The UK Liberal Democrats, coalition partner and fellow-traveler with the current Conservative-led government, have made a public commitment “to end child illiteracy by 2025,” according to a weekend announcement by party leader Nick Clegg. “The plans mean that every child born in 2014, who will leave primary school in 2025 will be able to read and write at a standard identified to lead to success in secondary school and beyond,” the announcement claims. “Unlike the Conservatives and Labour, the Liberal Democrats have a clear plan to protect the education budget from cradle to college.”
There’s already considerable skepticism abroad over the details, the timing, and the purpose of the Lib Dem proposals. Certain journalists hint – God forbid – that Nick Clegg is actually stooping low enough to play electioneering politics with the already checkered future of Britain’s kids. As well as asking why, if this is suddenly so important an issue, his party hasn’t done more to tackle it during their years in (co)government. After all, couldn’t he actually have been working with the Conservatives all that time to fix the situation rather than scoring points about it now?
Because the situation is pretty despicable. According to research published to accompany the Read On. Get On. campaign, launched in September 2014 by Save the Children, in partnership with the UK Publishers Association and major UK literary and education NGOs, “45% of low-income, white British boys were not reading well by the age of 11. Low-income, white British boys, who have English as their first language, are even less likely to be reading well by the age of 11 than many low-income groups for whom English is not their first language. The reading gap between boys and girls in England is one of the widest in the developed world: boys are twice as likely to fall below even a very basic reading level.” And furthermore, “England has a particular challenge with educational fairness. On average children do well – but, unacceptably for a wealthy country, we allow hundreds of thousands of children to fall behind. New analysis in this report demonstrates how only one other country in Europe, Romania, has more unequal reading attainment among ten-year-olds.”
Yes, that’s the Romania whose treatment of orphans and abandoned children was so widely stigmatized worldwide. And it seems that, by educational benchmarks, England’s treatment of its poorest children is down on a level with the Romanian orphans scandal. And this in the world’s sixth largest economy by UN 2013 figures. (Romania is the 54th.)
I hope you’re proud, Nick Clegg, of all you’ve done to help redress that situation during your time in office. And we truly, madly, deeply want to believe your promises that you can deliver the answer to this plight. Just like every other UK government and every other UK political party has so brilliantly done.
You’re making a mistake adopting the currently fashionable model that trends in societies can almost always be explained by a victimizer/victim model.
The victimizers, you claim, are the politicians of various parties. You suggest all sorts of nasty things about them. The only proof you offer are those low literacy rates. That’s not enough. You might as well blame them for obesity too.
The victims, you imply, can’t do anything for themselves. They must wait for someone else to come along an dmake them literate. They are, in particular, ” Low-income, white British boys, who have English as their first language, are even less likely to be reading well by the age of 11 than many low-income groups for whom English is not their first language.”
Sorry, but there are other possible answers, including the most obvious of all, that the subculture in which those “low-income, white British boys” come from doesn’t value literacy. As the old cliché goes, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” You can send these boys to school, but you can make them into readers if the desire isn’t there. And keep in mind that those illiterate boys are often attending the same schools that successful immigrant children are attending.
Nor is that unusual. Charles Murray describes the same problem developing here in his Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. He deliberately picked whites to make the point that it’s a subculture gone bad and not the racism that’s alleged for the same problems in the black underclass.
I bring this up because a few years ago I read a book by an up-and-coming physicist who came from that low-income British background. He pointed out that throughout history, parents have almost always wanted their children to do better than they did. What used to be called the British working class, he said, is not like that. They criticize and verbally abuse boys that want to get ahead by learning. For a parallel, think of black communities where studying hard is called “acting white” or more recently “acting Asian.” Same thing.
And no, this isn’t blaming the victim. It’s placing the responsibility where it belongs in individuals, families and groups. Reduce them to victims and you leave them powerless. In fact, reducing them to the status of victims and you will produce the same morbid results even it no victimizer exists to exploit them. If you’re hostile toward success, you’ll fail even more certainly than if someone else it trying to cause you to fail.
I wouldn’t sneer at these politicians. In the end, I think they’re neither part of the problem nor do they have much to do with its solution. When needs to happen is an end to all this destructive victimization. “Victim” today is just another word for a loser who whines and refuses to take responsibility for his life. We should quit excusing their failures.
–Michael W. Perry, co-author of Lily’s Ride