I used to think education was about social justice. Perhaps not in those terms exactly – it is a contested term after all – but at root this was the main justification for coming to the profession. Not sharing a love of subject, not wanting to spread knowledge, but addressing injustice – from this could I draw my sense of vocation, indeed my very identity, in the determination to put right what appeared to me to be such manifest wrongs.  

I confess I never inquired too much further into the nature of these injustices – what mattered was that I believed they were, and in crusading against them I could find solace in myself and evidence of my own virtue. I was angry and, with all the indignation of the Victorian moralist preaching to a fallen world, it was that anger which fired me to change the world and the people in it.  

As time has gone by, I am less convinced than I once was. In fact, that is probably not strong enough – I am now unconvinced by the idea that education is principally about social justice, or any other euphemism for the same. There are many reasons for this change, but fundamentally I think social justice cannot help but become an issue of power, which means it cannot help but become an issue of conflict, and I no longer think education is principally about power, let alone conflict.  For me education ultimately concerns the soul, not increasing wealth or power or position – yet social justice narratives cannot help but be about the latter, with all that entails.

Practically speaking too, the problem with narratives of power is they must include dominion; there can be no quarter given since negotiation can only ever look like the accommodation of injustice, which is not something the right-thinking can countenance. There can only be winners and losers; everything in the middle is fair game for the struggle. After all, who would accept peace terms with the status quo and those who would uphold injustice in preserving it? Against opposition there must be only victory, nothing less.  

There is a snag though. The thing is, anger is incredibly powerful, it can fire this revolution, this conflict, at least for a time, and give its adherents the courage to pick a fight with that status-quo and the power interests that reside there. It was why I originally held, and mostly retain, an admiration for Michael Gove, his authoritarian liberalism notwithstanding. He got it, I thought, he could see this wasn’t fair, and he was willing to rattle cages and upset vested interests to make sure something was done about it.  

But anger can also obscure, and consume, and make unknowable the life and loves of the person or people standing athwart the progress of your social justice narrative. If anything can be taken from the turf wars of the current education landscape, it is surely this. Whether it’s the internecine wars of the progs and trads, or the constant bickering over the existence of different types and structures of school, or the cultural (and increasingly moral) battle against the communities we serve and the parents who reside there – too much has become zero-sum conflict marked by demands of power, and righteous anger in the pursuit of it. 

I’m as guilty as anyone of this, and I’m sure this whole post – with all its pretensions – might be disregarded as an end-of-term indulgence, the ramblings of a tired teacher with more than a hint of the pompous. It’s also hard to get the language right, and if I’m making a hash of it I hope you’ll forgive the misfire. But either way, the more I reflect, the more I have become aware that the anger at social injustice that once fuelled my desire to ‘make a difference’ can no longer sustain the effort required to live with its effects.  

The Times newspaper once sent out a question to a collection of the most esteemed authors and thinkers of the day, asking a simple question: ‘what’s wrong with the world today?’ Amidst the detailed and worthy explanations from those justifiably angry with this injustice or that inequality, one writer responded with a simple answer: ‘I am.’ 

And I can’t help but thinking he was right. My justification for teaching, for wanting to help the most vulnerable, for wanting to ‘change the world,’ with all the laughable, beautiful naïvety it displayed, can no longer be about anger at social (in)justice, because I can no longer find a way to believe that anger at social injustice is up to the task.   

The truth is, however much I wish otherwise, I cannot change the world. I can only change myself. It was only pride that ever made me think otherwise.  As Newman put it, “To live is to change, and to change often is to become more perfect.” I certainly lay no claim to perfection, nor even mediocrity in truth, but Newman’s words ring true – changing myself is the one thing I really do have power over. And maybe that’s the only realistic shot any of us really have at changing the world.  

I suppose what I’m asking is, what if that righteous anger which fires our desire to address social injustice and inequality, the indignation that has been at the root of the monumental political and social capital resources poured into the education revolution – what if none of this is enough? Not because this inequality or that injustice are unworthy of such emotions, but because perhaps righteous anger lacks the gravity to address such issues; too superficial, too fleeting, consuming its source and leaving behind the charred remains of a brief, if brightly shining, career.  

Maybe we need to transform it into something more fruitful, more sustainable. And for myself, I increasingly find the most convincing explanation of why we should do anything at all is simple service – a humbling of ourselves, a humble offering of ourselves, not for reward, not for social mobility, not for grades, not for greater wealth nor greater power, but because serving is its own justification. 

I suppose what I’m saying is maybe we need is to demand more from ourselves than righteous anger; maybe we need to demand love. 

Maybe love is greater, more radical, more fruitful, more sustainable, and yet infinitely more demanding, than anger or any of its emotional brethren. And as we in Catholic schools had drilled into us as kids, to love is to serve. I used to think this was meant metaphorically, in the way someone with power serves merely by executing that power, but now I suspect it was more than that: Christ’s washing of the feet was not just an act of humility, but an act of true leadership.  

Perhaps here, in this less glamorous act, this (for some) less compelling model of leadership, is how we achieve our social justice. Perhaps here we can face with cheerfulness the unwinnable odds, we can suffer the slings and arrows and still find reason to persist. Perhaps here we become more effective agents of change than all the angry tweets and emotional speeches and heartfelt handwringing, because we dare to humble ourselves in service of it. Not for anger, but for love. Only love. 

 For some this might not be enough – indeed for some this might be pious hokum. Maybe anger is what helps us get up in the morning, to fix manifest wrongs, to have the battles and survive the conflicts that are a necessary part of effecting change. And I understand that and admire those who can sustain it. After all, it worked for me for a long time. I don’t like kids getting a raw deal either. I dislike injustice too. But ultimately, it exacts a terrible toll. And I’m just not sure any longer if I have the resources left to pay it.  

I think I was 14. It was an English lesson, as I recall. And the words were delivered with the hint of a smirk.

‘Well of course, the Sun has a reading age of eight.’

Innocuous enough. And I didn’t know if it was true, nor much care. The truth was less important than the implication, to be honest, veracity less important than meaning. I knew what was going on, what was really being said: ‘here are people who are not like us, we clever ones, we sophisticated ones, we who can see through the ruse to the ignorance of folk. We, children, know better, are better.’

I wanted to be part of the in-group. I wanted to have real status and authority, too. To be like you, Sir, all knowledgeable and self-assured and authoritative. I didn’t want to be one of Them, so subtly scorned with a barbed comment and the raise of an eyebrow. So it seeped in. It became true. Those stupid Sun readers – thickos, bigots all.

Only, my Dad was a Sun reader. And many of my family. And most of the folk on the council estate where I grew up. I knew this because I delivered their morning papers seven days a week. And it was nearly always the Sun, occasionally the Star, the odd Daily Mirror. Except on Sundays, when it was usually the News of the World, and occasionally the Sunday People.

I was, to use an unfashionable term, something of a ‘chav’ at school, though I can chart a change in self-image from around this time onward, from Kappa and Ellesse to Officers’ Club and a whole different section of the Littlewoods catalogue. Perhaps this was just normal teenage rebellion. Either way, I had decided that I wanted something different, that I was cut from different cloth, that the world held better in store for me than it did for those whose love and support had brought me to this point. I distinctly remember being in a GCSE class, reading aloud Heaney’s Follower, a poem superficially about a boy helping his father with jobs around the farm, and the words of the final stanza hitting like thunder – ‘I was a nuisance, tripping, falling/Yapping always. But today/It is my father who keeps stumbling/Behind me, and will not go away.’

My father, no academic but a bloody good soldier, and in many ways our salvation (I need not go into details), with all his coarse dependability, became an awkward moment, to be transcended, to be left behind.

Or when I graduated from my degree course. My gramps, an Irishman who came looking for work in the chemical factories in the North East before finding work driving wagons and settling in Stockton, proud enough of my achievement that he had tears in his eyes. I’ll never forget the hug he gave me. It might have even been my first, aged 22 – you didn’t really do that kind of thing in the Merrick family.

The whole tribe came up to Lancaster, and we went for a meal in a little village called Heysham, which was awkward to get to but classier than the Brewers’ Fayre some had suggested and enabled me to show that I was now a bit more upmarket than that. Whilst we were waiting, Gramps and I went for a stroll, settling just along from a rock with graves carved into it, looking out over the sands of Morecambe Bay. I was in heaven. I’ve always idolised my Gramps – he was different, from somewhere else, with stories to tell. And so when we talked, and he began to give his sage advice, I lapped it up. And then he said, without hint of humour or irony, ‘Michael, you’re a bright boy – have you ever thought about running a pub?’ As my memory tells it, I guffawed, and assured him I had my sights set on greater things. He fell quiet and, after five minutes or so looking out to sea, we made our way back for the meal.

His Dad, it turns out, my great-grandad, ran a pub. In Dublin. And his Dad, my great-grandad, was a great man, a source of pride.

I had just guffawed.

Or with my other Grandad, a bluff Yorkshireman from Wakefield who drove wagons his whole life. We sat in his front room, a three-bedroomed former council house in Pendlebury, Salford. He enjoyed films, did my Grandad. And so when I asked, he started telling me about the ones he liked best. Pretty soon I launched into a monologue about my favourites, all of them foreign language films, airily pronouncing on their artistic qualities, the more obscure and niche the better; Satantango, Russian Ark, Yojimbo, Roma città aperta, Dekalog. I asked him if he’d seen them, and when he said he hadn’t I suggested he lend them (I’d just been to the Trafford Centre and bought a load from HMV), and was mystified when he said no. In the end, with a smile, he gently assured me ‘I’m not into all that,’ and gazed back at the television screen, flicking through what was on and settling for CSI Miami.

I don’t know if these were my favourite films. Maybe they were at the time, though to be honest I doubt it. Looking back, this was about status. Me, the smart-arse, the graduate, the one who went to university, lording it over my Grandad, in his own sitting room. I asked my Dad about this other day, suggesting I was perhaps unbearable after university. He smiled, a sympathetic, loving smile: ‘well, sometimes maybe.’

I had been the first to go to university in my family, on both sides, save for my grandmother’s brother, an outlier whose name was spoken in hushed tones, and whom I had never met because like all clever people he had moved away and was different from us now. And I thought that could be me. It came with a fight – I had had to quit professional football to go to university, much to the incomprehension of various family members, especially when it became clear I was studying Theology (‘do you want to be a priest or what?). In the end, I think I enjoyed the mystique. I was being just like my ‘uncle’ Tony.

And yet, for all I was quietly rejecting them, they never rejected me. I was one of them, even if I increasingly gave the impression of not wanting to be. I was ‘our Mike’, and forever would be. And as time has gone by, I realise how intensely proud I am of them, and of the great fortune it is to have been raised as a working-class kid, as one of them. This background was not an obstacle to be overcome, which is what arguments for social mobility nearly always collapse into, but a fertile soil in which to plant the seeds of future success. It is only with passing years, and the challenges that come with raising your own children, that such issues find a way back to the now, to be chewed over and answered once again, ugly truths and all.

All of this might, of course, hold no greater lesson than my own deficiencies as a human being. I’m happy to acknowledge I have plenty of them. And maybe this post would have been more accurately entitled ‘Gentle Regrets’ or ‘Confessions of an Arrogant Fool.’ But if this is the case, I suspect I share the platform with plenty of others. And this whole thought process was kicked off by the following series of tweets, by Mike Tyler, tweets that resonated with me.

See, that was me. I was those graduates. Much to my shame, I thought that was the character of being educated. And maybe, at times, I still do. Blood is thicker than water, but professional and social respectability is a powerful confounding variable. My own kids have a different childhood from the one I had –so am I rejecting it, or building on it? I can’t honestly say I know the answer to that question. And when you dwell on that loss of identity, of simple surety, it can cut deep. When others tread all over it, it stings.

 

Neither Here nor There

It is a long established truth that graduates tend to be much more liberal than their non-graduate compatriots. Indeed, since the referendum, plenty on the Remain have been quick to point out the education gap between Leave voters and themselves. The observation is innocent enough, though it too often contains all the smirk and subtext of that teacher from my youth.

Thus the graduate professions take on a particular character, with norms of outlook, of worldview, indeed of morality. The moral compass of the liberal outlook is distinct from the conservative, and these things split broadly over class, which correlates with level of education; these tribes value different things, draw lines in different places. But when the deck is stacked so heavily toward one over the other, the chances of any effort to comprehend the difference diminish whilst self-certainty proliferates. And liberals, contrary to assumption, tend to be as intolerant as conservatives, who have a broader moral outlook, though less understanding of the conservative viewpoint than the other way round. In a profession which is graduate dominated, and with graduate-level education so tightly correlated with liberal outlook, so we might see the roots of an important disconnect. Conformity to the norms of the in-group becomes the mark of the sophisticated, the cultured, the educated. And transgression comes at a cost.

As such, if you arrive from a working-class background shaped by these subversive norms, the graduate professions are not always a comfortable place to be. You must grow accustomed to the objects of derision and mockery being people like your family, those you grew up with, those you know and love. Whilst the derision might be delivered in the abstract – against a general viewpoint or unidentified Other – the barbs are felt personally. The word bigot, or any of its linguistic manifestations, is chucked about casually, but it hits specific targets, especially when it addresses a common viewpoint amongst those who comprise your upbringing. Those ‘xenophobes’ and ‘racists’ who voted Leave, for example, are not disembodied, theoretical people, but those who you know to be nothing of the sort, such as grandparents, who were always so loving and kind, and parents, who have lived a life of service to others, friends, who are decent and hardworking, the folks who live next door, the lady who you see at Church each week, the priest who baptised your kids. It becomes personal, and it jars.

But with public affirmation of in-group norms comes prestige –  in the echo chamber of social media, there is status to be acquired through the sassy, the rude, the downright spiteful to working-class folk with more conservative views, on immigration, perhaps, or crime, or Brexit. An army of followers giddily RT and ‘Like’ such comments, as if their articulacy were evidence of their truth and justification for their prejudice. Thus the motes are plucked out whilst the beams remain – the cultured despisers find in their intellectual superiority a justification of their presumed existential superiority, too.

They say in comedy that you should never punch down because it makes you look a bully, though this does not seem to be a moderating influence when there is a witty observation to be delivered highlighting deficiencies of the ‘deplorables.’ I remember attending a Diversity course as a GTP trainee, delivered through a series of dramas and roleplays. It was a good day and I learned plenty, particularly about the importance and power of language – something I grappled with here – though it was noticeable that each time a bigot was portrayed in a drama, they had a strong regional accent and performed a manual trade, with uniform and props to match. When I asked about the apparent incongruity I was told, in a stuttering response, that this simply reflected real life. Prejudice, indeed.

There is nothing particularly new in this, and since most culture-forming and socially prestigious professions are graduate dominated, so the outlooks and assumptions are reflected back and reinforced, presenting a wall of affirmation through which any dissent is proof that someone is Not Like Us, and thus wrong. And from this, the belief that it is a duty to help future generations avoid such a fate, and become more Like Us, and thus right.

In our schools, this has real consequences – as I have explored here and here – creating a representation vacuum as a class of Anywheres seek to educate a generation of Somewheres, Pioneers against Settlers, with the former holding all the power and believing professional success consists in educating the latter out of the values and culture of their upbringing. Pupils from a socially conservative background, which often (not always) overlaps with a working-class (or religious) background, will at times find themselves at odds with the ethical and moral paradigms of those who educate them, a culture chasm always framed as simply a matter of education (or the absence of it). And so the cycle starts over, an abiding tension between home and school, since in this case to be educated is to leave behind what you hear and are taught at home.

But some do choose home. Not because of a lack of learning but because of a refusal to shed heritage and home as the participation fee. If we want to talk about why working-class kids are alienated from education, we could do worse than start a conversation there. That those who agitate so fiercely for social justice, and write and speak so piously about the disenfranchisement of the working class, should choose to studiously ignore this particular deficit, and indeed locate their own virtue in the perpetuation of it, tells us a lot about the intractability of the culture clash we accommodate.

Of course, it follows that the same is true with teachers, though perhaps more acutely, since the heresies of those within are more serious than the ignorance of those without – the latter is tragedy, the former is malice. During Brexit, half a dozen teachers confessed to me that they voted Leave, all by DM, and all saying they did not dare say so publicly. To date, I’m only aware of one having since revealed their vote. And yesterday, in response to a question about one thing that Twitter had changed your mind on, one person DMed and said abortion, but they could never admit this publicly.

I’m not sure such conformism can be described as an evident good, nor the surest sign of a good education. The current creation myth of the teaching profession is one of a virtuous battle against intolerance, bigotry and demonization of the Other – yet those who pursue such accounts of virtue do not always realise, or do not care, that these are precisely the sins they commit in the eyes of those on the receiving end of their evangelism.

And yet… it is more complex than a simple to-and-fro between two competing accounts of the good life, a power play with only one plausible winner. Neither side are entirely wrong, even if heart battles fiercely with head in trying to work out the worst of the two. If you join the affray from a working-class background, you inevitably have a foot in both camps. One may get defensive when those whom you know and love are targets of censure, but you also carry the knowledge that, in some sense, you also chose to leave this tribe behind. And, uncomfortable as it might be, one can also see the validity of some of the analysis, even if its descent into moral judgement and lack of charity becomes sufficient motivation for fighting it. Some might call this contrarianism, but maybe it is something more primal than that. We often see the faults in those we love, but we naturally get defensive if somebody from the outside decides to make it an object of their own crusade. Maybe the same applies here.

Needless to say, this high-minded detachment does not solve the feeling of disconnect. For a working-class kid in a graduate profession, having a foot in both camps mean not really belonging in either, an outsider to each, wishing it did not have to be either-or but finding it difficult to see how it might be otherwise. The norms of one are the enemy of the other. One might mourn the perceived conflict of heritage or professional flourishing, but it is difficult to deny. The world that formed you, that helped you fly, can be the world that holds you back, a world which you both reject(ed) and embrace at the same time. And it is always the rejection that each side of this conflict remembers, never the embrace.

And so you crash along, feeling like an imposter wherever you stand, looking for allies in the cause. But it can be a lonely place. And who wants to be lonely?