Elitism has had a bad press in recent years. The concept has, alas, been tainted by its association with the numerous elites who have corrupted it by allowing self-interest and prejudice to become self-perpetuating. It’s been sullied by its association with old school ties and masonic-style handshakes – by closed networks which work to exclude those who happen to fall outside the pre-determined in-group.
So no wonder we don’t like it any more. Who would? But its gravest sin of all has been its role in pulling up the drawbridge to protect privilege in general, through a kind of unspoken fish-knife test. If you don’t know what it’s for, you don’t get in.
One way people used to storm the castle of privilege was through grammar schools, of course. These bastions of educational elitism gave the grammar school boys enough of the sports and classics to pass muster, even if the snobs still laughed at their trousers or aitches. Unfortunately a Labour government ruled that grammar schools themselves were too elitist and so they scrapped most of them. Which is ironic – especially when you look at the cabinets of the 1960s through to the 1980s and see that they were often packed with gifted ex-grammar school pupils such as Denis Healey, Harold Wilson, Roy Jenkins and Ken Clarke, to name but a few.
I wonder if anyone now really thinks that the attempt to abolish grammar schools by the Labour government in the 1960s actually contributed to an improvement in educational standards in Britain. Similarly, does anyone believe that the target of getting half of 18-year-olds to university imposed by the Blair government in the 1990s has done anything substantially positive for society? I think we know the answer: the house parties were good, private landlords made a packet but an awful lot of youngsters ended up with not-very-useful qualifications that saddled them with debts for life.
Now let’s consider two more recent moves to stamp out elitism. First, the decision by Keir Starmer’s government to bin the Latin Excellence Programme for non-selective state schools. That will do the power of good for thousands of boys and girls, won’t it? What about the decision to slap VAT on private education? All that’s doing is making private school provision even more expensive – so serving to make ‘exclusive’ private schools even more, er, exclusive.
In fact, it appears that each of these reforms of education policy is likely to have achieved the exact opposite of its stated objective – lowering standards rather than raising them. What they have done, largely, is to trade elite attainment by a minority for a largely illusory improvement in standards for all. Productivity growth has flatlined over the past 15 years, and our productivity per working hour is still about 20 per cent lower than that of the USA. Judged economically, we are today poorer per capita than the Germans, Irish, Dutch, Belgians, Norwegians and Australians, and of course significantly less well off than the Americans – people who don’t just celebrate elite achievement, they revel in it.
Unfortunately, our rejection of elitism has gone well beyond education policy. Across the board, our cultural aitches have been dropped to bring down the appearance of differences or barriers. Definite articles have been ditched by ‘elite’ organisations in displays of demotic abasement – think ‘Tate’. The BBC has virtually stopped broadcasting any voice which speaks the King’s English, which might or might not be because there aren’t any left. We have become a nation where politicians need to pretend to be interested in football even when they should be far, far too busy thinking about policy and about how to fix the broken parts of the country.
If Britain is to thrive, we must be prepared to foster, celebrate and revel in the accomplishments of the minority who can succeed in any given field
So, before it’s too late, it’s time we reconsidered our Maoist antipathy to elitism. It’s time we accepted that the revolution has failed. It’s time we learned to love elitism again and to recognise why it matters.
It’s perhaps easiest to do this through the prism of sport where unsurprisingly, given the demographic context where talent is more evenly distributed through society regardless of wealth, elitism has survived intact. Here we are able to accept the trade-offs required for elitism to flourish – namely that while some succeed and can become elite athletes or footballers, others cannot make the grade and will therefore fail. Hard though it is to acknowledge this in a society where everyone now gets a medal for simply finishing, we must allow ourselves to confront these hard basic truths.
Unfortunately we struggle to apply them to the sphere of academic performance, where it’s still somehow less acceptable to admit that some people are simply more intelligent or able than others. Rather, we like to delude ourselves that if we try hard enough we all have it in us to become high-achieving theoretical physicists. You don’t need to watch Celebrity Gogglebox to know that this is simply nonsense.
The problem is that in academic achievement, the grounds for success are too closely bound to privilege to be deemed socially acceptable. Hence the decision to axe those grammar schools and add VAT on school fees. It’s like recognising the fact that people who grow up in houses with books tend to be more educationally successful than those that don’t – and then deciding to ban all books in private houses to fix the problem. But trying to eradicate the difference that way has failed.
Which brings us back to sport, an area of rare national excellence. As with football or the Olympics, we must acknowledge that to be the best, we must become the best. And that entails elitism. Of course, we don’t want to go back to the socially narrow, fish-knife elitism that existed in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, but we must accept that for all its trade-offs – where you have winners you have losers, too – elitism is better than the alternative of mediocracy, drift and decline. So let’s do it well: let’s have inclusive elitism, but elitism all the same.
The hardest part is that the shift to embracing elitism requires in us an ability to take ourselves seriously and to treat our ambitions seriously. In other words, it’s finding the self-belief to consider ourselves worthy of being elite. Without this we are lost in the sharp-elbowed 21st century, where there really aren’t enough lifeboats to go round. If Britain is to thrive, we must be prepared to foster, celebrate and revel in the accomplishments of the minority who can succeed in any given field. And we must support them in their achievement. Otherwise we will all continue to come second – or much worse – in every race we enter.
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