Are We Living in a Fool’s Paradise? If So, Which of Us Is Truly the Fool?

Civitas, 13 January 2009

These days, it seems, you can’t open a newspaper without reading about social mobility and what the Government is doing to increase it. Yesterday, we read of Alan Milburn’s appointment to lead an enquiry into how more children from poor backgrounds might be got into the professions. Reports of his appointment precede publication today of a White Paper on social mobility that will doubtless occupy endless column inches in tomorrow’s papers.
Today, we read teachers who join and remain for three years at the country’s most disadvantaged secondary schools will be given bonuses of £10,000. Why? Because good teaching is thought key to pupil success, and that the key to social mobility.

While being all in favour of good teaching, especially in disadvantaged schools, I have my doubts its prime purpose and value should be considered its contribution towards social mobility. Indeed, I am beginning to have serious doubts social mobility should be a goal of public policy at all.
Alan Milburn shares none of them. Yesterday he was reported as saying about his appointment: ‘This is the right time for the Government to make its core purpose creating an upwardly mobile society again.’
Just why is social mobility such a good thing, and for exactly whom should it be thought such?
First thoughts might suggest that social mobility must be good both for the upwardly mobile as well as for their society as a whole. Those moving up the social ladder derive, from their ascension, greater income and status. Society benefits by the more efficient utilisation of the talents at its collective disposal their ascension brings about.
However, as I say, I am seriously beginning to have serious doubts about all this.
First of all, take those who move up the social ladder. Are they always necessarily better off through having so moved? Maybe, financially speaking and in terms of social prestige.
But is increased income and social standing always necessarily for the better?
What if the non-monetary price exacted by such economic and social improvement is greater stress, marital break-up, and loss of contact with former friends and family without acquisition of any new ones besides the all too familiar computer screen, blinking incessantly in the early hours of the morning — every morning?
As to the balance-sheet for society as a whole, while theoretically a fully social mobile society may well result in all jobs being occupied by those best able to perform them, perhaps society does not necessarily always benefit from achieving such a perfect distribution of labour, if the price it pays is to have turned into an atomised mass of stressed out wage-slaves.
‘Oh’, I will be told in horror: ‘How can you possibly not want those at the bottom of the pile to improve their lot?’
But just what constitutes improvement in this context?
Doubts about the value of social mobility have begun to arise after reading, in addition to all the newspaper reports about it, about the results of a recently published nationwide survey conducted by Ofsted of 150,000 teenagers living throughout England.
It found that the seemingly most happy of them were those living in the most deprived areas and attending the least well-performing schools. Meanwhile, amongst the least happy of them were those living in middle class districts and attending high-achieving schools.
When the story about the survey broke last week, a 16 year old girl from Liverpool, whose schools are consistently the least well-performing, was quoted as saying:
‘I’m basically always happy… I just tend to be happy… My area doesn’t bother me. As long as I’ve got a roof over my head and a good relationship with everyone I’m fine…Would I ever move to London? No way. It’s too busy – I spent a few days there but it’s too annoying… Everyone’s too business-oriented and they need to chill out.’
This girl was reported to be learning to be a hairdresser at school, as well as planning to learn body-piercing too. Ugh! Not my cup of tea. But, who is to say that she would have done better in life had she been encouraged at school to aspire to some professional career that would have required her to leave her friends and family and move down South?
She seemed very content with her lot and prospects which is apparently more than can be said about many middle-class children who attend high-achieving schools.
A poll conducted last year by the Children’s Society of 8,000 14-16 year olds reportedly found ‘many said they were subjected to academic stress at school, peer group pressure from classmates and high expectations within the family’. As many as twenty seven per cent of the teenagers ploeed agreed that they often felt depressed.
Perhaps, that’s just par for the course of adolescence. But equally perhaps, in our school- league-table dominated age in which middle-class parents are ever more anxious about their children’s academic success, whilst simultaneously ever more willing to sacrifice their family life and own leisure for career, the sixteen year lass from Liverpool and her low flying chums have gotten it right and the rest of us wrong.
If so, while we might all be living in a fool’s paradise, many of us might have got it completely wrong as to who the true fools are.