Bishop Hill Incredible popular delusions and the madness of statists
Oct 21, 2007 Liberalism Another week, another round of stories of failure in the public services.
On Wednesday, OFSTED reported that half of all secondary schools fail to give children a good education. Today come stories of patients flying to eastern Europe for dental treatment, something that at least appears to be rather more comfortable than the alternative approach of extracting ones own teeth with a pair of pliers.
To someone from the developed world - you know, somewhere like America or Singapore- the medieval barbarities of modern Britain must be truly shocking. Here they seem to be viewed as "just the way things are". Take the Liberal Democrat response to school failure. Their spokesman, David Laws, who is alleged to be on the right of the party, seems to think that the problem will be solved by
a new educational standards authority and a genuine devolution of the power to innovate to all schools.
When you think about it, this is utterly bizarre. The education system is in crisis, and is failing children absolutely, and all the party can come up with is a new layer of bureaucracy and a bit of local decision-making.
And while the political parties micturate into the wind and dream of shiny new bureaucracies, the public shrugs its collective shoulders.
Can nobody out there beyond a few bloggers ask the fundamental questions of why a state monopoly is the only acceptable answer to the question of who should deliver health and education in the UK? Why does nobody in the MSM write about Singapore-style healthcare accounts or Swedish-style education vouchers? Why are the public not clamouring for them? It's as though the whole country is operating under a mass delusion - a mirage of a wonderful world in which the man in Whitehall does actually give a fig about what consumers want, and that a state-run monopoly does actually deliver a half-decent service.
In the book from which this posting borrows its title, the delusion is always shattered, the bubble burst by the sudden realisation that it is just that - a delusion. Tulips are not worth a fortune, investors loose their shirts, the scams are seen through. Eventually people will see through the "public services" scam too. A straw will blow in on the wind and the camel's back will be broken.
When that will happen is anyone's guess. Only a few lonely voices are calling for fundamental change. But until they are heard, a lot more childen will remain illiterate and a lot more people will suffer or die for lack of treatment.
Reader Comments (15)
I also discovered that the number of recycling bins has become very important. The host only had 4 bins, it seems, 5 or 6 bins are now required to be socially respectable.
Devolving the power to innovate seems to me to be a complete cop-out. Schools need to be accountable to parents, not politicians. While politicians remain in charge any devolution of power remains window dressing. How can it be any other way? When innovation goes wrong who is responsible? If you have state education then it must be the politician. Why then should the politicians allow any real innovation? They bear all the risks for an innovation which was not their idea.
You can't devolve power in a centralised bureaucracy.
And don't get me started about JS Mill and state education.
I don't know whether you saw Mike Ion's pieces on CiF and LabourHome about banning grammar schools.
You would have thought, wouldn't you, that they would have noticed that education is not noticeably better in areas where there are no grammars.
The Labour party just doesn't actually care about ordinary people.
Another thought: if you went to a Sainsbury's, and half of the time you went there, its products were poor or just plain bad, would you keep going? Would you argue that management just needed more decision-making power, or perhaps an oversight body too? Or would you go to Tesco?
Why do you love state education so much?
I think Labour, and socialist in general, DO care about ordinary people but in a paternalistic / oppressive way. The lunch guests really believed that people would not make the right choices so those choices needed to be made for them.
Really? They can see that state schooling is failing half of secondary school children. How can they possibly care about these children and still argue that state schooling is the best thing for them?
"How can they possibly care about these children and still argue that state schooling is the best thing for them?"
Their mind-set is fixed, so that sociality/state/they know best so anything else will have worse outcomes. They agree state schools are bad but this is caused by competition .e.g. existence of private schools and faith schools.
Interestingly, I dropped Hayek's name into the conversion but only one person heard of him but all had read Marx...
Therefore a policy of devolving power is a policy of dismantling the centralised bureaucracy.
I don't particularly care about state education, it is a means to an end. I do care about universal education.
Given that the politician promises "a new educational standards authority" to go with that devolution it is difficult to understand your optimism.
-0-
There are five interest groups in education. The politicians, the bureaucrats, the teachers, the parents and the children. Clearly the object of education is the interests of the children but they are the least able to promote their own interest. For that reason the first four groups have claimed that they should have priority in acting in the interests of the children. The first three groups have managed to persuade the public that parents are generally unqualified or unsuitable to determine their children's best interests. Thus excluded, the three remaining groups argue over the distribution of the power between them.
Politicians assume they can control both bureaucrats and the teachers. Their ability to do so is severely limited. If we require proof then look at the scandal over phonics. Both the Conservatives under Baker and Labour subsequently have demanded that synthetic phonics be at the centre of the literacy strategy. Yet in both eras their objectives have been undermined by both the bureaucrats and the teachers.
This latest proposal is more of the same. The politician promises to both decrease bureaucratic control of the teachers, yet maintain the children's interests by increasing the bureaucratic control of a standards authority. What would they do - would they sack teachers who failed? In short this is a transfer of power between two interest groups. It doesn't move power back to either parents or pupils.
To be fair, that is not what they say although I agree that is the logical consequence of their beliefs.
The current excuse is that the best children are creamed off by the better schools which means that other schools start off with the dregs. Of course they don't use those terms but they do believe that mixing Nigellas with Britneys helps the Britneys more than if the latter were taught only with other Britneys.
But you haven't addressed the question of how the accountability will work if you devolve decision-making.
Sorry, pedant moment. That should be:
"Tulips are not worth a fortune, investors lose their shirts, the scams are seen through."
;-)