On Sunday I went to the Cheltenham Literary Festival to bang the drum for free schools. I was expecting a warm reception. The local MP is a Lib Dem, but the county council is Conservative. This wouldn’t be like my trip to Manchester last month. Almost as soon as I stepped off the train I was recognised by an anti-government protestor who greeted me with a cry of ‘Fuck off back to London you Tory tosser.’
The first event was a discussion chaired by Marcus Brigstocke in which Natalie Haynes, Shazia Mirza and I had been asked to read three books we wouldn’t normally read. Natalie chose Who Moved My Cheese? and Shazia selected The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and they were both very funny about them. I chose Dickens’s Hard Times and made the mistake of being both too flip and too earnest.
Flip, because I thought it would be entertaining if I praised the central character, Thomas Gradgrind, for creating the Victorian equivalent of a Free School. I was on slightly dangerous ground here because ‘Gradgrindian’ is a catch-all term of abuse used by progressives to describe any approach to education that doesn’t include ‘project work’ on multiculturalism, climate change and LGBT History Week. I spotted several beardy-weirdies in the audience scribbling down notes and I knew it wouldn’t be long before my eulogy to Gradgrind’s school came back to bite me on the bum.
Earnest, because I had a more serious point to make about rote learning and factual knowledge — the two main characteristics of Gradgrind’s academy. I quoted from Katharine Birbalsingh’s recent lecture at the Cass Business School in which she criticised the educational establishment for placing no value on the teaching of common knowledge, thereby short-changing children from deprived backgrounds who don’t pick it up at home. ‘I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had conversations with kids about Winston Churchill where they think he’s “that dog” off the insurance advert on TV,’ she said.
I was just getting into my stride, lamenting the fact that only 31 per cent of English schoolchildren took a GCSE in history in 2010, when a man in the front row shouted, ‘Get off your soapbox.’ This was greeted by a murmur of approval. Clearly, the audience had come to hear Marcus, Natalie and Shazia being funny, not to be lectured by a bug-eyed free schools evangelist.
The next event was billed as ‘The Great Education Debate’ in which I was pitted against Dr Anthony Seldon, Melissa Benn and Chris Healy, the headmaster of a nearby comprehensive. Would the coalition’s expansion of the academies programme and roll-out of free schools bring about any lasting improvement in educational attainment? Here, at least, I was permitted to be serious, but that didn’t make the audience any more friendly. They listened politely to my methodical presentation of the evidence that those countries which allowed taxpayer-funded schools the greatest degree of autonomy tended to come top of the international league tables, then burst into rapturous applause when the local headmaster condemned free schools as a dangerous ideological experiment. I smiled through gritted teeth, but on the inside I was thinking, ‘Didn’t you hear a word I just said?’
Sure enough, as soon as the audience was invited to ask questions, a bearded man grabbed the microphone. ‘Earlier today Toby Young held out Thomas Gradgrind as an educational role model,’ he said, consulting his notebook. ‘Why are we listening to someone who thinks all you need to know about a horse is that it’s a quadruped with 40 teeth and hooves that need to be shod with iron?’
Cue gales of laughter, followed by thunderous applause.
On reflection, I think there were two reasons the audiences in Cheltenham weren’t more enthusiastic about free schools. The first is that people who go to literary festivals tend to be left-of-centre. The second is that all audiences at public events, no matter what their political composition is, are more likely to applaud left-wing viewpoints than right-wing ones. Why? Because conservative voters are, with a few exceptions, more inhibited about showing their true colours. They worry that people will think them mean-spirited if they express approval of a Tory policy, so they sit on their hands. It’s why the Question Time audience always seems to be left-of-centre. It’s not that the BBC is biased. It’s that few people want to be publicly identified with the ‘nasty party’ and the good burghers of Cheltenham are no exception.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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