It comes as no surprise whatever to me that socio-economically the most exclusive secondary schools in the country are nominally comprehensives, but with such things as tiny catchment areas. If any, in some cases – there is, for example, a school in Glasgow, beloved of the Labour elite, which admits only by “placing request” (who you know).
As parents, the public school Tony Blair and his grammar school wife favoured such schools, including one of the best-known and most flagrant, where someone known to me taught for a time before ever realising that it was a state school (a realisation which presumably only arrived with the pay slip). They would have secured a more mixed formative environment for their offspring by doing as Harold Wilson did and sending them to private schools. Which is no doubt why they did not do so.
There are schools like this all round the country, attended by the children of the people who decide these things. However, the concentration of them is in London, attended by the children of the people who decide everything.
This isn’t about future earnings. Everyone in Cuba is paid exactly the same. But these institutions’ prototype and archetype, the Lenin High School in Havana, survives and thrives. From there, you will go on to a much better job, even if it is paid exactly the same. The parents know this from direct personal experience.
As our own Lenin High Schools do and will survive and thrive.
Until we bring back grammar schools.
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"Everyone in Cuba is paid exactly the same."
ReplyDeleteThis isn't true; this thought it's so frequently trotted out by disingenous anti-socialists that it's no wonder you've been taken it as fact. There has always been wage differentiation.
Really? Everyone who has ever told me this has been very left-wing indeed and thought that it was a Cuban plus point.
ReplyDeleteEither those you have spoken to haven't explained it well, or they are misinformed themselves!
ReplyDeleteCan you imagine an economy working in which everyone is paid exactly the same wage? This is ridiculous - why bother with skills training if there's no payoff in terms of a better wage?
The idea that Cuba doesn't have pay scales is commonly repeated, but that doesn't make it true. I've even heard people who have degrees in economics repeat this - which goes to show how little of the actual functioning socialist economies is taught...
Following Marx, remuneration in a socialist society is "from each according to ability to each *according to his work*".
Helen Yaffe, who has studied the Cuban economy describes it thusly:
"Capped or not, bonus payments in Cuba are awarded for over-completion of the national plan in the production of physical goods or services [...] bonus payments remain capped at 30% for various bureaucrats, technicians and economists, a measure to prevent the emergence of a technocratic elite." [http://www.ratb.org.uk/frfi/204cub5conviction.HTML]
Oh, you don't need to convince me that it's a daft idea. But the people whom I have heard say this about Cuba all thought otherwise.
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