Can Government Deliver on Education?

Tony Blair, everyone’s darling, has resigned as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and now Gordon Brown has been appointed by the Queen to serve as his successor.  Everyone is full of advice, of course.

Anatole Kaletsky advises him to concentrate on education. 

If Mr Brown really wants to show that he can think afresh and that he is in touch with the concerns of ordinary voters he should recognise that the people of Britain are far more worried about the daily disappointments of their children’s education — not to mention the physical threats they face on the way to school, as they run the gauntlet of outlaw gangs increasingly addicted to violence

Britain is the home of the “bog-standard” comprehensive school.  If you don’t know exactly what that means, you can still guess. 

But can a centralized government education system ever deliver?  Well, we shall see.

The welfare state is something like 100 years old and in Britain and the United States centralized government education is about 150 years old.  And it shows.

The great promise made by the academic middle class a century ago for its education and welfare state project was that they, the educated and the experts, could make government actually do something to help people.  Don’t trust those dangerous businessmen, they said.  They don’t care about people.  But we do.  Trust us, they said.

And the academic middle class believed themselves.  Yes, they could make government into something it had never been. They could make it deliver.

Let’s face it.  Government is really a patronage and clientage game, always was, always will be.  As long as politicians stick to rewarding their friends and punishing their enemies they know what they are doing.  But when it comes to actually running something, like education or welfare, or immigration (and yes, immigration is just as screwed up in Britain as it is here) government seems to be a complete disaster.

Therein lies our opportunity.  We conservatives should recognize that there is a real possibility that we are entering an end game on government education.

You can put all the funding you like into education (and we have) but it really doesn’t matter.  That’s because it really doesn’t matter if the principals and the teachers in a government education system do their job.  They still get paid and the politicians pay more attention to them than to the voters.

Expect the concept of government education to be tested to destruction in the next twenty years.  Then we should be ready to grab the chance to do some real reform. 

Because we conservatives care about kids.

After all, there’s a difference between conservatives and liberals.  Conservatives have more children.