How Not To Be a Hypocrite has many virtues. It is brisk, clever, lucid and amusing. It is also wrong on almost every issue it touches. This is not a criticism; making interesting mistakes is a greater contribution to intellectual progress than the reiteration of truisms, however true they may be, and Adam Swift's errors are instructive.
The book divides into two parts. The first part explains what's wrong with private and selective schools - that is, schools that are either private or selective, and particularly if they are both. The second part explains how parents who have been persuaded by the first part that they should vote to abolish private/selective schools may nonetheless without hypocrisy send their children to private/selective schools so long as they exist.
The second part reads like a handbook for readers of the Guardian. The good-natured utilitarian will agree that anything that makes Guardian readers happier is prima facie a good thing. But whether reducing the moral unease of the English middle classes is, in utilitarian terms, as urgent as Dr Swift supposes is something on which opinions will vary. I would myself rate it rather lower than the restoration of clean water and personal security in Iraq or ending the civil war in the Congo.
Still, the second part of the book is essentially parasitic on the first. If there is no reason to think that all education ought to be provided by the State and no reason to vote to make it illegal to offer education except through state institutions, Swift could stop worrying about whether his friends are acting hypocritically - at any rate in this matter. Life is too rich in opportunities for self-deception, hypocrisy and simple moral obtuseness to suppose that private education is the only matter about which these vices will cluster, and if Swift is anxious about his friends' moral health, he will have plenty to keep him busy,
Swift has two interesting arguments against private and selective education, and one more familiar one against private education that has no application to publicly funded selective education. The argument against private education is much the same as the argument against private medicine, and it is the argument against queue-jumping. Education, one might argue, has two sorts of purpose; intrinsically, it enriches the life of the student, and if it is well chosen, sensitively delivered and properly matched to the child to whom it is offered, it can make a vast difference to the child's existence.
Extrinsically, it provides the student with the resources to compete effectively in the marketplace; a better education provides an edge in the marketplace. How should we think about the allocation of these extrinsically useful resources? It is, in fact, very unclear what the answer is. One view is that the brightest deserve the best; another is that since the brightest will do most with whatever they are given, it is the least bright that deserve the best. A third view is that we should think in terms of maximizing the productive skills of the whole population, so that the brightest will create the resources which a judiciously contrived scheme of taxation will redistribute for the benefit of the less bright (or less lucky). Since the greater part of the difference between the life-chances of one child and another is created long before children ever reach school, and is a genetic and social lottery of a wholly arbitrary kind, one might think that a sensible egalitarian would not waste time debating theories of social justice as applied to schooling, but would instead think of ways of ensuring that children were born to competent and ambitious parents.
But Swift is surely right to think that there is no view of education conceived of in this instrumental fashion that suggests that it is just to allocate the most effective education according to parental income. If the brightest should get it, brains count: if the least bright, then lack of brains; if it's efficiency, then whatever is efficient. If the best education is provided in private selective schools, either justice or efficiency requires something like an assisted places scheme so that it goes to the right people regardless of their parents' incomes.
Swift thinks that paying for a better education is in essence a way of bumping your child up the competitive ladder; this, he says, is unfair. This is right. How big an unfair advantage one purchases is an interesting question, just as are others he raises in passing, such as what to say about parents who send their children to the local comprehensive school and pay for private tuition on the side. Access to the intellectually toughest private schools is not a matter of one's pocketbook, of course, a point that Swift makes somewhat inadvertently when he argues that such schools may look good only because they start with such promising material. That is a good point, but it rather undermines the argument that private education is queue-jumping. If these students would come top no matter where they went, they are not queue-jumping. Still, there will surely be children in the middle of the ability/energy/ambition range who will be a bit advantaged by what their parents buy for them, in a way which pure meritocratic justice would deplore. Whether all other theories of resource allocation would is another matter.
Swift's most interesting arguments are different. The first is an argument from the virtues of community. The Common School, as Horace Mann called it 170 years ago, is a good thing in its own right. The argument is more an argument against selectivity as such than against selection by pocketbook. Even if selective schools conferred no economic advantage, and charged next to nothing, only being established to allow Jews, Catholics, Muslims, Quakers, atheists, or violinists, gymnasts and contrabassoonists to educate their own children in their own way, Swift thinks they would be a bad thing. That is, bad enough to warrant our making it illegal to offer or purchase an education outside the state system.
The value of "community" is so taken for granted that it rarely receives the kicking it needs, but after six years of New Labour piety, we need a revival of anti-communitarianism. It is obvious that we do not want the sort of education system that fosters civil war. An education system where children of group A are brought up to regard the children of group B as murderous lunatics, and children of group B are brought up to regard the members of group A as oppressive thugs is patently undesirable. Moreover, it is perfectly true that people with shared tastes, beliefs and enthusiasms will generally enjoy each other's company, and in that sense naturally form a community. That aside, what is so wonderful about "community" as a value?
Or, to put it another way, if it is wrong to allow Jews, Muslims, atheists or whomever to reinforce their sense of community by establishing schools where their children can be taught together and in ways that their families find acceptable, why is it such a good idea to promote a sense of community among the inhabitants of, say, North Oxford - especially when it is to be promoted coercively?
What would be wrong with a society of individuals who happily cooperate out of affection and mutual advantage, but who would, if asked, regard the recent outbreak of communitarian moralizing as so much guff - a society of enthusiasts for Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Stuart Mill, let us say? In any case, the whole argument rests on very dubious factual assumptions. What little empirical evidence there is suggests that jamming children from very different backgrounds together instils mutual dislike as much as mutual affection. Since human beings find it quite difficult to live with each other at the best of times, would it not be better to allow them as much choice as possible about whom to associate with, and when, and on what terms?
Swift's other argument for making private and selective education illegal is that being able to opt out of the local authority's provision renders comprehensive schools less comprehensive than they should be. It is not only the cleverest pupils that they will lose, and Swift mentions many other reasons parents might want to take their children out of the local comprehensive, varying from religion via musical talent to fear of their children being bullied. Still, it is the cleverest pupils on whom he focuses. Put simply, the argument is that the brightest students are a resource for everyone else and parents have no right to deprive the rest of the school of their presence - ceteris paribus, of course, to cover cases where the school is truly dreadful, or the child a victim of racial or sexual harassment or whatever.
Underlying this argument is a premiss that Swift does not articulate, but it is to be found in its purest form in William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Godwin, it will be recalled, insisted that if we were to be faced with a choice between rescuing Bishop Fenelon or his chambermaid from a fire, we should unhesitatingly rescue the Bishop, even if the chambermaid were our mother. To say that I know Fenelon is a great man, but she is my mother cuts no ice. "What magic is there in the pronoun 'my', to overturn the decisions of everlasting truth?" asked Godwin. Swift is a little less austere in his advocacy of universal benevolence; he agrees that although reading a bedtime story to one's child affords her an advantage not open to everyone, and therefore an unfair one, it would be preposterous to damage family relationships by forbidding such activities. But his principle is Godwin's; in serious matters, parental and filial partiality give way, and we are to treat our children as collective resources, whose presence in the classroom of their less fortunate peers will do an amount of good that outweighs whatever minor deprivations - no Latin or Greek, no violin lessons, occasionally being bullied - they may be called on to suffer.
How Not To Be a Hypocrite is rightly described on the dust jacket as "the most intellectually aggressive case for state education in recent times". It is also entirely unpersuasive. It involves drastic assaults on freedom for dubious gains; and the idea that we are all resources for other people's ends is morally unpersuasive. Consider the obvious alternative, that there should be (almost) no education other than what is provided on a private and selective basis. Instead of coercing people into sacrificing their children to Swift's principles, we should encourage them to set up whatever schools they think fit, and bend our collective imaginations to think of ways of facilitating it. State-provided education was a useful interim measure in a newly industrialized society where the means of providing for ourselves were less abundant. It has become administratively overloaded, rigid, uniform, hostile to experiment and about as good for national intelligence as the economic bureaucracy of the ancien regime was for the French economy of the eighteenth century. Much good teaching goes on, and a lot of children are well taught, but that is a miracle that reflects very well on the ability of teachers to do their jobs in the face of everything that government puts in their way.
Get the State off their backs, and they will teach better and more interestingly. If all schools were private and selective, many would doubtless be very peculiar (and therefore much loved by the Prime Minister and Prince Charles), but none need fail to produce children who were literate, numerate and employable. The State should confine itself to making sure that children attend some school or other and to establishing some credible public examinations to ensure that children know what a rational being needs to know at sixteen.
If such a creature as a secretary of state for education and skills were to re-emerge, they should be sent to a desert island without eight records but with the works of Ivan Illich. The State's role should be to make sure the badly off can afford good schooling by handing out means-tested vouchers to parents; the rest should be up to endowments, scholarships and charitable donations. What such a world would produce would be experiment, variety and the chance of real progress. Almost no interesting advance in twentieth-century education began in state schools - you may have doubts about Froebel, Dewey, Flexner, Neill, Kurt Hahn and their friends and followers, but every one of their experiments would have been prevented if Adam Swift's wish to make private education illegal had been gratified. In short, the middle-class dinner tables of north Oxford can relax; since there is no case for abolishing private education, and a very good case for abolishing state education, they can without fear of hypocrisy get on and do whatever they think best for their children - assuming, of course, that they can form a clear view of what that is.