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| The Synergy of Harry Reid | We Support Our GOP Troops. Then What? |
Euro-Humanity Upon The Wane
by Christopher Chantrill
October 22, 2006 at 5:48 pm
PEOPLE HAVE needs. When your liberal friend tells you that, he imagines that he’s justified the whole panoply of liberal social programs. Stop being selfish and pay up.
But after a century of paying up, you get something like modern Europe. With all basic needs taken care of, the average Euro doesn’t get the point of life. So s/he doesn’t produce any lifeâ€â€children that is. That is the argument of Mark Steyn in his
America Alone.
But is Steyn right?
Fortunately, in the remarkable Up Series documentary project, filmmaker Michael Apted has provided us a historical record of just what happens over the long term to a people living under the welfare state. This month, in the weeks before the latest DVD debuts in mid November, you can see the latest episode in this amazing chronicle. The movie 49 Up is playing in selected theaters around the United States.
The documentary features interviews with a group of Britons who we first got to see as seven-year-olds in 1963 in the Granada TV documentary Seven Up. The project was conceived as a melodrama about the British class system. It featured three adorable little working class girls from a government elementary school in the East End of London contrasted with three insufferable upper-class West End prigs from a swank Kensington private school. Now these children of the Sixties are forty-nine.
It’s a pity the whole think blew up in the filmmakers’ faces. But it blew up for an interesting reason. In the mid 1960s the Labour Party reformed the British secondary school system and gutted the ancient grammar schools that provided a challenging academic program to children who could pass the “Eleven Plus” test. Instead the government decreed that every child would go to a new expert-designed comprehensive school where there would be no “selection by ability.”
Maybe it’s just a coincidence. The Up Series children who ended up as angry and bitter adults all went to comprehensive schools. The children who ended up divorced or as single parents went to comprehensive schools. The children who ended up on “incapacity benefit,” or “job-seekers allowance,” went to comprehensive schools. “Bog standard” comprehensives is what they call them today.
OK, so the public schools aren’t as good as they should be. But how can we hope to educate the children of the poor without universal, compulsory, expert-designed government education? People have needs!
We could ask the Third World. We could ask Professor James Tooley, who’s done research on educational systems throughout the Third World. What he has found is that private school systems thrive precisely in the teeming slums where government education does not reach.
The Old City of Hyderabad in India is a slum of 800,000 people. Tooley writes:
our team found 918 schools: 35 percent were government run; 23 percent were private schools that had official recognition by the government (“recognized”); and, incredibly, 37 percent slipped under the government radar (“unrecognized”). The last group is, in effect, a black market in education, operating entirely without both state funding and regulation.
If we assume that of the 800,000 people about 200,000 are school-age children, then there is one school for every 218 children. In fact Toomey’s survey team found that the average unregulated school had about 8 teachers and 170 students. So it seems that the black market in schools provides an adequtate number of seats for the Old City slum children. But what about performance?
In Hyderabad, students attending recognized and unrecognized private schools outperformed their peers in government schools by a full standard deviation in both English and math.
So what, you ask? We are just establishing a very small point. Contrary to the received notion, it appears that the urban poor are not too poor, or too ignorant, or too feckless to send their children to schoolâ€â€or to pay for it.
And we are idly tossing into the air another very small idea, as inadvertently suggested by the documentary Up Series. What if children suckled at the teat of government schools generally grow up to be adult adolescents, don’t bother to marry, and don’t bother to have children?
They would be well on the way to the status of H.G. Wells’ Eloi in The Time Machine, “humanity upon the wane,” shortly to fall into the clutches of the Muslim Morlocks. For when society sets itself “steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword,” it has no need to develop “intellectual versatility... the compensation for change, danger, and trouble,” until it is too late.
People have needs, but they must need struggle to meet them.
Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.
Buy his Road to the Middle Class.
To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.
To email the author, click here.
Responsibility
Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050
Living the Virtues
When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Faith and Politics
As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable...
[1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Class War
In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”
Government Expenditure
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Conservatism
Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy