, designers, programmers, or even
(close to my own heart) philosophers could and should address. We can argue with
the current shape of technology and propose how it might be better. But there is
seldom much engagement in this direction. More common are dour warnings about
our impotence in the face of new technology; that it is the agent and we the passive
recipient.

This is the real problem, I think: the idea that it is technology itself that makes
us smarter or dumber has come to be seen as a conventional and
unremarkable truth. This is summed up in a word which is almost unavoidable
when we talk about the way we use technology today: impact. We say the technology
impacts us. Almost any article you read on the use or effects of the internet (or other
technologies for that matter) uses this metaphor. But technology does not impact us,
at least unless we take a very passive stance on it.

Technologies do not make us dumber or smarter, but we can choose to be smarter

by making the best of what technology has to offer—but also by thinking much harder
about what we want it to do for us. But we need to start thinking not just about
technology, but also the sort of intellectual and moral beings we want to be, as this
will guide our creation of technologies. In striving to humanize the internet in this way
I think there is every chance that we can become ‘smarter,’ but this depends on us.
No technology will do the job for us.

This is an edited version of a talk given to the Brighton Salon as part of a Battle of
Ideas Satellite debate on the 2nd of November, 2011. Rob Clowes is currently
working on the completion of his book: Being Human after Facebook.
Just think, what would happen if your computer, iPad, or laptop crashed today? What if someone
took away your phone for some days or perhaps you lost it? If thinking about these incidences
makes you stressed, you are not alone. Today, most people are into technology such that losing it
would alter their life negatively.
As exciting as it may sound, I can’t deny that we are becoming dependent on technology quite fast.
This can be proved by the fact that most of us cannot go for a minute without looking at our phones
and the fear of the battery dying is immense. But, do we need it? I can admit that when we talk of
technology, it’s hard to resist the benefits it comes with.

Well, society may have gone too far in technology dependence such that it has become so immense
that doctors have recommended for “technology detox.” Perhaps you may have heard of it. If not,
according to Oxford Dictionary, Technology Detox is a period during which an individual avoids
using any electronic devices including computers, smartphones etc as a chance to reduce stress
and focus on social interaction in the outside world.

Technology is changing quite faster. After few months, we have an old product replaced by a new
version which is even faster and smarter. For those who work in an office, think of a day without
internet connection. For the employees, this may be a good time to wander around because there
are no new tasks, but ask your boss the stress that comes with this. At home, think of a weekend
with no television and cell phone. Actually, these items have become a part of our lives that is
indispensable and there is no chance of lacking or losing them.

In fact there is drastic change compared to the early years where kids used to spend a lot time with
each other or parents playing or just sharing stories. Those evening games after school is over,
watching cartoons on a Sunday or playing with friends are no longer there. Today, more than 75% of
kids remain indoors playing computer games or with a smartphone. Technology has taken all our
time.

Well, this may get the better part of you of how technology has taken the better part of our society,
but here are some signs that our generation depends too much on technology.
 MODERN TECHNOLOGY-
PERSUASIVE ESSAY
Posted on October 23, 2012 by deemahagehassan

0
New devices and different types of technology are being brought to our
attention every day. All of these things thus far haven’t always had a positive
affect on  people. Modern technology is creating a single world culture and
making communication between people much less personal. It is the cause of
many negative things such has limited personal contact, strained
relationships, and insecurity or low self-esteem.

Cell phones, computers, and Ipads are all types of devices that prevent us
from really knowing a person. These devices and machines make it
unnecessary  to ever have to be face to face with someone. Being hidden
behind one of these contraptions makes it much easier for someone to e
someone entirely different. Denying someone the opportunity to speak to
someone face to face makes lying that much easier and tempting.

With the divorce rate being higher than ever, it is safe to say that modern
technology definitely doesn’t improve these statistics. While phones and
video can help keep a couple close in their moments apart, it can also cause
further separation. Although typical, it is always a possibility that one may
find messages, or what not, of their partner with someone else that appears to
be suspicious. Einstein once said, “It has become appallingly obvious that our
technology has exceeded our humanity.” The sad reality of it is how true that
quote has come to be.

Behind a screen is where all new identities begin. Always being behind some
sort of screen refuses that persons the chance to be able to form realistic
bonds. Having such a relationship with technology so often eventually causes
that person to entirely lose the ability to communicate with people, and leads
to low self-esteem. The positive side of it is that it allows people to make
connections and build new relationships without the fear of face to face
contact in case it is a weakness of theirs.
There are many contrasting opinions and thoughts on whether or not modern
technology is the cause of the lack of interaction between people. It seems
that the majority of the time, modern technology is the cause of many
negative results. Thus, modern technology is in fact making communication
between people much less personal.

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