It's amazing what conversations one has on the hunting field. You meet all walks of life and get to discuss particular and peculiar interests – especially so in the form of hunting I follow: beagling. Since we follow on foot and walk, rest, and run, as we each see fit, there is plenty of time for conversation and chatter as well as for meditation. Except for when we comment on the potential ban hanging over this idyllic and ancient past-time, politics is avoided. In the presently muddy and miry fields of England, it's not really brought up – it is so irrelevant when one is confronted with the flow of the land stretching ahead over the valleys and wolds (hills), as the sun streaks through billowy clouds, and as the hounds find the scent and produce a cascading operatic euphony that echoes around the valley and coverts. To bring politics into our conversation is like when you're looking up at the immensity of space and floating on fascinating contemplations of life and some one says, u2018Tom Cruise is starring in a new film, you know.' You feel that being brought back to such human trivia is so trifling that it pains you to re-orient your consciousness. But into politics I was drawn.
Not intentionally – although I am a persistently political, or I should say, philosophical animal, for I do like to check others' beliefs and premises and above all to get them to think. I attempt to do this diplomatically and of course appropriately as one should, but there we were crossing and slipping over a wonderfully soggy and sloping grass field conversing with a newcomer, when the usual question of my profession came up. I explained that I had been a university lecturer and in recent years taught in the state school system, but now I was tutoring privately which permitted flexibility for pursuing some writing projects. After a while, Tennyson (it's the done thing to veil characters, counties, and towns in hunting literature) asked whether I was not, u2018in the words of Radio Four presenters [our State-owned news station] pandering to the upper-middle classes in their desire to constantly improve their children?'
Into politics we fell – well, indirectly so, since this was a question about my career. But it did feel like being jolted back to earth. I explained that although I disparage class notions, all my pupils come from, if anything, upper-working class backgrounds; they are pupils who are failing or not getting along well in the state school system and their parents work hard to get extra help for them. He asked again whether I thought that private tutoring was justifiable – not in an aggressive manner but curiously so, which warranted a good reply. When I explained that I thought all education ought to be private and completely liberalised, and that parents ought to pay for the education of the children they beget, I think he was rather taken aback. To say the least. Houseman, who knows my views, said Tennyson looked as if he had never heard such a proposition before. Tennyson seemed quite entertained by it. u2018Don't you think that's a taboo, though?' he asked tentatively. u2018Absolutely – all the more to think about it and discuss it!' Houseman then pointed out the inconsistency in the present government's approach to education: up to the age of 18 it is free (for those who sacrifice their children to the great behemoth of the state sector, which swallows up 90% of educational resources), but then at the university level they expect students and their families to pay – because it is good for them, improves their career prospects, it's a great personal investment, etc. An inconsistency that Houseman thought rather amusing: the government does not expect families to pay for their education up till 18, because presumably the schools have got nothing to do with bettering their minds, improving their occupational prospects, etc. We continued in this vein for a while, till Tennyson declared that he had gone to private school, and that he had always been made to play it down, avoid acknowledging it, or even to feel ashamed of it. It's not an unusual disposition amongst the privately educated here: my fiancée also felt the same. As the State has a monopoly on education (and it's difficult to avoid the State if you seek a career in education), those who u2018teach teachers' the criteria for their pathetic licence are disparaging of those whose parents acted responsibly and paid for their children's education. (Needless to say, but the same education u2018specialists' are also vehemently deprecating of any teachers or pupils who hunt.) As one who survived the state system, I told Tennyson that he should be proud of his education and of his parents for being so responsible. He seemed rather refreshed by the conversation we were having, and on we walked in search of Hern, our huntsman, and the fading echoes of the hounds' music somewhere over the horizon and another hedge-line.
Returning home though, I checked the news and discovered that the government has new plans for our universities. Guess what? The State controls most of our higher educational institutions. At the higher levels of academia and of human thought, we find the big fat plodding Jabba the Hutt of the State. And since it has interfered in funding, it has increasingly interfered with teaching. So, although well qualified to teach in a British University (one academic book, another to be completed this year, one edited academic book, several articles and reviews, active speaker at professional philosophical conferences, etc.) I would not go near this State-infested industry: and I'm not averse to letting all I chat to know my feelings on the score.
In 1997 the Labour regime introduced tuition fees. Great – a step in the right direction you'd think, but of course that was a nationally imposed price for higher education and a price that was well below the market rate (~$1500). Professorial producer interest groups were moaning of under-funding, but being generally of a leftish persuasion, they did not mean under-funding on the part of their student consumers but by the taxpayer. The producer interest group has continued to complain: and it certainly does have a case. Since the State has encroached, the infrastructure and resources available for students has declined, the salaries of professors has relatively fallen, while student numbers has increased as a result of government directives to aim for 50% inclusion rates (it was at 12% in the 1980s); and the once great and independent Universities and Colleges of Oxford, Cambridge, St. Andrews, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, etc., have had to suffer the ignominy of the pedantic, bureaucratic, box-ticking enema of ‘Quality Assessment Exercises.’ This is when professors and bureaucrats from other (often inferior) universities deign to evaluate their teaching methods. I have warned a few Oxbridge professors about this: u2018You wait,' I've said, u2018till some clip-board toting bearded mediocrity from Nonentity University comes and evaluates your extempore orations and flourishes on the historical flows and characters of the 17th century that leave the lecture hall mesmerised and overawed, and complains that you didn't use Powerpoint.' They've laughed. But it's coming. (I've enjoyed the experience at the high school level – I didn't use an overhead projector.)
Since Czar Blair took over, his government has swung several sharp political axes at the elite universities demanding that they increase their uptake of poorer people and even commenting on particular decisions not to admit certain students. Interestingly, many of the Cabinet and top Labour advisers have enjoyed a private education and attendance at the elite universities. And just as writers on these pages like to note how, when in power, such socialists enjoy nobbling the chances of the present poor to catch up and advance by imposing progressive taxes on income, so too do the Labour advisers wish to undermine the chances of the children of poor folk to get a decent education by forging a comprehensive-style higher education industry. (Here, State schools are often called comprehensive – comprehensive in incompetence and waste certainly.)
Are we surprised to hear that before the introduction of government grants for tuition and maintenance in the 1960s, Oxford and Cambridge actively sought bright pupils from poor backgrounds in a centuries' old tradition of scouring the land for active minds? But that stopped once the then Labour government meddled.
The news tonight was that students will be expected to pay for their higher education after they graduate: then they will be charged maybe $5000 for the privilege of wasting untold tens of thousands of taxpayers' money. Now, libertarians know how governments work and how they work in education: and States do become rather predictable don't they? … Well, following this compromising offer to the professors to inject more cash into the universities, you've probably guessed it already, the Education Minister demanded that they accept more students of the government's choosing. Ho-hum for us libertarians who study the principles of intervention, but you can imagine the growing backlash and surprise over the weekend amongst those who do not. Students will be furious – because, after all, a great many of them presently enjoy a vastly subsidized three years' waste at others' expense, and now they are being asked to contribute to reducing some of that waste. Professors will again be shocked at this grand intrusion into their decision-making. Oh, but they lost that freedom long ago when they accepted the government's funds. Another reason I could not bear to be part of that machine.
Now, who is the Education Minister? Charles Clarke: Cambridge graduate. Hmm. Interesting scent. Hey, he did some teaching once as a part-time maths lecturer at a (government funded) further education place. Whooeey. Then, like many MPs in this country, he describes his previous career as "Management Consultancy." Uhuh. Then he became a full-time politician advising the mighty scabrous satraps of the Labour Party. Dare I mention that he earned an Economics/Maths degree from Cambridge? Keynes's university and still Keynesian from its output too. From Clarke's voting record, he's anti-hunt and pro-war: not surprising in this land of increasingly Prussian-Hegelian politics, gobbledegook and interference. But we mustn't assume Cambridge only produces socialists: both Tennyson and Houseman, my fellow hunt-followers are Cambridge chaps. And it has its own beagle pack.
If the Education Minister has his way, the fragile remnants of academic freedom shall be lost in this once highly cultured land. The Universities will go the same way as the comprehensives (and they have to be experienced to believe how dire things can get under socialism). We can expect centrally controlled directives on admissions, courses, and tutors (who will need to study for a licence to lecture). And … oh, one can see it already … a National Higher Education Curriculum that will incorporate compulsory EU Citizenship courses.
I've already u2018shrugged' from the embarrassing direction that the Universities are headed: others, who are less politically or philosophically aware, will passively follow suit as the bureaucratic intrusions into their teaching and research increase and the student body becomes even more academically undisciplined and unprepared and generally unmotivated. The older professors will hang on in there to enjoy their retirement benefits, but the younger and talented ones will seep away. Bless 'em all, as Vera Lynn once sang in the war. The government will react to the brain drain by mandating all post-graduates to do a few years draft in University teaching: it's on the cards for high school teachers: so many who earn a teaching certificate do not teach; and it was almost a fact for medical consultants whom the government tried to enslave into giving seven years' service to the National Health Scam – here the government had to back down, for what would it do if the top brains in medicine suddenly started migrating in droves? Teachers and professors can do so, after all they don't really do anything important, but consultants from the prized National Health Disservice? No way. So the government will be on the lookout for an easier target to enslave: education.
Periodically, I hear of plans afoot in the elite Universities to secede from the State and to charge their own fees. Oh, let's hope they've got the guts! But so many Judases have been bought by the State to crucify freedom that it's hard to remain optimistic. Many of us over here wonder who actually won the last war? The Allies may have won all the battles, but as Mises and Hayek were wont to point out, the more important war was to be waged for the idea of freedom. On my reckoning the Prussians have taken over; on my fiance's, the lunatics have taken over the asylum. Freedom has suffered but the repercussions are increasingly evident.
In the face of escalating interference, is it any wonder that many people I speak to on the hunting fields and off – poor and rich – are seriously considering migrating from this enfettered isle? A neighbour has left for Spain. Another couple are seriously considering France. Increasing numbers of Brits are purchasing property around Europe and in Florida to escape the politics and advancing Prussian socialism. I escape it for the day on the hunting fields. But the government is seeking to ban hunting. So I return to earth and to politics. My competition in private tutoring is a State sponsored and controlled monopoly which eats up $75bn and rising each year and barely produces a viable product. I have a niche market of parents who are willing to pay privately, of course, but my fiancée often asks whether we should stay. Well, does anybody know of a new New England we may all come to?
January 20, 2003
